- Prometheus: Author: Pielke Jr., R. Archives

Roger Pielke, Jr. former director of the University of Colorado's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research and is also an associate professor of environmental studies.

Contents:

January 30, 2008

Witanagemot Justice And Senator Inhofe’s Fancy List

Anyone interested in the intersection of science and politics has to be watching with some amusement and more than a little dismay at the spectacle of professional immolation that the climate science community has engaged in following the release of Senator James Inhofe’s list of 400+ climate skeptics.

The amusement comes from the fact that everyone involved in this tempest in a teapot seems to be working as hard as possible in ways contrary to their political interests.

From the perspective of Senator Inhofe, by producing such a list he has raised the stakes associated with any scientist going public with any concerns about the scientific consensus on climate change. Not only would announcement of such concerns lead one to risk being associated with one of the most despised politicians in the climate science community, but several climate scientists have taken on as their personal responsibility the chore of personally attacking people who happen to find themselves on the Senator’s list. What young scholar would want to face the climate science attack dogs? Of course, those sharing the Senator’s political views may not mind being on such a list, but this does nothing more than further politicize climate science.

And this leads to the repugnant behavior of the attack dog climate scientists who otherwise would like to be taken seriously. By engaging in the character assassination of people who happen to find themselves on Senator Inhofe’s list they reinforce the absurd notion that scientific claims can be adjudicated solely by head counts and a narrow view of professional qualifications. They can’t. (See this enlightening and amusing discussion by Dan Sarewitz of leading experts arguing over who is qualified to comment on climate issues.) But by suggesting that knowledge claims can be judged by credentials the attack dog scientists reinforce an anti-democratic authoritarian streak found in the activist wing of the climate science community. Of course, from the perspective of the activist scientists such attacks may be effective if they dissuade other challenges to orthodoxy, but surely climate scientists deserving of the designation should be encouraging challenges to knowledge claims, rather than excoriating anyone who dares to challenge their beliefs.

I recently chatted with Steve Rayner and Gwyn Prins, authors of the brilliant and provocative essay The Wrong Trousers (PDF), who found themselves , somewhat bizarrely, on Senator Inhofe’s list. Neither has expressed anything resembling views challenging claims of human-caused climate change, however they are (rightly) critical of the political approach to climate change embodied by Kyoto. I asked them what they thought about being on the Senator’s list. Steve Rayner asked if there was some way to sue the Senator for defamation, tongue only partly in cheek. Gwyn Prins offered the following gem:

I think that pointing out that the mere fact of this funny headcounting is worthy of note: In the Anglo-Saxon witanagemot justice was achieved by oath-swearing so the number and the status of your oath-swearers mattered more than the facts of the matter; and this issue is being adjudicated on both sides – denialists and climate puritans – in just such a manner.

He is right of course, and this brings us to the dismay. The climate science community – or at least its most publicly visible activist wing – seems to be working as hard as possible to undercut the legitimacy and the precarious trust than society provides in support of activities of the broader scientific community. Senator Inhofe is a politician, and plays politics. If activist climate scientists wish to play the Senator’s game, then don’t be surprised to see common wisdom viewing these activists more as political players than trustworthy experts. If this is correct then maybe the Senator is a bit more astute than given credit for.

Ultimately, the mainstream climate science community might share with their activist colleagues the same sort of advice Representative Jim Clyburn (D-SC) offered to former President Bill Clinton – "chill."

Posted on January 30, 2008 01:15 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

January 29, 2008

Eugene Skolnikoff on The Honest Broker

It is really an honor to see MIT's Eugene Skolnikoff review The Honest Broker in the January Review of Policy Research of the Policy Studies Organization. Professor Skolnikoff has been a leading scholar of science and technology policy for more than four decades. He served on the staff of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, and as a consultant to President Carter, in addition to playing many other roles in the academic and applied communities.

He has these nice things to say about the book:

. . . Pielke’s book is a primer that can be a valuable introduction to clarifying the wide roles scientists can and do play, and can be useful in explaining what lies behind some of the controversies so evident today.
The bulk of the book is devoted to elaborating these four roles [of Pure Scientist, Science Arbiter, Issue Advocate, and Honest Broker], providing some background on what earlier scholars have written, elaborating the roles with illustrative issues, and discussing the important underlying elements of values and uncertainty. Pielke clearly has been through the wars on science policy issues and shows his experience and, by implication, his frustration with those scientists who advocate policies they argue are dictated by the scientific facts, without recognizing (or admitting) that their views are a result of their commitment to certain policy outcomes. He demonstrates a solid grasp of science and policy interactions, a sophisticated knowledge of U.S. science policy and institutions, and can write and express important ideas clearly and convincingly. For those reasons, the book is a valuable addition to the science and policy scene.

Professor Skolnikoff takes issue with several aspects of the book, such as its lack of discussions of engineers and technology. More importantly he suggests that I am "arguing that all scientists who call for action, some action, to deal with what they see as possible consequences of emerging evidence have become advocates, whose scientific views can thereby be considered to be politicized." This is indeed what I have argued. He concludes that "Pielke appears to tar all scientists who have strong views on a controversial issue, notably climate change again, with the claim they have simply become advocates and thus closed to alternative evidence."

I actually do not assert that advocates are closed to alternative evidence nor do I cast advocacy in such a pejorative light. In fact, I make a strong case for the importance of advocacy in democratic politics. It is not "tarring" someone to identify them as participating in advocacy, which I define as working to reduce the scope of political choice. What I do take strong issue with is what I call "stealth issue advocacy" in which an expert claims to be focused only on science (or more generally, truth), while really working to advance a specific agenda. Unfortunately, Professor Skolnikoff does not discuss this distinction among advocacy activities.

Overall, it is a thoughtful review, in which Skolnikoff describes the book as "generally valuable and occasionally provocative," which sounds pretty good to me.

Posted on January 29, 2008 12:29 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | The Honest Broker

January 28, 2008

Two New Blogs to Check Out

Like anyone needs a longer personal blogroll, but here are two that might be worth a look.

William Briggs is a statistician, a delightful writer, and provocatively skeptical about all sort of subjects in exactly the way that scientists should be skeptical. His new blog is extremely thoughtful. For example, he has a post up today titled, "Is climatology a pseudoscience?" and provides a nuanced, and yes, provocative answer.

A new group blog called Science Policy Development has just started up on the heels of the recent NAS Science and Technology Policy Graduate Student Forum. There is plenty of room in the blogosphere for more discussions of science policy and I am hopeful that this group maintains an active presence in science policy discussions.

Posted on January 28, 2008 03:22 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Hodge Podge | Science Policy: General

January 26, 2008

Updated IPCC Forecasts vs. Observations

Carl Mears from Remote Sensing Systems, Inc. was kind enough to email me to point out that the RSS data that I had shared with our readers a few weeks ago contained an error that RSS has since corrected. The summary figure above is re-plotted with the corrected data (RSS is the red curve). At the time I wrote:

Something fishy is going on. The IPCC and CCSP recently argued that the surface and satellite records are reconciled. This might be the case from the standpoint of long-term linear trends. But the data here suggest that there is some work left to do. The UAH and NASA curves are remarkably consistent. But RSS dramatically contradicts both. UKMET shows 2007 as the coolest year since 2001, whereas NASA has 2007 as the second warmest. In particular estimates for 2007 seem to diverge in unique ways. It'd be nice to see the scientific community explain all of this.

For those interested in the specifics, Carl explained in his email:

The error was simple -- I made a small change in the code ~ 1 year ago that resulted in a ~0.1K decrease in the absolute value of AMSU TLTs, but neglected to reprocess data from 1998-2006, instead only using it for the new (Jan 2007 onward) data. Since the AMSU TLTs are forced to match the MSU TLTs (on average) during the overlap period, this resulted in an apparent drop in TLT for 2007. Reprocessing the earlier AMSU data, thus lowering AMSU TLT by 0.1 from 1998-2006, resulted in small changes in the parameters that are added to the AMSU temperatures to make them match MSU temperatures, and thus the 2007 data is increased by ~0.1K. My colleagues at UAH (Christy and Spencer) were both very helpful in diagnosing the problem.

It is important to note that the RSS correction does not alter my earlier analysis of the IPCC predictions (made in 1990, 1995, 2001, 2007) and various observations. Thanks again to Carl for alerting me to the error and giving me a chance to update the figures with the new information!

Posted on January 26, 2008 01:10 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Prediction and Forecasting | Scientific Assessments

January 23, 2008

The Authoritarianism of Experts

Have you ever heard anyone make the argument that we must take a certain course of action because the experts tell us we must? The issue might be the threat of another country or an environmental risk, but increasingly we see appeals to authority used as the basis for arguing for this or that action.

In a new book, David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith take the appeal to experts somewhat further and argue that in order to deal with climate change we need to replace liberal democracy with an authoritarianism of scientific expertise. They write in a recent op-ed:

Liberal democracy is sweet and addictive and indeed in the most extreme case, the USA, unbridled individual liberty overwhelms many of the collective needs of the citizens. . .
There must be open minds to look critically at liberal democracy. Reform must involve the adoption of structures to act quickly regardless of some perceived liberties. . .

We are going to have to look how authoritarian decisions based on consensus science can be implemented to contain greenhouse emissions.

On their book page they write:

[T]he authors conclude that an authoritarian form of government is necessary, but this will be governance by experts and not by those who seek power.

So whenever you hear (or invoke) an argument from expertise (i.e., "the experts tell us that we must ...") ask if we should listen to the experts in just this one case, or if we should turn over all decisions to experts. If just this one case, why this one and not others? If a general prescription, should we do away with democracy in favor of an authoritarianism of expertise?

Posted on January 23, 2008 06:25 AM View this article | Comments (8)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science + Politics | The Honest Broker

January 20, 2008

I'm So Confused

Last week I received an email from our Chancellor, Bud Peterson, warning me and my CU colleagues of the perils of engaging in political advocacy activities as a university employee. Here is an excerpt:

TO: Boulder Campus Teaching & Research Faculty, Staff, Deans, Directors, Dept Chairs
FROM: Office of the Chancellor

SENDER: Chancellor G.P. "Bud" Peterson

DATE: January 18, 2008

SUBJECT: Guidelines on Campaign-Related Activities by Members of the University Community

Dear Colleagues:

In light of the many political campaigns currently, or soon to be, underway at the national, state and local levels, I would like to provide you with a set of guidelines we, as members of the University community, should keep in mind as we consider our own activities and level of involvement. The guidelines were developed by the Office of the University Counsel, and if you have questions, I urge you to contact Counsel's office at 303-492-7481.

GUIDELINES ON CAMPAIGN-RELATED ACTIVITIES BY MEMBERS OF THE UNIVERSITY
COMMUNITY

IN GENERAL, UNIVERSITY EMPLOYEES MAY NOT:

* Engage in any activity during working hours designed to urge electors to vote for or against any campaign issues, which include campaigns for public office, state-wide campaign issues or referred measures, and local campaign issues or levies.

* Employees wishing to participate in a campaign activity should take personal leave.

* Use office supplies or equipment, including computers, telephones, printers or facsimile machines to create materials urging electors to vote for or against a campaign issue.

* Use their University email accounts to urge electors to vote for or against a campaign issue, or to forward materials that urge electors to vote for or against a campaign issue.

* Use University-hosted websites to urge electors to vote for or against a campaign issue.

At the same time Chancellor Peterson has endorsed faculty participation in a January 31 political advocacy effort called "Focus the Nation," which seeks to motivate action on climate change.

Here is how The Colorado Daily describes the activity:

There's also a hint of politics involved: the teach-in is scheduled for Jan. 31, shortly before statewide primaries and caucuses, and is timed to place pressure on political candidates. [Colorado's caucus is Feb. 5].
"We wanted to do it right in the height of the early primaries to ensure that climate change is at the forefront of the issues," [Garrett] Brennan [media director for Focus the Nation] said.

After all, raising awareness about climate change is one thing, he said. Actually solving it is another.

"The solutions are pretty cut and dry," Brennan said. "You're not going to create an art installation and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Raising awareness - making it personal to people - is multidisciplinary. The solutions are policies that are going to get passed."

That could be one reason that voter-registration group New Era Colorado will be on campus that day, displaying poster-board profiles that detail each candidate's stance on environmental issues.

The website for Focus the Nation lists the policy actions that it wishes to focus our nation's attention on and for me to discuss in the classroom, and here are a few of the options that I am supposed to provide to my students:

To stabilize global warming at the low end of the possible range (3-4 degrees F) will require deep cuts in global warming pollution beginning in about 2020. In the US, reductions in emissions of roughly 15%-20% per decade will be needed.
Place a tax on each ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) embodied in fossil fuels. Set the tax high enough to initially stabilize nationwide emissions, and then have the tax rise over time, generating steady cuts in pollution. Use tax revenue to (1) compensate lower income Americans for higher energy prices, and (2) to assist impacted workers, especially in coal mining.

To the extent that coal use is unavoidable, only allow coal plants that capture and permanently sequester their emissions in geologic formations.

Cap total carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution emitted in the US through a system of a fixed number of permits; auction the permits to emitters; use auction revenue to (1) compensate lower income Americans for higher energy prices, and (2) to assist impacted workers, especially in coal mining.

By 2030, require by law that all new buildings in the US be "carbon neutral" (no net emissions of global warming pollution from fossil fuel combustion).

Set the emerging biofuels sector on a sustainable basis through: (1) A Low Carbon Fuel Standard that sets a goal for reducing carbon intensity in the total light and heavy duty vehicles fuels mix by10 percent by 2020, and (2) Mount a major effort to research, develop, demonstrate and deploy sustainable biofuels feedstocks and technologies.

Prevent CO2 emissions and remove atmospheric CO2 through forest conservation, management and restoration. Include forests in cap & auction system, allowing the trade of forest emissions reductions that are real, additional, verifiable, and permanent.

For the United States as a whole, adopt California’s standards requiring a 23% reduction in global warming pollution from new vehicles sold by 2012, and a 30% reduction in global warming pollution from new vehicles sold by 2016.

I am so confused.

Focus the Nation is unadulterated political advocacy. But my campus forbids me to use my official time, paid for by taxpayers, to advocate for particular campaign issues. But global warming is so important. But my Chancellor forbids me to engage in political advocacy as part of my job. But my Chancellor is the keynote speaker for our Focus the Nation activities. But my job is to teach not indoctrinate. But I actually agree with many of the proposed policies. But it is not my job to use my platform as a professor to tell students what to think; I am supposed to teach them how to think and come to their own conclusions. But if I don't go along I'll be castigated as one of those bad guys, like a Holocaust denier or slave owner. But doing the right thing is so obvious.

Thank goodness I am on sabbatical.

Posted on January 20, 2008 03:10 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Education | Science + Politics

January 18, 2008

Temperature Trends 1990-2007: Hansen, IPCC, Obs

The figure below shows linear trends in temperature for Jim Hansen's three 1988 scenarios (in shades of blue), for the IPCC predictions issued in 1990, 1995, 2001, 2007 (in shades of green), and for four sets of observations (in shades of brown). I choose the period 1990-2007 because this is the period of overlap for all of the predictions (except IPCC 2007, which starts in 2000).

temp trends.png

Looking just at these measures of central tendency (i.e., no formal consideration of uncertainties) it seems clear that:

1. Trends in all of Hansen's scenarios are above IPCC 1995, 2001, and 2007, as well as three of the four surface observations.

2. The outlier on surface observations, and the one consistent with Hansen's Scenarios A and B is the NASA dataset overseen by Jim Hansen. Whatever the explanation for this, good scientific practice would have forecasting and data collection used to verify those forecasts conducted by completely separate groups.

3. Hansen's Scenario A is very similar to IPCC 1990, which makes sense given their closeness in time, and assumptions of forcings at the time (i.e., thoughts on business-as-usual did not change much over that time).

The data for the Hansen scenarios was obtained at Climate Audit from the ongoing discussion there, and the IPCC and observational data is as described on this site over the past week or so in the forecast verification exercise that I have conducted. This is an ongoing exercise, as part of a conversation across the web, so if you have questions or comments, please share them, either here, or if our comment interface is driving you nuts (as it is with me), then comment over at Climate Audit where I'll participate in the discussions.

Posted on January 18, 2008 11:54 AM View this article | Comments (8)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Prediction and Forecasting | Scientific Assessments

Worldwatch Wants You to Think

prius v nano.png

Worldwatch asks a challenging question:

One car gets 46 miles per gallon, features fancy accessories, and sports two engines with a combined 145 horsepower. The other car reportedly gets 54 miles per gallon, runs on a diminutive 30-horsepower engine, and is positively spartan in its interior trimmings. The first is a darling of the environmentally conscious. The latter is reviled as a climate wrecker. These two vehicles are the Toyota Prius and the newly unveiled Tata Nano, dubbed "the people’s car." Is there a double standard?

Posted on January 18, 2008 07:24 AM View this article | Comments (7)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Energy Policy | Technology and Globalization

January 17, 2008

New Paper on Normalized Hurricane Damages

Normalized Hurricane Damage.png

Our paper on normalized hurricane damages 1900 to 2005 has now been published. By "normalized" we mean taking damages as recorded in the year that they occurred in that year's dollars, and adjusting them to account for societal changes such as population growth, building stock, tangible wealth, and inflation. The figure above shows the results of one of the two approaches to normalization presented in our paper.

The full paper can be found at the link below and an Excel dataset can be found here.

Pielke, Jr., R. A., Gratz, J., Landsea, C. W., Collins, D., Saunders, M., and Musulin, R., 2008. Normalized Hurricane Damages in the United States: 1900-2005. Natural Hazards Review, 9:29-42. (PDF)

A few brief comments follow.

For those who might be interested in the debate over hurricanes and global warming, there is nothing added to the debate from this paper. Here is what we say that is most relevant:

Pielke and Landsea (1998) found no trends in normalized losses, a finding subsequently replicated by Katz (2002). Recent analyses of longitudinal geophysical data find that there are no trends on hurricane frequency and intensity at U.S. landfall (see, Landsea 2005; Emanuel 2005; Landsea 2007). Because the normalization methodology is subject to assumptions, differences in which can lead to significant changes in results, there is general agreement that normalized data are in general not the best first place to look for changes in underlying geophysical variables, and such changes are best explored using the geophysical data directly (cf. Höppe and Pielke 2006). However, when climate trends or variability have sufficiently large effects on losses, they can be detected in damage data (e.g., Pielke and Landsea 1999).
The two normalized datasets reported here show no trends in either the absolute data or under a logarithmic transformation: the variance explained by a best fit linear trend line = 0.0004 and 0.0003 respectively for PL05, and 0.0014 and 0.00006 respectively for CL05. The lack of trend in twentieth century normalized hurricane losses is consistent with what one would expect to find given the lack of trends in hurricane frequency or intensity at landfall. This finding should add some confidence that, at least to a first degree, the normalization approach has successfully adjusted for changing societal conditions. Given the lack of trends in hurricanes themselves, any trend observed in the normalized losses would necessarily reflect some bias in the adjustment process, such as failing to recognize changes in adaptive capacity or misspecifying wealth. Because we do not have a resulting bias suggests that any factors not included in the normalization methods do not have a resulting net large significance.

Below is an image showing the top 50 storms for one of the normalization methods. For the details on the methods and a whole bunch of analysis, please see the paper.

Normalized Damage Top 50.png

Posted on January 17, 2008 02:54 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Disasters

January 16, 2008

UKMET Short Term Global Temperature Forecast

UKMET Short Term Forecast.png

This figure shows a short-term forecast of global average temperature issued by the UK Meteorological Service, with some annotations that I've added and described below. The forecast is discussed in this PDF where you can find the original figure. This sort of forecast should be applauded, because it allows for learning based on experience. Such forecasts, whether eventually shown to be wrong or right, can serve as powerful tests of knowledge and predictive skill. The UK Met Service is to be applauded. Now on to the figure itself.

The figure is accompanied by this caption:

Observations of global average temperature (black line) compared with decadal ‘hindcasts’ (10-year model simulations of the past, white lines and red shading), plus the first decadal prediction for the 10 years from 2005. Temperatures are plotted as anomalies (relative to 1979–2001). As with short-term weather forecasts there remains some uncertainty in our predictions of temperature over a decade. The red shading shows our confidence in predictions of temperature in any given year. If there are no volcanic eruptions during the forecast period, there is a 90% likelihood of the temperature being within the shaded area.

The figure shows both hindcasts and a forecast. I've shaded the hindcasts in grey. I've added the green curve which is my replication of the global temperature anomalies from the UKMET HADCRUT3 dataset extended to 2007. I've also plotted as a blue dot the prediction issued by UKMET for 2008, which is expected to be indistinguishable from the temperature of years 2001 to 2007 (which were indistinguishable from each other). The magnitude of the UKMET forecast over the next decade is almost exactly identical to the IPCC AR4 prediction over the same time period, which I discussed last week.

I have added the pink star at 1995 to highlight the advantages offered by hindcasting. Imagine if the model realization begun in 1985 had been continued beyond 1995, rather than being re-run after 1995. Clearly, all subsequent observed temperatures would have been well below that 1985 curve. One important reason for this is of course the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, which was not predicted. And that is precisely the point -- prediction is really hard, especially when conducted in the context of open systems, and as is often said, especially about the the future. Our ability to explain why a prediction was wrong does not make that prediction right, and this is a point often lost in debate about climate change.

Again, kudos to the UK Met Service. They've had the fortitude to issue a short term prediction related to climate change. Other scientific bodies should follow this lead. It is good for science, and good for the use of science in decision making.

Posted on January 16, 2008 02:15 AM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Prediction and Forecasting | Scientific Assessments

January 15, 2008

Verification of IPCC Sea Level Rise Forecasts 1990, 1995, 2001

Here is a graph showing IPCC sea level rise forecasts from the FAR (1990), SAR (1995), and TAR (2001).

IPCC Sea Level.png

And here are the sources:

IPCC Sea Level Sources.png

Observational data can be found here. Thanks to my colleague Steve Nerem.

Unlike temperature forecasts by the IPCC, sea level rise shows no indication that scientists have a handle on the issue. As with temperature the IPCC dramatically decreased its predictions of sea level rise in between its first (1990) and second (1995) assessment reports. It then nudged down its prediction a very small amount in its 2001 report. The observational data falls in the middle of the 1990 and 1995/2001 assessments.

Last year Rahmstorf et al. published a short paper in Science comparing observations of temperature with IPCC 2001 predictions (Aside: it is remarkable that Science allowed them to ignore IPCC 1990 and 1995). Their analysis is completely consistent with the temperature and sea level rise verifications that I have shown. On sea level rise they concluded:

Previous projections, as summarized by IPCC, have not exaggerated but may in some respects even have underestimated the change, in particular for sea level.

This statement is only true if one ignores the 1990 IPCC report which overestimated both sea level rise and temperature. Rahmstorf et al. interpretation of the results is little more than spin, as it would have been equally valid to conclude based on the 1990 report:

Previous projections, as summarized by IPCC, have not underestimated but may in some respects even have exaggerated the change, both for sea level and temperature.

Rather than spin the results, I conclude that the ongoing debate about future sea level rise is entirely appropriate. The fact that the IPCC has been unsuccessful in predicting sea level rise, does not mean that things are worse or better, but simply that scientists clearly do not have a handle on this issue and are unable to predict sea level changes on a decadal scale. The lack of predictive accuracy does not lend optimism about the prospects for accuracy on the multi-decadal scale. Consider that the 2007 IPCC took a pass on predicting near term sea level rise, choosing instead to focus 90 years out (as far as I am aware, anyone who knows differently, please let me know).

This state of affairs should give no comfort to anyone: over the 21st century sea level is expected to rise, anywhere from an unnoticeable amount to the catastrophic, and scientists have essentially no ability to predict this rise, much less the effects of various climate policies on that rise. As we've said here before, this is a cherrypickers delight, and a policy makers nightmare. It'd be nice to see the scientific community engaged in a bit less spin, and a bit more comprehensive analysis.

Posted on January 15, 2008 12:59 AM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Prediction and Forecasting | Scientific Assessments

January 14, 2008

James Hansen on One Year's Temperature

NASA's James Hansen just sent around a commentary (in PDF here) on the significance of the 2007 global temperature in the context of the long-term temperature record that he compiles for NASA. After Real Climate went nuts over how misguided it is to engage in a discussion of eight years worth of temperature records, I can''t wait to see them lay into Jim Hansen for asserting that one year's data is of particular significance (and also for not graphing uncertainty ranges):

The Southern Oscillation and the solar cycle have significant effects on year-to-year global temperature change. Because both of these natural effects were in their cool phases in 2007, the unusual warmth of 2007 is all the more notable.

But maybe it is that data that confirms previously held beliefs is acceptable no matter how short the record, and data that does not is not acceptable, no matter how long the record. But that would be confirmation bias, wouldn't it?

Anyway, Dr. Hansen does not explain why the 2007 NASA data runs counter to that of UKMET, UAH or RSS, but does manage to note the "incorrect" 2007 UKMET prediction of a record warm year. Dr. Hansen issues his own prediction:

. . . it is unlikely that 2008 will be a year with an unusual global temperature change, i.e., it is likely to remain close to the range of (high) values exhibited in 2002-2007. On the other hand, when the next El Nino occurs it is likely to carry global temperature to a significantly higher level than has occurred in recent centuries, probably higher than any year in recent millennia. Thus we suggest that, barring the unlikely event of a large volcanic eruption, a record global temperature clearly exceeding that of 2005 can be expected within the next 2-3 years.

I wonder if this holds just for the NASA dataset put together by Dr. Hansen or for all of the temperature datasets.

Posted on January 14, 2008 04:27 PM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Prediction and Forecasting | Scientific Assessments

Updated Chart: IPCC Temperature Verification

I've received some email comments suggesting that my use of the 1992 IPCC Supplement as the basis for IPCC 1990 temperature predictions was "too fair" to the IPCC because the IPCC actually reduced its temperature projections from 1990 to 1992. In addition, Gavin Schmidt and a commenter over at Climate Audit also did not like my use of the 1992 report. So I am going to take full advantage of the rapid feedback of the web to provide an updated figure, based on IPCC 1990, specifically, Figure A.9, p. 336. In other words, I no longer rely on the 1992 supplement, and have simply gone back to the original IPCC 1990 FAR. Here then is that updated Figure:

IPCC Verification 90-95-01-07 vs Obs.png

Thanks all for the feedback!

Posted on January 14, 2008 02:46 PM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Prediction and Forecasting | Scientific Assessments

Pachauri on Recent Climate Trends

Last week scientists at the Real Climate blog gave their confirmation bias synapses a workout by explaining that eight years of climate data is meaningless, and people who pay any attention to recent climate trends are "misguided." I certainly agree that we should exhibit cautiousness in interpreting short-duration observations, nonetheless we should always be trying to explain (rather than simply discount) observational evidence to avoid the trap of confirmation bias.

So it was interesting to see IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri exhibit "misguided" behavior when he expressed some surprise about recent climate trends in The Guardian:

Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the U.N. Panel that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, said he would look into the apparent temperature plateau so far this century.
"One would really have to see on the basis of some analysis what this really represents," he told Reuters, adding "are there natural factors compensating?" for increases in greenhouse gases from human activities.

He added that sceptics about a human role in climate change delighted in hints that temperatures might not be rising. "There are some people who would want to find every single excuse to say that this is all hogwash," he said.

Ironically, by suggesting that their might be some significance to recent climate trends, Dr. Pachauri has provided ammunition to those very same skeptics that he disparages. Perhaps Real Climate will explain how misguided he is, but somehow I doubt it.

For the record, I accept the conclusions of IPCC Working Group I. I don't know how to interpret climate observations of the early 21st century, but believe that there are currently multiple valid hypotheses. I also think that we can best avoid confirmation bias, and other cognitive traps, by making explicit predictions of the future and testing them against experience. The climate community, or at least its activist wing, studiously avoids forecast verification. It just goes to show, confirmation bias is more a more comfortable state than dissonance -- and that goes for people on all sides of the climate debate.

Posted on January 14, 2008 08:02 AM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Prediction and Forecasting | Scientific Assessments

Verification of IPCC Temperature Forecasts 1990, 1995, 2001, and 2007

Last week I began an exercise in which I sought to compare global average temperature predictions with the actual observed temperature record. With this post I'll share my complete results.

Last week I showed a comparison of the 2007 IPCC temperature forecasts (which actually began in 2000, so they were really forecasts of data that had already been observed). Here is that figure.

surf-sat vs. IPCC.png

Then I showed a figure with a comparison of the 1990 predictions made by the IPCC in 1992 with actual temperature data. Some folks misinterpreted the three curves that I showed from the IPCC to be an uncertainty bound. They were not. Instead, they were forecasts conditional on different assumptions about climate sensitivity, with the middle curve showing the prediction for a 2.5 degree climate sensitivity, which is lower than scientists currently believe to the most likely value. So I have reproduced that graph below without the 1.5 and 4.5 degree climate sensitivity curves.

IPCC 1990 verification.png

Now here is a similar figure for the 1995 forecast. The IPCC in 1995 dramatically lowered its global temperature predictions, primarily due to the inclusion of consideration of atmospheric aerosols, which have a cooling effect. You can see the 1995 IPCC predictions on pp. 322-323 of its Second Assessment Report. Figure 6.20 shows the dramatic reduction of temperature predictions through the inclusion of aerosols. The predictions themselves can be found in Figure 6.22, and are the values that I use in the figure below, which also use a 2.5 degree climate sensitivity, and are also based on the IS92e or IS92f scenarios.

IPCC 1995 Verification.png

In contrast to the 1990 prediction, the 1995 prediction looks spot on. It is worth noting that the 1995 prediction began in 1990, and so includes observations that were known at the time of the prediction.

In 2001, the IPCC nudged its predictions up a small amount. The prediction is also based on a 1990 start, and can be found in the Third Assessment Report here. The most relevant scenario is A1FI, and the average climate sensitivity of the models used to generate these predictions is 2.8 degrees, which may be large enough to account for the difference between the 1995 and 2001 predictions. Here is a figure showing the 2001 forecast verification.

IPCC 2001 Verification.png

Like 1995, the 2001 figure looks quite good in comparison to the actual data.

Now we can compare all four predictions with the data, but first here are all four IPCC temperature predictions (1990, 1995, 2001, 2007) on one graph.

IPCC Predictions 90-95-01-07.png

IPCC issued its first temperature prediction in 1990 (I actually use the prediction from the supplement to the 1990 report issued in 1992). Its 1995 report dramatically lowered this prediction. 2001 nudged this up a bit, and 2001 elevated the entire curve another small increment, keeping the slope the same. My hypothesis for what is going on here is that the various changes over time to the IPCC predictions reflect incrementally improved fits to observed temperature data, as more observations have come in since 1990.

In other words, the early 1990s showed how important aerosols were in the form of dramatically lowered temperatures (after Mt. Pinatubo), and immediately put the 1990 predictions well off track. So the IPCC recognized the importance of aerosols and lowered its predictions, putting the 1995 IPCC back on track with what had happened with the real climate since its earlier report. With the higher observed temperatures in the late 1990s and early 2000s the slightly increased predictions of temperature in 2001 and 2007 represented better fits with observations since 1995 (for the 2001 report) and 2001 (for the 2007 report).

Imagine if your were asked to issue a prediction for the temperature trend over next week, and you are allowed to update that prediction every 2nd day. Regardless of where you think things will eventually end up, you'd be foolish not to include what you've observed in producing your mid-week updates. Was this behavior by the IPCC intentional or simply the inevitable result of using a prediction start-date years before the forecast was being issued? I have no idea. But the lesson for the IPCC should be quite clear: All predictions (and projections) that it issues should begin no earlier than the year that the prediction is being made.

And now the graph that you have all been waiting for. Here is a figure showing all four IPCC predictions with the surface (NASA, UKMET) and satellite (UAH, RSS) temperature record.

IPCC Verification 90-95-01-07 vs Obs.png

You can see on this graph that the 1990 prediction was obviously much higher than the other three, and you can also clearly see how the IPCC temperature predictions have creeped up as observations showed increasing temperatures from 1995-2005. A simple test of my hypothesis is as follows: In the next IPCC, if temperatures from 2005 to the next report fall below the 2007 IPCC prediction, then the next IPCC will lower its predictions. Similarly, if values fall above that level, then the IPCC will increase its predictions.

What to take from this exercise?

1. The IPCC does not make forecast verification an easy task. The IPCC does not clearly identify what exactly it is predicting nor the variables that can be used to verify those predictions. Like so much else in climate science this leaves evaluations of predictions subject to much ambiguity, cherrypicking, and seeing what one wants to see.

2. The IPCC actually has a pretty good track record in its predictions, especially after it dramatically reduced its 1990 prediction. This record is clouded by an appearance of post-hoc curve fitting. In each of 1995, 2001, and 2007 the changes to the IPCC predictions had the net result of improving predictive performance with observations that had already been made. This is a bit like predicting today's weather at 6PM.

3. Because the IPCC clears the slate every 5-7 years with a new assessment report, it is guarantees that its most recent predictions can never be rigorously verified, because, as climate scientists will tell you, 5-7 years is far too short to say anything about climate predictions. Consequently, the IPCC should not predict and then move on, but pay close attention to its past predictions and examine why the succeed or fail. As new reports are issued the IPCC should go to great lengths to place its new predictions on an apples-to-apples basis with earlier predictions. The SAR did a nice job of this, more recent reports have not. A good example of how not to update predictions is the predictions of sea level rise between the TAR and AR4 which are not at all apples-to-apples.

4. Finally, and I repeat myself, the IPCC should issue predictions for the future, not the recent past.

Appendix: Checking My Work

The IPCC AR4 Technical Summary includes a figure (Figure TS.26) that shows a verification of sorts. I use that figure as a comparison to what I've done. Here is that figure, with a number of my annotations superimposed, and explained below.

IPCC Check.png

Let me first say that the IPCC probably could not have produced a more difficult-to-interpret figure (I see Gavin Schmidt at Real Climate has put out a call for help in understanding it). I have annotated it with letters and some lines and I explain them below.

A. I added this thick horizontal blue line to indicate the 1990 baseline. This line crosses a thin blue line that I placed to represent 2007.

B. This thin blue line crosses the vertical axis where my 1995 verification value lies, represented by the large purple dot.

C. This thin blue line crosses the vertical axis where my 1990 verification value lies, represented by the large green dot. (My 2001 verification is represented by the large light blue dot.)

D. You can see that my 1990 verification value falls exactly on a line extended from the upper bound of the IPCC curve. I have also extended the IPCC mid-range curve as well (note that my extension superimposed falls a tiny bit higher than it should). Why is this? I'm not sure, but one answer is that the uncertainty range presented by the IPCC represents the scenario range, but of course in the past there is no scenario uncertainty. Since emissions have fallen at the high end of the scenario space, if my interpretation is correct, then my verification is consistent with that of the IPCC.

E. For the 1995 verification, you can see that similarly my value falls exactly on a line extended from the upper end of the IPCC range. This would also be consistent with the IPCC presenting the uncertainty range as representing alternative scenarios. The light blue dot is similarly at the upper end of the blue range. What should not be missed is that the relative difference between my verifications and those of the IPCCs are just about identical.

A few commenters over at Real Climate, including Gavin Schmidt, have suggested that such figures need uncertainty bounds on them. In general, I agree, but I'd note that none of the model predictions presented by the IPCC (B1, A1B, A2, Commitment -- note that all of these understate reality since emissions are following A1FI, the highest, most closely) show any model uncertainty whatsoever (nor any observational uncertainty, nor multiple measures of temperature). Surely with the vast resources available to the IPCC, they could have done a much more rigorous job of verification.

In closing, I guess I'd suggest to the IPCC that this sort of exercise should be taken up as a formal part of its work. There are many, many other variables (and relationships between variables) that might be examined in this way. And they should be.

Posted on January 14, 2008 01:57 AM View this article | Comments (18)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Prediction and Forecasting | Scientific Assessments

January 11, 2008

Real Climate's Two Voices on Short-Term Climate Fluctuations

Real Climate has been speaking with two voices on how to compare observations of climate with models. Last August they asserted that one-year's sea ice extent could be compared with models:

A few people have already remarked on some pretty surprising numbers in Arctic sea ice extent this year (the New York Times has also noticed). The minimum extent is usually in early to mid September, but this year, conditions by Aug 9 had already beaten all previous record minima. Given that there is at least a few more weeks of melting to go, it looks like the record set in 2005 will be unequivocally surpassed. It could be interesting to follow especially in light of model predictions discussed previously.

Today, they say that looking at 8 years of temperature records is misguided:

John Tierney and Roger Pielke Jr. have recently discussed attempts to validate (or falsify) IPCC projections of global temperature change over the period 2000-2007. Others have attempted to show that last year's numbers imply that 'Global Warming has stopped' or that it is 'taking a break' (Uli Kulke, Die Welt)). However, as most of our readers will realise, these comparisons are flawed since they basically compare long term climate change to short term weather variability.

So according to Real Climate one-year's ice extent data can be compared to climate models, but 8 years of temperature data cannot.

Right. This is why I believe that whatever one's position of climate change is, everyone should agree that rigorous forecast verification is needed.

Post Script. I see at Real Climate commenters are already calling me a "skeptic" for even discussing forecast verification. For the record I accept the consensus of the IPCC WGI. If asking questions about forecast verification is to be tabooo, then climate science is in worse shape than I thought.

Posted on January 11, 2008 09:25 AM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Prediction and Forecasting | Scientific Assessments

January 10, 2008

Verification of 1990 IPCC Temperature Predictions

1990 IPCC verification.png

I continue to receive good suggestions and positive feedback on the verification exercise that I have been playing around with this week. Several readers have suggested that a longer view might be more appropriate. So I took a look at the IPCC's First Assessment Report that had been sitting on my shelf, and tried to find its temperature prediction starting in 1990. I actually found what I was looking for in a follow up document: Climate Change 1992: The Supplementary Report to the IPCC Scientific Assessment (not online that I am aware of).

In conducting this type of forecast verification, one of the first things to do is to specify which emissions scenario most closely approximated what has actually happened since 1990. As we have discussed here before, emissions have been occurring at the high end of the various scenarios used by the IPCC. So in this case I have used IS92e or IS92f (the differences are too small to be relevant to this analysis), which are discussed beginning on p. 69.

With the relevant emissions scenario, I then went to the section that projected future temperatures, and found this in Figure Ax.3 on p. 174. From that I took from the graph the 100-year temperature change and converted it into an annual rate. At the time the IPCC presented estimates for climate sensitivities of 1.5 degree, 2.5 degrees, and 4.5 degrees, with 2.5 degrees identified as a "best estimate." In the figure above I have estimated the 1.5 and 4.5 degree values based on the ratios taken from graph Ax.2, but I make no claim that they are precise. My understanding is that climate scientists today think that climate sensitivity is around 3.0 degrees, so if one were to re-do the 1990 prediction with a climate sensitivity of 3.0 the resulting curve would be a bit above the 2.5 degree curve shown above.

On the graph you will also see the now familiar temperature records from two satellite and two surface analyses. It seems pretty clear that the IPCC in 1990 over-forecast temperature increases, and this is confirmed by the most recent IPCC report (Figure TS.26), so it is not surprising.

I'll move on to the predictions of the Second Assessment Report in a follow up.

Posted on January 10, 2008 07:03 PM View this article | Comments (7)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Prediction and Forecasting | Scientific Assessments

Radio Interview with Radio Radicale

You can hear a 12 minute interview with me on my book The Honest Broker with Radio Radicale (Rome, Italy) here.

Posted on January 10, 2008 02:51 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | The Honest Broker

January 09, 2008

Forecast Verification for Climate Science, Part 3

By popular demand, here is a graph showing the two main analyses of global temperatures from satellite, from RSS and UAH, as well as the two main analyses of global temperatures from the surface record, UKMET and NASA, plotted with the temperature predictions reported in IPCC AR4, as described in Part 1 of this series.

surf-sat vs. IPCC.png

Some things to note:

1) I have not graphed observational uncertainties, but I'd guess that they are about +/-0.05 (and someone please correct me if this is wildly off), and their inclusion would not alter the discussion here.

2) A feast for cherrypickers. One can arrive at whatever conclusion one wants with respect to the IPCC predictions. Want the temperature record to be consistent with IPCC? OK, then you like NASA. How about inconsistent? Well, then you are a fan of RSS. On the fence? Well, UAH and UKMET serve that purpose pretty well.

3) Something fishy is going on. The IPCC and CCSP recently argued that the surface and satellite records are reconciled. This might be the case from the standpoint of long-term liner trends. But the data here suggest that there is some work left to do. The UAH and NASA curves are remarkably consistent. But RSS dramatically contradicts both. UKMET shows 2007 as the coolest year since 2001, whereas NASA has 2007 as the second warmest. In particular estimates for 2007 seem to diverge in unique ways. It'd be nice to see the scientific community explain all of this.

4) All show continued warming since 2000!

5) From the standpoint of forecast verification, which is where all of this began, the climate community really needs to construct a verification dataset for global temperature and other variables that will be (a) the focus of predictions, and (b) the ground truth against which those predictions will be verified.

Absent an ability to rigorously evaluate forecasts, in the presence of multiple valid approaches to observational data we run the risk of engaging in all sorts of cognitive traps -- such as availability bias and confirmation bias. So here is a plea to the climate community: when you say that you are predicting something like global temperature or sea ice extent or hurricanes -- tell us is specific detail what those variables are, who is measuring them, and where to look in the future to verify the predictions. If weather forecasters, stock brokers, and gamblers can do it, then you can too.

Posted on January 9, 2008 08:12 AM View this article | Comments (9)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Prediction and Forecasting | Scientific Assessments

January 08, 2008

Forecast Verification for Climate Science, Part 2

Yesterday I posted a figure showing how surface temperatures compare with IPCC model predictions. I chose to use the RSS satellite record under the assumption that the recent IPCC and CCSP reports were both correct in their conclusions that the surface and satellite records have been reconciled. It turns out that my reliance of the IPCC and CCSP may have been mistaken.

I received a few comments from people suggesting that I had selectively used the RSS data because it showed different results than other global temperature datasets. My first reaction to this was to wonder how the different datasets could show different results if the IPCC was correct when it stated (PDF):

New analyses of balloon-borne and satellite measurements of lower- and mid-tropospheric temperature show warming rates that are similar to those of the surface temperature record and are consistent within their respective uncertainties, largely reconciling a discrepancy noted in the TAR.

But I decided to check for myself. I went to the NASA GISS and downloaded its temperature data and scaled to a 1980-1999 mean. I then plotted it on the same scale as the RSS data that I shared yesterday. Here is what the curves look like on the same scale.

Well, I'm no climate scientist, but they sure don't look reconciled to me, especially 2007. (Any suggestions on the marked divergence in 2007?)

What does this mean for the comparison with IPCC predictions? I have overlaid the GISS data on the graph I prepared yesterday.

AR4 Verificantion Surf Sat.png

So using the NASA GISS global temperature data for 2000-2007 results in observations that are consistent with the IPCC predictions, but contradict the IPCC's conclusion that the surface and satellite temperature records are reconciled. Using the RSS data results in observations that are (apparently) inconsistent with the IPCC predictions.

I am sure that in conducting such a verification some will indeed favor the dataset that best confirms their desired conclusions. But, it would be ironic indeed to see scientists now abandon RSS after championing it in the CCSP and IPCC reports. So, I'm not sure what to think.

Is it really the case that the surface and satellite records are again at odds? What dataset should be used to verify climate forecasts of the IPCC?

Answers welcomed.

Posted on January 8, 2008 05:55 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Prediction and Forecasting | Scientific Assessments

January 07, 2008

Forecast Verification for Climate Science

Last week I asked a question:

What behavior of the climate system could hypothetically be observed over the next 1, 5, 10 years that would be inconsistent with the current consensus on climate change?

We didn’t have much discussion on our blog, perhaps in part due to our ongoing technical difficulties (which I am assured will be cleared up soon). But John Tierney at the New York Times sure received an avalanche of responses, many of which seemed to excoriate him simply for asking the question, and none that really engaged the question.

I did receive a few interesting replies by email from climate scientists. Here is one of the most interesting:

The IPCC reports, both AR4 (see Chapter 10) and TAR, are full of predictions made starting in 2000 for the evolution of surface temperature, precipitation, precipitation intensity, sea ice extent, and on and on. It would be a relatively easy task for someone to begin tracking the evolution of these variables and compare them to the IPCC’s forecasts. I am not aware of anyone actually engaged in this kind of climate forecast verification with respect to the IPCC, but it is worth doing.

So I have decided to take him up on this and present an example of what such a verification might look like. I have heard some claims lately that global warming has stopped, based on temperature trends over the past decade. So global average temperature seems like a as good a place as any to provide an example.

I begin with the temperature trends. I have decided to use the satellite record provided by Remote Sensing Systems, mainly because of the easy access of its data. But the choice of satellite versus surface global temperature dataset should not matter, since these have been reconciled according to the IPCC AR4. Here is a look at the satellite data starting in 1998 through 2007.

This dataset starts with the record 1997/1998 ENSO event which boosted temperatures a good deal. It is interesting to look at, but probably not the best place to start for this analysis. A better place to start is with 2000, but not because of what the climate has done, but because this is the baseline used for many of the IPCC AR4 predictions.

Before proceeding, a clarification must be made between a prediction and a projection. Some have claimed that the IPCC doesn’t make predictions, it only makes projections across a wide range of emissions scenarios. This is just a fancy way of saying that the IPCC doesn’t predict future emissions. But make no mistake, it does make conditional predictions for each scenario. Enough years have passed for us to be able to say that global emissions have been increasing at the very high end of the family of scenarios used by the IPCC (closest to A1F1 for those scoring at home). This means that we can zero in on what the IPCC predicted (yes, predicted) for the A1F1 scenario, which has best matched actual emissions.

So how has global temperature changed since 2000? Here is a figure showing the monthly values, indicating that while there has been a decrease in average global temperature of late, the linear trend since 2000 is still positive.

But monthly values are noisy, and not comparable with anything produced by the IPCC, so let’s take a look at annual values.

The annual values result in a curve that looks a bit like an upwards sloping letter M.

The model results produced by the IPCC are not readily available, so I will work from their figures. In the IPCC AR4 report Figure 10.26 on p. 803 of Chapter 10 of the Working Group I report (here in PDF) provides predictions of future temperature as a function of emissions scenario. The one relevant for my purposes can be found in the bottom row (degrees C above 1980-2000 mean) and second column (A1F1).

I have zoomed in on that figure, and overlaid the RSS temperature trends 2000-2007 which you can see below.

AR4 Verification Example.png

Now a few things to note:

1. The IPCC temperature increase is relative to a 1980 to 2000 mean, whereas the RSS anomalies are off of a 1979 to 1998 mean. I don’t expect the differences to be that important in this analysis, particularly given the blunt approach to the graph, but if someone wants to show otherwise, I’m all ears.

2. It should be expected that the curves are not equal in 2000. The anomaly for 2000 according to RSS is 0.08, hence the red curve begins at that value. Figure 10.26 on p. 803 of Chapter 10 of the Working Group I report actually shows observed temperatures for a few years beyond 2000, and by zooming in on the graph in the lower left hand corner of the figure one can see that 2000 was in fact below the A1B curve.

So it appears that temperature trends since 2000 are not closely following the most relevant prediction of the IPCC. Does this make recent temperature trends inconsistent with the IPCC? I have no idea, and that is not the point of this post. I'll leave it to climate scientists to tell us the significance. I assume that many climate scientists will say that there is no significance to what has happened since 2000, and perhaps emphasize that predictions of global temperature are more certain in the longer term than shorter term. But that is not what the IPCC figure indicates. In any case, 2000-2007 may not be sufficient time for climate scientists to become concerned that their predictions are off, but I’d guess that at some point, if observations don’t match predictions they might be of some concern. Alternatively, if observations square with predictions, then this would add confidence.

Before one dismisses this exercise as an exercise in randomness, it should be observed that in other contexts scientists associated short term trends with longer-term predictions. In fact, one need look no further than the record 2007 summer melt in the Arctic which was way beyond anything predicted by the IPCC, reaching close to 3 million square miles less than the 1978-2000 mean. The summer anomaly was much greater than any of the IPCC predictions on this time scale (which can be seen in IPCC AR4 Chapter 10 Figure 10.13 on p. 771). This led many scientists to claim that because the observations were inconsistent with the models, that there should be heightened concern about climate change. Maybe so. But if one variable can be examined for its significance with respect to long-term projections, then surely others can as well.

What I’d love to see is a place where the IPCC predictions for a whole range of relevant variables are provided in quantitative fashion, and as corresponding observations come in, they can be compared with the predictions. This would allow for rigorous evaluations of both the predictions and the actual uncertainties associated with those predictions. Noted atmospheric scientist Roger Pielke, Sr. (my father, of course) has suggested that three variables be looked at: lower tropospheric warming, atmospheric water vapor content, and oceanic heat content. And I am sure there are many other variables worth looking at.

Forecast evaluations also confer another advantage – they would help to move beyond the incessant arguing about this or that latest research paper and focus on true tests of the fidelity of our ability to forecast future states of the climate system. Making predictions and them comparing them to actual events is central to the scientific method. So everyone in the climate debate, whether skeptical or certain, should welcome a focus on verification of climate forecasts. If the IPCC is indeed settled science, then forecast verifications will do nothing but reinforce that conclusion.

For further reading:

Pielke, Jr., R.A., 2003: The role of models in prediction for decision, Chapter 7, pp. 113-137 in C. Canham and W. Lauenroth (eds.), Understanding Ecosystems: The Role of Quantitative Models in Observations, Synthesis, and Prediction, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. (PDF)

Sarewitz, D., R.A. Pielke, Jr., and R. Byerly, Jr., (eds.) 2000: Prediction: Science, decision making and the future of nature, Island Press, Washington, DC. (link) and final chapter (PDF).

Posted on January 7, 2008 05:12 PM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Prediction and Forecasting | Scientific Assessments

Deja Vu All Over Again

The Washington Post had a excellent story yesterday by Marc Kaufman describing NASA’s intentions to increase the flight rate of the Space Shuttle program. This is remarkable, and as good an indication as any that NASA has not yet learned the lessons of its past.

According to the Post:

Although NASA has many new safety procedures in place as a result of the Columbia accident, the schedule has raised fears that the space agency, pressured by budgetary and political considerations, might again find itself tempting fate with the shuttles, which some say were always too high-maintenance for the real world of space flight.

A NASA official is quoted in the story:

"The schedule we've made is very achievable in the big scheme of things. That is, unless we get some unforeseen problems."

The Post has exactly the right follow up to this comment:

The history of the program, however, is filled with such problems -- including a rare and damaging hailstorm at the Kennedy Space Center last year as well as the shedding of foam insulation that led to the destruction of Columbia and its crew in 2003. . . "This pressure feels so familiar," said Alex Roland, a professor at Duke University and a former NASA historian. "It was the same before the Challenger and Columbia disasters: this push to do more with a spaceship that is inherently unpredictable because it is so complex."

John Logsdon, dean of space policy experts and longtime supporter of NASA, recognizes the risks that NASA is taking:

Every time we launch a shuttle, we risk the future of the human space flight program. The sooner we stop flying this risky vehicle, the better it is for the program.

Duke University’s Alex Roland also hit the nail on the head;

Duke professor Roland said that based on the shuttle program's history, he sees virtually no possibility of NASA completing 13 flights by the deadline. He predicted that the agency would ultimately cut some of the launches but still declare the space station completed.
"NASA is filled with can-do people who I really admire, and they will try their best to fulfill the missions they are given," he said. "What I worry about is when this approach comes into conflict with basically impossible demands. Something has to give."

It is instructive to look at the 1987 report of the investigation of the House Science Committee into the 1986 Challenger disaster, which you can find online here in PDF (thanks to Rad Byerly and Ami Nacu-Schmidt). That report contains lessons that apparently have yet to be fully appreciated, even after the loss of Columbia in 2003. Here is an excerpt from the Executive Summary (emphasis added, see also pp. 119-124):

The Committee found that NASA’s drive to achieve a launch schedule of 24 flights per year created pressure throughout the agency that directly contributed to unsafe launch operations. The Committee believes that the pressure to push for an unrealistic number of flights continues to exist in some sectors of NASA and jeopardizes the promotion of a "safety first" attitude throughout the Shuttle program.
The Committee, Congress, and the Administration have played a contributing role in creating this pressure. . . NASA management and the Congress must remember the lessons learned from the Challenger accident and never again set unreasonable goals which stress the system beyond its safe functioning.

One would hope that the House Science Committee has these lessons in mind and is paying close attention to decision making in NASA. It would certainly be appropriate for some greater public oversight of NASA decision making about the Shuttle flight rate and eventual termination. Otherwise, there is a good chance that such oversight will take place after another tragedy and the complete wreckage of the U.S. civilian space program.

For further reading:

Pielke Jr., R. A., 1993: A Reappraisal of the Space Shuttle Program. Space Policy, May, 133-157. (PDF)

Pielke Jr., R.A., and R. Byerly Jr., 1992: The Space Shuttle Program: Performance versus Promise in Space Policy Alternatives, edited by R. Byerly, Westview Press, Boulder, pp. 223-245. (PDF)

Posted on January 7, 2008 12:21 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty | Science Policy: General | Space Policy

January 05, 2008

My Comments to Science on Hillary Clinton's Science Policy Plans

I was recently asked by Eli Kintisch at Science to comment on Hillary Clinton's recent discussion of science policies. Eli quotes a few of my comments in this week's Science, which has a special focus on the presidential candidates. My full reaction to Eli is below:

Hi Eli-
The document seems typical for this early stage of the campaign -- that is, it blends a heavy dose of political red meat, with the entirely vacuous, with hints of some innovative and perhaps even revolutionary new ideas, accompanied with a range of budget promises that almost certainly can't be met. But most significantly is the fact that she has put some science policy ideas forward to be discussed, which is far more than most other candidates of either party have done related to science.

*The red meat is all of the "I'm not George Bush" type statements, such as the stem cell proposal and re-elevation of the science advisor position.

*The vacuous includes the comment that you starred on political appointees. The meaning of this statement depends entirely on the definition of "legitimate basis" and "unwarranted supression" -- well, what is "legitimate" and "unwarranted"? -- as written it is a political Rorschach test, which can be good politics but certainly does nothing to clarify the specific science policies she would enact. Also, the idea that civil servants and scientists are free from politics in regulatory decision making probably needs more thinking through -- but balancing accountability and expertise probably requires more wonky discussion than a campaign sound bite can provide.

*The most innovative idea is the $50 billion strategic energy fund, which is short on details, but promises real money to an area desperately in need of support. This stands out as something really new and potentially very exciting.

*The promises that probably can't be met include keeping the Shuttle contractors in business while pursuing a new human spaceflight program, while at the same time fully funding earth sciences research and a new space-based climate research program, while putting NIH on a doubling trajectory over the next 10 years, not to mention a bit for aeronautics and the $50 billion for energy research. Good luck finding room in the R&D budget for all of that. But again, more politics than science policy, this time aimed at more specific constituencies looking to see that their concerns get some play.

The biggest criticism I have is the comment about the NIH budget, which her husband set on a doubling trajectory and which was completed under Bush. To suggest that NIH has suffered a lack of support is not a great argument. Also, a minor criticism, the part about the U.S. national assessment on climate change says that Bush hasn't released one for 6.5 years, but Clinton/Gore took more than 7 years to release theirs. The national assessment is more political red meat, and probably tangential to where the action is on climate issues anyway.

Hope this helps, please follow up if clarification is needed . . .

Best regards,

Roger

Roger Pielke, Jr.
University of Colorado

Posted on January 5, 2008 10:16 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science + Politics | Science Policy: General | Technology Policy

January 02, 2008

Technology ,Trade, and U.S. Pollution

At the Vox blog Georgetown's Arik Levinson asks:

Since the 1970s, US manufacturing output has risen by 70% but air pollution has fallen by 58%. Was this due to improved abatement technology or shifting dirty production abroad?

He answers the question with some very nice empirical research. Here are his conclusions:

What is the bottom line? Increased net imports of polluting goods account for about 70 percent of the composition-related decline in US manufacturing pollution. The composition effect in turn explains about 40 percent of the overall decline in pollution from US manufacturing. Putting these two findings together, international trade can explain at most 28 percent of the clean-up of US manufacturing.

Why should we care?

If the 75% reduction in pollution from US manufacturing resulted from increased international trade, the pundits and protestors might have a case. Environmental improvements might be said to have imposed large, unmeasured environmental costs on the countries from which those goods are imported. And more importantly, the improvements in the US would not be replicable by all countries indefinitely, because the poorest countries in the world will never have even poorer countries from which to import their pollution-intensive goods. The US clean-up would simply have been the result of the US coming out ahead in an environmental zero-sum game, merely shifting pollution to different locations. However, if the US pollution reductions come from technology, nothing suggests those improvements cannot continue indefinitely and be repeated around the world. The analyses here suggest that most the pollution reductions have come from improved technology, that the environmental concerns of antiglobalization protesters have been overblown, and that the pollution reduction achieved by US manufacturing will replicable by other countries in the future.

Posted on January 2, 2008 09:07 AM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Technology and Globalization

Natural Disasters in Australia

Here (in PDF) is an interesting analysis by researchers at Macquarie University in Australia:

The collective evidence reviewed above suggests that social factors – dwelling numbers and values – are the predominant reasons for increasing building losses due to natural disasters in Australia. The role of anthropogenic climate change is not detectable at this time. This being the case, it seems logical approach that in addition to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent investments be made to reduce society’s vulnerability to current and future climate and climate variability.

We are aware of few policies explicitly developed to help Australian communities adapt to future climate change (Leigh et al., 1998). One positive example is improved wind loading codes introduced in the 1980s as part of a National Building Code of Australia. These codes have been mentioned already and were introduced for all new housing construction following the destruction of Darwin by Tropical Cyclone Tracy in 1974. As a result, dramatic reductions in wind-induced losses were observed following Tropical Cyclones Winifred (1986) and Aivu (1989) (Walker, 1999) and most recently, Larry (2006) (Guy Carpenter, 2006). While these measures were introduced in response to the immediate threat from current climatic events, the benefits will hold true under any future.

An increased threat from bushfires under global climate change is often assumed. However, our analyses suggest that while the prevalence of conditions leading to bushfires is likely to increase, the impact is unlikely to be as dramatic as the combined changes of all of the other factors that have so far failed to materially affect the likelihood of bushfires losses over the last century. This is not to ignore the threat posed by global climate change, but, at least in the case of fire in Australia, the main menace will continue to be the extreme fires. The threat to the most at-risk homes on the bushland-urban interface can only be diminished by improved planning regulations that restrict where and how people build with respect to distance from the forest. Again these are political choices.

Posted on January 2, 2008 02:17 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

January 01, 2008

Is there any weather inconsistent with the the scientific consensus on climate?

Two years ago I asked a question of climate scientists that never received a good answer. Over at the TierneyLab at the New York Times, John Tierney raises the question again:

What behavior of the climate system could hypothetically be observed over the next 1, 5, 10 years that would be inconsistent with the current consensus on climate change? My focus is on extreme events like floods and hurricanes, so please consider those, but consider any other climate metric or phenomena you think important as well for answering this question. Ideally, a response would focus on more than just sea level rise and global average temperature, but if these are the only metrics that are relevant here that too would be very interesting to know.

The answer, it seems, is "nothing would be inconsistent," but I am open to being educated. Climate scientists especially invited to weigh in in the comments or via email, here or at the TierneyLab.

And a Happy 2008 to all our readers!

Posted on January 1, 2008 10:26 AM View this article | Comments (7)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Scientific Assessments

December 26, 2007

End-of-2007 Hurricane-Global Warming Update

There are a few new papers out on hurricanes (or more generally, tropical cyclones) and global warming that motivate this update.

Before sharing these new papers, let me provide a bit of background.

Regular readers will know that I began studying hurricanes during my post-doc years at NCAR, and even co-authored a book on them (PDF) with my father. I've been fortunate to get to know many of the people in the science community who study hurricanes and also to become familiar with the literature on hurricanes and climate change.

Let me also remind readers that I believe that there is little policy significance in the debate over hurricanes and global warming. Why not? Because no matter who is right, it won't do much to alter the ranking of alternative policies focused on addressing future storm impacts. This is an argument I make in this recent paper, which I'll point to for interested readers:

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 2007. Future Economic Damage from Tropical Cyclones: Sensitivities to Societal and Climate Changes, Proceedings of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 365:2717-2729.(PDF)

But from a political perspective, the issue remains of considerable importance, as those advocating action on energy policies based on stemming the impacts from future cyclones place themselves far out on a thin limb. As tempting as it is to invoke the impacts of hurricanes as a justification for action on climate-related energy policies, it really should be a "no go zone."

In 2004, I along with Chris Landsea, Max Mayfield, Jim Laver, and Richard Pasch decided to prepare a short, accessible summary on the state of the debate over hurricanes and climate change, which ultimately was published as a peer-reviewed paper in 2005 in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (PDF). In that paper we concluded that the debate over hurricanes (and their impacts) and climate change would not be resolved anytime soon, and we provided three reasons for this:

First, no connection has been established between greenhouse gas emissions and the observed behavior of hurricanes (Houghton et al. 2001; Walsh 2004). Emanuel (2005) is suggestive of such a connection, but is by no means definitive. In the future, such a connection may be established [e.g., in the case of the observations of Emanuel (2005) or the projections of Knutson and Tuleya (2004)] or made in the context of other metrics of tropical cyclone intensity and duration that remain to be closely examined. Second, the peer-reviewed literature reflects that a scientific consensus exists that any future changes in hurricane intensities will likely be small in the context of observed variability (Knutson and Tuleya 2004; Henderson-Sellers et al. 1998), while the scientific problem of tropical cyclogenesis is so far from being solved that little can be said about possible changes in frequency. And third, under the assumptions of the IPCC, expected future damages to society of its projected changes in the behavior of hurricanes are dwarfed by the influence of its own projections of growing wealth and population (Pielke et al. 2000). While future research or experience may yet overturn these conclusions, the state of the peer-reviewed knowledge today is such that there are good reasons to expect that any conclusive connection between global warming and hurricanes or their impacts will not be made in the near term.

If I might pat ourselves on our collective backs for a moment, these conclusions that we reached in 2005 were echoed in 2006 by a much more comprehensive assessment report prepared by the World Meteorological Organization:

A consensus of 125 of the world’s leading tropical cyclone researchers and forecasters says that no firm link can yet be drawn between human-induced climate change and variations in the intensity and frequency of tropical cyclones.

And then in 2007 by the IPCC. IPCC lead author Neville Nicholls characterized the report's conclusions on hurricanes and climate change as follows:

We concluded that the question of whether there was a greenhouse-cyclone link was pretty much a toss of a coin at the present state of the science, with just a slight leaning towards the likelihood of such a link.

So our 2005 paper has held up really well. Did we get some recognition from the IPCC for providing an accurate assessment of the state of the scientific debate and its relevance? Well, no. But maybe we at least could point to a citation in the relevant IPCC chapter, which of course summarized all of the peer-reviewed literature? Actually the IPCC ignored our review. It is not that they were unaware of it. The lead author for the relevant chapter (Chapter 3 of WG 1), Kevin Trenberth, said of our paper at the time it was released:

I think the role of the changing climate is greatly underestimated by Roger Pielke Jr. I think he should withdraw this article. This is a shameful article.

So, despite providing an accurate assessment of hurricanes and global warming in 2005 which was ultimately backed up by WMO and IPCC, given Kevin Trenberth's obvious bias against our views, we weren't really surprised to see our paper go uncited by the IPCC chapter that Kevin was lead author on. I did notice that Trenberth was somehow able to find room to mention his own work 95 times in that chapter, but I digress.

So our assessment of the state of the hurricane-global warming has held up really well. And in fact, I'd say that our assertion of the lack of a conclusive connection seems even stronger today. Over recent weeks I have become aware of 4 significant new papers on hurricanes and climate change that raise important questions about many aspects of the debate. I highlight these four papers not because they point toward certainty in the debate, quite the opposite: they indicate that the debate is alive and well, and uncertainty continues to reign on this subject. And unless you are paying attention to the literature, you'll probably never hear of these papers.

The first paper is one I mentioned a few weeks ago by Vecchi/Soden published in Nature . That paper suggested that identifying the signal of global warming in tropical cyclone behavior would be challenging in the context of ongoing climate variability. I wondered why that paper escaped media attention, despite being published in Nature and being a major contribution to the ongoing debate. Here are three other papers that will probably also escape media attention.

Statistician William Briggs has two new papers. One is in press with the Journal of Climate, and is titled "On the changes in number and intensity of North Atlantic tropical cyclones" (PDF). That paper concludes:

We find that to conclude that there has been an increase in the number of tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic basin depends on from what date you start looking. Looking from 1900 gives strong evidence that an increase has taken place; however, data early from that period are certainly tainted by inadequate and missing observations, so the confidence we have in this evidence is greatly reduced. Starting from (the years around) 1966 does not give evidence of a linear increase, but starting from (the years around) 1975 does. These potential increases are noted after controlling for the effects of CTI, NAOI, and the AMO. These differences due to start date could be real, perhaps because of some underlying cyclicity in the data that coincidentally bottomed out around 1975 (after controlling for AMO etc.), or it may just be a good lesson that it's possible to pick and choose your starting date to argue either way: yes, there's been an increase, or no, there hasn't been.

Briggs is presenting a second paper at the upcoming AMS meeting in which he applies the same technique to other basins, in a paper titled, "Changes in number and intensity of tropical cyclones" (PDF). That paper concludes:

We find little evidence that the mean of the distribution of individual storm intensity, measured by storm days, track length, or individual storm PDI, has changed (increased or decreased) since 1975 over all the oceans. Again, there were certain noted increases in the Indian oceans, which may be real or may be due to flaws in the data: this is evidenced by the posteriors from these oceans being very sensitive to the priors used. We did, however, find an unambiguous increase in the variance of the distribution of storm intensity over all oceans. We also found that two components of intensity, storm days and track length, have likely decreased since 1990 over most oceans. Thus, we conclude that mean intensity has not been increasing, at least since 1975, and certainly not since 1990.

A fourth paper has just been published in the journal Risk Analysis by Kenneth Bogen, Edwin Jones, and Larry Fischer, titled, "Hurricane Destructive Power Predictions Based on Historical Storm and Sea Surface Temperature Data." That paper concludes:

Results obtained clearly challenge recent hypotheses about the effect of rising SST on future hurricane destructive potential . . .In contrast to a significant post-1970 positive trend in NAO SST and previous claims that this trend is linked to increased hurricane activity (Goldenberg et al., 2001; Emanuel, 2005; Trenberth, 2005; Webster et al., 2005; Hoyos et al., 2006; Santer et al., 2006; Trenberth & Shea, 2006), this study found little evidence of APDI trend or of a substantial APDI correlation with SST.

These papers suggest that the science of hurricane and global warming is healthy and new voices are bringing new ideas and methods to the debate. This is all good news. But it should also be apparent that the issue remains highly uncertain and contested. If anything, uncertainties have increased since we published our 2005 paper.

So I am going to stand pat with our conclusions first presented in 2005 in that shameful (but accurate) article:

[T]here are good reasons to expect that any conclusive connection between global warming and hurricanes or their impacts will not be made in the near term.

That is where things stand on this subject at the close of 2007.

Posted on December 26, 2007 05:22 AM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

December 21, 2007

On the Political Relevance of Scientific Consensus

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) has released a report in which he has identified some hundreds of scientists who disagree with the IPCC consensus. Yawn. In the comments of Andy Revkin's blog post on the report you can get a sense of why I often claim that arguing about the science of climate change is endlessly entertaining but hardly productive, and confirming Andy's assertion that "A lot of us live in intellectual silos."

In 2005 I had an exchange with Naomi Oreskes in Science on the significance of a scientific consensus in climate politics. Here is what I said then (PDF):

IN HER ESSAY "THE SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS on climate change" (3 Dec. 2004, p. 1686), N. Oreskes asserts that the consensus reflected in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) appears to reflect, well, a consensus. Although Oreskes found unanimity in the 928 articles with key words "global climate change," we should not be surprised if a broader review were to find conclusions at odds with the IPCC consensus, as "consensus" does not mean uniformity of perspective. In the discussion motivated by Oreskes’ Essay, I have seen one claim made that there are more than 11,000 articles on "climate change" in the ISI database and suggestions that about 10% somehow contradict the IPCC consensus position.
But so what? If that number is 1% or 40%, it does not make any difference whatsoever from the standpoint of policy action. Of course, one has to be careful, because people tend to read into the phrase "policy action" a particular course of action that they themselves advocate. But in the IPCC, one can find statements to use in arguing for or against support of the Kyoto Protocol. The same is true for any other specific course of policy action on climate change. The IPCC maintains that its assessments do not advocate any single course of action.

So in addition to arguing about the science of climate change as a proxy for political debate on climate policy, we now can add arguments about the notion of consensus itself. These proxy debates are both a distraction from progress on climate change and a reflection of the tendency of all involved to politicize climate science.

The actions that we take on climate change should be robust to (i) the diversity of scientific perspectives, and thus also to (ii) the diversity of perspectives of the nature of the consensus. A consensus is a measure of a central tendency and, as such, it necessarily has a distribution of perspectives around that central measure (1). On climate change, almost all of this distribution is well within the bounds of legitimate scientific debate and reflected within the full text of the IPCC reports. Our policies should not be optimized to reflect a single measure of the central tendency or, worse yet, caricatures of that measure, but instead they should be robust enough to accommodate the distribution of perspectives around that
central measure, thus providing a buffer against the possibility that we might learn more in the future (2).

ROGER A. PIELKE JR.
Center for Science and Technology Policy Research,
University of Colorado, UCB 488, Boulder, CO
80309–0488, USA.

References
1 D. Bray,H. von Storch, Bull.Am.Meteorol. Soc. 80, 439 (1999).
2. R. Lempert, M. Schlesinger, Clim. Change 45, 387 (2000).

December 20, 2007

Laboratories of Democracy? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Laboratories of Democracy

Yesterday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency denied a request from the state of California for permission to exceed national standards on automobile emissions. It was the first such denial since the Clean Air Act was originally passed, marking a departure from 50-some such waivers previously granted.

It was not so long ago that the State Department's Harlan Watson spoke at the 2003 Ninth Session of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change on The Bush Administration's enthusiasm for state-level initiatives on climate policy:

I would like to highlight the efforts being made by State and local governments in the United States to address climate change. Geographically, the United States encompasses vast and diverse climatic zones representative of all major regions of the world -- polar, temperate, semi-tropical, and tropical -- with different heating, cooling, and transportation needs and with different energy endowments. Such diversity allows our State and local governments to act as laboratories where new and creative ideas and methods can be applied and shared with others and inform federal policy -- a truly bottom-up approach to addressing global climate change.
At the State level, 40 of our 50 States have prepared GHG inventories, 27 States have completed climate change action plans, and 8 States have adopted voluntary GHG emissions goals. In addition, 13 States have adopted "Renewable Portfolio Standards" requiring electricity generators to gradually increase the portion of electricity produced from renewable resources such as wind, biomass, geothermal, and solar energy. And, at the local level, more than 140 local governments participating in the Cities for Climate Protection Campaign are developing cost-effective GHG reduction plans, setting goals, and reducing GHG emissions

Yesterday, EPA's Steven Johnson explains why the Bush Administration is now opposed to state by state efforts to innovate:

"The Bush administration is moving forward with a clear national solution — not a confusing patchwork of state rules," Mr. Johnson told reporters on a conference call. "I believe this is a better approach than if individual states were to act alone."

Climate policy needs more not less opportunities to learn from implementation. The Bush Administration's inconsistent actions are not only ham-handed politics, but just bad policy, whatever one's views on climate change, energy policy, or partisan politics.

H/T DotEarth

Posted on December 20, 2007 02:06 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Energy Policy

December 19, 2007

Rajendra Pachauri, IPCC, Science and Politics

The current issue of Nature has a lengthy profile of Rajendra Pachauri, its "Newsmaker of the Year." In the profile Dr. Pachauri discusses his personal views on the politics of climate change and his responsibilities as IPCC chair. Here is how he characterizes his own efforts, as quoted in the Nature profile:

We have been so drunk with this desire to produce and consume more and more whatever the cost to the environment that we're on a totally unsustainable path. I am not going to rest easy until I have articulated in every possible forum the need to bring about major structural changes in economic growth and development.

AP Pachauri Gore.jpg

In recent weeks and months, Dr. Pachauri, and other representatives of the IPCC, have certainly not been shy in advocating specific actions on climate change, using their role as IPCC leaders as a pulpit to advance those agendas. For instance, in a recent interview with CNN on the occasion of representing the IPCC at the Nobel Prize ceremony, Dr. Pachauri downplayed the role of geoengineering as a possible response to climate change, suggested that people eat less meat, called for lifestyle changes, suggested that all the needed technologies to deal with climate change are in the marketplace or soon to be commercialized, endorsed the Kyoto Protocol approach, criticized via allusion U.S. non-participation, and defended the right of developing countries to be exempt from limits on future emissions.

Dr. Pachauri has every right to these personal opinions, but each of the actions called for above are contested by some thoughtful people who believe that climate change is a problem requiring action, and accept the science as reported by the IPCC. These policies are not advocated by the IPCC because the formal mandate of the IPCC is to be "policy neutral." But with its recent higher profile, it seems that the IPCC leadership believes that it can flout this stance with impunity. The Nature profile discusses this issue:

The IPCC's mandate is to be 'neutral with respect to policy' — to set out the options and let policy-makers decide how to act. The reports themselves reflect this. Every word is checked and double-checked by scientists, reviewers and then government representatives — "sanitized", as Pachauri puts it. But Pachauri is the face of the IPCC, and he often can't resist speaking out, despite a few "raps on the knuckles" for his comments. He insists that he always makes it clear he is speaking on his own behalf and not for the IPCC. "It's one thing to make sure that our reports are sanitized. It's another for me as an individual to talk about policies that might work. I feel I have responsibility far beyond being a spokesman for the IPCC. If I feel there are certain actions that can help us meet this challenge, I feel I should articulate them."
"I think Patchy needs to be careful," says Bert Metz, a senior researcher at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency in Bilthoven, who is one of the co-chairs of the IPCC's working group on greenhouse-gas mitigation. "One of the things about the IPCC is that it lays down the facts. If you start mixing [that] with your own views that's not very wise. But he gets away with it because of his charm." Steve Rayner, director of the James Martin Institute at the University of Oxford, UK, and a senior author with the same working group, feels that Pachauri's personal statements place too much stress on lifestyles and not enough on technologies. But he also concedes that a certain amount of outspokenness is an essential part of the job. "I don't think you can provide inspirational leadership in an enterprise like this unless you are passionate. That's something Bob [Watson] and Patchy have in common. They are both very passionate about the issue and I think that's appropriate."

In general, those who agree with the political agenda advanced by Dr. Pachauri will see no problem with his advocacy, and those opposed will find it to be problematic. And this is precisely the problem. By using his platform as a scientific advisor to advance a political agenda, Dr. Pachauri risks politicizing the IPCC and turning it (or perceptions of it) into simply another advocacy group on climate change, threatening its legitimacy and ultimately, its ability to serve as a trusted arbiter of science.

On this point reasonable people will disagree. However, before you decide how you feel about this subject, consider how you would feel if the head of the International Atomic Energy Association responsible for evaluating nuclear weapons programs were to be an outspoken advocate for bombing the very country he was assessing, or if the head of the CIA with responsibility to bring intelligence to policy makers also was at the same time waging a public campaign on certain foreign policies directly related to his intelligence responsibilities. For many people the conflation of providing advice and seeking to achieve political ends would seem to be a dangerous mix for both the quality of advice and the quality of decision making.

The IPCC is riding high these days, but as Burt Metz says, they need to be very careful. Saying that your organization is "policy neutral" while behaving quite differently does not seem to be a sustainable practice. Policy makers will need science advice on climate change for a long time. The IPCC politicizes its efforts with some risk.

Posted on December 19, 2007 02:39 PM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science + Politics | Scientific Assessments | The Honest Broker

A Follow Up on Media Coverage and Climate Change

Last week I asked a few reporters and scholars why it is that a major paper in Nature last week on hurricanes and global warming received almost no media coverage whereas another paper released last summer received quite a bit more. Andy Revkin raised the issue on his blog which stimulated many more responses. With this post I’d like to report back on what I’ve heard, and what I’ve concluded, at least tentatively, on the role of the media in the climate debate.

First, there are a wide range of explanations for the differences in media coverage of the two papers. Here is a summary of what I heard (warning: not all explanations are consistent with each other):

*The media is biased toward sensational stories, and Vecchi/Soden was not sensational.
*The relevant media was distracted by the Bali climate meeting.

*The relevant media was distracted by the AGU meeting.

*The relevant media had an interest in stories that added to pressure to act on climate change in Bali.

*The media has (recently) begun to downplay research that suggests uncertainty in climate science.

*Nature did not promote the Vecchi/Soden paper, whereas NCAR aggressively promoted Webster/Holland.

*Vecchi/Soden buried their main message, so the news value was hard to see.

*The hurricane/climate change issue is “s/he said-s/he said” and not interesting.

*Hurricane season is over.

One question I asked of several people is the apparent paradox between the recent "balance as bias" thesis which holds that skeptical voices are given too much play in debate over climate change with the claims from several people I spoke to that the media tends to favor alarming stories in the climate debate. The best answer I got to this came from a reporter:

In general, news coverage favors the sensational rather than the mundane. For example, there were tons of stories this year on the arctic sea ice extent. Next year, if the sea ice doesn’t set a record, the coverage will be less by orders of magnitude.
However, within stories on global warming, there is a great pressure to be balanced. So if we have scientists saying human activity is causing the melting, there’s a desire to represent another viewpoint, no matter how much in the minority it may be.

So there’s an overall bias for sensationalism (or alarmism, when it comes to global warming). The simple reason is this attracts eyeballs. But within stories there’s an effort for balance.

To test this out the hypothesis of a general bias against skeptical voices I searched Google News for references (2004 to present) to "climate change" and "hurricanes" for both "William Gray" who advocates no discernible effect of global warming on hurricanes and "Kerry Emanuel" who advocates a very strong effect. There were 268 stories quoting Emanuel and 297 quoting Gray. This would suggest that, on the hurricane issue at least, there is no indication that the media has disfavored skeptical voices. These data don’t say much about the media favoring the sensational, as Gray’s presence in news stories might just be "balance" in a sensationalized story. More work would need to be done to say anything on that.

Looking to the academic literature Mullainathan and Shleifer (2002, full cite and link below) provide the best piece of research that I have seen on media bias. They focus on ideological biases and also what they call "spin." which is the same thing as favoring (or creating) sensational stories as suggested above. They suggest that (emphasis added):

. . . competition is an important argument for free press: despite the ideological biases of individual news suppliers, the truth comes out through competition. We show that, with Bayesian readers, this is indeed the case: competition undoes the biases from ideology. With readers who are categorical thinkers, however, the consequences of competition are more complex. We show that, in the absence of ideology, competition actually reinforces the adverse effects of spin on accuracy. Not only do the media outlets bias news reporting, but the stories reinforce each other. As each paper spins stories, it increases the incentives of later outlets to spin. This piling on of stories means non-ideological competition worsens the bias of spin. Moreover, spin can exacerbate the influence of one-sided ideology. When the first news outlet that uncovers the story is ideological and later ones are not, the first one sets the tone and later ones reinforce this spin. This can explain why and how inside sources leak information to news outlets: their principal motivation is to control how the story is eventually spun.
Our theory of news reporting falls between two extremes. The traditional view is that readers demand, and media outlets supply, pure information about political and economic markets, and thereby facilitate better consumer and voter choice (Coase 1974, Besley and Burgess 2001, Besley and Prat 2002, Djankov et al. 2002, Stromberg 2001, Dyck and Zingales 2002). The opposite but also plausible view, pursued by Mencken (1920) and Jensen (1976), sees the media as entertainment, with no obvious grounding in reality. The perspective of this paper is that media outlets provide neither unadulterated information, nor pure entertainment. News outlets may be biased for ideological reasons. And consumers, while not desiring pure entertainment as might be the case with sensational or human interest stories, do indirectly affect news content because of how they process information. So for reasons of ideology news outlets may bias information to please their owners, and for reasons of consumer psychology they may bias the information to please their readers.

These results have significant implications for media accuracy. They explain, in particular, how the media in the aggregate are likely to get to the bottom of a news story with significant ideological dimension. Ideological diversity serves as a safeguard against spin. Our results are consistent with Richard Posner's (1999) highly favorable assessment of the press in the coverage of the Clinton affair. Our results also show why media bias is most severe in the cases where no or little ideological diversity bears on the story, such as the investigation of Wen Ho Lee. In this case, the bias comes from spin, and spin causes the followers to pile on. Competition among media outlets is not a solution to the problem of spin - indeed, it makes the problem worse. Our paper makes the case for extreme ideological diversity in the media - in such diversity lies the best hope against spin.

If these findings are anywhere close to the mark, then they offer a powerful counterargument to the "balance as bias" thesis. The climate issue is characterized by a wide range of ideological perspectives, and it seems hard to justify why any of those perspectives should not be represented by the media. That means reporting on a wide range of political perspectives and the justifications for those views offered by those holding those perspectives, even if the reporter, or the vast majority of scientists or other groups, happens to disagree with either the politics or justifications. Where there is diversity balance is not bias, but bias is bias.

S. Mullainathan and A. Shleifer. 2002. Media Bias, NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES, Working Paper 9295 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, October 2002, © 2002 by Sendhil Mullainathan and Andrei Shleifer. http://www.nber.org/papers/w9295

For further reading, see this New York Times book review on media bias by Richard Posner.

Posted on December 19, 2007 01:31 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Journalism, Science & Environment

December 18, 2007

New Data on the Global Economy

The World Bank has released a valuable new dataset with data on the global economy calculated as PPP and MER. In 2005 the global economy was about $44 trillion (MER) and $55 trillion (PPP). The slide below is taken from the press briefing presentation (ppt).

world economy.png

Posted on December 18, 2007 10:39 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | International

Climate Policy as Farce

According to The Telegraph to deal with the issue of climate change the UK's Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor Sir David King, has encouraged a "cultural change" among women to prefer men who save energy, rather than hog it, such as by driving Ferrari's. And for those of you unfamiliar with UK newspapers, it is important to point out that The Telegraph is not the UK's version of The Onion.

Here is an excerpt:

Professor Sir David King said governments could only do so much to control greenhouse gas emissions and it was time for a cultural change among the British public.
And he singled out women who find supercar drivers "sexy", adding that they should divert their affections to men who live more environmentally-friendly lives.

His comments were greeted with anger by sports car drivers who insisted that their vehicles' greenhouse gas emissions were tiny compared with those from four-wheel-drive vehicles.

Sir David, who is due to retire as the UK's Chief Scientific Adviser at the end of the year, said individuals needed to change their behaviour.

"I was asked at a lecture by a young woman about what she could do and I told her to stop admiring young men in Ferraris," he said.

"What I was saying is that you have got to admire people who are conserving energy and not those wilfully using it."

Sir David, who persuaded the Government to start using the Toyota Prius, a hybrid car that claims to have lower emissions than most conventional cars, added: "Government has so many levers that it can pull - when it comes to the business sector it is quite effective.

"As soon as you come to the individual, however, they will buy a Ferrari, not because it is cheap to run or has low carbon dioxide emissions, but because young women think it is sexy to see men driving Ferraris. That is the area where a culture change is needed."

Meanwhile, Europe is divided about strengthening regulations on emissions from autos:

Emergency talks aimed at setting EU targets to reduce CO2 car emissions are being held today amid fears that bitter wrangling between car manufacturing countries could delay or even derail the process entirely.
The European Commission is due to adopt a draft regulation tomorrow on reducing carbon emissions from passenger cars to 120 grams per kilometre within five years, but a bitter fallout between European heavyweights has plunged the key negotiations into crisis. Member states with car manufacturers that traditionally produce heavy, energy-hungry cars are concerned that the emission targets will unfairly benefit those businesses that make lighter, more efficient vehicles.

France and Germany, in particular, are believed to be at loggerheads over the Commission's proposals. French manufacturers such as Peugeot-Citroen have already reduced their carbon emissions to 140g for their cars, whereas German companies such as BMW, Mercedes and Daimler still lag behind on emission targets because their vehicles are heavier and higher performance models. Sweden, which also tends to make larger cars, is also thought to be unhappy about the proposals, while Italy is backing France.

What is lost among this empty moralizing and trade disputes is that a zero-emission Ferrari would require no need to change the libidinal desires of young women (granting Prof. King's dubious premise), nor an embarrassing trade dispute between countries committed to reducing emissions.

These anecdotes -- frustrating and farcical as they may be -- illustrate a serious underlying point: Much of climate debate is exactly backwards. Advocates are spending far too much time arguing over how important that it is that others change their behavior, usually in ways that those doing the advocating would want regardless of climate change. In this way climate change becomes not a problem to be solved but a political weapon in service of other goals. The alternative to the dominant approach to climate change would be to initiate those steps that will actually make a difference, thus enabling political compromise. As Dan Sarewitz and I have often argued it is often technological advances that enable compromise rather than vice versa. And in the case of climate change those steps that will actually make a difference begin with making the costs of producing alternative energy cheaper than fossil fuels (as Shellenberger and Nordhaus have argued, and now Google), and working to make people and ecosystems more resilient/less vulnerable to climate impacts. Of course many groups are doing exactly this, but they are certainly not those leading the charge on climate policy.

Posted on December 18, 2007 09:32 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Technology Policy

Technology Assessment and Globalization

My latest column for Bridges is out, and it is titled "Technology Assessment and Globalization". This is a subject that I'll be devoting a lot more time to in 2008.

Here is an excerpt:

When my parents brought home our first color television in the early 1970s, they could not have envisioned that they were contributing in a small but significant way to forces of globalization that 30 years later have resulted in their grandchildren asking me for sushi as a treat from our local grocery store.

Read it here and listen to the podcast here.

Posted on December 18, 2007 02:32 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Technology and Globalization

December 17, 2007

Shellenberger on Bali

Over at the Breakthrough blog, Michael Shellenberger offers some straight talk on the outcome of the Bali meeting.

Posted on December 17, 2007 03:00 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Energy Policy | International

A Second Reponse from RMS

A few weeks ago I provided a midterm evaluation of the RMS 2006-2010 US hurricane damage prediction. RMS (and specifically Steve Jewson) responded and has subsequently (and graciously) sent in a further response to a question that I posed:

Does RMS stand by its spring 2006 forecast that the period 2006-2010 would see total insured losses 40% above the historical average?

The RMS response appears below, and I'll respond in the comments:

Yes, we do stand by that forecast, although I should point out that we update the forecast every year, so the 2005 forecast (for 2006-2010) is now 2 years out of date. Apart from questions of forecast accuracy, there's no particular reason for any of our users to use the 2005 forecast at this point (that would be like using a weather forecast from last week). It is, of course, important to understand the correct mathematical interpretation of the forecast. In your original post you interpreted the forecast incorrectly in a couple of ways. Over the last 2-3 years we've issued this forecast to hundreds of insurance companies, and discussed it with dozens of scientists around the world, and none of them have misinterpreted it, so I don't think our communication of the intended meaning of the forecast is unclear. However, some explanation is required and I realise that you probably haven't had the benefit of hearing one of the many presentations we've given on this subject. The two things that need clarifying are: 1) This forecast is a best estimate of the mean of a very wide distribution of possible losses. Because of this no-one should expect to be able to verify or falsify the forecast in a short period of time.
This is a typical property of forecasts in situations with high levels of uncertainty. I think it's pretty well understood by the users of the forecast.

One curious property of the loss distribution is that it is very skewed. As a result the real losses would be expected to fall below the mean in most years. This is compensated for in the average by occasional years with very high losses.

In fact the forecast that we give to the insurance industry is a completely probabilistic forecast, that estimates the entire distribution of possible losses, but it's a bit difficult to put that
kind of information into a press release, or on a blog.

2) Your conditional interpretation of the forecast is not mathematically correct. Neither RMS, nor our clients, expect the losses to increase in 2008-2010 in the way you suggest just because they were low in 2006-2007. I can't think of any reason why that would be the case. To get the (roughly) correct interpretation for 2008-2010 you have to multiply the original 5 year mean values by 0.6. That's what the users of our forecast do when they want that number.

I hope that clarifies the issues a bit.

Posted on December 17, 2007 01:36 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Disasters | Prediction and Forecasting | Scientific Assessments

December 16, 2007

China's Growing Emissions

According to this paper by two researchers at the University of California carbon dioxide emissions in China are projected to grow between 11.05% and 13.19% per year for the period 2000-2010. What does this mean? I hope you are sitting down because you won’t believe this.

In 2006 China’s carbon dioxide emissions contained about 1.70 gigatons of carbon (GtC) (source). By 2010, at the growth rates projected by these researchers the annual emissions from China will be between 2.6 and 2.8 GtC. The growth in China's emissions from 2006-2010 is equivalent to adding the 2004 emissions of Japan, Germany, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia to China's 2006 total (source). The emissions growth in China at these rates is like adding another Germany every year, or a UK and Australia together, to global emissions. The graph below illustrates the point.

Think about that.

China Emissions.png

Posted on December 16, 2007 05:44 PM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Energy Policy

Parable About the Precariousness of Monoculture

In today's New York Times magazine there is an interesting article by Michael Pollan on the consequences of technological innovation in pursuit of ever more efficiency in agricultural production. Here is an excerpt:

To call a practice or system unsustainable is not just to lodge an objection based on aesthetics, say, or fairness or some ideal of environmental rectitude. What it means is that the practice or process can’t go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which it depends. It means that, as the Marxists used to say, there are internal contradictions that sooner or later will lead to a breakdown.
For years now, critics have been speaking of modern industrial agriculture as "unsustainable" in precisely these terms, though what form the "breakdown" might take or when it might happen has never been certain. Would the aquifers run dry? The pesticides stop working? The soil lose its fertility? All these breakdowns have been predicted and they may yet come to pass. But if a system is unsustainable — if its workings offend the rules of nature — the cracks and signs of breakdown may show up in the most unexpected times and places. Two stories in the news this year, stories that on their faces would seem to have nothing to do with each other let alone with agriculture, may point to an imminent breakdown in the way we’re growing food today.

The stories that he discusses are pig farming and bee pollination. The bottom line according to Pollan?

Whenever we try to rearrange natural systems along the lines of a machine or a factory, whether by raising too many pigs in one place or too many almond trees, whatever we may gain in industrial efficiency, we sacrifice in biological resilience. The question is not whether systems this brittle will break down, but when and how, and whether when they do, we’ll be prepared to treat the whole idea of sustainability as something more than a nice word.

Posted on December 16, 2007 08:42 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Technology and Globalization

December 14, 2007

Chris Green on Emissions Target Setting

Chris Green, an economist from McGill University (Canada), has written an op-ed for the Global and Mail explaining why he thinks that the setting of long-term emissions targets just kicks the can down the road. This is sure to be an unpopular opinion among many in the climate debate, but ultimately I think he is right. Here is an excerpt:

It is not difficult to set forth the outlines of a potentially effective climate policy. Unfortunately, what may be effective is not necessarily politically acceptable. It now seems that the main barrier to an effective climate policy is the obsession with emission targets — a legacy of the Kyoto Protocol. Emission targets stand in the way of concentrating on actions whose payoff is mainly beyond the targeted time frame. Worse, because of an effective effort by climate-change "campaigners" to portray the Kyoto Protocol as humankind's last best hope on climate change, emission targets have now taken on a life of their own, particularly in political arenas susceptible to grandstanding behaviour. The evidence is all around us.
The fundamental problem with mandated emission reduction targets is that they focus on ends rather than on the technological means of achieving those ends. Because targets are assessed only rarely in terms of what is doable but usually in terms of what pressure groups think ought to be done, target-based policies lack credibility in virtually the same proportion in which they are politically popular. The Conference of the Parties session in Bali will indicate whether there is a sufficient number of countries prepared to say that the target-setting emperor has no clothes, and are ready to put a moratorium on this failed approach to climate policy.

The op-ed is distilled from a longer piece from the magazine Policy Options, and a PDF of that essay can be found here. It is well worth a read regardless of your views on the climate issue.

Posted on December 14, 2007 12:31 PM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Energy Policy | Technology Policy

A Question for the Media

I've generally thought that the media has done a nice job on covering the climate issue over the past 20 years. There are of course leaders and laggards, but overall, I think that the community of journalists has done a nice job on a very tough issue. However, there are times when I am less impressed. Here is one example.

news.stories.png

Nature magazine, arguably the leading scientific journal in the world, published a paper this week by two widely-respected scholars -- Gabriel Vecchi and Brian Soden -- suggesting that global warming may have a minimal effect on hurricanes. Over two days the media -- as measured by Google News -- published a grand total of 3 news stories on this paper. Now contrast this with a paper published in July in a fairly obscure journal by two other respected scholars -- Peter Webster and Greg Holland -- suggesting that global warming has a huge effect on hurricanes. That paper resulted in 79 news stories stories over two days.

What accounts for the 26 to 1 ratio in news stories?

December 13, 2007

Reality Check

From Alan Zarembo writing in the LA Times today, this dose of reality:

Here's a recipe to head off the worst effects of global warming:
1. Start with 30 new nuclear power plants around the world.

2. Add 17,0000 wind turbines, 400 biomass power plants, two hydroelectric dams the size of China's Three Gorges Dam, and 42 coal or natural gas power plants equipped with still-experimental systems to sequester their carbon dioxide emissions underground.

3. Build everything in 2013. Repeat every year until 2030.

It's an intentionally implausible plan presented this week by the International Energy Agency to make a point: For all the talk about emissions reductions, the actual work is way beyond what the world can achieve.

As delegates from 190 countries gather here on the Indonesian island of Bali to negotiate a "road map" for the successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming, some experts are wondering whether the meeting has lost touch with the reality of tackling climate change.

So far, the thousands of delegates have been consumed by a debate over caps on emissions of greenhouse gases that are the primary cause of global warming.

The United States and China -- the two biggest carbon polluters, each accounting for about 20% of worldwide emissions -- have opposed any hard caps.

But while the debate continues, the most fundamental question of what it will take to achieve meaningful reductions has gone largely forgotten.

Posted on December 13, 2007 09:08 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Energy Policy | International

December 12, 2007

Fun With Carbon Accounting

Dieter Helm of Oxford has a very interesting paper (PDF) on trends in carbon dioxide emissions in the UK (via Climate Feedback) when they are measured from a consumption basis versus the production basis used under the Kyoto Protocol. Here is an excerpt from the paper:

On the UNFCCC basis, UK greenhouse gas emissions have fallen by 15% since 1990. In contrast, on a consumption basis, the illustrative outcome is a rise in emissions of 19% over the same period. This is a dramatic reversal of fortune. It merits an immediate, more detailed and more robust assessment. It suggests that the decline in greenhouse gas emissions from the UK economy may have been to a considerable degree an illusion. Trade may have displaced the UK’s greenhouse gas appetite elsewhere. . .
The UK’s record against the UNFCCC greenhouse gas indicator is impressive, achieving a fall in emissions between 1990 and 2005. It has already beaten its Kyoto target of 12.5% by 2008–12. Against its own domestic goal of a 20% CO2 reduction by 2010, progress has been
less impressive. The UK’s CO2 emissions have risen slightly recently, and last year lay only 5.3% below 1990 levels. This is despite the fact that the UK’s climate change policy programme focuses effort on tackling CO2.

All of the above figures were produced on a territorial accounting basis. When the account is extended to the Office for National Statistics’ residents’ basis, by including international transport and overseas activities, the picture looks worse. Emissions fell by only 11.9%, as shipping and international aviation boomed. Furthermore, airline passengers and firms from the UK consumed more greenhouse gases during their visits and activities abroad than overseas visitors and firms did in the UK, weakening the UK’s overall performance when these trade activities are included. The trend is an adverse one.

Yet, even this extended scope of measurement does not represent the true picture of the UK economy’s impact on the climate. To understand the UK’s true impact, the greenhouse gas accounts should be reported on a 'consumption basis'. On this basis, all greenhouse gases embodied in UK consumption are counted, and by adding greenhouse gases embedded in imports and subtracting greenhouse gases embedded in exports, the crude calculations presented here suggest that UK emissions have been rising steeply. Between 1990 and 2003 the crude calculation indicates a rise of 19%.

Posted on December 12, 2007 04:55 PM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Energy Policy

Waxman's Whitewash

One of the themes that I have tried to develop on this blog is that policy arguments should be well founded. So along these lines I have on a number of occasions taken issue with the approach of Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) to issues associated with how the Bush Administration manages scientific information and scientists in pursuit of its political agenda.

In my view Mr. Waxman's investigative approach has been sloppy and unsophisticated, meaning that in some respects his investigation has come to embody those very same characteristics that he has complained about in the Bush Administration, namely, cherry picking of information, selective reliance on friendly experts, and misrepresenting facts. Some people who have heard my complaints naively assume that I am defending the Bush Administration. Nothing could be further from the truth, as I am a strong critic of many (or more likely most) Bush Administration policies, including how they have handled issues of science communication. My critique of Mr. Waxman's efforts stems from my frustration that it has fallen far short of its potential to improve policies involving science, and instead, represents only so much political red meat, furthering partisan differences and serving to reduce that very small space in political discussions for policy analyses.

Here is a perfect example of Mr. Waxman's sloppiness.

In his report he points to a few emails -- including those from Republican staffer in the Senate, and political appointees in NOAA -- expressing an interest in making FEMA look bad and also "killing" the hurricane-climate issue. From this Mr. Waxman sees that then-director of the National Hurricane Center Max Mayfield (with whom I have collaborated on the issue of hurricanes and global warming) testifies before Congress that he see no evidence of linkage of hurricanes and climate change and thus assumes that natural variability still dominates. Mr. Waxman assumes correlation-is-causation and writes in his report, "this political motivation seems to have impacted NOAA testimony and talking points."

Well, it turns out that they did not talk to Max Mayfield to ask his views, but ABC news did:

For example, Mayfield's written testimony read in part: "the increased activity since 1995 is due to natural fluctuations/cycles of hurricane activity driven by the Atlantic Ocean itself along with the atmosphere above it and not enhanced substantially by global warming."
Mayfield, however, denies that anyone told him to alter his testimony as the Waxman report suggests.

"I want the record to show that no one forced me to say anything on the subject of climate change and tropical cyclones that I didn't believe at the time," Mayfield told ABC News.

"I accept the fact that global warming is real," Mayfield said. "Most meteorologists with knowledge of tropical cyclones think that there will be some impact from global warming on hurricanes. The debate is over how much of an impact."

He says he never heard from anyone on the committee about the incident. "No one ever asked me about the context in which my testimony was given. No one from this committee or any other Congressional committee ever asked me if I was improperly pressured to change my testimony," Mayfield said.

What does Mr. Waxman's committee do? They went back and quietly re-wrote the report after it was released and incorporated Max Mayfield's comments to ABC news. (Link to most recent version in here in PDF.) On the one hand, it is good to see that Mr. Waxman's Committee has corrected the factual record. But on the other hand it is sloppy, at best, to try to cover up your mistakes by rewriting history, which included removing the false claims by the Oversight Committee in the original release of its report. A more appropriate approach would have been to issue a correction or a new press release.

Is the bumbling by the Waxman Committee proportionate to the missteps by the Bush Administration? Certainly not. But they embody the exact same dynamics of manipulating information for political gain. If Congressional oversight is only about scoring political points, then it will do little to improve actual decision making in government. And on that basis, Mr. Waxman has let slip a perfect opportunity to improve science policies. And that is why I am so critical.

Posted on December 12, 2007 11:31 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science + Politics | The Honest Broker

December 10, 2007

AGU Powerpoint with Steve McIntyre

Here is a link to a PPT file providing an overview of a paper by Steve McIntyre and I titled, "Changes in Spatial Distribution of North Atlantic Tropical Cyclones," which he will be presenting this week at the AGU meeting.

Here are our conclusions:

Spatially descriptive statistics can contribute to analysis of controversial hurricane issues.
There has been no statistically significant increase in cyclone activity in the western Atlantic basin; the entire increase in measured storm and hurricane activity has taken place in the mid-Atlantic;

Lack of trend in landfall and normalized damage reconciles perfectly with lack of trend in western quartile storm and hurricane indices

The eastward shift cannot be attributed merely to earlier detection.

The shift could be technological or climatological or some combination; there is no plausible statistical basis for saying that the shift to the mid-Atlantic is not as important or relevant as the overall increase.

If the trend only occurs in the mid-Atlantic, should policy-makers care?

Comments welcomed.

Posted on December 10, 2007 11:16 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Disasters | Risk & Uncertainty

Chutzpah

This comment from former Bush Administration official John Bolton is telling, reported in the LA Times,

U.S. intelligence services attempted to influence political policy by releasing their assessment that concludes Iran halted its nuclear arms program in 2003, said John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Der Spiegel magazine quoted Bolton on Saturday as alleging that the aim of the National Intelligence Estimate, which contradicts his and President Bush's position, was not to provide the latest intelligence on Iran.

"This is politics disguised as intelligence," Bolton was quoted as saying in an article appearing in this week's edition.

When new information does not provide support for policy justifications that you have been making, it simply must be politicized. When it provides support for your arguments, of course, it is free from political influence. It was not long ago that intelligence, according to Mr. Bolton's standards, was apparently unpoliticized (ahem). From the archive of The New York Times:

Now John R. Bolton, nominated as United Nations ambassador, has emerged as a new lightning rod for those who saw a pattern of political pressure on intelligence analysts. And this time, current and former officials are complaining more publicly than before. . .
Some of them are prompted by antipathy to Mr. Bolton, some by lingering guilt about Iraq. Some, perhaps, are nervous about the quality of current intelligence assessments at a time of new uncertainties about North Korea's nuclear program, and ambiguous evidence about whether it is moving toward a nuclear test.

One of those critics, Robert L. Hutchings, the former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, made the point in an e-mail message, even as he declined to discuss Mr. Bolton in specific detail. "This is not just about the behavior of a few individuals but about a culture that permitted them to continue trying to skew the intelligence to suit their policy agenda - even after it became clear that we as a government had so badly missed the call on Iraqi W.M.D.," Mr. Hutchings said. The most recent criticism of Mr. Bolton to emerge comes from John E. McLaughlin, the former deputy director of central intelligence, who has told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Mr. Bolton's effort to oust a top Central Intelligence Agency analyst from his position in 2002 breached what should be a barrier between policy makers and intelligence analysts.

Now I have no idea whether the newest National Intelligence Estimate from the U.S. on Iran is politicized or not, but I do know that its reception reflects a disturbing tendency to substitute criteria of political efficacy for information quality in making judgments about the quality of guidance provided by experts, an argument I develop in The Honest Broker.

It is of course one thing for a die-hard partisan like John Bolton to engage in such behavior, but it is quite another, and of greater concern, when the experts themselves start playing that game.

Posted on December 10, 2007 04:29 AM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science + Politics | The Honest Broker

Hillary for President

After this wise move, what more could you possibly need to know?

Posted on December 10, 2007 03:25 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Hodge Podge

December 08, 2007

Prins and Rayner in the WSJ

In the weekend WSJ there is a thoughtful op-ed by Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner, presenting the argument that they discuss at length in their essay The Wrong Trousers (PDF). Here is how the WSJ op-ed begins:

This week in Bali, Indonesia, delegates are considering climate policy after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. We will witness a well-known human response to failure. Delegates will insist on doing more of what is not working: in this case more stringent emissions-reduction targets, and timetables involving more countries. A bigger and "better" Kyoto will be a bigger and worse failure.
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was a symbolically important expression of concern about climate change. It sought to manipulate a basket of diverse greenhouse gases and all their sources. It required its signatories to show demonstrable progress toward a 5% emissions reduction over 1990 levels by 2005. It did so partly through an international cap-and-trade system, and also by establishing a Clean Development Mechanism that would enable big greenhouse-gas emitters to claim credit for reducing emissions which they secured by buying reductions elsewhere, in developing countries.

None of this has worked. Nevertheless, support for "Kyoto" has become the test by which individuals and nations demonstrate whether they are for or against the planet and its poor.

Kevin Rudd's Australian government just showed this. It will ratify the Protocol to show that it is serious about climate change. But Australia, like other countries already signed up to Kyoto, will produce no demonstrable reductions in emissions or even in anticipated emissions growth as a result of doing so.

Where emissions reductions have happened, notably in eastern Europe, re-unified Germany and the United Kingdom, they were the result of unrelated policies -- such as the collapse of communism, and with it the shutdown of highly inefficient and polluting industries, or Margaret Thatcher's smashing of union power by destroying the British coal industry, which meant the substitution of coal by cleaner North Sea gas.

Strip out Germany and the U.K. from the EU-15, and European emissions actually increased 10% between 1990 and 2005. In five countries, emissions rates rose more than in the U.S. Without the collapse of Russia and Ukraine, the Kyoto Protocol's "all signatory total" registers rises since 1990. Even in Japan, emission levels are rising. Kyoto's supporters blame nonsignatory governments, especially the U.S. and, (until last week) Australia.

Read the whole thing.

Posted on December 8, 2007 03:27 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

December 06, 2007

Precipitation and Flood Damage

I was just contacted by a reporter who is doing a story based on a news release put out by a group called Environment Colorado. The news release says that Colorado has seen a 30% increase in extreme precipitation over the past 60 years, based on a new study called "When it Rains, It Pours" (PDF).

The thing is, there has been no increase in flood damage in Colorado (from 1955-2003 in our dataset), as can be seen in the following graph.

CO Flood.png

This data has only been adjusted for inflation. Given the pace of growth and development in Colorado, one could make a strong case that flood impacts have gone down pretty sharply in per capita or per unit wealth terms. So it may very well be the case that extreme precipitation has increased, but these measures of precipitation are not well correlated with flood damage, which is what Mary Downton and I found in a 2000 study.

Just for fun I also looked at California, which was the subject of a different press release put out by Environment California, and guess what? Extreme precipitation is up 26% in California, and there is no statistically significant trend in damage, even without considering population growth and development.

CA Flood.png

So while human caused climate change may be responsible for changes in "extreme" precipitation, these measures are not well correlated with damaging floods.

Posted on December 6, 2007 08:02 AM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Disasters

Why Action on Energy Policy is Not Enough

When in the comments on Tom's post about the recent scientists petition for action on climate change I complained that 200 scientists calling for action on climate change had ignored adaptation, Todd Neff, a local reporter from here in Boulder, helpfully explained to me why climate change is only about energy policy and not human development, and how a focus on the latter implies "pooh-poohing" the former:

Lots of things kill human beings and make them miserable. Poverty and income inequality is real, and 50-1 ratios and 7.3s versus 0.15s should be addressed with real vigor. But that's not what's being talked about in Bali. Pooh-poohing efforts to transform the energy system because poverty remains a problem despite Lyndon Johnson's best efforts strikes me as diverting from the point. These climate scientists are completely ignoring Tay-Sachs disease, too, not to mention tooth decay and this nefarious hiphop prisoner jeans-at-the-knees look that clearly risks widespread tripping among America's male teens.

The view that adaptation is not a part of climate change does seem to be widely shared among environmentalists who would like the climate issue to be narrowly looked at as only an energy issue. Not everyone agrees, particularly folks who work in developing countries. OXFAM for example (PDF) has a different perspective, reflected in this call for action in Bali:

To enable poor countries to adapt successfully, change needs to occur at many levels. Communities must be at the heart of efforts to build resilience, whether through improving economic choices, diversifying livelihoods, protecting eco-systems, or strengthening food and water security. Ministries must be able to integrate climate risk management into their overall planning and budgeting, and must also integrate adaptation into development-planning processes, restructure and strengthen institutions, and provide early-warning systems. In addition, they must ensure that climate risks are integrated into national and local disaster-risk reduction plans, so that they can tackle the underlying vulnerabilities that put communities at risk in the face of the increasing number of climate-related disasters.
Given rich countries' historic role in causing climate change, they now have two clear obligations: to stop harming, by cutting their greenhouse gas emissions hardest and fastest; and to start helping, by providing compensatory finance so that poor countries can adapt before they suffer the full impacts of climate change. . .

In 2005, the G8 countries promised to increase annual aid levels by $50bn by the year 2010. This finance would be a crucial step towards achieving the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets, which aim to halve poverty by 2015. But it is still only 0.36 per cent of rich countries’ incomes – just half of the 0.7 per cent target they signed up to in 1970. Importantly, it is also a target that does not account for the costs of climate change. Two years on, aid to poor countries is falling, not rising and, if current trends continue, Oxfam calculates that the G8 will miss their promised increase by a staggering $30bn. This funding deficit would be a major concern even without climate change.

On top of this deficit, climate change will make it harder to realise the MDGs because it threatens the prospects of reaching every one of them. As the Stern Review states, the scale of additional funding needed for adaptation 'makes it still more important for developed countries to honour both their existing commitments to increase aid sharply and help the world’s poorest countries adapt to climate change.'

Mitigation and adaptation as complements, what an idea! The continued opposition to adaptation among advocates for action on climate change -- whether scientists or members of the media -- remains as baffling as ever to me.

Posted on December 6, 2007 03:42 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | International

Revisiting The 2006-2010 RMS Hurricane Damage Prediction

In the spring of 2006, a company called Risk Management Solutions (RMS) issued a five year forecast of hurricane activity (for 2006-2010) predicting U.S. insured losses to be 40% higher than average. RMS is an important company because their loss models are used by insurance companies to set rates charged to homeowners, by reinsurance companies to set rates they charge to insurers, by ratings agencies for evaluating risks, and others.

We are now two years into the RMS forecast period and can thus say something preliminary about their forecast based on actual hurricane damage from 2006 and 2007, which was minimal. In short, the forecast doesn't look too good. For 2006 and 2007, the following figure shows average annual insured historical losses (for 2005 and earlier) in blue (based on Pielke et al. 2008, adjusted up by 4% from 2006 to 2007 to account for changing exposure), the RMS prediction of 40% more losses above the average in pink, and the actual losses in red.

RMS Verification.png

The RMS prediction obviously did not improve upon a naive forecast of average losses in either year.

What are the chances for the 5-year forecast yet to verify?

Average U.S. insured losses according to Pielke et al. (2008) are about $5.2 billion per year. Over 5 years this is $26 billion, and 40% higher than this is $36 billion. A $36 billion dollar insured loss is about $72 billion in total damage, and $26 billion insured is about $52 billion. For the RMS forecast to do better than the naive baseline of Pielke et al. (2008) total damage in 2008-2010 will have to be higher than $62 billion ($31 billion insured). That is, losses higher than $62B are closer to the RMS forecast than to the naive baseline.

The NHC official estimate for Katrina is $81 billion. So for the 2006-2010 RMS forecast to verify will require close to another Katrina-like event to occur in the next 3 years, or several large events. This is of course possible, but I doubt that there is a hurricane expert out there willing to put forward a combination of event probability and loss magnitude that will lead to an expected $62 billion total loss over the next 3 years. Consider that a 50% chance of $124 billion in losses results in an expected $62 billion. Is there any scientific basis to expect a 50% chance of $124 billion in losses? Or perhaps a 100% chance of $62 billion in total losses? Anyone wanting to make claims of this sort, please let us know!

From Pielke et al. (2008) the annual chances of a >$10B event (i.e., $5B insured) during 1900-2005 about 25%, and the annual chances of a >$50 billion ($25 billion insured) are just under 5%. There were 7 unique three-year periods with >$62B (>$31B insured) in total losses, or about a 7% chance. So RMS prediction of 40% higher than average losses for 2006-2010 has about a 7% chance of being more accurate than a naive baseline. It could happen, of course, but I wouldn't bet on it without good odds!

So what has RMS done is the face of evidence that its first 5-year forecast was not so accurate? Well, they have declared success and issued another 5-year forecast of 40% higher losses for the period 2008-2012.

Risk Management Solutions (RMS) has confirmed its modeled hurricane activity rates for 2008 to 2012 following an elicitation with a group of the world's leading hurricane researchers. . . . The current activity rates lead to estimates of average annual insured losses that will be 40% higher than those predicted by the long-term mean of hurricane activity for the Gulf Coast, Florida, and the Southeast, and 25-30% higher for the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast coastal regions.

For further reading:

Pielke, R. A., Jr., Gratz, J., Landsea, C. W., Collins, D., Saunders, M. A., and Musulin, R. (2008). "Normalized Hurricane Damages in the United States: 1900-2005." Natural Hazards Review, in press, February. (PDF, prepublication version)

December 05, 2007

How to Get Good Intelligence

In The Honest Broker I have a chapter that evaluates the role of intelligence in the decision to go to war in Iraq. I argue that intelligence was used by the Bush Administration as a tool of political advocacy rather than policy insight. With the release earlier this week of a new intelligence estimate on Iran, it may be that the intelligence community is regaining some of its credibility. The New York Times today explains some changes that have taken place:

Over the past year, officials have put into place rigorous new procedures for analyzing conclusions about difficult intelligence targets like Iran, North Korea, global terrorism and China.
Analysts from disparate spy agencies are no longer pushed to achieve unanimity in their conclusions, a process criticized in the past for leading to "groupthink." Alternate judgments are now encouraged.

In the case of the 2007 Iran report, "red teams" were established to test and find weaknesses in the report's conclusions. Counterintelligence officials at the C.I.A. also did an extensive analysis to determine whether the new information might have been planted by Tehran to throw the United States off the trail of Iran's nuclear program.

One result was an intelligence report that some of the intelligence community's consistent critics have embraced.

"Just possibly, the intelligence community may have taken a major step forward," Senator Rockefeller said.

Posted on December 5, 2007 07:31 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | The Honest Broker

November 26, 2007

It Will Take More than Holocaust Analogies

Andy Revkin reports on a spat between NASA's James Hansen and Kraig R. Naasz, the president of the National Mining Association. You can go read the details at Dot Earth. After you do that you might mull over the following factoids (emphasis added). . .

From the International Energy Association's 2007 World Energy Report (PDF):

In line with the spectacular growth of the past few years, coal sees the biggest increase in demand in absolute terms, jumping by 73% between 2005 and 2030 and pushing its share of total energy demand up from 25% to 28%. Most of the increase in coal use arises in China and India. . . Higher oil and gas prices are making coal more competitive as a fuel for baseload generation. China and India, which already account for 45% of world coal use, drive over four-fifths of the increase to 2030 in the Reference Scenario. In the OECD, coal use grows only very slowly, with most of the increase coming from the United States. In all regions, the outlook for coal use depends largely on relative fuel prices, government policies on fuel diversification, climate change and air pollution, and developments in clean coal technology in power generation. The widespread deployment of more efficient power-generation technology is expected to cut the amount of coal needed to generate a kWh of electricity, but boost the attraction of coal over other fuels, thereby leading to higher demand.

From some excellent reporting by the Christian Science Monitor:

In all, at least 37 nations [in Asia, Americas, EU, and elsewhere] plan to add coal-fired capacity in the next five years – up from the 26 nations that added capacity during the past five years. With Sri Lanka, Laos, and even oil-producing nations like Iran getting set to join the coal-power pack, the world faces the prospect five years from now of having 7,474 coal-fired power plants in 79 countries pumping out 9 billion tons of CO2 emissions annually – out of 31 billion tons from all sources in 2012.

One can understand why Stanford's David Victor offers a less-than-optimistic view of the issue, here is part of his comment posted at Dot Earth:

The reason coal matters so much is that it offers the best route for getting leverage on emissions–because coal is used mainly in large central generating stations that are managed by professionals and where economies of scale favor the installation of carbon storage, etc.
That means that simple-sounding solutions like shutting coal plants or passing moratoria are politically impractical and also probably will set back the cause. For example, some existing stations may offer cheaper routes for controlling emissions (such as through installation of post combustion capture) than building brand new units. We don’t know which routes will work, and until we know some more–which requires a much larger effort–it is hard to know what exactly to recommend.

Our group at Stanford has started tracking CCS projects, and what’s striking to us is that if you add up ALL the projects you get to an effort that is perhaps 1/100 of what is actually needed to halt emissions. The whole policy effort, so far, is Potemkin–it looks nice on the surface, but there’s little behind the facade. And to pin all that on coal isn’t right. The problem is us.

The reality is that energy from coal is here to stay. That David Victor sees coal plants as part of the solution to limiting greenhouse gas emissions and James Hansen does not illustrates how widely experts who agree on the need to limit emissions disagree on energy policy.

Posted on November 26, 2007 04:34 PM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Energy Policy

John Quiggin on Adaptation

Last week I took strong issue with a view of climate adaptation put forward by Australian economist John Quiggin. After some discussion, John has graciously provided an extended and considerably more nuanced view of his thoughts on adaptation, which we are happy to highlight here. (Thanks, John!):

There is no reason to expect too little adaptation in developed countries, assuming that individuals and firms act in their own interests, and that governments follow standard policy procedures aimed at selecting policies that promote the welfare of their constituents. To the extent that these things don’t happen, international negotiations won’t help.
There is a big reason to expect excessive emissions by all countries (and the excess is much greater for the rich countries) because of the externality problem. Those making the emissions don’t bear more than a tiny fraction of the costs.

Finally, poor countries won’t have enough adaptation because they don’t have enough of anything. The best solution to this is to increase aid (and access to trade) across the board. Given sufficient resources, poor countries can their own decisions on how to allocate them.

Climate change negotiations provide a chance to put pressure on rich countries to compensate poor countries for the damage caused by climate change, or to pay them to participate in mitigation. In the former context, it may be possible to get finance for adaptation projects as part of the global negotiation process and if so, I welcome it.

Taking all of that together, this means the primary focus of international negotiations should be on emissions reductions and mitigation. But if aid for adaptation can be included in the package, that would be a good thing.

While I disagree with John, I can appreciate that his view is identical to that espoused in the Framework Convention on Climate Change, and a logical consequence of its Article 2.

My own view is that Article 2 leads to a devaluing of sustainable development; specifically, it makes little sense in practice to try to separate "climate change adaptation" (where climate change is narrowly defined as those changes resulting from greenhouse gas emissions) from the more general challenge of sustainable development. I argue this point in the following paper:

Pielke, Jr., R.A., 2005. Misdefining "climate change": consequences for science and action, Environmental Science & Policy, Vol. 8, pp. 548-561. (PDF)

I suspect that the tensions between rich world countries wanting to focus on emissions and developing countries focusing on development will be a central feature of the upcoming FCCC Bali negotiations.

Posted on November 26, 2007 06:09 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

November 25, 2007

Promises, Promises

Three interesting news stories shared by Benny Peiser:

First on adaptation from The Guardian:

A group of rich countries including Britain has broken a promise to pay more than a billion dollars to help the developing world cope with the effects of climate change. The group agreed in 2001 to pay $1.2bn (£600m) to help poor and vulnerable countries predict and plan for the effects of global warming, as well as fund flood defences, conservation and thousands of other projects. But new figures show less than £90m of the promised money has been delivered. Britain has so far paid just £10m. . .
The vast majority of the promised money was expected to be channelled through funds run by an organisation called the Global Environment Facility (GEF) in Washington DC, which was to distribute it through programmes run by the World Bank and United Nations. But accounts presented to a GEF council meeting last week show that only $177m (£86m) had been paid into the funds by September 30 this year, much less than the $1.2bn due by the end of 2007 under the Bonn agreement. Another $106m (£51m) has been pledged to the GEF by specific countries, but not yet paid. Britain has pledged to pay another £10m over the next three years, which makes it among the largest donors, but still below its promised level of commitment.

Saleem Huq, head of the climate change group at the International Institute for Environment and Development, said Britain should have paid between a fifth and a quarter of the £600m promised to date, based on past contributions to international aid. He said: "Most people in the climate change debate focus on how to cut emissions and how to bring the US, China and India into an agreement. The impact of climate change on poor countries, and the responsibilities of rich countries to help them, gets much less attention." The Department for International Development insisted Britain's share was closer to £30m a year, and that it had "fully met its commitments". It said Britain had given an extra £100m since 2005 to climate change work in the developing world through routes outside the GEF, such as bilateral aid given directly to poor countries.

Huq said this money cannot be counted towards the Bonn agreement because it was part of general overseas aid. "The Bonn agreement is clear that the money paid to help developing countries cope with climate change must be additional. Just counting overseas development aid as money for climate change adaptation cuts no ice and is double counting."

Next on emissions from EU autos:

European Union governments look set to reject calls for taxing cars based on their contribution to climate change.
At a Dec. 4 meeting, finance ministers from the EU’s 27 member states are scheduled to discuss a proposal for reshaping taxes imposed on cars so that they take account of the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2), the main climate-changing gas, they emit.

But Portugal, the current holder of the EU’s rotating presidency, has conceded that a breakthrough on this plan is unlikely. This is despite a pledge made by the EU governments earlier this year that they would lead international efforts to fight climate change.

In an internal paper, seen by IPS, the Lisbon government says there is "opposition from a considerable number" of EU countries to "an obligation to introduce a CO2 element into national car taxes."

. . . Angela Merkel, now Germany’s chancellor, advocated in 1994 that a maximum legal limit of 120 grams of carbon dioxide emissions per kilometre should be established for cars. Merkel was her country’s environment minister at the time.

Although EU policy-makers have discussed that target ever since then, the Commission suggested earlier this year that a less stringent goal of 130g/km should be set. Ironically, it agreed to that measure after Merkel and the German car industry lobbied the Commission not to opt for the 120g/km limit.

And on that third runway at Heathrow:

Isn't politics wonderful? Within days of Gordon Brown's address to the conservation group WWF, in which he pledged eye-wateringly tough reductions in British emissions of Co2, the Government has announced its support for the construction of a third runway at Heathrow Airport. "This time he really gets it," Greenpeace's executive director had enthused after the Prime Minister's "Let's save the polar bear" speech. Yesterday, following the Transport Secretary's endorsement of BAA's expansion plans, Greenpeace was back to its default position, spitting ecological tacks.
You might think this is a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing (or possibly the left hand not knowing what the left hand is doing) especially given the Government's growing reputation for administrative chaos. In fact it is entirely deliberate. The Government both wants to claim "leadership in the fight against climate change" while at the same time it – quite understandably– does not want to do anything which might reduce this country's international competitiveness. It knows that these two objectives are incompatible – very well, then: it will contradict itself. . .

It has been written often enough that any likely reduction in Co2 emissions from our own generation of electricity is not just sub-microscopic in terms of any measurable effect on the climate: the People's Republic of China is now opening two new coal-fired power stations every week. Real "climate change leadership" would be developing "clean coal" technology and selling it to the Chinese – but for some reason that does not fascinate politicians in the way that targets do. It is insufficiently heroic.

We can see the same national self-obsession in the debate over the environmental consequences of opening a third runway at Heathrow: last year China announced plans to expand 73 of its airports and build 42 new ones. Yes, the British government could demonstrate "increased climate change leadership" by blocking BAA's plans to build another runway at Heathrow. Does anyone seriously imagine that the consequence of further congestion and delays will be something other than a transfer of traffic from that airport to others in the immediate vicinity, such as Charles de Gaulle, which already has much more capacity?

Posted on November 25, 2007 08:43 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

November 20, 2007

Optimal Adaptation?

Thomas Henry Huxley once described science as "organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact." The same can be said of economics.

In a unpublished letter to Nature posted as a comment on the Nature Climate Feedback blog Australian economist John Quiggin responds to the recent Prins/Rayner piece in Nature. He explains how economics theory indicates that we really have no reason to worry about adaptation to climate change, because economics theory says so:

Prins and Rayner also assume that because adaptation is as important as mitigation, it should receive equal attention as a focus of public policy. But emissions of greenhouse gases represent a market failure. No individual or nation has a strong incentive to reduce their own emissions. Hence, mitigation requires a global policy response so that this externality is taken into account. By contrast, private parties, in deciding how to adapt to climate change, will, in the absence of policy intervention, bear the costs and receive the benefits of their decisions in most cases. There is no reason to expect too little adaptation.

I suppose one could argue that this thesis is supported by the obvious fact that the world today does indeed have an optimal level of climate adaptation.

But then again, one might also take a look at Bangladesh and the effects of Cyclone Sidr over the past week to see that such an argument is not only wrong but wrongheaded, and perhaps even morally bereft. The two "private parties" in the photo to the left (courtesy of The Boston Herald) are obviously practicing "optimal adaptation" in the "absence of policy intervention."

Yeah, right.

Posted on November 20, 2007 10:32 AM View this article | Comments (10)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

November 19, 2007

IPCC and Policy Options: To Open Up or Close Down?

With the release of the IPCC AR4 Synthesis report last week, the IPCC made a dramatic statement that has thus far escaped notice. The IPCC has endorsed the Kyoto Protocol process, at once discarding its fig leaf of being "policy neutral" and putting its scientific authority on the line by supporting a policy approach that many people think simply cannot work.

The IPCC Synthesis Report states:

There is high agreement and much evidence that notable achievements of the UNFCCC and its Kyoto Protocol are the establishment of a global response to climate change, stimulation of an array of national policies, and the creation of an international carbon market and new institutional mechanisms that may provide the foundation for future mitigation efforts. Progress has also been made in addressing adaptation within the UNFCCC and additional international initiatives have been suggested.

The IPCC has never really been "policy neutral" despite its claims, so such openness in its political advocacy is a welcome change (an "emboldened" stance is also noted by the NYT's Elisabeth Rosenthal).

However, its claims that there is "high agreement" and "much evidence" of the success of the Kyoto Protocol approach are simply wrong, unless one restricts those claims to a fairly narrow group of experts. The ability of the Kyoto Protocol approach to effectively deal with the challenge of climate change is hotly debated (for instance, PDF). And there is considerable evidence that it has done little (or less) in practice. The claim by the IPCC that the UNFCCC has contributed to progress on adaptation is laughable (PDF).

In short, the IPCC appears to be using the language and concepts of a scientific consensus to suggest that there is also a consensus on the policy effectiveness and political worth of the Kyoto approach. This is a perfect example of how science becomes pathologically politicized. There are a wide range of approaches to climate change policy that are consistent with the work of the IPCC working groups. For an example of such an approach, see my congressional testimony from last May which synthesizes the 3 IPCC reports (here in PDF) in a way that suggests that it is future development paths that matter much more than Kyoto-like attempts to limit emissions.

Ultimately, it is fair to ask of the IPCC what its role in climate policy actually is -- is it to provide an assessment of the views of a wide range of experts on questions of relevance to decision makers? Or perhaps it is to survey a wide range of policy options to facilitate decision making by governments? Or is it to pick a "winner" in climate politics and advocate for its agenda above all others?

Is it to open up debate on climate policy or close it down? Judging by the AR4 Synthesis Report the IPCC has chosen the latter path.

The risk is that the IPCC has chosen a losing policy option to advocate for -- "the wrong trousers" to borrow a metaphor -- and thus is more likely to work against the adoption of effective climate policies than it would by presenting policy makers with a wide range of options to chose from, including but not limited to Kyoto. Climate policy debates will be ongoing for years and probably decades. We will need honest brokers if we are to made good decisions about climate policy.

The more that the IPCC resembles an advocacy group with a narrow political agenda tied to the Kyoto Protocol, the more it risks its credibility, legitimacy, and ultimately, its sustainability.

Posted on November 19, 2007 10:21 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

Prins and Rayner - The Wrong Trousers

Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner have released the full version of their analysis of the failure of the Kyoto Protocol. It is available as a PDF here. They write:

The idea that the Kyoto Protocol approach to climate change mitigation is the only solution compounds the problem of finding viable responses for real problems. Another solution must be found—or rather other solutions.

It is a thoughtful, hard-hitting, and on target assessment of the current state of climate policy debate. It deserves to be read carefully and broadly discussed. Have a look.

Posted on November 19, 2007 10:15 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

November 16, 2007

Neal Lane and Roger Pielke, Jr. on NPR Science Friday

Presidential Science Advisors (broadcast Friday, November 16th, 2007)

How important are a president's advisors when it comes to making decisions that deal with science and technology? Scientist Roger Pielke, Jr. interviewed seven of the fourteen most recent Presidential Science Advisors, who served under presidents from Lyndon Johnson to George W Bush. In this segment, Ira talks with Pielke about what he learned from the interviews, and about how future administrations might try to manage the massive amounts of scientific advice available.

3PM EST on NPR!!!

Posted on November 16, 2007 08:38 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science + Politics

November 15, 2007

The Science Advisor at 50

I've got a Commentary in this week's Nature on the President's science advisor. Here is a link to the PDF.

Tomorrow I'll be appearing on NPR's Science Friday to discuss the piece and the past 50 years of presidential science advice. Please tune in at 3PM EST!

Posted on November 15, 2007 02:07 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | R&D Funding | Science + Politics | Science Policy: General

November 14, 2007

Not Ambitious Enough

In today’s New York Times, Thomas Friedman has a column lamenting the failure of politicians to enact a gasoline tax following 9/11. I am a strong supporter for a dramatically increased gasoline tax in the United States. The problem with Friedman’s proposed gasoline tax is that it is not ambitious enough.

Here are some data:

Sources:

U.S. gasoline prices
U.S. gasoline usage
U.S. GDP

On September 11, 2001 U.S. gasoline averaged $1.15 per gallon. By May 1, 2006 it was $2.90 per gallon. The difference of $1.75 per gallon is larger than the gasoline tax proposed by Friedman, and thus allows for a natural experiment on the effects on consumption.

US gasoline consumption in September, 2001 was 8.6 million barrels per day. In May, 2006 it was 9.3 million barrels per day. This does not suggest a strong relationship between price and consumption, although it is certainly possible to argue that consumption would have been higher with lower prices. Clearly, the $1.75 increase per gallon did not lead to reduced consumption.

One can look at the figures from the standpoint of the overall economy as well. In 2001 the US economy generated $3.22 of economic activity for every gallon of gasoline burned. In 2006 it generated $3.91 of economic activity for every gallon of gasoline burned. This does not suggest a strong relationship of gasoline use and economic growth. This is good news because it suggests that gasoline prices might be able to increase considerably without large negative economic effects.

One might argue that the $1.00 per gallon tax would be on top of the supply/demand fluctuations in price. But even gasoline at $4 or $5 dollars is unlikely to lead to dramatic changes in behavior or innovation.

Consider that a gasoline tax of $1/per gallon would have raised only about $3.4 billion in tax revenue in 2006, which is small in relation to overall U.S. incomes taxes, which in 2006 were more than $1 trillion (PDF). Thus it is very (!) misleading when Friedman quotes Philip Verleger in his column as saying, "We could have replaced the current payroll tax with a gasoline tax." Well, I suppose that if the gasoline tax was about $300/gallon under present levels of consumption then that statement would be accurate!

What does the literature say?

There is a very nice review paper on the elasticity of gasoline demand based on a wide range of studies by Graham and Glaister (2002)(PDF). This paper concludes:

There are differences between the short- and long-run elasticities of fuel consumption with respect to price. . . Therefore, it may be right to say that "it won’t make much difference" or "people will use their cars just the same", but only in the short run. The evidence is clear and remarkably consistent over a wide range of studies in many countries that in the long run there is a significant response, albeit a less than proportionate one. . .

So the effects of a gasoline tax are important and take place over the long term. However, the tax would have to be significant enough to generate significant responses, lest it be more symbolic than effective. I am not sure what that is in the United States, but I am sure that $1 per gallon is only a step in the right direction; it is not all that is needed by a longshot.

Both long- and short-term effects of gasoline prices on traffic levels tend to be less than their effects on the volume of fuel burned. . . Raising fuel prices will therefore be more effective in reducing the quantity of fuel used than in reducing the volume of traffic. . .

Anyone who has driven at rush hour in the UK where gasoline costs a lot more than the U.S. will be well aware of this reality. It is therefore misleading to suggest that a higher gasoline tax will reduce congestion, as some have suggested. It won’t. To reduce congestion would require other strategies.

The demand for owning cars in heavily dependent on income. . . The implication is that fuel prices must rise faster than the rate of income growth, even to stabilise consumption at existing levels.

Consider the difference between dollars of GDP per gallon in 2001 and 2006. US GDP increased over this period by 30% while gasoline prices increased by about 90%, and gasoline consumption still increased by 7%.

If goals of energy policy are to dramatically reduce the U.S. reliance on foreign sources of oil and to rapidly accelerate the decarbonization of the energy system, then a gasoline tax can certainly contribute to that end. However, it is misleading at best to suggest that $1 per gallon can do the job, or make a big step in that direction, when it can’t. Achieving a gasoline tax in the United States would be a monumental political achievement. It would be a shame to see such an achievement undercut by getting the policy wrong by reaching for too little. Of course, that might just be a good characterization of current debates on U.S. energy policy generally.

Posted on November 14, 2007 09:34 AM View this article | Comments (11)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Energy Policy

November 12, 2007

Geotimes Interview

Geotimes has an interview with me online about The Honest Broker.

The interviewer, Nicole Branan, has this to say about the book:

Any scientist would benefit from reading this book, as it is an eye-opener about the scientist-policymaking relationship.

Buy one for yourself and as the holiday season approaches, don't forget all of your scientist friends!

Posted on November 12, 2007 09:10 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | The Honest Broker

November 07, 2007

Sokal Revisited - I Smell a Hoax

Benny Peiser sent around on his CCNet list a link to the following paper:

Carbon dioxide production by benthic bacteria: the death of manmade global warming theory? Journal of Geoclimatic Studies (2007) 13:3. 223-231.

It has the following statement within the text:

Moreover we note that there is no possible mechanism by which industrial emissions could have caused the recent temperature increase, as they are two orders of magnitude too small to have exerted an effect of this size. We have no choice but to conclude that the recent increase in global temperatures, which has caused so much disquiet among policy makers, bears no relation to industrial emissions, but is in fact a natural phenomenom.
These findings place us in a difficult position. We feel an obligation to publish, both in the cause of scientific objectivity and to prevent a terrible mistake - with extremely costly implications - from being made by the world's governments. But we recognise that in doing so, we lay our careers on the line. As we have found in seeking to broach this issue gently with colleagues, and in attempting to publish these findings in other peer-reviewed journals, the "consensus" on climate change is enforced not by fact but by fear. We have been warned, collectively and individually, that in bringing our findings to public attention we are not only likely to be deprived of all future sources of funding, but that we also jeopardise the funding of the departments for which we work.

We believe that academic intimidation of this kind contradicts the spirit of open enquiry in which scientific investigations should be conducted. We deplore the aggressive responses we encountered before our findings were published, and fear the reaction this paper might provoke. But dangerous as these findings are, we feel we have no choice but to publish.

Shocking, it seems. But call me a skeptic skeptic - I'm calling this a hoax.

Posted on November 7, 2007 12:32 PM View this article | Comments (11)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

NAS Student Forum on Science and Technology Policy

Full details here . . .

On January 4-5, 2008, the National Academies are sponsoring a two-day public forum intended for students, postdoctoral fellows, and recent graduates interested in studying and careers in science and technology policy.

The forum will feature both invited presentations and interactive discussions that will bring together a cross-section of government, academia, and industry to address practice and opportunities of the science and technology profession.

Apply here!

Have questions or comments? Email us at studentforum@nas.edu

Posted on November 7, 2007 06:50 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science Policy: General

November 02, 2007

Confronting Disaster Losses

From today's Science:

L. M. Bouwer, R. P. Crompton, E. Faust, P. Höppe, and R. A. Pielke Jr. 2007. Confronting disaster losses, Science 318, 753.

Here is an excerpt from the Supporting Online Material:

Societal change and economic development are mainly responsible for increasing losses in recent decades, as convincingly shown in analyses of long-term records of losses (S1). After adjusting for societal changes, resulting time series accurately reflect documented trends (or lack thereof) and variability consistent with the observed climatological record of weather events (S1, S5). This implies that the net result of the adjustments has to a significant degree successfully removed the signal of societal change from the loss record. . .
Within the next 20 years projected changes in the intensity and frequency of extreme events—depending on the time scale and hazard—remain uncertain. The most severe effects of human-caused climate change are expected in the second half of the century
(S6). In the immediate future, disaster losses will increase as a result of societal change and economic development, independent of climate change.

We'll provide the full text as soon as it is posted on our site. Meantime, subscribers to Science can find it here.

UPDATE: Full text here in PDF.

Posted on November 2, 2007 07:59 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Disasters

October 30, 2007

A Range of Views on Prins/Rayner

Here are a few reactions, and my comments in response, to the Prins/Rayner piece in Nature last week, which has generated a good deal of healthy discussion on climate policies.

At his new DotEarth blog Andy Revkin notes perceptively that debate over greenhouse gas reduction policies is emerging between those who think that setting a price for carbon is the most important action to be taken, versus others who think that setting a price for carbon can only have modest effects on efficiency, and by itself will not stimulate a transition to a post-fossil fuel world. Most everyone nowadays, including Prins/Rayner, would seem to agree that putting a price on carbon makes good sense. The debate is over the degree to which setting such a price will lead to a significant change in the trajectory of emissions paths. Prins/Rayner are not optimistic (and I agree), and others are more sanguine.

At Nature’s Climate Feedback, a number of informed commenters respond to Prins/Rayner by raising questions about the effectiveness of Kyoto mechanisms. Prins/Rayner emphasize the symbolic importance of Kyoto, but criticize its practical results. They suggest that more of the same – feel-good symbolism over actual, large emissions reductions – is not what the world needs at this point. On this point reasonable people will disagree, but ultimately atmospheric concentrations will arbitrate the debate.

The Wall Street Journal Energy Blog does a nice job identifying where Prins/Rayner agree with and disagree with the policies of the Bush Administration. Unfortunately, the role of technology in the climate debate has been caught up in partisan bickering. Some argue that all of the technologies that are needed to stabilize emissions (or at least make a big forward step in that direction) are already available. I find this argument unconvincing at best, and more likely just plain wrongheaded. Others, such as Nordhaus/Shellenberger suggest that a massive investment in new technologies are needed, a point on which I, and Prins/Rayner, agree. Many environmentalists do their arguments (and efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions) no favors by taking an anti-technological investment stance, which seems more like a reflexive reaction to be against anything that the Bush Administration might be for -- Note however that while the Bush Administration often uses the word "technology" in the context of climate change policy, they have never advocated the sort of investment advocated by Prins/Rayner/Nordhaus/Shellenberger.

There will be more to discuss when Prins/Rayner release the long version of their analysis, hopefully soon. We’ll link to it here when available.

Posted on October 30, 2007 07:05 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Energy Policy

October 24, 2007

Prins and Rayner in Nature

Gwyn Prins, of the London School of Economics, and Steve Rayner, of Oxford University have a brave and challenging piece in the current issue of Nature on why we need to rethink climate policy. Here is how it begins:

The Kyoto Protocol is a symbolically important expression of governments' concern about climate change. But as an instrument for achieving emissions reductions, it has failed. It has produced no demonstrable reductions in emissions or even in anticipated emissions growth. And it pays no more than token attention to the needs of societies to adapt to existing climate change. The impending United Nations Climate Change Conference being held in Bali in December — to decide international policy after 2012 — needs to radically rethink climate policy.
Kyoto's supporters often blame non-signatory governments, especially the United States and Australia, for its woes. But the Kyoto Protocol was always the wrong tool for the nature of the job. Kyoto was constructed by quickly borrowing from past treaty regimes dealing with stratospheric ozone depletion, acid rain from sulphur emissions and nuclear weapons. Drawing on these plausible but partial analogies, Kyoto's architects assumed that climate change would be best attacked directly through global emissions controls, treating tonnes of carbon dioxide like stockpiles of nuclear weapons to be reduced via mutually verifiable targets and timetables. Unfortunately, this borrowing simply failed to accommodate the complexity of the climate-change issue.

Kyoto has failed in several ways, not just in its lack of success in slowing global warming, but also because it has stifled discussion of alternative policy approaches that could both combat climate change and adapt to its unavoidable consequences. As Kyoto became a litmus test of political correctness, those who were concerned about climate change, but sceptical of the top-down approach adopted by the protocol were sternly admonished that "Kyoto is the only game in town". We are anxious that the same mistake is not repeated in the current round of negotiations.

The Kyoto Protocol was always the wrong tool for the nature of the job.

Already, in the post-Kyoto discussions, we are witnessing that well-documented human response to failure, especially where political or emotional capital is involved, which is to insist on more of what is not working: in this case more stringent targets and timetables, involving more countries. The next round of negotiations needs to open up new approaches, not to close them down as Kyoto did.

Read the whole thing free on the Nature site.

Posted on October 24, 2007 02:13 PM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

September 29, 2007

Late Action by Lame Ducks

I have a new column out in Bridges on a scenario for the climate policy end game by the Bush Administration -- read it here.

Posted on September 29, 2007 07:23 AM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Energy Policy

September 20, 2007

The Honest Broker 20% Off!!

Cambridge University Press is offering The Honest Broker at 20% off -- for the coupon code visit the CUP site here.

Posted on September 20, 2007 04:09 PM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | The Honest Broker

September 14, 2007

Breakthrough Blog

I'll be blogging on climate policy over at the Breakthrough blog, check it out, my first post is up!

Posted on September 14, 2007 05:50 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Site News

August 23, 2007

The Honest Broker Reviewed in Nature

Some quotes from the 23 August 2007 issue of Nature, which has a review of The Honest Broker by Andrew A. Rosenberg from the University of New Hampshire (subscribers can see it here).

Happily, the book by Roger Pielke, Jr. on the engagement of scientists in policy offers a pithy, insightful basis for discussing the contributions scientists can make to advising policy makers. . .
This is a clear, thought-provoking book that helps move us away from thinking of science as 'pure' and distinct from policy. It would make an excellent basis for a graduate seminar. It isn't a textbook, but a think-piece, and we all need to consider carefully our responsibility to engage as scientists in policy making.

Buy your copy today!

Posted on August 23, 2007 10:16 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | The Honest Broker

August 17, 2007

The Honest Broker Reviewed in Science

Some quotes from the review of The Honest Broker by Georgetown University's Nathan Hultman appearing in the 17 August 2007 issue of Science:

"In The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics, Roger Pielke Jr. successfully illuminates these challenges to science and scientists."

"Pielke's framework provides a helpful starting point for investigating factors that complicate the science-society relationship. . . Pielke deftly shows how scientists selections among these options can affect outcomes."

"[T]he book's direct language and concrete examples convey the concepts to a wide audience. By categorizing different roles in the often vexed but necessary relations between scientists and their social world, Pielke clarifies choices not only for scientists but also for the diverse members of democratic society, for whom scientific perspectives are an essential component of better policy."

Buy your copy today!

Posted on August 17, 2007 10:40 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | The Honest Broker

New Publication

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 2007. Mistreatment of the economic impacts of extreme events in the Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change, in press, corrected proof.

Full text here in PDF.

Posted on August 17, 2007 12:55 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters | Scientific Assessments

June 25, 2007

Normalized US Hurricane Damages

The following paper has now been peer reviewed and accepted for publication in the journal Natural Hazards Review:

Pielke, Jr., R.A., Gratz, J., Landsea, C.W., Collins, D., Saunders, M., and Musulin, R., 2007. Normalized Hurricane Damages in the United States: 1900-2005. Natural Hazards Review (accepted) Accepted Version in PDF

The dataset is available here.

Posted on June 25, 2007 04:12 PM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Disasters

May 16, 2007

End of the Line . . .

After three years of blogging, I have decided to take an extended break that just-so-happens to coincide with my sabbatical leave. Oh, I'll be promoting my book here and there, but I won't be posting regularly. It has been a fun experience, even with the obvious downsides, but it is time to close this chapter.

Prometheus, I hope, will continue to provoke and irritate, as is our custom, so don't go far!

Posted on May 16, 2007 02:05 PM View this article | Comments (12)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Site News

The Importance of the Development Pathway in the Climate Debate

Today I am testifying before the House Committee on Science and Technology of the U.S. Congress. In my testimony I argue that we should pay attention to development paths in addition to the mitigation of greenhouse gases. You can see my testimony in full here in PDF.

A full reference:

Pielke, Jr., R.A., 2007. Statement to the House Committee on Science and Technology of the United States House of Representatives, The State of Climate Change Science 2007: The Findings of the Fourth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Working Group III: Mitigation of Climate Change, 16 May.

Posted on May 16, 2007 03:01 AM View this article | Comments (6)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Sustainability

May 15, 2007

Upcoming Congressional Testimony

I will be testifying before the House Committee on Science and Technology on Wednesday of this week. I'll post my written testimony here beforehand.

Posted on May 15, 2007 12:42 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

Preview of The Honest Broker

Google provides a limited preview of The Honest Broker.

Posted on May 15, 2007 12:29 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | The Honest Broker

May 11, 2007

State of Florida Rejects RMS Cat Model Approach

According to a press release from RMS, Inc. the state of Florida has rejected their risk assessment methodology based on using an expert elicitation to predict hurricane risk for the next five years. Regular readers may recall that we discussed this issue in depth not long ago. Here is an excerpt from the press release:

During the week of April 23, the Professional Team of the Florida Commission on Hurricane Loss Projection Methodology (FCHLPM) visited the RMS offices to assess the v6.0 RMS U.S. Hurricane Model. The model submitted for review incorporates our standard forward-looking estimates of medium-term hurricane activity over the next five years, which reflect the current prolonged period of increased hurricane frequency in the Atlantic basin. This model, released by RMS in May 2006, is already being used by insurance and reinsurance companies to manage the risk of losses from hurricanes in the United States.
Over the past year, RMS has been in discussions with the FCHLPM regarding use of a new method of estimating future hurricane activity over the next five years, drawing upon the expert opinion of the hurricane research community, rather than relying on a simplistic long-term historical average which does not distinguish between periods of higher and lower hurricane frequency. RMS was optimistic that the certification process would accommodate a more robust approach, so it was disappointed that the Professional Team was "unable to verify" that the company had met certain FCHLPM model standards relating to the use of long-term data for landfalling hurricanes since 1900.

As a result of the Professional Team’s decision, RMS has elected this year to submit a revised version of the model that is based on the long-term average, to satisfy the needs of the FCHLPM.

This is of course the exact same issue that we highlighted over at Climate Feedback, where I wrote, "Effective planning depends on knowing what range of possibilities to expect in the immediate and longer-term future. Use too long a record from the past and you may underestimate trends. Use too short a record and you miss out on longer time-scale variability."

In their press release, RMS complains correctly that the state of Florida is now likely to underestimate risk:

The long-term historical average significantly underestimates the level of hurricane hazard along the U.S. coast, and there is a consensus among expert hurricane researchers that we will continue to experience elevated frequency for at least the next 10 years. The current standards make it more difficult for insurers and their policy-holders to understand, manage, and reduce hurricane risk effectively.

In its complaint, RMS is absolutely correct. However, the presence of increased risk does not justify using an untested, unproven, and problematic methodology for assessing risk, even if it seems to give the "right" answer.

The state of Florida would be wise to err in the decision making on the side of recognizing that the long-term record of hurricane landfalls and impacts is likely to dramatically understate their current risk and exposure. From all accounts, the state of Florida appears to be gambling with its hurricane future rather than engaging in robust risk management. For their part, RMS, the rest of the cat model industry, and insurance and reinsurance companies should together carefully consider how best to incorporate rapidly evolving and still-uncertain science into scientifically robust and politically legitimate tools for risk management, and this cannot happen quickly enough.

Posted on May 11, 2007 01:14 PM View this article | Comments (8)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Disasters | Prediction and Forecasting | Risk & Uncertainty

May 10, 2007

Reorienting U.S. Climate Science Policies

Last week the House Committee on Science and Technology held an important hearing on the future direction of climate research in he United States (PDF).

The major scientific debate is settled. Climate change is occurring. It is impacting our nation and the rest of the world and will continue to impact us into the future. The USGCRP should move beyond an emphasis on addressing uncertainties and refining climate science. In addition the Program needs to provide information that supports action to reduce vulnerability to climate and other global changes and facilitates the development of adaptation and mitigation strategies that can be applied here in the U.S. and in other vulnerable locations throughout the world.

This refocusing of climate research is timely and worthwhile. Kudos to the S&T Committee.

For a number of years, Congressman Mark Udall (D-CO) has led efforts to make the nation's climate research enterprise more responsive to the needs of decision makers (joined by Bob Inglis (R-SC)). Mr. Udall explained the reasons for rethinking climate science as follows:

The evolution of global science and the global change issue sparked the need to make changes to the 1978 National Climate Program Act, and gave us the Global Change Research Act of 1990. It is now time for another adjustment to alter the focus of the program governed by this law.
The debate, about whether climate change is occurring and about whether human activity has contributed to it, is over. As our population, economy, and infrastructure have grown, we have put more pressure on the natural resources we all depend upon. Each year, fires, droughts, hurricanes, and other natural events remind us of our vulnerability to extreme weather and climate changes. The human and economic cost of these events is very high. With better planning and implementation of adaptation strategies these costs can be reduced.

For all of these reasons, we need the USGCRP to produce more information that is readily useable by decision makers and resource managers in government and in the private sector. People throughout this country and in the rest of the world need information they can use to develop response, adaptation, and mitigation strategies to make our communities, our businesses, and our nation more resilient and less vulnerable to the changes that are inevitable.

We must also move aggressively to reduce greenhouse gas emissions if we are to avoid future increases in surface temperature that will trigger severe impacts that we cannot overcome with adaptation strategies. We need economic and technical information as well as information about system responses and climate responses to different concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The USGCRP should be the vehicle for providing this information.

The hearing charter (PDF) is worth reading in full.

Posted on May 10, 2007 03:50 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | R&D Funding | Scientific Assessments

May 09, 2007

Should the Gates Foundation fund Policy Research?

Well, according Hannah Brown writing in BMJ the answer is "yes" (h/t SciDev.net). It turns out that simply investing money in scientific research or technology development is not sufficient to realize benefits on the ground. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has already changed he world for the better, and has much future potential, so it is good that it is learning the limitations of the so-called "linear model" of science and society sooner rather than later. Here is an excerpt from Brown's commentary:

Ask anyone with a passing interest in global health what the Gates Foundation means to them and you'll likely get just one answer: money. In a field long fatigued by the perpetual struggle for cash, the foundation's eagerness to finance projects neglected by many other donors raised high hopes among campaigners that its impact on health would be swift and great. And with the commitment last June by America's second richest man, Warren Buffet, to effectively double the foundation's $30bn (£15bn; {euro}22bn) endowment,1 hopes of substantial health achievements grew higher still.
But despite Bill Gates's prediction at a press conference to mark Buffet's pledge that there was now "No reason why we can't cure the top 20 diseases"2 observers are starting to question whether all this money is reaping sufficient rewards. For although the foundation has given a huge boost to research and development into technologies against some of the world's most devastating and neglected diseases, critics suggest that its reluctance to embrace research, demonstration, and capacity building in health delivery systems is worsening the gap between what technology can do and what is actually happening to health in poor communities. This situation, critics charge, is preventing the Gates's grants from achieving their full potential.

Read the whole thing.

May 07, 2007

Policy Research? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Policy Research

From today's New York Times a tale of incredible myopia all too common in the Bush Administration:

When Jon Oberg, a Department of Education researcher, warned in 2003 that student lending companies were improperly collecting hundreds of millions in federal subsidies and suggested how to correct the problem, his supervisor told him to work on something else.
The department "does not have an intramural program of research on postsecondary education finance," the supervisor, Grover Whitehurst, a political appointee, wrote in a November 2003 e-mail message to Mr. Oberg, a civil servant who was soon to retire. "In the 18 months you have remaining, I will expect your time and talents to be directed primarily to our business of conceptualizing, competing and monitoring research grants."

For three more years, the vast overpayments continued. Education Secretary Rod Paige and his successor, Margaret Spellings, argued repeatedly that under existing law they were powerless to stop the payments and that it was Congress that needed to act. Then this past January, the department largely shut off the subsidies by sending a simple letter to lenders — the very measure Mr. Oberg had urged in 2003.

Posted on May 7, 2007 02:31 PM View this article | Comments (7)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | The Honest Broker

May 05, 2007

Hans von Storch on The Honest Broker

Hans von Storch interprets The Honest Broker in the context of the climate debate in the Swiss newspaper Berner Zeitung. The review is in German. Info on The Honest Broker can be found here.

Posted on May 5, 2007 06:04 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | The Honest Broker

May 04, 2007

You Must be a Creationist

Academic blogging is an interesting medium. On the one hand it "flattens" the world of communication and facilitates the public engagement of experts with everyone else. But it also has some strong negatives, on display this week over at Chris Mooney's blog.

Chris, and fellow blogger American University's Matt Nisbet, recently wrote two pieces for Science and The Washington Post, in which they engaged in a little Science Studies 101, pointing out that how issues are framed influences how they are received. Seems pretty straightforward. But in their piece they suggested, correctly in my view, that how some atheists advance their agenda on the back of science may actually backfire in political debates. For their trouble Chris and Matt have been lambasted by the agitprop blogosphere.

One particularly clueless commentator -- a professor with a Harvard degree -- went so far as to suggest that Mooney and Nisbet are in fact creationists! This strategy of allowing absolutely no nuance is the main tool in the agitprop toolbox. Why else would Matt and Chris criticize Richard Dawkins unless they are really creationists at heart?! Such drivel is extremely irritating, as Chris and Matt's reactions indicate and there is really no effective response to it. Here at Prometheus I routinely hear from trolls and others with bad intent and that I must be a Republican (or a Republican sympathizer) since I have advanced some views that some Republicans think make sense. (Outside the blogosphere actually convincing people of the merits of your arguments is viewed in a positive light!;-)

The issue, not surprisingly, is one of framing. The professor alleging the creationist in Mooney and Nisbet describes religious people as his "enemies" suggesting that we are at war with them. Mooney for his part disavows such nonsense:

"Attack"? Those are your words.
"Enemies"? Those are also your words.

I don't see it that way.

We were trying to make a very serious point about how scientists need to rethink communication strategies. We saw Dawkins as a prominent example to use. He is, after all, prominent.

In political debates the agitprop partisans always have the upper hand, as they can level personal attacks, misrepresent your work, make mountains out of molehills, and nanny-nanny-boo-boo call you names all day long. For academic bloggers who don't want to themselves become mindless partisans there are only a few choices, develop a thick skin or get out of the fray. David Brooks' column yesterday on how to handle such people is worth a read (of course, my citing it must be an indicateion my conservative tendencies;-):

. . . they’ll never be open-minded toward you. But the other three-quarters are honorable, intelligent people. If you treat these people with respect, and find places where you can work together, they will teach you things and make you more effective. If you treat them the way you treat the partisans, they’ll turn into partisans and destroy you.

So here at Promethues, until the blogging negatives outweigh the positives, we will stomach those with ill-intent and simply correct the record when necessary and let nonsense stand on its own. The good news, for Matt and Chris and others who find themselves under attack from people who seek to distract from the substance of their arguments is that their arguments must be pretty strong on their merits to attract such passionate attention. So Matt and Chris, keep up the good work, and don't get too exercised about the noise. Not much you can do about that!

Posted on May 4, 2007 06:57 AM View this article | Comments (8)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Hodge Podge

Review of Useless Arithmetic

In the current issue of Nature I review Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future by Orrin Pilkey & Linda Pilkey-Jarvis. Here is my review in PDF. The book's home page can be found here.

Posted on May 4, 2007 01:35 AM View this article | Comments (11)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Prediction and Forecasting

May 03, 2007

I'm Outta Here . . .

Only sort of . . . Nature has set up a new blog on climate science and policy and the opportunity to join a blog community of people with very diverse views has proven too good to pass up.

The new blog is call Climate Feedback. It has just gone live with a new post by yours truly on climate variability and trends, plus posts by Hans von Storch and Eduadro Zorita on how the scientific process worked in the case of the "hockey stick". Kevin Vranes will also be blogging there.

As the website gets up to full speed I plan on concentrating my climate-related posts at the Nature blog and more general science policy stuff here. We'll see how it goes.

Have a look!

Posted on May 3, 2007 10:29 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Site News

New Landsea Paper in EOS

Chris Landsea has shared his just-out paper from EOS (PDF) and send the following capsule summary:

The link between the frequency of tropical cyclones [hurricanes and tropical storms] and anthropogenic global warming has become an emerging focus. However, an analysis of the data shows that improved monitoring in recent years is responsible for most, if not all, of the observed trend in increasing frequency of tropical cyclones.

Comments, criticisms, alternative perspectives welcomed!

Posted on May 3, 2007 08:58 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

May 02, 2007

Bob Ward Responds - Swindle Letter

In fairness to Bob Ward, lead author of the "Swindle Letter" we thought it important to highlight comments that he submitted under that thread. -Ed.]

Click through for his comments . . .

Some interesting comments here about the letter. I thought it might be helpful to clarify a few points.

First, I would encourage Russell Seitz not to continue to spread the entirely false rumour that I was sacked by the Royal Society. It is a shame that he is using Prometheus as a platform for his personal smear campaign against me - or perhaps this is an example of him exercising his cherished right to "freedom of speech"?

Some have tried to characterise the letter as a violation of the right to free speech. It is not. The UK's Broadcasting Code specifies that "Views and facts must not be misrepresented". When 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' was broadcast on Channel Four on 8 March, and subsequently repeated on More 4, I believe it violated the Broadcasting Code because it contained major misrepresentations of views and facts. I have submitted a complaint to both the broadcaster and to Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator.

Ofcom and Channel Four have yet to rule on the complaints from me and about 200 other people. However, Wag TV, the programme's producers are not obliged to reflect that ruling at all in the DVD version of the programme, and indeed it is being marketed partly on the basis that it was broadcast on Channel Four.

It seems to me and the other 36 signatories that viewers are just as likely to be misled by the misrepresentations within the programme regardless of whether it is watched on DVD or on a TV channel. We wrote to ask the programme-maker to remove the misrepresentations before distributing the DVD. He has so far admitted just one of the seven major misrepresentations, but has steadfastly refused to make any changes.

Free speech comes with responsibilities, and in the UK at least there are regulations that are designed to ensure that the media do not knowingly mislead the public. The letter does not complain about the the airing of different opinions on climate change, and I'm not arguing that the programme-maker shouldn't be able to tell porky pies at dinner parties with his mates from the media. But I do think that programme-makers should take their responsibilities seriously and to consider the public interest.

It remains to be seen whether the confident predictions that the letter will have the opposite effect to that intended will be right. To me, success would be for everybody who is exposed to the misrepresentations in the programme to at least be aware of them.

Posted on May 2, 2007 02:43 PM View this article | Comments (28)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science + Politics

April 30, 2007

The Swindle Letter

Some of you will be aware that a TV film entitled "The Great Global Warming Swindle" was produced by a company called Wag TV and shown on UK TV. The show, which I have not seen, purportedly debunks the science behind climate change. When aired it generated the sort of tempest in a teapot reaction that so often characterizes these sorts of things.

But subsequently, Bob Ward, formerly a spokesperson for the Royal Society and now in a similar role for a catastrophe modeling firm, RMS, Inc., organized a open letter calling for Wag TV, and the film's producer Martin Durkin, to cease and desist plans to disseminate the show via DVD. The letter has stirred up a debate about free speech and the role of scientists in political debates. Mr. Ward explained the letter as follows:

"Free speech does not extend to misleading the public by making factually inaccurate statements. Somebody has to stand up for the public interest here."

This episode is similar in some ways to Mr. Ward's efforts when employed by the Royal Society to silence ExxonMobil using the same strategy.

I have a different reaction to this episode than I did to the Royal Society letter to ExxonMobil. Then I argued that the Royal Society was acting inappropriately, given its mission. In this case I take no issue with the appropriateness of Mr. Ward's actions, I just think that they are wrongheaded. The difference is that the scientists organized by Mr. Ward in this case are speaking on their own with the support of a number of advocacy groups. They are not using the authority of the Royal Society, or any other public interest group, to advance their special interests. This is power politics pure and simple in the public arena.

And from that standpoint, I think that Mr. Ward's letter will prove ineffective with respect to the goals that he seeks, and most likely will have the opposite effect to that intended. In such circumstances, I recall how sales of Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist quadrupled after it was criticized by scientists. A link in the comments here in a previous thread from Francis Sedgemore, who I have not met perviously, points to some of his strong, but on target comments, which I stitch together from his two relevant blog posts:

You can take it that I have little time for Mr Durkin or his junk science film, and there should be no need for me to rehash the arguments against it. . .
Ward’s open letter is a very bad mistake, in my opinion. As well as indicating a contempt for free speech, the signitories display a lack of political nous, and I fear that Durkin will run rings around them. . . what annoys me most about all this is how public scientific discourse on climate change is fast degenerating to a level set by the worst elements of the scientifically-illiterate media. . .

What we need is not calls for censorship, but more scientists and science communicators aggressively putting the case for good science. Stern letters and articles in the broadsheets make us all look ridiculous by association. . . if this is to be our response to inaccurate material in the public domain, and the ravings of lunatics, where do we start? How about the bible? "See you in court, Dr Ratzinger. We have ways of making you shut up!"

This is spot on. When members of the scientific community call for silencing of others in political debates, at best it demonstrates that they believe that they cannot win arguments on their merits, and at worst is demonstrates a complete disregard for democracy and the ability of the public to participate in important political debates. Positioning oneself n opposition to fundamental principles of democracy is always a losing proposition.

Posted on April 30, 2007 10:53 AM View this article | Comments (21)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science + Politics | The Honest Broker

April 26, 2007

The Battle for U.S. Public Opinion on Climate Change is Over

We've argued here that it has been over for a while, but this survey from the New York Times should make it obvious:

Americans in large bipartisan numbers say the heating of the earth’s atmosphere is having serious effects on the environment now or will soon and think that it is necessary to take immediate steps to reduce its effects, the latest New York Times/CBS News poll finds.
Ninety percent of Democrats, 80 percent of independents and 60 percent of Republicans said immediate action was required to curb the warming of the atmosphere and deal with its effects on the global climate. Nineteen percent said it was not necessary to act now, and 1 percent said no steps were needed.

Recent international reports have said with near certainty that human activities are the main cause of global warming since 1950. The poll found that 84 percent of Americans see human activity as at least contributing to warming.

The poll also found that Americans want the United States to support conservation and to be a global leader in addressing environmental problems and developing alternative energy sources to reduce reliance on fossil fuels like oil and coal.

For those still looking to play the skeptic game there is also good news as there are still a few left: 4% said recent strange weather was caused by "God/end of world/bible" and 2% said "space junk." ;-) In all seriousness, I don't expect the skeptic game to end any time soon, despite the overwhelming consensus of public opinion.

Posted on April 26, 2007 08:47 PM View this article | Comments (25)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

Swing State Al

This 2008 presidential race poll by Quinnipac University provides some evidence in support of our hypothesis that climate change can prove to be a powerful wedge issue for Al Gore in the 2008 election. Key point:

But former Vice President Al Gore, who is not yet a candidate, runs better against Republican challengers in most Swing State matchups than Sen. Clinton or Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. . . "Mayor Rudolph Giuliani remains the front-runner, but he and the entire Democratic field should wonder if Al Gore will become an inconvenient truth in the 2008 presidential race and go for the biggest Oscar of them all," said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

Posted on April 26, 2007 01:23 PM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science + Politics

The Politics of Air Capture

A while back we prepped our readers to get ready for air capture. This article from a New Jersey newspaper, the Star-Ledger, describes how one air capture technology is progressing and how different interests are already taking political positions on its merits:

Klaus Lackner's invention has been called many things -- a wind scrubber, a synthetic tree, a carbon vacuum, even a giant fly swatter.
The energy guru, inventor and professor at Columbia University prefers to call it an "air extractor." By any name, however, Lackner predicts that the giant machines he is building will one day stop global warming in its tracks.

After three years of intensive experiments, Lackner and scientists at Global Research Technologies LLC, in Arizona, have produced a working model of the device, which can sop up carbon dioxide, the dreaded greenhouse gas, from the atmosphere.

"Look, it's one arrow in the quiver," said Lackner, reached by telephone. "This begins to offer a solution to an overwhelming problem."

Others were more expansive.

"This significant achievement holds incredible promise in the fight against climate change," said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia. "The world may, sooner rather than later, have an important tool in this fight."

Here is one reaction to the technology:

"There's no magic bullet to save us from the problem of global warming," said Kert Davies, an energy expert for Greenpeace USA in Washington, D.C. Removing greenhouse gases so readily will not encourage people to develop alternate, renewable technologies, he said, and strive for energy efficiency.
Such techno-fixes also miss the point of the environmental degradation brought on by the use of fossil fuels, he said.

Carbon scrubbers won't stop oil spills, habitat-destroying strip mining and ozone, he said. "It's like having cancer and putting a Band-Aid on it," he added.

Besides, Davies said, the devices, which will in principle be larger than the prototype, will be eyesores. "Can you imagine thousands of acres of giant fly swatters across the land?"

If reducing fossil fuels is not really about carbon dioxde, as the Greenpeace spokesman suggests but also about many other benefits, then why shouldn't these benefits play a more central role in energy policy debates? And being so quick to abandon the carbon dioxide argument is not an effective strategy for compelling action on carbon dioxide. Greenpeace has come out in favor of wind power and the required acres of windmills across the land. This is hard to square with CO2-removal technologies as eyesores, unless one recognizes that the aesthetics of a technology appear to be a function of its political role.

I have no idea if Professor Lackner's ideas will prove to have technical merit or not. However, I do believe that all options should be on the table, and we should resist efforts to limit choice prematurely.

April 25, 2007

Gliese 581

This fascinating discovery portends all sorts of interesting ethical, political, and policy questions. I do wonder how much thinking governments, the Vatican, and others have put into developing a response plan for when life is discovered beyond Earth. It'd be surprising if there were no thinking along these lines, then again, maybe not.

Posted on April 25, 2007 12:05 PM View this article | Comments (16)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Space Policy

April 23, 2007

What does Consensus Mean for IPCC WGIII?

The IPCC assessment process is widely referred to as reflecting a consensus of the scientific community. An AP news story reports on a leaked copy of the forthcoming Working Group III report on mitigation.

"Governments, businesses and individuals all need to be pulling in the same direction," said British researcher Rachel Warren, one of the report's authors.
For one thing, the governments of such major emitters as the United States, China and India will have to join the Kyoto Protocol countries of Europe and Japan in imposing cutbacks in carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases emitted by industry, power plants and other sources.

The Bush administration rejected the protocol's mandatory cuts, contending they would slow U.S. economic growth too much. China and other poorer developing countries were exempted from the 1997 pact, but most expected growth in greenhouse emissions will come from the developing world.

The draft report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose final version is to be issued in Bangkok on May 4, says emissions can be cut below current levels if the world shifts away from carbon-heavy fuels like coal, embraces energy efficiency and significantly reduces deforestation.

"The opportunities, the technology are there and now it's a case of encouraging the increased use of these technologies," said International Energy Agency analyst Ralph Sims, another of the 33 scientists who drafted the report.

As we've often discussed here, human-caused climate change is a serious problem requiring attention to both mitigation and adaptation. While I can make sense of a consensus among Working Group I scientists on causes and consequences of climate change, and even a consensus among Working Group II on impacts, how should we interpret a "consensus" among 33 authors recommending specific political actions? All of the movement toward the "democratization of science" and "stakeholder involvement" and "public participation" that characterizes science and technology issues ranging from GMOs to nanotechnology to nuclear waste disposal seems oddly absent in the climate issue in favor of a far more technocratic model of decision making. Is climate change somehow different?

Posted on April 23, 2007 07:01 PM View this article | Comments (11)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics | Scientific Assessments

April 20, 2007

New GAO Report on Climate Change and Insurance

At the request of Congressman Joseph Lieberman (ID-CT), the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a research arm of Congress, has just released a report on climate change and insurance (PDF). The report is excellent and well worth reading for anyone with interest in the subject. Now whether or not an excellent report makes a positive difference in policy making is another matter . . . Here are a few excerpts and my commentary:

On trends in losses:

Taken together, private and federal insurers paid more than $320 billion in claims on weather-related losses from 1980 through 2005. In constant dollars, private insurers paid the largest part of the claims during this period, $243.5 billion (about 76 percent); followed by federal crop insurance, $43.6 billion (about 14 percent); and federal flood insurance, $34.1 billion (about 11 percent). Claims varied significantly from year to year—largely due to the incidence and effects of catastrophic weather events such as hurricanes and droughts—but generally increased during this period. In particular, the years with the largest insured losses were generally associated with major hurricanes, which comprised well over one-third of all weather-related losses since 1980. The growth in population in hazard-prone areas, and resulting real estate development and increasing real estate values, have increased federal and private insurers’ exposure, and have helped to explain the increase in losses. In particular, heavily-populated areas along the Northeast, Southeast, and Texas coasts have among the highest value of insured properties in the United States and face the highest likelihood of major hurricanes. Due to these and other factors, federal insurers’ exposures have grown substantially. Since 1980, NFIP’s exposure has quadrupled, nearing $1 trillion, and program expansion has increased FCIC’s exposure nearly 26-fold to $44 billion. These escalating exposures to catastrophic weather events are leaving the federal government at increased financial risk. FCIC officials told us, for example, that if the widespread Midwest floods of 1993 were to occur today, losses would be five times greater. [p. 4]

How much would that be? The 1993 Midwest floods resulted in $1.3 billion in federal flood insurance costs (Source: PDF). Five times this amount is $6.5 billion, in 1993 dollars. Adjusting for inflation to 2005 dollars gives a total of $8.5 billion, which is about half the costs of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, and more than four times the premiums taken in by the program annually (Source: PDF).

The conclusion? Regardless of climate change federal flood insurance is of questionable financial sustainability without an expectation of major and frequent subsidies. So perhaps greater attention to adaptation might be needed:

Federal insurance programs, on the other hand, have done little to develop the kind of information needed to understand the programs’ long-term exposure to climate change for a variety of reasons. The federal insurance programs are not oriented toward earning profits like private insurers but rather toward increasing participation among eligible parties. Consequently, neither program has had reason to develop information on their long-term exposure to the fiscal risks associated with climate change.
We acknowledge the different mandate and operating environment in which the major federal insurance programs operate, but we believe that better information about the federal government’s exposure to potential changes in weather-related risk would help the Congress identify and manage this emerging high-risk area—one which may not constitute an immediate crisis, but which does have significant implications for the nation’s growing fiscal imbalance. Accordingly, GAO is recommending that the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of Homeland Security direct the Under Secretary for Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services and the Under Secretary of Homeland Security for Emergency Preparedness to analyze the potential long-term fiscal implications of climate change for the FCIC and the NFIP, respectively, and report their findings to the Congress.

Another factor not mentioned here is the bias against adaptation in climate policy. For example, in yesterday's Wall Street Journal (by subscription), Senator Lieberman (mis)used the report to justify changes in energy policies, saying that it:

presents another strong argument -- this one fiscal -- for adopting an economywide, cap and trade, anti-global-warming law.

But the report offers absolutely no information on how changes in energy policies will affect disaster losses. The report certainly offers no recommendations on energy policies. In fact, to the contrary, it cites our Hohenkammer workshop which clearly explained that the most effective responses over coming decades will be adaptive in nature. And as we've discussed on occasion here, there is good reason for concern not just in the public sector about adaptive capacity -- the so-called "catastrophe models" used by private insurers may not leave them as prepared to manage risk as they might think.

Finally, there is this very interesting nugget found in the response by the USDA (Appendix 5, p. 59), which runs the federal crop insurance progam:

The increase in crop insurance indemnities over time reflects the rapid growth of the crop insurance program, not an increase in either the frequency and/or severity of catastrophic weather events. In fact, the severity of loss for the crop insurance program, as measured by the loss ratio, has been generally lower in the 1990's and 2000's than in the 1980's. Thus, if anything, the frequency and severity of catastrophic loss events for the crop insurance program appears to be decreasing.

Interesting, huh?

Posted on April 20, 2007 07:42 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

April 19, 2007

Media Reporting of Climate Change: Too Balanced or Biased?

Cherries ripe for the picking:

Too balanced

Biased

Put me in neither camp. I actually think that the media -- in toto -- has done a good job of covering a challenging and protean issue.

Posted on April 19, 2007 08:59 PM View this article | Comments (19)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

A Little Testy at RealClimate

Based on my most recent interaction, the folks at RealClimate seem less interested than ever on an open exchange of views on scientific topics. But I guess that is what might be expected when one points out that the they are spreading misinformation.

A commenter on a thread on ocean temperatures asked an innocuous question about the new paper by Vecchi and Soden which was discussed here by Chris Landsea . The always cordial Michael Mann replied:

I have no knowledge of (or frankly, interest in) what Chris Landsea may be saying about the paper . . . In short, the Emanuel (2005) study continues to stand on its merit, and I don't see where this paper puts even a dent in it.

I don't much read RealClimate anymore, but when a commenter on the Landsea thread pointed to this exchange in the comments here, I surfed over to find this blatantly false assertion by Michael Mann in response to a follow up comment:

Emanuel (2005) shows that the warming SSTs are behind the increased TC intensity in the Atlantic. No impartial reading of that paper could come to any other conclusion.

Being a science site and all, I assumed that the RealClimate folks would be happy to engage in a discussion of, you know, science. Boy was I was mistaken. Here is my submitted response:

Mike-
You are simply incorrect when you assert: "Emanuel (2005) shows that the warming SSTs are behind the increased TC intensity in the Atlantic. No impartial reading of that paper could come to any other conclusion."

Here is what Emanuel actually says:

"Tropical cyclones do not respond directly to SST, however, and the appropriate measure of their thermodynamic environment is the potential intensity, which depends not only on surface temperature but on the whole temperature profile of the troposphere. . . The above discussion suggests that only part of the observed increase in tropical cyclone power dissipation is directly due to increased SSTs; the rest can only be explained by changes in other factors known to influence hurricane intensity, such as vertical wind shear."

Misrepresenting Emanuel is bad enough, but for a site that often underscores the importance of consensus, your favoring of one single study (on a thread about not favoring one single study) when consensus perspectives exist (WMO, IPCC) does a disservice to your readers.

Here is what RealClimate allowed:

Mike-
You are simply incorrect when you assert: "Emanuel (2005) shows that the warming SSTs are behind the increased TC intensity in the Atlantic. No impartial reading of that paper could come to any other conclusion."

What are they so worried about that they have to protect their audience from the comments of a political scientist?

Here is Michael Mann's (always cordial) response:

Response: Roger, we're not about cherry-picking sentences and out of context quotations here at RC, so you should take that somewhere else. Anybody who has studied the scientific issues involved well knows that SSTs in this context are a proxy for a more complex set of interconnected atmospheric environmental variables which tend to covary with it. We hardly need you to quote Emanuel for us. Figure 1 in Emanuel (2005) comparing SST and TC Power Dissipation in the tropical Atlantic speaks for itself, you might want to take another look. If we do an article on Hurricanes in the near future, you're free to engage in the discussion. But that's not the topic of this post, so we're going to close it out with this. -mike

Heaven forbid a discussion of actual substance over there. If we did we might have to discuss Kossin et al. and how SSTs don't covary with intensity in all basins, and the fact that Emanuel signed on to the WMO consensus, and well, a whole bunch of stuff that is fair game to discuss in scientific circles, but not apparently at RealClimate. In my view the issue of hurricanes and climate remains uncertain and contested and is well worth discussing.

Posted on April 19, 2007 07:48 PM View this article | Comments (34)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

April 18, 2007

Some Views of IPCC WGII Contributors That You Won't Read About in the News

I was surprised to read in E&E News today a news story on yesterday's hearing held by the House Science Committee suggesting that the take-home message was that adaptation would be difficult, hence mitigation should be preferred (for subscribers here is the full story). My reading of the written testimony suggested a very different message, and not one I've seen in the media. Below are some relevant excerpts from IPCC WG II authors who testified yesterday (emphasis added). I know both and respect their views.

Roger Pulwarty (PDF)

Climate is one factor among many that produce changes in our environment. Demographic, socio-economic and technological changes may play a more important role in most time horizons and regions. In the 2050s, differences in the population projections of the four scenarios contained in the IPCC Special Report on Emission Scenarios show that population size could have a greater impact on people living in water-stressed river basins (defined as basins with per-capita water resources of less than 1000 m3/year) than differences in emissions scenarios. As the number of people and attendant demands in already stressed river basins increase, even small changes in natural or anthropogenic climate can trigger large impacts on water resources.
Adaptation is unavoidable because climate is always varying even if changes in variability are amplified or dampened by anthropogenic warming. In the near term, adaptation will be necessary to meet the challenge of impacts to which we are already committed. There are significant barriers to implementing adaptation in complex settings. These barriers include both the inability of natural systems to adapt at the rate and magnitude of climate change, as well as technological, financial, cognitive and behavioral, social and cultural constraints. There are also significant knowledge gaps for adaptation, as well as impediments to flows of knowledge and information relevant for decision makers. In addition, the scale at which reliable information is produced (i.e. global) does not always match with what is needed for adaptation decisions (i.e. watershed and local). New planning processes are attempting to overcome these barriers at local, regional and national levels in both developing and developed countries.

Shardul Agrawala (PDF)

The costs of both mitigation and adaptation are predominantly local and near term. Meanwhile, the climate related benefits of mitigation are predominantly global and long-term, but not immediate. Owing to lag times in the climate system, the benefits of current mitigation efforts will hardly be noticeable for several decades. The benefits of adaptation are more immediate, but primarily local, and over the short to medium term.
Given these differences between mitigation and adaptation, climate policy is not about making a choice between adapting to and mitigating climate change. Even the most stringent mitigation efforts cannot avoid further impacts of climate change in the next few decades, which makes adaptation essential, particularly in addressing near term impacts. On the other hand, unmitigated climate change would, in the long term exceed the capacity of natural, managed, and human systems to adapt.

Posted on April 18, 2007 01:57 PM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Scientific Assessments

April 17, 2007

Bridges Column on The Honest Broker

My latest column for Bridges is out and in it I provide an overview of my new book. Here is how it begins:

When former US Vice President Al Gore testified before Congress last month he used an analogy to describe the challenge of climate change:
If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don't say, "Well, I read a science fiction novel that told me it's not a problem." If the crib's on fire, you don't speculate that the baby is flame retardant. You take action.

With this example Al Gore was not only advocating a particular course of action on climate change, he was also describing the relationship between science (and expertise more generally) and decision making. In Mr. Gore's analogy, the baby's parents (i.e. "you") are largely irrelevant to the process of decision making, as the doctor's recommendation is accepted without question.

But anyone who has had to take their child to a doctor for a serious health problem or an injury knows that the interaction between patient, parent, and doctor can take a number of different forms. In my new book The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics (Cambridge University Press), I seek to describe various ways that an expert (e.g., a doctor) can interact with a decision maker (e.g., a parent) in ways that lead to desirable outcomes (e.g., a healthy child). Experts have choices in how they relate to decision makers, and these choices have important effects on decisions but also the role of experts in society. Mr. Gore's metaphor provides a useful way to illustrate the four different roles for experts in decision making that are discussed in The Honest Broker.

The Honest Broker can be found at Amazon US, Amazon UK (and Amazon.ca has it at 40% off) and also through Cambridge University Press.

And as always, OSTINA has produced an excellent issue of Bridges, this one focused on innovation, read the whole thing.

Posted on April 17, 2007 11:09 AM View this article | Comments (6)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | The Honest Broker

Laurens Bouwer on IPCC WG II on Disasters

In the comments, Laurens Bouwer, of the Institute for Environmental Studies, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, who served as an expert reviewer for the IPCC WGII report, provides the following perspective (Thanks Laurens!):

Thanks Roger, for this discussion. It clearly points the fact that IPCC has not done enough to make an unambiguous statement on the attribution of disaster losses in their Working Group 2 Summary for Policymakers (SPM). This now leaves room for speculation based on the individual statements and graphs from underlying chapters in the report, in particular Figure TS-15, Chapters 1, 3 and 7, that all have substantial paragraphs on the topic.
As reviewer for WG2 I have repeatedly (3 times) asked to put a clear statement in the SPM that is in line with the general literature, and underlying WG2 chapters. In my view, WG2 has not succeeded in adequately quoting and discussing all relevant recent papers that have come out on this topic -- see above-mentioned chapters.

Initial drafts of the SPM had relatively nuanced statements such as:

Global economic losses from weather-related disasters have risen substantially since the 1970s. During the same period, global temperatures have risen and the magnitude of some extremes, such as the intensity of tropical cyclones, has increased. However, because of increases in exposed values ..., the contribution of these weather-related trends to increased losses is at present not known.

For unknown reasons, this statement (which seems to implicitly acknowledge Roger's and the May 2006 workshop conclusion that societal factors dominate) was dropped from the final SPM. Now the SPM has no statement on the attribution of disaster losses, and we do not know what is the 'consensus' here.

Posted on April 17, 2007 07:51 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters | Scientific Assessments

April 16, 2007

On Framing . . .

Recent discussion of Nisbet/Mooney's presentation of "framing" in the blogosphere has been interesting, to say the least. I completely agree with the basic theoretical propositions being shared by Matt and Chris, though perhaps in framing framing in terms of a political battle over religion in modern society they may have misframed their argument -- at least if selling scientists on the inescapable reality of framing dynamics in public discourse was their goal.

In 1997 I wrote the following on the subject:

The characterization of a particular set of circumstances as a "problem" requires attention to who is claiming that a problem exists, their perspectives, and their ability to act (cf. Lasswell 1971). From the standpoint of effective practical action, it is important that a problem be appropriately framed and presented to those with authority and ability to act. There are many examples of modern-day Cassandras who identify important problems that fail to either reach or be understood by decision makers. Hence, the existence of information related to a problem is not a sufficient condition for addressing the problem; attention to a healthy process that actively links that information with a decision maker’s needs is also necessary.

For the full context, have a look at this paper, especially beginning at page 258:

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 1997: Asking the Right Questions: Atmospheric Sciences Research and Societal Needs. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 78:255-264. (PDF)

Posted on April 16, 2007 07:30 PM View this article | Comments (6)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science + Politics

Frank Laird on Peak Oil, Global Warming, and Policy Choice

Frank Laird, from the University of Denver and also a Center affiliate, has the lead article in our latest newsletter. His topic is peak oil, climate change, and policy choice. Here is an excerpt:

A recent spate of books and articles proclaim the end of oil and an imminent crisis for the world. Likewise, global warming alarms sound from almost every corner of the press. What are policy makers to do? How should policy analysts help decision makers frame the debate and assess the alternatives? Many advocates are trying to do exactly the wrong thing: narrow policy makers’ options through a rhetoric proclaiming that policy makers will have no choice but to adopt their favored technology, so the sooner they get to it, the better. This approach both misunderstands how policy making works and does a disservice to policy makers. . .
Ironically, both renewable and nuclear energy advocates see themselves as possessing the key to an energy-abundant and climate-safe future. Both advocacy communities have been around for decades, have a history of mutual hostility, and think their time is nigh. Yet both groups are using a language of inevitability that suggests a naïveté about public policy, short-changes the policy process, and makes it all the harder to have intelligent, nuanced discussions of the difficult policy choices that lie ahead.

Their central point is that society or governments will have “no choice” but to adopt their preferred solution. They believe that the problems of peak oil and climate change present such severe problems to our society that policy makers will realize that they must adopt nuclear or renewable energy, that the lack of choice will be plain.

This language distorts the reality of policy making and short-changes society by trying to close off debate over the many and possibly creative solutions that policy could bring to bear on these problems. The central fact of policy making is that governments always have a choice. No circumstance, no matter how dire, leaves them with only one choice. To be sure, not all choices are equally good, and anyone familiar with history will know that sometimes governments make bad, even disastrous, choices. But they always have choices to make. Pretending otherwise just misunderstands all we know about public policy.

Read the whole thing.

Posted on April 16, 2007 07:15 AM View this article | Comments (5)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Energy Policy | Technology Policy

April 12, 2007

New Peer-Reviewed Publication on the Benefits of Emissions Reductions for Future Tropical Cyclone (Hurricane) Losses Around the World

I have a paper accepted for publication that projects into the future a range of possible scenarios for increasing losses related to tropical cyclones around the world.

Pielke, Jr., R. A. (accepted, 2007). Future Economic Damage from Tropical Cyclones: Sensitivities to Societal and Climate Changes, Proceedings of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. (PDF)

The factors that comprise the different scenarios include changes in population, per capita wealth, tropical cyclone intensity, and also damage functions as a function of intensity. [Note: Tropical cyclone frequency is not included as scientists presently do not expect frequencies to increase. However, even if frequencies do increase it is possible in the scenarios to equate the effects of frequency in terms of intensity, as discussed in the paper.] The goal of the paper is to delineate a scenarios space as a function of permutations in these variables in order to assess the robustness of mitigation and adaptation responses to future losses. Here is the abstract:

This paper examines future economic damages from tropical cyclones under a range of assumptions about societal change, climate change, and the relationship of climate change to damage in 2050. It finds in all cases that efforts to reduce vulnerability to losses, often called climate adaptation, have far greater potential effectiveness to reduce damage related to tropical cyclones than efforts to modulate the behavior of storms through greenhouse gas emissions reduction policies, typically called climate mitigation and achieved through energy policies. The paper urges caution in using economic losses of tropical cyclones as justification for action on energy policies when far more potentially effective options are available.

Nothing new here for regular Prometheus readers, but now this analysis has been formalized and has gone through peer review. Here are the paper’s conclusions:

This paper finds that under a wide range of assumptions about future growth in wealth and population, and about the effects of human-caused climate change, in every case there is far greater potential to affect future losses by focusing attention on the societal conditions that generate vulnerability to losses. Efforts to modulate tropical cyclone intensities through climate stabilization policies have extremely limited potential to reduce future losses. This conclusion is robust across assumptions, even unrealistic assumptions about the timing and magnitude of emissions reductions policies on tropical cyclone behavior. The importance of the societal factors increases with the time horizon.
This does not mean that climate stabilization policies do not make sense or that policy makers should ignore influences of human-caused climate change on tropical cyclone behavior. It does mean that efforts to justify emissions reductions based on future tropical cyclone damages are misleading at best, given that available alternatives have far greater potential to achieve reductions in damage. The most effective policies in the face of tropical cyclones have been and will continue to be adaptive in nature, and thus should play a prominent role in any comprehensive approach to climate policy.

Posted on April 12, 2007 01:24 PM View this article | Comments (5)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters | Energy Policy

April 11, 2007

This is Just Embarassing

The Figure below is found in the IPCC WG II report, Chapter 7, supplementary material (p. 3 here in PDF). I am shocked to see such a figure in the IPCC of all places, purporting to show something meaningful and scientifically vetted. Sorry to be harsh, but this figure is neither. [Note: The reference (Miller et al. 2006) is not listed in the report (pointers from readers would be welcomed).]

I am amazed that this figure made it past review of any sort, but especially given what the broader literature on this subject actually says. I have generally been a supporter of the IPCC, but I do have to admit that if it is this sloppy and irresponsible in an area of climate change where I have expertise, why should I have confidence in the areas where I am not an expert?

Addendum, a few of the many problems with this figure:

1. Global average temperatures do not cause disaster losses, extreme events cause disasters, mostly floods and tropical cyclones.

2. if you can't attribute disaster losses regionally to changes in extremes, then you can't do it globally with a metric only loosely (at best) related to extremes.

2. A 9-year smoothing in a 35 year record?

3. The IPCC has said that 30 years is not sufficient for such an attribution analysis, a 35 year record with 4 degrees of freedom probably isn't either.

4. The Muir-Wood global dataset (if that is what is used) has huge error bars not noted here. Any global analysis should be matched with a regional summation.

5. The Muir-Wood dataset, without error bars, leads to opposite conclusions using a longer record to 1950. Why didn't they show that? I wonder . . .

6. Studies of floods and hurricanes at the regional level, around the world, do not support a relationship of average global atmospheric temperature and disaster losses.

7. A consensus conference with experts around the world came to very different conclusions. What happened to the importance of consensus?

A more comprehensive synthesis can be found here:

Pielke, Jr., R.A., 2006. Seventh Annual Roger Revelle Commemorative Lecture: Disasters, Death, and Destruction: Making Sense of Recent Calamities, Oceanography, Special Issue: The Oceans and Human Health, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 138-147. (PDF)

Posted on April 11, 2007 11:48 AM View this article | Comments (17)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

Here We Go Again: Cherry Picking in the IPCC WGII Full Report on Disaster Losses

The IPCC WGII full report is available (hat tip: ClimateScienceWatch). I have had a look at what they say about disaster losses, and unfortunately, the IPCC WG II commits the exact same cherry picking error as did the Stern report.

Here is what IPCC says about catastrophe losses (Chapter 1, pp. 50-51):

Global losses reveal rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s. One study has found that while the dominant signal remains that of the significant increases in the values of exposure at risk, once losses are normalised for exposure, there still remains an underlying rising trend.

The one study? Muir-Wood et al. 2006 that was prepared as the basis for our workshop last year with Munich re on Disaster Losses and Climate Change. Here is what we said when the Stern Report cherry picked this same information:

The source is a paper prepared by Robert Muir-Wood and colleagues as input to our workshop last May on disasters and climate change. Muir-Wood et al. do report the 2% trend since 1970. What Stern Report does not say is that Muir-Wood et al. find no trend 1950-2005 and Muir-Wood et al. acknowledge that their work shows a very strong influence of 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons in the United States. Muir-Wood et al. are therefore very cautious and responsible about their analysis. Presumably this is one reason why at the workshop Robert Muir-Wood signed on to our consensus statements, which said the following:
Because of issues related to data quality, the stochastic nature of extreme event impacts, length of time series, and various societal factors present in the disaster loss record, it is still not possible to determine the portion of the increase in damages that might be attributed to climate change due to GHG emissions . . . In the near future the quantitative link (attribution) of trends in storm and flood losses to climate changes related to GHG emissions is unlikely to be answered unequivocally.

The Stern Report’s selective fishing out of a convenient statement from one of the background papers prepared for our workshop is a classic example of cherry picking a result from a diversity of perspectives, rather than focusing on the consensus of the entire spectrum of experts that participated in our meeting. The Stern Report even cherry picks from within the Muir-Wood et al. paper.

The full discussion by the IPCC WG II has a bit more nuance, but it is clear that they are reaching for whatever they can to support a conclusion that simply is not backed up in the broader literature. Can anyone point to any other area in the IPCC where one non-peer-reviewed study is used to overturn the robust conclusions of an entire literature? Here is the full discussion:

Economic losses attributed to natural disasters have increased from US$75.5 billion in the 1960s to US$659.9 billion in the 1990s (a compound annual growth rate of 8%) (United Nations Development Programme 2004). Private sector data on insurance costs also shows rising insured losses over a similar period (Munich Re Group 2005; Swiss Reinsurance Company 2005). The dominant signal is of significant increase in the values of exposure (Pielke and Hoppe 2006).
However, as has been widely acknowledged, failing to adjust for time-variant economic factors yields loss amounts that are not directly comparable and a pronounced upward trend through time for purely economic reasons. A previous normalization of losses, undertaken for United States hurricanes by Pielke and Landsea (1998) and US floods (Pielke et al., 2002) included normalizing the economic losses for changes in wealth and population to express losses in constant dollars. These previous national US assessments, as well as those for normalized Cuban hurricane losses (Pielke et al., 2003), did not show any significant upward trend in losses over time, but this was before the remarkable hurricane losses of 2004 and 2005.

A ‘global’ catalogue of catastrophe losses was constructed (Muir Wood et al., 2006) normalized to account for changes that have resulted from variations in wealth and the numbers and values of properties located in the path of the catastrophes, using the method of Pielke and Landsea (1999). The global survey was considered largely comprehensive from 1970–2005 for countries and regions (Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea, US, Caribbean, Central America, China, India and the Philippines) that had centralized catastrophe loss information and included a broad range of peril types: tropical cyclone, extratropical cyclone, thunderstorm, hailstorm, wildfire and flood, and that spanned high and low latitude areas.

Once the data were normalized a small statistically significant trend was found for an increase in annual catastrophe loss since 1970 of 2% per year (see Fig. SM1.1). However, for a number of regions, such as Australia and India, normalized losses show a statistically significant reduction since 1970. The significance of the upward trend is influenced by the losses in the US and Caribbean in 2004 and 2005 and arguably biased by the relative wealth of the US, in particular relative to India.

More on the figure that they reference in the next post . . .

Posted on April 11, 2007 10:51 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

April 09, 2007

Turn the Trade Balance Around

It is not a prescription drug, but The Honest Broker can be found at Amazon Canada for less than US$20, which is almost US$11 less than at Amazon U.S.. Go figure.

Posted on April 9, 2007 02:40 AM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | The Honest Broker

April 07, 2007

A Comment on IPCC Working Group II on the Importance of Development

Implicit in the work of the IPCC, and almost explicit in the report released yesterday, is the overriding importance of how the world choses to develop in the future. In the analysis in the IPCC lies the inescapable fact that how the world chooses to develop, independent of how the world responds to climate change, will modulate future global per capita GDP by a factor of up to 4.7 (the differences between the lowest and highest in the IPCC storylines for the future). By contrast, how the world chooses to respond to climate change, independent of how the world develops, will modulate future global per capita GDP by a factor of 1.05 to 1.20 (i.e., the conclusions presented in the IPCC WG II and the Stern Report).

To put this another way, from the standpoint of global GDP decisions that the world makes that make one storyline more likely to occur than another are between 19 and 74 times more important than decisions that are made about greenhouse gas emissions, under the assumptions provided by the IPCC!

So long as the IPCC, the Stern report, and others use GDP as a metric to advocate action on climate change, then this result is unavoidable. This is the main reason why some people have concluded that decisions about development, otherwise known as adaptation, must be front and center in any discussion of climate change. Yet the IPCC continuously tries to deemphasize the importance of adaptation as development, for instance writing that,

there are formidable environmental, economic, informational, social, attitudinal and behavioural barriers to implementation of adaptation.

Of course the exact same thing could be said about mitigation (but is not said), and by contrast the IPCC always frames mitigation in a positive light:

Many impacts can be avoided, reduced or delayed by mitigation.

It is well past time that the community openly and forthrightly discusses the importance of development pathways as the primary determinant of the future welfare of people and the environment. Carbon dioxide should be a part of that discussion, but not a substitute for it. The IPCC WG II is a small step in the right direction, but there remains a long way to go.

The background and calculations which provide the startling numbers above can be found below.

The IPCC effort is based on a range of plausible scenarios of the future:

Scenarios are images of the future, or alternative futures. They are neither predictions nor forecasts. Rather, each scenario is one alternative image of how the future might unfold. . . . They represent pertinent, plausible, alternative futures.

The IPCC uses four families of scenarios comprised of 40 different scenarios:

*The A1 storyline and scenario family describes a future world of very rapid economic growth, low population growth, and the rapid introduction of new and more efficient technologies. Major underlying themes are convergence among regions, capacity building and increased cultural and social interactions, with a substantial reduction in regional differences in per capita income. The A1 scenario family develops into four groups that describe alternative directions of technological change in the energy system.
* The A2 storyline and scenario family describes a very heterogeneous world. The underlying theme is self-reliance and preservation of local identities. Fertility patterns across regions converge very slowly, which results in high population growth. Economic development is primarily regionally oriented and per capita economic growth and technological change are more fragmented and slower than in other storylines.

* The B1 storyline and scenario family describes a convergent world with the same low population growth as in the A1 storyline, but with rapid changes in economic structures toward a service and information economy, with reductions in material intensity, and the introduction of clean and resource-efficient technologies. The emphasis is on global solutions to economic, social, and environmental sustainability, including improved equity, but without additional climate initiatives.

*The B2 storyline and scenario family describes a world in which the emphasis is on local solutions to economic, social, and environmental sustainability. It is a world with moderate population growth, intermediate levels of economic development, and less rapid and more diverse technological change than in the B1 and A1 storylines. While the scenario is also oriented toward environmental protection and social equity, it focuses on local and regional levels. (link)

The IPCC went to great efforts to suggest that any of the scenarios are possible future outcomes:

The broad consensus among the SRES writing team is that the current literature analysis suggests the future is inherently unpredictable and so views will differ as to which of the storylines and representative scenarios could be more or less likely.

And importantly, the scenarios do not consider any policies specific to human caused climate change:

The SRES storylines do not include explicit policies to limit GHG emissions or to adapt to the expected global climate change.

The IPCC concludes that:

All four SRES "futures" represented by the distinct storylines are treated as equally possible.

The role of policy making is to shape the future in preferred ways. The IPCC scenarios suggest different global outcomes based on decisions that societies around the world make, independently and jointly, starting today. Let’s consider such decisions with respect to one metric used by The Stern Report and the IPCC: wealth as measured by global per capita GDP. Let me acknowledge up front that GDP is not the only metric that matters, but it is one proposed by both Stern and IPCC, so I use it here.

The IPCC Working Group II report released yesterday (PDF) concluded that "global mean losses could be 1-5% Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for 4 degrees C of warming." This conclusion is consistent with the conclusion of the Stern Report which concluded that business as usual could lead to economic losses of 5% to 20% of per capita GDP. In the analysis below we will therefore use both 5% and 20% as the possible impacts of climate change.

The IPCC finds global per capita GDP to be $4,000 in 1990. Under each of its four storylines it describes global per capita GDP for 2100 as follows (in constant 1990 dollars):

A1: $74,900
A2: $16,100
B1: $46,600
B2: $22,600

Under each storyline people around the world are significantly wealthier than they are today. The IPCC SRES report is careful to avoid a judgment of whether or not this is desirable. But because both Stern and IPCC WGII identify losses in GDP as being problematic, and a cause for action, we can safely conclude that both reports identify a higher GDP as being a better societal outcome than a lower GDP.

Now what happen when we factor in the effects climate change? For a 4 degree increase according to IPCC WGII these values would decrease by 5%:

A1: $71,200
A2: $15,300
B1: $44,300
B2: $21,500

And unmitigated BAU, according to Stern could reduce these values by as much as 20%:

A1: $59,900
A2: $12,900
B1: $37,300
B2: $18,100

So how the world chooses to respond to climate change, independent of how the world develops, will modulate future GDP by a factor of 1.05 to 1.20 (i.e., 5% to 20% found in IPCC WG II and Stern).

But implicit in the IPCC storylines, is how the world chooses to develop, independent of how the world responds to climate change, will modulate future GDP by a factor of up to 4.7 (i.e., the GDP in A1 divided by the GDP in A2). To put this another way, from the standpoint of global GDP decisions that the world makes that make one storyline more likely to occur than another are between 19 and 74 times more important than decisions that are made about greenhouse gas emissions, under the assumptions provided by the IPCC! [19 ~= 3.7/0.2 and 74 = 3.7/0.05]

This is the main reason why some people have concluded that decisions about development, otherwise known as adaptation, must be front and center in any discussion of climate change.

The IPCC WG II report acknowledges this point when it writes:

An important advance since the IPCC Third Assessment has been the completion of impacts studies for a range of different development pathways taking into account not only projected climate change but also projected social and economic changes. Most have been based on characterisations of population and income level drawn from the IPCC Special Report on Emission Scenarios (SRES). [2.4]
These studies show that the projected impacts of climate change can vary greatly due to the development pathway assumed. For example, there may be large differences in regional population, income and technological development under alternative scenarios, which are often a strong determinant of the level of vulnerability to climate change. [2.4]

To illustrate, in a number of recent studies of global impacts of climate change on food supply, risk of coastal flooding and water scarcity, the projected number of people affected is considerably greater under the A2-type scenario of development (characterised by relatively low per capita income and large population growth) than under other SRES futures. [T20.6] This difference is largely explained, not by differences in changes of climate, but by differences in vulnerability.

The unavoidable conclusion: we should be discussing development pathways, and not simply carbon dioxide.

Posted on April 7, 2007 09:24 AM View this article | Comments (12)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

April 05, 2007

NOAA’s New Media Policy: A Recipe for Conflict

The Department of Commerce, the parent agency of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has released a new media policy for its employees (thanks to an alert Prometheus reader for pointing us to it). The new policy was prepared in response to criticisms levied against the agency for its media policies related to agency scientists which some viewed as over-bearing and too politicized. Unfortunately, the new policy does little to address the challenges of public communication in highly politicized contexts, and probably makes things worse.

The new media policy can be found here in PDF. It seeks to draw dark lines between different activities and information. For instance, the policy seeks to distinguish a "Fundamental Research Communication" from an "Official Communication." A FRC is defined as:

means a Public Communication that relates to the Department's programs, policies, or operations and takes place or is prepared officially (i.e., under Section 6.03a. 1-4) and that deals with the products of basic or applied research in science or engineering, the results of which ordinarily are published and shared broadly within the scientific community, so long as the communication does not contain information that is proprietary, classified, or restricted by federal statute. If a communication also includes matters of policy, budget, or management, then it is not a Fundamental Research Communication.

By Contrast, an OC is defined as:

any Public Communication by an employee that relates to the Department's programs, policies, or operations and takes place or is prepared:
1. At the direction of a superior of the employee;

2. Substantially during the official working hours of the employee;

3. With the substantial use of U.S. Government resource(s); or

4. With substantial assistance of U.S. Government employee(s) on official duty. All news releases and similar documents are Official Communications.

This effort to distinguish research from other activities sets up a first point of inevitable conflict:

Although, by definition, an Official Communication is not a Fundamental Research Communication, for an Official Communication that deals with the products of basic or applied research in science or engineering, the role of the public affairs office is to assist with presentation, style, and logistics of the science or engineering information, not to alter its substance in any way.

It is impossible to preserve the precise substance of a scientific paper in a press release, unless one simply reprints the entire scientific paper. Even the choice of what to present and what not to present will alter the meaning in some manner, and the job of a press release is to simplify. In this circumstance, if a scientist does not like how their work has been presented, they need only cry that their work has been altered in some way, which of course will be true. If the Public Affairs official complains, then the dispute could wind up on the pages of the New York Times. This may or may not be desired, but NOAA should recognize that conflict is the inevitable result.

Or consider a research paper on NOAA's forecast process in the National Weather Service, is this an FRC or an OC? And who decides? There will be considerable overlap between the two, setting the stage for conflict.

Another inevitable point of conflict is found in the description of how communications are to be approved:

Based on the operating unit's internal procedures, all written and audiovisual materials that are, or are prepared in connection with, a Fundamental Research Communication must be submitted by the researcher, before the communication occurs, to the head of the operating unit, or his or her designee(s), for approval in a timely manner. These procedures may not permit approval or non-approval to be based on the policy, budget, or management implications of the research.

The guidelines do not explain how the agency will enforce the prohibition against using criteria of policy, budget, or management as criteria for approval or nonapproval. This is because this directive in unenforceable. Consider the simple example of a scholar doing work on the policy implications of hurricane evacuation planning. If the policy research element of this work is flawed – say, it doesn’t reflect the realities of interagency communication -- does this directive prohibit using criteria of “policy” to request that the author rethink his/her work?

The guidelines then have an odd passage suggesting that individual units within the agency will have accepted scientific positions:

Department researchers may draw scientific conclusions based on research related to their jobs, and may, subject to Section 7.01, communicate those conclusions to the public and the media in a Fundamental Research Communication. However, if such a conclusion could reasonably be construed as representing the view of the Department or an operating unit when it does not, then the researcher must make clear that he or she is presenting his or her individual conclusion and not the views of the Department or an operating unit.

Scientists always have their individual views, which they publish in the literature. Whether or not they conform with an agency perspective would seem to be irrelevant. In fact, while agencies do have to have clear views on policies, why should an agency even have its own views on scientific conclusions?

The following passage might have been the core of a more sensible media policy:

Only spokespeople designated by the Appropriate Public Affairs Office are authorized to speak for the Department or its operating units in an official capacity regarding matters of policy, budget, or management.

The following is bizarre:

If, in the course of the Official Communication, an unexpected topic arises that is not the intended subject matter, the employee shall promptly notify the head of the operating unit or Secretarial office, or their designee(s).

In the FAQ explaining the policy, DOC makes matters worse when they try to cleanly separate fact from opinion:

It is not acceptable for government employees to use government resources to promote personal activities or opinions. Department researchers may draw scientific conclusions based on fundamental research related to their jobs and may communicate such information. Personal opinions that go beyond scientific conclusions based on fundamental research related to their jobs are personal communications. If employees wish to publicize their personal opinions, they may do so on their own time, as long as it doesn’t violate federal law.

This is simply unenforceable. Consider that several NOAA scientists signed a joint statement last year on hurricane policies. Their views certainly included their personal opinions. Had they provided their views from their office, on their phone, or identified as a government employee, they would be in violation of the policy. This is nonsense.

I could go on. DOC will, in my opinion, inevitably have to revisit this fundamentally flawed policy. When they do, they should take another look at NASA’s communication policy for some guidance (PDF). When creating such policies, sometimes less is more. The key distinctions to be made are not about what can be said, as drawing bright lines between science and policy, fact and opinion, which are doomed to fail in practice. The key distinctions are to be made between those who are authorized to represent agency policies and those who are not. And any government employee who feels that they cannot support the policies of the agency has opportunities to motivate change from within, and ultimately if they feel strongly enough the chance to resign and seek change from the outside.

Any government employee who uses their position to subvert government performance risks their job. If they lose their job for such a reason, then their supervisor, politically appointed or not, will experience public and political scrutiny. Recent goings on in the Department of Justice speak to this issue.

DOC and NOAA should let the mechanisms of the U.S. government work, rather than trying to over-proceduralize the communications process. Their efforts have likely created the conditions for more not less conflict.

Disclaimer: I am a fellow of CIRES here at University of Colorado. CIRES is a NOAA joint institute. I have benefited from NOAA support of my research over the past 15 years.

Posted on April 5, 2007 08:34 AM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science + Politics | The Honest Broker

April 03, 2007

The Honest Broker Available in UK and EU This Week!

For our readers across the pond, you'll get it first (available here and here). We look forward to comments and criticisms!

Posted on April 3, 2007 07:37 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | The Honest Broker

April 02, 2007

A Few Comments on Massachusetts vs. EPA

We discussed the lawsuit in depth here at Prometheus not long ago (here and here). Now the Supreme Court has rendered a judgment. The outcome is along the lines that we anticipated (see Office Pool 2007), with the Supreme Court deciding 5-4 that EPA has authority to regulate carbon dioxide, but seemingly withholding judgment on whether EPA must regulate CO2. But a close reading of the majority opinion (warning: by this non-expert) suggests that the ruling in fact leaves EPA little alternative other than to promulgate regulations on greenhouse gas emissions.

First there is a science error in the majority opinion, though it seems clear that it would not change their judgment of injury. It states:

. . . global sea levels rose somewhere between 10 and 20 centimeters over the 20th century as a result of global warming.

According to the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report this value is more like 3 to 5.5 centimeters (from figure 11.10b here) with the rest of the 10 to 20 centimeters total due to natural causes. The Supreme Court has attributed all sea level rise to global warming which is incorrect. I had argued in earlier discussions that missing from this case, in arguments by both sides, was some evidence that the 3 to 5.5 centimeters of increase over the 20th century due to human-caused climate change can be related to some injury. However, given the line of argument taken by the majority opinion it appears that what would matter is that this number is quantifiable at all, not its relative magnitude, hence my opinion that an accurate reporting of actual 20th century sea level rise due to global warming would not have affected the reasoning. In footnote 21 the majority opinion explains this point as follows:

Yet the likelihood that Massachusetts’ coastline will recede has nothing to do with whether petitioners have determined the precise metes and bounds of their soon-to-be-flooded land. Petitioners maintain that the seas are rising and will continue to rise, and have alleged that such a rise will lead to the loss of Massachusetts’ sovereign territory. No one, save perhaps the dissenters, disputes those allegations. Our cases require nothing more.

The majority opinion also notes that redressability of harms also does not need to be precisely quantified or large:

That a first step might be tentative does not by itself support the notion that federal courts lack jurisdiction to determine whether that step conforms to law.

The bottom line?

Here is the SC take home message:

We need not and do not reach the question whether on remand EPA must make an endangerment finding, or whether policy concerns can inform EPA’s actions in the event that it makes such a finding. . . We hold only that EPA must ground its reasons for action or inaction in the statute.

In other words, if EPA wants to continue to avoid promulgating regulations on greenhouse gases, then it needs to come up with a better excuse than than those used so far under the Bush Administration. However, it seems clear from the text of the opinion that the majority does in fact render an opinion on whether EPA must make an endangerment finding. I am not an expert on Supreme Court rulings, but the following passage goes pretty far down the path of prescribing exactly what regulatory action EPA should take:

The alternative basis for EPA’s decision—that even if it does have statutory authority to regulate greenhouse gases, it would be unwise to do so at this time—rests on reasoning divorced from the statutory text. While the statute does condition the exercise of EPA’s authority on its formation of a “judgment,” 42 U. S. C. §7521(a)(1), that judgment must relate to whether an air pollutant “cause[s], or contribute[s] to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare,” ibid. Put another way, the use of the word “judgment” is not a roving license to ignore the statutory text. It is but a direction to exercise discretion within defined statutory limits. If EPA makes a finding of endangerment, the Clean Air Act requires the agency to regulate emissions of the deleterious pollutant from new motor vehicles. Ibid. (statingthat “[EPA] shall by regulation prescribe . . . standards applicable to the emission of any air pollutant from any class of new motor vehicles”). EPA no doubt has significant latitude as to the manner, timing, content, and coordination of its regulations with those of other agencies. But once EPA has responded to a petition for rulemaking, its reasons for action or inaction must conform to the authorizing statute. Under the clear terms of the Clean Air Act, EPA can avoid taking further action only if it determines that greenhouse gases do not contribute to climate change or if it provides some reasonable explanation as to why it cannot or will not exercise its discretion to determine whether they do.
EPA has refused to comply with this clear statutory command. Instead, it has offered a laundry list of reasons not to regulate. For example, EPA said that a number of voluntary executive branch programs already provide an effective response to the threat of global warming, 68 Fed. Reg. 52932, that regulating greenhouse gases might impair the President’s ability to negotiate with “key developing nations” to reduce emissions, id., at 52931, and that curtailing motor-vehicle emissions would reflect "an inefficient, piecemeal approach to address the climate change issue," ibid.

Although we have neither the expertise nor the authority to evaluate these policy judgments, it is evident they have nothing to do with whether greenhouse gas emissions contribute to climate change. [emphasis added]

The language here suggests that if greenhouse gases contribute to climate change, then EPA has no other choice other than to regulate. The majority opinion states that they have neither expertise not authority to make policy judgments, but do so anyway. I’d welcome Supreme Court experts weighing in on this. Is this sort of prescriptive language common? Is it actionable in future lawsuits?

If my interpretation is correct (big if) then regardless of what excuse for inaction that EPA under President Bush comes up with, the language of this opinion gives considerable latitude for a subsequent lawsuit suing EPA for its failure to regulate. I doubt that there is enough time left in the Bush Administration for this to occur. Nonetheless it will be a trump card to hold over the next president, Democrat or Republican. A similar lawsuit helped break the gridlock over ozone depletion leading to a negotiated settlement resulting is U.S. participation in the Vienna Convention (details here in PDF). Would there be a similar agreement possible on climate change? If so, what would petitioners ask for and what would a president agree to? Could all of this be trumped by Congress?

Posted on April 2, 2007 04:22 PM View this article | Comments (20)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

April 01, 2007

Sea Level Rise Consensus Statement and Next Steps

In a paper by Jim Hansen that we discussed last week, he called for a consensus statement to be issued on global warming, West Antarctica and sea level rise, from relevant scientific experts. A group of scientists have beat him to the punch issuing a consensus statement last week:

Polar ice experts from Europe and the United States, meeting to pursue greater scientific consensus over the fate of the world’s largest fresh water reservoir, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, conclude their three-day meeting at The University of Texas at Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences with the following statement:

Read the whole thing, but the take home point is that there remain substantial uncertainties, as indicated in the following parts of the consensus statement:

*Satellite observations show that both the grounded ice sheet and the floating ice shelves of the Amundsen Sea Embayment have thinned over the last decades.
*Ongoing thinning in the grounded ice sheet is already contributing to sea-level rise.

*The thinning of the ice has occurred because melting beneath the ice shelves has increased, reducing the friction holding back the grounded ice sheet and causing faster flow.

*Oceanic changes have caused the increased ice-shelf melting. The observed average warming of the global ocean has not yet notably affected the waters reaching the base of the ice shelves. However, recent changes in winds around Antarctica caused by human influence and/or natural variability may be changing ocean currents, moving warmer waters under the ice shelves.

*Our understanding of ice-sheet flow suggests the possibility that too much melting beneath ice shelves will lead to "runaway" thinning of the grounded ice sheet. Current understanding is too limited to know whether, when, or how rapidly this might happen, but discussions at the meeting included the possibility of several feet of sea-level rise over a few centuries from changes in this region.

What is the policy significance of this statement?

1. Decisions about climate change will have to be made is the face of considerable uncertainties as those related to sea level rise will not be reduced anytime soon.

2. There is the "possibility of several feet of sea-level rise over a few centuries from changes in this region." This contrasts strongly with Jim Hansen's assertion that

"Spatial and temporal fluctuations are normal, short-term expectations for Greenland glaciers are different from long-term expectations for West Antarctica. Integration via the gravity satellite measurements puts individual glacier fluctuations in proper perspective. The broader picture gives strong indication that ice sheets will, and are already beginning to, respond in a nonlinear fashion to global warming.There is enough information now, in my opinion, to make it a near certainty that IPCC BAU climate forcing scenarios would lead to disastrous multi-meter sea level rise on the century time scale" (PDF).

Who will eventually be proven correct? I have no idea. Nor do I think that it matters at all from the perspective of policy (compare Naomi Oreskes' views on this subject here) . The significance of this difference in views has more to do with issue of scientific advice than sea level rise itself -- if scientists create an expectation that our decision making should be guided by consensus views of relevant experts, then they should take care when abandoning that approach to scientific advice when less politically convenient.

3. Bottom line: Sea level rose about 20 cm over the past century. The IPCC expects that it may rise from less than that amount to about 60 cm over the next century. RealClimate says they see another 40 cm possible in the IPCC report. And there is a long thin probability tail of higher amounts with low probability and high consequences.

So, What are the Next Steps?

**Mitigation actions can have only a small effect on sea level rise in the short term (e.g., from no impact decades hences to small impacts a century out) and thus respond primarily to the longer term threats of sea level rise more than a century in the future.

**The most (and only) effective responses to sea level rise over the century timescale will be adaptive. So once again we see that mitigation and adaptation respond to fundamentally different aspects of the climate issue. Mitigation and adaptation should occur in parallel.

**Mitigation and adaptation policies to in response to sea level rise have been looked at (notably in the work of Richard Tol, e.g., here), but far more needs to be done (e.g., as argued here in PDF and here in PDF). Sea level rise has, like so many aspects of the climate issue, fallen into the trap of the "prediction game" at the expense of research on the possible consequences of alternative policies in response to that which we already know. The sea level rise issue risks becoming simply a "poster child" for mitigation rather than an issue deserving more attention itself.

So my recommendation is: Rather than arguing over which predictions of the climate future (or which scientists) are correct, we know enough about the general trend in sea level rise and the possibility of a large increase to begin thinking and talking in far more depth about a wide range of possible policy responses, especially adaptation. Such discussions have to go beyond the simplistic use of future sea level rise as a argument to mitigate. Under any scenario of mitigation the adaptation challenge remains essentially the same, and similarly under any adaptation efforts the mitigation challenge does not change. Absolutely no science on the prediction of future sea level rise will alter this basic reality.

Posted on April 1, 2007 04:58 PM View this article | Comments (10)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty

No Joke: 25 to 1

Andy Revkin has a piece in today's New York Times on the challenges facing climate adaptation. He reports that money being spent on human-caused climate change in developing countries under the Framework Convention on Climate Change is biased in favor of mitigation over adaptation by a factor of 25 to 1:

But for now, the actual spending in adaptation projects in the world’s most vulnerable spots, totaling around $40 million a year, “borders on the derisory,” said Kevin Watkins, the director of the United Nations Human Development Report Office, which tracks factors affecting the quality of life around the world.
The lack of climate aid persists even though nearly all the world’s industrialized nations, including the United States under the first President Bush, pledged to help when they signed the first global warming treaty, the Framework Convention on Climate Change, in 1992. Under that treaty, industrialized countries promised to assist others “that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change in meeting costs of adaptation.” It did not specify how much they would pay.

A $3 billion Global Environmental Facility fund maintained by contributions from developed countries has nearly $1 billion set aside for projects in poorer countries that limit emissions of greenhouse gases. But critics say those projects often do not have direct local benefits, and many are happening in the large fast-industrializing developing countries — not the poorest ones.

This situation exists despite the following consensus view from the IPCC:

In its most recent report, in February, the [IPCC] panel said that decades of warming and rising seas were inevitable with the existing greenhouse-gas buildup, no matter what was done about cutting future greenhouse gas emissions.

My former colleague (and boss) at NCAR, Mickey Glantz aptly sums up where this leaves climate policy:

Michael H. Glantz, an expert on climate hazards at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who has spent two decades pressing for more work on adaptation to warming, has called for wealthy countries to help establish a center for climate and water monitoring in Africa, run by Africans. But for now, he says he is doubtful that much will be done.
"The third world has been on its own," he said, "and I think it pretty much will remain on its own."

Posted on April 1, 2007 04:31 PM View this article | Comments (5)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

March 30, 2007

Response to Nature Commentary: Insiders and Outsiders

Three leaders in the adaptation community submitted a letter to Nature responding to our commentary published last month (here in PDF). Nature won't be publishing their letter, but we are happy to reproduce it here. Below is the letter and our response to it, followed by a bit more commentary from me.

We take issue with the commentary by Pielke et al. (Nature 445: 597). The authors accuse mitigation advocates of incorrectly arguing that efforts on adaptation detract from mitigation. We agree that the argument is spurious. Yet, the authors make the opposite argument which we also take issue with: that mitigation detracts from adaptation. The notion that the UNFCCC allows investments in adaptation to be reduced by investments in mitigation is unfounded.
Both mitigation and adaptation are needed. Global warming threatens to destabilize ice sheets, causing sea level rise to rise for centuries. It also threatens to cause widespread disruption of ecosystems and loss of biodiversity. It is not clear how adaptation will offset these impacts. Thus, mitigation is needed to slow down global warming and avoid its worst effects.

As the authors note, adaptation is also needed because climate change is underway and further warming is inevitable. The climate change adaptation community has long recognized that effective adaptation has to address shortcomings in natural resource management as well as addressing the added risks introduced by climate change. This is not a diversion, but a necessary response to an unprecedented threat facing humanity.

Joel B. Smith
Stratus Consulting Inc.
Boulder, CO USA

Ian Burton
University of Toronto
Toronto

Saleemul Huq
International Institute for Environment and Development
London

And here is our response, which we shared with the authors by email:

A criticism from arguably the three leading voices on adaptation for our not paying sufficient attention to mitigation underscores our point. You letter fails to acknowledge our main point -- that two views of adaptation are present in the current discourse. Of course, you are all well aware of this because it is you who has done the most to introduce the broader definition!
The narrow view of adaptation that we describe is indeed linked tightly to mitigation (as for instance reflected in the Stern Report) and does indeed compete with the broader view of adaptation as sustainable development (this tension is reflected in the IPCC reports which use both definitions inconsistently). Some of your own work arguing for the broader definition makes this absolutely clear. Our article was about how these two framings of adaptation compete with one another.

To fail to recognize this distinction is I think to mischaracterize our piece. If every response to advocacy for a greater emphasis on adaptation as sustainable development is countered by a criticism that describes the importance of mitigation, it is fair to ask who is creating the perception of a trade-off.

In response to climate change, we can (and must) do more than one thing at once. But to do so requires that we stop defending mitigation reflexively every time someone makes a strong argument for adaptation. Our piece argued that these agendas should be decoupled which is what the broad definition of adaptation helps to achieve. By not acknowledging this distinction, your letter in response brings them together again and creates ambiguity.

We do appreciate the feedback and it is indeed a sign of progress on this issue if we can begin debating the dimensions of adaptation, rather than if we should be adapting at all.

And I would further point to a recent Pew Center report co-authored by Joel Smith and Ian Burton (PDF) which included the following argument indicating that adaptation is indeed tightly tied to mitigation under the FCCC:

. . . .the adaptation effort has suffered from ambiguities in the [FCCC] regime. One concerns the very definition of adaptation, which is nowhere explicit in the Convention. In that adaptation is referenced only in the context of climate change, the implication is that support under the Convention must be directed to activities addressing primarily if not exclusively human-induced impacts. Yet, as noted earlier, and in expert meetings convened under the Convention, adaptation strategies often are most effective when addressing the full continuum of climate risk. In addition, there appears significant confusion over the terms for adaptation funding through the GEF. As the GEF was established to address global environmental issues, projects supported through its principal trust fund must deliver a "global environmental benefit." In the area of adaptation, most funding flows through the separate dedicated funds established under the Convention and the Kyoto Protocol. Although guidance from the parties is not explicit on the point, the GEF’s position is that the "global environmental benefits" test does not apply to these funds. Yet there remains a widespread perception among potential recipients that it does.

This is identical to the argument that we made in the Nature commentary and that I analyze in depth in this paper (in PDF)!

And Saleemul Huq (with Hannah Reid) write:

For example, the six case studies on adaptation to climate change undertaken under the auspices of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (see Agrawala, this Bulletin) define adaptation to climate change narrowly so that it refers to only those climate change impacts that are deemed to be directly attributable to human-induced climate change, rather than to adaptation to the broader range of impacts associated with "climate variability". A narrow definition of climate impacts would tend to then only produce a small range of adaptation responses as being necessary and hence requiring funding – in essence addressing only a very narrow set of examples of adaptation development linkages (i.e. the "tip of the iceberg" in Figure 2) and hence missing the much larger set of relevant adaptation-development linkages where there are additional co-benefits.

It is difficult for me to see how these perspectives differ at all from our own expressed in Nature as follows:

The focus on mitigation has created policy instruments that are biased against adaptation. Under the Kyoto Protocol to the UNFCCC, rich countries pay costs that poor countries incur by adapting to the marginal impacts of climate change — but they can in principle avoid these costs through enhanced mitigation efforts. This provision of the Protocol exemplifies the failure to take adaptation seriously: not only are the funds involved provided on a voluntary basis by rich countries but they are held hostage to mitigation. The logic is that greenhouse-gas reductions will, in turn, reduce marginal adaptation costs. In practice, this means that the UNFCCC will pay "costs that lead to global environmental benefits, but not those that result in local benefits". To those experiencing devastating losses from climate impacts in developing countries, such logic must sound surreal: policy 'success' means not investing in adaptation even as climate impacts, driven mainly by non-climate factors, continue to mount.

The only difference that I can see between Smith, Burton, and Huq and Pielke, Prins, Rayner, and Sarewitz is that we are a bit less polite about discussing the big fat elephant in the room. And that just might be attributed to a difference between insiders and outsiders in the FCCC community.

Posted on March 30, 2007 11:16 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

Interview at ClimateandInsurance.Org

I am interviewed by the website ClimateandInsurance.org, check it out here.

Posted on March 30, 2007 08:00 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Site News

March 29, 2007

Now I've Seen Everything

NASA's Jim Hansen has discovered STS (science and technology studies, i.e., social scientists who study science), and he is using it to justify why the IPCC is wrong and he, and he alone, is correct on predictions of future sea level rise and as well on calls for certain political actions, like campaign finance reform.

In a new paper posted online (here in PDF) Dr. Hansen conveniently selects a notable 1961 paper on the sociology of scientific discovery from Science to suggest that scientific reticence can be used to predict where future research results will lead. And he finds, interestingly enough, that they lead exactly to where his views are today.

What evidence does Dr. Hansen provide to indicate that his views on sea level rise are correct and those presented by the IPCC, which he openly disagrees with, are wrong? Well, for one he explains that no glaciologist agrees with his views (as they are apparently reticent), suggesting that in fact his views must be correct (a creative use of STS if I've ever seen one;-). If holding a minority view is a standard for predicting future scientific understandings then we should therefore apparently pay more attention to all those lonely skeptics crying out in the wilderness, no?

I find it simply amazing that Dr. Hansen has the moxie to invoke the STS literature to support his scientific arguments when that literature, had he looked at maybe one more paper, indicates that Bernard Barber's 1961 essay, while provocative is not widely accepted (see, e.g., this book or this paper). And even if one accepts Barber's article at face value which argues that scientists resist new discoveries (Thomas Kuhn, hello?), what Dr. Hansen doesn't explain (as he is throwing out the IPCC model of scientific consensus) is why his views are those that will prove to be proven correct in the future rather than those other scientific perspectives that are not endorsed by the IPCC. (Dr. Hansen appears to ignore Barber's argument in the same paper suggesting that older scientists are more likely to be captured by political or other interests when presenting their science.)

If we can use the sociology of science to foretell where science is headed, we could save a lot of money not having to in fact do the research. The climate issue is full of surprises and this one just about takes the cake for me. Now I've seen everything!

Posted on March 29, 2007 03:12 AM View this article | Comments (30)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Prediction and Forecasting

Cashing In

At least one IPCC lead author appears to be trying to cash in on concern over climate change. With the help of several University of Arizona faculty members, including one prominent IPCC contributor, a company called Climate Appraisal, LLC is selling address specific climate predictions looking out as far as the next 100 years. Call me a skeptic or a cynic but I'm pretty sure that the science of climate change hasn't advanced to the point of providing such place-specific information. In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest that if such information were credible and available, it'd already be in the IPCC. The path from global consensus to snake oil seems pretty short. I wouldn't deny anyone the chance to make a buck, but can this be good for the credibility of the IPCC?

Posted on March 29, 2007 02:57 AM View this article | Comments (6)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Prediction and Forecasting

March 28, 2007

Why is Climate Change a Partisan Issue in the United States?

Several people asked me to comment on this Jonathan Chait essay from the L.A. Times last week in which he sought to explain the partisan nature of the climate issue. While I think there are some elements of truth in Chait's perspective, I think that he misses the elephant in the room.

Climate change is indeed a partisan issue. This is confirmed time and again by opinion polls, most recently this poll released last week.

Chait seeks to explain this partisanship as follows:

How did it get this way? The easy answer is that Republicans are just tools of the energy industry. It's certainly true that many of them are. Leading global warming skeptic Rep. Joe L. Barton (R-Texas), for instance, was the subject of a fascinating story in the Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago. The bottom line is that his relationship to the energy industry is as puppet relates to hand.
But the financial relationship doesn't quite explain the entirety of GOP skepticism on global warming. For one thing, the energy industry has dramatically softened its opposition to global warming over the last year, even as Republicans have stiffened theirs.

The truth is more complicated — and more depressing: A small number of hard-core ideologues (some, but not all, industry shills) have led the thinking for the whole conservative movement.

Your typical conservative has little interest in the issue. Of course, neither does the average nonconservative. But we nonconservatives tend to defer to mainstream scientific wisdom. Conservatives defer to a tiny handful of renegade scientists who reject the overwhelming professional consensus.

National Review magazine, with its popular website, is a perfect example. It has a blog dedicated to casting doubt on global warming, or solutions to global warming, or anybody who advocates a solution. Its title is "Planet Gore." The psychology at work here is pretty clear: Your average conservative may not know anything about climate science, but conservatives do know they hate Al Gore. So, hold up Gore as a hate figure and conservatives will let that dictate their thinking on the issue.

Chait's suggestion that non-conservatives defer to the scientific mainstream while conservatives do not gets the cart and horse mixed up. Chait falls victim to the idea that for some people -- those rational beings in the reality-based community -- political perspectives flow from a fountain of facts. And if one's entire view of the relationship of science and politics is grounded in very recent Republican-Democrat conflict it is easy to see how this perspective might be reinforced. On the very hot-button issues of climate change and the teaching of evolution, Republican political agendas require confronting current scientific consensus.

But a broader look at science and politics shows that challenges to a current scientific consensus occurs across the ideological spectrum. Consider genetically modified agricultural products and the European Union. The EU has strongly opposed these products for political and cultural reasons (sound familiar?) in the face of a scientific consensus that indicates little risks. Consider also smoking, where a robust scientific consensus exists, yet far more people smoke in left-leaning Europe than in the United States. When I testified before Congress last February I pointed out that the Democrats organizing the hearing had decided not to invoke a recent consensus statement on hurricanes and global warming in favor of relying on a few selected studies most convenient to their political agenda. The reality is that we all filter facts through our pre-existing values and biases, and each of use is perfectly capable of ignoring or selectively interpreting facts as is convenient. Those who stubbornly refuse to accept the previous sentence would be a good example of these dynamics.

The blindingly obvious and somewhat banal answer to the question why climate change is a partisan issue is that climate change is a partisan issue because it has evolved as a partisan issue. The fact that at some point the issue took on partisan characteristics has led to a reinforcement of the partisanship. The important question to ask is how it is that climate change became a partisan issue. There are several answers to this question.

1. George W. Bush. Everything George Bush touches becomes a partisan issue (and seems to break). George Bush squandered an opportunity to become a great president in the aftermath of 9/11 and instead will be remembered as one of the worst presidents in U.S. history. In this context, his early-2001 decision to unceremoniously abandon the Kyoto process and flip the bird at Europe more than anything fed the partisan nature of the climate debate. In the 1992 presidential election climate change first became a high-level partisan issue as Al Gore and George H. W. Bush used the issue to score political points, with GHWB calling Gore "ozone man" and promising to counter the greenhouse effect with the "White House effect." Of course the deeper history, back to the 1970s, involves the Republicans as the party of the extractive resources industries and the Democrats as the party of alternative energy. These debates conveniently mapped right onto the 1980s emergence of climate change as Dan Sarewitz and I documented in 2000 in the Atlantic Monthly. Of course, if one were to go back to the 1950s and 1960s these partisan roles were somewhat reversed, as Frank Laird documents in his excellent book on the history of solar energy.

2. Al Gore. Long before George W. Bush was in politics Al Gore was in the business of politicizing the climate issue. I have no doubt that he feels strongly about climate change, but his actions for several decades bely his oft-stated claim that climate change is not a partisan issue. Today Al Gore's leadership on this issue is by its very nature a partisan issue:

Appearing before a Congressional Committee, Gore said that Global Warming is "not a partisan issue; it’s a moral issue." However, polling data suggests that among the general public it’s a very partisan issue. By a 65% to 9% margin, Democrats say that Gore knows what he’s talking about. By a 57% to 11%, Republicans say he does not. Those not affiliated with either party are evenly divided.

So long as the main protagonists in the U.S. climate issue are the opponents from the overwhelmingly partisan 2000 presidential election, how in the world can the climate issue be anything other than partisan?

3. The Chorus. Given the dynamics described above, it is entirely natural that the climate debate attracts participants ranging from experts to the lay public, who together I call the chorus. And people are attracted to the issue because of its partisan nature, and the nature of blogs and media coverage amplify the voice of the chorus. And in turn the chorus reinforces the partisan nature of the debate through several forms of dynamics.

First, climate change is a perfect issue for the scientization of politics. This refers to the tendency to characterize political debates in terms of technical disputes -- remember the Hockey Stick? There is an endless supply of climate science to debate and discuss and always the presence of irritating skeptics who challenge the current consensus (see discussion at RealClimate). This situation elevates the authority of subject matter experts in political debates, which makes it appealing for some experts, but also inevitably politicizes the expert community as they self-segregate according to political perspectives.

Second, self-segregation is not unique to experts. A short tour around the web reveals the truth of Cass Sunstein's notion of internet-based "echo chambers" in which people talk only with those who share their views and lambaste as evil subhumans those who they disagree with. It is a rare discussion on climate change that involves a thoughtful exchange of ideas from people who hold fundamentally different political views. The self-segregation has the effect of increasing the partisan nature of the debate as people come to believe more strongly of the absolute truth in their views and the absolute lack of morals in their opponents.

Third, forced segregation. For those who do not fit easily into the partisan nature of the climate debate, partisans go to great effort to force these perspectives into a partisan framework. For instance, here at Prometheus we've consistently advanced views on climate policy (held long before George Bush came around) that emphasize the importance of adaptation and immediate, no-regrets mitigation to occur in parallel (see my 2006 Congressional testimony for the full spiel), and we've experienced a steady effort by some to frame our views as "right-leaning" simply because they are not "left-leaning." The repeated attacks on us from the environmental Gristmill blog are a case in point, despite the fact that there appears to be an enormous substantive agreement in our views. Of course, if the political right actually accepted the views on policy that we have been advocating then those on the political left would probably be rejoicing! On the climate issue, because the chorus has little stomach for perspectives that deviate in any sense from the partisan framing, it is any surprise that the partisan framing dominates?

The bottom line is that climate change is a partisan issue. It will likely remain so in the United States for a long time. Political action will happen nonetheless simply because the Democrats have succeeded in making it a political issue during a time of their ascendancy. If Al Gore runs for president, as I suspect he will, it will further increase the partisan nature of the debate. To the extent that Democrats continue to raise expectations that climate change is central to their agenda, action will inevitably occur. Republicans will eventually accept that action will occur and will do the best to use it as a vehicle to advance their own interests, as typically occurs in all political situations. For those interested in effective policy action, as opposed to scoring political points real or symbolic, there will be a continuing need to keep a focus on policy options and their likely consequences. Die hard partisans will do there best to make that task difficult as discussion of options requires the sort of nuance not present in political horse races.

Soon climate politics in the United States will come to resemble the current dynamics in the EU, in which the issues will be messier and more complicated. When that occurs, like old Cold Warriors the climate partisans will long for the days of good guys and bad guys, and will likely hang on too long to the past.

Posted on March 28, 2007 08:30 AM View this article | Comments (25)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

So Long as We Are Discussing Congressional Myopia . . .

I had a chance to meet Congressman Wayne Gilchrest (R-MD) last year at an informal dinner at the home of Thomas Lovejoy, head of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment. In my conversations with Mr. Gilchrest I found him to be extremely thoughtful and exactly the sort of person that anyone would welcome representing them in Congress, Republican or Democrat. My views were reinforced when I saw Mr. Gilchrest sitting with Congressional committees looking into global warming even though he wasn’t on those committees but was attending simply to educate himself, one time when I was testifying.

So it was with some surprise that I read the following about Mr. Gilchrest in a news story last week:

House Republican Leader John Boehner would have appointed Rep. Wayne Gilchrest to the bipartisan Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming — but only if the Maryland Republican would say humans are not causing climate change, Gilchrest said.
"I said, 'John, I can't do that,'" Gilchrest said in an interview.

Gilchrest didn't make the committee. Neither did other Republican moderates or science-minded members, whose guidance centrist GOP members usually seek on the issue. Republican moderates, called the Tuesday Group, invited Boehner to this week's meeting to push for different representation.
. . .
Gilchrest expressed his interest in the committee several times to Boehner and Minority Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri, telling them the best thing they could do for Republican credibility was to appoint members familiar with the scientific data.

"Roy Blunt said he didn't think there was enough evidence to suggest that humans are causing global warming," Gilchrest said. "Right there, holy cow, there's like 9,000 scientists to three on that one."

The fact that the Republican leadership seeks to ensure political unanimity via a litmus test on the science of climate change should be a surprise to no one. More troubling is the fact that the participation of one of our most thoughtful public servants on an important select committee is a casualty of such political myopia. Not only will policy discussions be impoverished by such actions, but it is also hard to see how it works in the favor of the Republican political agenda.

Posted on March 28, 2007 01:29 AM View this article | Comments (5)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

March 27, 2007

Pay No Attention to Those Earmarks

According to a column in the Wall Street Journal Congress, in its wisdom, has decided to prohibit the ability of its Congressional Research Service (CRS) to publish reports documenting congressional earmarks, or targeted spending inserted in appropriations bills (aka "pork-barrel spending"). This is a bad decision.

The thinking in Congress must be that if they don't report the existence of earmarks then no one will know what is going on. As has been documented time and again here we see an effort to shape political outcomes by manipulating the availability of information. In this case the incentives are not partisan, but institutional, as members of both political parties in Congress have a shared incentive to keep earmarks out of the public eye. Earmarks are often associated with irresponsible public spending (e.g., the Alaska "bridge to nowhere") and are especially problematic in the R&D enterprise, as I've discussed here previously.

Congress is doing the public a disservice by seeking to aggressively limit information on spending that it makes available to the public. This behavior is likely to be counterproductive when at the same time several Congress committees are conducting useful investigations of the Executive branch's heavy-handed information management strategies. In general, openness and transparency are good principles, and that is the case here as well.

Here is an excerpt from the WSJ column:

Nothing highlighted Congress's spending problem in last year's election more than earmarks, the special projects like Alaska's "Bridge to Nowhere" that members drop into last-minute conference reports leaving no opportunity to debate or amend them. Voters opted for change in Congress, but on earmarks it looks as if they'll only be getting more smoke and mirrors.
Democrats promised reform and instituted "a moratorium" on all earmarks until the system was cleaned up. Now the appropriations committees are privately accepting pork-barrel requests again. But curiously, the scorekeeper on earmarks, the Library of Congress's Congressional Research Service (CRS)--a publicly funded, nonpartisan federal agency--has suddenly announced it will no longer respond to requests from members of Congress on the size, number or background of earmarks. "They claim it'll be transparent, but they're taking away the very data that lets us know what's really happening," says Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn. "I'm convinced the appropriations committees are flexing their muscles with CRS."

Indeed, the shift in CRS policy represents a dramatic break with its 12-year practice of supplying members with earmark data. "CRS will no longer identify earmarks for individual programs, activities, entities, or individuals," stated a private Feb. 22 directive from CRS Director Daniel Mulhollan.

When Sen. Coburn and Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina submitted earmark inquiries recently, they were both turned down. Each then had heated conversations with Mr. Mulhollan. The director, who declined to be interviewed for this article, explained that because the appropriations committees and the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) were now preparing their own lists of earmarks, CRS should no longer play a role in the process. He also noted that both the House and Senate are preparing their own definitions of earmarks. "It is not appropriate for us to continue our research," his directive states.

That is sophistry. The House rule making earmarks public, which was passed in January, doesn't apply to earmarks for fiscal year 2007, the year Mr. Coburn wanted his report on. There is no Senate rule, and a proposed statute defining earmarks hasn't become law. OMB's list of earmarks applies only to fiscal year 2005.

And in any case, CRS works for Congress, so it is bizarre for it to claim work being done by the executive branch as a reason to deny members information it was happy to collect and release in the past. When I asked a CRS official if the new policy stemmed from complaints by appropriations committee members, she refused to answer the question, citing "confidentiality" concerns. . .

Today squeeze plays on CRS are not uncommon, and they have come from both parties. In the 1990s, GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey was so angry with a CRS report questioning the workability of a flat tax that he temporarily zeroed out the agency's budget. Rep. Henry Waxman, as a member of a Democratic minority, demanded and got revisions to CRS reports on how prescription drug pricing rules in his bills would work. "Everyone expects Waxman and others to be even more insistent on getting what they want now [that he's in the majority]," says another CRS staffer.

Posted on March 27, 2007 09:52 AM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Democratization of Knowledge | The Honest Broker

Unpublished Letter to the San Francisco Chronicle

A few weeks ago Henry Miller had an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle that discussed our recent commentary in Nature on adaptation (PDF). We sent in a letter in response that for whatever reason the Chronicle decided not to publish. So we have reproduced it here:

Dear Editor-
We appreciate that Henry Miller (Sunday, March 11, 2007) highlighted our recent commentary in Nature magazine which called for greater attention to adaptation in climate policy. In that article we argue that advocates of mitigation (i.e., reducing greenhouse gas emissions) frequently go too far when they present energy policies as an alternative to societal adaptation to the impacts of a changing climate. Unfortunately, Dr. Miller commits an equally grave mistake by suggesting that adaptation can take the place of mitigation. Any effective approach to climate policy will require that we both mitigate and adapt. The urge to present adaptation and mitigation as somehow in opposition is a reflex shared by those on opposing sides of the debate over greenhouse gas emissions. On climate policy we must walk and chew gum at the same time.

Roger Pielke, Jr., University of Colorado
Gwyn Prins, London School of Economics and Columbia University
Steve Rayner, Oxford University's James Martin Institute
Daniel Sarewitz, Arizona State University

Posted on March 27, 2007 12:44 AM View this article | Comments (14)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

March 26, 2007

Whose political agenda is reflected in the IPCC Working Group 1, Scientists or Politicians?

Recent discussion here on Prometheus and elsewhere has indicated two very different perspectives on who controls the IPCC’s Working Group I on the science of climate change. The different views reflect various efforts to legitimize and delegitimize the IPCC. However, the different perspectives cannot be reconciled for reasons I describe below, placing scientists in an interesting double bind.

The first view is that the IPCC is subject to governmental control at the start and at the finish, and thus is an overtly political document. It is after all the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. From this perspective the IPCC is very much a political document with political officials setting its agenda in the form of of the questions that it is to address and political officials also acting as gatekeepers on the resulting scientific report.

This view on the back end was expressed by Michael Mann, of Penn State University and RealClimate, who commented in New Scientist earlier this month:

Allowing governmental delegations to ride into town at the last minute and water down conclusions after they were painstakingly arrived at in an objective scientific assessment does not serve society well.

On the front end of the report, Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M, suggested that this too was controlled by politicians and not scientists, writing in the comments on another Prometheus post:

. . . you have to conclude that the [IPCC chapter] outline represents the questions member gov'ts want to know in order to respond to climate change.

The second view is that the IPCC is squarely in the control of the scientific community with governmental officials having a right to approve the IPCC report on the front and back ends but with no authority to alter it’s substance in any way for political purposes. Twenty distinguished climate scientists who participated in drafting of the recent IPCC Summary for Policymakers wrote a letter objecting vehemently to an article in the New Scientist suggesting that political officials had any influence whatsoever on the report.

At all stages, including at the final plenary in Paris, the authors had control over the text . . In particular, our co-chair Susan Solomon is robustly independent and has been determined to maintain the credibility of the science throughout the four-year process. . . The wide participation of the scientific community, the scientific accuracy and the absence of any policy prescription in this report are the characteristics that render this report so powerful. . . Another related misconception, promulgated by [New Scientist], is that the Summary for Policymakers was written by and for the government delegations, and changes were made to the scientific conclusions before and during the Paris plenary for political purposes. In fact, the Summary for Policymakers was written by the scientists who also wrote the underlying chapters. The purpose of the Paris plenary was to make clarifications in order to more succinctly and accessibly communicate the science to the policy-makers. The scientists were present in Paris to ensure scientific accuracy and consistency with the underlying report. Those of us also involved in previous assessments were pleasantly surprised that there were far fewer alterations made to the text at this final meeting, and that there were very few attempts at political interference.

So here is the double bind that scientists find themselves in: Some scientists, like Andrew Dessler (cited above), wish to assert that the IPCC is essentially value-free reflecting the revealed truths of the climate system as discerned by objective climate scientists with no political agenda. From this perspective, the only political agenda that the IPCC reflects is that imposed upon it by governments on the front end in the form of questions that they would like to see answered. It is otherwise scientifically pure. Other scientists, like Michael Mann (cited above), hold a very different view seeing the IPCC as reflecting a political agenda of member governments who have in fact corrupted the objective views of the climate scientists. From this perspective, the IPCC does in fact reflect a political agenda that shaped it on the back end.

If governmental representatives in fact have no influence on content of the IPCC only an ability to approve, as suggested by the twenty authors of the letter to the New Scientist, then all decisions made by the IPCC about what information to present in the report reflect the values and judgments of the scientists participating. Many scientists do not like this assertion because it suggests that the IPCC is not accountable to anyone, and stands as a technocratic exercise far from any sort of democratic governance of science. If instead governmental officials do in fact have influence, then the IPCC has some greater accountability and perhaps meets some criteria of democratic governance, but at the same time many scientists do not like this assertion because then the IPCC risks losing its legitimacy as its conclusions would then reflect the political agendas of its overseers. So does the IPCC Working Group I reflect a political agenda or not?

The only way that this double bind could be broken would be for the IPCC to do two things. First, on its front end it would need to have a formal, transparent, and systematic process for eliciting the demands for information from policy makers in the forms of questions asked and information sought. (Dan Sarewitz and I describe such a process in this paper: PDF.) There was in fact no such process on the front end.

Second, on the back end the IPCC would need an accepted process that allowed member governments to ask questions seeking to clarify and focus the report, opposed to changing its content. The IPCC authors suggest that this is in fact what happened, but its critics assert the opposite. So whatever the reality, it seems clear that the following statement from the twenty IPCC letter-writers holds up: "A legitimate criticism perhaps is the poor communication to the general public of IPCC procedures."

Everyone seems to agree that the IPCC reflects a political agenda, the question is who’s political agenda? Is it that of the participating scientists? Do participating scientists in fact have a "political agenda" or instead do they have many competing political agendas? Or is the political agenda of the IPCC that of the participating governments? But do participating governments in fact have a "political agenda" or many competing political agendas?

The answers to the questions are all unclear. The IPCC tries to have things both ways by asserting governmental participation without governmental influence. This makes no sense, and participation is meaningless absent influence. As a result, how people view the legitimacy of the IPCC will therefore most likely be an inkblot test on their views of governance by experts versus the democratization of knowledge. One thing seems clear, global governance of the IPCC would be much more straightforward, and its role far easier to understand, with some explicit answers to who controls the IPCC, scientists or governments?

Posted on March 26, 2007 07:45 AM View this article | Comments (13)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Democratization of Knowledge | The Honest Broker

March 24, 2007

Praise for The Honest Broker

Three people who I have a lot of respect for have read my book and offered some kind (far too kind, actually) words:

With an analytical honesty unmarred by hidden agendas, Roger Pielke brilliantly brings the murky interface of science and politics into perfect focus. Scientists and policy makers alike need to read this book, and need to absorb its wisdom.
Michael M. Crow, President, Arizona State University

Roger Pielke Jr. has produced a beautifully clear account of the often murky relationship between scientific advice and the policy process. While his distinction between pure scientist, science arbiter, issue advocate, and honest broker may not fully satisfy purists in Science and Technology Studies (STS), it ought to be compulsory reading for every science graduate and all decision makers in government, business, the judiciary, or campaigning groups who claim that their decisions are rooted in scientific evidence. It is also an invaluable guide to the ordinary citizen who just wants to navigate through the confusion and contradiction that often seems to surround the use of science in policy debates.

Steve Rayner, James Martin Professor of Science and Civilization, University of Oxford

Decision-making can be an important problem, both in everyday life and when science, politics and policy are involved. The Honest Broker broadens the options of decision-making by going beyond the traditional roles of the 'pure scientist' or the 'issue advocate'. Scientific knowledge can be integrated with stakeholder concerns if the policy context is taken into account in an adequate way. Based on extensive experience in the analysis of decision-making relating to scientific and technological issues, Roger Pielke Jr. goes a long way to be an honest broker himself: between science and democracy.

Helga Nowotny, Vice-President of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council and Fellow at Wissenschaftszentrum Wien

Should be available in a week or so, here is the Amazon link to order the paperback version.

Posted on March 24, 2007 11:55 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | The Honest Broker

March 12, 2007

We Interrupt this Spring Break . . .

. . . to bring you a link to an article titled "The Convenient Truth" by Jonathan Rauch in the National Journal on climate policy. Now back to the blogging break . . .

Posted on March 12, 2007 03:43 PM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

March 01, 2007

. . . Meantime, Buy This Book!

Out any day now:

Posted on March 1, 2007 02:23 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Site News

Spring Break . . .

I'll be taking a spring blogging break . . . back in April! But stay tuned, Kevin is in charge while I'm offline.

Posted on March 1, 2007 02:19 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Site News

February 28, 2007

Spinning Science

We have had a lot of discussion here about the process of producing press releases. Last month, I participated in a congressional hearing in which several scientists argued strongly that official press releases should be faithful to the science being reported. A press release put out by the University of Wisconsin today is a case of a press release completely misrepresenting the science in the paper that it is presenting. I am going to speculate that because the press release errs on the side of emphasizing a global warming connection where there is in fact none indicated in the paper that there will be little concern expressed by the scientific community about its inaccuracies.

UPDATE: NSF issues its own release "New Information Links Atlantic Ocean Warming to Stronger Hurricanes" compounding the misrepresentation. The NSF release (like the UW version) contradicts its own headline:

The Atlantic is also unique in that the physical variables that converge to form hurricanes--including wind speeds, wind directions and temperatures--mysteriously feed off each other to make conditions ripe for a storm. But scientists don't understand why, Kossin adds.

The press release is titled: "New evidence that global warming fuels stronger Atlantic hurricanes." The first paragraph of the release says:

Atmospheric scientists have uncovered fresh evidence to support the hotly debated theory that global warming has contributed to the emergence of stronger hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean.

The paper, by Jim Kossin and colleagues appears in today's Geophysical Research Letters and actually says nothing like this (paper here in PDF). It does say the following:

**Over the past 23 years there are no global trends in tropical cyclone activity in any basin except the Atlantic. This is an important finding because it contradicts the findings presented in 2005 by Webster et al. that there have been global trends. Kossin et al. call into question a straightforward relationship of SST and tropical cyclone activity. This is news.

**The paper does find the Atlantic to be more active over the past 23 years. No one in the world has ever questioned whether or not the Atlantic has been more active over the past 3 decades. Any assertion that the Atlantic has become more active is hardly "fresh evidence." This is not news.

*The paper does not engage in attribution, and openly admits that a 23-year record is too short for attribution studies (i.e., that indicate causes of trends).

Here is what Kossin et al. say in their conclusion:

Efforts are presently underway to maximize the length of our new homogeneous data record but at most we can add another 6–7 years, and whether meaningful trends can be measured or inferred in a 30-year data record remains very much an open question. Given these limitations of the data, the question of whether hurricane intensity is globally trending upwards in a warming climate will likely remain a point of debate in the foreseeable future. Still, the very real and dangerous increases in recent Atlantic hurricane activity will no doubt continue to provide a heightened sense of purpose to research addressing how hurricane behavior might change in our changing climate, and further efforts toward improvement of archival data quality are expected to continue in parallel with efforts to better reconcile the physical processes involved. If our 23-year record is in fact representative of the longer record, then we need to better understand why hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin is varying in a fundamentally different way than the rest of the world despite similar upward trends of SST in each basin.

The University of Wisconsin press release is either a cheap publicity grab or a deliberate attempt to spin the paper's results 180 degrees from what it actually says.

Posted on February 28, 2007 10:19 AM View this article | Comments (24)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters | Science + Politics

Success-Oriented Planning at NASA

NASA is delaying the next launch of the space shuttle due to a hail storm that damaged the external tank. However, according to NASA this delay won't cause any problems meeting their launch schedule this year:

[N. Wayne Hale Jr., the shuttle program manager, in a briefing from Cape Canaveral, Fla.] said that despite the latest delay he believed that the launching schedule had enough flexibility to allow the five flights that are planned for this year.

Anyone want to bet that NASA will in fact launch the shuttle 5 times in the last 7 months of 2007? Consider the following data from a paper we did in 1992 (PDF):

NASA is either fooling themselves or fooling us. Neither is a particualrly good way to run the nation's space program.

Posted on February 28, 2007 08:35 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Space Policy

February 27, 2007

Science, Politics, Variability, Change, Learning, Uncertainty

The issue of floodplain management in the city of Boulder reflects in microcosm many of the themes that we discuss on this site. Here is an excerpt from an article in the Daily Camera today:

Boulder's water board approved a flood plan Monday that predicts hundreds more homes and businesses will be inundated in a 100-year flood than previously believed.
But the new flood study predicts the University of Colorado's South Campus property will stay dry in a 100-year flood, worrying residents who don't want to see the former gravel mine developed.

The city's current map places 363 structures in the flood plain. The new study predicts more than three times as many buildings — 1,137 — would take on some level of water in a 100-year flood, which has a 1 percent chance of occurring in any year.

Some issues raised by this circumstance:

1. The climate varies and changes faster than the built environment. Yesterday's "100-year flood" is today's "50-year flood." Any flood policy based on the assumption of long-term stasis in climate is bound to fail.

2. Scientific understandings change faster than the built environment. Policies should be flexible to the possibility that we may learn more in the future, and such learning may result in revisions to our expectations for risks and vulnerabilities. Any policy that is based on an assumption that we know all we are going to is likely to fail.

3. People have different vested interests in particular scientific outcomes. In Boulder, people with different views about development have strong feelings about how the floodplain should be designated, based on how they think that will affect the chances of development. It would be foolish to think that such considerations can be ignored or kept separate from the political process of designating floodplain restrictions.

4. All important decisions are characterized by some degree of uncertainty. An important analytical question is not whether we can remove uncertainty (we can of course by chose to ignore it), but to design decision processes that are robust in the face of uncertainties.

The case study of flood policy in Boulder, Colorado reflects all of these issues.

Posted on February 27, 2007 07:19 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty

University of Colorado Sustainability Initiatives

Not long ago we raised some questions about how well the University of Colorado's commitment to sustainability was actually being reflected in actions. Recent remarks by our Chancellor, G.P. "Bud" Peterson, at a conference on sustainability last week suggest that our campus leadership is in fact now taking this issue seriously. Here is an excerpt:

First, on behalf of CU-Boulder I have pledged to participate in the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment (PCC), which will solidify our goal of reducing Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. CU-Boulder will begin immediately, a detailed inventory of our current emissions; then, within two years, the campus will outline short and long-term strategies for emission reductions to reach the PCC goal of "climate neutrality" - zero net GHG.
This is a bold challenge, but CU-Boulder has an excellent record to build upon. Today, the University purchases 10 percent of the campus's electricity from renewable sources, and we have reduced our electrical consumption by 13 percent per square foot since 2001. In addition, CU-Boulder has helped to generate 3.2 million rides per year on RTD buses through participation in RTD's Ecopass program, created a recycling program that is diverting 1600 tons from landfills annually (and has saved the campus about $2.4 million in avoided costs over the past three years alone) and pioneered water conservation programs that save over 110 million gallons annually on campus.

Most of all, our students are to be credited for their leadership in helping to make the recently completed ATLAS building at CU-Boulder the first public building in the state of Colorado to achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold Certification - one of only seven buildings statewide to achieve such a designation.

With the need for a centralized heating and cooling facility to be built, we must take new and stronger measures to offset our purchase of electricity from sources that increase our carbon output. To assist in this process, I am pleased to announce that in the next fiscal year, we will begin investing $250,000 annually in projects to reduce campus energy consumption, particularly electrical consumption. At some point in the near future, we expect we may seek new funds or a reallocation of a portion of the $250,000 for renewable energy production systems on campus properties or close to the campus.

I am also asking that investments beyond the $250,000 per year be considered for future funding as a pressing campus priority in order to aggressively pursue options for greatly reducing CU-Boulder's GHG emissions. To offset our carbon output in the meantime, our campus has committed to spending an additional $50,000 per year for the purchase of renewable wind energy.

Finally, I am pleased to announce one more measure that I believe will lay the groundwork for even more progress toward sustainability. That is the establishment of the Chancellor's Committee on Energy, Environment and Sustainability (CCEES), a working group to be led by Vice Chancellor for Administration Paul Tabolt, charged with setting sustainability goals for the campus and advising the university on all environmental matters.

Posted on February 27, 2007 06:52 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Education | Sustainability

February 26, 2007

State Climatologists Redux

Let's start by acknowledging that the position of "State Climatologist" is problematic simply because it is federally designated role and not an official state government position. So there is ample room for confusion as to who the person in the position actually speaks for, and NOAA should indeed address this -- which could easily be done by changing the title to "NOAA-designated climate services extension officer" or something inscrutable like that. Even so, a statement like the following should concern anyone, regardless of their views on climate change:

Your views on climate change, as I understand them, are not aligned with those of my my administration.

. . . from a 13 February 2007 letter (PDF) from Delaware Governor Ruth Ann Minner to Delaware's State Climatologist, as designated by the federal government and approved by the State of Delaware (PDF), David Legates.

It seems fairly obvious to me that if Governor Minner is truly concerned about the confusion between the federal designation and the Delaware executive branch, then she should be discussing with NOAA options for changing its use of the designation "State Climatologist" rather than telling Mr. Legates not to use the federal designation, which the state has previously approved under her own signature. The letter she has written to Mr. Legates makes it look like her concern is in fact not possible confusion about the designation, but instead the fact that David Legates holds different views on policy than those of her administration. If she wants to have advisers on climate change determined by political criteria, that is of course her right.

I can imagine that if the Bush Administration sent the exact same letter to Jim Hansen, there might be some greater reaction than we have seen to Ms. Minner's letter.

My reactions to this letter, and (non) reactions to it, echo my concerns with the approach that Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) has take to overseeing the issue of the politicization of science. If the concern is really procedural -- that is, who gets to speak what information under what designation -- then the response should be focused on improving those procedures. The selective focus on certain individuals and certain perspectives instead makes these complaints about the "politicization of science" themselves politicized. While this might work to the short-term advantage of certain agendas in political debate, what won't be addressed by this approach are those processes that foster the pathological politicization of science.

Posted on February 26, 2007 07:24 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science + Politics

Science and the Developing World

At SciDev.net, David Dickson has a thoughtful editorial on how the scientific community and others advocating increased investments in S&T in the developing world should temper expectations on what these investments in alone can achieve. Here is an excerpt:

The current danger lies in promoting policies that see S&T as drivers of social progress and economic development, rather than components of innovation programmes in which other factors — from regulatory policy to education and training — are just as important.
The scientific community is particularly prone to this one-dimensional approach. Arguing that heavy investment in research and development is enough to promote economic growth naturally appeals to those keen to see scientific laboratories flourish across the developing world.

But experience has shown that such investment is only part of the solution. The real challenge lies in embedding science in all spheres of government policy, and introducing educational, regulatory and fiscal measures to enable innovation to flourish across the economy.

Until this happens, demands for more money for science will inevitably be seen as little more than self-interested pleading from the scientific community. [emphasis in original]

Posted on February 26, 2007 05:47 AM View this article | Comments (5)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | International | R&D Funding

February 23, 2007

IPCCfacts.org Responds

Here is the prompt and satisfactory response I received late today:

We regret that your views were misrepresented on IPCCfacts.org, and have removed the post.
The intent of the site is to follow the conversation around the IPCC
report and, where mischaracterizations about the report are made,
clearly and directly present the IPCC findings. We stand behind our
presentation of the IPCC report findings.

We regret the error.

Sincerely,

Joel Finkelstein

Posted on February 23, 2007 08:15 PM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

IPCCfacts.org has its Facts Wrong

There is a webpage called IPCCfacts.org that is grossly misrepresenting my views on hurricanes and climate change, which is bizarre given my strong endorsement of the recent IPCC report. Anyone wanting to get "facts" on the IPCC should look elsewhere than IPCCfacts.org, like to the actual IPCC. Here I set the record straight and request that IPCCfacts.org correct their mistakes.

It is always nice to know who is misrepresenting one’s views and it this case the group’s origins are a bit hard to discern, but it is connected to Fenton Communications, which coincidentally is also associated with RealClimate. IPCCfacts.org receives funding from the United Nations Foundation.

Anyway, IPCCfacts.org misrepresents my views on the recent IPCC report on the subject of hurricanes and climate change. As anyone who reads Prometheus knows, I was quite complementary of the IPCC’s judgment on this issue. Nonetheless, IPCCfacts.org sees fit to cite my views as representing a "myth":

Myth: The report shows that the overall number of hurricanes is expected to decline, undercutting the argument that global warming produces extreme weather events.
"So there might be a human contribution [to increased hurricanes] ... but the human contribution itself has not been quantitatively assessed, yet the experts, using their judgment, expect it to be there. In plain English this is what is called a ‘hypothesis’ and not a ‘conclusion.’ And it is a fair representation of the issue." –Roger Pielke Jr. climate scientist, University of Colorado, Blog post, February 2, 2007.

First, the report indicates that there is little confidence in estimates of how the number of hurricanes will change—up or down.

Second, the really important issue is not frequency, but intensity and damage potential. Hurricanes and other tropical cyclones draw their energy from warm ocean waters, which typically, under the right conditions, lead to increases in the size and intensity of hurricanes. The warmer ocean waters that result from global warming thus provide an environment suitable to the generation of larger hurricanes.

And larger hurricanes are characterized by all the elements that increase potential destructiveness: higher wind speed, greater intensity of rainfall and higher storm surges in advance of landfall.

In response, first a minor point -- they call me a "climate scientist" which is only accurate if one includes climate impacts under that designation, which is typically not done. I don’t characterize myself as such. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) certainly does not.

Second, the quote from me that they suggest represents a "myth" comes from this blog post. The part that they ellipsis out is the following parenthetical:

(and presumably this is just to the observed upwards trends observed in some basins, and not to downward trends observed in others, but this is unclear)

At no point (in the post that they reference or anywhere else) do I suggest that there will be less hurricanes, nor do I suggest that such a decline undercuts the argument for an increase in extreme events in the future. Where they get this impression I have no idea. This is simply a gross misrepresentation. In fact, my writings say much the opposite, such as the following (PDF):

For future decades the IPCC (2001) expects increases in the occurrence and/or intensity of some extreme events as a result of anthropogenic climate change.

Peer-reviewed papers I have co-authored (here in PDF and here in PDF) that survey the literature on tropical cyclone science, impacts, and policy are actually 100% consistent with the IPCC SPM.

And of the blog post of mine that they cite summarizing the IPCC SPM, here is what one of the scientists on the U.S. delegation had to say:

Thank you for your thoughtful and balanced assessment of what the IPCC SPM says. You have got it right. Your careful analysis on what the report says and how it compares to the WMO consensus statement is most appreciated.

Then IPCCfacts.org start talking about the size of hurricanes, a discussion which is nowhere to be found in the IPCC SPM. In short, IPCCfacts.org have got their facts wrong and are spinning some "myths" of their own.

Posted on February 23, 2007 09:00 AM View this article | Comments (12)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

Al Gore on Adaptation

From the International Herald Tribune,, Al Gore reiterates that despite many efforts to characterize adaptation and mitigation as complementary, he prefers to persist in viewing them as competing:

Trying to prevent global warming is certainly worthwhile, said Roger Pielke, Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado.
But he said capable people are not adequately putting their minds to the challenge of adapting to climate change, which is inevitable in coming decades because of continuing emissions and because of the damage done already.

"If all we do is try to mitigate we're going to miss a big part of the challenge," Pielke said.

The world's leaders also need to address other problems that are likely to be aggravated by global warming, such as tropical diseases, drinking water supply and increasing storm vulnerability, Pielke and several colleagues argued in the scientific journal Nature.

Many global warming activists are suspicious of such recommendations. They feel that too much reliance on adaptation will lull the world into a false sense of security, decreasing the motivation to reduce greenhouse gases.

"We really have to focus on prevention," Al Gore said on Tuesday during a question-and-answer session at Columbia University in New York City.

He warned that if we fail to avert the worst of global warming, the dire environmental consequences will overwhelm any adaptive measures.

We've had a number of prominent people react in private to our recent article on adaptation in Nature (PDF) by suggesting that we really should have emphasized mitigation instead.

I wonder how many criticisms of Mr. Gore's exclusive focus on "prevention" (sorry, prevention is not in the cards, ask the IPCC) we will hear about. My guess is not more than one -- and you're looking at it. Lots of inconvenient truths to go around, it seems.

Posted on February 23, 2007 01:56 AM View this article | Comments (39)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

Catastrophic Visions

The last time that we pointed to an essay by Brad Allenby of ASU it generated much thoughtful discussion. I expect no different from this provocative piece in the latest CSPO Newsletter from ASU titled Dueling Elites and Catastrophic Visions. Here is an excerpt:

. . . consider two of the primary dialogs of our times that, while superficially quite different, are in fact disconcertingly similar in intent and tone. One is the current U.S. Administration’s insistence on a continuing and inescapable threat of ubiquitous and unpredictable terrorism, a campaign which appears designed to create on-going fear and insecurity in the population. (That the cultural animosity underlying increases in anti-US attitudes is to a significant degree a result of Administration choices and policy is either supreme irony or Machiavellian brilliance, depending on who one listens to.) This campaign is characterized by constant reference to worst case scenarios (e.g., nuclear attack on an American city), patterns of government intervention in common activities that reinforce a siege mentality while providing no obvious additional protection against threats (e.g., certain TSA procedures and requirements at airports), few public details regarding actual threats or specific situations, and the implicit message that the current state of affairs will persist for the indefinite future.
The second is the significant acceleration in stories and publicity regarding predictions of planetary disaster as a result of human activities, especially global warming. This challenge is characterized in remarkably similar terms as the terrorist threat: ubiquitous and uncertain with a potential for unexpected disaster, an emphasis on worst case scenarios, and suggestions that extraordinary government intervention is required and justified because all other values pale in comparison to the threat. So, for example, Vice President Gore recently stated that global warming was "infinitely" worse than the Iraq quagmire, while UK environment secretary David Miliband suggests issuing all British adults with annual carbon allowances. Indeed, the UK government has formed a study group to report back on the idea; Nature (442:340) reports that researchers favor such quotas as "a sensible way to extend emissions trading to the personal level." The connection between social engineering and environmental disaster as lever could scarcely be clearer. Similarly, a recent report in Science notes the reluctance of some climate scientists to consider geoengineering solutions to global climate change not because they don’t work, but because they don’t require social engineering (314:401-403). As one European climate scientist complains, "You’re papering over the problem [by even considering geoengineering options] so people can keep inflicting damage on the climate system without having to give up fossil fuels." Whether scientists should arrogate to themselves the responsibility for deciding for everyone that fossil fuels should be given up, as opposed to other alternatives to managing climate change, is apparently not to be subject to dialog.

Posted on February 23, 2007 01:30 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty

February 22, 2007

Where Stern is Right and Wrong

The Christian Science Monitor adds a few interesting details to Nicolas Stern's recent U.S. visit. On mitigation Stern explains why the debate over the science of climate change is in fact irrelevant:

Even if climate change turned out to be the biggest hoax in history, Stern argues, the world will still be better off with all the new technologies it will develop to combat it.

If mitigation can indeed be justified on factors other than climate change, which I think it can, then why not bring these factors more centrally into the debate?

Stern also dismissed two other arguments for inaction: that humans will easily adapt to climate change and that its effects are too far in the future to address now. Putting the burden of dealing with climate change on future generations is "unethical," Stern said.

Once again adaptation is being downplayed as somehow being in opposition to mitigation. Stern may in fact believe that we need to both adapt and mitigate, but that is certainly not what is conveyed here. The Stern Review itself adopted a very narrow view of adaptation as reflecting the costs of failed mitigation. When framed in this narrow way there is no alternative than to characterize adaptation and mitigation as trade-offs, and in today's political climate guess which one loses out?

Posted on February 22, 2007 07:19 AM View this article | Comments (10)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty | Technology Policy

February 21, 2007

Mike Hulme in Nature on UK Media Coverage of the IPCC

Nature published a letter in its current issue on media coverage of the recent IPCC report. The book he refers to is co-edited by our own Lisa Dilling. Here is an excerpt from the letter:

Nature 445, 818 (22 February 2007) | doi:10.1038/445818b; Published online 21 February 2007
Newspaper scare headlines can be counter-productive

Mike Hulme
Tyndall Centre, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK

. . . Communicating science to wider, public audiences, however — in this case on matters of important public policy — is an art that requires careful message management and tone setting. It seems that confident and salient science, as presented by the IPCC, may be received by the public in non-productive ways, depending on the intervening media.

With this in mind, I examined the coverage of the IPCC report in the ten main national UK newspapers for Saturday 3 February, the day after the report was released. Only one newspaper failed to run at least one story on the report (one newspaper ran seven stories), but what was most striking was the tone.

The four UK 'quality' newspapers all ran front-page headlines conveying a message of rising anxiety: "Final warning", "Worse than we thought", "New fears on climate raise heat on leaders" and "Only man can stop climate disaster". And all nine newspapers introduced one or more of the adjectives "catastrophic", "shocking", "terrifying" or "devastating" in their various qualifications of climate change. Yet none of these words exist in the report, nor were they used in the scientists' presentations in Paris. Added to the front-page vocabulary of "final", "fears", "worse" and "disaster", they offer an insight into the likely response of the 20 million Britons who read these newspapers.

In contrast, an online search of some leading newspapers in the United States suggests a different media discourse. Thus, on the same day, one finds these headlines: "UN climate panel says warming is man-made", "New tack on global warming", "Warming report builds support for action" and "The basics: ever firmer statements on global warming". This suggests a more neutral representation in the United States of the IPCC's key message, and a tone that facilitates a less loaded or frenzied debate about options for action.

Campaigners, media and some scientists seem to be appealing to fear in order to generate a sense of urgency. If they want to engage the public in responding to climate change, this is unreliable at best and counter-productive at worst. As Susanne Moser and Lisa Dilling point out in Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), such appeals often lead to denial, paralysis, apathy or even perverse reactive behaviour.

The journey from producing confident assessments of scientific knowledge to a destination of induced social change is a tortuous one, fraught with dangers and many blind alleys. The challenging policy choices that lie ahead will not be well served by the type of loaded reporting of science seen in the UK media described above.

Posted on February 21, 2007 03:02 PM View this article | Comments (5)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty

Have We Entered a Post-Analysis Phase of the Climate Debate?

The New York Times today has an interesting summary of a debate between Sir Nicolas Stern and Professor William Nordhaus of Yale University on the economics of climate change. The article raises the question, for me at least, at what point do policy analyses cease to matter? In the language of my forthcoming book -- The Honest Broker -- has climate politics become "abortion politics"? The answer to my own question is that, yes, we may indeed be in a situation where analysis is viewed as being more useful as a tool of persuasion than clarifying the consequences of a wide range of alternative courses of action. In such a situation policy analyses will be far less important than the political dynamics.

A recent example of such a situation that will be familiar to most readers is when the Bush Administration decided to invade Iraq and then fixed the intelligence to meet the policy. Any analysis that supported invasion, regardless of its intellectual merits, then became "right" even if for the "wrong reasons." Sure, some policy analyses were still needed after that decision, for instance, to determine whether 110,000 versus 130,000 troops would be needed. But I view this as a far different sort of analysis than focusing analytical attention on the broad question of what might have been done about Saddam Hussein. In that situation, once the politics were settled, then such wide-ranging analyses became completely irrelevant. But arguably that is exactly the sort of analysis that mattered most of all and for the lack of which were are suffering today Climate change, of course some will say, is different.

Here is an excerpt from the Times article, which describes these dynamics:

Technically, then, Sir Nicholas’s opponents win the debate. But in practical terms, their argument has a weak link. They are assuming that the economic gains from, say, education will make future generations rich enough to make up for any damage caused by climate change. Sea walls will be able to protect cities; technology can allow crops to grow in new ways; better medicines can stop the spread of disease.
No one knows whether this is true, let alone desirable, because no one knows what life will be like on a planet that is five degrees hotter. "If ever there was an example where there was uncertainty, this is it," said Martin L. Weitzman, a Harvard economist who attended the debate.

While sitting there, I was reminded of the speeches that Alan Greenspan gave a few years ago about the risks of deflation. It wasn’t the most likely outcome, he said, but the consequences of it could be so bad that policy makers had to take steps to prevent it. Focusing attention on this point — the catastrophic risks of climate change — is Sir Nicholas’s biggest accomplishment, whatever you think of his math.

As Mr. Weitzman puts it, the Stern Review is "right for the wrong reasons."

Even its critics seem open to this idea. When Mr. Nordhaus and Sir Nicholas were exchanging e-mail messages before the debate — to their credit, some academics keep their arguments from becoming personal — Mr. Nordhaus sent a note that summed up his view. “I think it’s a great study, but it’s 50 years ahead of its time,” he recalled writing. "Since everybody else is 50 years behind the times, if you average the two, you might come out just right."

In other words, it’s time for a tax on carbon emissions.

Once your have the political answer in hand, analysis then ceases to be a tool that provides insight on alternatives and then becomes a tool of marketing, and sometimes a way to limit debate. Harvard's Martin Weitzman acknowledges this explicitly in the review paper (here in PDF) on Stern cited in the Times article:

The Stern Review is a political document –in Keynes’s phrase an essay in persuasion –as much as it is an economic analysis, and in fairness it needs ultimately to be judged by both standards. To its great credit the Review supports very strongly the politically- unpalatable idea, which no politician planning to remain in office anywhere wants to hear, that the world needs desperately to start confronting the reality that burning carbon has a significant externality cost that should be taken into account by being charged full-freight for doing it. (This should have been, but of course was not, the most central “inconvenient truth”of all in Al Gore'’s tale about inconvenient climate-change truths.) As the Review puts it, “establishing a carbon price, through tax, trading, or regulation, is an essential foundation for climate-change policy.” One can only wish that U.S. political leaders might have the wisdom to understand and the courage to act upon the breathtakingly-simple relatively-market-friendly idea that the right carbon tax could do much more to unleash the decentralized power of greedy, self seeking, capitalistic American inventive genius on the problem of developing commercially-feasible carbon-avoiding alternative technologies than all of the command-and-control schemes and patchwork subsidies making the rounds in Washington these days. As I have made clear here, a generous interpretation might also credit the Stern Review with intuiting the greater significance of insuring against catastrophic uncertainty than of consumption smoothing for the climate problem, even if this intuition remains subliminal and does not formally enter the analysis through the front door.
To be honest about the economic-analysis side, the Stern Review predetermines the outcome in favor of strong immediate action to curtail greenhouse gas emissions by creating a very low value of r ~1.4% via the indirect route of picking parameter values p ~ 0 and n~ 1 1that are more like theoretically-reasoned extreme lower bounds than empirically-plausible estimates of representative tastes. In this sense, it must be said staightforwardly that the subconsiously-reverse-engineered output of PAGE and the goal-oriented formal economic analysis of the Review are not worth a great deal. But we have also seen that a fair recognition of the truth that we are genuinely uncertain about what interest rate should be used to discount costs and benefits of climate changes a century from now brings discounting rates down from conventional values r 6% to much lower values of perhaps r ~ 2-3%, which would create a more intermediate sense of urgency somewhere between what the Stern
Review is advocating and the more modest measures to slow global warming advocated by its mainstream critics. The important remaining caveat is that such an intermediate position is still grounded in a conventional deterministic consumption-smoothing approach to the
economic analysis of climate change that, at least formally, ignores the issue of what to do about catastrophe insurance against the possibility of rare disasters.

On the political side of the Stern Review, my most charitable interpretation of its urgent tone is that the report is an essay in persuasion that is more about gut instincts regarding the horrors of uncertain rare disasters whose probabilities we do not know than it is about economic analysis as that term is conventionally understood. Although it is difficult enough to analyze people’s motives, much less the motives of a 600-page document, I can’'t help but think after reading it that the strong tone of morality and alarm is mostly reflecting a fear of what is potentially out there with greenhouse warming in (using ponderous terminology here to make sure the thought is exact) “the inherently-thick left tail of the reduced-form posterior-predictive probability distribution of the growth rate of a comprehensive measure of consumption that includes the natural environment.” I have argued that this inherently- thick left tail of g is an important aspect of the economics of climate change that every analyst –Stern and the critics of Stern –might do well to try to address more directly. History will judge whether the economic analysis of the Stern Review was more wrong or more right, and, if it was more right, whether as pure economic analysis it was right for the right reasons or it was right for the wrong reasons.

Posted on February 21, 2007 06:47 AM View this article | Comments (11)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

February 20, 2007

Al Gore 2008, Part 3: Washington Post on California Energy

The Washington Post has an excellent article on California’s energy policies (Thanks BK!), which adds some context to our ongoing analysis explaining why Al Gore will be the next president of the United States. Here are several key excerpts:

Do 2004 Blue states in fact have higher energy costs?

The reason for California's success is no secret: Electricity there is expensive, so people use less of it. Thanks to its use of pricey renewables and natural gas and its spurning of cheap coal, California's rates are almost 13 cents a kilowatt hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. The other most-energy-frugal states, such as New Jersey and New Hampshire, charge about 12 cents and 14 cents a kilowatt hour, respectively. Hawaii, which relies on oil-fired plants, tops EIA's list at about 21 cents.
"If the history of energy consumption in the U.S. has taught us anything, it is that cost drives conservation," says Chris Cooper, executive director of the Network for New Energy Choices.

Three of the nation's most profligate users of energy -- Wyoming, Kentucky and Alabama -- have one thing in common: low prices. Their electricity prices range from 5.25 cents a kilowatt hour to 7.06 cents, according to the EIA.

"What's dirt cheap tends to get treated like dirt," Rosenfeld says.

The District, also a wasteful user of energy, has a rate of 10.70 cents a kilowatt hour, only after recent rate increases. Virginia charges average 6.78 cents, and Maryland is at 10.03 cents.

Answer: Yes, consider:

CA, NJ, NH, HI, MD = Blue
WY, KY, VA, AL = Red

What are some of the effects of increasing energy prices?

Many manufacturers complain that the high electricity prices make the state an unappealing place to do business. Since 2001, California has lost 375,000 manufacturing jobs, a 19.9 percent drop that slightly exceeded the nationwide decline of 17 percent. Some firms -- such as Buck Knives, with 250 jobs, or bottle manufacturer Bomatic, with 100 jobs -- moved to states such as Idaho or Utah, where they said expenses, including energy, were lower.
Gino DiCaro, a spokesman for the California Manufacturers and Technology Association, says manufacturing investment is also "stalled" because of uncertainty about how the new legislation authorizing limits on greenhouse gases will affect energy costs.

"We've lost a lot of manufacturing jobs and we can't replace them," says DiCaro. While it's hard to blame the state's high energy costs alone, he says, "we know that . . . energy is one of the largest portions of a manufacturer's operating budget."

But at some point do high prices become a virtue?

But for those homeowners and businesses staying in California, the high prices have provided a big incentive for greater efficiency.
Laura Scher, chief executive of Working Assets, a wireless, long distance and credit card company that donates part of its revenue to socially progressive organizations, said she checked her home's meter every week during the electricity crisis in the summer of 2001 and unplugged her family's second refrigerator. "Part of it is our prices got really high," she said. But she added that California's habits go back much further. "It's sort of a culture to be an energy conserver here," she said.

Posted on February 20, 2007 05:43 PM View this article | Comments (5)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Energy Policy | Science + Politics

Prediction in Science and Policy

In the New York Times today Corneila Dean has an article about a new book by Orrin Pilkey and Linda Pilkey-Jarvis on the role of predictions in decision making. The book is titled Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future.

Here is an excerpt from the book’s description at Columbia University Press:

Writing for the general, nonmathematician reader and using examples from throughout the environmental sciences, Pilkey and Pilkey-Jarvis show how unquestioned faith in mathematical models can blind us to the hard data and sound judgment of experienced scientific fieldwork. They begin with a riveting account of the extinction of the North Atlantic cod on the Grand Banks of Canada. Next they engage in a general discussion of the limitations of many models across a broad array of crucial environmental subjects.
The book offers fascinating case studies depicting how the seductiveness of quantitative models has led to unmanageable nuclear waste disposal practices, poisoned mining sites, unjustifiable faith in predicted sea level rise rates, bad predictions of future shoreline erosion rates, overoptimistic cost estimates of artificial beaches, and a host of other thorny problems. The authors demonstrate how many modelers have been reckless, employing fudge factors to assure "correct" answers and caring little if their models actually worked.

A timely and urgent book written in an engaging style, Useless Arithmetic evaluates the assumptions behind models, the nature of the field data, and the dialogue between modelers and their "customers."

Naomi Oreskes offers the following praise quote:

Orrin H. Pilkey and Linda Pilkey-Jarvis argue that many models are worse than useless, providing a false sense of security and an unwarranted confidence in our scientific expertise. Regardless of how one responds to their views, they can't be ignored. A must-read for anyone seriously interested in the role of models in contemporary science and policy.

In an interview the authors comment:

The problem is not the math itself, but the blind acceptance and even idolatry we have applied to the quantitative models. These predictive models leave citizens befuddled and unable to defend or criticize model-based decisions. We argue that we should accept the fact that we live in a qualitative world when it comes to natural processes. We must rely on qualitative models that predict only direction, trends, or magnitudes of natural phenomena, and accept the possibility of being imprecise or wrong to some degree. We should demand that when models are used, the assumptions and model simplifications are clearly stated. A better method in many cases will be adaptive management, where a flexible approach is used, where we admit there are uncertainties down the road and we watch and adapt as nature rolls on.

I have not yet read the book, but I will.

Orrin participated in our project on Prediction in the Earth Sciences in the late 1990s, contributing a chapter on beach nourishment. The project resulted in this book:

Sarewitz, D., R.A. Pielke, Jr., and R. Byerly, Jr., (eds.) 2000: Prediction: Science, decision making and the future of nature, Island Press, Washington, DC.

Our last chapter can be found here in PDF.

Posted on February 20, 2007 10:20 AM View this article | Comments (5)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Prediction and Forecasting

February 18, 2007

Al Gore 2008, Part 2: A Comparison with the 2004 Evangelical Wedge

Last Friday I speculated that Al Gore will win the 2008 presidency in no small part due to the emergence of climate change as a wedge issue. A wedge issue well used in a political campaign will serve to split your opposition's base and lead to a turn-out advantage among those motivated to vote. As a Pew Research analysis explained:

In electoral politics, however, what often matters most in measuring an issue's potential impact is not whether a great many people care about it, but whether even a relatively small number care about it enough to base their vote on it. Indeed, the classic "wedge issue" is one that draws more of one kind of partisan than another to the polls.

So to explore this issue further I thought I'd compare the climate issue to evangelicals in the population. In the 2004 election the mobilization of evangelical voters was widely attributed as a successful strategy for George W. Bush. Here is what I found.

First, I gathered data on the self-described proportion of voters who call themselves 'evangelical" from a poll taken in 2003-200 by the Annenberg Center (here in PDF). The following graph, left panel, compares the ranking of Evangelical voters with rank in percentage of 2004 presidential vote received by George W. Bush. Note that data was available for only 34 states. The right panel repeats the graph I presented in the earlier Gore post comparing the ranking of per capita CO2 emissions with rank in percentage of 2004 presidential vote received by George W. Bush.

The rank correlation between evangelicals and Bush vote is 0.69. Recall that it was 0.67 between per capita CO2 and Bush vote. Very interesting! (Note Ohio and Florida in that swing-state zone.)

Now compare the distribution of states in the following chart, color coded to represent the vote outcome in the 2004 election.

So what should you take from this comparison? If evangelical issues did indeed serve as a "wedge issue" in 2004 to the benefit the Republicans and George W. Bush, then the baseline conditions for the climate issue leading to 2008 suggest that it is equally amenable to exploitation for political gain among the Democrats, but particularly (and perhaps uniquely) for Al Gore.

Posted on February 18, 2007 10:10 AM View this article | Comments (14)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science + Politics

Some Sunday NASA News Vignettes

A few items on NASA stitched together . . .

In a Q&A with the New York Times Sunday Magazine, NASA’s Drew Shindell predicts that we’ll know less about the climate system if his group at NASA doesn’t get more funding:

If your department is that politicized, how does that affect research? Well, five years from now, we will know less about our home planet that we know now. The future does not have money set aside to maintain even the current level of observations. There were proposals for lots of climate-monitoring instruments, most of which have been canceled.

To understand NASA’s budget priorities doesn’t require one to be a rocket scientist. This Reuter’s news story contains what may be the most laughable cost estimate from NASA that I’ve seen in a long time, for deflecting a killer asteroid from hitting the Earth.

[Former NASA astronaut Rusty] Schweickart wants to see the United Nations adopt procedures for assessing asteroid threats and deciding if and when to take action.
The favored approach to dealing with a potentially deadly space rock is to dispatch a spacecraft that would use gravity to alter the asteroid's course so it no longer threatens Earth, said astronaut Ed Lu, a veteran of the International Space Station.

The so-called Gravity Tractor could maintain a position near the threatening asteroid, exerting a gentle tug that, over time, would deflect the asteroid.

An asteroid the size of Apophis, which is about 460 feet long, would take about 12 days of gravity-tugging, Lu added.

Mission costs are estimated at $300 million.

NASA’s track record of cost and schedule performance does not lead one to optimism about any projection of costs, as indicated by this report from the Seattle Times:

Boeing received a bonus of $425.3 million — 92 percent of the potential award — for work on the international space station that ran eight years late and cost more than twice what was expected, according to federal auditors.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a report set for release today that the fee was paid on a $13.4 billion so-called "cost-plus" contract where NASA reimburses all costs and pays a bonus for exceptional performance. Raytheon and Lockheed Martin received similar bonuses for troubled programs.

"NASA paid most of the available fee on all of the contracts we reviewed — including on projects that showed cost increases, schedule delays and technical problems," the GAO said in its report for U.S. Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., who chairs the House Science Committee.

Maybe they should have instead sent that bonus money to Dr. Shindell’s lab. Alternatively, if in fact we’ll know less in five years, maybe we should stop climate research altogether, as it seems like we know a lot right now . . .

Posted on February 18, 2007 08:08 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Space Policy

Should I Care About Cognitive Misers Fighting Over My Wikipedia Biography?

Some time ago a few of my students emailed me (from a bar somewhere I believe) to alert me to the fact that I had a Wikipedia biography page. I had known this already because one of the site administrators had emailed me for a photo. I never though much of it, but my students seemed to think it was cool (or maybe they were laughing at me, it is sometimes hard to tell;-).

It has recently come to my attention that over the past few months some folks are engaged in a minor skirmish over my biography, something I assume is fairly common on biographies, and elsewhere in Wikipedia (Politicization of knowledge? Go figure). It appears that some anonymous people are using the biography to try to paint me as a . . . Republican (cue breaking glass!;-). (Perhaps they are some of the less thoughtful Grist readers, as opposed to most who comment there, where character assassination in mainline posts appears to be accepted behavior.)

First, let’s state for the record that such insinuations are simply wrong. I suppose they are advanced by the disingenuous for the benefit of a small set of cognitive misers for whom such labels are useful shortcuts that help to avoid actually engaging in the substance of my academic policy work. Apparently some feel threatened enough by my work enough to try to influence how I am publicly perceived. To get a sense of the sort of juvenile editorial changes taking place over there, one recent edit removed references to liberal-leaning groups who had favorably cited my work.

I typically don’t pay much attention to such things because the folks who care only about assigning political labels in litmus-test fashion are probably not the ones who are going to be too interested in policy analyses anyway. After all, why spend the time understanding nuances of a complex topic when a pejorative political label is available as a convenient mental shortcut? We saw some of this from the rabid right in the (mostly deleted) comments here on my recent post about Al Gore.

I have also recently learned that Wikipedia frowns upon an individual editing their own biography, which seems fair, so rather than seek to create a more accurate page myself, I have decided to ask Prometheus readers if this is an issue I should even be concerned about, and if so, what to do about it.

I don’t have much quibble about the details of the specific facts presented in the current entry. But the facts selected for highlighting do cherry pick one of literally hundreds of media appearances (i.e., Fox News) and one of hundreds of articles (i.e, Regulation), I suppose the selectivity is to make the point that I have at times interacted with people on the political right. (Shock! Horror!) For the record, I was happy to accept an interview with Fox News (as I do with most all requests from the media) as their viewers (in my opinion) would benefit from hearing about the stuff we do, just like CNN viewers (for whom I have also appeared). And I also happily accepted an invitation to rework one of my peer-reviewed articles for Regulation (published by the libertarian Cato Institute) as their readers (in my opinion) would also benefit from hearing about the stuff we do, just like The New Republic readers (for whom I’ve also published).

To be absolutely clear, as a policy scholar I am happy to have people from any political persuasion show in interest in our work, and I’ll continue to write for and speak with people who are interested that come from a range of perspectives -- Democrat, Green, Libertarian, Republican, Socialist, Labour, Liberal Democrat, Conservative, etc. etc.. I won't give in to efforts to intimidate by casting perjorative political labels. Ideally, members of all of these political parties will see the inescapable wisdom is our work, though I won't hold my breath;-) And for the most part I’ll also continue to ignore the more inane criticisms.

So my question, Prometheus readers, is: should I care about the Wikipedia biography?

Posted on February 18, 2007 01:50 AM View this article | Comments (34)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science + Politics

February 16, 2007

Why Al Gore Will be the Next President of the United States

Al Gore will be the next president of the United States. He will win with at least 293 electoral votes, and perhaps in a landslide. This post explains why.

Last week I posted up a graph from The Economist that I found intriguing. The graph showed how California’s electricity usage was about half the national average and even less than the average in the "Red States" (i.e., those that voted Republican in the 2004 Presidential election). In the comments astute Prometheus readers pointed out some important issues, and this motivated me to look at some data a bit more closely and here is what I found and why I think it is important. This post is intended to motivate discussion and comment. My students can tell you how well I predicted the last presidential election;-)

The difference in per capita carbon dioxide emissions between Red and Blue states (from the 2004 elections) is startling (data on CO2 emissions expressed in million metric tons available here in xls. and state population data available here in .xls, and in this analysis I use 2003 values. Election data is from CNN.com).

Red State

Mean (state): 31.7
Median (state): 24.4

Blue State

Mean (state): 15.2
Median (state): 14.4

This means that in 2004 the per-state carbon dioxide emissions in states that voted for George Bush were about twice as large on a per capita basis than those in states that voted for John Kerry. The figure below shows a scatter plot of where each of the 50 states ranks (from 1 to 50) on per capita carbon dioxide emissions and the share of the popular vote won by George W. Bush in 2004. The correlation is a stunning 0.67.

Global climate change was a non-issue in the 2004 elections, so this relationship was a correlate of other factors that determined the election and therefore not a direct factor in the election outcome. It does however provide a baseline for understanding the role of carbon dioxide emissions in the politics of the 2008 election.

2008 will be different than 2004. Elites have decided that global climate change is an issue worth politicizing, that is to say, worth making an issue in politics. Therefore, carbon dioxide emissions will be an issue in the 2008 election.

Obvious point #1: Policy proposals focused on reducing carbon dioxide emissions all involve placing a cost on carbon. Proposals that have been advanced include a cap (on total emissions) and trade (of permits to emit under the cap), a carbon tax, incentives to adopt renewables (e.g., RPS), and others. The specifics matter less than the fact that all involve adding costs to emissions that today are not present (other than as externalities).

Obvious point #2: Additional costs on carbon dioxide emissions will disproportionately hit those voters (and businesses that employ voters) in states with high carbon emissions per capita. Now individual voters may not be so sensitized to this issue. But industry, professional associations, state elected officials and agency officials, national politicians, and others whose careers are based on the provision and use of energy will surely be aware of this issue and its consequences. It is true that some in industry, even in the energy industry, have joined the calls for action on carbon dioxide. But it seems reasonable to think that the smaller the cost (or perceived cost) of policies on carbon dioxide, the more likely that such policies will be accepted. Similarly, the higher the costs, the greater the likelihood of opposition.

Consider the following table which shows the 50 states listed with highest per capita carbon dioxide emissions at the top to the lowest at the bottom, shaded to indicate how they voted in the 2004 presidential election. With few exceptions the higher per capita emitting states voted Republican and vice versa.

It is likely that no matter what happens, in 2008 the reddest red states will likely stay red and the bluest blue states will stay blue. This leaves two categories of states to consider, outliers and swing states.

The outliers include Idaho (50th in per capita CO2 emissions, 2nd highest in 2004 vote share to George Bush), Pennsylvania (19 and 33), Florida (40 and 15), Arizona (37 and 25), Delaware (22 and 39), and Virginia (35 and 23). I am going to assume that ID, DE, and PA are unlikely to change in 2008, and while FL, AZ, and VA may be in play, they don’t have to be in the scenario I am here developing.

This leaves the swing states, defined as the states in which the difference between Republican and Democrat in 2004 was less than 5%. These states and their per capita CO2 emissions are (bold indicates a 2004 Red State):

Oregon 11.3
New Hamp. 15.8
Michigan 18.1
Wisconsin 18.9
Nevada 19.1
Colorado 19.5
Minnesota 19.7
Pennsylvania 21.6
Ohio 22.8
Iowa 26.3
New Mexico 30.3

If climate change is a major issue in 2008 then there is a decided advantage in these states to the Democrats, both for holding on to the 2004 state victories and for changing the others from Red to Blue. Colorado and Nevada are below the national average for carbon dioxide emissions and Ohio and Iowa stand to benefit immensely from an ethanol bidding war (already underway). New Mexico has less to gain but also less to offer in terms of electoral votes.

If it seems a stretch to use per capita carbon dioxide emissions as a factor in thinking about electoral politics, consider the following in the aftermath of the 2006 mid-term congressional election:

States with 2 Republican Senators

Average CO2 emissions 36.3 (median = 28.4)

States with 2 Democratic Senators

Average CO2 emissions 14.7 (median = 14.4)

States with 1 Democratic and 1 Republican Senator

Average CO2 emissions 23.1 (median = 22.2)

How will Al Gore win the presidency?

He will continue to take actions that will keep climate change an important issue that cannot be neglected in political discourse. This will involve congressional testimony, a book release, a global set of coordinated concerts, and other actions. He has been nominated for an Oscar and a Nobel Prize. He'll get some help, whether intended or not as the international community is focused on climate change and even the Bush Administration is now helping to keep the topic in play. These factors together will ensure that the issue remains salient and Mr. Gore remains at the fore. He will enter the race late and dramatically. The "will he or won't he" story will overshadow his competition. And on the major campaign issue of the Iraq War he is exceedingly well positioned.

Hillary Clinton cannot compete with Mr. Gore on climate change (and she has an Iraq vote to explain, plus other issues), and is probably weaker on this issue than John McCain, and not much different than other Republicans who might gain the nomination, especially those who still have time to articulate an aggressive position of climate change. By comparison, consider how the three parties in the U.K. are falling over each other to be viewed among voters as the more aggressive on climate change. For John Edwards and Barak Obama, climate change is just not their gig. If Al Gore can win his party’s nomination, which is certainly not guaranteed, the general election would be his to lose.

If he does run, and he does win his party’s nomination, then as of right now I predict that he will get at least 293 electoral votes, comprised of the 2004 blue states plus NV, CO, OH, and IA. Add in a surprise or two (e.g., FL – two hurricane seasons between now and the 2008 election, AZ, VA) and it is then a landslide.

2008 will be the climate change election and Al Gore will be the next president of the United States.

Posted on February 16, 2007 02:36 AM View this article | Comments (35)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

February 15, 2007

Another Reason to View Adaptation as Sustainable Development

This news story from Reuters highlights the consequences of neglecting certain areas of research and policy:

One billion poor suffer from neglected diseases: WHO
Last Updated: 2007-02-14 9:44:10 -0400 (Reuters Health)

JAKARTA (Reuters) - One billion people in tropical countries are still suffering from debilitating and disfiguring diseases associated with poverty, but many remain untreated due to official neglect, health officials said on Wednesday.

Despite the existence of inexpensive and safe treatment, those who suffer from diseases such as leprosy, elephantiasis and yaws remain untreated due to a lack of resources and political will, said Jai Narain, South East Asia director of communicable diseases at the World Health Organization (WHO).

"These tropical diseases have been neglected by policy makers, by the research community and also by the international community," Nairan told a news conference at the start of an international meeting to tackle tropical diseases.

"But at the same time these diseases cause considerable amount of suffering, disability, disfigurement and even social economic impact, particularly for populations which are extremely marginalised," he said.

Nairan said the fact that the diseases were not in the headlines and not global problems like polio, HIV/AIDS and malaria contributed to the lack of attention.

"These diseases are closely related to poverty. The elimination of such diseases would be a significant step toward poverty reduction," he said. Many who contract the diseases suffer from discrimination and are shunned by their communities, said Nyoman Kandun, director general for communicable disease control at the Indonesian health ministry. . . .

Posted on February 15, 2007 07:03 AM View this article | Comments (5)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Health

February 14, 2007

Final Chapter, Hurricanes and IPCC, Book IV

Two years ago NOAA's Chris Landsea resigned from participating in the IPCC citing concerns that the chapter on hurricanes had been politicized, specifically citing the role that Kevin Trenberth, IPCC convening lead author for the chapter that covered hurricanes, had playing in an October, 2004 media event hyping a hurricane-global warming connection.

With this post we'd like to follow up and in the process close the book on this particular dispute -- at least for us here at Prometheus. The "hurricane wars" are probably far from over, but we should acknowledge that both Chris Landsea and Kevin Trenberth both come out of this situation looking pretty good. Both can and should feel vindicated. Read on if you are interested in a few final details from the last chapter in this story.

The first signs that there might be a happy ending to this saga were evident in June, 2005 when Kevin Trenberth authored a commentary in Science in which he wrote:

[T]here is no sound theoretical basis for drawing any conclusions about how anthropogenic change affects hurricane numbers or tracks, and thus how many hit land.

This led me to conclude at the time:

Landsea and Trenberth are scientifically on the same page, and the perspectives now being espoused by Trenberth [in Science] are (in my interpretation) entirely consistent with what Landsea argued at the time he stepped down from the IPCC.

So it shouldn't have been too surprising when the IPCC accurately reported the state of scientific understandings of tropical cyclones and climate change in its recent summary for policy makers, despite some last-minute concerns. (Of course, the WMO Consensus Statement was probably the most significant factor shaping the IPCC's final judgments.) When the full IPCC WG I report comes out, I have no doubts there will be some room for quibbling about the details on this subject, but the big picture presented in the SPM appears to me to be just about right.

Yesterday in an online Q&A with the public organized by the Washington Post Kevin Trenberth addressed an explicit question about this issue:

Washington, D.C.: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Chris Landsea resigned a year ago from the IPCC and leveled charges that the IPCC, and you in particular, had a overly-politicized view of global warming trends. (link to washingtonpost.com here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29397-2005Jan22.html). Specifically, I believe that Landsea objected to the fact that some on the IPCC would "utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming." I assume that you disagree with Mr. Landsea. Do you believe that recent hurricane patterns have been negatively affected by global warming?
Kevin Trenberth: This is what the IPCC says in the Policy Makers Summary: "There is observational evidence for an increase of intense tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic since about 1970, correlated with increases of tropical sea surface temperatures. There are also suggestions of increased intense tropical cyclone activity in some other regions where concerns over data quality are greater. Multi-decadal variability and the quality of the tropical cyclone records prior to routine satellite observations in about 1970 complicate the detection of long-term trends in tropical cyclone activity. There is no clear trend in the annual numbers of tropical cyclones. " This was agreed to by the US Govt and crafted by the lead authors present (including me). Landsea's comments were not correct.

Dr. Trenberth stuck to what the IPCC concluded and did not take the bait offered by this questioner. He was also taking the high ground in claiming that the IPCC SPM accurately reflected the current state of the science. But Chris Landsea should feel good as well because there can be no doubt that his actions helped to ensure that the IPCC got things right in the end.

Kudos to both, but it's time to move on.

Posted on February 14, 2007 03:56 PM View this article | Comments (7)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

Words of Wisdom in The Daily Camera

There is an excellent letter to the editor in today's Daily Camera (our local newspaper) by Robert Davis, who comments favorably in reaction to a recent op-ed by Chris Mooney and Alan Sokal. Mr. Davis wisely distinguishes advice as policy analysis, and underscores the importance of honest brokers of policy alternatives. Here is Mr. Davis' letter in full:

Your editorial pages for Feb. 11 contained an abundance of thoughtful and relevant writing. In particular, the piece by Mooney and Sokal offers a welcome defense of science as evidence-based reasoning that deserves protection from ideologues ("Taking the spin out of science," Feb. 11).
As a policy analyst who worked as a civil servant in the office of one of the president`s cabinet secretaries through three administrations, I would offer the caution that scientists themselves can become ideologues and need to be reminded of their roles in the decision-making apparatus of a government.

Effective and helpful policy analysis for the head of an agency includes laying out all of the alternatives for addressing a particular problem and exploring the consequences of each alternative. It is in this phase that scientists make their most valuable contribution.

In the case of global warming, we need desperately to know the consequences of the actions we might take. I include costs as one of the consequences, and, of course, probabilities must be addressed, because, in any policy-making, certainty is the rarest of commodities.

Scientists are least helpful when they try to short-cut the policy analysis by prescribing what we must do. At this point, they stop being scientists and the most visible among them become pontificating celebrities. Any government has an obligation to keep its scientists from making fools of themselves, but it is a fine line to hoe.

Certainly, we want the opinions of scientists at the appropriate point in the process of making policy. Without judging the Bush administration or its critics, I would maintain that we have a right to expect that scientists be held to the rules of rational, effective and disciplined policy analysis.

ROBERT DAVIS
Boulder

Posted on February 14, 2007 12:32 PM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | The Honest Broker

February 13, 2007

An Evaluation of U.S. Self-Evaluation on Climate Policy

The Bush Administration has provided the most substantive presentation of its climate policies (that I have seen at least) in the form of a speech yesterday by Kurt Volker, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs before the German Marshall Fund in Berlin, Germany. With this post are a few reactions to this self-evaluation of U.S. climate policies presented by the Bush Administration. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I come to a different conclusion than the Bush Administration when evaluating U.S. climate policies.

The speech begins by acknowledging that the US policies on climate change are not so warmly received in Europe, with Mr. Volker suggesting that the U.S. is "misunderstood." Then there is this unfortunate spin:

As all of you know, President Bush devoted a significant portion of his State of the Union address last month to the subject of climate change-and to what the U.S. intends to do about it.

Here is that "significant portion" in full:

America is on the verge of technological breakthroughs that will enable us to live our lives less dependent on oil. And these technologies will help us be better stewards of the environment, and they will help us to confront the serious challenge of global climate change.

The Bush Administration seems yet to appreciate that being well understood requires a basis in trust, a condition that is hard maintain in the face of constant spin and heavy-handed information management. Those still following Mr. Volker after this statement were treated to an in depth self-evaluation of U.S. policies, well worth reading.

Mr. Volker starts out with "some clear, simple statements":

*The United States, and this Administration, care deeply about climate change.
*We agree that human activity contributes to global warming.

*We support the recent IPCC report, in which U.S. scientists played a leading role.

*We are committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

*We have made tremendous investments in reducing emissions.

*We are working multilaterally to do so.

*We are continuing these efforts.

*These efforts are producing results that stand up favorably against anyone in the world.

Just because we haven't joined the Kyoto Protocol doesn't make any of these statements less true.

Mr. Volker then directly confronts the U.S.-Europe split on climate change:

Now, I know there is a deeply held view among many in Europe that the U.S. Government doesn't get it. That we don't care about climate change, that we are doing nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and that Europe, while perhaps not perfect, is doing a far better job of tackling the issue than the United States. This proposition--no matter how simple, no matter how widely held, and no matter how much it fits a pop-culture "blame-the-United States" paradigm--is completely wrong, on every point.

This statement (remember, delivered in Germany) is quite bold and aggressive. What accounts for this new-found self-confidence and aggressiveness? Mr. Volker does not make his audience wait long for the answer:

Let me start first with the data, because it is important to have the facts on the table. No question: The United States is the world's largest emitter of CO2. Everybody in the room knows this. But this fact says no more about the United States, than the fact that Germany leads Europe in emissions says about Germany.
The United States is number one in greenhouse gas emissions primarily because it is the number one economy in the world. With 5% of the world's population we produce 25% of global wealth. And despite being relatively clean and green, Germany leads Europe in emissions, because it is Europe's largest economy. Our emissions are not out of line with the size of our economy. And it's worth noting: the International Energy Agency is forecasting that China, with a smaller economy, is expected to surpass U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2009.

More important than current emissions is the trend line. What is actually happening to emissions? Are they being reduced? This, after all, is what Kyoto is supposed to address.

According to data from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, from 2000-2004--the most recent period for which we have good, comparative data--U.S. greenhouse gas emissions increased by 1.3 percent. This is an increase, but a very modest increase. The EU-25, on the other hand, increased collective emissions by 2.1 percent.

And, no, this is not because the new EU members added since the 2004 expansion run dirtier economies than the previous 15 members, and this then bumps up the numbers. Actually, the new members have the opposite effect. Those nations--by moving away from some older energy technologies like brown coal--are part of the good news story. If the new EU members did not bring down the average, the old EU-15 would get a worse report card--having increased emissions by 2.4 percent during this same time period.

Germany, I should state, had an admirable record of actually cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 0.7 percent during this time period--but Germany's efforts were overshadowed by increases in most other EU economies.

Now let's be honest--even a 2.4 percent increase for the EU-15 is a very modest increase. But given the way this issue gets talked about publicly in Europe, I would venture to say that few people in Europe know that from 2000 to 2004, EU-15 emissions grew at nearly double the U.S. rate, and that Europe, at least during this period, has been moving away from-not towards-its Kyoto target of an 8 percent cut.

The Bush Administration has finally, clumsily, begun moving toward a realpolitik approach to climate change, one that I recommended almost three years ago:

. . . consider this amazing fact: if President Bush in 2001 had, instead of pulling out of the Kyoto process, simply committed the United States to participate and then did nothing else differently since that time, then the United States would be closer to meeting its Kyoto targets than EU members Ireland, Spain, Austria, Portugal, and about even with Denmark.
Ironically, expressing support for the Kyoto process but not taking dramatic action to implement it is the exact climate policy pursued by the Administration of Bill Clinton whose approach to climate policy is substantively very similar to the approach of the Bush Administration. But the two administration's approaches to climate politics could not be more different.

Of course, success in international politics does not necessarily mean good policy will result. . .

The Bush Administration’s new, aggressive approach is based on the surprising discovery that European greenhouse gas emissions have increased faster than those in the United States. Mr. Volker’s talk is even suggestively titled "Post-Kyoto Surprise: America's Quiet Efforts to Cut Greenhouse Gases Are Producing Results." Because the United States over 2000-2004 did relatively better than Europe in the rate of greenhouse gas emissions growth, this has apparently given the Bush Administration the sense that they can thumb their nose at the Europeans and say "nya-nya-nya." An approach more politically effective (from the perspective of the Bush Administration) might have instead been to share in the difficulties of reducing emissions, rather than presenting the US-EU as being opposed to one another. I have doubts that the Bush Administration will ever learn the merits of diplomacy.

What goes unsaid by Mr. Vokler is that a more relevant metric of policy success (as compared, say, to political posturing) in reducing greenhouse gas emissions is not the level of emissions of the EU, but rather the absolute amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And on this count both the United States and Europe are performing quite poorly, the small differences between the two over 2000-2004 is pretty much irrelevant.

More fundamentally, a reduction in the growth rate of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions has occurred not by policy design, but by happenstance. To be fair, the Bush Administration has always emphasized reducing the amount of greenhouse gas emissions per unit of economic output, but its targets have been no more aggressive than the long-term rate of transformation of the economy to being less energy intensive. The Bush Administration would be on more solid ground claiming policy success for reductions in emissions intensity greater than the background trend if it had actually presented such outcomes as policy goals at sometime in the past. Instead, it has stumbled upon an outcome that it never actually sought and claimed it as the result of intentional policy action.

It surely must be uncomfortable for the EU to see the Bush Administration trumpeting its greenhouse emissions reductions "successes" after rudely pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001. And on the count the Bush Administration once again demonstrates its utter incompetence in international relations to the detriment of its own political agenda. Upon learning that U.S. greenhouse gas emissions were less than that of the EU over a short 4-year period, rather than rubbing the European’s noses in their own struggles over climate policy, the Bush Administration might have instead taken a more conciliatory approach. It has once again favored playing politics rather than focusing on the real policy challenges presented by climate change. Ironically, those favoring a more aggressive approach to emissions reductions should welcome the Bush Administration’s ham-handedness in helping to keep the issue alive. A more politically sophisticated approach might not have the same results.

Finally, the notion of adaptation does not appear in the Bush Administration’s self-evaluation. Any climate policy that purports to be comprehensive but does not discuss adaptation must be considered incomplete at best and more likely a failure.

Posted on February 13, 2007 09:04 AM View this article | Comments (21)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

February 12, 2007

An Inconvenient Survey

Last Friday I visited Savannah, Georgia to participate in a viewing and discussion of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” This is the second time I have had a chance to participate in such an event, and it was a pleasure to participate in this event (including getting to see a thoughtful talk by Georgia Tech’s peter Webster).. This time I thought I’d collect a bit of data. So like the college professor that I am I gave a pop quiz right after the movie. After watching a documentary on climate change one should have the basic facts down, right? Unfortunately, no. Here is the pop quiz I gave with answers on the other side.

1. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its 4th Assessment Report last Friday. It projects a likely global average temperature increase for 2100 of (degrees C):

A. 1.1 to 6.4
B. 1.5 to 4.5
C. 5.0 to 11.5
D. 7.0 to 9.0

2. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its 4th Assessment Report last Friday. It projects a (mid-range) global average sea level rise for 2100 of:

A. 16 inches
B. 48 inches
C. 10 feet
D. 70 feet

3. If the Kyoto Protocol is fully implemented, including US participation, the effects on global average temperatures in 2080 would be:

A. Undetectable
B. Reduce the projected increase by 0.5 degrees
C. Reduce the projected increase by 1.0 degrees
D. Reduce the projected increase by 2.0 degrees

4. If the global greenhouse gas emissions magically stopped right now global average temperatures would:

A. Stop increasing immediately
B. Continue increasing for many decades

5. In order to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide requires that net global emissions be reduced from today’s levels:

A. to 1990 levels
B. by 20%
C. by 50%
D. by 100%

Answers:

1. A
2. A
3. A
4. B
5. D

No one in the audience of about 200 people admitted to getting all 5 correct. Judging by the show of hands very few came close to the correct answers on 1, 2, 3 or 5. Most people did get #4 correct. In fact, on 1, 2, and 3 the overwhelming answers were C and D and 5 it was A and B. And this was a very educated, engaged audience. I would venture that a scientific survey would find that Mr. Gore’s movie is more apt to mislead than bring the viewer to a clear understanding of the center of gravity of scientific opinion on climate change.

Is it alarmist? By effect on its uninformed audience, I'd hypothesize based on this nonscientific data set that it is.

What was most troubling was the comments of a few people in the audience who reacted pretty negatively to my remarks. One person commented (paraphrase):

We are here to talk about the end of the world and you want to talk about hurricanes. It is energy policy only we need to talk about, not disasters.

Of course Mr. Gore’s movie is chock full of references to disasters, most notably Katrina. The amazing thing to me is that about 6 people from Savannah that I spoke to in some depth, including taxi drivers and lawyers, mentioned to me that Savannah is fortunate to be in a hurricane shadow – it can’t be hit. The reality is that it can and will be hit, and hit hard. And to the extent that the focus on climate change distracts from hurricane preparation, when that fateful day occurs, the resulting disaster will inevitably be worse.

And if you don’t think that the focus on climate-change-as-energy-policy distracts from the need to adapt to climate change, consider this amazing admission from a state official in New Mexico, reacting to our recent paper in Nature:

The problem, Pielke said, is that advocates fear efforts to adapt to climate change will blunt calls to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
That fear has affected New Mexico's ambitious governmental climate change effort.

A report last year from the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer concluded that "adaptation" is critical to coping with climate change and population growth.

But most of the state's climate change effort has focused on cutting greenhouse gas emissions rather than on coping with the collision between a growing population and a changing climate.

Jim Norton, one of the state officials heading up the effort, agrees with Pielke that adaptation is critical. But there was a fear, Norton said, that too much emphasis "could sort of divert attention away from solving the problem of growing greenhouse gas emissions." [emphasis added]

Reducing emissions is a challenge well worth undertaking. But when it becomes such an overwhelming focus that nothing else is allowed, especially adaptation in mal-adapated communities, then a virtue becomes a vice. An Inconvenient Truth mislead because it suggests that we only need do one thing to respond to the threat of climate change. The reality is that we must do many things, among which we must evaluate tradeoffs, costs and benefits, risks and uncertainties. And that is a real inconvenient truth.

Posted on February 12, 2007 02:44 AM View this article | Comments (26)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty

February 11, 2007

The Honest Broker

The Honest Broker is soon going to the printer with Cambridge University Press. Amazon has the cover up, here it is:

If you are qualified (an editor, in the media, a popular blogger, etc.) and you would like a review copy, please email me at pielke@colorado.edu with your details and I will add you to the list I am sending to CUP. Others can pre-order the book here and here. Thanks!

Posted on February 11, 2007 11:54 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | The Honest Broker

February 10, 2007

So This is Interesting

Bjorn Lomborg writing in The Guardian 7 February 2007:

Imagine if the director of the CIA published a new assessment of Iran, saying: "I hope this report will shock people, governments into taking more serious action."

We wrote here on Prometheus 25 January 2007:

Imagine, by contrast, if the Director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, another organization with an agenda to be "policy neutral," were reported in the media to say of the agency’s latest assessment on Iran, "I hope that the report will shock people, governments into taking more serious action."

Not a huge deal, and maybe just a simple coincidence, but we academics tend to notice and be a bit prickly about such things . . .

Posted on February 10, 2007 01:32 PM View this article | Comments (7)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

February 09, 2007

Quote from Nelson Polsby

Nelson Polsby, a political scientist widely respected for his pioneering studies of Congress and political parties, died earlier this week. This interesting quote is from an interview with Prof. Polsby in his obituary in

"There are often too many facts and not infrequently too many different versions of the facts. Rather than speaking for themselves, various facts have what we have come to refer to as spokespersons."
Posted on February 9, 2007 02:08 PM View this article | Comments (8)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science + Politics

Air Capture Prize

This prize looks to raise the stature of air capture technologies that we have discussed here before (Hat tip: James Annan).

Posted on February 9, 2007 04:28 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Technology Policy

February 08, 2007

New Blog at CU!

Tom Yulsman, an occasional contributor here and professor of Journalism here at CU, along with colleagues have started a new weblog focused on Environmental Journalism. Check it out here!

Posted on February 8, 2007 09:27 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Hodge Podge

February 07, 2007

Clarifying IPCC AR4 Statements on Sea Level Rise

The statements in the IPCC’s AR4 SPM released last week on sea level rise have led to some confusion and conflict over what exactly they said and how it compares to the 2001 IPCC TAR. The IPCC could have made it easier for all of us by presenting the data in a comparable manner. This post reflects my efforts to make sense of this situation. I hope that experts on the subject will weigh in on my initial thoughts.

I conclude that the IPCC has indeed lowered its top end estimates of sea level rise over the 21st century relative to 1990, in contrast to the conclusions at RealClimate which suggest that this has in fact not occurred. For details, please read on.

First, what did the IPCC 2001 TAR say about sea level? It reported:

For the complete range of AOGCMs and SRES scenarios and including uncertainties in land-ice changes, permafrost changes and sediment deposition, global average sea level is projected to rise by 0.09 to 0.88 m over 1990 to 2100, with a central value of 0.48 m

Some information was not included:

In addition, Warrick et al. included an allowance for ice-dynamical changes in the WAIS. The range we have given does not include such changes. The contribution of the WAIS is potentially important on the longer term, but it is now widely agreed that major loss of grounded ice from the WAIS and consequent accelerated sea-level rise are very unlikely during the 21st century.

and

The range we have given also does not take account of uncertainty in modelling of radiative forcing, the carbon cycle, atmospheric chemistry, or storage of water in the terrestrial environment.

This is quite similar to the just-released IPCC AR4 (PDF) which says:

Models used to date do not include uncertainties in climate-carbon cycle feedback nor do they include the full effects of changes in ice sheet flow, because a basis in published literature is lacking.

The IPCC AR4 does apparently incorporate information from Greenland and Antarctica:

The projections include a contribution due to increased ice flow from Greenland and Antarctica at the rates observed for 1993-2003, but these flow rates could increase or decrease in the future.

It suggests that on the increasing side that:

For example, if this contribution were to grow linearly with global average temperature change, the upper ranges of sea level rise for SRES scenarios shown in Table SPM-3 would increase by 0.1 m to 0.2 m. Larger values cannot be excluded, but understanding of these effects is too limited to assess their likelihood or provide a best estimate or an upper bound for sea level rise.

Over at RealClimate they seem to have added to the confusion by asserting incorrectly:

Note that some media have been comparing apples with pears here: they claimed IPCC has reduced its upper sea level limit from 88 to 59 cm, but the former number from the TAR did include this ice dynamics uncertainty, while the latter from the AR4 does not

As documented above the TAR did not include such uncertainties, writing of its Figure 11.12:

Note that this range does not allow for uncertainty relating to ice-dynamical changes in the West Antarctic ice sheet.

I asked RealClimate about this, and they responded:

The TAR range included mass-balance estimates for the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets (though did not include dynamical changes - i.e. changes due to changes in ice streams, calving, grounding line movement, etc which were then thought to be small). Recent observations point to the vital importance of such terms in assessing the net mass balance, thus since they are highly uncertain, it was thought more prudent to not include the mass-balance terms this time around. Our statement above should probably state that "the former number from the TAR did include some ice-sheet mass balance uncertainty, while the latter from the AR4 does not"

What RealClimate fails to acknowledge is that because the TAR did not consider dynamical uncertainties, then a similar uncertainty range would have to be added on top of the TAR top end estimate to make it apples-to-apples with the top end uncertainty in the AR4. So in effect they cancel out and are not relevant to this discussion.

Presumably when the IPCC AR4 says "a basis in published literature is lacking" it is indeed prudent not to speculate. I would assume that there is also no basis in the published literature to conclude that sea level rise might stop instantaneously next year, so they didn’t include that either;-)

So what then do we get when comparing the two reports? The following figure shows the TAR and AR4 estimates on the same graph, taken from the TAR with the AR4 values superimposed. The AR4 ranges are delineated using the same color scheme as the TAR, but with rounded ends. The AR4 values are for 2090-2099, which I have presented as 2095. There is, as noted above, some error term on the upper end of the range. But it should be applied to both the TAR and AR4 estimates, so for comparative purposes they basically cancel out.

Thus, I conclude that the top end estimate has indeed come down from the TAR to the AR4, and those making this observation are accurately representing the AR4. Why didn't the IPCC just say so?

Posted on February 7, 2007 03:18 PM View this article | Comments (23)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty

Lifting the Taboo on Adaptation

Our article is online with Nature. A copy of the full text can also be found here in PDF. Comments welcomed.

Pielke, Jr., R.A., Prins, G., Rayner, S. and Sarewitz, D., 2007. Lifting the taboo on adaptation. Nature, 7 February.

Posted on February 7, 2007 01:05 PM View this article | Comments (12)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

Scientific Integrity and Budget Cuts

I am watching the Senate Commerce Committee's hearing this morning on "Climate Change Research and Scientific Integrity." I note in this hearing a conflation of allegations of Bush Administration interference in science communication with research budgets for climate scientists. Both Rick Piltz's testimony and that of Rick Anthes emphasized science budgets. Seems to me that such claims are crassly opportunistic. Here are some actual climate science budget facts that should give some pause to such arguments:

From 1995 to 2001:

Climate science funding was cut from $2.234B to $1.886B (constant dollars), representing a cut of 15.6%. With respect to climate science funding as a proportion of domestic discretionary spending the cut is 23%.

From 2002 to 2006:

Climate science funding was cut from $1.792B to $1.674B (constant dollars), representing a cut of 6.6%. With respect to climate science funding as a proportion of domestic discretionary spending the cut is 20%.

Data from Rick Piltz's testimony and the Congressional Budget Office. Note that funding in 2000 and 2001 are virtually identical.

If the Bush Administration's cuts represent an assault on scientific integrity, then why wouldn't the larger cuts by the Clinton Administration also fall under that same category?

In my mind, conflating research budgets with heavy-handed Bush Administration communication policies is a mistake.

Posted on February 7, 2007 09:09 AM View this article | Comments (12)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

Understanding US Climate Politics

This graph from the 25 January 2007 issue of The Economist says a lot about the politics of energy policy in the United States. According to the article, "California's greenhouse-gas emissions per person are on a par with those of Denmark. Relative to the size of its economy, they are lower."

Posted on February 7, 2007 08:32 AM View this article | Comments (31)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Energy Policy

Should A Scientific Advisor be Evaluated According to Political Criteria?

Consider NASA’s James Hansen who complained that he was being interfered with by the Bush Administration which saw Mr. Hansen’s views as inconvenient with respect to their policies on climate change. Dr. Hansen is, by his own admission, outside of the scientific consensus on climate change, as reflected by the IPCC. Should Dr. Hansen’s ability to speak or even hold his job be a function of the political views of the officials who happen to be in office? Hold on to your answer for a moment and click through . . .

Now consider the State of Oregon and its state climatologist:

In an exclusive interview with KGW-TV, Governor Ted Kulongoski confirmed he wants to take that title [of state climatologist] from Oregon State’s George] Taylor. The governor said Taylor's contradictions interfere with the state's stated goals to reduce greenhouse gases, the accepted cause of global warming in the eyes of a vast majority of scientists.
"He is Oregon State University's climatologist. He is not the state of Oregon's climatologist," Kulongoski said.

Taylor declined to comment on the proposal other than to say he was a "bit shocked" by the news. He recently engaged in a debate at O.M.S.I. and repeated his doubts about accepted science.

In an interview he told KGW, "There are a lot of people saying the bulk of the warming of the last 50 years is due to human activities and I don't believe that's true." He believes natural cycles explain most of the changes the earth has seen.

A bill will be introduced in Salem soon on the matter.

Sen. Brad Avakian, (D) Washington County, is sponsoring the bill. He said global warming is so important to state policy it's important to have a climatologist as a consultant to the governor. He denied this is targeted personally at Taylor. "Absolutely not," Avakian said, "I've never met Mr. Taylor and if he's got opinions I hope he comes to the hearing and testifies."

Kulongoski said the state needs a consistent message on reducing greenhouse gases to combat climate change.

The Governor says, "I just think there has to be somebody that says, 'this is the state position on this.'" [emphasis added]

Whatever one thinks about the science of climate change, one should have concern about scientific advisory positions being determined by purely political criteria, as described in the interview with Oregon's governor. Imagine if George Bush said what the Oregon governor said above in regards to James Hansen -- "I just think there has to be somebody that says, 'this is the U.S. position on this.'" We saw exactly this sort of treatment of intelligence expertise with the Bush Administration's shenanigans leading to the Iraq War.

One should also be concerned about double standards among observers. Both Hansen and Taylor are admittedly outside the IPCC's scientific consensus on climate change and both are inconvenient for the elected officials for whom they serve. Do we really want to go down a path where politicians are able to manipulate governmental advisors to suit their policy preferences? Do the rest of us need any semblance of intellectual coherence on this issue? Or should we instead have of scientific advice simply reflect a convenient political litmus test?

Posted on February 7, 2007 02:10 AM View this article | Comments (35)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

February 06, 2007

Post-IPCC Political Handicapping: Count the Votes

The National Journal has updated its poll of opinions on climate change among members of the U.S. Congress, which it first presented last April. The results, with a few exceptions, are much the same. What the poll indicates are that while there are indeed partisan differences on how members of congress view the science of climate change, there is nonetheless a strong majority of members who accept that "it’s been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth is warming because of man-made pollution." Given this finding, one might wonder what marginal value exists in continuing to debate the science (one answer found below). Here are a few further details.

In its February 3, 2007 issue the National Journal finds (PDF) that 97% of Democrats and 16% of Republicans answered yes (or "consensus" or "part of cause") to the question: "Do you think it’s been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth is warming because of man-made problems?"

Let’s assume, for the present discussion, that "beyond a reasonable doubt" is interpreted identically to the IPCC’s "very likely" (meaning >90% certainty, the NJ poll was taken before IPCC's release last week). Let’s also assume that the poll of 72 members is in fact representative of the 535 total. Finally, let’s set aside the debate of whether partisanship drives views on science or vice-versa.

What does this poll signify?

It means that in the Senate there are 57 members who believe that there is no "reasonable doubt" on the cause of global warming, and in the House this number is 258. These are strong majorities.

With respect to the policy questions asked by the National Journal here is how the numbers break out for those favoring various policies:

Mandatory CO2 Limits:

House 243
Senate 54

Carbon Tax

House 123
Senate 27

Cap and Trade

House 290
Senate 65

These counts (again, if an accurate reflection of members’ positions) suggest a few important conclusions.

1. The issue of science is no longer relevant to debate in Congress. A majority in both chambers accepts the human role in climate change, and further a majority accepts the need for action, including mandatory caps on carbon dioxide.

2. A carbon tax is largely unrelated to debate over the science. Even if the entire House were to be comprised of members who accept the science of climate change, as this factor alone drove voting behavior, the vote would be even. However, among Democrats only 50% favor a carbon tax, indicating that there are significant factors at play beyond just views of the science. If one posits that Republican views on a carbon tax are different than Democrats (big stretch), let’s say half as favorable (to be generous) with respect to their views of the science, then this would mean that Congress would have to be at least 75% Democratic to get a majority favoring a carbon tax. Under the present political landscape – not gonna happen.

Bottom line – the votes for action appear to be there. So too is broad public acceptance of the reality of climate change and a need for action. Why then is not action happening more quickly?

There are probably a few answers:

1. When push comes to shove. It may be the case that among many people global warming is an issue with more emotional affect than implications for action. In the U.K. for instance, where climate change is squarely on the agenda, only 11% of respondents to a recent poll indicated that they would fly less to reduce their emissions. The current debate in Europe reflects the difficulties of actually reducing emissions even in the context of apparent strong political and public support.

2. Political overreach. Some who want action on climate change have suggested that it might be best for the 110th Congress not to act in order to wait for a Democratic president to be elected in 2009 (or a least someone who is not GWB). The thinking is that even stronger legislation will be possible under those conditions. This might be wishful thinking. A good rule in politics is to take what you can when you can get it.

3. Those skeptics. Just when you thought that we’d seen the end of the debate over climate skeptics, it turns out that some scientists are busy trying to keep them in the limelight. Yes, you read that right. Consider that immediately upon release of the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers the RealClimate blog immediately followed up its 1,280 word review of the IPCC SPM with a 1,585 word essay on some anti-IPCC statement from a group of self-appointed climate skeptics. Without RealClimate’s generous lavishing of attention and imputed significance, the anti-IPCC document would probably have gone unnoticed by most folks. Like old Cold Warriors longing for the Soviet Union the complete and utter domination of the IPCC consensus view seems difficult for some to accept. This issue runs far deeper than bloggers worried about being out of a job, as it will no doubt manifest itself in debates over climate change research budgets. A strong case can be made that now that the science is settled, at least from the standpoint of justifying mitigation, that there is ample room to downsize significant aspects of the climate research enterprise. After all, plate tectonics is not a big area of research.

4. Fighting is more fun than winning. The dynamics of debate over climate change in the blogoshpere might be a good indication of the broader political dynamics for many. It is easy to transform the issue into skeptic vs. nonskeptic in order to debate science, or Republican vs. Democract to debate politics, or environmentalist vs. capitalist to debate the economy/environment, or any of a number of wedge issues that people find fun and exciting to discuss. We see that achieving pragmatic action on real issues -- which might involve moving beyond the science or reaching a political compromise with one's sworn enemies seems pretty tame and unexciting for many. I have little doubt that for some people, climate change is all about the fight, not the victory, so preserving conflict is paramount.

Bottom line from this post: The votes are there. What is lacking, as I’ve often asserted, are a wide range of policy options to exploit the current political receptivity. In the absence of good options, it is likely that we’ll continue see symbolic action (at best) and loud exhortations, as the battle over climate change continues.

Posted on February 6, 2007 08:31 AM View this article | Comments (38)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

February 05, 2007

Upcoming This Week . . . [UPDATED]

A preview of what to expect this upcoming week here on Prometheus:

On Wednesday Nature will be publishing a commentary that I co-authored with Gwyn Prins (University College London/Columbia University), Steve Rayner (Oxford University’s James Martin Institute), and Dan Sarewitz (ASU). The piece is titled "Lifting the Taboo on Adaptation." We’ll post it here as soon as it is available.

This just in from the House Science and Technology Committee staff:

I just now got out of a meeting with the senior Republican Members of the Science Committee and they decided they want to go in a different direction for Thursday's IPCC hearing. Rather than have you testify, they want me to find a witness from industry for the hearing.

So no testimony for me this week . . .

On Thursday, I have been invited by the House Committee on Science and Technology to testify at a hearing along with leading IPCC scientists. I’ve been asked to discuss the relationship of scientific advice and policy making. This week’s testimony will be straight out of The Honest Broker. Despite my occasional comments about sausage factories, it is an honor to have a chance to present some of our work to policy makers, and I welcome the attention being given to the challenge of connecting science to decision making. Tune in here later this week for my prepared testimony, oral remarks, and reactions. Do note that your favorite "perfidious corporate lapdog"/"closet Republican" (to pick two of my favorite quotes from last week;-) was once again invited by the congressional minority. As always your comments and reactions are welcomed – positive, negative, or indifferent.

On Friday, I’ll be appearing in Savannah, Georgia at an event with Georgia Tech’s Peter Webster where we’ll watch a screening of An Inconvenient Truth and then give short presentations on science and policy issues of climate change immediately after. Here is how a local Savannah paper described the upcoming event:

The film will be followed by a discussion led by Georgia Tech climatologist Peter Webster, who Bonnell said "truly believes we're about to fry," and Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, who stands in the middle of the climate change debate, calling himself a "nonskeptical heretic."
"I'd say don't be put off by the person speaking, just look at the ideas," Bonnell said. "We're hoping people will be engaged by what they say."

Should be an interesting week.

Posted on February 5, 2007 03:39 PM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

Loose Ends -- IPCC and Hurricanes

Just a few loose ends that may be of interest to those following this issue:

1. The International Institute for Sustainable Development continues their invaluable tradition of providing a window into the negotiations with first-hand reports. Here is what their report says about the negotiations over hurricanes in the IPCC:

Regarding tropical cyclones, the US drew attention to a consensus statement produced at a recent WMO cyclone workshop about the difficulties of detecting cyclone trends, and cautioned that using the terms "global" and "trend" to describe an increase in the intensity of tropical cyclones could open the IPCC to criticism. The Netherlands and the Philippines agreed that the proposed language, "satellite records suggest a global trend toward more intense tropical cyclones since about 1970, correlated with observed warming of tropical sea surfaces temperatures," was too strong. Germany and Kenya disagreed, deferring to the judgment of the Coordinating Lead Authors in assessing the scientific literature. The Coordinating Lead Authors clarified that the WMO workshop participants were hurricane scientists and not climate scientists, and that this statement, released six months after the WGI AR4 underlying report was submitted, was not peer-reviewed or open to comment. The issue was referred to a contact group, where participants discussed variability in the data and shortcomings in the modeling approaches, highlighted the importance of reflecting the main conclusions of the underlying chapter, and noted recent studies in support of both sides. As there was common ground on the robustness of evidence within the North Atlantic, the agreed text focused on the “observational evidence for an increase of intense tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic” and included a more detailed discussion of the factors that complicate identification of long-term patterns. A row in the table on extreme weather events (Table SPM-1) on "intense tropical cyclone activity increases" was modified to reflect the text agreed in the contact group, adding "in some regions." [emphasis added]

Of all groups I would think the IPCC Coordinating lead Authors could do better than offer a critique suggesting that the relevant experts were not "climate scientists." (Close readers will recall that we've seen that argument made here at times.) In any case, the team that wrote the WMO statement was populated by many leading researchers who by any definition are indeed "climate scientists," including luminaries like Tom Knutson and Kerry Emanuel.

2. Randy Dole, a member of the U.S. delegation to the IPCC sent in this nice comment referencing my interpretation of the SPM statements on tropical cyclones:

Thank you for your thoughtful and balanced assessment of what the IPCC SPM says. You have got it right. Your careful analysis on what the report says and how it compares to the WMO consensus statement is most appreciated.

Thanks Randy!

Posted on February 5, 2007 02:22 AM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters | Science + Politics

February 02, 2007

Follow Up: IPCC and Hurricanes

The IPCC report is out (PDF) and here is what it says about hurricanes (tropical cyclones). Kudos to the scientists involved. Despite the pressures, on tropical cyclones they figured out a way to maintain consistency with the actual balance of opinion(s) in the community of relevant experts.

Here is the discussion of observed changes:

There is observational evidence for an increase of intense tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic since about 1970, correlated with increases of tropical sea surface temperatures. There are also suggestions of increased intense tropical cyclone activity in some other regions where concerns over data quality are greater. Multi-decadal variability and the quality of the tropical cyclone records prior to routine satellite observations in about 1970 complicate the detection of long-term trends in tropical cyclone activity. There is no clear trend in the annual numbers of tropical cyclones.

Interestingly, in a table that discusses attribution of trends to anthropogenic causes it reports that there are some trends observed in some regions in tropical cyclone behavior, writing that these trends "more likely than not" represent the "likelihood of a human contribution to observed trend." But then this statement is footnoted with the following qualification:

Magnitude of anthropogenic contributions not assessed. Attribution for these phenomena based on expert judgement rather than formal attribution studies.

So there might be a human contribution (and presumably this is just to the observed upwards trends observed in some basins, and not to downward trends observed in others, but this is unclear) but the human contribution itself has not been quantitatively assessed, yet the experts, using their judgment, expect it to be there. In plain English this is what is called a "hypothesis" and not a "conclusion." And it is a fair representation of the issue.

The projections for the future are as frequently represented in the literature:

Based on a range of models, it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense, with larger peak wind speeds and more heavy precipitation associated with ongoing increases of tropical SSTs. There is less confidence in projections of a global decrease in numbers of tropical cyclones. The apparent increase in the proportion of very intense storms since 1970 in some regions is much larger than simulated by current models for that period.

This comment on the process was offered by Australia's Neville Nicholls, who was one of the authors responsible for drafting the language on tropical cyclones:

"I was disappointed that after more than two years carefully analysing the literature on possible links between tropical cyclones and global warming that even before the report was approved it was being misreported and misrepresented. We concluded that the question of whether there was a greenhouse-cyclone link was pretty much a toss of a coin at the present state of the science, with just a slight leaning towards the likelihood of such a link. But the premature reports suggested that we were asserting the existence of much stronger evidence. I hope that when people read the real report they will see that it is a careful and balanced assessment of all the evidence."

The open atmosphere of negotiations in the IPCC is probably something that should be revised. How anyone can deny that political factors were everpresent in the negotiations isn't paying attention.

Posted on February 2, 2007 05:37 AM View this article | Comments (15)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters | Science + Politics

February 01, 2007

Report from IPCC Negotiations

From NOAA's Randy Dole in Paris, lifted from the comments:

Roger and all,

I generally stay out of blogs, but as a member of the US delegation here I would strongly counsel against premature judgment. Once the final document is out, I hope that you and others will fairly compare what the final report says with the WMO consensus statement. I suspect that an objective analyst who carefully reads both the IPCC and WMO documents - that is, does not cherry pick - will find far more common ground than might now be anticipated.

The two reports are not identical of course, nor should they be, but in the end the careful reader will see far more areas of agreement than current reports might suggest. For those who are relying on press reports or any earlier drafts of the IPCC SPM, you will simply be misled.

In short, wait for the report, look carefully at what it says, and then evaluate and critique. This would be the fair process.

See you back in Boulder,

Randy Dole

P.S.: A little after midnight here in Paris, still at UNESCO, but the final draft has been approved. Just waiting for one final review to ensure all agreed upon changes have been made.

Posted on February 1, 2007 05:47 PM View this article | Comments (10)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters | Science + Politics

IPCC on Hurricanes

The IPCC Summary for Policy Makers is not out yet, but if this report in the Washington Post is in fact true, then we are in store for some controversy:

Global warming has made stronger hurricanes, including those in the Atlantic such as Katrina, an authoritative panel on climate change has concluded for the first time, participants in the deliberations said Thursday.

This will be controversial for several reasons. First, the WMO consensus was written by a range of scientists, including Kerry Emanuel and Greg Holland, who have argued that there is a strong global warming signal, but who have also accepted that their colleagues have valid arguments as well. Second, the IPCC cannot consider recent studies since it has a publication deadline (exactly what that is I don’t know but it was spring-ish 2006). Thus, the IPCC is a bit like a time machine telling us what the literature said about a year ago. The WMO statement incorporates more recent literature. However the IPCC is being presented as new. Third, the IPCC’s lead man on hurricanes and climate change is a fervent partisan in the debate itself. Whether his views are correct or not, it does not help the legitimacy of the process to see a carefully constructed consensus statement among 120 scientists with diverse views overturned by a very (very) narrow set of participants that may be only a few people.

This issue no doubt will become even more politicized than before, with partisans on both sides rejoicing or attacking. For my part, the IPCC overturns the WMO statement with some considerable risk to its own credibility. Of course, we’ll have to wait until May to actually find out the basis for this rejection.

Posted on February 1, 2007 08:09 AM View this article | Comments (18)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters | Science + Politics

Does the Truth Matter?

Here are seven paragraphs from the conclusion to Alan Mazur’s excellent book True Warnings and False Alarms: Evaluating Fears about the Health Risks of Technology, 1948-1971 (Resources for the Future, 2004, pp. 107-109, buy a copy here)-- the concluding subsection is titled "Does the Truth Matter?" .

Mazur distinguishes between a "knowledge model" and a "politics model" for understanding public debates involving science. These distinctions are somewhat (but not entirely) related to the concepts of the "linear model" and "interest group pluralism" that I discuss in my forthcoming book, which is really about how to reconcile the fact that there are elements of both models in the reality of decision making. Neither of Mazur’s models accurately describes how the world works, we need both. Some of the more useful debates and discussions following my testimony his week reflected a paradigm clash between those who view the world through the lens pf the "knowledge model" and those – like me – who accept that the "politics model" also reflects some fundamental realities as well. Here is the excerpt:

In a democracy, the people or their representatives are free to spend public money as they see fit. Interest groups compete to channel funding to their favorite causes. If U.S. society chooses to allot far more money to cleaning up toxic waste sites, which harm few people, than to prevent teenagers from smoking, which creates an enormous health burden, that is our privilege as a nation.
Still, many risk analysts are disturbed when we fail to maximize the number of lives save per dollar of risk remediation. They point out that actions taken by government to avoid the consequences of an alleged hazard are often unrelated to the severity or scientific validity of the hazard (EPA 1982; Breyer 1993; Graham and Wiener 1995; Mazur 1998). The inference is that policy should be better aligned with science, and that irrational or inefficient elements of policymaking should be eliminated (but see Mazur 1995 and Driesen 2001 for limitations on this positions).

Yet public policy does not always flow directly from scientific knowledge. A value-laden subject decision is always involved, one that requires weighing pros and cons, costs and benefits, winners and losers. A wise policy choice for one party with certain interest may not be the wisest choice for a party with different interests. These considerations raise a question: does scientific evaluation of a warning matter at all?

Essentially two models show how science is applied to public policy. The first – call it the "knowledge model" – assumes that scientists can obtain approximately true answers to their research questions with methods that are fairly objective. This knowledge is used to inform public policy. For example, scientists can determine the health risks from exposure to fluoride at levels adequate to prevent cavities. Policy makers then use this finding as one factor in deciding whether to add fluoride to community drinking water. Such decisions cannot follow from facts alone, but facts ought to influence outcomes. If health risk is high, that should help shift the decision against fluoridation; if low, that should encourage fluoridation. The model makes no sense to anyone who denies that science can find correct answers.

The second model – the "politics model" – can be applied whatever one’s view concerning the objectivity of science. Here partisans use scientific findings as political capital to sway policy in the direction they prefer. If such partisans favor fluoridation, they will claim there is little health risk; if they oppose it, they claim a high health risk. I makes no difference if the findings are correct, objective, or honest as long as they are persuasive. The actors bury findings that work against their position, or attack them as invalid or inapplicable. In the politics model, scientific claims are used polemically, just like any other kind of political argumentation (Mazur 1998; Brown 1991).

The politics model has many proponents. Partisans in a particular controversy often see their goal as sufficiently important to justify any interpretation of scientific data that is favorable to their cause. During breaks from writing this final chapter, I am reading John McPhee’s (1971) laudable biography of David Brower, a major environmentalist of the postwar period. McPhee repeatedly describes Brower’s habit of making up “facts” to support his arguments against industrialists and developers. The biographer seems to regard this as an endearing tactic of the "archdruid" in his advocacy for wilderness preservation. Like McPhee, we sympathize with those who fight the good fight, accepting their argumentation when in other contexts it would be vexing.

But the politics model loses its appeal if applied to the entire array of technical controversies affecting policy. Science that is sufficiently malleable to serve any position in one controversy can serve any position in all controversies, and in that event science does not matter at all. The famous parable of “the tragedy of the commons” tells how each shepherd maximized his own herd’s grazing on the village green until no grass remained for anyone (Hardin 1968). In the same way, if each technical expert interprets data for his or her own convenience, with no attempt at objectivity, there will be no experts left with unimpeachable credibility, and we will all suffer for it. [emphasis added]

Posted on February 1, 2007 07:48 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty | Science + Politics | The Honest Broker

January 31, 2007

The Cherry Pick

I am doing a lot of travel this week, and that means lots of time in airports with a wireless connection. So apologies for the bloggarea . . . all this discussion of cherry picking has led me to think it would be worth pointing to an earlier essay on this topic:

The Cherry Pick, May, 2004

Do note that this essay was written almost three years ago before I really figured out the language of "honest brokers of policy alternatives" that you'll see in my new book.

Posted on January 31, 2007 12:14 PM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science + Politics

Even More: Mr. Issa’s Confusion and a Comment on Budget Politics

At the Waxman hearing yesterday one of the more unproductive exchanges was between Mr. Issa and Dr. Brifo of the Union of Concerned Scientists. The UCS released a report chronicling responses to a request for information from climate scientists about their perceptions about politics and science. Mr. Issa focused on the statistical power of the survey, which is the wrong way to look at it. The responses were the responses. They are not evidence of a larger population – the responses ARE the population. That being said the UCS supports my own contention that politics and science are inherently intermixed.

The UCS survey does have its own problems. For instance it lumped in budget issues as political interference. Dr. Shindell also did this at the end of the hearing. If not giving scientists enough money is evidence of political interference then what isn’t? Here are some representative examples cited in the UCS report about how to improve climate science “integrity” (p. 22):

”I believe that climate research at NASA is being undermined by the current administration. This is accomplished not through direct threats of intimidation, but through lack of funding. . .”
“The U.S. Climate Change Science Program has not received sufficient funding . . .”

“Problems with climate research in the federal government mainly have to do with funding . . .”

“I have not worked directly on climate change since funding was eliminated in my area. Other areas of much less importance have been emphasized as a result.”

“Funding for climate research is a factor of 5-10 below critical mass to develop a designed climate observing system.”

[This last one is my favorite - $10-$20 billion, right!]

By adding the politics of the budget process into the mix the UCS has revealed that climate science is indeed very political indeed.

Posted on January 31, 2007 07:58 AM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

Additional Reactions – Waxman Hearing

Here are a few additional thoughts on yesterday’s hearing and reactions to it.

Here are some impressions – and they are just speculations -- on the politics of the issue of "science suppression" and where it might be headed. First, one notable feature of yesterday’s hearing that you only would have noticed if you were there or watched was the reaction of Rep. Christopher Shays, a moderate Republican. He seemed pretty ticked off at the hearing at the testimony of Rick Piltz in particular and gave him a brief hard time. Mr. Shays commented that he came to the hearing expecting to hear about science suppression but that he had instead heard minor complaints about report edits in a partisan context. He may have been posturing (always possible), but if he was indeed sincere, then Mr. Waxman may have to engage in a bit of logrolling to maintain/retain any sense of bipartisanship in this area of oversight.

Second, the hearing has received a lot of media attention; it even overshadowed the Senate hearing the same day on climate policy. This is of course good for Mr. Waxman and increases pressures on the Bush Administration. But it also raises the bar for future attention pretty high. What does the committee do next? They could invite a few more agency officials, Jim Hansen comes to mind, but there would be a good chance, from a media perspective, of being the same story, which may not generate the same buzz.

Third, President Bush is a lame (very lame) duck, and the presidential election season is getting closer every day. There is not much time available for oversight investigation of any sort. Meantime, the principle bad guys in the story in the Bush Administration have resigned or moved on (in one case to ExxonMobil). Both NASA and NOAA have changed their media policies (for the better?). The Union of Concerned Scientists continues to release reports indicating that science and politics intermix, but if they don’t watch out, they might do such a good job that people might start thinking that . . . science and politics intermix. The Bush Administration can stonewall Mr. Waxman’s request for documents for a long time, and I wouldn’t bet that Mr. Waxman would issue subpoenas on this issue, since the lack of responsiveness by the Administration is almost certainly just a politically useful as the documents themselves. For all of these reasons it seems like there will be diminishing political returns to the issue of "science suppression" especially in the context of Mr. Waxman’s interest in other areas of oversight with more political traction, like the war in Iraq.

For the above reasons, I speculate – and it is just speculation – that we have seen the high water mark on Congressional attention to the issue of “science suppression.” I hope that I am wrong. It would be very informative and useful for Mr. Waxman to bring in media relations officials from various science agencies to examine what they do and how they do it. But I am not expecting this to happen. It is more likely that some other committee, such as the Science Committee takes up aspects of this issue if only to demonstrate ownership of their own turf. Therefore, for the Waxman committee I will put the over/under on future hearings on science suppression at one (bumped up from 0.5).

Finally, I fully expect that scientists who are exploiting their authority to advance their political views do not appreciate someone pointing out the close relation of science and politics. This also goes for those advocates who argue for their political agenda based on an appeal to objective, impartial authorities. Telling enough is that most public responses to my testimony along these lines have carefully avoided responding to anything that I actually wrote. I expect the loudest public complaints from those scientists most active politically. There is a stark contrast between what I see on the web versus what is in my inbox, which is reassuring.

Posted on January 31, 2007 05:09 AM View this article | Comments (10)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

January 30, 2007

Instant Reaction – Waxman Hearing

There is much I could say about the hearing today. Apparently parts of it were on C-Span and will be replayed, and I think the streaming video is available for anyone who wants to subject themselves to four hours inside the sausage factory . . . .

For me the most interesting set of exchanges illustrated exactly the dynamics I discussed in my prepared testimony (available here in PDF). First, Representative McCollum spent some time getting NASA’s Drew Shindell on record explaining that the views of Soon and Baliunas (two scientists who wrote a controversial paper cited by the White House in opposition to the findings of the IPCC) did not and could not overturn the IPCC consensus. (I completely agree with this point.) Dr. Shidell gave in far to easy (and contributed) to the discussion that because the scientists in question had the wrong degrees, that they need not be taken seriously. (I disagree with that – science should be judged on its merits.)

Then, Rep. Welch, apparently not even appreciating the irony, took issue with my invocation in my testimony of the WMO consensus statement on tropical cyclones, which has recently been endorsed by the AMS Executive Council. I pointed out that the Committee's background memo was highly selective in its presentation of hurricane science, which seems fairly obvious, but which they apparently did not like me doing. He claimed that they had just emailed Judy Curry and Michael Mann, and they had written back, apparently both taking issue with the WMO Consensus! In fact, according to Mr. Welch Dr. CUrry's and Dr. Mann's views are more representative of the state of the science than that expressed by the WMO. (Judy and Mike are welcome to share their emails to the Committee here if they’d like.) Surprise, surprise – they could find some experts who disagreed with the WMO consensus!

Did he not see that he was doing the exact same thing that Rep. McCollum was criticizing the White House for? I tried to point out this irony, not sure if I made the point very well. (Dr. Shindell illustrated that he doesn’t know much about the hurricane community when he asserted that Michael Mann is a leading hurricane/climate scientist whose views should be taken over the WMO, but maybe he misspoke or I misheard.) I stick to my views, as if there is any area of science I know well it is the hurricane/climate debate.

Henry Waxman tried to salvage the exchange by pointing out that I am in fact a "political scientist" so what the hell do I know about hurricanes anyway;-) Hey, if you can’t win on the facts attack the man. I believe that strategy speaks for itself quite loudly.

I am not sure what Mr. Waxman thinks he accomplished with this hearing other further politicizing the issue of science politicization. The whole exercise seems to prove that the politicization of science is endemic, as I argued in my testimony. If Mr. Waxman was interested in actually improving policies governing science he’d haul down agency press officers and those responsible for the process of approving government reports to focus on actual processes. The repeated calls for science and politics to be separate are just empty exhortations without discussion of actual policies.

Posted on January 30, 2007 01:39 PM View this article | Comments (13)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

Waxman Hearing Testimony - Oral Remarks

Here are my remarks as prepared for delivery at 10AM today at the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee. They might still change. They are pretty brief, as I only have 5 minutes. Here is the fully referenced written testimony [pdf], which goes into a lot more detail.

I thank the Chairman and the Committee for the opportunity to offer testimony this morning. I am a professor at the University of Colorado and also director of the university’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. A short biography with more details can be found at the end of my written testimony.

My main point today is that politics and science cannot in practice be separated. Consequently, policies for the production, promotion, and use of information in decision making should be based on the realities of science in politics, and not on the mistaken impression that they can somehow be kept separate. Efforts to separate them will in most case only contribute to the pathological politicization of science.

Imagine the following situation:

The president has in his administration a range of scientific experts on the most important policy issue of the day. However, the president is denied access to that advice by the manipulative actions of one of his primary advisors, who we’ll call "the Admiral." It turns out that the Admiral has the president’s ear on matters of science but he himself has in fact never had any formal scientific training. He justifies his actions on the belief that United States is engaged in a fundamental religious, political, and economic conflict between good and evil. When two leading government scientists seek to provide advice to the president that differs from that being offered by the Admiral, the Admiral asks the FBI to open investigations of these scientists. One of the scientists subsequently faces hearings to consider his lack of loyalty to the United States and he never again works as a government scientist. The other scientist warns that this case indicated to scientists that

"scientific integrity and frankness in advising government on policy matters of a technical nature can lead to later reprisals against those whose earlier opinions have become unpopular."

One of the nation’s leading scientist writes that the relationship between government and scientists has been "gravely damaged" because the government has given the impression that it would "exclude anyone who does not conform to the judgment of those who in one way or another have acquired authority."

The year? 1954
The President? Dwight Eisenhower
The Admiral? Lewis Strauss
The Scientists? Robert Oppenheimer, Hans Bethe, and Vannevar Bush

This vignette drawn from Benjamin Green’s excellent new book Eisenhower, Science Advice, and the Nuclear Test-Ban Debate, 1945-1963 (Stanford University Press, 2007), along with the other examples recounted in my written testimony discussing issues of science and politics from presidential administrations from Richard Nixon through Bill Clinton, show that science and politics have always been issues of concern for policy makers. And the subject of today’s hearing indicates that today is no different.

There are however reasons why today’s conflicts are receiving more attention from scholars, political advocates, and politicians.

1. There are an increasing number of important issues which are related to science and technology in some way.
2. Policy makers increasingly invoke expertise to justify a course of action that they advocate.
3. Advocacy groups increasingly rely on experts to justify their favored course of action.
4. Congress, at least for the past six years, and perhaps longer has been derelict in its oversight duties, particularly related to issues of science and technology.
5. Many scientists are increasingly engaging in political advocacy.
6. Some issues of science have become increasingly partisan as some politicians sense that there is political gain to be found such as on stem cells, teaching of evolution, and climate change.
7. The Bush Administration has engaged in hyper-controlling strategies for the management of information.

I’ll now give just several very short vignettes which illustrate how fundamentally science and politics are inter-related.

The language of science in public discussions lends itself to politicization. For instance, The New York Times reported last year that scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory had complained because they had been instructed to use the phrase "climate change" rather than the phrase "global warming." A Republican strategy memo did recommend use of the phrase "climate change" over "global warming”" and environmental groups have long had the opposite preference. Another federal scientist, at NOAA, described how he was instructed by superiors not to use the word "Kyoto" or "climate change."

To cite another example, several years ago the Union of Concerned Scientists, as part of its advocacy campaign on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, recommended the use of the word "harbinger" to describe current climate events that may become more frequent with future global warming. Subsequently scientists at NOAA, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and the Fish and Wildlife Service's Polar Bear Project began to use the phrase in their public communication in concert with advocacy groups like Greenpeace. The term has also appeared in official government press releases. Policy makers and their staff are of course intimately familiar with these dynamics : we have just recently seen them in practice as Republicans and Democrats have battled over framing President Bush’s proposed troop increases in Iraq as a "surge" or as an "escalation."

An example of how easy it is to misrepresent science in a political setting, consider the memorandum prepared last week by the majority staff of this Committee to provide background information on this hearing. The memorandum states, quite correctly, that "a consensus has emerged on the basic science of global warming." It then goes on to assert that:

". . . recently published studies have suggested that the impacts [of global warming] include increases in the intensity of hurricanes and tropical storms . . .."

It supports this claim by citing three papers. But what the memorandum does not relate is that authors of each of the three cited studies recently participated with about 120 experts from around the world to prepare a consensus statement under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) which concluded that "no consensus has been reached on this issue."

The WMO Statement was subsequently endorsed by the Executive Council of the American Meteorological Society. Thus, the science cited in the Committee memo is incomplete and misleading. Such cherry picking and misrepresentations of science are endemic in political discussions involving science.

What has occurred in the preparation of this memorandum is in microcosm exactly the same sort of thing that we have seen with heavy-handed Bush administration information management strategies which include editing government reports and overbearing management of agency press releases and media contacts with scientists. Inevitably, such ham-handed information management will backfire, because people will notice and demand accountability. This oversight hearing today is good evidence for that.

My written testimony goes into far more detail on issues of press releases, agency media policies, empanelment of federal advisory committees, and other subjects which I would be happy to discuss with you further,

Thank you.

Posted on January 30, 2007 03:12 AM View this article | Comments (18)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

January 29, 2007

Mike Hulme on Avery and Singer

Over at Post-Normal Times the Tyndall Centre's Mike Hulme has a thought-provoking review of a recent book by Dennis Avery and Fred Singer. Here is an excerpt:

Too often the reasons we disagree about what to do about climate change are framed in this way, as disputes about the truth claims of some aspect of biogeophysical science – is the world warming; are greenhouse gases responsible; will this ice-sheet collapse? This reflects one view of science, the conventional Enlightenment view of science as an objective, disinterested endeavour incrementally leading us closer and closer to a universal and immutable view of reality … past, present and future. This is ‘normal’ science.
But for many years now, around 25 at least, philosophers and practitioners of science have identified a different mode of scientific activity, a mode where stakes are high, uncertainties large and decisions urgent, and where values are embedded in the way science is done and spoken. This is what Silvio Funtowicz labelled in 1993 ‘post-normal’ science. Disputes in post-normal science focus as often on the process of science – who gets funded, who evaluates quality, who has the ear of policy - as on the facts of science. The IPCC is a classic example of a post-normal scientific activity. The IPCC is a large procedural assessment activity involving first of all scientists, but then later entraining a broad range of other experts from government, business, civil society to evaluate the quality of the assessment, before the modified text is presented to government representatives for their amendment and approval.

But there is also a third way of interpreting contemporary science, which is yet one further step removed from the binary truth-falsehood view of Singer and Avery. This third way of seeing science pays more attention to the social and cultural context in which science works and speaks than to the phenomena being studied. Who are the scientists, what are their values, motives and preferences, why are they being asked to study this particular problem rather than some other problem, and who funds them? This understanding of science is what sociologists have termed its social construction.

Read the whole thing.

Posted on January 29, 2007 07:50 AM View this article | Comments (15)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

Congressional Testimony

I am scheduled to testify at this hearing tomorrow on "political interference in the work of government climate change scientists." Should be interesting. My testimony will be posted here tomorrow morning. If we come across a link to the streaming video, we'll post in the comments. Stay tuned . . .

Posted on January 29, 2007 06:47 AM View this article | Comments (6)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

Science and Politics of Food

The New York Times Sunday Magazine has an excellent and provocative article on the science and politics of food by Michael Pollan. Here is an excerpt, but read the whole thing:

Most nutritional science involves studying one nutrient at a time, an approach that even nutritionists who do it will tell you is deeply flawed. “The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science,” points out Marion Nestle, the New York University nutritionist, "is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of food, the food out of the context of diet and the diet out of the context of lifestyle."
If nutritional scientists know this, why do they do it anyway? Because a nutrient bias is built into the way science is done: scientists need individual variables they can isolate. Yet even the simplest food is a hopelessly complex thing to study, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in complex and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another. So if you’re a nutritional scientist, you do the only thing you can do, given the tools at your disposal: break the thing down into its component parts and study those one by one, even if that means ignoring complex interactions and contexts, as well as the fact that the whole may be more than, or just different from, the sum of its parts. This is what we mean by reductionist science.

Scientific reductionism is an undeniably powerful tool, but it can mislead us too, especially when applied to something as complex as, on the one side, a food, and on the other, a human eater. It encourages us to take a mechanistic view of that transaction: put in this nutrient; get out that physiological result. Yet people differ in important ways. Some populations can metabolize sugars better than others; depending on your evolutionary heritage, you may or may not be able to digest the lactose in milk. The specific ecology of your intestines helps determine how efficiently you digest what you eat, so that the same input of 100 calories may yield more or less energy depending on the proportion of Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes living in your gut. There is nothing very machinelike about the human eater, and so to think of food as simply fuel is wrong.

Also, people don’t eat nutrients, they eat foods, and foods can behave very differently than the nutrients they contain. Researchers have long believed, based on epidemiological comparisons of different populations, that a diet high in fruits and vegetables confers some protection against cancer. So naturally they ask, What nutrients in those plant foods are responsible for that effect? One hypothesis is that the antioxidants in fresh produce — compounds like beta carotene, lycopene, vitamin E, etc. — are the X factor. It makes good sense: these molecules (which plants produce to protect themselves from the highly reactive oxygen atoms produced in photosynthesis) vanquish the free radicals in our bodies, which can damage DNA and initiate cancers. At least that’s how it seems to work in the test tube. Yet as soon as you remove these useful molecules from the context of the whole foods they’re found in, as we’ve done in creating antioxidant supplements, they don’t work at all. Indeed, in the case of beta carotene ingested as a supplement, scientists have discovered that it actually increases the risk of certain cancers. Big oops.

Posted on January 29, 2007 01:20 AM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Biotechnology | Risk & Uncertainty | Science + Politics

January 27, 2007

Climate change a 'questionable truth'

That is the headline of a lengthy article by Margaret Wente, a columnist for The Global and Mail, on climate policy and politics. The following excerpt introduces the piece:

Is the sky really falling? How fast and how hard? And if the vast majority of scientists agree, then why don't governments act? After all, nobody wants the world to melt.
If you're an average, concerned citizen, no one will blame you for being confused or angry. The global-warming debate has become so shrill, so political and so polarized that it's impossible for even a reasonably well-informed person to figure out who or what to believe. Only one thing is for sure: Science isn't all that is driving this debate. Politics, ideology and scaremongering are too.

Posted on January 27, 2007 12:35 PM View this article | Comments (19)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

January 26, 2007

Richard Benedick on Climate Policy

The always excellent Issues in Science and Technology (and if you don’t subscribe you should) has a great essay in its winter issue by Richard Benedick, former deputy assistant secretary of state and chief U.S. negotiator of the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Protect the Ozone Layer. The essay is titled "Avoiding Gridlock on Climate Change" and appears on pp. 37-40. Mr. Benedick knows something about international environmental agreements. His essay is not yet online, but I have excerpted some key passages below.

He begins by leveling some string criticism at the annual gatherings under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

These UN mega-conferences have by now developed a predictable pattern. Considerable time is occupied by tedious problems of coordinating positions and tactics, both inside the huge national delegations and within blocs of countries such as the European Union and other regional or "like-minded" coalitions. There are the usual dire warnings— fully justifiable—of impending global catastrophe. There are trivial protocol debates and ritualistic ministerial speeches exhorting complicated and unrealistic actions. There are cultural diversions such as boat rides on the Rhine or dance performances in Marrakech. As the end nears, all-night negotiating sessions contribute to a sense of destiny. But despite the customary self-congratulatory finale, the results at Nairobi, as at preceding meetings, were embarrassingly meager. . .

Part of the problem, as he sees it, is a short-term obsession with targets and timetables.

The climate meetings, obsessively focused on short-term targets and timetables applying only to industrialized nations, have become trapped in a process that is unmanageable, inefficient, and impervious to serious negotiation of complex issues that have profound environmental, economic, and social implications extending over many decades into the future. . .

He suggests that that the UNFCCC’s Kyoto Protocol actually serves the interests of industry, oil-producing countries, and the Bush Administration. These views qualify him for instant "non-skeptic heretic" status (sorry, couldn’t resist;-).

The Kyoto Protocol, lamely defended by its proponents as “the only game in town,” now best serves the interests of politicians whose rhetoric is stronger than their actions and of those commercial interests and governments that want no meaningful actions at all—notably, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other Near East oil producers, and the U.S. administration, which is not unhappy with the treaty’s lack of progress. . .

In a crucial passage, Mr. Benedick goes a long way to dispelling some of the myths of the ozone experience. Reading the following closely.

It is worth recalling that the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer, later characterized by the heads of the UN Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization as “one of the great international achievements of the century,” was negotiated by only about 30 nations in nine months, with delegations seldom exceeding six persons and with minimal attention from outside observers and media. I doubt whether the ozone treaty could have been achieved under the currently fashionable global format.
We might draw some useful lessons from the ozone history. In the late 1970s, the ozone science was actually much more disputed than the climate science of today, and the major countries that produced and consumed chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were hopelessly deadlocked over the necessity for any controls at all. In this situation, the first international action on protecting the ozone layer was neither global, nor even a treaty. Rather, it was an informal accord among a loose coalition of like-minded nations, including Australia, Canada, Norway, Sweden, and the United States, to individually and separately ban the use of CFCs in aerosol spray cans.

This measure alone resulted in a temporary 30% drop in global CFC consumption (temporary because these “wonder chemicals” were continuing to find new uses in numerous industries.) But the action was nevertheless significant for the future. The resultant technological innovations demonstrated to the skeptics (in this case the European Community, Japan, and the Soviet Union) that controls were feasible, at least for this class of products. It also gave the United States and other proponents of a strong treaty the moral and practical high ground in later negotiations to restrict all uses of CFCs. Yet, if anyone had actually proposed a 30% reduction target, it would surely have been rejected as impossible.

An important lesson here is that a specific policy measure, not an abstract target, could stimulate unanticipated technological innovation. The policy measure drove the agreement on targets in the later ozone protocol, not vice versa. In contrast, the half-hearted performance of most governments with respect to climate policy measures has not matched their political rhetoric about the urgency of targets.

Another important lesson from the Montreal history was that not all countries need to agree in order to take a substantial step forward. It is also relevant to note that, in contrast to Kyoto, developing nations did accept limitations on their CFC consumption, but only when they were assured of equitable access to new technologies. Technology development is the missing guest at the Kyoto feast. . . [Emphasis added. –RP]

He makes a case that climate change needs to be grappled with piecemeal, eschewing the fantasy of a single global agreement that will drive policy and technology. As highlighted above, experience suggest that the direction of causality is precisely backward -- it is the presence of smaller scale agreements and technological innovation that makes global agreements possible. This is the lesson drawn by Pielke and Betsill (1997) (PDF).

The climate problem could be disaggregated into smaller, more manageable components with fewer participants—in effect, a search for partial solutions rather than a comprehensive global model. An architecture of parallel regimes, involving varying combinations of national and local governments, industry, and civil society on different themes, could reinvigorate the climate negotiations by acknowledging the diverse interests and by expanding the scope of possible solutions. To be sure, even here success would require a degree of genuine political will among at least a significant number of key governments. Nonetheless, by focusing on specific sectors and policy measures in smaller, less formal settings with varying combinations of actors and by not operating under UN consensus rules, the possibilities for achieving forward motion would be increased. The process and results could be termed protocols or forums or agreements, but their essential character would more closely resemble a pragmatic working group than a formal diplomatic negotiation. . .

He discusses some details on issue areas where he thinks that subglobal cooperation and coordination might take place. I don’t reproduce any of the details here, other than to list these issue areas:

Energy research and development Transportation Power generation Agriculture, coal, and adaptation technologies Other technology R&D agreements Government procurement policies Regional cooperation

He concludes by observing that we need to be expanding our options, not foreclosing them, a view often advocated here.

There are no easy answers; we could begin by admitting that over a decade of global negotiations has not brought notable progress. We should be open to new ideas.

Ever the diplomat, in the end he offers some conciliatory words to the UNFCCC suggesting that his vision might operate in parallel. My reading of his argument is that the reality is that progress on climate change won’t be made until we break free from the current approach.

Posted on January 26, 2007 08:45 AM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | International

January 25, 2007

IPCC, Policy Neutrality, and Political Advocacy

We have commented in the past here about how the leadership of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has flouted its own guidance to be "policy neutral" by engaging in overt political advocacy on climate change. The comments by its Director Rajendra Pachauri reported today again highlight this issue:

I hope this [forthcoming IPCC] report will shock people, governments into taking more serious action as you really can't get a more authentic and a more credible piece of scientific work.

Imagine, by contrast, if the Director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, another organization with an agenda to be "policy neutral," were reported in the media to say of the agency’s latest assessment on Iran, "I hope that the report will shock people, governments into taking more serious action." He would be looking for a new job in no time, I am sure. Why should climate change be treated differently?

The past reaction to my comments on political advocacy by IPCC leadership has been mixed. Some who share the IPCC's advocated agenda see no problem in the IPCC leadership engaging in such advocacy. Who wouldn’t want such a group perceived as authoritative and legitimate on their side? (Similarly, I am sure neo-cons would welcome a CIA Director advocating action on Iran!) By contrast some opposed to the advocated agenda have seized upon the obvious inconsistency in the IPCC’s views on "neutrality" to try to impinge the credibility of the organization. From my perspective, while both of these perspectives are to be expected (and I am sure will make their views known in response), there is a third view that matters most -- and that is the question of the appropriate role of organized expertise in decision making, whether it is the CIA or IPCC. This last view is quite independent of (or it should be) what one thinks about the issues of climate policy.

It seems obvious that if the IPCC leadership is inconsistent in its statements on "policy neutrality" then it does risk becoming perceived as an organized interest, not unlike an NGO, which will eat away at its own authority and independence, which derives in no small part from its claims to "neutrality." The IPCC could correct this perception (or reality) of inconsistent behavior by removing its goal of being "policy neutral" and openly admit a political agenda that it is advocating. Alternatively, the IPCC's leaders could eschew public discussions of what they prefer for political outcomes. Neither of these options seems particularly realistic. A formal departure from stated "neutrality" would harm the IPCC’s credibility, so it won’t do that. And the temptation to use scientific authority as a tool of politics is very strong, and won’t stop unless scientific leaders in the IPCC suggest that it should stop.

The best option of all, and which I recognize is fanciful dreaming on my part, would be for the IPCC to present decision makers with a wide range of policy options and their consequences, recognizing that the IPCC is an advisory body, not an advocacy group. There should be room in public discourse on climate change for an authoritative group to comprehensively assess options and their consequences, recognizing that advisors advise and decision makers decide. The tension between the IPCC's stated objective of "policy neutrality" and behavior by its leaders that is decided "non-neutral" is unlikely be sustainable. The IPCC should come to grips with what it means by "policy neutral."

Posted on January 25, 2007 08:40 AM View this article | Comments (34)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics | The Honest Broker

January 24, 2007

AMS Endorses WMO TC Consensus Statement

Full text from action by the American Meteorological Society on the recent consensus statement (PDF) by the World Meteorological Organization on Tropical Cyclones and Climate Change:

The American Meteorological Society endorses the "Statement on Tropical Cyclones and Climate Change" by the participants of the World Meteorological Organization’s 6th International Workshop on Tropical Cyclones (IWTC-VI), released on 11 December 2006.
(Adopted by AMS Council on 14 January 2007)
Bull. Amer. Met. Soc., 87

Posted on January 24, 2007 04:35 PM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

A Report from the Bureaucracy

A report titled "Key Challenges Remain for Developing and Deploying Advanced Energy Technologies to Meet Future Needs"(PDF) from the Government Accountability Office, released last week, should be required reading for anything wanting to understand the challenges of transforming energy policy. Here is the bottom line (p. 53):

It is unlikely that DOE’s current level of R&D funding or the nation’s current energy policies will be sufficient to deploy alternative energy sources in the next 25 years that will reverse our growing dependence on imported oil or the adverse environmental effects of using conventional fossil energy. The United States has generally relied on market forces to determine the nation’s energy portfolio, primarily conventional supplies of oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear energy. In contrast, advanced energy technologies have higher up-front capital costs that make them less cost competitive than conventional technologies. As a result, despite periodic energy price spikes caused by disruptive world events and about $50 billion (in real terms) in energy R&D funding since 1978, the United States has made only steady incremental progress in developing and deploying advanced renewable, coal, and nuclear technologies that can compete with conventional energy technologies. However, continued reliance on conventional technologies leaves the United States vulnerable to crude oil supply disruptions, with economic, energy security, and national security consequences.

And here is what the report recommends to the Congress (p. 54):

To meet the nation’s rising demand for energy, reduce its economic and national security vulnerability to crude oil supply disruptions, and minimize adverse environmental effects, the Congress should consider further stimulating the development and deployment of a diversified energy portfolio by focusing R&D funding on advanced energy technologies.

Posted on January 24, 2007 08:35 AM View this article | Comments (5)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Energy Policy

January 22, 2007

Recycled Nonsense on Disaster Losses

If you want an example of the sort of scientific exaggeration that should concern both scientists and advocates involved in the climate debate (but typically goes uncorrected), next week's Newsweek magazine has an article on the growing tab of disaster losses, which it attributes to global warming.

Around the country, [insurance] companies have been racking up record property losses from freakish weather, such as the ice storms last week that paralyzed much of the Great Plains and froze California's citrus crops. In recent years, wildfires in the Northwest, drought and hail in the Midwest, windstorms, lightning strikes on power grids, soil subsidence and other calamities of nature have led to cumulative property losses that exceed those caused by hurricanes. "There's a shift going on to more frequent, extreme weather events," says Evan Mills, an environmental scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "It's as much an issue in the heartland as on the coast."
Global warming is the culprit, claim many—including several insurers who are canceling policies. While scientists cannot determine whether a single weather event is caused by a natural cycle, or is evidence of more permanent, malignant climate change, the pattern of mounting losses is clear. According to Mills, weather-related catastrophe losses have increased from about $1 billion a year in the 1970s to an average of $17 billion a year over the past decade. In 2005, the year of Katrina, that figure reached $71 billion.

We have interacted with Evan Mills before, and despite having his work throughly debunked and the existence of an expert workshop report on the topic cosponsored by Munich Re, he continues to fundamentally misrepresent the state of the science to suggest that comparing disaster losses unadjusted for societal change from the 1970s to the present says something about global warming. It does not. Here are relevant conclusions from our 2006 workshop:

Analyses of long-term records of disaster losses indicate that societal change and economic development are the principal factors responsible for the documented increasing losses to date.
Because of issues related to data quality, the stochastic nature of extreme event impacts, length of time series, and various societal factors present in the disaster loss record, it is still not possible to determine the portion of the increase in damages that might be attributed to climate change due to GHG emissions.

In the near future the quantitative link (attribution) of trends in storm and flood losses to climate changes related to GHG emissions is unlikely to be answered unequivocally.

Posted on January 22, 2007 04:32 PM View this article | Comments (6)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

Pielke’s Comments on Houston Chronicle Story

Kevin Vranes and I are quoted in a Houston Chronicle story today on the "overselling" of climate science. Kevin just posted his reactions. I have a few reactions as well.

First, I was surprised to see the following quote from NAS President Ralph Cicerone, which I had not seen before:

I think we understand the mechanisms of CO2 and climate better than we do of what causes lung cancer. ... In fact, it is fair to say that global warming may be the most carefully and fully studied scientific topic in human history.

Not only is this absurd on its face, it is politically dangerous for those wanting action on climate change. Consider another similar statement along these lines from RealClimate’s Ray Pierrehumbert:

On the subject of controversy and evidence for evolution vs. evidence for CO2-induced global warming, I'd say both are well supported but that in some ways the case for anthropogenic global warming is a bit more straightforward. That's because its mostly physical science rather than biology. We have quantitative mathematical representations of far more of the process, and ways of testing individual bits in a more straightforward way (as in laboratory measurements of infrared absorption by CO2). Evolution proceeds slowly, and while there are definitely cases where it can be observed in action, reading the fossil record presents difficulties that are in some ways more challenging than reading the paleoclimate record. There are cases where the difficulties are comparable (e.g. figuring out Cretaceous CO2 levels, or making sense of satellite measurements of tropical lapse rate trends) but on the whole, we know how to take a reductionist approach to climate better than we know how to take a reductionist approach to biology. [Emphasis added. -Ed.]

The comparisons by Drs. Cicerone and Pierrehumbert to smoking and evolution are of course political comments in the guise of science. The thinking appears to be that if you accept certain political action on smoking and evolution, then you necessarily must accept certain political action on climate change because the scientific cases in smoking and evolution are weaker than in climate change yet we take certain actions in those cases. Talk about overselling . . .

The political danger is of course that it is quite appropriate to take issue with the fundamental premise of these statements and use that to argue that we shouldn't be taking action on climate change until the science is as certain as smoking or evolution. Then one is caught up debating . . . guess what . . . the science of climate change in relation to evolution and smoking, and not policy actions in the face of fundamental uncertainties. I don't care if climate science is or is not more certain than evolution or smoking, it doesn;t matter one bit for the case for action.

Second, it is interesting to see Judy Curry, a frequent commenter here, offering some support for Kevin Vranes’ views about their being some tension in the community. Of course, she is well positioned to know given that the hurricane community has seen more than its fair share of such tensions.

Finally, I’m quoted at the end of the story as follows:

"I can understand how a scientist without tenure can feel the community pressures," says environmental scientist Roger Pielke Jr., a colleague of Vranes' at the University of Colorado.
Pielke says he has felt pressure from his peers: A prominent scientist angrily accused him of being a skeptic, and a scientific journal editor asked him to "dampen" the message of a peer-reviewed paper to derail skeptics and business interests.

"The case for action on climate science, both for energy policy and adaptation, is overwhelming," Pielke says. "But if we oversell the science, our credibility is at stake."

For those wanting more details about pressures I’ve personally experienced, please have a look at this post.

Posted on January 22, 2007 10:49 AM View this article | Comments (46)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

January 20, 2007

Hypocrisy Starts at Home

If you want a sense of how difficult it will be for 6.5 billion people to reduce, much less eliminate, their emissions of fossil fuels, consider this telling vignette from the University of Colorado, my home institution, here in Boulder.

The Daily Camera, our local paper, reports today that the University is going to build a new power plant:

The University of Colorado is making plans for a new plant to replace the aging power facility near the corner of 18th Street and Colorado Avenue.
Originally built in 1909, it's both inefficient and too small to keep up with the university's growth, CU officials say.

The new plant would cost $60 million to $75 million and be running in 2011 at the earliest, said Paul Tabolt, CU's vice chancellor for administration. It is tentatively planned for a spot northeast of the Coors Events Center.

One thing the new power plant wouldn't provide is electricity, which could affect Boulder's ability to adhere to the Climate Action Plan passed by voters in November. That plan involves spending more than $820,000 a year on energy efficiency and other measures to reduce the city's heat-trapping gases 24 percent by 2012 so that Boulder meets Kyoto Protocol goals.

According to the CU Power Plant home page, as recently as 2003 the current power plant, powered by natural gas, not only provided for all campus electricity needs, but it also produced a surplus of power which it provided to the grid.

But due to the high cost of natural gas CU decided to stop using its own natural gas-powered power plant in favor of purchasing power from Xcel Energy. According to a December, 2006 campus study (PDF) of options for providing power:

The recent increase in the price of natural gas along with increasing turbine maintenance costs has forced Utility Services to reconsider the balance of reliability and economics. These increasing costs have compelled Utility Services to shut down both generators except for forced or planned outages.

Why does this matter from the standpoint of the city of Boulder's environmental goals? Again according to the December, 2006 study:

Gross [greenhouse gas] emissions to the environment are increased when the University purchases electricity from Xcel Energy since the electricity comes primarily from coal fired plants instead of the University’s gas fired system. Approximately 80% of Xcel Energy’s electricity is produced by coal fired generating stations, although wind and other sustainable sources are included in their grid areas.Also, Xcel Energy’s new coal fired plant will utilize extensive emission reduction equipment and existing coal fired plants are being retrofitted for emission reduction. These measures will make the emission from coal fired plants nearby equal to the emissions from gas fired plants. Since two alternatives of this study provide for the shutdown of the University’s cogeneration system and the purchase of all electricity from Xcel Energy Utilities, emissions from coal fired plants into the environment may increase under these two alternatives. An alternative is for the University is to purchase all power from wind sources, or Green renewable energy credits (REC’s), which will reduce emissions.
An alternative to this proposal is to maintain the cogeneration system at the University. Maintaining cogeneration capability allows the University the option of offsetting any or all of the coal fired emissions that would be produced if the electricity was purchased from Xcel Energy. This option comes at a significant operational cost on an annual basis, since abandoning the cogeneration system has a cost reduction of nearly $2 million per year.

According to this U.S. EPA website electricity from natural natural gas produces about half of the greenhouse gases that electricity produced from coal. Given the energy needs of the Boulder campus, it is not unreasonable to think that a permanent doubling of its greenhouse gas emissions for electricity will make Boulder's goal of meeting the Kyoto Protocol a moot point.

Here is what The Daily Camera reported about my Environmental Studies compatriot Professor Jim White's description the trade-offs involved, and also the reaction of the Chancellor, Bud Peterson:

Jim White, a CU professor of environmental studies, said generation that doesn't involve renewable energy, such as wind, would take some sheen off CU's reputation as an environmental hotbed. He said CU's national leadership in environmental-science research should be reflected in the university's actions.
"In the end, money drives a lot of what we're talking about," White said. "But I think there's a moral imperative. You've got to balance the money issues with doing the right thing."

CU Chancellor Bud Peterson said the university could buy wind-energy credits for $250,000 a year.

"Given our budget, that's not a lot. We could be bragging about how we're carbon-neutral," Peterson said. "Quite frankly, I'd rather take $250,000 a year and invest it in a way that can make a meaningful difference."

So keep these facts in mind:

*The University will be spending $60-$75 million to build a new power plant for steam.

*The University prides itself on being environmentally conscious.

*The University is about to institutionalize for a decade or longer a doubling of its greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation.

*The city of Boulder has passed a law to meet the Kyoto targets.

*The Chancellor has balked at spending $250,000/year, or 0.3% of the cost of the new power plant on this issue.

Whatever one thinks about climate change or greenhouse gas emissions, this story from the University of Colorado tells you all you need to know about the difficulties of actually reducing emissions even in the context of strong political support, strong public support, and the existence of a law providing a (modest) emissions target and timetable. This is the situation that on a much larger scale Europe is now grappling with, and I suspect, the United States eventually will be as well.

Posted on January 20, 2007 09:09 AM View this article | Comments (27)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Education | Energy Policy

January 18, 2007

Kudos for Explicit Political Advocacy

A number of prominent scientists -- including the well-known James Hansen, Judy Curry, Paul Epstein, and Rita Colwell -- have joined with the National Association of Evangelicals to advocate for political action on climate change. They released a statement (PDF) yesterday which stated:

We believe that the protection of life on Earth is a profound moral imperative. It addresses without discrimination the interests of all humanity as well as the value of the non-human world. It requires a new moral awakening to a compelling demand, clearly articulated in Scripture and supported by science, that we must steward the natural world in order to preserve for ourselves and future generations a beautiful, rich, and healthful environment. For many of us, this is a religious obligation, rooted in our sense of gratitude for Creation and reverence for its Creator.

Here at Prometheus we often call out scientists who hide their political agendas behind science, particularly on climate change. But in this case, there is none of that, to these scientists' credit. These scientists are explicit about their political values and their efforts to use a seemingly "strange bedfellows" association with a major religious group to influence the political process (PDF).

The role of science in policy and politics is much more straightforward when scientists clearly identify when they are advocating for values that they strongly hold, rather than suggesting that it is science that compels particular political outcomes.

Posted on January 18, 2007 03:36 AM View this article | Comments (19)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | The Honest Broker

January 16, 2007

Change the Climate, Plant a Tree?

In today’s New York Times Stanford’s Ken Caldeira has a thought provoking op-ed on the impact of planting trees on the global climate system. His basic argument is that planting trees is not a solution to rising carbon dioxide levels, even though trees remove carbon from the atmosphere. Although perhaps not intentioned, Caldeira’s op-ed indicates that the approach of the Framework Convention on Climate Change may be fatally flawed. Caldeira ends up, as these discussions often do, focused narrowly on reducing carbon dioxide emissions. However, his own argument suggests that a broader perspective is needed. In the end we return to the start -- what is the problem posed by climate change, anyway?

Caldeira begins by observing that trees do indeed remove carbon from the atmosphere:

We add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every time we use energy from coal, oil or gas; but each tree can remove more than a ton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over its lifetime. Based on this logic, it might seem a good idea to go out and plant a tree to slow global heating.

And because of this he notes that many initiatives have sprung up around the world to “offset” emissions by planting trees.

. . . projects have sprung up throughout the world claiming to help cool the earth, ready to accept your money and plant a tree in your name. The computer company Dell will now donate $2 from every laptop sale to planting trees in an effort to offset the carbon dioxide emissions that result from powering their computers. For a 2 percent to 4 percent surcharge on bills, Pacific Gas and Electric will offer to offset its customers’ carbon emissions by helping to preserve California’s carbon-storing forests.

Sounds great, right? Well, not really. Caldeira explains that planting trees may not in fact have the desired effects on the climate system.

While preserving and restoring forests is unquestionably good for the natural environment, new scientific studies are concluding that preservation and restoration of forests outside the tropics will do little or nothing to help slow climate change. And some projects intended to slow the heating of the planet may be accelerating it instead.

This is not a new perspective. It has been present in the literature for years. For example, Marland et al. wrote in 2003:

Changes in land surface can result in emission or removal of CO2 to the atmosphere and thus to changes in the Earth’s radiation balance. Changes in land surface can also change the radiation balance by altering the Earth’s surface albedo. In addition, changes in land surface can alter the fluxes of sensible and latent heat to the atmosphere and thus the distribution of energy within the climate system; and in so doing can alter climate at the local, regional, and even global scale. Mitigation strategies that give credits or debits for changing the flux of CO2 to the atmosphere but do not simultaneously acknowledge the importance of changes in the albedo or in the flows of energy within the Earth system might lead to land management decisions that do not produce the intended climatic results.

Marland, G., Pielke Sr., R.A., Apps, M., Avissar, R., Betts, R.A., Davis, K.J., Frumhoff, P.C., Jackson, S.T., Joyce, L., Kauppi, P., Katzenberger, J., MacDicken, K.G., Neilson, R., Niles, J.O., Dutta, D., Niyogi, S., Norby, R.J., Pena, N., Sampson, N., Xue, Y., 2003. The climatic impacts of land surface change and carbon management, and the implications for climate-change mitigation policy. Climate Policy 3:149–157. (PDF)

Why is it that removing carbon doesn’t have the desired climatic effects? Caldeira explains that there are multiple influences on the climate system, with the radiative forcing of carbon dioxide being only one of them, especially at the higher latitudes. Further, the effects of carbon dioxide are not so large as to overshadow the other effects. In fact Caldeira suggests that the other climate effects are on par with those of the radiative effects of carbon dioxide.

Trees don’t just absorb carbon dioxide — they soak up the sun’s heating rays, too. Forests tend to be darker than farms and pastures and therefore tend to absorb more sunlight. This has a warming influence that appears to cancel, on average, the cooling influence of the forest’s carbon storage. This effect is most pronounced in snowy areas — snow on bare ground reflects far more sunlight back to space than does a snowed-in forest — so forests in areas with seasonal snow cover can be strongly warming.
In contrast, tropical forests appear to be doubly valuable to the earth’s climate system. Not only do they store copious amounts of carbon, the roots of tropical trees reach down deep, drawing up water that they evaporate through their leaves. In the atmosphere, this water may form clouds that reflect sunlight back to space, helping to cool the earth.

As usual, it is when discussing the significance of science for policy that things get tricky. Caldeira first highlights (but does not explicitly say so) that the Framework Convention on Climate Change is incapable of dealing with the broad range of forcings that are important in the climate system.

These findings have important policy implications. It has been suggested that agreements to limit climate change should consider carbon stored in forests. If so, they would need to consider the direct climate effects of forests so as to avoid perverse incentives to plant warming forests in places like the United States, Canada, Europe and the former Soviet Union. However, tropical forests, which are generally found in developing countries, may be due a double climate credit — one for their carbon storage and another for their cooling clouds.

However, as we have detailed here on many occasions, the Climate Convention is focused only on a narrow subset of forcings relevant to the climate system. Its Article 1 makes this explicit when it defines “climate change” as:

a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.

The albedo effects of forests are not in fact covered under this definition – nor are other effects of land use, the biogeochemical effects of carbon dioxide, or other human-caused effects on climate change (for an overview of these aspects of climate science, see my father’s excellent blog). Caldeira’s perspective suggests that the Framework Convention offers too narrow a perspective on climate change if it is to be used as a policy instrument to actively manage the climate. Caldeira wisely reminds us that the goals of slowing carbon dioxide growth or stopping climate change are not the primary reason for concern about climate change, even though policy is often presented in that manner. Emissions reductions are means, not ends:

The broadest goal is neither to slow the growth of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere nor to slow climate change, but rather to preserve the irreplaceable natural balance that sustains life as we know it on this planet.

But here is where Caldeira’s argument falls apart. Despite acknowledging that the goals of climate policy must be broader than simply slowing emissions, he suggests in the end that that is exactly what we should be doing.

But the notion that we can save the planet just by planting trees is a dangerous illusion. To preserve our environment, we must drastically reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and this will require a major transformation of our energy system. A primary goal for the next half-century should be to transform our energy system to one based on clean, safe and environmentally acceptable energy sources like wind, solar and perhaps nuclear. This means solving the real problems involved with storing and distributing power, providing energy for transportation, and using nuclear plants.

He says nothing about what we should do about the effects of land use that he believes have a local or regional influence that rivals the radiative effects of carbon dioxide. He explains how this might occur in California.

Consider Pacific Gas and Electric’s surcharge plan [Described above. Ed.]. While the carbon soaked up by California’s forests reduces atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations everywhere, cooling Crete, Cancún and Calcutta, the sunlight they absorb warms the state and the surrounding region.

My reading of this statement is that unless there is attention to the effects of local/regional land use on climate in California under some scenarios of afforestation the effects greenhouse gas emissions on climate would be counteracted. Because land use change occurs all over the world it could have similar effects in other places (and of course different or opposite effects elsewhere, and everything in between). Caldeira completely ignores these effects in his discussion of advocating policy focused only on carbon dioxide. In fact, he goes so far as to advocate the planting of trees,

We want to avoid climate change so that we might pass these diverse natural riches on to future generations. In this light, preserving and restoring forests is a valuable activity, regardless of its impact on climate — we need more trees, not fewer.

Huh? Climate change resulting from greenhouse gases is bad, but the exact same climate change resulting from more trees is good? This is logically inconsistent. If society should indeed be concerned about future climate change because of its impacts on things that people care about, say on California snowpack and water resources, then the specific cause of climate change should not matter for deciding whether or not a problem exists. It is inconsistent to suggest that carbon dioxide-caused climate change is a problem, but land use-caused climate change is not.

Caldeira concludes as follows:

We cannot afford to indulge ourselves with well-intentioned activities that do little to solve the underlying problem. Instead, we must demand that our political leaders do more to revolutionize our energy system and preserve our environmental inheritance for future generations.
And then we can plant a tree.

All of this boils down to how we define the problem. Is it in fact dealing with the impacts of climate on things we care about? Or is it about transforming energy systems and preserving the environment? The difference matters because defining the problem in these different ways lead to very different portfolios of policy alternatives and justifications for them.

Posted on January 16, 2007 08:43 AM View this article | Comments (33)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

January 15, 2007

Common Sense in the Climate Debate

Here is a column by Cathy Young in the Boston Globe that (obviously) I think is pretty much on target.

Ms. Young cites a blog post by Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy studies at UCLA and a blogger (two appealing characteristics, if I say so myself) which can be found here.

Posted on January 15, 2007 08:32 AM View this article | Comments (52)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

January 10, 2007

Received Wisdom

The folks at Demos (my favorite think tank) in London have done it again. Alan Irwin, Kevin Jones, and Jack Stilgoe have produced a magnificent, readable, and erudite report on the role of expertise in decision making titled The Received Wisdom. Their report complements nicely (rather than makes obsolete before release, whew!) my forthcoming book, The Honest Broker. Below I’ve provided a set of lengthy excerpts on points I thought interesting and/or exceptionally well made. Anyone interested in the role of experts in democratic decision making should read this report carefully. I’ll be adding it to my syllabus for the spring.

Experts are woven into the fabric of government. But they tend to be talked about only when things go wrong. They are a resource, we are told – "on tap, not on top", according to Churchill. Behind the veneer of their advice, they are normally portrayed as neutral. And yet their authority is codified in the legislative process. They are often asked to speak beyond their immediate area of specialist knowledge, but their status as scientists – usually independent university scientists – gives them rhetorical power. Like expert witnesses in court, their evidence resists challenge because of their status. In the last 20 years, however, the politics of expertise have been exposed all too dramatically. Rather than making the best use of expert knowledge, politicians were seen relying on expert authority, shedding their own responsibility for making decisions. (p. 17)
. . . . . .

Governments rely on committees of experts rather than individuals because the committee will have a collectively wider range of knowledge and the committee’s discussion will strengthen their advice. However, we need to ensure that these committees do not fall into the trap of groupthink. When a new disease is discovered or a new technology brings a new set of concerns, it may not be clear what sorts of expertise are relevant. Experts in any particular area will ask certain questions. But other questions will remain unanswered and unasked. New issues demand cognitive diversity – different ways of looking at things. Opening-up needs to mean more than showing people how expert advice works. Opening-up needs to mean open-mindedness, it needs to mean asking new questions and it needs to mean listening to a much wider range of perspectives. (p. 22)

. . . . . .

In November 2006, a report from the Commons Select Committee on Science held a mirror to the fashion for evidence-based policy. In some areas, the committee argued, "evidence-based" has become a way to justify policy rather than a way to make policy – the evidence is found to suit the decision. Evan Harris, a committee member and
Liberal Democrat science spokesman, said that the way some policies claimed to be evidence-based was a "fraud which corrupts the whole use of science in government".

Unfortunately for civil servants, far from providing easy answers, the rise of evidence-based policy forces more questions to the surface. As we have seen in the last few years, controversies involving expertise frequently involve questions such as: What counts as evidence? Whose evidence? Evidence of what? Evidence for whom? What do we still not know? As Arie Rip puts it: "There are deep problems, with "evidence", with "-based", and with "policy"." The inescapable paradox is that "policy is about the future, and evidence is about the past".23 As BSE reminded us, by accentuating the positive – what is known – evidence-based policy often overlooks the uncertainties that come to define our problems. (p. 23)

. . . . . .

Far from taking power away from experts, we are suggesting that they contribute more, in a role that extends beyond evidence to wisdom. Experts should be encouraged to speak up, to contribute to debate and challenge its terms. We are taking the first steps towards a new social contract between experts and society. This means rethinking science – as a process rather than as a body of facts. It means looking at "the public" more respectfully. And it means appreciating the complexity of policy-making. (p. 25)

. . . . . .

As one civil servant told the inquiry: "One was aware of slightly leaning into the wind . . . we tended to make more reassuring sounding statements than might ideally have been said."39 According to a quip attributed to Bismarck, there are two things that it is better not to see in the making – laws and sausages. The assumption at the time of BSE was that expert advice should be a third. The then chief scientific adviser described the instinct "to hold the facts close" so that a "simple message can be taken out into the market place". But BSE had taught him that ‘the full messy process whereby scientific understanding is arrived at, with all its problems, has to be spilled out into the open’.40 The Phillips report stressed several points that, in the wake of BSE, have become central to the UK policy mantra when dealing with matters of risk and science:

Trust can only be generated by openness.

*Openness requires recognition of uncertainty, where it exists.
*The public should be trusted to respond rationally to openness.
*Scientific investigation of risk should be open and transparent.
*The advice and reasoning of advisory committees should be made public. (p. 34)

. . . . . .

The new rhetoric of open expertise has been widely heard. But there is a real question of how and to what extent such messages can be translated into governance practice. How do we spill "the full messy process" of scientific practice "out into the open" while continuing to make effective decisions about science, technology and society? As Sir William discovered, while it is important to talk about uncertainty, judgements must be made about how much uncertainty to acknowledge and in what form. And there is a risk that the acknowledgement of uncertainty is seen as a collapse of leadership and responsibility. (pp. 38-39)

. . . . . .

Blair describes himself as "evangelical" when it comes to science.80 The last thing experts need is moral certainty. The spirit of science is sceptical, exploratory and uncertain. The place of political leadership is not "standing up for science"81 – a model of science that few scientists would recognise. Science is not one thing. And it does not need defending; it needs debating. In the last ten years, with a move towards public dialogue about science, we have seen how vibrant such debates can be. Scientists who get involved are often surprised and enthused by the questions that people ask.82 These new questions are not a threat. They can help us build better scientific advice. There can be many reasons why technical experts and policymakers struggle to hear the voices of outsiders. Science is comfortable with universal statements expressed without obvious emotion or personality. "Non-experts" can shout too loudly, ignore professional codes of behaviour and make it clear that they care very deeply about the issues. Public groups will define the issues in their own way: what’s at stake can appear very different from varying social standpoints. The exchange of expertise and experience may not be straightforward. It is all too easy for insiders to become dismissive, to think that the public is failing to recognise the real issues or that the quality of debate is too low, that we knew all this already and so on. Learning to listen means suspending the tendency to dismiss what appears irrelevant, anecdotal or ill-informed until a real effort has been made to hear how the issues appear from a different point of view and to see what lessons might be learnt. This will also involve a willingness to acknowledge critical messages about how scientific institutions currently operate and not to become defensive in the face of criticism. Rather than trying to fit other voices into already established ways of thinking and acting, it means seeing things through different eyes. (p. 52)

. . . . . .

Issues involving science do not arrive with a script. And they do not bring with them a body of relevant evidence. Knowledge and wisdom must be marshalled to make sense of new challenges. Hard decisions will have to be made on the basis of pretty soft science. Facts will be hard to come by and uncertainty is likely to be rife.101 In such cases, experts and policy-makers need to be open-minded and intellectually humble. As they make sense of issues, they need to explore rather than assume. We have learnt from experience that, as well as shedding light on problems, expertise can blind us to our ignorance. We still need to learn how to take decisions openly in these situations. This exploratory, adaptive mode of expertise involves, as the Chief Scientific Adviser suggests, listening to new voices and seeking out diverse areas of expertise. And it also involves changing how we see science in policy. We cannot expect that science has all the answers. Theoretical models and predictions therefore need to be augmented by monitoring and research focused on answering specific questions. This provisional mode casts experts differently. It asks them to broaden their remits, to question, challenge and apply their wisdom. Policy-makers should expect what Andy Stirling calls "plural and conditional advice" as opposed to recommendations that are "monolithic and prescriptive".102 Minority reports from committees should be considered part of the process of making robust decisions rather than a dangerous break from unanimity. Scientific uncertainty does not mean that "anything goes". But recent debates do tell us that we need to find new ways to talk about uncertainty, as part of a richer conversation about expertise. (p. 70)

. . . . . .

Expert uncertainty does not have to sit uneasily with policymaking. Governance is a process of negotiating ambiguity, a messy business consisting of compromises, partial decisions and continuous renegotiation. But the problem with facts is that they are easy to hide behind. Complexities are obscured by discussions of evidence and knowledge. Uncertainty isn’t just about the limits of knowledge. It is also about the untidiness of policy. Buzzwords like openness and transparency need to be extended to the ways in which advice is used, or disregarded, in policy.

Putting the politics back into policy means politicians and policymakers taking greater responsibility for decisions. It means restoring legitimacy to the decision-making powers of government. It means being honest with the public about why decisions were made. And it means being open to criticism and conflict. (p. 73)

Posted on January 10, 2007 12:39 AM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | The Honest Broker

January 09, 2007

New Literature Review: Hurricanes and Global Warming

J. Marshall Shephard, a professor at the University of Georgia, and Tom Knutson, NOAA GFDL, have just published a review paper titled "The Current Debate on the Linkage Between Global Warming and Hurricanes" with the journal Geography Compass, which publishes review articles. The full text of the paper can be found here in html and it is also available from that page in PDF.

The paper reinforces the conclusions of the recent consensus statement of the World Meteorological Organization (note that T. Knutson was a lead author of the WMO statement), concluding:

Significantly more research – from observations, theory, and modeling – is needed to resolve the current debate around global warming and hurricanes.

Posted on January 9, 2007 03:19 PM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

January 08, 2007

An Update: Faulty Catastrophe Models?

Last April we discussed at length the profound significance to hurricane risk estimation of changes made by a leading company, Risk Management Solutions or RMS, to the implementation of catastrophe models used by insurance, reinsurance, among others in the risk management business. A news story from yesterday’s Tampa Tribune provides a perspective that underscores our original analysis.

Last April we wrote:

It does not seem to me that RMS recognizes how profoundly revolutionary this perspective is, or its potential consequences for their own business. What they are say is that the historical climatology of hurricane activity is no longer a valid basis for estimating future risks. This means that the catastrophe models that they provide are untethered from experience. Imagine if you are playing a game of poker, and the dealer tells you that the composition of the deck has been completely changed – now you don’t know whether there are 4 aces in the deck or 20. It would make gambling based on probabilities a pretty dodgy exercise. If RMS is correct, then it has planted the seed that has potential to completely transform its business and the modern insurance and reinsurance industries.

Yesterday’s Tampa Tribune has an article on the changes to the RMS model, which includes comments from scientists consulted by RMS who suggest that the changes to the model are scientifically unsupportable. Here is an excerpt from the news story:

The leading computer model used by the insurance industry to justify huge rate increases in coastal areas nationwide relies on faulty science, says an expert credited with helping develop it.
"I think it points to a problem with the way these modeling groups are operating," said Jim Elsner, a professor of geography at Florida State University.

Elsner was one of four experts on a panel assembled in late 2005 to provide input for the computer model by Risk Management Solutions of Newark, Calif.

He said the results, details of which were brought to his attention by the Tribune, contain assumptions that are "actually unscientific."

The flaws identified by Elsner and another panelist have nationwide implications. The expert input was used to justify loss estimates that have prompted major insurance companies to request homeowners rate increases of up to 40 percent.

The problem: RMS took a consensus of experts that there will be more storms across the Atlantic, then added its own projections about which U.S. regions would be most affected.

In an interview Saturday, Gov. Charlie Crist called RMS's actions "apparent misrepresentations" that are stunning and appalling, but in a way, part of a pattern.

"It almost doesn't shock me because this industry has been taking remarkable advantage of our people," Crist said. "Big insurance is about to face a new day in Florida."

The article reveals that the changes made by RMS apparently did not reflect what they were told by a panel of scientists that they convened to provide an informal expert elicitation:

In March, RMS surprised the insurance industry with a dramatic change in the benchmark catastrophe software model it sells access to. Instead of using historical models based on more than 100 years of storm data, RMS announced a "medium-term" five-year model for 2006 through 2010.

The models contain specific data on tens of millions of homes, allowing insurers to estimate risk based on computer simulations of possible storms.

Based on the new model, RMS said hurricane losses would increase by 40 percent over the Gulf Coast and 25 percent to 30 percent in the other regions.

Consumer advocates tried to raise alarms at the time, with little success.

Robert Hunter, a former Texas insurance commissioner now with the Consumer Federation of America, said the primary reason for the change to the five-year model appeared to be pressure from the insurance industry.

Thomas R. Knutson, a research meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton, N.J., and another RMS expert panelist, said the five-year timeline didn't come from the experts.

"I think that question was driven more by the needs of the insurance industry as opposed to the science," he said.

In March, RMS said the five-year model was developed in cooperation with the expert panel that included Elsner and Knutson, and that based on their perspective: "Increases in hurricane frequency should be expected along the entire U.S. coast, but will be highest in the Gulf, Florida, and the Southeast, while lower in the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast."

"I didn't make any such statement of that type," Knutson said Friday.
Elsner said he warned RMS about flaws in the model. "I said that's not a good way of doing it," he recalled, and said RMS exaggerated the basic science "well beyond what we expected."

Though RMS said in March that the expert panel "agreed unanimously that a forward-looking view of risk should reflect a higher probability of landfalling hurricanes," Elsner said there was no consensus.

It doesn’t sound like we’ve heard the end of this issue:

Other experts in the catastrophe-modeling business have questions, too.
Long-term historical data are still the most credible, given the sparse data available for projecting the next five years, Karen Clark, chief executive officer of AIR Worldwide, said in a speech in the summer. Her company is an RMS competitor. Clark encouraged insurance companies not to replace the long-term model with the short-term one. Still, AIR has launched its own version of a five-year program for customers.

The details of how RMS arrives at its projections are considered a trade secret.

"We have never been able to get what they call the information out of the black box to review their models," said Bob Lotane, a spokesman for Florida's Office of Insurance Regulation. He said a public modeling system the state is working on should provide a way to verify the RMS projections.

Crist said information from RMS might be subpoenaed.

As we concluded last April,

From the perspective of the basic functioning of the insurance and reinsurance industries, the change in approach by RMS is an admission that the future is far more uncertain than has been the norm for this community. Such uncertainty may call into question the very basis of hurricane insurance and reinsurance which lies in an ability to quantify and anticipate risks. If the industry can’t anticipate risks, or simply come to a consensus on how to calculate risks (even if inaccurate), then this removes one of the key characteristics of successful insurance. Debate on this issue has only just begun.

Posted on January 8, 2007 12:31 PM View this article | Comments (15)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters | Risk & Uncertainty

The Steps Not Yet Taken

Dan Sarewitz and I have a new chapter in press on climate policy:

Sarewitz, D. and R. Pielke, Jr., (2007, forthcoming), The Steps Not Yet Taken, Controversies in Science and Technology, Volume 2, edited by Daniel Lee Kleinman, Karen Cloud-Hansen, Christina Matta, and Jo Handelsman (publisher TBA). (prepublication version here in PDF)

Here is how we start off the chapter:

The climate system of the planet earth, and the energy system built by those who inhabit the earth, are today seen as the integrated elements of a single problem: global warming. In turn, scientific inquiry, public concern, and policy prescription have given rise to an international regime for controlling the behavior of the climate through management of the global energy system. In this chapter we explain why this regime, and in particular its codification through the Kyoto Protocol, is a failure. Our central point is simple: protecting people and the environment from the impacts of climate is a different problem from reducing greenhouse gas emissions to combat global warming. The policies that have resulted from combining these two problems are, as a consequence, failing to meaningfully address either problem. Policies to reduce global warming must be pursued independently of policies to reduce climate impacts.
First we explain why the Kyoto Protocol is not achieving its environmentally modest goals, a failure that has no connection to the refusal of the United States to sign onto the treaty, but rather reflects the complexity of energy systems and their management. We then consider the impacts of climate on society through the lens of Hurricane Katrina. Such impacts are unrelated to global warming, and cannot be addressed by emissions reductions. Instead, they require policies specifically focused on reduction of socioeconomic vulnerability to climate.

But emissions reductions are a key societal goal, and next we discuss the role of technological innovation in pursuing that goal. Current policies, embodied in Kyoto, are inappropriate and insufficient for making the necessary progress. A cornerstone of our argument is that much of the failure to date of climate change policy originates in a misunderstanding of the appropriate roles of science and technology in social and political change. Proponents of action on global warming have treated scientific evidence as the central catalyst for motivating necessary change, while technological advance has been viewed as a second-order consequence of such change. We argue that this reasoning is backwards, and that technological innovation is a much more effective scaffolding upon which to address energy policies than scientific knowledge.

The Kyoto Protocol is not effectively addressing the climate impacts problem or the energy technology problem. Although Kyoto is often portrayed as only a first step toward establishing an effective international climate change regime, we conclude that it is a step in the wrong direction.

You can read a prepublication version of the whole chapter here in PDF. Comment welcomed!

Posted on January 8, 2007 01:03 AM View this article | Comments (5)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters | Energy Policy

January 07, 2007

The End of Research?

Also from today's NYT, William Broad covers angst in the research community over the year-long continuing resolution. Here is an excerpt:

The failure of Congress to pass new budgets for the current fiscal year has produced a crisis in science financing that threatens to close major facilities, delay new projects and leave thousands of government scientists out of work, federal and private officials say.
"The consequences for American science will be disastrous," said Michael S. Lubell, a senior official of the American Physical Society, the world’s largest group of physicists. "The message to young scientists and industry leaders, alike, will be, ‘Look outside the U.S. if you want to succeed.’ "

Last year, Congress passed just 2 of 11 spending bills — for the military and domestic security — and froze all other federal spending at 2006 levels. Factoring in inflation, the budgets translate into reductions of about 3 percent to 4 percent for most fields of science and engineering.

Representative Rush D. Holt, a New Jersey Democrat and a physicist, said that scientists, in most cases, were likely to see little or no relief. "It’s that bad," Mr. Holt said. "For this year, it’s going to be belt tightening all around."

Congressional Democrats said last month that they would not try to finish multiple spending bills left hanging by the departed Republican majority and would instead keep most government agencies operating under their current budgets until next fall. Except for the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, the government is being financed under a stopgap resolution. It expires Feb. 15, and Democrats said they planned to extend a similar resolution through Sept. 30.

Some Republicans favored not finishing the bills because of automatic savings achieved by forgoing expected spending increases. Democrats and Republicans alike say that operating under current budgets, in some cases with less money, can strap federal agencies and lead to major disruptions in service.

Scientists say that is especially true for the physical sciences, which include physics, chemistry and astronomy. When it comes to federal financing, such fields in recent years have fared poorly compared with biology. The National Institutes of Health, for instance, spend more than $28 billion annually on biomedical programs, five times more than all federal spending for physical sciences.

For 2007, Congress and the Bush administration agreed that the federal budget for the physical sciences should get a major increase. A year ago, in his American Competitiveness Initiative, President Bush called for doubling the money for science over a decade. That prompted schools and federal laboratories to prepare for long-deferred repairs and expansions, plans that appear now to be in jeopardy.

Posted on January 7, 2007 11:21 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | R&D Funding

Meantime, Back in the News Section

The NYT's Elisabeth Rosenthal has a very interesting article today on Europe's "car boom." She writes:

Since 1990, emissions from transportation in Ireland have risen about 140 percent, the most in Europe. But Ireland is not alone.
Vehicular emissions are rising in nearly every European country, and across the globe. Because of increasing car and truck use, greenhouse-gas emissions are increasing even where pollution from industry is waning.

The 23 percent growth in vehicular emissions in Europe since 1990 has “offset” the effect of cleaner factories, according to a recent report by the European Environment Agency. The growth has occurred despite the invention of far more environmentally friendly fuels and cars.

“What we gain by hybrid cars and ethanol buses, we more than lose because of sheer numbers of vehicles,” said Ronan Uhel, a senior scientist with the European Environment Agency, which is based in Copenhagen. Vehicles, mostly cars, create more than one-fifth of the greenhouse-gas emissions in Europe, where the problem has been extensively studied.

The few places that have aggressively sought to fight the trend have taken sometimes draconian measures. Denmark, for example, treats cars the way it treats yachts — as luxury items — imposing purchase taxes that are sometimes 200 percent of the cost of the vehicle. A simple Czech-made Skoda car that costs $18,400 in Italy or Sweden costs more than $34,000 in Denmark. . .

High taxes on cars or gasoline of the type levied in Copenhagen are effective in curbing traffic, experts say, but they scare voters, making even environmentalist politicians unlikely to propose them. When Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, revealed his “green” budget proposal, it included an increase in gas taxes of less than two and a half cents per quart.

Other cities have tried variations that require fewer absolute sacrifices from motorists. Rome allows only cars with low emissions ratings into its historic center. In London and Stockholm, drivers must pay a congestion charge to enter the city center. Such programs do reduce traffic and pollution at a city’s core, but evidence suggests that car use simply moves to the suburbs.

But Dublin is more typical of cities around the world, from Asia to Latin America, where road transport volumes are increasing in tandem with economic growth. Since 1997, Beijing has built a new ring road every two years, each new concentric superhighway giving rise to a host of malls and housing compounds.

In Ireland, car ownership has more than doubled since 1990 and car engines have grown steadily larger. Meanwhile, new environmental laws have meant that emissions from electrical plants, a major polluter, have been decreasing since 2001.

Urban sprawl and cars are the chicken and egg of the environmental debate. Cars make it easier for people to live and shop outside the center city. As traffic increases, governments build more roads, encouraging people to buy more cars and move yet farther away. In Europe alone, 6,200 miles of motorways were built from 1990 to 2003 and, with the European Union’s enlargement, 7,500 more are planned. Government enthusiasm for spending on public transportation, which is costly and takes years to build, generally lags far behind.

On energy at least, European and Americans (and Chinese and Indians) seem to share more in common than is commonly assumed in the debate over climate and energy.

Posted on January 7, 2007 08:26 AM View this article | Comments (5)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Energy Policy

Climate Determinism Lives On

Andy Revkin of the New York Times has an article in today’s paper which suggests that the different political outcomes on on climate change in the United States and Europe might be explained to some degree by their different climates – positing that Europe has one climate and the United States has many. Somewhat bizarrely on this sociological and political question Andy quotes a number of physical scientists, and the results are about what one would expect. For instance, Penn State’s Michael Mann opines:

[Mann] has another theory about why Washington, particularly, has lagged even as some states and cities have moved ahead to limit such emissions. "The East Coast of the United States, and particularly the mid-Atlantic region, did not warm nearly as much as rest of globe over the 20th century," Dr. Mann said. "And that’s where the decision-making is going on."

Perhaps someone at Penn State’s political science department might share with Professor Mann the fact that our elected representatives actually come from all over the United States. More generally, had Andy Revkin spoke to relevant experts like Bill Travis, Nico Stehr, or Mickey Glantz he might have learned that climate determinism – the idea that regional climate differences can explain social and political outcomes -- has been completely discredited for decades in the social sciences. Some even called the idea racist. He might have simply queried Wikipedia:

The fundamental argument of the environmental determinists was that aspects of physical geography, particularly that of climate, influenced the psychological mind-set of individuals, which in turn defined the behaviour and culture of the society that those individuals formed. For example, tropical climates were said to cause laziness, relaxed attitudes and promiscuity, while the frequent variability in the weather of the middle latitudes led to more determined and driven work ethics. Because these environmental influences operate slowly on human biology, it was important to trace the migrations of groups to see what environmental conditions they had evolved under.
Between 1920 and 1940, environmental determinism came under repeated attacks as its claims were found to be severely faulted at best, and often dangerously wrong. Geographers reacted to this by first developing the softer notion of "environmental possibilism," and later by abandoning the search for theory and causal explanation for many decades. Later critics charged that determinism served to justify racism and imperialism. The experience of environmental determinism has left a scar on geography, with many geographers reacting negatively to any suggestion of environmental influences on human society.

The climate community, and those that cover it, have a blind spot when it comes to social science.

Posted on January 7, 2007 01:58 AM View this article | Comments (17)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

January 06, 2007

Who Said This? No Cheating!

One day, anthropologists, sociologists, and maybe even psychoanalysts will look back on the early-twenty first century debate on climate change with incredulity and bafflement. Consider the following statement as a weekend pop quiz – no Googling if you wan to play along!

I worry a little bit about what you might call the Tyranny of the IPCC. . . That gives me some slight willies. . . Sure, IPCC is confident about the existence and cause of recent warming . . . But there are other areas -- mainly around the effects of climate change -- where the IPCC says, in effect, "we don't know for sure yet." Does that mean all respectable people must stay silent about those effects until the IPCC ratifies a consensus conclusion? Yes, we have to leave science to the scientists. But science is not a priesthood that can or should impose quietude on the rest of us. Our informed gut feelings about how things will turn out are legitimate. People make statements beyond what's strictly supported by the peer-reviewed evidence all the time.

Was this statement made by:

(a) A Republican U.S. Senator from a Midwestern state with a panhandle in a Senate floor speech
(b) A scientist formerly associated with the IPCC responding to being labeled a "skeptic" by his peers
(c) An environmentalist writer defending Al Gore’s scientifically unsupportable statements
(d) A prominent NASA scientist defending his work projecting rapid future sea level rise
(e) A conservative blogger explaining why the notion of scientific consensus is really cover for a political agenda

Click through for the answer (click on Comments now to reply before reading the answer):

The answer is (c). The author is Dave Roberts at Grist magazine. He writes these views over at the Gristmill blog. To best serve the pop quiz we did cut out some of what Dave wrote to preserve ambiguity, so please do go and read the whole thing. We have every respect for Dave as a passionate advocate for causes that he believes in (check him out on TWC, also a music recommendation for Dave;-). But at the same time his willingness to forgive departures from scientific standards in support of causes and people that he believes in makes him no different from his opponents who do the exact same thing.

In the comments on Dave’s post climate scientist Andrew Dessler tries to gently make this exact same point:

I am very leery letting Al Gore or anyone "supplement" the IPCC. If we let Al Gore inject his scientific expertise, then why shouldn't we let James Inhofe also make pronouncements on the science. Gore and Inhofe are both advocates, and their interpretation of the science clearly reflects their preferred policy choices. I would therefore argue that science should be left to the professionals. I know that sounds elitist and I'll probably get flamed for it, but so be it.

This pop quiz should be interpreted as a lesson in the politicization of science. It is very easy to hold different standards for representations of science as a function of different political or policy commitments. Some, like Prof. Dessler will say that the antidote to this is to focus on getting the best scientific assessments possible. Others, like me, recognize that scientists who produce assessments are people with values and political agendas. So I argue that the only way to move beyond this situation is to of course seek the best science but to also discuss policy options explicitly, rather than orienting the climate debate solely with respect to science. Science is comfortable, and allows some a convenient excuse not to discuss policy (or worse a way to smuggle politics under the cover of "science"). But we should remember that we talk, debate, and argue about climate change because it matters, and because the decisions that we take matter as well. The answer to this is not to pretend that science can be discussed in a vacuum, or to suggest that politicians are legitimate voices on where future science is going.

The answer lies in explicitly discussing policy – what should we do, when, at what cost, with what effects, etc.? Everything else is a distraction.

Posted on January 6, 2007 02:47 AM View this article | Comments (12)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Scientific Assessments

January 04, 2007

Progressive Radio Network Interview, Today 1PM MST

Later today I'll be discussing climate change with Steve Barnett on his show "Paradise Parking Lot" on the Progressive Radio Network. You can tune in live at 1:00 PM (Mountain Time) today here.

Posted on January 4, 2007 10:21 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

January 03, 2007

RealClimate Comment

RealClimate has not always decided to post my comments. So here is what I just submitted on their thread reacting to Andy Revkin's piece this week:

Nice post.

When I first presented the idea of a third "tribe" in the climate debate, partly tongue-in-cheek, I did so to recognize a another political position on climate change. Not science. That political position is characterized by people who accept the IPCC (hence, non-skeptic, i.e., "skeptic" as a noun, as often used in derogatory fashion on this site) but reject the targets and timetables approach that is codified in the Framework Convention. This includes a variety of different, even mutually inconsistent approaches proposed by people as diverse as Steve Rayner, Bjorn Lomborg, Dan Sarewitz, and Gregg Easterbrook. (And in some quarters -- maybe here -- simply mentioning the name Lomborg is enough to be labeled a heretic, ;-) )

Now, as far as I know you guys have no views on the Framework Convention one way or the other, or at least that is what you say. So this political debate has nothing to do with what you present here, and this third way should not be relevant, right? The reality is that if climate policy is going to move forward, it has to break out of (a) positioning everything in terms of science, and (b) framing everything in terms of alarmists and skeptics/contrarians. And like it or not, RealClimate is a big player in keeping this Manichean view alive, such as with your recent "year in review" and incessant skeptic obsession.

I don't care if this third way on climate policy is called the middle, top, bottom, left, or right. And I have no affinity for the NSH tag. What I do care about is that people engage in serious discussions of actual policy options in manner that is far more diverse that has existed to date. If that is something that RC wants to venture into, we'd all benefit.

Happy 2007!

Posted on January 3, 2007 07:14 PM View this article | Comments (26)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

Climatic Change Special Issue on Geoengineering

The August, 2006 issue of the journal Climatic Change has some interesting commentary reacting to Paul Crutzen’s idea that climate change might be dealt with by injecting aerosols into the atmosphere. Here are a few excerpts from these commentaries on Crutzen:

Ralph Cicerone, National Academy of Sciences, Wasington, DC (PDF, subscription required)

I am aware that various individuals have opposed the publication of Crutzen’s paper, even after peer review and revisions, for various and sincere reasons that are not wholly scientific. Here, I write in support of his call for research on Geoengineering and propose a framework for future progress in which supporting and opposing viewpoints can be heard and incorporated. I also propose that research on geoengineering be considered separately from actual implementation, and I suggest a path in that direction. . .
A commonly held view is that commitment to geoengineering would undercut human resolve to deal with the cause of the original problem, greenhouse gases in the case of climate change; Crutzen states such concerns as did Cicerone et al. (1992), Schneider (1996), and Schelling (1996). There is a widespread, perhaps universal belief that humans must first attempt to limit these emissions. Crutzen notes that worldwide agreements may not prove to be effective. Most scientists believe that there is also a danger from ignorance of harmful side effects, and there are other reservations against geoengineering on ethical grounds. While some people fear that research will lead to direct experimentation and to geoengineering interventions, I believe that we should encourage research, and separate research from actual interventions (see below). Research is needed to reduce ignorance, and it is likely that gaining an acceptable amount of knowledge before intervention will take many years. Freedom of inquiry itself has moral value.

Jeffrey Kiehl, NCAR, Boulder, CO (PDF, subscription required)

It is important to note that Crutzen argues that this idea be studied in depth and openly before any large scale action is taken. A basic assumption to this approach is that we, humans, understand the Earth system sufficiently to modify it and ‘know’ how the system will respond. . . .
We have already ‘chosen’ to geoengineer our climate system through our use of fossil fuels, where the engineering of the climate system is an inadvertent by product of our values around forms of consumption. Proposals to consciously alter the climate system to treat the symptom of our behaviors imply we understand all of the complexities of Earth as a system. At times Earth performs a stratospheric albedo enhancement experiment through the eruption of volcanoes. As pointed out by Crutzen, the Earth does cool due to this experiment, but this experiment also provides ample evidence of the non-local and non-linear response of Earth’s climate system, e.g. winter NH warming. This example exhibits how Earth’s climate system is far more complex than a simple energy balance picture. For this reason, I support Crutzen’s argument that more detailed and comprehensive modeling studies be carried out with regards to experiments. But my concern is that all models have their limitations (e.g. note the inability of models to predict the appearance of the Antarctic ozone hole before it was observed). When will we know a model is ‘good enough’ to go out and perform a real experiment?

On the issue of ethics, I feel we would be taking on the ultimate state of hubris to believe we can control Earth. We (the industrially developed world) would essentially be telling the (rest of the) world not to worry about our insatiable use of energy. In essence we are treating the symptom, not the cause. Our species needs to begin to address the cause(s) behind the problem. For example, an analysis of the U.S. contribution to CO2 emissions indicates that these emissions in part arise from three factors: the large number of SUVs, the size of homes, and distance we drive to work. I would argue that the first two of these factors are ones of choice, and not necessity. Yet, the American public chooses to buy SUVs and build large homes. Why? It seems that we need to address the fundamental issue of value, before tinkering with a system that we do not completely understand.

Lennart Bengtsson, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany (PDF, subscription required)

Here I will bring up three major issues, which must be more thoroughly understood before any geo-engineering of climate could be considered, if at all. The three issues are (i) the lack of accuracy in climate prediction, (ii) the huge difference in timescale between the effect of greenhouse gases and the effect of aerosols and (iii) serious environmental problems which may be caused by high carbon dioxide concentration irrespective of the warming of the climate. . .
. . . our understanding of the effects on aerosols on climate is less well understood than the greenhouse gases. Aerosols are not well mixed and interact with clouds in a complex way, where many questions are still open as we lack detailed empirical data. In addition, the role of clouds in regulating the climate under changed forcing conditions is not yet known with sufficient details. Present climate models are highly parameterized and the processes regulating the interaction of clouds, aerosols and radiation through the depth of the atmosphere are highly tuned. We do not yet know for sure to what extent we overestimate the feedback effect from the greenhouse gases and thus need the aerosols as compensation or whether we underestimate the effect of the greenhouse gases and thus the effect of aerosols is less significant (Rodhe et al., 2000). . .

So in conclusion, I do consider it more feasible to succeed in solving the world’s energy problem, which is the main cause to the present concern about climate change, than to successfully manage a geo-engineering experiment on this scale and magnitude, which even if it works is unable to solve all problems with the very high concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Michael McCracken, Climate Institute, Washington, DC (PDF, subscription required)

. . . if greenhouse gas emissions are not going to be reduced, there will not only need to be an increasingly aggressive geoengineering effort to counter-balance the radiative influences, but the effort also would need to be continued virtually indefinitely. Although it might be conceivable for one nation to actually commit to such a program, it seems rather unlikely that a global coalition of nations could be kept together to sustain such a diversion of resources for a task that would seem, to the typical citizen, to generate no immediate or direct benefits . . .
In addition to the political, ethical, and economic issues that such a long-term commitment would raise, there is also a potential legal impediment. Reacting to the attempts at weather modification during the Vietnam War, the nations of the world agreed in 1978 to the UN Convention on the Prohibition of Military or any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques4 (Fleming, 2004), which essentially prohibits weather modification that any nation would consider hostile or environmentally damaging. In that “climate” is really a mathematical construct created by averaging over the weather, it would not be far-fetched to argue that this treaty might well not permit geoengineering schemes to be used for the purpose of climate change, or counterbalancing it (indeed, changing climate patterns is specifically mentioned as being covered in one of the understandings of the treaty). The notion of one or a few countries proceeding on some geoengineering approach without the permission of all countries would almost certainly be considered hostile by some nation. . .

There has already been some experience with political consideration of geoengineering, and in this case additional considerations arose. In its initial formulation in mid 2001, President Bush’s Climate Change Technology Initiative included consideration of geoengineering as one of the possible approaches, and indeed a meeting was held in the fall of 2001 and a draft report prepared (Ehsan Khan, personal communication). A powerful argument against proceeding emerged, namely that if a viable and low cost geoengineering alternative really were available, economic analysis would then seem to argue against continuing to try to reduce CO2 emissions. As such, geoengineering would really be, in essence, an enabler for undiminished addiction to fossil fuels, roughly equivalent to foregoing fire insurance based on an assurance that the fire department was right next door and could quickly put out any blaze. In addition to adding to the perception that the Administration’s emission reduction program was not serious, relying on Geoengineering came across as only conceivable if one had an unrealistically complete understanding of all the possible situations that could lie ahead (i.e., could be absolutely assured it would work in all cases for an indefinite time).Without such knowledge, particularly regarding the potential for surprises and abrupt change, full reliance on geoengineering to counterbalance the climate-changing effects of greenhouse gases would, over time, not only compound the necessity of sustaining the Geoengineering option, but also mean that stopping might well result in even greater consequences than if one had not pursued the geoengineering approach at all, especially in comparison to devoting the resources to reducing the costs of non-fossil energy technologies. . .

What is clear from review of the various options is that it is easier to warm the climate than to cool it. For this reason, continued and increasing emissions of greenhouse gases merit very serious control efforts.

Mark Lawrence, Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Mainz, Germany (PDF, subscription required)

An intriguing dichotomy has developed within the field of atmospheric and climate research. On the one side, it has become common practice to examine pessimistic future scenarios of anthropogenic pollutant emissions and their environmental impacts. Not surprisingly, compared to the alternative "best guess" or "maximum feasible reduction" emissions scenarios, the pessimistic scenario simulations tend to predict large changes in the climate system and air quality. These scenarios can certainly attract attention to the possibly disastrous consequences of a careless environmental stewardship. However, they can also backfire politically, being seen as "unrealistic scare tactics" or "Hollywood horrors" put forth by scientists with environmentalist agendas. Furthermore, each simulation can only show one potential outcome among many possible states for a strongly perturbed climate. The predicted extreme outcomes of pessimistic scenarios will tend to vary widely from model to model. Unless this is communicated effectively, it can lead to confusion among policy makers, and can reduce confidence in such predictive studies. Nevertheless, such pessimistic scenario calculations are not only allowed, but are strongly condoned, for instance by the IPCC (2001), which employs these types of pessimistic scenarios as a central part of its regular assessments. This is well justified, given the most important outcome of these scenario calculations: scientists learn, and they learn a lot about the behavior of the earth system. The key is ensuring that the results are reported to the public and policy-making sectors as clearly and responsibly as possible, which is part of the purpose of the intense IPCC review procedure.
On the other side of the dichotomy, serious scientific research into Geoengineering possibilities, such as discussed in the publications by Crutzen (2006) and Cicerone (2006), is not at all condoned by the overall climate and atmospheric chemistry research communities. Quite the contrary, according to Cicerone, “refereed publications that deal with such ideas are not numerous nor are they cited widely”. In the discussions that surrounded the drafting of Crutzen’s article, there was a passionate outcry by several prominent scientists claiming that it is irresponsible to publish such an article focused on a particular geoengineering proposal. . .

I deeply hope that we will never see an era where widespread geoengineering like that discussed by Crutzen is being practiced, but there is no way to guarantee that this will be the case. Crutzen expresses the sincere concern that we may eventually reach the state of extreme climate change where the overall international sentiment is in favor of applying geoengineering. If we do not conduct careful research now, we will not be prepared to advise politicians on how to best approach large-scale geoengineering applications – including providing sound information on the various risks involved, and on which ideas should not be pursued further. . .

Many concerns have been expressed about the possible future application of widespread geoengineering. Especially worrisome is that it could end up being used as an excuse for not needing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, in which case it follows that the intensity of any geoengineering efforts (e.g., the amount of sulfur injected into the stratosphere per year) would also need to increase to keep pace with accumulating, long-lived greenhouse gases. Nevertheless, geoengineering is being discussed intensely, at least outside of the formal scientific literature, and it is not going to go away by ignoring it or refusing to discuss it scientifically. Thus, I would argue that it is our responsibility to do what scientists do best: explore it, understand it deeply, and eventually describe the key points of this understanding in terms accessible to the educated public and policy-making communities, in order to support well-informed decisions on geoengineering in the future.

Posted on January 3, 2007 12:01 PM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

January 02, 2007

Profiling Frank Laird

Andy Revkin’s article in the New York Times yesterday suggested that there are an untapped set of views on climate policy that might be worth hearing from. We thought it might be worth profiling some of these voices periodically. One such perspective is provided by Frank Laird, a professor in the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver. Frank is also a friend and a faculty affiliate at our Center at CU.

One of Frank’s areas of expertise is energy policy, and specifically renewable energy policies. His excellent 2001 book Solar Energy, Technology Policy, and Institutional Values, (Cambridge University Press), was a finalist (one of the top 3) 2004 Don K. Price Award for the best book in science and technology policy or politics, awarded by the American Political Science Association. I reviewed his book in 2002 for the journal Policy Sciences and you can see my review here in PDF. Frank's book illustrates how technologies become objects onto which political partisans map their valued ends and means. While values don’t always change quickly, a technology – in this case solar energy and nuclear energy -- can be favored at different times for difference reasons by different political camps. Politics does make strange bedfellows. Consequently we should be careful in linking a particular technology with a political perspective. In the case of solar energy, Laird argues, success in making such a linkage is one factor which arguably held back the further expansion of solar technologies in the 1970s. Laird also shows quite convincingly how energy policy decisions made in the 1950s and 1960s have shaped where we are at today.

Frank has written on climate change as well. In 2000 he wrote Just Say No to Greenhouse Gas Emissions Targets in Issues in Science and Technology. In that article he wrote:

The critiques in this paper are not based on skepticism about the nature and seriousness of climate change, and they are not intended to give aid and comfort to the diminishing band of greenhouse skeptics. I assume for this analysis that the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are correct. . . . Although the science still contains substantial uncertainty, as climate scientist Stephen Schneider and others remind us, that uncertainty cuts both ways, so that the effects of climate change could be significantly worse than the models predict. That downside potential is all the more reason why we need policies that will actually help us to put off and cope with whatever changes will come. The Kyoto Protocol emissions targets will only hinder our collective ability to do that.

His critique remains current today:

Effective international actions to cope with climate change should be based on three principles. First, the international institutions that will implement climate change treaties must be understood as catalytic, not regulatory. Second, actions on climate change need to make effective use of the substantial institutional developments already in place around the globe. Third, the goals of the treaty must be process-oriented, not descriptions of some final outcome. . .
The Protocol requires a major overhaul. It is based fundamentally on the monitoring, reduction, and trading of GHG emissions: a foundation that guarantees stiff political opposition and years of arcane technical arguments, absorbing the time, energy, and money of many participants. Nations, the UN, and NGOs organizations have so many diplomatic, financial, and technical resources tied up in Kyoto that it would be tragic for it to fail now; such a failure would set back international climate change efforts for years. It is time to let go of the failed emissions targets and seek new paths that will better serve everyone's needs.

I encourage everyone to read the whole article. It is short essay but prescient. Frank is current studying renewable energy policies in the United States and Germany.

Posted on January 2, 2007 06:53 PM View this article | Comments (5)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Energy Policy | Technology Policy

January 01, 2007

Nonskeptical Heretics in the NYT

Andy Revkin has a well-done article on the "middle ground" in the climate change debate. I fully expect that many of the usual suspects on the extremes of the debate (both sides) will respond to this story by saying that they've been in the middle all along. A two-sided debate rarely welcomes a third view, especially one that makes as much sense as that espoused in the NYT article. Here is an excerpt:

Amid the shouting lately about whether global warming is a human-caused catastrophe or a hoax, some usually staid climate scientists in the usually invisible middle are speaking up.
The discourse over the issue has been feverish since Hurricane Katrina. Seizing the moment, many environmental campaigners, former Vice President Al Gore and some scientists have portrayed the growing human influence on the climate as an unfolding disaster that is already measurably strengthening hurricanes, spreading diseases and amplifying recent droughts and deluges.

Conservative politicians and a few scientists, many with ties to energy companies, have variously countered that human-driven warming is inconsequential, unproved or a manufactured crisis.

A third stance is now emerging, espoused by many experts who challenge both poles of the debate.

They agree that accumulating carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases probably pose a momentous environmental challenge, but say the appropriate response is more akin to buying fire insurance and installing sprinklers and new wiring in an old, irreplaceable house (the home planet) than to fighting a fire already raging.

"Climate change presents a very real risk," said Carl Wunsch, a climate and oceans expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It seems worth a very large premium to insure ourselves against the most catastrophic scenarios. Denying the risk seems utterly stupid. Claiming we can calculate the probabilities with any degree of skill seems equally stupid."

Many in this camp seek a policy of reducing vulnerability to all climate extremes while building public support for a sustained shift to nonpolluting energy sources.

They have made their voices heard in Web logs, news media interviews and at least one statement from a large scientific group, the World Meteorological Organization. In early December, that group posted a statement written by a committee consisting of most of the climatologists assessing whether warming seas have affected hurricanes.

While each degree of warming of tropical oceans is likely to intensify such storms a percentage point or two in the future, they said, there is no firm evidence of a heat-triggered strengthening in storms in recent years. The experts added that the recent increase in the impact of storms was because of more people getting in harm’s way, not stronger storms.

There are enough experts holding such views that Roger A. Pielke Jr., a political scientist and blogger at the University of Colorado, Boulder, came up with a name for them (and himself): "nonskeptical heretics."

"A lot of people have independently come to the same sort of conclusion," Dr. Pielke said. "We do have a problem, we do need to act, but what actions are practical and pragmatic?"

Posted on January 1, 2007 10:44 AM View this article | Comments (31)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

December 30, 2006

2007 Office Pool

Happy New Year everyone! A 2007 office pool for your enjoyment:

1. In 2007 the space shuttle will fly (a) once, (b) twice, (c) 3 or more times, (d) its last mission.

2. Academic earmarks on non-defense discretionary spending for FY2007 will (a) be held to near zero as Democrats hold steadfast to their year-long continuing resolution, (b) will quietly creep up to their FY2006 levels as supplemental spending bills are laden with pork, (c) will not formally appear in appropriations or reports but will somehow appear out of existing agency appropriations as agency officials seek to keep congressional appropriators happy.

3. The number of hurricanes in the North Atlantic will be (a) less than 10, (b) between 10 and 15, (c) 16 to 20, (d) more than 20.

4. The IPCC will be released in three installments in the first half of 2007. The big news story from the IPCC will be (a) actually nothing, as nothing new will be reported, (b) a change in the IPCC and its leaders to an explicit advocacy role, (c) that it spells the end of the climate convention as it presents “dangerous interference” as inevitable, (d) provides much fodder for those wanting to “go slow” on climate policy by presenting an image of climate change far more conservative than found in the media, (e) will totally botch the issue of economic losses from extreme events, and especially hurricanes.

5. Al Gore will enter the 2008 presidential race (a) in the spring with his speech accepting the Oscar for best documentary, (b) in the late summer or early fall following the devastation of southern Florida by Hurricane Jerry, (c) not at all and Roger will owe Lisa lunch, (d) in 2008.

6. The U.S. budget for R&D in FY2007 will (a) represent the first cut in decades as Democrats hold fast to their year-long continuing resolution, (b) increase from FY2006 level through several targeted supplemental appropriations bills, most notable passage of some version of the ACI/PACE legislation, (c) so frustrate some scientists that they will begin speaking of a “Democratic war on science”.

7. The most notable S&T legislation to be passed by Congress in 2007 and vetoed by President Bush will be focused on (a) federal funding for stem cell research, (b) mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions, (c) prohibition of the transfer of nuclear technologies to India, (d) repeal of certain aspects of the Patriot Act focused on surveillance

8. The Supreme Court will rule in EPA vs. Massachusetts that (a) Massachusetts in fact has no standing to file the lawsuit, (b) that EPA has authority to regulate carbon dioxide and leave to EPA’s discretion whether regulation is required, (c) EPA must regulate emissions under the Clean Air Act, (d) that some call greenhouse gases a “pollutant” while others simply call it “life”

9. Internationally, the biggest news of 2007 will be (a) the introduction and then termination of carbon rationing cards in the U.K., (b) Germany’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, (c) the announcement by Hugo Chavez that Venezuela will conduct a nuclear test, (d) China’s devaluation of its currency sending the dollar into a tailspin

10. In 2007, here at Prometheus we will see (a) an angel bequeathing a massive endowment to our Center, (b) the blog reinvented at another university far, far away, (c) new authors and new contributors, and an ever-expanding readership (d) enough on climate change already, .and a shift to The Honest Broker.

My guesses below.

1. (a) 30%, (b) 60%, (c) 10%, (d) 50%
2. (c)
3. (a) 10%, (b) 50%, (c) 30%, (d) 10%
4. all of the above
5. (b), but maybe (d), (c) no way
6. (b), (a) is possible but unlikely
7. (a), almost certainly
8. (a) or (b), probably (b)
9. none of the above
10. (a) were still waiting on this one;-), (b), (c), and (d) – stay tuned!

Happy New Year!

Posted on December 30, 2006 11:06 AM View this article | Comments (7)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Hodge Podge

December 28, 2006

Draft Paper for Comment: Decreased Proportion of Tropical Cyclone Landfalls in the United States

Below you will find a short, draft paper on the decreasing proportion of U.S. hurricane landfalls to total North Atlantic hurricanes from 1851-2006 that I will soon submit for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. I am not worried about pre-publication on the web and the policies of the big journals as Nature has already declined to send it out for review, suggesting that the specialty journals are a more appropriate venue. I have shared earlier versions of the paper with a range of different scientists inside (and outside of) the tropical cyclone research community, and I thank those who have so far responded for their helpful suggestions. I welcome any comments readers here may have as well.

Decreased Proportions of Tropical Cyclone Landfalls in the United States: Data Artifact, Blind Luck, Natural Variability, and/or Global Warming?

Roger A. Pielke, Jr.
28 December 2006
DISCUSSION DRAFT

Introduction

This short note is motivated by several recent studies that examine Atlantic tropical cyclone statistics over the past century and a half finding a significant upward trend (Holland and Webster, 2007; Mann and Emanuel, 2006). Both studies attribute an observed increase in North Atlantic (NATL) tropical cyclone activity to anthropogenic causes. This paper uses a simple approach to examine trends in U.S. hurricane landfalls 1851-2006. The annual number of U.S. hurricane landfalls has remained remarkably constant over this period exhibiting no trend. However, out of the total NATL storm activity, the proportion of landfalling storms making landfall in the United States has exhibited a marked decrease. These trends raise important but heretofore largely unexamined research questions about tropical cyclone landfall theory, data, and analyses.

North Atlantic Tropical Cyclone Data

Two datasets in this analysis are kept by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The first dataset includes all tropical cyclones of at least tropical storm strength (i.e., maximum winds >17 meters/second) in the NATL 1851-2006 (1). The second dataset includes all such storms that affected the U.S. coastline at hurricane strength (i.e., maximum winds of >33 meters/second) (2). It is widely accepted that the number of landfalling storms is among the most accurate metrics available for tropical cyclones in the Atlantic (Landsea 2005, Emanuel 2005).

Issues about data quality are at the center of a vigorous and scientifically productive debate within the tropical cyclone research community (e.g., Landsea et al. 2006, Kossin et al. in press). This paper proceeds under the same assumptions on data quality used by Holland and Webster (2007),

Before 1945 the overall statistic of total tropical cyclones numbers contains useful information . . . In summary, we consider that the veracity of the NATL tropical storm data base is sufficient to enable the broad brush analysis that we undertake in this study. Prior to 1945 we concentrate on the total number of tropical cyclones, irrespective of intensity.

And also Mann and Emanuel (2006),

A reasonably reliable record of annual North Atlantic tropical cyclone counts is thus available back into the late nineteenth century.

The point here is not that these conclusions about data quality are necessarily correct, but to argue that if one accepts the analyses in these studies predicated on the fidelity of long-term counts of NATL tropical cyclones, then it follows logically that one also has to accept the analysis presented here using the exact same data.

Analysis

Figure 1 shows the total number of United States hurricane landfalls 1851-2006.

There is no trend in the data. This finding is generally accepted, and is supported by the lack of trend in normalized U.S. hurricane damage over the past century (Pielke, et al. under review). Figure 2 shows the percentage of total storms that affected the United States as hurricanes from 1851-2006 (3).

There is a decrease in the proportion of storms striking the United States from any starting point prior to about 1970. This decrease increases in statistical significance as the record is extended further into the past. A linear trend line is presented on the graph for both the raw data and the 9-year moving average (4). Apparent in Figure 2 starting in 1944, which is considered to be the most accurate data period in the Atlantic (Neumann et al. 1999, Landsea et al. 1999), is a decrease in the proportion of storms striking the coast over this time period as well (statistics discussed below). Holland and Webster (2007) identify three climatic regimes, 1905-1930, 1931-1994, and 1995-2005. The proportion of landfalling storms for each of the three eras indicates a steady decline, respectively at 31.8%, 17.0%, and 14.6%.

Figure 3 shows for 1950-2006 the relationship of the percentage of landfalling storms and NATL August-September-October (ASO) sea surface temperatures (5).

On this time scale at least there is no significant relationship, though perhaps a more comprehensive statistical analysis that goes beyond the present focus may yet reveal a relationship (cf. Jagger et al. 2007).

Discussion

The data presented here suggests some interesting possibilities which cannot be resolved based on the data presented here.

First, it is possible that the decreasing trend in U.S. landfalls as a percentage of total storms is a statistical artifact resulting from an undercount of historical storms. The number of landfalling storms is certainly known with much higher certainty than the total number of storms. Thus, an undercount of the total number of storms would artificially increase landfalling storms as a percentage of total storms. This first interpretation is consistent with a view that the NATL record is most accurate since 1970, and that inaccuracies exist prior to that time. This view on data quality would also be inconsistent with those who argue that the NATL record is complete since 1944 (cf. Landsea et al. 1999). If the decreasing trend is an artifact of the datasets, then it would obviously call into question any analysis of trends based on the total number of storms over thuis time period.

Second, it is possible that the decreasing trend in U.S. landfalls as a percentage of total storms is (at least in part) a reflection of the actual behavior of the climate system. That is, if one accepts the trends reported by Holland and Webster (2007) and Mann and Emanuel (2006), then logically, it follows that one also has to accept the trends reported here. In this case, if NATL tropical cyclone activity has indeed increased, then there has also been a significant decrease in the proportion of storms that strike the U.S. coast.

Under this second possibility there is then the question of attribution. Figure 3 indicates that, at least since 1950, there is in fact no obvious relationship between NATL ASO SST and the proportion of total storms that make landfall. Given this finding, if SSTs are indeed the principle factor explaining increasing tropical cyclone activity, as some studies have suggested (e.g., Holland and Webster (2007), Mann and Emanuel (2006), Hoyos et al. (2006)) and SSTs are largely forced by greenhouse gases (Santer et al. 2006), then it follows that explaining the decreasing proportion of landfalling storms requires further investigations of climate processes beyond trends in SSTs. In other words, if global warming is increasing the incidence of NATL tropical cyclones, then the same dataset that indicates this result also suggests that global warming, and/or some other factors, are acting to diminish the proportion of total storms that strike the United States.

Emanuel (2005) raises the possibility that simple randomness might explain the lack of a trend in landfalling storm intensities in the presence of such a trend in the entire NATL. This may very well be the case (Pielke 2005); however, Emanuel’s point was made with respect to an integrated index of power dissipation, for which the landfalling component was only about 1% of the total NATL data. In the case of total storms, about 20% of the total storms make landfall over the entire dataset. It is therefore quite unlikely that randomness alone explains these results.

This conclusion is unavoidable if one accepts the results of Holland and Webster (2007) that "data errors cannot explain the sharp, high amplitude transitions between the climatic regimes in the North Atlantic, each with an increase of around 50% in cyclone and hurricane numbers." With an increase of 50% in total hurricane numbers in two transitions among three climate regimes, and landfalling storms representing approximately 20% of the long-term total, it is statistically improbable that these changes would not manifest themselves in increased landfalls, all else being equal. Consider that that 31.8% of all storms that made landfall during 1905-1930 (Holland and Webster’s first NATL TC climate regime). Under a binomial distribution the probability of subsequently observing 131 or fewer landfalls out of 788 in the period 1931-2006 (i.e., the actual observations) at the earlier period’s probability of landfall is less than 0.00001. Thus, it necessarily must be true that either the data is flawed or there are real changes in the landfall characteristics of NATL climatology.

More recently, from 1944 to 1974 17.9% (31 years, 55/307) of total NATL storms made landfall in the U.S., and from 1975-2006 (31 years, 51/360) 14.2% of total NATL storms made landfall in the U.S.. The probability of observing 51 or less landfalls in the second period at the earlier period’s landfall rate is 0.054. Thus, there is reason to believe that even in the most recent half century where storm counts have been assumed to be most accurate there are either data problems or real changes have occurred in the climatology of NATL tropical cyclone landfalls.

Conclusion

This short note has revisited trends in U.S. landfalling hurricanes both as annual totals and as a proportion of total North Atlantic tropical cyclone activity from 1851-2006. The data indicate that there are no trends in landfall numbers but a marked decrease in the proportion of storms that make landfall. There are several possibilities for this decrease.

•One explanation is that earlier data fails to accurately represent the total actual number of tropical cyclones, thereby artificially increasing landfalling storms as a proportion of the total.

•A second explanation is that the trends in the total number of storms are in fact reflective of increasing Atlantic activity and the decreasing proportion that make landfall results from some yet unknown climate process that may or may not have a relationship to human activity. There is no obvious relationship between SSTs and landfall proportions.

•A third possibility, that the remarkable stability of landfall numbers over time is due to randomness, is highly unlikely simply for basic reasons of probability if one assumes that landfall proportions are constant over the long run.

Scientists are nonetheless in agreement that the coming decades will see landfall numbers that exceed the average from 1970-1994. Decision makers should take care not to overlook the possibility that future landfall rates may exceed that observed in the historical record, whether due to global warming, randomness, natural causes, or some combination. A lack of knowledge about the future means that surprises should be expected. Given the importance of landfalling storms to decision makers, a concluding recommendation is that the research community should place even greater attention to the challenging and important scientific questions of hurricane landfall climatology.

Footnotes

1. http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Storm_pages/Atl/ATLdate.dat

2. http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/ushurrlist18512005-gt.txt See the NOAA WWW page for a discussion of "affected the U.S. coastline."

3. The use of a ratio based on total storms follows the similar use of a ratio by Holland and Webster (2007) to examine trends in storm intensity.

4. Note that a 9-year moving average is used simply because this is the smoothing used in Holland and Webster (2007).

5. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center provides NATL SST indices by month from 1950 here: http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/data/indices/sstoi.atl.indices

References to be added

Posted on December 28, 2006 01:14 PM View this article | Comments (12)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

December 24, 2006

Calling Carbon Cycle Experts

We'd welcome an explanation of the possible (or non) significance of this new paper in Science for understandings of the global carbon cycle. A news story contained the following interesting paragraph (italics added):

Scientists say the discovery could bear on estimates of the pervasiveness of exotic microbial life, which some experts suspect forms a hidden biosphere extending miles underground whose total mass may exceed that of all surface life.

Posted on December 24, 2006 06:58 AM View this article | Comments (10)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Biotechnology | Climate Change

December 22, 2006

Happy Holidays Prometheus Readers!

All of us here at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado/CIRES would like to send our readers best wishes for the holiday season and a happy new year!

We greatly value the excellent feedback, comments, suggestions, and contributions from the readers/commentors on our blog, who we believe are the best you will find on any blog on any subject. We look forward to 2007 and a chance to continue to learn from our many substantive interactions with our knowledgeable readers. For our part you can expect that we'll continue to provide analysis and commentary in the new year, and you can expect that some things you'll agree with, some you won't, and sometimes we'll make really excellent arguments and sometimes we won't!

Over the holidays we'll be paying attention, and maybe blogging if the occasion is right. So during the next 10 days or so, if your comment gets held up, just drop us an email and we'll get it online as soon as we can.

Happy Holidays!!

Posted on December 22, 2006 03:30 PM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Hodge Podge

Swiss Re on 2006 Disaster Losses

It was a good year to be in the insurance and reinsurance industries. Swiss Re has released their preliminary assessment of 2006 catastrophe losses which are spectacularly low.

According to one industry official, "will see further rate increases even though 2006 has been a remarkably catastrophe-free year. 2005 was so bad that catastrophe rates must rise further."

According to our analysis, 2006 ranks 18th in terms of normalized hurricane damage years since 1987. According to Swiss Re, "Among the last 20 years, 2006 has produced the third-lowest insured losses, after 1997 and 1988. This is attributable mainly to the quiet hurricane season in the US and surrounding countries." But there were remarkably few other disasters as well.

Posted on December 22, 2006 02:10 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Disasters

And I'm focused on adaptation?

An excellent and eye-opening story from Keith Bradsher in yesterday's NYT provides a new angle on the economics of the Kyoto Protocol:

Foreign businesses have embraced an obscure United Nations-backed program as a favored approach to limiting global warming. But the early efforts have revealed some hidden problems.
Under the program, businesses in wealthier nations of Europe and in Japan help pay to reduce pollution in poorer ones as a way of staying within government limits for emitting climate-changing gases like carbon dioxide, as part of the Kyoto Protocol.

Among their targets is a large rusting chemical factory here in southeastern China. Its emissions of just one waste gas contribute as much to global warming each year as the emissions from a million American cars, each driven 12,000 miles.

Cleaning up this factory will require an incinerator that costs $5 million — far less than the cost of cleaning up so many cars, or other sources of pollution in Europe and Japan.

Yet the foreign companies will pay roughly $500 million for the incinerator — 100 times what it cost. The high price is set in a European-based market in carbon dioxide emissions. Because the waste gas has a far more powerful effect on global warming than carbon dioxide emissions, the foreign businesses must pay a premium far beyond the cost of the actual cleanup.

The huge profits from that will be divided by the chemical factory’s owners, a Chinese government energy fund, and the consultants and bankers who put together the deal from a mansion in the wealthy Mayfair district of London.

It seems that mitigation pays.

Posted on December 22, 2006 01:43 AM View this article | Comments (12)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Energy Policy

December 19, 2006

Ryan Meyer in Ogmius

Ryan Meyer, whose letter to Science we highlighted a few days ago, also has the cover story in our Center's latest newsletter which has just been put online. Ryan's article is titled, "Arbitrary Impacts and Unknown Futures: The shortcomings of climate impact models" and be found here.

The newsletter, called Ogmius, can be found here in html and here in PDF. Have a look!

Posted on December 19, 2006 02:05 AM View this article | Comments (15)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Prediction and Forecasting

December 18, 2006

Misrepresenting Literature on Hurricanes and Climate Change

Greg Holland and Peter Webster have a new paper accepted on the statistics of Atlantic hurricanes. While there are many interesting questions that might be raised about the data and statistics in the paper, here I comment on the paper’s treatment of the existing literature, some of which involves work I have contributed to. In this instance I find their characterization of the literature to grossly misrepresent what the existing research actually says. I have shared my comments with Drs. Holland and Webster, to which I received the following reaction from Greg Holland: "We shall not be modifying the paper as a result of your comments."

Below I present their original text and my comments. We think that readers can judge for themselves whether a mischaracterization of the literature has occurred. I promised Peter Webster that I wouldn’t speculate on their motivations, and so I’ll stick to the facts in what I present below. I do know that when scientists misrepresent each others work, it is likely to stymie the advancement of knowledge in the community, and thus should be of general concern. When such misrepresentations are missed in the peer review process this also should raise some concerns. In this case I find the misrepresentations obvious to see and egregious, occurring in just about every sentence in the relevant paragraph.

Do note that the comments below do not get into their statistical analysis, which is worth considering separately on its own merits, but which goes beyond the focus of this post. Both Drs. Holland and Webster are widely published and respected scientists with admirable track records. They are welcome to respond here if they’d like. And I do note that different people can interpret the literature in different ways, so the below is my reading only.

Holland and Webster’s new paper can be found here in PDF and the text I have excerpted below in bold comes from their pp. 5-6. My comments are interlaid within their text.

Questions have been raised over the quality of the NATL data even for such a broad brush accounting. For example, a recent study by Landsea et al (2006) claimed that long-term trends in tropical cyclone numbers and characteristics cannot be determined because of the poor quality of the data base in the NATL even after the incorporation of satellite data into the data base. Landsea et al. also state unequivocally that there is no trend in any tropical storm characteristics (frequency or intensity) after 1960, despite this being established in earlier papers by Emanuel (2005) and Webster et al. (2005), and more recently by Hoyos et al. (2006).
Here is what I read in Landsea et al. (2006) (PDF): "There may indeed be real trends in tropical cyclone intensity . . ." Holland and Webster report the opposite of what Landsea et al. (2006) actually says. Landsea et al. (2006) state that they do not believe that the data record is of sufficient quality to definitively detect trends. They do not say that there are no trends. Holland and Webster ascribe a claim to Landsea et al. that they do not make.

Figure 1 shows a strong statistically significant trend since the 1970s similar to that found by Hoyos et al. (2006) and Curry et al. (2006). The overall Landsea et al. analysis is curious and is based on the premise that the data must be wrong because the models suggest a much smaller change in hurricane characteristics relative to the observed SST warming (e.g., Henderson-Sellers et al 1998).

Here is what Landsea at al. (2006) actually say: "Theoretical considerations based on sea surface temperature increases suggest an increase of ~4% in maximum sustained surface wind per degree Celsius (4, 5). But such trends are very likely to be much smaller (or even negligible) than those found in the recent studies (1-3)." Landsea et al. (2006) are reporting a finding accepted in the community. Indeed, the recent WMO statement (written and signed by Greg Holland) states, "The more relevant question is how large a change: a relatively small one several decades into the future or large changes occurring today? Currently published theory and numerical modeling results suggest the former, which is inconsistent with the observational studies of Emanuel (2005) and Webster et al. (2005) by a factor of 5 to 8 (for the Emanuel study)." Holland and Webster do not cite the WMO statement.

In contrast, Michaels, Knappenberger and Landsea (2005) argue the opposite, that the models must be wrong because they do not agree with the data. We shall show later that there are factors not included in the models that may explain some of the differences between model and observed trends.

Michaels et al. (2005) do not say that "the models must be wrong because they do not agree with the data." They say that if you run the models with different inputs you get different results. They write (PDF), "when [Knutson and Tuleya’s model is] driven by real-world observations rather than unrealistically parameterized and constrained model conditions, the prospects for a detectable increase in hurricane strength in coming decades are reduced to the noise level of the data." Michaels et al. are not comparing data with models, but looking at modeled output using different inputs.
Further, noticeable by omission is that Holland and Webster ignore relevant work that discusses the relationship of models, theory, and observations that includes Landsea as an author (which seems to be the focus of this paragraph). In particular the following paper discusses this subject explicitly:

Pielke, Jr., R. A., C.W. Landsea, M. Mayfield, J. Laver, R. Pasch, 2006. Reply to Hurricanes and Global Warming Potential Linkages and Consequences, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Vol. 87, pp. 628-631. (PDF)

It particular Pielke et al. (2006) responds to a statement in a related paper (Anthes et al., Greg Holland included in the et al., PDF), that says that there is "broad consistency between observations, models, and theory." This statement is contradicted by Pielke et al. (2006) and WMO (2006), the latter is actually signed by Holland.

Of greater concern is that the conclusions in the Landsea et al. paper are at odds with several previous publications that include the same authors (e.g. Owens and Landsea 2003, Landsea et al. 1999), without introducing any additional evidence. These papers state clearly that the author’s considered that the period of reliable and accurate NATL records commenced in 1944 with the implementation of aircraft reconnaissance.

I coauthored Landsea et al. (1999) (PDF) and in that paper there are indeed statements on concerns about post-1944 hurricane data (e.g., at p. 94). Further, Landsea et al. (2006) cite a range of post-1999 studies acknowledging new uncertainties in data and methodologies, (e.g., C. Velden et al., Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc., in press.; J. A. Knaff, R. M. Zehr, Weather Forecast., in press). To say that there has been no additional evidence cited by Landsea et al. (2006) (when Holland and Webster’s work is key to that new evidence) is simply misleading and wrong.

The bottom line here is that while this is just one paragraph in one paper, there is perhaps reason to be concerned about the fidelity of the literature, whatever the underlying causes may be. We have documented other shortfalls in the literature on several occasions on this site. To the extent that these data points are representative of broader problems in the climate literature, scientists should redouble their efforts to exert high standards of quality control. For if I can spot these misrepresentations in the literature, then others will as well.

Posted on December 18, 2006 04:54 PM View this article | Comments (14)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters | Scientific Assessments

December 16, 2006

Climate Change Hearings and Policy Issues

Ryan Meyer, a PhD student at ASU's Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes and collaborator in our SPARC project, has a letter in the current issue of Science.

Here is Ryan's letter:

The Random Samples item "As earth warms, Congress listens" (6 Oct., p. 29) ends with a proclamation by the National Resources Defense Council's David Doniger that climate change hearings "don't do anything." Although Doniger's frustrations are understandable, his lament misses a crucial point: In fact, it is precisely what climate hearings actually do that so badly hinders policy progress.
Climate change hearings are held because the issue is deeply divisive. As Nobelist Herbert Simon reminded us, "when an issue becomes highly controversial--when it is surrounded by uncertainties and conflicting values--then expertness is very hard to come by, and it is no longer easy to legitimate the experts" (1). Studies of discourse in these settings, including my own analysis of examples from the last 15 years (2-4), show, for example, that discussions of uncertainty have had the dual effect of justifying increased research funding while delaying policy decisions--a win for both the scientists and the politicians!

Scientists must recognize that when they testify at such hearings, they are participating in a political event, not a scientific one. When issues are highly polarized, a hearing may be a useful tool for adding to the public record or building support for a particular policy position, but it should not be seen as a way to impose scientific rationality on politics.

Ryan M. Meyer
Consortium for Science Policy and Outcomes
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-4401, USA

References

1. H. A. Simon, Reason in Human Affairs (Stanford Univ. Press, Stanford, CA, 1983), p. 97.
2. S. Shackley, P. Young, S. Parkinson, B. Wynne, Clim. Change 38, 159 (1998).
3. J. van der Sluijs, J. van Eijndhoven, S. Shackley, B. Wynne, Social Stud. Sci. 28, 291 (Apr. 1998).
4. R. Meyer, Perspect. Public Affairs 3, 85 (Spring 2006).

The article of Ryan's that he refers to is titled, "Intractable Debate: Why Congressional hearings on climate fail to advance policy" and can be found here in PDF. Do pay attention. Ryan is someone I expect that we'll be hearing much more from.

Posted on December 16, 2006 05:48 PM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

December 15, 2006

Useable Information for Policy

Twenty-two members of Congress have written a letter to the head of the Climate Change Science Program observing that the program is failing to fulfill its mandate under Public Law 101-606 to deliver useable information for policy makers. This is good news.

The letter observes that the Bush Administration has failed to produce an assessment as required by the law, which is supposed to be delivered every four years. This situation is analogous to the behavior of the Clinton Administration which produced a single assessment in 2000, which was six years overdue. The assessment produced by the Clinton Administration was produced within OSTP under the nominal leadership of Al Gore which – rightly or wrongly – put a partisan tint on the product. Some – both on the right and the left -- continue to use the 2000 assessment six years later as a political wedge device.

The letter from the members of Congress observes:

. . . the current CCSP [Climate Change Science Program] website acknowledges that the law directs the agencies to "produce information readily useable by policy makers attempting to formulate effective strategies for preventing, mitigating, and adapting to the effects of global change," . . . The failure of the CCSP to produce a National Assessment report within the time frame required by law has made it more difficult for Congress to develop a comprehensive policy response to the challenge of global climate change.

The CCSP is currently producing 20 different assessment reports but according to the program’s previous direction, the CCSP does not engage in discussion of policy options. It is pretty difficult to produce usable information for policy makers without discussing policy options.

Does the Bush Administration want to avoid disucssion of policy options on climate change? Yes. Did the Clinton Administration also want to avoid discussion of policy options on climate change? Yes. Has much of the scientific community also wanted to avoid discussion of policy options on climate change? Yes. Sounds like a perfect situation for congressional oversight.

The policy failures of the CCSP have nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans, and everything to do with the structure of scientific advice implemented under the CCSP and its predecessor organization. Why do I say this? Because in 1994 I defended my doctoral dissertation on implementation of the climate science program under Public Law 101-606, and the exact same issues involving "usable information for policy" identified by the current letter from the 22 members of Congress existed at that time as well.

It is good to see Congress finally invoking the language in P.L 101-606 calling for usable information for policy makers. This is a matter of the effective governance of science in support of decision making, and it should not be dragged into partisan political bickering. The bipartisan letter from 22 members of Congress is a good place to start.

For details see:

Pielke Jr., R. A., 1995: Usable Information for Policy: An Appraisal of the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Policy Sciences, 38, 39-77. (PDF)

Letter from 22 members of Congress to CCSP, courtesy of E&E Daily (PDF)

Posted on December 15, 2006 11:32 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics | Scientific Assessments

Senator Coal and King Coal

A few items on my desk related to coal are worth mentioning.

First, there has been some recent discussion about a letter from Senators Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) to Exxon-Mobil. I saw it and didn’t think much of it. Politicians politicize. I don’t see the letter as an affront to free speech, quashing Exxon’s right to speech, or having much at all to do with science. What I did find interesting however was Senator Rockefeller’s response to a hometown newspaper taking him to task for writing the letter. In the letter Senator Rockefeller makes the following comment:

We didn't "attempt to squelch debate," as the Daily Mail suggested. Rather, our letter was, in fact, an attempt to create and foster greater debate.
And part of that debate, I believe, requires calling attention to Exxon-Mobil's funding of a pseudoscientific community whose purpose is to prevent us from tackling global climate change.

ExxonMobil is out of step even with its own industry. Other oil companies have explicitly acknowledged global climate change and are moving to develop and support new energy technologies and solutions.

Thankfully for West Virginia, clean coal technology is at the heart of these solutions. And I don't intend to allow deliberate misinformation to undermine our push for major national investments in the clean coal research and facilities that can help solve this problem.

The reality is that we need to have a free and honest debate about how we're going to address a problem that threatens to be of epic proportions.

So Mr. Rockefeller is using the issue of scientific integrity as a means to advance the interests of the coal industry over the oil and gas industry. In other words, he is politicizing the politicization of science. Presumably, Exxon doesn’t have too many jobs in West Virginia. Politics makes strange bedfellows, of course, but I do wonder how Mr. Rockefeller’s views play with those who don’t buy into the idea of "clean coal" such as Dave Roberts at Grist Magazine who keeps telling us that "Coal is the enemy of the human race." It seems like the strongest political consensus on climate change these days is that Exxon is bad; after that, it all breaks down.

This brings me to my second point on coal. I have sitting on my desk yet-to-be-read a book titled Sustainable Fossil Fuels: The Unusual Suspect in the Quest for Clean and Enduring Energy (Cambridge, 2007) by Marc Jaccard of Simon Fraser University. The book’s blurbs include positive statements from a crowd of people as varied as Bill Hare (formerly Greenpeace, now PIK) who recommends the book but "remains unconvinced," David Hawkins (NRDC), and the CEO of the World Coal Institute. Spiked-Online has a short essay from Prof. Jaccard, and here is an excerpt:

Some argue that fossil fuels should be abandoned because there are superior alternatives - energy efficiency, nuclear power and renewables such as wind, solar and hydropower. The aggressive pursuit of energy efficiency is desirable. But around the world, humans continue to crave ever-greater access to energy. The global energy system was 16 times larger in 2000 than in 1900. Two billion people today are without electricity and modern fuels, and by 2100 their offspring will be four billion. These people use less than one gigajoule of energy per year while a typical American uses over 300. Even with dramatic energy efficiency gains in wealthier countries, a subsistence level of 30 gigajoules for the planet’s poorer people will still require a three-fold expansion of the energy system during this century. Scale-up is the major challenge for nuclear power and renewable energy. Fossil fuels currently account for 84 per cent of the global energy system. Nuclear is at two per cent and renewables - mostly burning of wood and agricultural residues - at 14 per cent.
The wholesale replacement of fossil fuels in just one century will require a phenomenal expansion. The nuclear industry should grow, but its pace is limited by challenges in siting new facilities, storing radioactive waste and preventing nuclear weapons proliferation. Most renewable energy has low energy density and variable production, which increases land-use conflicts and capital costs.

An essential effort in research and development will decrease the costs of renewables. But zero-emission fossil fuels will remain cost competitive for at least this century. Acceptance of this economic reality means admitting that fossil fuels should be not be regarded as a foe, but rather humanity’s best friend in its quest for a clean, enduring and affordable energy system. Long live the king!

I’ll have more comments after I’ve read his book, but it is safe to say that we’ll be with fossil fuels for a long while.

Posted on December 15, 2006 01:05 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Energy Policy | Science + Politics

The Importance of Evaluation

A story in the New York Times today on the effectiveness of colonoscopy highlights the importance of evaluating the effectiveness of action. One of the biggest areas of study in academic policy research is evaluation, and the federal government has an entire agency that focuses on evaluation in the Government Accountability Office.

But in policy as in medicine – as the colonoscopy case illustrates -- it is amazing how often evaluation of the effectiveness of action is overlooked or simply not done. Evaluation matters because it indicates what is working and what works. In the case of colonoscopy, improved health outcomes are apparently achieved with only a minor change in medical practice.

Posted on December 15, 2006 12:26 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Health | Science Policy: General

December 14, 2006

New Bridges Article on 110th Congress

The December issue of Bridges is out, and it includes my column, this time on what we might expect on science and technology policy from the 110th Congress.

But do read the whole issue. Bridges is one of the top publications you'll find anywhere on science and technology policy.

Posted on December 14, 2006 11:12 AM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | R&D Funding | Science + Politics | Science Policy: General

Follow Up to Flood Policy Presentation

I had the opportunity to give a presentation yesterday at the National Flood Risk Policy Summit to an audience which included many national leaders on flood policy. I promised the audience that I’d post a short entry here with links to relevant background papers and other materials. This post provides these links.

First, here are the main points of my presentation:

*The "100-year flood" is not a good basis for a successful national flood policy.
*Losses provide a basis for evaluating long-term policy success.

*Political factors play a large role in the disaster declaration process.

*Population and development drive loss trends.

*As yet, no link established between human-caused climate change and flood/storm damages

EMERGING ISSUES?
OR THE SAME OLD ISSUES?

Here are relevant background links:

We have created a WWW site – www.flooddamagedata.org -- that presents a range of U.S. flood data and analyses. As I mentioned at the talk, we would gladly turn this over to any agency or organization that is interested in keeping it updated, publicly available, and of use to researchers and policy makers. For now it is not being updated.

Several papers of ours are relevant:

On national flood policies:

Pielke Jr., R.A., 1999: Nine fallacies of floods. Climatic Change, 42, 413-438. (PDF)

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 2000. Flood Impacts on Society: Damaging Floods as a Framework for Assessment. Chapter 21 in D. Parker (ed.), Floods. Routledge Press: London, 133-155. (PDF)

On climate and flood damage:

Pielke, Jr., R. A. and M.W. Downton, 2000. Precipitation and Damaging Floods: Trends in the United States, 1932-97. Journal of Climate, 13(20), 3625-3637. (PDF)

On the politics of flood disaster declarations:

Downton, M. and R.A. Pielke, Jr., 2001. Discretion Without Accountability: Politics, Flood Damage, and Climate, Natural Hazards Review, 2(4):157-166. ((PDF)

On disaster losses and flood damage:

Downton, M., J. Z. B. Miller and R. A. Pielke, Jr., 2005. Reanalysis of U.S. National Weather Service Flood Loss Database, Natural Hazards Review, 6:13-22. (PDF)

Downton, M. and R. A. Pielke, Jr., 2005. How Accurate are Disaster Loss Data? The Case of U.S. Flood Damage, Natural Hazards, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 211-228. (PDF)

On flood disasters related to tropical cyclones:

Pielke, Jr., R. A. and R. Klein, 2005. Distinguishing Tropical Cyclone-Related Flooding in U.S. Presidential Disaster Declarations: 1965-1997, Natural Hazards Review, May 2005, pp. 55-59. (PDF)

On the role of demographics in hurricane losses:

For a global perspective, see the report of our Hohenkammer Workshop, in parthership with Munich Re, GKSS, and the Tyndall Centre.

More along these lines can be found here.

Posted on December 14, 2006 01:26 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Disasters | Risk & Uncertainty

December 13, 2006

Dan Sarewitz - Lies We Must Live With

Dan Sarewitz, a professor at ASU and faculty affiliate at the CU Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, has penned a thought-provoking essay on science and religion in the latest CSPO Newsletter. Here is an excerpt, but do read the whole thing (and bring your thinking cap).

Now the most serious conflicts among humans are all, at root, conflicts about how to balance a variety of moral concerns such as justice, equality, and liberty. So, when scientists argue that the world would be better off without religion, then they are also arguing that humans would be better able to solve their deepest and most vexing problems in the absence of religion. A slightly different way to make the scientific claim is this: Moral discourse among those who don’t believe in ultimate meaning will yield more satisfactory results for society than if such discourse also includes believers.

But what difference does it make if you trace your morals and values to a non-existent supernatural authority, or if you trace them to biochemically and culturally determined cognitive processes? There may be a psychological difference—the difference between delusion and realism—but neither position, according to the scientific perspective, can make a claim to moral authority; both are irrational in the scientific sense. So the key point here cannot be the fact that believers are delusional about the source of their beliefs, rather it must be that, in being delusional, believers’ beliefs are less good than nonbelievers’ beliefs.

Why, then, should scientists expect that the world would be a better place if moral discourse was dominated by people who don’t believe in god than if it was dominated by believers? The answer is obvious: because the scientists making this argument are people who don’t believe in god! So of course they think that if they made all the important choices the world would be better!! They’d be making the choices!!! In other words, this is a political claim, not an a priori statement about rationality. This must be the case because there is, from the serious scientific perspective, no authoritatively rational solution to moral dilemmas, there are only political solutions. Put somewhat differently, science’s claim to ultimate knowledge is precisely what robs it of any legitimate claim to special privilege in public, and moral, discourse.

Dan ends the piece as follows:

The challenge here to scientism is as profound as the challenge to fundamentalism. From a scientific perspective, views rooted in supernatural explanations are views rooted in lies. This may be factually correct, but the rigors of pluralistic discourse demand that these lies have a seat at the table, right along side the neurologically and evolutionarily contingent preferences of the highly rational. This is not a matter of principle but of logic tempered by experience. There is no reason to believe that good moral reasoning derives from the scientific rigor of one’s views of ultimate causation. There are some lies that society cannot do without.

The antidote to irrationality is not its contrary, but its plural. It’s about inclusiveness, pluralism, democracy, not about rationality versus irrationality. The problem with fundamentalists is not God but fundamentalism. Conflating fundamentalism with all of religion is like conflating particle physics with all of science. Fundamentalists and physicists might like to claim that they alone occupy the solid ground of ultimate authority, but the rest of us know differently. A world run by like-thinking scientists is as horrific to contemplate as one run by like-thinking evangelicals.

The only questions I have is, when is this guy going to get a MacArthur Grant already?

Read the whole thing.

Posted on December 13, 2006 02:08 AM View this article | Comments (16)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Religion + Science | Science + Politics

December 12, 2006

WMO Press Release on Hurricanes and Climate Change

This press release (.doc) from the World Meteorological Organization yesterday:

A consensus of 125 of the world’s leading tropical cyclone researchers and forecasters says that no firm link can yet be drawn between human-induced climate change and variations in the intensity and frequency of tropical cyclones.

The WMO is of course one of the parent bodies of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Given this pedigree and the importance of this consensus statement, I'm sure that we'll now see this widely discussed on science-related weblogs and in the media. For details on the consensus statement, see our earlier discussion here.

Posted on December 12, 2006 10:17 AM View this article | Comments (10)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

December 11, 2006

You Just Can't Say Such Things Redux

From today's Rocky Mountain News still more evidence that the climate debate is spiraling out of control:

A federal climate scientist in Boulder says his boss told him never to utter the word Kyoto and tried to bar him from using the phrase climate change at a conference.
The allegations come as federal investigators probe whether Bush administration officials tried to block government scientists from speaking freely about global warming and attempted to censor their research.

The Kyoto Protocol is an international agreement - never ratified by the United States and opposed by the Bush administration - that requires nations to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming.

Pieter Tans, a senior scientist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Boulder laboratory, said the ban on using the word Kyoto was issued about four years ago.

"We were under instructions not to use the word Kyoto, which of course is absurd," said Tans, who measures levels of carbon dioxide at NOAA's Global Monitoring Division. He has worked for the agency since 1990.

Tans said the order was issued verbally by his boss, David Hofmann, the division director. Another senior researcher at the Boulder laboratory, NOAA physicist James Elkins, said Hofmann told him the same thing.

Elkins studies greenhouse gases and has worked at NOAA for more than 20 years. He said he can't remember when the directive was issued, but it was "probably in 2000 or 2001."

"When I asked why we weren't supposed to use Kyoto, I was told that we're not supposed to use it in the policy context," Elkins said. "I'm not supposed to be talking about policy."

Hofmann, however, called the allegations "nonsense" and said there was no ban on using the word Kyoto.

"I never said it specifically in those words," Hofmann said. "I probably said that since the Kyoto Protocol is not ratified - is not part of the U.S. program - stay away from talking about Kyoto when you give a presentation."

"It has nothing to do with the science we're doing here," Hofmann said of Kyoto.

The Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997 and went into effect in February 2005, following ratification by Russia.

Elkins said the prohibition against using the word was lifted after Russia ratified the protocol.

"Once Russia signed Kyoto, it was a done deal," he said.

Posted on December 11, 2006 06:01 PM View this article | Comments (9)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

You Just Can’t Say Such Things

Larry Summers learned the hard way that there are some things that you just don’t do in a university setting. Nancy Greene Raine, Chancellor of Thompson River University in Canada who also was a gold medalist skier in the 1960s, is learning the same lessons.

From the Kamloops Daily News last Saturday via a weblog:

University professors outraged by comments from TRU chancellor Nancy Greene Raine, who expressed doubt on climate change in a national media broadcast, met with her in a hastily called session Friday afternoon.
The meeting was arranged by senior administration at Thompson Rivers University following a cascade of e-mails among faculty concerned that her opinion reflects poorly on the university.

Penny Powers, a professor in the school of nursing confirmed earlier Friday she had been called to the meeting with Raine.

'One of the most important goals of a university is to instill in the students an ability to assess the evidence for and against claims of any kind,' she wrote in an e-mail to faculty.

'What kind of role model do we put in place when the chancellor herself gives poorly-considered credence to widely discredited extremist opinions such as these?' . . .

Charles Hays a professor of journalism at TRU, wrote in a message to colleagues that Greene Raine cannot be the symbolic head of the university and make statements that run counter to the overwhelming weight of scientific opinion.

'And as chancellor, she has accepted a role as the symbolic head of the university. In that role, she owes it to the university not to make statements of opinion and expect that they will be perceived as merely the words of a private citizen.'

The Daily News was unable to reach anyone for comment on what took place during the meeting between faculty and Greene Raine.

What was it that the Chancellor said that set off this firestorm?

. . . another big name in Canadian skiing cautioned that people shouldn't push the panic button.
"I am very suspicious now when I see people make blanket statements because there are two sides to every issue," said Nancy Greene Raine, an Olympic gold medallist in the 1960s who has helped develop some of the top skiing resorts in British Columbia since her retirement.

"And in science there's almost never black and white. We don't know what next week's weather going to be. To say in 50 or 100 years, the temperature is going to do this, is a bit of a stretch for me."

Posted on December 11, 2006 05:40 PM View this article | Comments (33)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Education | Science + Politics

Disquiet on the Hurricane Front

[This op-ed by Dan Sarewitz and Roger Pielke, Jr. on the 2006 hurricane season was not published by a number of major newspapers. So we are happy to share it here. Anyone interested in publishing it before a wider audience, please send us an email. -Ed.]

The 2006 hurricane season has ended without a single hurricane landfall along the Gulf or East coasts. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans, journalists, politicians, and even some scientists were proclaiming that the catastrophe of global warming was upon us. A quiet year later, perhaps there is some room for clearer thinking about hurricanes, about global warming, and about society’s vulnerability to climate.

Before this year, the last years without a U.S. hurricane landfall were 2000 and 2001, just a blink of an eye in climate terms, but an eternity in the politics of global warming. In all, hurricane behavior over the past century and more has been highly variable, with periods of great intensity followed by lulls. Scientists remain deeply divided about the role of greenhouse gas emissions in hurricane behavior. But scientists have appreciated for decades the inevitability of a Katrina-like hit on New Orleans. The city was doomed for reasons that have nothing at all to do with global warming: it lies on a subsiding river delta in the heart of hurricane country.

Increasing damages from U.S. hurricane landfalls in the U.S. over the past century are entirely explained by growing socioeconomic vulnerability—that is, by coastal development trends that continually expose more people, more infrastructure, and more economic activity, to hurricanes. If one accounts for the effects of socioeconomic change, then there has been no observable increase in U.S. hurricane damage since data were first collected in 1900.

The future may indeed hold more frequent or intense hurricanes. However, the science at this point shows unambiguously that the effects of any such changes in storm behavior will be completely dwarfed by the effects of continued coastal development.

As Katrina made devastatingly clear, the hurricane problem is one of unsustainable coastal development combined with unconscionable socioeconomic vulnerability. Katrina’s blood relatives are the 2004 south Asian tsunami (220,000 dead) and the 2005 Pakistan earthquake (80,000 dead), not the Earth’s slowly warming atmosphere.

Feel-good appeals to buy hybrid vehicles cannot reduce the entrenched social inequities, irresponsible development trends, and inadequate hazard reduction policies that led to the worst of Katrina’s depredations and that are the cause of rising disaster vulnerability worldwide. Neither can the Kyoto Protocol, carbon trading markets, or other energy policies. There is simply no evidence that reductions in greenhouse gas emissions—as important as they are for other reasons—will lead to any discernible reduction in hurricane impacts over the next 50 to 100 years. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is about as relevant to controlling the impacts of hurricanes and other natural disasters as a nuclear non-proliferation treaty is to protecting public health.
Yet many well-tested policies are available to help reduce vulnerability to natural disasters. These range from building codes that can keep structures from collapsing in a storm or earthquake, to land use regulations that limit construction in disaster-prone areas, to environmental laws that preserve natural features, such as wetlands and forested slopes, that act as buffers against extreme events. The rising toll of disasters around the world demonstrates that nations are greatly underinvested in applying such policies, despite the fact that they are known to be effective, and despite the certainty that more disasters will soon occur.

From a political perspective, it is tempting to exploit the tragedy of Katrina and other natural disasters to promote action on greenhouse gas reductions. But no matter how strongly advocates may feel about global warming, if climate policies are based on the false expectation that emissions reductions will reduce hurricane losses, then political failure is inevitable, because the problem will get worse, not better. (To grasp this point, just consider the political impact of falsely linking Iraq to terrorism).

During this quiet hurricane season, more people moved to the coasts and other locations vulnerable to disasters, ensuring that future losses will be larger than those of the past. At the same time, more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were emitted into the atmosphere. These are separate problems that demand separate solutions. But by turning hurricanes into a greenhouse gas problem, we fail to focus sufficient attention and resources on reducing disaster vulnerability, and thus turn our backs on the victims of future disasters as well.

Posted on December 11, 2006 02:59 AM View this article | Comments (8)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters | Energy Policy

December 08, 2006

Hurricane Trends, Frequency, Prediction

This post is a slightly edited version of some random musings on hurricane science that I have shared with the Tropical Storms discussion list.

A few thoughts come to mind from the latest round of exchanges on the list.

1. Detection of trends

I call your attention to a recent paper by Rob Wilby:

Wilby, R. L. 2006. When and where might climate change be detectable in UK river flows? Geophys. Res. Lett., Vol. 33, No. 19, 14 October. (PDF)

. . .under widely assumed climate change scenarios, expected trends in UK summer river flows will seldom be detectable within typical planning horizons (the 2020s). Even where climate driven changes may already be underway, losses in deployable resources will have to be factored into long-term water plans long before they are statistically detectable.

Specifically, Wilby finds that "Assuming no change in variance, annual mean [river flow] must change by 38-46% by 2025 or 28-33% by 2055 to be detectable." These are huge numbers for changes in means and they assume perfect data quality. Wilby explains this result as "The long detection times for trends in UK river flow are due to the low signal-to-noise ratio of hydro-climatic time series at basin scales."

What does this mean for detection of trends in tropical cyclone intensity?

Assuming as the recent WMO report does that there is a 3-5% increase in windspeed for every degree increase in SST, and given that (a) windspeeds are, to date at least, measured with certainties that are arguably not at this level of precision (sometimes using S/S categories that are up to 5 times as large as these values), and (b) SSTs themselves are a noisy series, see e.g. this paper, this community may be in a situation where the science is fundamentally "underdetermined." I think that everyone in this community would benefit from an understanding of the notion of "underdetermination" in science and what it signifies for scientific debates. For an intro see this brief discussion.

For these reasons I have come to the conclusion that the search for detection of trends in TC activity will no doubt motivate much interesting research, but cannot result in a comprehensive community consensus anytime soon.

2. A Theory of (Maximum Potential) Frequency

If the above points may seem pessimistic (well, they are;-) the community need not throw up its hands. It seems to me that a way out of this quandary is for even greater attention to be paid to the development of a theory of maximum potential frequency to parallel MPI (maximum potential intensity) theory. I may be mistaken, but as an outsider looking in, it seems that much of the community is quite comfortable with existing MPI theory and is largely hopeless about a theoretical understanding of frequency (those working on further exploring MPI and developing a theory of frequency, please forgive, I am making a general point).

It also seems to me, perhaps naively, that intensity and frequency cannot be treated as independent, and continuing to treat TC research in this manner is an obstacle to further advances.

I would be interested in any efforts to develop a basin-by-basin theory of maximum potential frequency. For the Atlantic basin for instance, what is the maximum theoretically possible number of TCs that can develop during a single hurricane season, and why? Even starting with the classic six (?) conditions for development provides an upper constraint on the number of developing systems in a particular season. Inherent in the notion of a "season" are the seeds of an MPF theory. Consider that in the Atlantic 2005 saw 28 named storms, could there be 35? Why or Why not? 40? How about 5? Zero?

How about it?

3. The Importance of Prediction

In recent decades, Bill Gray, and others, have drawn a line in the sand, by arguing that in a particular basin the best that can be done in terms of expecting future activity is not to be found based on theory-based models but based on an understanding of statistical relationships which may not be fully understood from a theoretical standpoint. Debates about statistical vs. dynamical approaches to prediction occur across the sciences, and are no different here.

It seems to me that if this community wants to make progress on the debate over hurricanes and climate, it will necessarily have to engage in predictions of the future to a far greater degree that it does now, much as the ENSO community has done. There will be limited successes at first and successes and failures determined by luck. There will also have to be the careful management of public and policy makers expectations.

By predictions I mean - can anyone devise a methodology that can systematically beat out Gray, Saunders, Elsner, NOAA, climatology etc.? Such predictions might be seasonal, multi-year, or longer, but they should be verifiable by actual data on time scales that allow for feedback into the process of research. The experiences of the ENSO community are very instructive (and somewhat humbling) along these lines. If the long-term climate (i.e., over several years and longer) of TCs is indeed nonstationary, then over time those who base their predictions on historical statistical relationships will produce predictions whose skill should be easily exceeded by those using dynamical methods. In practice, in many fields, achieving such success has been difficult -- compare managed mutual fund performance to the naive baseline of the S&P 500, for instance!

Generic predictions about what will happen under 2XCO2 in 2100 are great, but they are unfalsifiable by experience on research timescales, feeding the problem of underdetermination. The alternative to making scientific predictions is that we perpetuate the state of underdetermination in this community and risk detaching ourselves from the fundamentals of this important aspect of the scientific method.

Posted on December 8, 2006 05:52 PM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

Inside the IPCC's Dead Zone

Climate scientist James Annan has related a tale of angst and suffering as a result of peer reviews that will, in broad terms, sound familiar to most academics. His experience raises a question that I’d like to ask of the folks familiar with the IPCC.

I have no idea what James’ paper is about, except that it argues that very high values of climate sensitivity can be ruled out, which I take it is contrary to the views of some others in the field. This situation leads me to consider several general questions about the IPCC:

How does the IPCC handle information that appears after its deadline for citation of peer-reviewed papers that may contradict literature which appears before that deadline?

Doesn’t this create a potential conflict of interest for contributors to the IPCC who are reviewing papers that appear during the drafting process?

Take hurricanes and climate change for example. Whatever the IPCC reports next March, it certainly won’t be as current as the recent WMO consensus report because the IPCC cannot cite literature that appeared after some point early in 2006, and the WMO can. And I'd bet there will be more studies released between now and march. On hurricanes the IPCC may wind up creating confusion by taking the scientific discussion back to early 2006 when in reality much has happened since. Similarly, its discussion of climate sensitivity and other areas could, in principle, suffer from the same lag effects. Now James’ paper was rejected, and for all I know, correctly. But on highly sensitive topics, I find myself agreeing with the AAAS – trust alone is no longer enough.

Posted on December 8, 2006 09:18 AM View this article | Comments (13)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science Policy: General | Scientific Assessments

December 06, 2006

That Didn't Take Long -- Misrepresenting Hurricane Science

Now that the WMO has issued a consensus statement on the state of climate science, scientists should be careful in how they characterize the overall state of the science. I have complete respect for scientists who have strong views on what the data, models, and theory shows, and fully expect them to make their case to their colleagues and others. However, scientists also should be careful not to represent their own views as in fact representing a consensus of the community when they do not, especially when making arguments for political action.

Here is an example of a scientist involved in the hurricane debate, Michael Mann of Penn State, making a demonstrably incorrect statement about the state of understanding of hurricanes and climate change six days after the WMO issued its consensus statement on tropical cyclones and climate change:

It is the increasingly widespread belief by researchers that increasing sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are leading to increases in various measures of Hurricane activity over time, both globally, and for the tropical North Atlantic region whose storms influence the Gulf coast and East Coast of the U.S..

Here is what the WMO says:

The possibility that greenhouse gas induced global warming may have already caused a substantial increase in some tropical cyclone indices has been raised (e.g. Mann and Emanuel, 2006), but no consensus has been reached on this issue.

And on the existence of trends in storm intensity the WMO says:

This is still hotly debated area for which we can provide no definitive conclusion.

This is a situation that Dr. Mann should understand well, as he has argued strongly for adherence to scientific consensus on his weblog, RealClimate. Dr. Mann's characterization about what researchers increasingly believe about hurricanes and climate change is not backed up by what the researchers themselves are saying. Why does this matter? Because Dr. Mann is using his characterization of the community's views on hurricanes and climate change as a basis for arguing for particular policy actions. As Dr. Mann writes:

We are likely to see only increased warming and increased Hurricane activity, if we continue to increase atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations through fossil fuel burning.

To be clear -- I take no issue with Dr. Mann making an argument that reducing greenhouse gas emissions will reduce hurricane intensity. That is what he believes, and as a scientist conducting research in this area he is someone we should listen to. But when he characterizes the community's views as "widespread" and "increasingly" supporting his perspective, he has engaged in a mischaracterization. Mischaracterizations of science, by themselves, are perhaps of only scholarly interest. But when the mischaracterizations are used as tools of political advocacy they are no longer simply mischaracterizations of science, but instead, they are bad policy arguments.

For scientists wanting to use the notion of consensus as a tool of political advocacy, they risk being perceived as inconsistent when their actions change when they are the ones on the outside looking in.

Posted on December 6, 2006 10:27 AM View this article | Comments (55)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters | Science + Politics

Andy Revkin on Media on Climate Change

[Andy Revkin shares these comments by email on the media and climate change, which I have reproduced here with his permission. He is blogging them here where he has additional comments, including some specific to today's hearing heald by Senator Inhofe on the media and climate change. Our view here at Prometheus is that Senator Inhofe's hearing, which we watched in full, was a dud all around. We appreciate Andy sharing these comments. -Ed.]

I do think the media have sometimes screwed up in covering climate, in three ways. For a long time they ignored the story because they saw it as a "he says, she says" dispute. Then they ignored it as simply too complex and incremental (not good ingredients for a news story).

Lately, some have presumed that because disagreement is gone on the basics (more carbon dioxide will warm the world) there is now no aspect of the problem that is uncertain. That's led to a lot of "be worried" coverage that really, to my eye, has gone way beyond the science.

After covering human influence on climate for 20 years, through more than one cycle of public engagement and disengagement, I stand by my assertions in The Times and public talks and my new book, The North Pole Was Here, that everyone in this polarized discourse is missing the powerful middle.

There is no serious disagreement in the scientific community at all on the main point -- that humans are exerting a growing influence on the thermostat of the home planet.

To me, that's more than enough to justify a lot of attention, while perhaps not amounting to the kind of real-time disaster that the media tend to get excited about.

There is a tendency of some media to try to fit human-driven warming in the old-style template for an environmental crisis that we grew up with in the 20th century. That is a bad fit. It is harder than that. This problem, and possible solutions, all relate to the future.

Old problems that were dealt with effectively were realtime threats to health and welfare (soot, smog, untreated sewage). Add a filter and they go away.

Even if we turned off every engine on Earth today, there would be no discernible impact on climate for many, many years, if not decades. It'd be great if this issue was easier to understand, and write about, but we're stuck with it the way it is.

The best tonic of course: consider giving as a holiday gift The North Pole Was Here, the one book out there that powerfully conveys this, and is the first to do so for everyone 10 and up (a range including Senators!). It was just named one of the Outstanding Science Books of 2006 by the Childrens Book Council & National Science Teachers Assn.

Posted on December 6, 2006 10:16 AM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

December 05, 2006

The Future of Climate Policy Debates

How about this comment from George Monbiot today, a columnist for The Guardian:

[E]very time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned.

Or this not long ago from NASA Scientist James Hansen (PDF):

. . . a certain shock treatment is needed, but it would best be delivered with a two-by-four as a solid whack to the head of politicians who remain oblivious to fundamental physical facts.

Allusions to murder and beatings kind of puts a chill on discussing options for climate policy, doesn't it? Maybe that is the point. It certainly makes me think.

In my view people who fashion themselves as public intellectuals have an even greater obligation than everyone else to encourage civil debate and discussion. This applies to people on all sides of political debates. It is all too easy for leaders to incite people to actual violence on issues that they are passionate about. Mr. Monbiot and Dr. Hansen (and others, again on all sides) may not have that outcome in mind as they write such statements, but if they don't watch out, that may be what they get.

So how about we all encourage some common civility in public discussions of climate change, especially from (but not limited to) our public intellectuals?

Posted on December 5, 2006 07:00 AM View this article | Comments (16)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

Fiscal Caution on NASA’s New Moon Plans

According to the New York Times NASA has announced that it wishes to return to the moon and set up a permanent base 50 years after its first landing. NASA’s proposal should raise an eyebrow among anyone who understands NASA’s past failures at successfully budgeting human spaceflight programs.

Here is an excerpt from the Times story by Warren E. Leary:

NASA announced plans on Monday for a permanent base on the Moon, to be started soon after astronauts return there around 2020.
The agency’s deputy administrator, Shana Dale, said the United States would develop rockets and spacecraft to get people to the Moon and establish a rudimentary base. There, other countries and commercial enterprises could expand the outpost to develop scientific and other interests, Ms. Dale said.

Ms. Dale and other officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said the agency envisioned a base at one of the lunar poles, to take advantage of the near-constant sunlight for solar power generation. It would have an "open architecture" design to which others could add the capabilities they want.

Scott Horowitz, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration, said crews of four astronauts would make weeklong missions to the Moon starting around 2020.

As more equipment was set up, human stays would eventually grow to 180 days, and become permanent by 2024. By 2027, officials said, a pressurized roving vehicle on the surface would take people on expeditions far from the base.

NASA gave no cost estimate for the program and no design details for the base. Ms. Dale said all plans assumed that the agency would continue operating from a fixed budget of about $17 billion a year.

The space shuttle fleet is to be retired by 2010, and the United States plans to scale back its involvement in the International Space Station. The station is still under construction, with a mission by the shuttle Discovery to lift off on Thursday. Ms. Dale said money would be shifted to the lunar exploration program from the shuttle and the station.

It was this last part that caught my attention. Assuming that NASA spends half of its budget on human exploration, and that all of this will be devoted to the new Moon program, this would total about $75 billion by 2020 when NASA plans to return to the moon. This sounds like a lot of money, and it is. But let’s put the planned costs into historical perspective of other human spaceflight programs.

Costs of Human Exploration Programs in 2005 Dollars

Apollo $110-$125 billion (source in PDF)

Mercury, Gemini, Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz $20 billion (source in PDF)

Space Shuttle $150 billion (updated from here)

Space Station $100 billion (cited in NYT article today by John Schwartz)

With its new program NASA is proposing to do far more than Apollo accomplished on a similar timescale, with far less resources, and an annual equivalent expenditure of much less than half of what was spent during the brief Apollo era. On its surface, this sounds like a great bargain. But is it too good to be true?

Consider that NASA in the past promised (in 1984) that the Space Station would be completed by 1994 at the cost of $8 billion ($13.3 in 2005). It missed this estimate by at least 16 years and $90 billion, without discussing the reduction in capabilities. NASA promised (in 1972) that the shuttle would fly 48 flights per year at a cost of $20 million (2005$) per flight. Reality has seen something more like 4 flights per year at a cost of over $1 billion per flight. Numbers like these suggest that NASA can indeed accomplish its moon base plans, perhaps at a cost of $1 trillion and by 2050. And I say this only partially tongue-in-cheek.

NASA’s political strategy in the past has been to win Congressional approval for its desired programs by underestimating costs and schedule, overpromising capabilities, and then complaining to Congress about being underfunded. When reality sets in NASA has reduced planned capabilities and cut other parts of its budget – like science. The entire suite of NASA programs are disrupted, leading to huge inefficiencies and a lack of progress. The NYT today has an article reporting that many experts are asking what the space station is for anyway. The promises made in 1984 no longer have meaning, so NASA wants a do-over.

NASA has purposely created long-term programs with few mid-term milestones, thereby making it difficult for Congress to wield a carrot or stick in the budget process. For instance, most debates about the space station in the 1990s were about termination or continuation. The distribution of lucrative NASA contracts around the country stacks the deck against a drastic approach like termination. One lesson from this should be that NASA must have annual milestones with consequences for budget overruns or cost delays.

Congress by now should be wise to these strategies. It is indeed exciting and visionary to think about human colonization of the solar system. Nonetheless, we should all hope that the next Congress will apply some rigorous oversight to NASA’s planning. The lack of such oversight is one reason why the U.S. human space flight program in only now discussing catching up to where it was 35 years ago.

Posted on December 5, 2006 06:23 AM View this article | Comments (8)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | R&D Funding | Space Policy

December 03, 2006

The Simplest Solution to Eliminating U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions

"Air capture" refers to the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Leading work on this technology has been done by David Keith at the University of Calgary, his recent Ph.D. student Joshua Stolaroff, and separately by Klaus Lackner at Columbia University. Motivated by recent discussions on this site about the Massachusetts vs. EPA lawsuit, I wondered what the costs would be of neutralizing the carbon dioxide emissions of U.S. autos via air capture, and indeed all of U.S. emissions. Here is what I have come up with.

Air capture is a compelling technology because it requires no government regulation, no change in behavior, no international negotiations, and, most importantly from the standpoint of political action, no changes in energy production or use. Politically, it is therefore as simple and straightforward an approach as can be imagined. It is a top down technology in the sense that it can be used to "tune" the atmosphere to a desired concentration level. The downside is that it is expensive, but still far cheaper than the damages projected, for instance, in the recent Stern Review. Its ease in implementation and political simplicity more than offset its higher costs than other approaches to reducing carbon emissions.

In his recent dissertation (of which I have a copy but I am unaware if it is available online), Dr. Stolaroff suggests (his lower realistic estimate) that air capture technologies can remove carbon dioxide at a cost of $140/ton of carbon dioxide (or about $500/ton of carbon). In an interview with PBS earlier this year, Prof. Lackner suggested that the costs of direct air capture might eventually be as low as $30/ton of carbon dioxide (or about $100/ton of carbon). In the thought experiment below I’ll use both $100/ton and $500/ton.

1. US Auto CO2 Emissions

U.S. auto emissions are responsible for about 6% of total global emissions. The U.S. EIA estimates (XLS) total global carbon emissions in 2006 to be 7.45 GtC. Six percent of this is 0.45 GtC. The total costs of air capture to remove this amount of carbon from the atmosphere is $45 billion (at $100/ton) and $224 billion (at $500/ton). There are approximately 250 million passenger vehicles in the United States. The annual cost of air capture per auto is therefore $179 (at $100/ton) and $895 (at $500/ton). By contrast, this web site suggests that drivers can offset their auto emissions for $30-$80 per year per auto.

2. All U.S. CO2 Emissions

By extension, all U.S. carbon dioxide emissions could be offset by air capture for a per capita cost of $600 (at $100/ton) and $3,000 (at $500 per ton). At current use of gasoline (approximately 150 billion gallons per year) this could be achieved with a gas tax of $1.09 per gallon (at $100/ton) or $5.43 per gallon (at $500/ton). This level of taxation is comparable to gas taxes in European countries. If demand decreases as a result of the tax, as it probably would, then the tax would of course have to increase proportionately.

If the policy goal is to reduce total U.S. emissions by 40% then this could be achieved with a gas tax of $0.43 ($2.17). A gas tax of $1.00 would probably be more than enough to get this process started, including the costs of developing the air capture technology. The tax level could certainly be modified in future years based on experience with the actual costs of air capture technology and U.S. fuel usage.

This solution is so simple and straightforward, I wonder why those concerned with global warming aren't trumpeting it as a solution in the United States? Instead, the focus is on complicated and politically intractable approaches with dubious chances for success. Air capture is easy (compared to other solutions that have been proposed) to implement and politically requires only enough motivation to win a $1.00/gallon gas tax. If global warming is indeed going to cost us 5-20% of global GDP, how can we not pursue air capture?

What have I missed?

Posted on December 3, 2006 05:08 PM View this article | Comments (40)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

November 30, 2006

Less than A Quarter Inch by 2100

Following up on earlier discussions on the Mass. vs. EPA Supreme Court oral arguments and specifically on the issue of standing and redressibility, here are some numbers on the effects of the emissions reductions being discussed in the oral arguments and their effects on future sea level rise.

Assume the following:

A. Sea level will at an average of 3 mm/year

B. Of this 1 mm/year is already committed to (e.g., due to non-human causes, human caused due to past GHG emissions)

C. Emissions reductions have an instantaneous effect on sea level rise and that effect if proportional to the total emissions (of course this is not true, but makes this exercise easier, and makes my analysis conservative as emission reductions actually have less than this effect)

Under these assumptions what would the effects of EPA regulation as discussed yesterday be on future sea level rise?

Let’s go out to 2100 and assume that regulations are in place and successful by 2010 (not realistic, but again conservative).

90 years of Business as usual (BAU) * 3 mm/year = 270 mm = 10.63 inches

90 years of BAU minus 2.5% = 90 + 175.5 = 265.5 mm = 10.45 inches

Time delay until 270 mm is reached = 18 months

(If you would prefer to apply the effects of emissions reductions to the full 3 mm/year, then the numbers are 263.25 mm = 10.36 inches = 27 months)

What does this mean?

The maximum effect if reducing global emissions by 2.5% (i.e., as suggested in oral arguments yesterday) would be to reduce projected sea level rise by a less than a fifth of an inch in 2100. In other words, the sea level that would have occurred in January, 2100 would be put off until June, 2101. If you’d prefer to apply the effects of future emissions reductions of 2.5% to the total sea level rise (i.e., ignoring the existing commitment) then the numbers are a quarter inch and March, 2102.

Are these meaningful with respect to redressing damages? In my opinion, no they are not. In fact, I would argue that there is in fact no difference in damages that exists at a difference of less than a quarter inch of sea level.

Seems to me that these numbers might have been raised in the arguments at some point.

Posted on November 30, 2006 10:39 AM View this article | Comments (70)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

November 29, 2006

Quick Reactions to Arguments Today before the Supreme Court on Mass. vs. EPA

The transcript of arguments before the Supreme Court is available here in PDF. A good overview of the hearing from an expert on the Supreme Court can be found here. In what follows I provide some excerpts from the oral arguments and my reactions to them. In my judgment neither side did a particularly effective job on the substantive issues associated with climate impacts, and the issue of redressibility in particular. I do not have any opinions worth considering on the legal aspects of the case, nor do I have any strong views on what will happen. Please read on for my comments on the oral arguments.

People appearing below, in addition to Supreme Court Justices:

JAMES R. MILKEY, ESQ., Assistant Attorney General, Boston, Mass; on behalf of Petitioners [Mass.].

GREGORY C. GARRE, ESQ., Deputy Solicitor General, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.; on behalf of Respondents [EPA].

JUSTICE SCALIA: I gather that there's something of a consensus on warming, but not a consensus on how much of that is attributable to human activity. [p. 5]

This statement is incorrect. The IPCC stated in 2001 that, “There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.” (PDF) Not 100% of scientists agree with this statement of course, and it is very imprecise.

MR. MILKEY: And in any event, it is important to point out that because of the scale of the problem, relatively small percentage deductions in global emissions can lead to real world results. [p. 8]

This statement is incorrect. A relatively small percentage reduction in global emissions will not lead to detectable real world outcomes with respect to sea level rise. What is "small"? In the context of this conversation is it 2.5% of total global emissions.

MR. MILKEY: . . . But it's important that given the nature of the harms, even small reductions can be significant. For example, if we're able to save only a small fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars that Massachusetts parks agencies are projected to lose, that reduction is itself significant.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: That assumes everything else is going to remain constant, though, right? It assumes there isn't going to be a greater contribution of greenhouse gases from economic development in China and other places that's going to displace whatever marginal benefit you get here.

MR. MILKEY: Yes, Your Honor. But reducing domestic emissions will reduce our harm, the harm we would otherwise face regardless of what -

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Not if your harm is the alleged loss of coastline. Not necessarily. It depends upon what happens across the globe with respect to greenhouse emissions.

MR. MILKEY: Your Honor, we would still lose coastline but we would not lose as much because these harms are cumulative, and while reducing U.S. emissions will not eliminate all the harm we face, it can reduce the harm that these emissions are causing.
So it will necessarily reduce our harm and satisfy redressibility.

JUSTICE SCALIA: I mean, do we know that that's a straight line ratio, that a reduction of two-and-a-half percent of carbon dioxide -- well, two and a half overall would save two-and-a-half percent of your coastline? Is that how it works? I'm not a scientist, but I'd be surprised if it was so rigid.

MR. MILKEY: Your Honor, I don't believe it's established it's necessarily a straight line. But I want to emphasize that small vertical rises cause a large loss of horizontal land. For example, where the slope is less than 2 percent, which is true of much of the Massachusetts coastline, every foot rise will create a loss of more than 50 feet of horizontal land. And for example, in the State of New York, the Oppenheimer affidavit projects that New York could well lose thousands of acres of its sovereign territory by the year 2020. So the harm is already occurring. It is ongoing and it will happen well into the future. [pp. 11-13]

Mr. Milkey offers a very misleading and incorrect argument in this instance. Reducing emissions by a small amount will not save parts of the coastline. At best, it will delay the time for which sea level rise will occur, and by only a very small amount of time. At the levels being discussed here, again about 2.5% of global emissions (based on today’s emissions, it will be a smaller percentage in the future), it is unlikely that such a reduction would be discernible in future sea level rise.

This exchange points to an area where the scientific community has been grossly neglectful. There is very little work available that clearly explains the effects of different marginal emissions reductions on future specific climate impacts (e.g., sea level rise, hurricanes, drought, etc. — and not global average temperature as measured in hundredths of degrees). One reason for this oversight is of course that the answer in almost all cases the effects are almost nil on time scales of many decades, if not longer.

JUSTICE SCALIA: Mr. Milkey, I had -- my problem is precisely on the impermissible grounds. To be sure, carbon dioxide is a pollutant, and it can be an air pollutant. If we fill this room with carbon dioxide, it could be an air pollutant that endangers health. But I always thought an air pollutant was something different from a stratospheric pollutant, and your claim here is not that the pollution of what we normally call "air" is endangering health. That isn't, that isn't -- your assertion is that after the pollutant leaves the air and goes up into the stratosphere it is contributing to global warming.
MR. MILKEY: Respectfully, Your Honor, it is not the stratosphere. It's the troposphere.

JUSTICE SCALIA: Troposphere, whatever. I told you before I'm not a scientist.
(Laughter.)

JUSTICE SCALIA: That's why I don't want to have to deal with global warming, to tell you the truth. [pp. 22-23]

Justice Scalia clearly does not understand the science of climate change at a particularly sophisticated level. But that does not make him unique -- Nor apparently does anyone else speaking today.

Note that Justice Scalia does identify carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

JUSTICE STEVENS: I find it interesting that the scientists whose worked on that [2001 NRC] report said [in an amicus brief] there were a good many omissions that would have indicated that there wasn't nearly the uncertainty that the agency described.
MR. GARRE: Your Honor, if you are referring to the amicus brief, Your Honor, there are -- assuming there are amicus briefs on the other side. The Ballunas amicus brief -- I think it is fair for the Court to look at, to look at the document that the agency had before it. That -- that document produced by the National Research -- Research Council, that's the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences. And it's one of the gold standards of research.

JUSTICE STEVENS: But in their selective quotations, they left out parts that indicated there was far less uncertainty than the agency purported to find.

MR. GARRE: Well, Your Honor, I think one thing that we ought to be able to agree on is there is that there is uncertainty surrounding the phenomenon of global climate change. I think the debate is on which areas are more uncertain than the others. But certainly I think the agency was entitled to conclude, particularly if you take into account the deference this Court should give to that kind of determination, that the scientific uncertainty surrounding the issue of global climate change, surrounding issues of the extent of natural variability in climate, surrounding the issues of impact of climate feedbacks like ocean circulation, and low cloud cover, are permissible considerations for the agency to take into --

JUSTICE STEVENS: Is there uncertainty on the basic proposition that these greenhouse gases contribute to global warming?

MR. GARRE: Your Honor, the report says that it is likely that there is a -- a connection, but that it cannot unequivocally be established. I think that -if I could use that to go back to the standing question, Your Honor, which is the fundamental question of whether they've showed not just a connection between greenhouse gas emissions in toto and the phenomenon of global climate change, but the particular class of greenhouse gas emissions at issue in this case. Six percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, at most. That assumes you put all U.S. vehicles off the road or that they are all zero emission cars. So you're talking about emissions – [pp. 29-31]

Mr. Garre does himself no favors with this exchange. A connection between greenhouse gases and climate change has been established. Mr. Garre doesn’t seem to know what he wants to say about uncertainties. This exchange highlights the dangers of cherrypicking. Instead of making his case, Mr. Garre finds himself explaining away the earlier cherrypicking of the NRC report.

JUSTICE SOUTER: Let's assume the rest -let's assume that the rest of the world does nothing. I don't think that's a very reasonable assumption, but let's make that assumption. So that the only thing we're talking is the 6 percent [ie., the total of U.S. auto emissions as a percentage of global emissions]. If the 6 percent can be reduced -- I think the suggestion was over a reasonable period of time, by two and a half percent of the 6, there is, I suppose, reason to expect that there will be, maybe not two and a half percent less coastline lost, but some degree of less coastline lost because there is a correlation between the gas and the loss of the coastline. Why is that an unreasonable assumption to make in order to show causation and redressibility, bearing in mind that redressibility is a question of more or less, not a question of either/or. . .
They don't have to show that it will stop global warming. Their point is that will reduce the degree of global warming and likely reduce the degree of loss, if it is only by two and a half percent. What's wrong with that?

MR. GARRE: Justice Souter, their burden is to show that if the Court grants their requested relief it will redress their injuries. I'm not aware -

JUSTICE SOUTER: Not redress their injury in the sense that it will prevent any global warming or stop global warming and stop coastal erosion; their argument is a different one. It will reduce the degree of global warming and reduce the degree of coastal loss. [pp. 35-36]

Here Mr. Garre faced a hanging curve over the fat part of the plate and fanned. In other words, for our non-baseball literate readers, Mr. Garre had a chance to provide an authoritative answer to Justice Souter’s question which could have addressed Mr. Souter's concern and better made his case, but he did not.

JUSTICE SOUTER: But isn't it intuitively reasonable to suppose that with some reduction of the greenhouse gases, there will be some reduction of the ensuing damage or the ensuing climate change which causes the damage? Isn't that fair? p. 37

Justice Souter, like others, displays his lack of familiarity with the issue of climate change. His statement is logical and reasonable, but wrong. "Some reduction" of greenhouse gases (i.e., of the amounts being discussed in this case) will have no discernible effects on sea level rise. These reductions will not, as Justice Souter suggests, reduce damages. If anyone has a study suggesting the contrary, please share it.

MR. GARRE: That's right, Your Honor. We've got a unique collective action problem, and yet, the reaction experience of the agency in dealing with the issue of stratospheric ozone depletion rate had precisely that situation, where the U.S. initially took steps. The stratospheric ozone depletion worsened, and it was only after international agreement was reached in the Montreal Protocol that a global solution to the problem was reached. [p. 50]

Mr. Garre mischaracterizes the history of the ozone issue and the role of the United States. It was in fact U.S. action that motivated the international response, and the U.S. action was motivated by a lawsuit filed against EPA. However, that precedent is not directly relevant in this case. Why doesn’t he know this? For details, see this post.

Posted on November 29, 2006 01:43 PM View this article | Comments (41)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

AAAS Report on Standards of Peer Review

The AAAS has released a report motivated by several recent fraudulent papers that have been published in Science. The report suggests tightening the review process for certain types of papers. Here is an excerpt from the report (available here in PDF):

Science (and Nature) have reached a special status. Publication in Science has a significance that goes beyond that of 'normal' publication. Consequently, the value to some authors of publishing in Science, including enhanced reputation, visibility, position or cash rewards, is sufficiently high that some may not adhere to the usual scientific standards in order to achieve publication. Thus, the cachet of publishing in Science can be an incentive not to follow the rules. This problem has a significant impact on all of science, since trust in the system is essential, and since Science and Nature are seen to speak for the best in science. Furthermore, false information in the literature leads to an enormous waste of time and money in an effort to correct and clarify the science.
Science as a journal tries to select papers that will have high impact on both science and society. Some papers will be highly visible and attract considerable attention. Many of these papers purport to be major breakthroughs and claim to change fields in a significant way. However, because the content is so new or startling, it is often more difficult to evaluate the quality or veracity of the work than would be the case for a more conventional paper.

Papers in this class, particularly those that will receive public attention, can influence public policy or contribute to personal or institutional financial gain and thus warrant special scrutiny. In the immediate future, examples will likely come from the areas of climate change, human health, and particular issues in commercial biomedicine and nanotechnology. Progress in science depends on breakthroughs and in taking risks, both in research and in publishing. Nevertheless, it is essential to develop a process by which papers that have the likelihood of attracting attention are examined particularly closely for errors, misrepresentation, deception, or outright fraud. This examination should include especially high standards for providing primary data, a clear understanding of all of the authors' and coauthors’ contributions to the paper and a careful examination of data presented in the papers.

There is a major issue in the report left unaddressed, and this has to do with the following statement– "Science as a journal tries to select papers that will have high impact on both science and society." How does this selection process work? What are the criteria of “high impact”? What is the relationship of political positions taken by the Science editorial staff and the selection of papers for peer review and publication? If greater transparency makes sense for authors, then does greater transparency make sense for editors as well?

Posted on November 29, 2006 10:42 AM View this article | Comments (5)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science + Politics | Science Policy: General

November 28, 2006

Mugging Little Old Ladies and Reasoning by Analogy

[Updated 21:52 28 Nov 06]

Stanford’s Ken Caldeira provides an interesting, and I think unhelpful, analogy for how we might think about climate policy in the 20 November 2006 issue of the New Yorker in an article by Elizabeth Kolbert on carbon dioxide uptake by the oceans:

The term "ocean acidification" was coined in 2003 by two climate scientists, Ken Caldeira and Michael Wickett, who were working at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in Northern California. . . ~~Caldeira told me that he had chosen the term "ocean acidification" quite deliberately, for its shock value. . .~~ [According to Calderia, Kolbert has misquoted him. See comments. RP]
Caldeira said that he had recently gone to Washington to brief some members of Congress. "I was asked, 'What is the appropriate stabilization target for atmospheric CO2?' he recalled. "And I said, 'Well, I think it's inappropriate to think in terms of stabilization targets. I think we should think in terms of emissions targets.' And they said, 'O.K., what's the appropriate emissions target?' And I said, 'Zero.'

"If you’re talking about mugging little old ladies, you don’t say, 'What’s our target for the rate of mugging little old ladies?' You say, 'Mugging little old ladies is bad, and we’re going to try to eliminate it.' You recognize you might not be a hundred per cent successful, but your goal is to eliminate the mugging of little old ladies. And I think we need to eventually come around to looking at carbon-dioxide emissions the same way."

Analogies matter in policy debate. For instance, should we think of Iraq like the Vietnam War, the French in Algeria, or is the situation now a "civil war"? Public debate over contested policy issues often involves different interests seeking to define the policy problem in different ways – and hence limit the scope of acceptable alternatives in response. Analogical reasoning is central to battles over the framing of a policy problem.

For several reasons, Prof. Caldeira’s choice of analogies is less-than-helpful for the cause for which he is advocating. (And for the record, I support action on climate policy, as discussed in my summer, 2006 congressional testimony -- PDF.) Most significantly from the standpoint of framing of the climate problem, mugging little old ladies is a criminal activity while emitting greenhouse gases is not a criminal activity. Juxtaposing the two only adds to the perception of extremism among advocates of action on energy policies.

As an example, of these dynamics, it was not long after the phrase "climate change denier" became in vogue (and also adopted by activist scientists) that we heard an analogy -- which easily followed from the parallel construction to "Holocaust deniers" -- suggesting trials and executions for the climate change deniers. Surely this sort of analogical reasoning did not advance the political cause of those advocating rapid reductions in emissions.

~~Prof. Caldeira also explains that he seeks to "shock" with his terminology of "ocean acidification."~~ Seeking to motivate particular policy actions with scientific results – or a dramatic presentation of scientific results – is rarely effective or good for science, as we discussed last week. As Hans von Storch and Nico Stehr have written,

The costs of stirring up fear are high. It sacrifices the otherwise so highly valued principle of sustainability. A scarce resource - public attention and trust in the reliability of science - is used up without being renewed by the practice of positive examples.

The truth is that the uptake of carbon dioxide by the oceans is something that should capture our attention – whether we call it "ocean acidification" or not. But for the vast majority of people and policy makers there are far more immediate and compelling justifications to provide policy makers for beginning the decades-long challenge of reducing reliance on fossil fuels. Some of these reasons include saving money, increasing efficiency, reducing particulate air pollution, and reducing reliance on foreign sources of energy. Framing problems in terms of what actually matters to people is going to make action more likely that offering up scary science or misleading analogies.

Posted on November 28, 2006 07:23 AM View this article | Comments (45)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

November 27, 2006

The Benefits of Red Wine and the Politics of Science

Saturday’s New York Times had an interesting article (registration required) about scientific stuides finding possible health benefits of red wine, and the political constraints on the wine industry to advertise those benefits. Here is an excerpt from the article:

The wine industry certainly has welcomed the recent disclosures that a compound in red wine improves the health and endurance of laboratory mice. So why isn't the industry crowing about it?
Because it can’t. The industry has long been handcuffed by state and federal laws that discourage promoting the benefits of wine, with some of those restrictions dating back to the repeal of Prohibition in 1933.

"Yes, we’d all like to make hay of this, and we’ll do what we can, but we are very constrained," said Michael Mondavi, founder and president of Folio Fine Wine Partners, a producer and importer of wines here.

As an industry that is closely regulated by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, Mr. Mondavi said, "it is blatantly against the law for any alcoholic beverage producers to make any health claim regardless of the facts or the accuracy."

"Until that regulation is changed or modified in some way so that we can talk about the positive health aspects that are proven," said Mr. Mondavi, the older son of famed winemaker Robert Mondavi, "we have to sit on our hands and wait for others to pick up the story."

Government regulation of alcohol advertising has a long history steeped in American cultural attitudes about drinking. In this regard this issue shares some obvious similarities with, say, medical marijuana or even differences in male-female aptitude (e.g., as raised by Harvard’s Larry Summers not long ago). In other words, political issues involving science are immersed in rich stew of societal values and preferences. It is only when these values are strongly contested in society that issues of science in political debate actually come to the fore -- creating conditions for the pathological politicization of science. We tend to see these issues more starkly when political conflict exists and overlook them when conflict does not. Consisder the brouhaha over federal funding of stem research, yet there isn't similar controversy on federal funding for human cloning research.

When values are widely shared, aspects of science in politics that raise hackles in other contexts go overlooked or are treated as amusing side notes, such as in the NYT article on the potential benefits of red wine. That all issues of science in politics are not treated equally should make the obvious inescapable – when science and politics meet, the values context always matters. There is no such thing as decisions driven by science. Decisions are always driven by values. How, if, and when we wish to consider science in making those decisions is of course where much of the action lies. But we should not pretend that science makes decisions. People make decisions.

Posted on November 27, 2006 07:15 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Health | Science + Politics

Why don’t you write about __________?

Over the past week I have received the following two juxtaposed comments about what we focus on here at Prometheus. They are pretty typical of the sort of comments that I have received in the past, hence this response.

What still amazes me is that you can so clearly see [misrepresentations in policy arguments] going on in the area of your expertise and seemingly not recognize the same mischief in other areas of the science, from glaciers to solar variability. If the same people get it so terribly wrong here, why not there?

And also:

Why do you attack [Al Gore] on your site but not climate change deniers Fred Singer or Pat Michaels? Perhaps this tells us something about your own biases. Al Gore may have made a few mistakes but he is far more accurate than the oil industry shills that you seem to conveniently overlook.

Question: Why don’t I write about glaciers, solar variability, Fred Singer, or Pat Michaels?

Answer: I don’t know anything special about glaciers, solar variability, or the issues which are often discussed by Fred Singer or Pat Michaels. By contrast, I do know something about disasters and climate change. In fact, I know a lot, perhaps as much as only a few dozen people.

On disasters and climate change I can speak with authority, because I know the literature deeply and I have conducted a wide range of original studies in this area. When I am asked to comment on other topics my expertise drops off – precipitously. By commenting on these issues I would in effect simply be witnessing to who it is that I trust. So instead of offering inexpert commentary (which can be found in abundance elsewhere on blogs) we often rely on solicited and unsolicited guest weblogs, such as provided by Richard Tol on the Stern Report, and we sometimes invite competing perspectives to share their views here, as we did last year on the policy significance of the "hockey stick" debate. We are also have discussed plans for turning Prometheus into a more consistently multi-authored site with a range of expertise and perspectives on tap.

So lets cut to the chase -- do I trust those wacked alarmists or those nefarious skeptics? By answering this question, some might think, it would be far easier to classify me in a tribal category – "is he with us, or them"?

Truth is, based on my front-row seat view of the science of climate change, I don’t much trust the alarmists or the skeptics and by this I mean both (a) those political advocates couching their arguments in terms of science and (b) those scientists who have taken on the role of political advocates. I have been for many years convinced based on my own academic training and a "dinner table" degree in aspects of climate science that we should indeed be concerned about greenhouse gas emissions and other human influences on climate. But what I have also observed in my years inside the climate community is that it is deeply politicized throughout. This doesn’t mean that we need not be concerned about the human effects on climate. But what it does mean is that we need to take far more care with the relationship of climate science and climate policy, a responsibility that I believe requires the attention of the scientific community.

Question: Who is it then that I do trust?

Answer: Well, many of the non-skeptic heretics. And you should too. When the politics of climate change settles out over coming years and decades, these are the folks whose intellectual policy arguments will be left standing.

Meantime, if you are in fact looking for commentary from me on issues of climate change outside my own expertise, there will undoubtedly continue to be a few such musings that slip through on occasion – such is the nature of blogs. But for the most part (on climate change at least) I plan on generally sticking to what I know. Some of you may wish to see a political signal in this focus (as the two commenters that I opened with did, ironically enough in diffeent directions), which is perhaps unavoidable. As far as those of you interested in my own political leanings, here you go.

Posted on November 27, 2006 06:43 AM View this article | Comments (5)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

November 25, 2006

Politicization of Intelligence

The role of military intelligence in policy making is not unlike the role of science in policy making, a point I make in my forthcoming book. In the Los Angeles Times last week Jennifer Glaudmans has an excellent op-ed about the politicization of intelligence under Robert Gates, former CIA director and current nominee to replace Donald Rumsfeld. Her piece provides an interesting lens through which to think about the pathological politicization of science. Here are a few relevant excerpts (emphases added):

. . . we were asked, in 1985, to contribute to the National Intelligence Estimate on the subject of Iran.
Later, when we received the draft NIE, we were shocked to find that our contribution on Soviet relations with Iran had been completely reversed. Rather than stating that the prospects for improved Soviet-Iranian relations were negligible, the document indicated that Moscow assessed those prospects as quite good. What's more, the national intelligence officer responsible for coordinating the estimate had already sent a personal memo to the White House stating that the race between the U.S. and USSR "for Tehran is on, and whoever gets there first wins all."

No one in my office believed this Cold War hyperbole. There was simply no evidence to support the notion that Moscow was optimistic about its prospects for improved relations with Iran. All of our published analysis had consistently been pessimistic about Soviet-Iranian relations as long as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was alive.

We protested the conclusions of the NIE, citing evidence such as the Iranian government's repression of the communist Tudeh Party, the expulsion of all Soviet economic advisors and a number of Soviet diplomats who were KGB officers, and a continuing public rhetoric that chastised the "godless" communist regime as the "Second Satan" after the United States.

Despite overwhelming evidence, our analysis was suppressed. At a coordinating meeting, we were told that Gates wanted the language to stay in as it was, presumably to help justify "improving" our strained relations with Tehran through the Iran-Contra weapons sales.

This is another example of ends-justify-the-means thinking that seem to be behind just about every pathological politicization of science. If your desired policy actions are virtuous, then it shouldn't matter how you cause those actions to occur, right? In the end we will all be better off, right? Glaudmans indicates that this was the thinking on intelligence behind Ronald Reagan's Iran-Contra effort, it was also the thinking behind the neo-conservatives push in Iraq, and it is behind those pushing for immediate and drastic action on curtailing emissions of greenhouse gases such as described in the Stern Review (which we have discussed at some length).

Glaudmans continues:

It's possible that the Reagan administration would have gone ahead and made its overtures to Iran regardless of what was said in the NIE, but having the coordinated assessment of the intelligence community support its views certainly added legitimacy to its rationale. What's more, if the policymakers had received better and more accurate intelligence, perhaps someone would at least have questioned the false sense of urgency. Instead, our intelligence was used as expensive intra-government propaganda. . .
During those years, the government was clearly dominated by people who had a strong ideological view of the Soviet Union. But their conflict was not with people who were "soft" on communism, it was with people who looked at all the available evidence, without much bias one way or another, and who had been to the USSR and witnessed its hollow political and social structure, seeing not an omnipotent superpower but a clumsy, oafish regime often stumbling over its own feet.

What is interesting about this passage is Glaudmans' description of how those people seeking to provide good intelligence found themselves in conflict with the ideologues. This conflict occurs because those seeking to politicize intelligence beyond its limits are not necesarily threatened by their ideological opponents -- indeed such stark contrasts actually make the ideological differences more apparent and thus serve more effectively as a political "wedge." Instead the greatest threat to ideologues seeking to pathologuically politicize intelligence comes from those presenting solid analyses, which have a stubborn tendency to win out in the long run. On such conflicts, see for example a few of my own experiences described here.

Glaudmans concludes:

Is all this ancient history relevant today? It is if you believe that policymakers are poorly served when analysis is concocted to support their preexisting positions. It is relevant if you believe that the failure to learn the lessons from the 1991 Gates hearings harmed U.S. foreign policy when, a decade later, we went to war on false intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It is relevant if you believe that Congress should take its oversight responsibilities seriously.

It is certainly the case that the current Bush Administration has contributed to the pathological politicization of intelligence, economics, and science across a range of areas. Of this there is no doubt. Fortunately, these issues are suffering from no lack of attention. The concern that I have and discuss frequently on this blog, which I see almost every day, is the contributions by scientists (and other experts) to the pathological politicization of science. Once you lose the capability to provide solid policy analyses, pathologically politicized information is all that remains.

Posted on November 25, 2006 07:17 AM View this article | Comments (10)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science + Politics | The Honest Broker

November 24, 2006

Tol on Nordhaus on Stern

Whatever you might happen to think about Richard Tol's views, he cannot be criticized for being indirect. The statement below I have elevated from our comments. It is one of seveal gems from Richard in the past few weeks, and provides a cogent summary of why it is that solid policy arguments matter in political discourse -- whether the subject is climate change or WMDs or whatever.

I cannot speak for Nordhaus, but I have known him for many years and carefully read all his papers on climate change.
Nordhaus indeed favours climate policy, specifically greenhouse gas emission reduction. The House of Lords report also seems to favour climate policy -- its main author, David Pearce, was a strong advocate for sure. Indeed, any economist I know who seriously studied climate change, has come out in favour of emission reduction.

That does not imply that there is agreement with Stern.

Nordhaus and others have berated Stern for a number of technical errors and wild exageration. Qualitatively, Stern may be correct -- but quantitatively, Stern is very wrong.

There are several problems with that. Firstly, a supposedly eminent economist made a fool of himself in the public eye. This increases the general distrust of the public. Secondly, anyone who dislikes climate policy can quote Stern to demonstrate what fools climate policy advocates are.

Stern did not provide an argument for climate policy, but ammunition for the skeptics.

Besides, he has forced people like Nordhaus to waste precious time on refuting a silly argument. To the general public, the message of people like Nordhaus must be very confusing: Stern is wrong but right nonetheless.

Really, climate policy would have been in a better place without Nick Stern.

Posted on November 24, 2006 09:31 AM View this article | Comments (24)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

Class Copenhagen Consensus Exercise: Feedback Requested

This Post Will Stay at the Top through 24 Nov, New Posts Will Still Appear Below

This semester in my graduate seminar Policy, Science, and the Environment we have spent a good share of the semester replicating and critiquing the Copenhagen Consensus exercise. With this post we’d like to solicit some feedback on the class term projects reporting and justifying their results

For those of you unfamiliar with the Copenhagen Consensus, its homepage describes its efforts as follows:

The Copenhagen Consensus Center (CCC) is a center under the auspices of the Copenhagen Business School. Through the commissioning and conveying of research, we work to improve the foundation for prioritizing between various efforts to mitigate the consequences of the World's biggest challenges. In particular we focus on the international community's effort to solve the World's biggest challenges and how to do this in the most cost-efficient manner.
The idea is simple, yet often neglected. When financial resources are limited you need to prioritize your effort. Everyday, from policymakers to business leaders, at all levels, priorities are made between investing in one project and not another. However, many times, and particularly at the political level, decisions on priorities are made not based on facts, science or calculations but on which issue gets the most media coverage or is most politisized. The Copenhagen Consensus approach works to improve the foundation of knowledge, to get an overview of research and facts within a given problem, so that the prioritizing of efforts to solve this problem is based on evidence and is comparable with solutions across problems.

We are focusing on repeating the Copenhagen Consensus analysis in my class. This is the first time I’ve attempted this exercise, so this year I am very fortunate to have an extremely hard-working and thoughtful set of students in my class. Most importantly they have been extremely gracious in playing along as guinea pigs with a complete redesign of this course.

Here is what we’ve done. In our class we divided up into four groups – the Wolfpack, Troika, Great Danes, and the Savvy World Affairs Troubleshooters (SWAT). The first task for each group was to identify the two most important topics that were not on the Copenhagen Consensus list of 10 world problems. Each group presented two subjects and the students then voted among the recommendations to identify the two we would add to the list. We added Energy and Land Degradation.

The next task for the groups was to allocate $50 billion among the now 12 issue areas. Their assignment was to produce an allocation as well as a justification for their allocation. We have spent much of the semester focused on two tasks. One was learning from each other about the substantive issues involved with each problem area. The second was discussing the nature of cost-benefit analysis as a tool for producing information relevant to establishing priorities. We focused in particular on valuing human lives and discounting.

In producing their allocations and justifications, the groups were free to use whatever approach or method that they saw fit. We are posting the group reports here online to stimulate some feedback from our readers to the class on their reports. Note that the ~~dictator~~ professor disallowed efforts to spend the money over time or investing it in hopes of gaining a larger return, among other rules put in place to simplify and standardize the assignement. You will find a range of approaches to the allocation and a range of results.

Great Danes final report webpage
Troika final report webpage
SWAT final report webpage
Wolfpack final report webpage

Here is a spreadsheet summarizing the group allocations and comparing the class averages to three exercises run by the Copenhagen Consensus in 2004, 2006, and by the UN.

Whether or not you agree with their allocations, we would find useful any feedback on the group reports. How understandable are they? Are their arguments well supported and well justified? Are their reports credible?

It is a lot of work to read through the class projects, so we are grateful for whatever responses that our readers provide.

In closing, I wish to emphasize that in posting the reports the class is very interested in feedback but also wanted me to emphasize that many of the students are uncomfortable with the notion of cost-benefit analysis, and a few simply reject it as a legitimate basis for decision making altogether. We use the Copenhagen Consensus exercise as a pedagogical tool, not as an endorsement of the approach as a means of setting priorities. If I had $50 billion to spend, I certainly wouldn’t allocate it using the Copenhagen Consensus approach. Nonetheless, as an exercise for learning about global problems, the challenges of priority setting, and the difficulty of trade-offs, at least from the standpoint of the professor, the Copenhagen Consensus has some worthwhile qualities in the classroom. After the semester I’ll be happy to editorialize a bit more on the class and the Copenhagen Consensus, but for now I’d like the attention focused on the work of our students.

Posted on November 24, 2006 01:50 AM View this article | Comments (28)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Education | International

November 22, 2006

William Nordhaus on The Stern Report

Here is a link to Willian Norhaus' review of the The Stern Report (PDF). It is worth reading in full. Prof. Nordhaus provides the following "summary verdict."

How much and how fast should the globe reduce greenhouse-gas emissions? How should nations balance the costs of the reductions against the damages and dangers of climate change? The Stern Review answers these questions clearly and unambiguously: we need urgent, sharp, and immediate reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions.
I am reminded here of President Harry Truman’s complaint that his economists would always say, on the one hand this and on the other hand that. He wanted a one-handed economist. The Stern Review is a Prime Minister’s dream come true. It provides decisive and compelling answers instead of the dreaded conjectures, contingencies, and qualifications.

However, a closer look reveals that there is indeed another hand to these answers. The radical revision of the economics of climate change proposed by the Review does not arise from any new economics, science, or modeling. Rather, it depends decisively on the assumption of a near-zero social discount rate. The Review’s unambiguous conclusions about the need for extreme immediate action will not survive the substitution of discounting assumptions that are consistent with today’s market place. So the central questions about global-warming policy – how much, how fast, and how costly – remain open. The Review informs but does not answer these fundamental questions.

Posted on November 22, 2006 08:45 AM View this article | Comments (7)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

November 21, 2006

Walter Lippmann (1955) on Misrepresentation and Balance

Some things don't grow stale with age. The writings of Walter Lippmann are among them. Here are a few excerpts from Lippmann’s 1955 book The Public Philosophy that remind us that the politicization of information is far from a new concern and the importance of open debate in response.

. . . when the decision is critical and urgent, the public will not be told the whole truth. What can be told to the great public it will not hear in the complicated and qualified concreteness that is needed for a practical decision. When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into the absolute. Even when there is no deliberate distortion by censorship and propaganda, which is unlikely in time of war, the public opinion of masses cannot be counted upon to apprehend regularly and promptly the reality of things. There is an inherent tendency in opinion to feed upon rumors excited by our own wishes and fears. [p. 27]

On balance in the media and in public debates Lippmann is quite clear about maintaining conditions that foster debate and the exchange of perspectives.

. . . when the chaff of silliness, baseness, and deception is so voluminous that it submerges the kernels of truth, freedom of speech may produce such frivolity, or such mischief, that it cannot be preserved against the demand for a restoration of order or of decency. If there is a dividing line between liberty and license, it is where freedom of speech is no longer respected as a procedure of the truth and becomes the unrestricted right to exploit the ignorance, and incite the passions, of the people. The freedom is such a hullabaloo of sophistry, propaganda, special pleading, lobbying, and salesmanship that it is difficult to remember why freedom of speech is worth the pain and trouble of defending it.

What has been lost in the tumult is the meaning of the obligation which is involved in the right to speak freely. It is the obligation to subject the utterance to criticism and debate. Because the dialectical debate is a procedure for attaining moral and political truth, the right to speak is protected by a willingness to debate. . . .

And because the purpose of the confrontation is to discern truth, there are rules of evidence and of parliamentary procedure, there are codes of fair dealing and fair comment, by which a loyal man will consider himself bound when he exercises the right to publish opinions. For the right to freedom of speech is no license to deceive, and willful misrepresentation is a violation of its principles. It is sophistry to pretend that in a free country a man has some sort of inalienable or constitutional right to deceive his fellow men. There is no more right to deceive that there is a right to swindle, to cheat, or to pick pockets. It may be inexpedient to arraign every public liar, as we try to arraign other swindlers. It may be a poor policy to have too many laws which encourage litigation about matters of opinion. But, in principle, there can be no immunity for lying in any of its protean forms.

In our time the application of these fundamental principles poses many unsolved practical problems. For the modern media of mass communication do not lend themselves easily to a confrontation of opinions. The dialectical process for finding truth works best when the same audience hears all the sides of a disputation. . . Rarely, and on very few public issues, does the mass audience have the benefit of the process by which truth is sifted from error – the dialectic of debate in which there is immediate challenge, reply, cross-examination, and rebuttal.

Yet when genuine debate is lacking, freedom of speech does not work as it is meant to work. It has lost the principle which regulates and justifies it – that is to say, dialectic conducted according to logic and the rules of evidence. If there is not effective debate, the unrestricted right to speak will unloose so many propagandists, procurers, and panders upon the public that sooner or later in self-defense the people will turn to censors to protect them. An unrestricted and unregulated right to speak cannot be maintained. It will be curtailed for all manner of reasons and pretexts, and to serve all kinds of good, foolish, or sinister ends.

For in the absence of debate unrestricted utterance leads to the degradation of opinion. By a kind of Gresham’s law the more rational is overcome by the less rational, and the opinions that will prevail will be those which are held most ardently by those with the most passionate will. For that reason the freedom to speak can never be maintained merely by objecting to interference with the liberty of the press, of printing, of broadcasting, of the screen. It can be maintained only by promoting debate.

In the end what men will most ardently desire is to suppress those who disagree with them and, therefore, stand in the way of the realization of their desires. Thus, once confrontation in debate is no longer necessary, the toleration of all opinions leads to intolerance. Freedom of speech, separated from its essential principle, leads through a short transitional chaos to the destruction of freedom of speech. [pp. 96-101]

Posted on November 21, 2006 01:20 AM View this article | Comments (5)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science + Politics | The Honest Broker

November 20, 2006

Al Gore at His Best, and Worst

In yesterday’s Telegraph (UK) Al Gore has a lengthy article on climate change science and policy. In the piece Mr. Gore includes an egregious and unquestionable misrepresentation of the science of disasters and climate change. This is unfortunate, because it detracts from a compelling argument for action in the same piece.

Mr. Gore starts out, ironically enough, asserting the importance of peer-reviewed science. I call this ironic because the misrepresentation that follows (a) hasn’t been peer reviewed, and (b) the peer-reviewed literature contradicts the misrepresentation. Here is what Mr. Gore says about the peer reviewed literature:

[T]here is a reason why new scientific research is peer-reviewed and then published in journals such as Science, Nature, and the Geophysical Research Letters, rather than the broadsheets. The process is designed to ensure that trained scientists review the framing of the questions that are asked, the research and methodologies used to pursue the answers offered and even, in some cases, to monitor the funding of the laboratories — all in order to ensure that errors and biases are detected and corrected before reaching the public.

Shouldn’t this also apply to the claims that Mr. Gore makes, and not just his opponents? Here is the misrepresentation:

And with regards to some of the financial implications suggested by the Stern report, one need only look to the insurance industry for validation of the potential costs of global warming. On Wednesday, the reinsurance giant Munich Re reported, "driven by climate change, weather related disasters could cost as much as a trillion dollars in a single year by 2040".

We discussed this particular misrepresentation in depth in a post last week and discussed the Stern report’s misrepresentation the week before in this post. As I have said on many occasions, I am neither surprised nor too concerned that a politician would stretch the facts to advance his political agenda. What concerns me is that many scientists have been complicit in advancing such mischaracterizations and remain selectively mute when they are made. In this manner, a large portion of the mainstream climate science community has taken on the unfortunate characteristics of politicians like Mr. Gore, deciding to uphold scientific standards only when politically convenient. This is one way how science becomes pathologically politicized.

Mr. Gore’s misrepresentation is unfortunate because he makes a compelling argument for why action on climate change makes sense based on short-term benefits, a point a made in congressional testimony (PDF) last summer. Here is Mr. Gore’s argument for the short-term benefits for action on climate change:

Some of the policies detailed in the [Stern] report include: increasing global public energy research and development funding, dramatically reducing waste through energy efficiency measures, expanding and linking emissions trading systems and carbon markets, multiplying programmes to reduce deforestation of natural areas such as Amazonia, and continuing to set aggressive domestic and global targets to reduce the pollution that causes global warming. None of these policy measures should cause alarm.
In fact, not only are they rational, but also they have substantial co-benefits, which include increased air quality, improved access to energy among the rural poor in developed countries, further independence from foreign sources of energy in volatile and unstable regions of the world, and, of course, the obvious opportunities in the new markets developing for low carbon technologies.

We need more good arguments like this and less misrepresentation.

Posted on November 20, 2006 01:37 AM View this article | Comments (45)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

November 16, 2006

What is Wrong with Politically-Motivated Research?

This quote from Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen provides a clear example of seeking political ends through science:

Prominent scientists, among them a Nobel laureate, said a layer of pollution deliberately spewed into the atmosphere could act as a "shade" from the sun's rays and help cool the planet.
Reaction to the proposal here at the annual U.N. conference on climate change is a mix of caution, curiosity and some resignation to such "massive and drastic" operations, as the chief U.N. climatologist describes them.

The Nobel Prize-winning scientist who first made the proposal is himself "not enthusiastic about it."

"It was meant to startle the policymakers," said Paul J. Crutzen, of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. "If they don't take action much more strongly than they have in the past, then in the end we have to do experiments like this." [Emphasis added. RP]

In 2004 I characterized (in PDF) the "politicization of science by scientists" as "the use of science by scientists as a means of negotiating for desired political outcomes." Dr. Crutzen's description of his work clearly fits this definition.

I characterized the problem with such a strategy as follws, "many scientists encourage the mapping of established interests from across the political spectrum onto science and then use science as a proxy for political battle over these interests."

Why does this matter? "when politics is played out through science with the acquiescence and even facilitation of scientists, the results can serve to foster political gridlock to the detriment of science and policy alike because science alone is incapable of forcing a political consensus."

Starting with a desired political outcome and then generating the science to support that outcome is not the most effective way for science to support policy, even coming from a Nobel laureate.

Posted on November 16, 2006 12:59 PM View this article | Comments (6)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics | The Honest Broker

November 15, 2006

Looking Away from Misrepresentations of Science in Policy Debate Related to Disasters and Climate Change

For me the most amazing aspect of the repeated misrepresentation of science related to disasters and climate change is not that political advocates look to cherry pick science or go beyond the state of the science. What is most amazing is that in the face of incontrovertible and repeated misrepresentation that the overwhelming majority of scientists, the media, and responsible advocacy groups have remained mute (with a few notable exceptions such as Hans von Storch).

More than anything else, even the misrepresentations themselves, the collective willingness to overlook bad policy arguments unsupported (or even contradicted) by the current state of science while at the same time trumpeting the importance of scientific consensus is evidence of the comprehensive and pathological politicization of science in the policy debate over global warming. If climate scientists ever wonder why they are looked upon with suspicion among some people in society, they need look no further in their willingness to compromise their own intellectual standards in policy debate on the issue of disasters and climate change.

Here are just some of the misrepresentations of science in policy discussions related to disasters and climate change from the Prometheus archives:

Misrepresentation by ABI of UK Foresight flood assessment

Misrepresentation by UNEP of disaster loss trends

Misrepresentation by former head of IPCC of disaster loss trends

Misrepresentation by New York Times of trends in disaster losses

Misrepresentation by editor of Science of detection and attribution of trends in extreme events

Misrepresentation by editor of Science of attribution of Katrina to greenhouse gas emissions

Misrepresentation of literature of disaster trends and climate in article in Science

Misrepresentation by lead IPCC author responsible for hurricane chapter of attribution of Katrina to greenhouse gas emissions

Misrepresentation of ABI report on future tropical cyclone losses

Misrepresentation by Al Gore of state of hurricane science and attribution of Katrina

Misrepresentation by Time of science of hurricanes and attribution of Katrina

Misrepresentation by IPCC WG II of storm surge impacts research

Misrepresentation by AGU of science of seasonal hurricane forecast skill

Misrepresentation by Environmental Defense of attribution of Katrina to greenhouse gases and prospects for avoiding future hurricanes

Misrepresentation in the Washington Post of the science of disaster trends and future impacts

Misrepresentation in Stern report of trends in disaster losses and projections of future costs

Misrepresentation by UNEP of trends and projections in disaster losses

Posted on November 15, 2006 10:42 AM View this article | Comments (25)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters | Science + Politics

November 14, 2006

More Climate and Disaster Nonsense

Debunking nonsense related to disaster losses and climate change is getting to be a full time job. The latest misleading information is uncritically reported by Reuters and comes from a report commissioned by UNEP. Reuters reports:

Losses from extreme weather could top $1 trillion in a single year by 2040, a partnership of the United Nations Environment Programme and private finance institutions (UNEP FI) warned on Tuesday.
Speaking at a major U.N. climate meeting in Kenya, they said the estimated cost of droughts, storm surges, hurricanes and floods reached a record $210 billion in 2005, and such losses linked to global warming were seen doubling every 12 years.

"This is an unequivocal statement by 15 of the largest financial institutions: Climate change is now certain," Paul Clements-Hunt of UNEP FI told a news conference.

The $1 trillion figure comes from a report commissioned by UNEP, released today (PDF). The report states:

The following scenario constructed by Andlug Consulting presents one possible pathway that climatic losses might follow in coming decades, and suggests how the financial sector might be affected. It is NOT a prediction, but like all scenarios, is intended to explore the future so that better plans can be made.
The trend value for economic losses in 2005 is 50 billion USD ( Figure 7). Industry analysts reckon that this is about half the total losses, which therefore are 100 billion USD. The long-term trend of six percent annual growth means the costs double every 12 years, taking them to 800 billion USD by 2041, in 2005 values. However, great disasters always appear in clusters: Figure 7 shows that one year in three, the costs are 50 percent higher than the trend-line. In fact they were more than double the trend value in 1992, 1993 and 2005. Making allowance for such clusters, and for the inclusion of all societal and opportunity costs, it seems very likely that the there will be a “peak” year that will record costs of over 1 trillion USD before 2040. In fact, since so much development is taking place in coastal zones, the figure may arrive considerably before 2040.

The $1 trillion is therefore not linked to global warming but an extension of current loss trends into the future. This is a point that we made at the AGU one year ago and which was reported responsibly by Kenneth Chang of the New York Times 11 December, 2005 (link, registration required). That NYT article said, "With wealth and property values increasing, and more people moving to vulnerable coasts, by the year 2020 a single storm could cause losses of $500 billion -- several times the damage inflicted by Hurricane Katrina." It is no stretch to get from $500B in 2020 to $1 trillion by 2040. Of course, the size of the economy grows over that time frame as well.

Further, the UNEP analysis was prepared by Andlug Consulting, which is run by Andrew Dlugolecki, a participant in our Hohenkammer workshop of last May. At the workshop all participants agreed to the following consensus statements (report):

Because of issues related to data quality, the stochastic nature of extreme event impacts, length of time series, and various societal factors present in the disaster loss record, it is still not possible to determine the portion of the increase in damages that might be attributed to climate change due to GHG emissions . . . In the near future the quantitative link (attribution) of trends in storm and flood losses to climate changes related to GHG emissions is unlikely to be answered unequivocally.

Hence, the projection of the possibility of a $1 trillion disaster year is independent of projected effects of human-caused changes to the climate system on the intensity or frequency of extreme events.

Bottom line: The UNEP report does not say what the representative of UNEP said it did. Nor does it say what has been reported in the major media, including the Reuters report. This is unfortunate because the UNEP-report has some valuable information on the importance of adaptation in the face of continuing growth in vulnerability to disasters. Effective policy on climate is unlikely to develop if the UN and the media are providing misleading or incorrect analyses. As Richard Tol said here last week, unsound analyses only provide fodder for those skeptical of action on climate change.

Posted on November 14, 2006 05:20 PM View this article | Comments (7)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

Naomi Oreskes on Consensus

Naomi Oreskes, of the University of California-San Diego and a leading scholar of the history of science, wrote an excellent article on scientific consensus a few years ago as part of a special issue of Environmental Science & Policy which critiqued the debate over Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist. This is of course the same Naomi Oreskes famous for her short essay reviewing abstracts on "global climate change" in Science (a subject I do not wish to discuss in this thread, thanks!). Below I have reproduced a few lengthy excerpts from Naomi’s paper relevant to recent discussions here, though I encourage you to read the whole paper, especially the three cases that she describes. You can find the entire set of papers in the special issue here.

Oreskes, N., 2004. Science and public policy: what's proof got to do with it? Environmental Science & Policy, 7:369-383 (PDF).

In recent years it has become common for informed defenders of the status quo to argue that the scientific information pertinent to an environmental claim is uncertain, unreliable, and, fundamentally, unproven. Lack of proof is then used to deny demands for action. But the idea that science ever could provide proof upon which to base policy is a misunderstanding (or misrepresentation) of science, and therefore of the role that science ever could play in policy. In all but the most trivial cases, science does not produce logically indisputable proofs about the natural world. At best it produces a robust consensus based on a process of inquiry that allows for continued scrutiny, re-examination, and revision. . .
Most of us realize that proof—at least in an absolute sense—is a theoretical ideal, available in geometry class but not in real life. Nevertheless, many of us still cling to the idea that some set of facts—some body of knowledge—will resolve our problems and make clear how we should proceed. History suggests otherwise: earlier scientific wisdom has been overturned, earlier generations of experts have made mistakes. This is as true in physics and chemistry as in biology and geology. The criteria that are typically invoked in defense of the reliability of scientific knowledge—quantification, replicability, falsifiability—have proved no guarantee. Moreover, experts do not always agree. Even when there is no transparent political, social, or religious dimension to a debate, honest and intelligent people may come to different conclusions in the face of the "same" evidence, because they have focused their sights on different dimensions of that evidence, emphasizing different elements of the evidentiary landscape. Even when a scientific community reaches consensus on a previously contested issue—as earth scientists did in the 1960s over moving continents—there are always dimensions that remain unexplained. In the future, plate tectonics no doubt will be modified, perhaps overturned entirely. Indeed, there are a handful of scientists today who advocate Earth expansion to explain continental separation, and they are of course eager to detail the limitations of plate tectonics theory (e.g. Shieds, 2003). Nevertheless, for now plate tectonics remains the consensus of most Earth scientists: our best basis for understanding the Earth. . .

Scientific consensus is a complex process—involving a matrix of social, political, economic, historical considerations along with the epistemic—and history shows that its achievement typically requires a long time: years, decades, even centuries. But even when a stable consensus is achieved, scientific uncertainty is not eliminated. Rather, once we have deemed the remaining problems as "minor"—which is to say, insufficiently great as to warrant further concern—we simply live with them (Engelhardt and Caplan, 1987). Moreover, the grounds on which scientific communities have concluded that evidence is "good enough" to warrant living with the uncertainties have varied enormously throughout the course of history. A determined individual may choose to pursue these uncertainties, and that determination may successfully destabilize the prior consensus. In a "purely" scientific debate, that determination would, ideally, arise solely from the demands of empirical evidence, but no debate is ever "purely" scientific, given that, at minimum, credibility, reputation, and, perhaps future funding are at stake.

Posted on November 14, 2006 07:15 AM View this article | Comments (16)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty | Science + Politics

November 11, 2006

Interview with Richard Tol

The German magazine WirtschaftsWoche has posted online (auf Deutsch) an interview with economist Richard Tol discussing the economics of climate change. Benny Peiser has provided an English translation which we are happy to re-post here in full.

"WE'VE GOT ENOUGH TIME" - AN INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD TOL

WirtschaftsWoche, 11 November 2006

The eminent climate economist Richard Tol on climate alarmism and the right strategies for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions

WirtschaftsWoche (WiWo): Mr. Tol, You have called the report on the financial consequences of climate change by economics professor Sir Nicholas Stern "alarmist". How did you arrive at this judgement?

Tol: I speak of alarmism because Stern, in the summary of his report, estimated the damage [from climate change] to cost between 5 to 20 per cent of global GDP, but he is basing this on extremely pessimistic scenarios. He ignored other studies that estimate damages to be far below one per cent. This is how he arrives at the scary numbers. At the same time, the summary also gives the impression that the five per cent [of GDP damage] commences immediately and will continue for eternity if noting is done to counter it immediately. In the unabridged version, however, it is stated that the five per cent will be reached in 2075 at the earliest. This procedure is temerarious and an unacceptable way of political advice-giving.

WiWo: Now that the ice caps of the poles melt faster than even the leading sceptics have feared, isn't it essential to ring the alarm bells?

Tol: First of all, the report does not review these developments at all, and secondly any alarm does not help. It will take 50 to 100 years to lower the emission of greenhouse gases to an agreeable level. In order to achieve this goal, soberness is demanded.

WiWo: Why did Nicholas Stern sound the alarm nevertheless? He was the chief economist at the World Bank and is generally considered to be a sober person.

Tol: At the outset, the study was a purely academic exercise. Then the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, who commissioned the Stern Review, discerned that the leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, put the Labour Party increasingly under environmental pressure by portraying himself greener than the government. In order to raise its [environmental] profile, the government thus strongly influenced the tenor of the study.

WiWo: The fact that the earth is warming up due to human behaviour is scientifically beyond doubt. Isn't it then sensible to forcefully steer against it, as Nicholas Stern suggests?

Tol: We must do something and should now begin, that's where I agree with Stern. But there is no risk of damage that would force us to act injudiciously. We've got enough time to look for the economically most effective options rather than dash into 'actionism' which then becomes very expensive.

WiWo: Stern calculates that a forceful fight against global warming is today twenty times cheaper than doing nothing.

Tol: That is completely exaggerated. Stern has set the costs of damage much too high and the costs of emission reduction much too low. This employment of incorrect numbers makes it easy for opponents of climatic protection to evade accepting a consensus. They correctly assert: What the Stern Review claims is rubbish. You can only have an effective climate policy if everyone takes part. We need a long-term solution, and it has to be global one. The Stern Review perturbs this agreement process to the extent that it performs a disservice to the goals of climate protection.

WiWo: How seriously, according to your estimates, are the economic consequences of global warming?

Tol: The situation is serious, but definitely not as seriously as Stern claims. According to my computations the greenhouse effect can cause annual damage of around 0,5 per cent of global GDP. In the next century, when the impact of global warming will be felt fully, the damage could amount to two to four per cent, if nothing would be done about it.

WiWo: What do you suggest as counter measure?

Tol: The means of my choice would be to raise world-wide taxes on emissions. But that is politically not feasible. Thus, emission trading remains as the second best solution. The state allocates certificates to businesses which - at the outset - permit them free emissions of carbon dioxide, as they do today, and without setting secondary costs. However, if they want to produce more, they must either produce more [energy] efficiently or buy from other businesses (which have reduced their carbon dioxide output) certificates at a kind stock exchange. Such a free market system helps the environment.

WiWo: In Europe, such a regulatory system has been in place since last year. Nevertheless, it hasn't had much of an effect.

Tol: That is because of the fact that too many certificates were allocated. Consequently, little money can be made from the sales of certificates at the moment. Thus there are no incentives for lowering CO2-emissions. In order to have any lasting effect, the certificate trade would have to incorporate traffic, households and agriculture, additional greenhouse gases and the whole world economy. Europe alone cannot save the climate.

WiWo: Why should China and India, whose industries still produce a great deal with outdated technologies, join in the certificate trade?

Tol: It is exactly this outdated technology that makes it possible for China and India to achieve large CO2 reductions by way of relatively small investments. They could sell the emissions they reduce to Europe or the USA and could thus make a lot of money.

WiWo: The United Nations is currently trying to agree a new international climate treaty. How promising are such agreements?

Tol: They don't accomplish much as the Kyoto Treaty has already revealed. Only few countries committed themselves to concrete goals at all, only few uphold their obligations, and some, like Canada recently, simply pull out again. And why not - there is no threat of sanctions!

WiWo: Does that mean that 6000 UN delegates in Nairobi are gathering for a useless chit-chat?

Tol: They should concentrate on organising an international trade with certificates and close co-operation regarding the introduction of low-carbon technologies. Unfortunately neither issue is on the agenda. In fact, according to our calculations, world-wide greenhouse gas emissions could be halved in one fell swoop if the world would employ the best available technologies.

WiWo: Isn't it rather utopian to believe that all the countries in the world would agree on uniform technical standards?

Tol: It would often be sufficient if few market-dominating countries made advances in this direction. All the cars of this world, for example, are manufactured in just ten countries. If these countries would agree to reduce pollution output per HP by half in say ten years, that would relieve the environment enormously. The rest of the world would have no choice than to join in. Something similar applies to power stations, for which even fewer countries possess the technology. A bulk of problems would be solved if we succeeded to decouple energy consumption and emission output by means of modern technologies.

WiWo: Should the governments subsidise certain technologies financially?

Tol: We should certainly prevent civil servants to determine what is good or bad in this respect. Policy should be limited to determine certain goals, just like California, for instance, did with regards to car emissions. This would accelerate research and development most effectively.

WiWo: The German government reinforces the employment of renewable energies such as wind and sun. Wouldn't a rapid expansion of nuclear energy protect global climate substantially better?

Tol: The huge amount of money that is flowing into wind energy in Germany is an off-putting example of what happens when governments select the technology. The people who are now earning very well on account of wind turbines had most excellent relations to the formerly Green [Party run] Department of the Environment. Much money is flowing although wind energy is very unreliable and will never provide more than ten per cent of the total energy requirement. In addition, wind energy is expensive and technical progress already today seems to be exhausted to a large extent. Nuclear power can be a solution. In any case, it is more reliable and, most likely, also cheaper in the long term.

WiWo: Some experts believe that it costs less to adapt to climate change instead of stopping it. Are they right?

Tol: We should do both. In order to prevent that rising sea levels flood coastal areas, the building of dykes is an inexpensive solution. But we should not let global warming proceed unconstrained, otherwise we risk that one day the water in the oceans evaporates.

WiWo: Next year, the IPCC, the scientific committee of the UN in charge of assessing climate change, will issue its next report. Is there sufficient economic expertise readily available in the IPCC?

Tol: Unfortunately, not at all. Over the years, the IPCC has become ever greener and the few economists, who were previously involved, have been pushed out. Obviously, this casts doubt on the quality of the results.

WiWo: On a personal note, how confident are you that the climate can be still salvaged?

Tol: I do not see any reason to panic. We've got enough time to act in response. And, it would appear that the Americans and Chinese, the two biggest climate sinners, will soon invest much more in modes of climate protection. The results of the American elections will strengthen climate activists in the USA so that I envisage new concrete climate programmes in the next three years. The Chinese will follow suit in the next decade, not least because otherwise they will be threatened by catastrophic environmental damage. That will generate a huge drive.

Posted on November 11, 2006 09:29 AM View this article | Comments (8)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty

November 10, 2006

Interview With Chris Landsea

Thomson Scientific has an interesting interview with NOAA's Chris Landsea online here. In the interview Chris discusses our work on normalized hurricane losses as well as the recent debate over hurricanes and global warming. According to Thomson Scientific, Chris is the 2nd most highly cited scientist in the world on tropical cyclones 1996-February 28, 2006, and he also has the 2nd most cites per paper. You can see an interesting map of the most cited papers on tropical cyclones here.

Posted on November 10, 2006 02:24 AM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

Guardian Op-Ed on Adaptation

Last month I wrote an invited op-ed on the importance of adaptation in climate policy for the Guardian Unlimited, the online website of the Guardian newspaper, published in the UK. There won't be much new to frequent readers here. The op-ed can be found here. Comments welcomed!

Posted on November 10, 2006 02:16 AM View this article | Comments (12)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

November 09, 2006

Earmarking at CU-Boulder

For about the past two years I have served on the University of Colorado-Boulder’s Federal Relations Advisory Committee (FRAC). One issue that occupies a lot of the time and attention of the FRAC is the pursuit of congressional earmarks. In the FRAC we have discussed earmarking priorities for the campus, heard from faculty who want to pursue an earmark, and heard status reports from our lobbyists on prospects for earmarks. It is safe to say that federal earmarks have been a pretty high priority of the FRAC, at least during my time on the committee.

Long-time readers of Prometheus may recall these two pieces (here and here) from the past 18 months in which I have discussed the issue of congressional earmarks and my sense that the issue needs some attention here at CU-Boulder. However, aside from these pieces that allude to our discussions in the FRAC, in general I have stayed away from publicizing my concerns with Colorado-Boulder’s approach to academic earmarks and sought to work within the system to create effective change. No more.

Last week I resigned from the FRAC not only because I have found the campus approach to dealing with earmarks far too ad hoc for a major university, but because I viewed the process within the FRAC for potentially improving the approach to earmarking to be ineffective. After two years my patience has run out for working within the system and I have decided to simply make my case in a more public manner. So just like a policy wonk I have written an op-ed for our campus paper, which I am certain will make some people on campus a bit unhappy with me. The op-ed appears in the 9 November 2006 issue of the Silver & Gold Record, the newspaper for faculty and staff at the University of Colorado.

I have reproduced the op-ed in full below, and I have also shared it in advance with various CU administrators and members of the faculty. The op-ed seeks to explain the issues involving earmarking and why I think they matter for our campus. I understand already that there will be a response to the op-ed, which we will be happy to post. As usual, reader comments welcomed!

Academic Earmarking at CU-Boulder

Roger Pielke, Jr.
Director, Center for Science and Technology Policy Research
Professor, Environmental Studies
Fellow, CIRES

9 November 2006
Silver & Gold Record
University of Colorado

What separates a good university from a great university? According to Michael Crow, President of Arizona State University, "The great universities are in charge of their own destinies and they know it. And they advance their ideas to everyone who will listen to them to acquire the resources necessary to implement their ideas." Here at the University of Colorado-Boulder we have many opportunities to serve as a national leader in creating the 21st century university. One such opportunity lies in how we handle academic earmarks. However, on academic earmarks CU-Boulder is a follower rather than a leader, which has the effects of wasting of limited campus resources and contributing to bad policies at the campus and national levels.

Academic earmarks refer to federal funding obtained outside the normal process of proposal and peer review that most researchers are familiar with. The late Congressman George Brown (D-CA), who was a tireless champion of scientific research, described them as follows, "earmarks are the result of an academic institution using its special access to an influential Member of Congress (with access often facilitated by a high-paid lobbyist) using this advantage to gain a cash award without having to compete for the money or bear public scrutiny. The public and the taxpayer are the real losers as a result of this practice."

Why do universities seek federal earmarks? Well, for one, there is big money available. In 2006 almost $2.5 billion dollars of earmarks were distributed to universities. With budgets tight everywhere, and overall federal research funding peaking after years of increases, it is understandable that universities around the country might try for the easy payoff of a congressional earmark. CU-Boulder is no different.

Last week I resigned from the campus' Federal Relations Advisory Committee (FRAC), chaired by Susan Avery, Vice Chancellor for Research, over the campus policy -- or lack thereof -- on academic earmarking. For much of the past year I, along with the support of several colleagues, have pressed the FRAC to develop and seek adoption of a formal policy on academic earmarking in order to clarify what is a murky, behind-the-scenes process that operates in far-too-ad hoc of a manner for a university seeking excellence. The draft policy that we developed does not forbid earmarking, but it does state that "it is the general practice of the University not to seek and/or accept Congressionally directed or "earmarked" funds, except under specific, well-defined circumstances." The "well-defined circumstances" are clearly described in the draft policy. In effect, the policy would change earmarking from a proactive to a reactive process which would occur only in rare instances when exemptions to the general practice are met.

But when I learned last week that the campus was going to ignore this draft policy in hot pursuit of federal earmarks again this year, I decided that it was in the best interests of all involved for me to simply resign and make my case to the university community outside of the FRAC. There are three reasons why I think that the current CU-Boulder approach to academic earmarks is deeply flawed.

First, the obsessive focus on earmarks is a waste of our collective time and resources. Over the past three years, earmark funding represents about 0.2% of externally-supported research on the Boulder campus. This is trivial. From a cost-benefit perspective alone, the focus on earmarks is inefficient. Consider that the campus would receive more additional research funding simply by winning 1-2 additional competitive grants each year. Given the admirable success rates of CU faculty in securing external funding this would only mean submitting a total of 5-10 more grants on an annual basis among its 1,000 faculty members (and 1,500 additional members of its research staff). Our federal relations efforts would be far better spent on activities like ensuring that each member of the Colorado congressional delegation is invited to campus each year and warmly received, on providing grant-writing support and training for faculty who prepare the grant proposals that provide 99.8% of campus sponsored research, and by facilitating the interaction of campus researchers with agency officials in Washington, among many other worthwhile activities.

A second issue is that the focus on earmarks contributes to pathological national science policies. In my short time spent in George Brown's office in 1991 I became convinced of the merit of his views that academic earmarking does far more for members of Congress than for the scientific enterprise. For more than 20 years the American Association of Universities has -- with little success -- sought to stem the tide of academic earmarking. Former Congressman David Minge (D-MN) wrote in 2001 that academic earmarks are "vicious prostitutions of the political process that are practiced on a bipartisan basis," a view widely shared among scholars and observers of science and technology policy. To the extent that CU-Boulder contributes to pathological academic earmarking, we are contributing to federal science policies that eat away at academia’s cherished principles of peer review and accountability. By taking a leadership role CU-Boulder can perhaps help in some small way to correct this policy failure. In any case, the economic benefits of taking a leadership role would far exceed any financial loss resulting from an earmarking policy that limited the ability of CU-Boulder to pursue earmarks. Consider that in 2006 99.98% of academic earmarks went to institutions other than CU-Boulder.

Third, even for the minority who might reject the argument that earmarking is bad science policy, our current on-campus approach is still left wanting. Who among us gets to pursue an earmark? By what criteria are earmark opportunities selected and scarce university resources and political capital devoted to pursuing them? How much time and money is spent on campus to pursue earmarks? If you don't know the answers to these questions, then you are not alone. I have spent the past two years on the FRAC and the answers to these questions still remain unclear to me. Absent transparent policy and procedures for earmarking CU leadership leaves itself open to perceptions of cronyism and favoritism, irrespective of the reality. At a minimum, the lack of a formal campus policy governing earmarking works against equity, accountability, and openness.

CU-Boulder strives for excellence. But excellence is unlikely to result if we are following rather than leading. Achieving greatness demands that we clearly define our values and what those values mean for our actions. On the issue of academic earmarking, CU-Boulder has an opportunity to lead the nation. Or we could follow the crowd simply because it is the easy thing to do. We are in charge of our own destiny, and we know it. But are we a good university or a great university?

-end-

Posted on November 9, 2006 01:53 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Education | R&D Funding

November 08, 2006

Some Early Thoughts on the New Congress

These are just a few random thoughts on the morning after a historic U.S. midterm election about the possible consequences for science and technology policies. In an effort to be fair, I should add a disclaimer to note that I had the opportunity to work for the Democrats in 1991 in the House Science Committee under Congressman George Brown (D-CA). Seeing what happened to many of my friends and former colleagues when control of the House changed over in 1994 left a sour taste with me, and not just for the Gingrich Republicans, but more generally for the arrogance of political partisanship. I believe that the seeds of the current Republican loss are found not just in the policies of the Bush Administration (but to be sure, this plays a big part), but more deeply in how Republicans have managed their control over Congress since 1994. So I will admit to some personal satisfaction in seeing the tide turn once again. With that out of the way, here are some thoughts about the 110th Congress.

When I was in graduate school in the early 1990s getting a PhD in political science, it was all the rage to talk about the consequences of "divided government" referring to control of Congress by one party and the presidency by another. For some political scientists, governance under divided government was not only inelegant but also considered to be inefficient. I recall reading many articles emphasizing the importance of united government. Since 2002, with united Republican control of Congress and the Presidency (for the first time since 1953-1955) discussion among political scientists (although I am not as close to these discussions as I once was) of the perils of divided government appears to have been replaced with concerns over the perils of unified government.

As the United States once again enters a period of divided government, what consequences might we expect on issues of science and technology policy?

First and foremost, expect more oversight. One of the greatest challenges of unified government is that there are fewer incentives for effective oversight of the executive branch by congress. Oversight is challenging in the best of circumstances, and this is made worse when political incentives are added to the mix. If there is one thing that we might expect from the 110th Congress it will be greater oversight.

Greater oversight will be a welcome change, as recent Congresses have been derelict in their oversight duties. Much of the Congressional oversight will be directed to U.S. policies related to Iraq, and appropriately so. But there are also areas of science and technology policy where greater oversight should occur, including issues such as the the future of the Space Station, Space Shuttle, and NASA, Administration stem cell policy, energy policy, climate policy, state science policies and federalism, academic earmarking, technology transfer, management of the NPOESS project, drug approval processes, government science advice, K-12 on up through post-graduate education, workforce issues, and the list goes on.

In fact, there is such a need for congressional oversight that it will be very easy for the Democrats to lose focus and completely waste the next two years. The 2008 election will compress the time available to the 100th Congress to conduct effective oversight, creating incentives for more politically-motivated oversight, such as on stem cell policy, to the exclusion of wonky-behind-the-scenes-run-of-the-mill oversight in an effort to create advantage in the 2008 election. A little of this posturing should be expected, but too much will be a wasteful distraction. Arguably the Republicans lost sight of governance during their run in Congress – the Democrats should not do the same.

In the first year of the new Congress there will be those who seek vengeance for the past 12 years of Republican rule (particularly in the House). The transition that followed the 1994 Gingrich revolution left bad feelings with many Democrats, who had ruled continuously for decades (of course creating pent up demands for revenge among Republicans). Acting like the Gingrich Republicans may be emotionally satisfying to the Democrats, but won’t contribute to effective policy making or the future prospects for the Democratic Party in Congress (see, e.g., 2006 midterm elections).

More speculatively, I do not expect to see dramatic changes in specific science and technology policies, or even much progressive legislation emerge from the House or Senate. Both chambers are only narrowly controlled by the Democrats (assuming current Senate results hold), and thus will be governed by the middle, not the extreme. This diminishes the likelihood of significant policy change. On the other hand, it may be that a few pieces of novel legislation emerge simply with the goal of forcing a veto by President Bush – it is never too early to be thinking about the 2008 campaign commercials. Stem cell policy and energy policies are two issues that might fit into this latter category. I would expect that climate change will get a lot of talk, and there likely will be considerable debate over the issue, but I doubt there will be any significant action or realignment on the issue in Congress, and of course the presidential veto precludes significant departure from business-as-usual in any case.

As far as funding for research and development, I do not expect to see much if any change. R&D has always enjoyed strong bipartisan support and this won’t change. The macro-budgetary constraints have not changed, so don’t expect the funding picture to change.

Comments/critiques/other views are welcomed!

Posted on November 8, 2006 06:55 AM View this article | Comments (19)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science + Politics

November 07, 2006

Normalized US Hurricane Damage: 1900-2005

We are happy to release a new paper and dataset on normalized U.S. hurricane damages for the period 1900-2005. The paper and dataset can be found here. Please note that we are releasing the paper and the data upon submission for publication, so changes may result from the process of peer review. Comments are welcomed. In particular we are interested in hearing how people are using the dataset. I'll be discussing the data in various future posts. Here is what one of our normalization schemes looks like, 1900-2005.

Posted on November 7, 2006 12:51 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Disasters

November 06, 2006

Sarewitz and Pielke (2000)

We wrote this piece (in PDF) for The Atlantic Monthly in 2000. It seems to have held up pretty well since then, though it is true that in this piece we don't talk much about energy policy. If climate policy is to do any better than it present performance-- both with respect to adaptation and mitigation -- than a reframing of the issue is going to be necessary. Right now the approach is simply to turn up the volume on a framing that is fundamentally flawed. It's a bit like talking louder to someone who doesn't speak your language. Sure, you'll get their attention, but eventually they'll tune you out.

Have a look at our paper, comments welcomed.

Posted on November 6, 2006 07:04 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

November 05, 2006

Honest Broker Sighting

Just over the horizon.

I'd like to see if we can push up that 30 April 2007 date. I'll also see if we can swing some sort of discount for Prometheus readers ;-)

Posted on November 5, 2006 06:21 PM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | The Honest Broker

November 04, 2006

Mike Hulme on the Climate Debate

Mike Hulme, Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, and Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, has written a thoughtful, accurate, and brave op-ed for the BBC on the curent state of the climate debate. Here is how he begins:

Climate change is a reality, and science confirms that human activities are heavily implicated in this change.
But over the last few years a new environmental phenomenon has been constructed in this country - the phenomenon of "catastrophic" climate change.

It seems that mere "climate change" was not going to be bad enough, and so now it must be "catastrophic" to be worthy of attention.

The increasing use of this pejorative term - and its bedfellow qualifiers "chaotic", "irreversible", "rapid" - has altered the public discourse around climate change.

This discourse is now characterised by phrases such as "climate change is worse than we thought", that we are approaching "irreversible tipping in the Earth's climate", and that we are "at the point of no return".

I have found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied their thirst for environmental drama and exaggerated rhetoric.

It seems that it is we, the professional climate scientists, who are now the (catastrophe) sceptics. How the wheel turns.

His comments about being chastised for not going far enough in his pronouncements on climate change strike a chord very familiar to me. Comments by Mike Hulme echo those made by Steve Rayner, Hans von Storch and Nico Stehr, and others. Could it be that we are seeing the emergence of more responsible leadership on climate change among the scientific community? It sure looks that way.

Thanks Mike for speaking out.

Posted on November 4, 2006 08:30 AM View this article | Comments (25)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty

November 02, 2006

Update on Hurricanes and Global Warming

This news story about an all-too-predictable spat between Kevin Trenberth and Bill Gray reminds me that we are overdue to provide an update on the issue of hurricanes and global warming.

In December, 2005, five of us attempted to summarize the state of the science on hurricanes and global warming, including the science of impacts and the policy significance of current understandings. At that time we concluded (PDF) :

. . . the state of the peer-reviewed knowledge today is such that there are good reasons to expect that any conclusive connection between global warming and hurricanes or their impacts will not be made in the near term.

In May of this year we had a chance to once again address this issue in the form of a response to an extended comment on our earlier paper. We concluded by quoting a statement prepared by the World Meteorological Organization’s Tropical Meteorology Research Program Panel in February, 2006(PDF) :

The research issues discussed here are in a fluid state and are the subject of much current investigation. Given time the problem of causes and attribution of the events of 2004–2005 will be discussed and argued in the refereed scientific literature. Prior to this happening it is not possible to make any authoritative comment.

The WMO statement was meaningful because it was coauthored by many of the big names involved in research on hurricanes and climate change. Thanks to the WMO there has been another update made available on the community’s perspective as a result of background papers prepared for an upcoming workshop on tropical cyclones to be held in Costa Rica at the beginning of December.

Two background papers are particularly relevant to the community’s views on hurricanes and climate change. One presents a draft statement for discussion at the Costa Rica workshop prepared by Dr. John McBride, Dr Jeff Kepert (Australia), Prof. Johnny Chan (Hong Kong, China). Julian Heming (United Kingdom). Dr. Greg Holland, Professor Kerry Emanuel, Dr. Thomas Knutson, Dr Hugh Willoughby, Dr. Chris Landsea (USA). It says (PDF):

Emanuel (2005) has produced evidence for a substantial increase in the power of tropical cyclones (denoted by the integral of the cube of the maximum winds over time) during the last 50 years. This result is supported by the findings of Webster et al (2005) that there has been a substantial global increase (nearly 100%) in the proportion of the most severe tropical cyclones (category 4 and 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale), from the period from 1970 to 1995, which has been accompanied by a similar decrease in weaker systems.
The research community is deeply divided over whether the results of these studies are due, at least in part, to problems in the tropical cyclone data base. Precisely, the historical record of tropical cyclone tracks and intensities is a byproduct of real-time operations. Thus its accuracy and completeness changes continuously through the record as a result of the continuous changes and improvements in data density and quality, changes in satellite remote sensing retrieval and dissemination, and changes in training. In particular a step-function change in methodologies for determination of satellite intensity occurred with the introduction of geosynchronous satellites in the mid to late 1970’s.

The division in the community on the Webster et al and on the Emanuel papers is not as to whether Global Warming can cause a trend in tropical cyclone intensities. Rather it is on whether such a signal can be detected in the historical data base. Also it can be difficult to isolate the forced response of the climate system in the presence of substantial decadal and multi-decadal natural variability, such as the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation.

Whilst the existence of a large multi-decadal oscillation in Atlantic tropical cyclones is still generally accepted, some scientists believe that a trend towards more intense cyclones is emerging. This is a hotly debated area for which we can provide no definitive conclusion. It is agreed that there is no evidence for a decreasing trend in cyclone intensities. [emphasis added]

A second background paper provides a comprehensive literature review, led by Tom Knutson of NOAA, leading an extremely distinguished and diverse working group consisting of K. Emanuel, S. Emori, J. Evans, G. Holland, C. Landsea, K.-b. Liu, R. E. McDonald, D. Nolan, M. Sugi, Y. Wang. It includes the following statement (PDF):

There are substantial roadblocks both in making reliable future projections about TC activity and in determining whether a trend can be detected in historical TC data.

So based on these recent statements prepared by scientists with very different perspectives in the debate over hurricanes and climate change, I am happy to report that our 2005 and 2006 peer-reviewed papers are holding up extremely well. (As an aside, anyone want to offer odds on whether or not our 2005 paper will be cited by IPCC?;-)

As far as hurricane impacts and hurricane policy, the most relevant update is the report of our May, 2006 workshop in partnership with Munich Re, which can be found here. The consensus presented at this workshop was entirely consistent with our papers on hurricanes and climate change published in 2005 and 2006.

Bottom line? If you want a scientifically accurate and comprehensive perspective on the state of the science of hurricanes and global warming, as well as the significance of the science for societal impacts and policy responses, you could do much worse than our 2005 and 2006 papers, which in my view have held up exceedingly well in the context of a rapidly evolving debate.

Pielke, Jr., R. A., C. Landsea, M. Mayfield, J. Laver and R. Pasch, 2005. Hurricanes and global warming, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 86:1571-1575. (PDF)

Pielke, Jr., R. A., C.W. Landsea, M. Mayfield, J. Laver, R. Pasch, 2006. Reply to Hurricanes and Global Warming Potential Linkages and Consequences, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Vol. 87, pp. 628-631. (PDF)

Posted on November 2, 2006 01:10 AM View this article | Comments (10)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

November 01, 2006

The World in Black and White

Fred Pearce at the New Scientist apprently thinks that if you are critical of the IPCC, then you must be one of those nasty "sceptics." He writes in a news story:

Some insiders suggest that the IPCC may be more cautious in its upcoming report than it has been in the past, but this is unlikely to placate climate-change sceptics. Roger Pielke of the University of Colorado, Boulder, accuses the IPCC leadership of "seeing their role as political advocates rather than honest brokers".

Of course, as readers here know well, Mr. Pearce is just wrong (I've emailed the New Scientist as well). I accept the results of IPCC Working Group I and have for many years advocated policy action on both adaptation and mitigation. Mr. Pearce's lumping me in with the sceptics is particularly ironic because his entire article is a preemptive defense of IPCC scientists who are "targets of concerted attacks apparently designed to bring down their reputations and careers." If Mr. Pearce wanted to know my views he might have just called, rather than assuming that anyone who puts forth a criticism of the IPCC must be a climate sceptic.

It must be nice to see the world in terms of only good guys and bad guys, with not a shade of grey in sight.

Posted on November 1, 2006 07:35 PM View this article | Comments (19)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

October 30, 2006

Stern’s Cherry Picking on Disasters and Climate Change

The Stern Report has this passage on p. 131:

The costs of extreme weather events are already high and rising, with annual losses of around $60 billion since the 1990s (0.2% of World GDP), and record costs of $200 billion in 2005 (more than 0.5% of World GDP). New analysis based on insurance industry data has shown that weather-related catastrophe losses have increased by 2% each year since the 1970s over and above changes in wealth, inflation and population growth/movement. If this trend continued or intensified with rising global temperatures, losses from extreme weather could reach 0.5 - 1% of world GDP by the middle of the century. If temperatures continued to rise over the second half of the century, costs could reach several percent of GDP each year, particularly because the damages increase disproportionately at higher temperatures.

The source is a paper prepared by Robert Muir-Wood and colleagues as input to our workshop last May on disasters and climate change. Muir-Wood et al. do report the 2% trend since 1970. What Stern Report does not say is that Muir-Wood et al. find no trend 1950-2005 and Muir-Wood et al. acknowledge that their work shows a very strong influence of 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons in the United States. Muir-Wood et al. are therefore very cautious and responsible about their analysis. Presumably this is one reason why at the workshop Robert Muir-Wood signed on to our consensus statements, which said the following:

Because of issues related to data quality, the stochastic nature of extreme event impacts, length of time series, and various societal factors present in the disaster loss record, it is still not possible to determine the portion of the increase in damages that might be attributed to climate change due to GHG emissions . . . In the near future the quantitative link (attribution) of trends in storm and flood losses to climate changes related to GHG emissions is unlikely to be answered unequivocally.

The Stern Report’s selective fishing out of a convenient statement from one of the background papers prepared for our workshop is a classic example of cherry picking a result from a diversity of perspectives, rather than focusing on the consensus of the entire spectrum of experts that participated in our meeting. The Stern Report even cherry picks from within the Muir-Wood et al. paper.

Why does this matter? The Stern Report uses the cherry-picked information as the basis for one of its important conclusions about the projected costs of climate change(on p. 138),

The costs of climate change for developed countries could reach several percent of GDP as higher temperatures lead to a sharp increase in extreme weather events and large-scale changes.

To support its argument the Stern Report further relies on a significantly flawed report from the Association of British Insurers, which we critiqued here. Its presentation of the future costs of disasters and climate change is highly selective to put it mildly.

I haven’t yet read the whole Stern report, but if its treatment of disaster costs and climate change – an area where I do have some expertise – is indicative of its broader analysis, then Richard Tol’s comment in the open thread would appear to be on target.

Posted on October 30, 2006 11:58 AM View this article | Comments (8)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

October 29, 2006

Open Thread on UK Stern Report

The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, focused on climate policy, is going to be released tomorrow and I'm sure, like everyone else, we'll be discussing it. Until then I thought I'd open a space for anyone who is interested in discussing it or offering relevant pointers. The pre-release media coverage is already pretty interesting. When released, the report will be available here.

Posted on October 29, 2006 10:44 AM View this article | Comments (23)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

October 27, 2006

Origin of Phrase --Basic Research--?

I am looking for the earliest reference to the phrase "basic research."

I'll start off the bidding with:

J. Huxley. 1935. Science and Social Needs. Harper & Bros. Publishers, New York.

Posted on October 27, 2006 04:04 PM View this article | Comments (6)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science Policy: General

Recap: Atlantic SSTs and U.S. Hurricane Damages

We’ve had an interesting discussion this week on the historical relationship of Atlantic sea surface temperatures and U.S. hurricane damage. I began by asking:

What Does the Historical Relationship of Atlantic Sea Surface Temperature and U.S. Hurricane Damage Portend for the Future?

This post provides a recap of the week’s discussion.

I answered the initial question with two perspectives, one that I prepared and one by Munich Re’s Eberhard Faust. The conversation was quickly joined by noted hurricane expert Jim Elsner from Florida State, who claimed that his preferred approach definitively resolved this question. Jim and I have had a lengthy exchange this week in the comments, including an effort on my part to replicate part of his analysis, successful in the end, but with a mistake along the way. Thanks to Jim for helping make this replication successful

Even with the lengthy exchange, I remain confused about what Elsner is arguing. He has claimed that the signal of SST couldn’t be seen using all historical damage data in a simple regression because of the effects of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). Here is how Jim described it:

Sometimes when the Atlantic is warm and hurricanes are strong, the steering flow keeps them from reaching the US and the steering during the season can be predicted to some degree by preseason values of the NAO; thus a simple regression of annual loss on SST is inadequate for understanding the relationship between loss and SST.

This last phrase – "a simple regression of annual loss on SST is inadequate for understanding the relationship between loss and SST." – seems completely consistent with the focus of my original post in which I asserted that a relationship between SSTs and damage "may materialize in the future, but one cannot use the past to project such a relationship, it must be based on some other considerations." Elsner, it would seem, agreed that "other considerations" (e.g., like the NAO) actually matter for the ability to identify a signal. But Jim would have none of this potential agreement. He later made what appears to be the opposite argument, that the future influence of SST on damages would be identifiable independent of the NAO, explaining that "The correlation between tropical SST and NAO is small." Either the NAO masks or does not mask a SST signal, it cannot be both -- hence my confusion.

Lost in these very fine points about very marginal statistical relationships is the fact that Jim and I are pretty close in our views, no matter how aggressively he objects to each point that I make. He writes of his answer to my original question about what the past relationship of SSTs and damage tells us about the future:

If all we know are SST and damages from history, then I would assign a personal probability of 60-70% that over the next 100 years the warm SST years will, on average, have greater annual loss totals compared to the cold SST years.

If I were to modify Jim’s statement to more accurately reflect my own perspective, I’d simply change 60-70% to 50%, which in my view is not a particularly big difference. I therefore don’t see our views as being particularly far off from one another (though I am sure that Jim would strongly disagree;-).

I’ll close by referring the reader back to the first post presented in this discussion, and the two graphs that I presented.

To provide my answer to the question posted in Part 1 that kicked off this discussion. If all you know is SSTs and U.S. damage from the historical record -- that is, the data shown in these graphs – then you have no statistical basis for saying what will happen in the future if SSTs increase. Faust suggests that by looking at a subset of the data a stronger relationship can be seen. Elsner suggests that by introducing other climate variables than those presented here and distinguishing intensity from frequency a stronger relationship can be seen. Both Faust’s and Elnser’s points are fairly made. For reasons that you’ll find in the discussion this past week, I find that accepting their arguments at face value (i.e., setting aside the appropriateness of looking at a limited subset of data or the stability of relationships over time) leads to only marginal relationships (at best) whose existence are dependent upon the data of 2005. Sometimes the simplest analysis tells the whole story.

Future increases in Atlantic SSTs may indeed be accompanied by larger amounts of U.S. hurricane damage. But I find little basis for this conclusion in the overall historical record of SSTs and damage. Others disagree. I respect their views, but remain unconvinced by their analyses. If nothing else this exercise has been a wonderful example of the diversity of the scientific enterprise, and how seemingly simple questions are subject to a range of legitimate perspectives. The good news is that effective hurricane policies need not await consensus on this issue!

[Thanks to those of you who emailed ideas and comments!]

Posted on October 27, 2006 07:57 AM View this article | Comments (12)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

October 26, 2006

Another Policy-Related Faculty Position at CU-Boulder

The Environmental Studies Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder announces that it is recruiting a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Environmental Ethics. We are particularly interested in candidates with strong interdisciplinary interests and the ability to teach graduate and undergraduate courses in environmental ethics and the role of values in environmental policy-making. Candidates specializing in any areas of research and disciplinary background are welcome to apply. An earned terminal degree in the field of research specialization is required. The ability to interact with other departments is desirable. The Program is described at http://www.colorado.edu/envirostudies/ . Applicants should send a dossier that includes a CV and a statement of research and teaching interests, and arrange for three letters of reference to be sent, to Environmental Ethics Search Chair, Environmental Studies Program, 397 UCB, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309-0397. Review of completed applications will begin December 1, 2006, but applications will be accepted until the position is filled. The University of Colorado at Boulder is committed to diversity and equality in education and employment.

Posted on October 26, 2006 12:47 PM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Education

Conference for Grad Students on Science Policy

Science & Technology in Society:
An International Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference

Sponsored by:
The American Association for the Advancement of Science
Arizona State University, Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes
George Mason University
The George Washington University
Virginia Tech

When: March 31 - April 1, 2007
Where: American Association for the Advancement of Science, Headquarters,
Washington, DC

Abstract Deadline: January 16, 2007

This annual conference provides a venue for graduate students from Science & Technology Studies, Science & Technology Policy, Environmental Studies/Policy and related fields to present and receive constructive feedback on their research. In developing the agenda for the conference, the organizing committee's primary goal is to create a forum that encourages intellectual exchange between STS, S&T Policy and Environmental Studies/Policy by assembling diverse and exciting panels around similar themes. As such, the committee will accept the strongest proposals on issues relevant to either field, and build the agenda around them. The agenda for last year's conference (www.stglobal.org) provides examples of common themes
and topics that may be covered this year. In addition to presenting papers, students will have the opportunity to interact with each other and prominent scholars and professionals related to their field(s) of interest. Every year we invite prominent figures from both STS and S&T Policy to deliver keynote addresses. Because we draw participants from all over the world, this conference is an excellent opportunity for young scholars aspiring to work in academic, governmental, or non-governmental settings to build both national and international networks for future research and collaborations.

The conference organizing committee welcomes submissions of abstracts (up to 250 words) for a 15-minute presentation. Please submit abstracts and contact information to our website at www.stglobal.org by January 16, 2007. Notification of abstract acceptance will be given by February 7, 2007.

Information concerning area lodging and registration is posted on the conference website. Travel funds are available for a limited number of presenters. Indicate your need for travel funds when submitting your abstract. For further information, either e-mail abstract@stglobal.org or visit the conference website at www.stglobal.org.

Posted on October 26, 2006 11:24 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science Policy: General

Atlantic SSTs and U.S. Hurricane Damages, Part 5

Widely respected hurricane expert Jim Elsner of FSU has posted a lengthy response to these posts over at his blog. I’d encourage interested readers to have a look. This exchange reminds me of a quote attributed to John von Neumann speaking on statistics, "With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." It also serves as a good reminder that Dan Sarewitz’s notion of an "excess of objectivity" is alive and well even when one is dealing with 34 data points. Let me start by acknowledging that Jim and I are going to agree to disagree and interested readers will have to judge the merits of our arguments themselves.

Elsner argues that the statistics of loss data are best fit by using a "random sum" that combines the statistics of frequency of losses with those of intensity of losses. This approach was first applied to hurricane damage data by my former colleague at NCAR Rick Katz in his 2002 paper "Stochastic modeling of hurricane damage" (in PDF). In my critique of Elsner’s work, I accept that the "random sum" methodology is indeed useful for deconvolving components of a statistical relationship (see, e.g., the acknowledgements in Rick’s paper). As Katz writes in his 2002 paper, "By enabling the variations in total damage to be attributed to either variations in event occurrence or in event damage, the present modeling approach has an inherent advantage over previous analyses." But such a methodology, or any sophisticated statistics, cannot create a strong relationship in the real world where one does not exist.

I have focused my critique on the intensity part of Elsner’s analysis. With Jim’s help I have successfully replicated this part of their work (Part 4) and I have found that their results are highly unstable -- that is they do not hold for 1950-2004 or for 1950-2006. What they report on large losses has much more to do with one event in 2005 (Katrina) than statistical properties of the dataset that are stable over time. On his blog Elsner suggests that the period 1950-2005 "is not intended to stand by itself." That is good, because it does not stand by itself. Based on the lack of a relationship between SSTs and damage in the subset of data that Elsner claims that there is a strong relationship, I have concluded that there is little reason to expect that Elsner’s model would allow for an accurate prediction of future damage amounts conditional on SST. A question for Jim -- What, for instance, would it have predicted for 2006 before the season?

Let me reassert that reasonable people can disagree on such subjects, as I had stated in Part One. Elsner would in my view make a much better case for his arguments by focusing his replies on the substantive questions, such as the obvious lack of stability in his intensity model or what physical basis there exists between May-June SSTs and damage that occurs within the hurricane season (points which he does not address). He is representing his work as "sound science that will likely have a major impact in the reinsurance industry" and indeed he is selling services to these companies. Thus, he should probably expect that his methods will attract attention (and in my experience in academia, attention means that one’s views are worth considering, which should be a compliment, even if the attention is critical as is often the case in academic discussions). If Jim is confident in his approach then he should welcome such scrutiny and efforts to clarify his methods and their significance. Bluster and invective are not only weak means of argumentation, but also make for poor marketing tools.

Let me also once again acknowledge that I did make a mistake in an earlier post, which was corrected online immediately when Jim pointed it out. In response to Jim’s complaints about a lack of apology I posted the following on Jim’s blog:

Jim- Let me once again formally apologize for making a mistake. It happens from time-to-time ;-) It has been corrected, as you know. As I wrote immediately after you brought the data issue to my attention in a personal email to you, "Thanks Jim for following up. Thanks for catching the data sort mix up, apologies for that."
I'll follow up on the substance next. Thanks!

In closing it is worth remembering the old adage that if one tortures data sufficiently it will confess. In this case, simple and straightforward analyses of the relationship of SST and hurricane damage without deconvolving intensity or frequency indicates that there is no relationship. Elsner and Faust both show that if you segregate the data in various ways you can use the influence of 2005 to attain, at best, a very marginal relationship. We disagree on whether such a relationship is indeed marginal and also the importance of such a relationship. Fair enough. As 2006 provides an excellent example of, scientists have no ability to predict hurricane landfalls with accuracy, much less frequency or intensity at landfall before the season starts. Until such a capability has been demonstrated, efforts to predict damage with accuracy will in my view amount to little more than statistical data mining.

Posted on October 26, 2006 08:32 AM View this article | Comments (19)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

October 25, 2006

Atlantic SSTs vs, U.S. Hurricane Damage, Part 4

I am happy to report that after follow-up by Jim Elsner, I have been able to come close to replicating his results. However, the replication does not add much support to the hypothesis that Atlantic SSTs are related to normalized U.S. hurricane damage. Here is why.

First, in his paper (properly cited as Jagger et al., here in PDF) Elsner reports that their analysis was "able to explain 13% of the variation in the logarithm of loss values exceeding $100 mn using an ordinary least squares regression model." Their analysis focused on insured losses and ours is on total losses. Their analysis is in 2000 US dollars and ours in 2005 US dollars. Because insured damages are roughly half the total economic losses, and inflation, wealth, population increase by about 5-7% per year, it makes sense to use a cut-off of $250 million for our dataset rather than $100 million - thanks to the reader who made this observation. (This has the effect of eliminating about 70% of the data, an important point which I will return to later, but for now we are simply replicating the earlier results). With the dataset parsed in this fashion we get the following results.

You can see that just as is reported in Jagger et al.’s paper, this result also shows an r^2 of 0.13 and I get a p value of 0.03, so the results are significant. I am satisfied that we have faithfully replicated his analysis! But what happens when one looks at the relationship from 1950-2004? The following graph shows this result.

By removing 2005 the r^2 is cut in half and the p value goes up to 0.14, which is not statistically significant! So the results presented by Elsner are entirely a function of 2005, which was indeed an extreme year for both SSTs and damage. The question of whether 2005 is like seasons to come is a fair question, but I submit that the answer cannot be found in the historical data on SSTs and damage, not matter how one parses the data. Consider that if one adds 2006 to the results (damage = $250M, MJ SSTs = 26.88) the r^2 of the linear regression drops to 0.08, and the p value is 0.08, just outside statistical significance.

In short, there are a lot of ways to analyze data, and Elsner and colleagues approach is interesting. But in my view it does not provide much support for the hypothesis that SSTs are a useful or accurate predictor of damage. Anytime you have to remove 70% of the data to find a marginal (at best) relationship, it tells you that whatever relationship might exist cannot be that strong.

To underscore my perspective – future increases in Atlantic SSTs may indeed be accompanied by increases in normalized damages, but it is very difficult to accept this hypothesis based on the historical record of damage and SSTs, no matter how it is parsed. Thanks again to Jim for his continued involvement in these discussions.

Posted on October 25, 2006 09:45 AM View this article | Comments (14)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

October 24, 2006

Atlantic SSTs vs. US Hurricane Damage, Part 3

Following up a continuing conversation with hurricane expert Jim Elsner, this post presents an analysis of Atlantic May-June SSTs versus normalized damage 1950-2005, but only including storms which had >$100 million in damage and storms of hurricane or greater strength, as recommended by Jim. As the graph below shows [10-25-06 update -- analysis superceded by Part 4 here], the results of this analysis show no relationship.

[10-25-06 graph reposted in part 4 with >$250M threshold]

I'd welcome Jim's response, but for now I remain unambiguous in my conclusion that there is no relationship between SSTs and normalized damages. If Jim provides his data, I'd be happy to reconcile the different results, and perhaps my views will change. Until then, I necessarily must go with what the available data shows, which is quite unambiguous.

Posted on October 24, 2006 10:20 AM View this article | Comments (10)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

Atlantic SSTs vs. U.S. Hurricane Damage - Part 2

In the comments of our first post on this subject FSU's Jim Elsner, a widely respected hurricane expert, pointed us to a forthcoming paper (here in PDF) in which he and colleagues looked at the relationship of Atlantic SSTs and U.S. hurricane damage. In the paper Elsner et al. make the following claim:

Using the preseason Atlantic SST, we are able to explain 13% of the variation in the logarithm of loss values exceeding $100 mn using an ordinary least squares regression model. The relationship is positive indicating that warmer Atlantic SSTs are associated with larger losses as expected. The rank correlation between the amount of loss (exceeding $100 mn) and the May-June Atlantic SST is +0.31 (P-value = 0.0086) over all years in the dataset and is +0.37 (P-value = 0.0267) over the shorter 1950–2005 period.

I've looked at our dataset and find nothing remotely close like these numbers. Here is my analysis for 1950-2005:

The following graph [updated 10-25-06] shows the relationship of Atlantic May-June SSTs and U.S. normalized hurricane damage (for years in which damage exceeds $100M).

You can see from this graph there is no relationship; The rank correlation I get is -0.088. So I am curious about the reasons for the different results (leaving aside for the moment other questions). Are we using different data? To facilitate analysis, here is the data that I am using in this analysis (for all years 1950-2005, note that original NATL SST data is available here):

[UPDATED 10-25-06]

Year--MJ SST---Damage----------ln(dmg)
1950 26.11 $5,529,320,501 22.43333077
1951 26.65 $358,069,353 19.69623725
1952 26.66 $114,732,781 18.55811634
1953 26.59 $55,787,059 17.83705248
1954 26.49 $35,671,450,726 24.29761651
1955 26.29 $23,274,260,349 23.87061388
1956 26.18 $577,494,764 20.17420993
1957 26.29 $3,841,822,355 22.06921266
1958 27.30 $509,818,712 20.04956575
1959 26.09 $858,779,107 20.5710223
1960 26.60 $29,970,493,213 24.12347918
1961 26.24 $14,468,733,186 23.39525583
1962 26.79 $92,192,732 18.33939186
1963 26.56 $246,291,959 19.32202822
1964 26.44 $15,693,459,358 23.47650986
1965 26.12 $21,261,254,041 23.78015219
1966 26.65 $336,552,296 19.63426411
1967 26.21 $4,016,468,362 22.11366884
1968 26.21 $657,263,225 20.30359514
1969 26.99 $21,225,180,492 23.77845407
1970 26.75 $5,627,670,656 22.45096146
1971 25.94 $2,083,668,167 21.45739572
1972 26.10 $17,579,304,340 23.58998816
1973 26.32 $145,454,945 18.79537694
1974 25.53 $1,073,783,964 20.79445466
1975 25.75 $2,791,286,883 21.74976857
1976 25.82 $486,444,597 20.00263357
1977 26.43 $53,776,992 17.80035628
1978 26.38 $145,903,706 18.79845741
1979 26.87 $14,096,216,718 23.36917228
1980 27.05 $1,602,040,183 21.19454377
1981 26.77 $171,359,510 18.95927431
1982 26.53 $43,148,911 17.58016773
1983 26.98 $7,469,100,008 22.73404035
1984 26.12 $289,628,417 19.48410934
1985 26.00 $11,068,101,797 23.1273331
1986 25.95 $50,026,988 17.72807318
1987 26.94 $19,011,511 16.76055519
1988 26.73 $172,912,773 18.96829783
1989 25.95 $16,770,856,131 23.54290846
1990 26.62 $126,787,371 18.658022
1991 26.10 $3,044,037,453 21.83645058
1992 26.38 $57,663,865,630 24.77789657
1993 26.48 $126,479,971 18.65559452
1994 25.86 $1,938,752,062 21.38531034
1995 26.91 $7,501,957,030 22.73842976
1996 26.71 $6,537,460,457 22.60081462
1997 26.66 $163,560,186 18.91269159
1998 27.27 $6,021,601,438 22.51861908
1999 26.44 $8,277,977,785 22.83686455
2000 26.26 $36,525,742 17.41352783
2001 26.38 $6,970,450,131 22.66494564
2002 26.31 $1,491,060,293 21.12275331
2003 26.38 $4,212,081,525 22.16122279
2004 26.69 $49,130,243,738 24.61774064
2005 27.62 $107,350,000,000 25.39936036

Posted on October 24, 2006 02:02 AM View this article | Comments (11)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

October 22, 2006

What Does the Historical Relationship of Atlantic Sea Surface Temperature and U.S. Hurricane Damage Portend for the Future?

Every four years the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) holds a workshop that brings together forecasters and researchers from around the world who focus on tropical cyclones (which are called "hurricanes" in the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific). The sixth such workshop is taking place in Costa Rica at the end of November and in preparation for that workshop experts in a wide range of issues related to tropical cyclones have prepared number of background reports (links found below). Supported by an all-star international team, I was in charge of preparing a background report on "Factors Contributing to Human and Economic Losses." The WMO has now posted these background papers online. In this post I’d like to discuss one aspect of our report – the relationship of Atlantic sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and U.S. hurricane damage.

In particular, our report presents two different perspectives on the relationship of SSTs and damage. One perspective, mine, is that there is absolutely nothing in the historical record that suggests a relationship between SSTs and damage. Such a relationship may materialize in the future, but one cannot use the past to project such a relationship, it must be based on some other considerations. A second perspective is presented by my friend and colleague Eberhard Faust of Munich Re. He argues that there is “remarkable evidence for global warming effects on losses.” Because we disagree on this issue, in our report we presented our two different perspectives.

Our two perspectives are presented on pp. 548-550 (Pielke) and pp. 551-555 (Faust) of our report (available here in PDF), and are together in a final section titled "Differing views of the role of global warming on losses" which falls at the very end of our 23 page report at pp. 547-555. The brevity of these two analyses is such that it might make for a very good case study for students to examine in a course in statistics or atmospheric sciences. Which analysis is more compelling and why?

My argument is based on the following graphs.

In the paper I argue:

Figures 5.2.7a and 5.2.7b shows the lack of meaningful relationship between normalized U.S. hurricane damages (NHC data, transformed with the natural log) and North Atlantic [August, September, October = ASO] sea surface temperatures 1950-2005 and 1950-2004. The r-squared values are low with or without 2005 included, and the regression results are not statistically significant (p = 0.28 and 0.69 respectively). There is consequently no systematic evidence that higher SSTs are systematically associated with larger losses.

Eberhard’s begins with the following graph:

In the paper he argues:

But if analyzed more closely, the normalized loss data show nonetheless systematic changes over time. Fundamental to these changes is the presence of a correlation between normalized annual losses and June-October annual tropical sea surface temperatures. Munich Re analyzed the respective annual SST anomalies and annual normalized losses since 1900. Figure 5.2.8 simply displays the normalized losses against the SST anomalies. Also, the average loss calculated for a running window of 0.2°C in width is displayed (red line). The running average is shown over a range where the 0.2°C windows are populated densely enough (at least 12 data points, i.e. half the maximum population, see the dashed black line). A remarkable general increase in average annual normalized losses with increasing SST can be observed over the -0.4°C to +0.4°C anomaly range. Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient, which is independent of the distributions involved, gives 0.26 for the range from -0.4°C to +0.4°C and 0.28 for all of the data.

We both think that our respective analyses will be compelling. If you are interested, please read both analyses in full. Eberhard was a key participant in our workshop held last spring on Climate Change and Disaster Losses, the report of which you can find here. I’d be happy to discuss the two analyses in the WMO report in the comments if there is interest. Do note that neither of our perspectives have yet appeared in the peer-reviewed literature, but stay tuned.

For those of you interested in the other background reports prepared for the WMO workshop, they can be found here. In particular have a look at the Topic 4 "Climate variability and seasonal prediction of tropical cyclone activity/intensity" which includes a comprehensive literature review led by Tom Knutson (Special Topic 4a is also relevant). It is safe to conclude that debate persists on this subject. Topic 5 is relevant to those of you interested in policies related to tropical cyclones. We say it often enough here, but bears repeating -- the debate over human-caused climate change and tropical cyclones is scientifically interesting and has become caught up in the politics of global warming, but there is no evidence that energy policies can ever serve as an effective means of modulating future hurricane damage given that the overwhelming factors responsible for increasing damage have been and will continue to be the ever-increasing vulnerability of people and property.

Posted on October 22, 2006 11:28 AM View this article | Comments (11)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

October 20, 2006

Frank Laird on Teaching of Evolution

Frank Laird, of the University of Denver and a faculty affiliate of our Center, has a thought-provoking essay on the teaching of evolution over at the CSPO website titled, "Total Truth and the Ongoing Controversy Over the Teaching of Evolution." Here is how he starts:

The 2005 legal decision in Dover, PA, and the elections for the Kansas State Board of Education, are only the most visible recent skirmishes in the controversy over teaching alternatives to evolution in public schools. Discussions of this controversy mix and sometimes confuse three distinct and separate, though related, processes: what teachers teach, what students learn, and what citizens believe. In a recent Pew poll (2005, pp. 1-2), 42% of Americans said they believed “that life on earth has existed in its present form since the beginning of time.” Proponents of teaching evolution often point to such data as evidence that evolution needs stronger support in the classroom to ward off anti-science trends in society.
However, thinking that you can change what citizens believe by changing what teachers teach is too big a conceptual leap. While there is certainly a relationship between teaching, learning, and belief, it is by no means simple or linear. By separating those processes out we can better understand them. The study of what citizens believe is a huge social question. Scholars have compiled huge amounts of polling data on what citizens believe, though interpreting that data comes with problems, such as assuming that belief is measured by response to questions instead of processes that get citizens to reflect and deliberate on questions. But in any case we know more about what people believe that why they believe it. While formal high school education may have some influence, so will family background, religious affiliation, occupation, race, income, and a host of unquantifiable cultural beliefs and ways of sorting true from false claims, what Sheila Jasanoff has called civic epistemology (Jasanoff 2005).

The second process, what students learn in biology class is a pedagogical question, one that those who study science teaching and learning are most qualified to answer. Anyone who teaches knows that there is not a simple relationship between what teachers teach and what students learn. Does discussing intelligent design (ID) lead to students learning less or more about evolution?

This Perspective focuses on what teachers teach. This in fact is the nub of the evolution controversy and viewing it as an institutional question can help to clarify the issues surrounding it. Strengthening the institutions that govern what teachers teach is both politically more feasible and ethically more defensible than trying to change what citizens believe.

Read the whole thing here.

Posted on October 20, 2006 11:46 AM View this article | Comments (5)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Education | Science + Politics

October 17, 2006

Climate Change and Disaster Losses Workshop Report

Last May, Peter Hoeppe of Munich Re and I organized a workshop to bring together a diverse group of international experts in the fields of climatology and disaster research. The general questions to be answered at the workshop were:

* What factors account for increasing costs of weather related disasters in recent decades?

* What are the implications of these understandings, for both research and policy?

We are happy to release our final workshop report. From the workshop home page you can download PDFs of:

*The entire report (8 mb)
*Executive Summary
*Summary Report
*Individual participant white papers from:

* C. Bals
* L. Bouwer
* R. Brázdil
* H. Brooks
* I. Burton
* R. Crompton et al.
* A. Dlugolecki
* P. Epstein
* E. Faust et al.
* I. Goklany
* H. Grenier
* B. R. Gurjar et al.
* J. Helminen
* S. Jun
* C. Kemfert and K. Schumacher
* T. Knutson
* R. Muir-Wood et al.
* R. Pielke, Jr.
* S. Raghavan
* G. Tetzlaff
* E. Tompkins
* H. von Storch and R. Weisse
* Q. Ye
* R. Zapata-Marti

The workshop's major sponsors were Munich Re and the U.S. National Science Foundation, with contributing sponsorship from the GKSS Institute for Coastal Research and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

Posted on October 17, 2006 02:12 PM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

Café Scientifique Tonite in Denver

Café Scientifique
Tuesday 17 October 2006 6:30PM
Wynkoop Brewery Mercantile Room
1634 18th Street Denver, CO 80202

–SCIENCE AND SCIENTISTS IN POLITICIZED DEBATES –
details

Roger A. Pielke, Jr. , Professor of Environmental Studies and Director, Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, CU, Boulder

Scientists have choices about the roles that they play in today's controversial political debates such as on global warming, genetically modified foods, and the Plan B emergency contraception just to name a few. Should scientists ever become advocates for certain policy choices? Is it possible to separate personal moral beliefs from professional scientific findings? Where can politicians get unbiased scientific information? Is the current administration any worse than others in 'cherry-picking' scientific facts? A recent article in the National Journal went so far as to suggest that far from being victims of politicization, the scientific community "is itself contributing to the polarization that afflicts America's political culture." Is this really true? Roger Pielke, Jr. will discuss these questions and more, which are addressed in his forthcoming book on the choices scientists have in policy and politics and how they impact the scientific enterprise as whole.

Posted on October 17, 2006 06:42 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science + Politics

October 16, 2006

Facts, Values, and Scientists in Policy Debates

Politics, according to famed political scientist David Easton, is about “the authoritative allocation of social values.” Values refer to desired outcomes which include both the substance of policy and the procedures used to achieve outcomes. For instance, good health is an example of valued substantive outcome. Public participation in the making of policy is and example of a valued procedural outcome. Politics is necessary because people, as individuals and collections of individuals, have different conceptions about what substantive and procedural outcomes, or what rankings of outcomes, are desirable in society.

From this perspective consider this view of the relationship of science and values, written last week by Alan Leshner, CEO of AAAS, in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Credible scientists never contradict or go beyond the available data. We should never insert our personal values into discussions with the public about scientific issues. On the other hand, it is important to recognize that the rest of society is not constrained in that way and can mix facts and values at will.
That is another principle scientists find hard to accept, as they often have strong moral values. When a scientist brings personal views on, say, the beginning of life into a supposedly scientific discussion on the use of embryonic stem cells in research, his or her credibility as a source of neutral facts is automatically diminished. No matter what a scientist believes about moral issues, if an opponent in a debate introduces values or beliefs, the scientist should disclaim any ability to comment on those issues as outside the scientific realm.

Leshner’s perspective has been called the "fact-value distinction," which holds that facts and values can be cleanly separated. Scientists, the argument goes, focus only on facts, and not values. There are of course some situations in which it makes good sense for scientists to focus on narrow technical questions, like “Where is the tornado heading?” But scholars who have studied the roles of science in society have come to a robust consensus that the situations in which policy making is best served by the scientific arbitration of facts are limited to some very unique circumstances.

From the perspective of theory, scholars of science in policy and politics have for many years understood that the fact-value distinction doesn’t hold up. As an example of this research, consider the following excerpts from Shelia Jasanoff's excellent book, "The Fifth Branch: Science Advisors as Policymakers" (1990), (at pp. 230-31). Jasanoff, a leading voice in the discipline of science, technology, and society, focuses on science advisory bodies and organizations that bring science to decision makers and the public,:

Although pleas for maintaining a strict separation between science and politics continue to run like a leitmotif through the policy literature, the artificiality of this position can no longer be doubted. Studies of scientific advising leave in tatters the notion that it is possible, in practice, to restrict the advisory practice to technical issues or that the subjective values of scientists are irrelevant to decision making.

She also writes (at p. 249),

The notion that scientific advisors can or do limit themselves to addressing purely scientific issues, in particular, seems fundamentally misconceived ... the advisory process seems increasingly important as a locus for negotiating scientific differences that have political weight.

In practice, scientists are always introducing their values into public debate. In fact, any effort at public communication is necessarily an expression of a scientist’s values – the procedural value that the public would be better off with whatever information that the scientist is sharing. And in many cases scientists go well beyond procedural values and make public statements to advocate for specific political outcomes. For example, Leshner (along with AAAS president John Holdren) recently wrote (in PDF):

There is a clear message in the growing torrent of studies revealing that impacts of global climate change are already occurring: It is time to muster the political will for serious evasive action. . . The United States -- the largest emitter of carbon dioxide on the planet -- needs to become a leader instead of a laggard in developing and deploying serious solutions.

Leshner may believe that the substantive (action on energy policy) and procedural (U.S. leadership) values that he is expressing are not just his own personal values, but also in support of common interests, but they are an expression of values nonetheless. If Leshner stuck to his own advice about not expressing values "beyond the scientific realm" he would have refrained from calling for certain types of policy action. In fact, if scientists generally followed Leshner’s advice there would be essentially no public views expressed by scientists. This of course is neither realistic nor desirable. Effective policy making requires the integration of science and values, not their separation.

Leshner’s views on facts and values is contradicted by the AAAS, ironically enough in a story on its home page right next to Leshner’s Chronicle piece, containing calls for more scientists to play a role in overt political advocacy.

The important distinction to be made is not whether or not scientists should express values in their public statements. It is how they express those values. They can chose to serve as political advocates by seeking to reduce the scope of choice to some preferred outcomes, or they can seek to expand or clarify choice. In all but the most simple of decision contexts there is simply no option to "disclaim any ability to comment on those issues as outside the scientific realm." Those who give scientists such advice far out of step with robust knowledge of the roles of science in society only contribute to the pathological politicization of science.

Posted on October 16, 2006 02:55 AM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science + Politics | The Honest Broker

October 12, 2006

We Are Hiring! Two Faculty Positions!

Please share this far and wide!

Two Assistant/Associate Faculty Positions in Science and Technology Policy Research, CIRES, University of Colorado at Boulder

The Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder announces that it is recruiting for two faculty positions at the assistant/associate (with tenure) level in science and technology policy research with a focus on decision making under uncertainty. One position would be rostered in the Graduate School and within the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), the parent Institute of the Policy Center. Departmental affiliation for this position is open. The second position will be rostered in the College of Arts & Sciences in its Environmental Studies Program with a formal affiliation with CIRES and the Policy Center. We are particularly interested in candidates with strong interdisciplinary interests and the ability to teach graduate and undergraduate courses in science and technology policy and/or science and technology studies. Area of research specialization and disciplinary background are open. Required qualifications are a PhD in a cognate field. A major commitment to and demonstrated excellence in research and the ability to secure external research funding are expected, as well as commitment to excellence in teaching at both graduate and undergraduate levels.

Applicants should send letter of interest, curriculum vitae, evidence of teaching effectiveness, and three names for letters of reference to Karen Dempsey, CIRES Human Resources via email: jobs@cires.colorado.edu. Questions can be sent to Prof. Roger Pielke Jr., Chair, Search Committee for Science and Technology Policy Research: pielke@cires.colorado.edu.
Review of completed applications will begin December 1, 2006 and continue until the position is filled. For more information about CIRES, see http://cires.colorado.edu, and the Science and Technology Policy Center /cires.colorado.edu/science/centers/policy/

The University of Colorado at Boulder is committed to diversity and equality in education and employment.

Posted on October 12, 2006 01:57 PM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Education

Expertise in Biodiversity Governance

Last week I had the opportunity to participate in an excellent workshop on the role of expertise in biodiversity governance. The workshop was an exercise in the design of a new science-policy organization/institution. The workshop was titled "International Science-Policy Interfaces for Biodiversity Governance" and was held at the UFZ Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany. At the workshop participants produced a set of consensus recommendations for the role of an institution that would provide expert advice in the international arena of biodiversity policy.

The main motivation for the workshop is a current consultation seeking such recommendations, called IMoSEB, organized by the French government. You can find our workshop recommendations here in PDF, and also below in HTML. Your comments on the recommendations and the more general challenge of exert advice in the area of biodiversity would be welcomed.

Leipzig Workshop Recommendations for a Knowledge-Policy Interface for Biodiversity Governance

4 October 2006

This document contributes to ongoing debates, including the IMoSEB consultation process, seeking to identify the optimal niche and conditions for the creation of an independent and effective international knowledge-policy interface1 for biodiversity governance. A knowledge-policy interface is essential to support more effective biodiversity-related decision making and societal responses to the challenges of achieving sustainable development.

Mandate:

• Synthesize and communicate a knowledge base on biodiversity in support of decision making and implementation
• Bring together and acknowledge diverse understandings, perspectives, and values regarding biodiversity loss and change
• Create a mechanism for dialogue and exchange among holders of diverse knowledge and knowledge systems (i.e., all forms of traditional and modern knowledge and science)
• Foster deeper understanding of the ways in which biodiversity loss and change transcend scales (spatial, temporal, etc.) and jurisdictional boundaries
• Through its activities enhance and improve abilities to collect, exchange and disseminate knowledge and information, and promote actions in favor of better biodiversity management at all levels
Outputs and outcomes:
• Scenarios of human futures and biodiversity loss and change, in relation to poverty, food security, economic growth, water security, conflict, human health, energy, climate change, etc. illuminating policy options, choices, and strategies available to diverse actors
• Periodic assessments of:

o existing biodiversity knowledges, including identification of gaps in existing assessments,
o status and trends on biodiversity,
o strategies and options for response,
o policy effectiveness,
o capacity at all levels of decision making
o biodiversity knowledge-policy interfaces, and
o cross-issue linkages (e.g., poverty, food security, economic growth, water security, conflict, human health, energy, climate change)

• Analyses of the causes of biodiversity loss and change, including key aspects of political economies2, and the necessary elements of societal transformation to redress these causes
• Stock-taking and management of biodiversity knowledge, including for global trends, indicators, and monitoring systems

1 We use the phrase “knowledge-policy interface” to acknowledge that information and expertise relevant to policy must include all forms of knowledge.

2 In this context we understand political economy as the analysis of economic and political dynamics, power structures, regulations, policies and dominant ideologies that affect biodiversity and people’s relation to it.

• Comprehensive outreach and communication strategy in support of dialogue and action
• Identification of knowledge gaps and feedback into research policies and priorities
• Identification of gaps in capacity for linking biodiversity knowledge to action at all levels of decision making and implementation
• Creation and dissemination of tools and methodologies for assessments, analyses, and other means of connecting knowledge and policy

Process:

• Ongoing, dynamic, and independent process that brings together diverse forms of knowledge, expertise, and science
• Ensure that process is legitimate and has appropriate institutional support and authorizing environment
• Establish secure funding stream from multiple sources
• Engage governments, private sector, civil society, scientific community, indigenous communities, international organizations and conventions, etc., in the design and operation of the mechanism
• Networking process that links and builds upon—and does not reinvent or duplicate—diverse existing networks of biodiversity expertise and policy
• Innovating process that identifies and seeks to fill gaps in existing networks of biodiversity expertise and policy
• Catalyze nested networks and activities at national and sub-global (e.g., local, regional, trans-jurisdictional) levels
• Process that ensures interpretation and translation among relevant languages, cultures, and knowledge traditions
• Provide regular opportunities for appropriate internal and external evaluation and review
• Establish small and effective coordinating mechanism (e.g., governing board) that includes appropriate balance and diversity across geography, sectors, stakeholders, expertise, etc.

Questions requiring further reflection

Participants agreed that future consultations will require careful consideration of the following key questions given the reality of trade-offs among democratization of expertise, stakeholder involvement, political legitimacy and accountability, funding mandates, scientific excellence, trust and credibility, etc.:

• What is the appropriate form of funding, institutional framework, and authorization of the mechanism by governments, international conventions, and the United Nations system while maintaining independence?
• What are the appropriate means for developing the network described above?
• How to link the mechanism to the needs of the various international conventions?

Further information

More information on the Leipzig workshop, including a full report is available at http://www.ufz.de/spi-workshop

Posted on October 12, 2006 05:58 AM View this article | Comments (6)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Biodiversity | Science Policy: General

October 11, 2006

A Collective Research Project

In an earlier thread this week, I made a plea for people to recognize the symbolic weight carried by the phrase "climate change denial." The conversation has been quite interesting.

As an exercise in research on symbolic politics, I'd like to use this thread to see if we can collectively track the exact origins of the phrases "climate change denial" and "climate change deniers". (Thanks to those of you who got this started on the nearlier thread!) Please use the comment section here for this research challenge. Please use the earlier thread for continued discussions of the broader issue. Let's see what we can learn together.

Posted on October 11, 2006 08:36 AM View this article | Comments (37)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

October 10, 2006

Limits of Models in Decision

In today’s Financial Times columnist John Kay has a very insightful piece on the limits of models in decision making. He discusses the downfall of Amaranth, a hedge fund, which lost billions of dollars, in part, because its investors did not fully understand the full scope of uncertainties associated with their investment strategies. Kay highlights an important distinction between what he calls “in model” risk and “off model” risk. In model risk refers to the uncertainties that are associated with the design of the model, in data inputs, randomness, and so on. Modelers use techniques such as Monte Carlo analysis to get a quantitative sense of model uncertainties. Off model risk refers to the degree of conformance between a model and the real world. Models by their nature are always simplifications of the real world. As in the case of Amaranth, often hard lessons of experience remind us that as powerful as models are, they can also reinforce bad decisions. As Kay writes,

When someone does attach a probability to a forecast, they have – implicitly or explicitly – used a model of the problems. The model they have used accounts for in-model risk but ignores off-model risk. Their forecasts are therefore too confident and neither you nor they have much idea how over-confident they are. That is why mathematical modeling of risk can be an aid to sound judgment, but never a complete substitute.

Posted on October 10, 2006 03:13 PM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Prediction and Forecasting

A Perspective on the 2006 Hurricane Season

The 2006 hurricane season is not yet in the books, and there is plenty of time remaining for additional storms. However, if we consider the damage that has occurred this year thus far in historical perspective, how does it rank?

Let’s assume that this season has $250 million in damage. For the following data, I am using what we call “normalized” hurricane damage which adjusts past losses to current values. The 2006 season thus far ranks 73 out of 106 seasons since 1900, and 41 out of 56 seasons since 1950.

We hope to have the completely updated normalized loss analysis and data available soon. Stay tuned.

Posted on October 10, 2006 03:07 PM View this article | Comments (13)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Disasters

October 09, 2006

On Language

Let's be blunt. The phrase "climate change denier" is meant to be evocative of the phrase "holocaust denier". As such the phrase conjurs up a symbolic allusion fully intended to equate questioning of climate change with questioning of the Holocaust.

Let's be blunt. This allusion is an affront to those who suffered and died in the Holocaust. Let those who would make such an allusion instead be absolutely explicit about their assertion of moral equivalency between Holocaust deniers and those that they criticize.

This allusion has no place in the discourse on climate change. I say this as someone fully convinced of a significant human role in the behavior of the climate system.

Let's declare a moratorium on the phrases "climate change denier" and "climate change denial." Let's invoke the equivalent of Godwin's Law in discourse on climate policy. Maybe call it the Prometheus Principle.

No more invocation of "climate change deniers."

Posted on October 9, 2006 03:49 PM View this article | Comments (81)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

October 06, 2006

More on Royal Society’s Role in Political Debates

In various comment threads I have sought to identify clear criteria that the Royal Society applied when deciding to target Exxon and its funding of advocacy groups. I have asserted that this decision was political. Several readers and Bob Ward have suggested that the decision was based solely an effort to police misrepresentations of science by Exxon and groups that it funds. In this lengthy comment I explore this issue a bit further. Please read on if you are interested.

Why does this issue matter? I have often made the case that there is absolutely no problem with interests organizing to advance their agendas. Organized interests are an important part of how democracy works. What I have frequently objected to is the hiding of political agendas behind the notion of scientific objectivity or facts. Such action leads to a pathological politicization of science where debates about "what should we do?" are transformed into "whose science is right?" losing sight of the first question. This is even more problematic when institutions like the Royal Society participate in such pathological politicization, because such institutions have a unique and valuable role to play as what I have called "honest brokers of policy options." Such honest brokering is jeopardized when institutions take on the characteristics and behavior of an interest group, like for instance, Exxon.

What do I mean by "political"? I mean that the Royal Society is acting in a manner that seeks to gain advantage over others in debates over what society should do about climate change. In my opinion, the Royal Society letter was about far more than policing (mis)representations of science in public debate. If the Royal Society was in fact interested in the misrepresentation of science, and not political action on climate change, then presumably it would have developed general, unambiguous criteria to identify how one knows a "misrepresentation of science" when one sees it and then applied these criteria indiscriminately across organizations and issue areas. From Mr. Ward’s letter it appears that he started with Exxon’s Annual Report, which suggests that the Royal Society decided to start with Exxon based on some other criteria, which I would assume resulted from identification of Exxon as a strong interest against action on climate change. Action that the Royal Society favors, and has openly said so, such as in its joint statement prior to the G8 last year.

Further evidence for the political nature of the Royal Society’s action appears in the substance of Mr. Ward’s identification of a misrepresentation by Exxon in one of its reports. As shown below, the alleged misrepresentation is pretty weak stuff and I don’t even think that it rises to the level of misrepresentation. Certainly Exxon has engaged in cherrypicking to advance its perceived self-interest. Would the Royal Society suggest that any organization that cherrypicks information should not receive funding? If so that would likely lead to the end all public debate on all subjects!

Let’s take a look at the complaint and examine whether it is in fact a misrepresentation of science. Here is what Mr. Ward wrote to Exxon (link):

Thank-you for your recent letter and accompanying copies of the 2005 ExxonMobil 'Corporate Citizenship Report' and the 'UK and Ireland Corporate Citizenship' brochure. I have read both with interest, but I am writing to express my disappointment at the inaccurate and misleading view of the science of climate change that these documents present.
In particular, I was very surprised to read the following passage from the section on Environmental performance under the sub-heading of 'Uncertainty and risk' (p.23) in the 'Corporate Citizenship Report':

"While assessments such as those of the IPCC have expressed growing confidence that recent warming can be attributed to increases in greenhouse gases, these conclusions rely on expert judgment rather than objective, reproducible statistical methods. Taken together, gaps in the scientific basis for theoretical climate models and the interplay of significant natural variability make it very difficult to determine objectively the extent to which recent climate changes might be the result of human actions."

These statements also appear, of course, in the Exxon Mobil document on 'Tomorrow’s Energy', which was published in February. As I mentioned during our meeting in July, these statements are very misleading. The "expert judgment" of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was actually based on objective and quantitative analyses and methods, including advanced statistical appraisals, which carefully accounted for the interplay of natural variability, and which have been independently reproduced.

Furthermore, these statements in your documents are not consistent with the scientific literature that has been published on this issue.

Let’s take the claims one-by-one. For those interested in the original Exxon Mobil report itself, the relevant text cited in the Royal Society letter can be found here.

Does the IPCC rely on expert judgment?

Answer = YES.

According to the IPCC instructions for preparation of reports: "Be prepared to make expert judgments and explain those by providing a traceable account of the steps used to arrive at estimates of uncertainty or confidence for key findings . . ." (PDF)

Does the IPCC distinguish between expert judgment and objective methods?

Answer = YES

From an IPCC report on presentations of uncertainty in its reports: "The [IPCC] text should distinguish between confidence statements based on well-established, "objective" findings versus those based on subjective judgments."(PDF)

Does determination of the recent warming that can be attributed to increases in greenhouse gases require expert judgment?

Answer = YES

According to Real Climate:

In public discussions there is often an emphasis on seemingly simple questions (e.g. the percentage of the current greenhouse effect associated with water vapour) that, at first sight, appear to have profound importance to the question of human effects on climate change. In the scientific community however, discussions about these 'simple' questions are often not, and have subtleties that rarely get publicly addressed.
One such question is the percentage of 20th Century warming that can be attributed to CO2 increases. This appears straightforward, but it might be rather surprising to readers that this has neither an obvious definition, nor a precise answer. I will therefore try to explain why. . . In summary, I hope I've shown that there is too much ambiguity in any exact percentage attribution for it to be particularly relevant.

Thus, was there anything factually inaccurate or inconsistent with the IPCC in the Exxon statement objected to by the Royal Society?

Answer = NO

But let’s also not overlook the obvious, was Exxon selectively presenting information from the IPCC to imply that there are uncertainties in climate science in order to sow doubt about the need for action?

Answer = YES, OF COURSE

Is the Royal Society trying to exert influence in the political process to counter Exxon’s potential influence in the political process?

Answer = YES, OF COURSE

The Royal Society’s action is thus the very essence of political behavior. This leads to two final questions.

Should the actions of the Royal Society be characterized as political actions?

Answer = YES. LET’S JUST BE OPEN ABOUT IT.

Should the Royal Society seek to "call out" Exxon for its cherrypicking?

Answer = This depends upon the role one sees for a science academy in public debate.

I personally believe that science academies should not seek to replicate the characteristics of organized interest groups for two reasons. One is that the special expertise and legitimacy of science academies give them unique potential to serve as honest brokers of policy alternatives, which are all too few in policy debates. The other is that science academies are typically funded almost entirely by public money and yet pretty much outside the political system of democratic accountability. Any particular decision on what issues to advocate for and against by such an institution will be warmly received by like-minded advocates, but in the end, such decisions represent the parochial interests of those in the organization and not necessarily reflective of broader interests. This then will have the effect of turning an institution that was meant to serve common interests into just another special interest group.

In closing, I do recognize that reasonable people can disagree on the role of science academies in public debate. But we should all be able to agree that hiding an advocacy agenda behind assertions of scientific purity is not good for either science or policy.

Posted on October 6, 2006 09:45 AM View this article | Comments (12)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science + Politics | The Honest Broker

October 05, 2006

The One Percent Doctrine

This report from the BBC on the latest international climate negotiations:

One delegate told me he thought the pace of political ambition on emissions was so slow that we had a 1,000-1 chance of avoiding dangerous climate change.
He later sent me a text message to assert that he had been overly pessimistic. The odds, he said, were only 100-1.

So when is it time to re-open for negotiation FCCC Article 2? For those wanting a bit more background on this cryptic post, please see this paper in PDF.

Posted on October 5, 2006 04:17 PM View this article | Comments (5)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty

October 04, 2006

Follow Up on NOAA Hurricane Fact Sheet

Thanks very much to those who sent me the "Dear Colleague" letter from NOAA Administrator Conrad Lautenbacher discussing the now-released NOAA fact sheet on hurricanes and climate change (here in PDF). The full letter can be seen below.

Message From the Under Secretary
October 3, 2006

Dear Colleagues,

Many of you have probably seen the latest reports concerning a document on Atlantic hurricanes and climate. I do not make it a practice to comment on every mischaracterization and falsehood in media reports.

However, reports that deal with the agency’s scientific integrity strike directly at NOAA’s mission and everything the agency does. Therefore, I believe strongly that we must confront them directly and correct them quickly.

Without the foundation of sound science, every decision, policy, and action at the agency can be called into question. Unfortunately, the mere perception of scientific stifling has the same damaging effect. As someone who believes wholeheartedly in NOAA’s mission, its people and its work, I will continue to do everything in my power to ensure that NOAA stands for scientific integrity. As I’ve stated previously, peer-reviewed science speaks for itself and doesn’t need me or anyone else to interpret or modify the results. For those of you who know me personally, you realize that I encourage and actively pursue vigorous debate on all topics, particularly including science related to NOAA’s mission.

The latest round of news reports focus on an information sheet that was being prepared for this year’s hurricane season rollout. The information sheet detailed the current state of the science on the recent increase in hurricane activity. There is currently a healthy debate in the scientific community inside and outside NOAA about whether recent increases are the result of natural cycles, climate change, or other circumstances. The information sheet was prepared and reviewed in a highly collaborative fashion by nearly 50 scientists across the entire spectrum of the debate and aimed to highlight this debate in an easy-to-understand public document.

Media reports have alleged that the document was blocked because it made a reference to work by NOAA scientists that found climate change may have an impact on increased hurricane activity. This charge is inaccurate. The information sheet summarized existing scientific research and findings and contained no new science. In fact, all the studies cited for the information sheet are publicly available on the NOAA website, making the charge that they would somehow now be suppressed all the more unfounded.

The information sheet in question has been posted on our website (PDF
document:
http://hurricanes.noaa.gov/pdf/hurricanes-and-climate-change-09-2006.pdf).
I urge you to read the document so you can judge for yourself. As I tried to make clear to the media, my hope was that this process would be an exercise in scientists with different views coming together to answer important questions. While I fear an official science policy issued by the agency might have the effect of stifling this important debate, I completely support making the public aware of the state of the science.
We have established a process for encouraging further scientific debate and developing similar information sheets and we look forward to others coming out in the near future.

I reiterate my call to you to let me know personally if you ever feel like NOAA or DOC processes are not supporting the free flow of your or your colleagues’ scientific research. Scientific integrity is critical to NOAA’s credibility.

Sincerely,

Conrad Lautenbacher's Signature
Conrad C. Lautenbacher, Jr.
Vice Admiral, U.S. Navy (Ret.)
Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and NOAA Administrator

Posted on October 4, 2006 10:32 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters | Science + Politics

Bob Ward Comments on Royal Society Letter

{I am very pleased that Bob Ward, formerly of the Royal Society, has sent in the following comment which we are happy to post. Thanks very much! RP]

I've enjoyed reading this exchange of views, particularly the discussion over the Royal Society's contribution to the debate. I thought it might help to set out some of my views, although rather belatedly. I should explain that my employment at the Royal Society ceased on 22 September - not, as some have suggested, because I was sacked but because I am moving on to a new job and had agreed my departure date about three months ago.

I'd like to give a bit of background about the ExxonMobil sag, but start with an explanation of how the Royal Society sees its role (writing as an ex-employee).

[continued]

As you probably know, the Society was founded in 1660 to promote the 'new experimental philosophy' ie that our understanding of the natural world should be based on experiment and observation rather than merely speculating about the nature of things. The Society's motto 'nullius in verba' has been translated in various ways (eg trust not in words alone, etc), but is today generally regarded as meaning that statements about science should be assessed against evidence. The Society (technically the Council of the Royal Society) has spoken out frequently, on many issues and throughout its history, when the scientific evidence is being ignored or misrepresented. It promotes debate within the scientific community and outside, but it does challenge attempts to misrepresent the evidence, for whatever reasons.

As many have pointed out, the climate change debate is not merely one of science. The question of what to do in light of the scientific evidence is essentially a societal and political one in which scientists might be able to identify the options, but have no special role in deciding which options to pursue. However, the Society has taken the view that the debate about the options should be based on authoritative and reliable assessments of the scientific evidence, as documented in the peer-reviewed literature. It is for this reason that the IPCC has the support of the Royal Society, and indeed of many of the world's other scientific academies, such as the US National Academy of Science.

Our understanding of climate change continues to develop, and this is reflected in the work of the IPCC. The Fourth Assessment Report, due for publication next year, will be able to draw on information not available for the Third Assessment, such as probabilistic assessments of future temperature changes. And of course there are some scientists who don't agree with the IPCC's assessments. But the IPCC does an excellent job of summarising the state of knowledge, taking into account the uncertainties and differences of opinion. I recommend the NAS report published in 2001 as a critical examination of the work of the IPCC.

The saga with ExxonMobil began back in April when I gave 'The Guardian' newspaper a document I had drafted about the way in which the coverage of climate change was being covered by the UK media. 'The Guardian' correctly reported that the document had, among other things, been critical of both ExxonMobil and Greenpeace for releasing information into the public domain, via their websites, that was inconsistent with the scientific evidence, as summarised by the IPCC. Both organsiations complained about being singled out. Greenpeace made changes to their website. ExxonMobil requested a meeting with me.

I met with a couple of members of the Esso UK corporate affairs team in early July. They gave me a presentation about the company's views on energy and climate change. I told them that the Society was concerned about statements in a report published in February that we considered misleading.

I also pointed out that ExxonMobil also appeared to be funding a lot of organisations that were also making misleading public statements about climate change. They then said to me that they were planning to stop such funding.

The meeting ended and nothing further happened until the end of August, when one of the people I had met with in July sent me a copy of a new report from ExxonMobil, containing almost verbatim the statements I had complained about at the meeting. So I wrote a letter pointing out why the statements were inaccurate and misleading.

I also asked about progress towards the pledge they had made about stopping funding for organisations that were providing misleading information about climate change. I went through the list of organisations that ExxonMobil listed in their 2005 contributions report and found, of those organisations with websites that included information about climate change, 25 appeared to provide information that was more or less consistent with the evidence documented in the scientific literature, but 39 did not. I also asked for a list of organsiations that they were funding in the UK and rest of Europe, since they were not listed in the ExxonMobil contributions report.

I hope this account shows that my actions weren't really hectoring or bullying anybody. All I did was challenge the statements that ExxonMobil have been promoting, directly and indirectly through its sponsorship, to the public about the scientific evidence for climate change. Surely that is a legitimate activity for an academy of science?

Posted on October 4, 2006 06:47 AM View this article | Comments (29)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

Sizing Up Bush on Science

Here is an interesting article in The Scientist on the Bush Administration.

Posted on October 4, 2006 12:54 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science + Politics

October 02, 2006

Prediction and Decision

Across a number of threads comments have arisen about the role of forecasting in decision making. Questions that have come up include:

What is a good forecast?
When should research forecasts transition to operational forecasts?
What sorts of decisions require quantitative probabilities?
In what contexts can good decisions result without accurate predictions?

It was questions like these that motivated Rad Byerly, Dan Sarewitz, and I to work on a project in the late 1990s focused on prediction. the results of this work were published in a book by Island Press in 2000, titled "Prediction."

With this post I'd like to motivate discussion on this subject, and to point to our book's concluding chapter, which may provide a useful point of departure:

Pielke Jr., R. A., D. Sarewitz and R. Byerly Jr., 2000: Decision Making and the Future of Nature: Understanding and Using Predictions. Chapter 18 in Sarewitz, D., R. A. Pielke Jr., and R. Byerly Jr., (eds.), Prediction: Science Decision Making and the Future of Nature. Island press: Washington, DC. (PDF)

See in particular Table 18.1 on p. 383 which summarizes the criteria we developed in the form of questions which might be used to "question predictions."

Comments welcomed on any of the questions raised above, and others as appropriate as well.

Posted on October 2, 2006 03:12 AM View this article | Comments (7)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Prediction and Forecasting

September 29, 2006

Some Weekend Fun

Just so we don't take ourselves too seriously around here.

Posted on September 29, 2006 11:47 PM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R.

September 28, 2006

Latest Bridges Column

The latest issue of Bridges a publication of the Office of Science and Technology of the Austrian Embassy in Washington, DC, is now online. As always Bridges provides a wide range of interesting and stimulating essays and discussions. In particular, Stefan Kalt's column on Heidegger and technology is especially interesting.

My column in this issue is titled "Self-Segregation of Scientists by Political Predispositions" and can be found online here and as a podcast here (and regular Prometheus readers will see that it draws on several earlier discussions on our blog - thanks to all who contributed!). My essay ends with some specific recommendations for scientists -- I think along the lines specifically asked for by Judy Curry recently in the comments. As always, we welcome your feedback and comments.

Posted on September 28, 2006 07:12 AM View this article | Comments (6)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | The Honest Broker

Inconvenient Truth Panel Discussion at the University of Colorado

For locals:

Al Gore's global warming movie, "An Inconvenient Truth", will be shown on Thursday, September 28 at 7 and 9:15 pm in the Muenzinger Auditorium on the CU-Boulder campus. The Energy Initiative is sponsoring a panel titled "An Inconvenient Truth: Assessing the Science and Policy Implications" immediately following the 7 pm showing in Muenzinger Room E0046. Panelists include Roger Pielke, Jr. and Lisa Dilling of CIRES, Brian Toon of LASP, and Jim White of Environmental Studies.

Admission for the movie: $5 general, $4 w/UCB student ID. Call 303-492-1531 for more info.

There is no charge for the panel discussion and you do not need to have seen the movie beforehand to attend.

Posted on September 28, 2006 01:30 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

September 27, 2006

Caught in a Lie

There is an old political maxim that it is not the event but the cover-up that gets politicians in trouble. The issue of a two-page NOAA fact sheet and the decision by leadership in NOAA and/or its parent agency, Department of Commerce, to prevent its release is yet another lesson in Politics 101.

The figure below shows a recent version of the NOAA "fact sheet." (Note that I have received multiple copies from independent sources, several of whom -- but not all -- who asked me not to post. Several, but not all, of the documents have different dates, but the differences are not substantive. I present a screen shot of a version so as not to inadvertantly reveal where it came from.)

The document is clearly prepared for public dissemination. It includes the following text that I have circled:

The purpose of this document is to respond to frequently asked questions on the topic of Atlantic hurricanes and climate. This document reflects the current state of the science, which is based on official data sets and results presented in peer-reviewed publications. It does not contain any statements of policy or positions of NOAA, the Department of Commerce or the U.S. Government.

This is obviously not a statment one would find on an internal document. The second page includes the statement at the bottom "Visit us on the web at www.noaa.gov." Surely not a request made to employees.

Compare this to how Nature yesterday (here) reported NOAA Administrator Conrad Lautenbacher's description of the document.

When asked about the document, NOAA administrator Conrad Lautenbacher told Nature that it was simply an internal exercise designed to get researchers to respect each other's points of view. He said it could not be released because the agency cannot take an official position on a field of science that is changing so rapidly.

An internal exercise? Bush Administration appointees it seems can make plenty of smoke appear even when there is no fire.

Posted on September 27, 2006 04:01 PM View this article | Comments (7)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

Revealed! NOAA's Mystery Hurricane Report

Here is in its entirety is the NOAA "report" discussed in Nature yesterday. It is in fact titled a "fact sheet" and looks more like a set of talking points than a consensus report. I do not have the figures being referred to in the text. There is absolutely nothing new or surprising in the fact sheet. Why NOAA or DOC officials would not want this released is beyond me. Have a look.

NOAA Fact Sheet: Atlantic Hurricanes and Climate

What has been Atlantic hurricane activity during the 20th Century?
• Atlantic hurricane seasons since 1995 have been significantly more active, e.g. more hurricanes and more intense hurricanes, that the previous two decades (figure 1)
• Earlier periods, such as from 1945 to 1970 (and perhaps earlier), were apparently as active as the most recent decade.
• The past decade has seen increased U.S. landfalls, however periods of even higher landfalls occurred early in the century (figure 2)
• Strong natural decadal variations, as well as changes in data quality, density, sources, and methodologies for estimating hurricane strengths, lie at the heart of arguments whether or not a global warming contribution to a trend in tropical cyclone intensities can be detected.

How have ocean temperatures varied?
• Over the 20th Century, global ocean temperatures and sea surface temperatures in the main development region (MDR) for hurricanes in the tropical Atlantic, (and Gulf of Mexico) have warmed at similar rates, indicating a role for global warming in these regions. (Figure 3)
• Anomalous MDR, tropical Atlantic temperatures were significantly warmer than the global average from about 1930 to 1970 and after 2000 . This warming is attributed to the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO)
What factors influence seasonal to multi-decadal hurricane activity
• Hurricanes respond to a variety of environmental factors besides local ocean temperatures.
• The tropical multi-decadal phenomenon and the El Nino/La Nina cycle are important factors in determining the conditions for seasonal to multi-decadal extremes in hurricane activity.
• Research indicates that global warming can also increase hurricane intensities; there is less evidence for impacts on frequency.

How long will the current active period last?
• Scientists disagree as to whether currently a sound basis exists for making projections on how long the current active period will last. The viewpoints are:
o Limited understanding of natural decadal variability, combined with its irregular temporal behavior, preclude definitive statements about how long the active period will last. (NOAA)
o One might expect ongoing high levels of hurricane activity and U.S. landfalls for the next decade and beyond since the previous active period (1945-1970) lasted at least 25 years. (NOAA)
o Because of global warming the active period could persist
Programs of improvements to data sets, diagnostic studies for improved understanding, and systematic numerical experimentation studies will help to reveal the underlying causes for the recent active period and to predict how long the period of increased activity will last. NOAA is actively engaged in each of these activities.

Key Problems NOAA is working on
• Understanding the dynamics of the AMO, its links to the larger-scale tropical climate variability, and developing an ocean monitoring and decadal prediction capability
• Improving the quality and scope of hurricane relevant data sets
• Numerically simulating and ultimately understanding seasonal to decadal hurricane variability
• Understanding whether or not and to what degree anthropogenic forcing is having an influence on hurricanes
• Developing a predictive understanding of global climate variability and trends and the impacts of these on extreme events
• Making improvements to short range hurricane track and intensity forecasts through improved models and development of additional capabilities for hurricanes.

NOAA Resources for Additional Information

• NWS/NCEP/CPC – intraseasonal to multi-season climate forecasts; seasonal hurricane forecasts; diagnostic studies of major climate anomalies; real time monitoring of climate.

• NWS/NCEP/TPC/NHC – issue daily and seasonal (in conjunction with CPC and HRD) operational hurricane forecasts; maintain and update the official Atlantic and Northeast Pacific hurricane databases from which observational climate studies are conducted

• NESDIS/NCDC – official archive for climate data sets; development of global tropical cyclone databases, analysis of historical frequency and strength of Atlantic Basin hurricanes to support engineering design and levee rebuilding in New Orleans, analyses of climate trends, monitoring and historical perspective on current seasons.

• OAR/AOML/HRD & PHoD – physical understanding of hurricane dynamics through use of research aircraft and field studies; improvements to hurricane track and intensity forecasts; monitoring of Atlantic ocean circulations; studies of Atlantic climate

• OAR/GFDL – studies of climate variability and change; development and use of the required climate models; development of models used for operational hurricane forecasts by NOAA and the NAVY; numerical studies of climate impacts on hurricanes and their decadal variability

• OAR/ESRL – diagnostic studies of climate variability and changes; impacts of climate on extreme events.

• NOAA Climate Office – intramural and extramural support for development of a predictive understanding of the climate system, the required observational capabilities, delivery of climate services.

Posted on September 27, 2006 08:21 AM View this article | Comments (13)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

September 26, 2006

NOAA's Mystery Hurricane Report

According to Nature today last spring NOAA convened an internal seven-person team to prepare a consensus report for public release on hurricanes and global warming. According to press reports (e.g., here), the near final report's release was halted in May by (a) Department of Commerce political appointee(s).

I'd like to get the facts straight on this, as they are quite unclear in the media. I'd welcome hearing from anyone with firsthand knowledge of these events. We'd be happy to post a copy of the report as well, anonymity guaranteed.

As far as the science of hurricanes, it is safe to conclude that the mystery report has to be a synthesis of recent work that is publicly available, rather than any new science. What is more troubling to me is how the political ham-handedness (if not worse) of NOAA and its Bush Adminstration handlers works against effective hurricane policy and climate policy. Consider the following statement for the AP news report:

The possibility of global warming affecting hurricanes is politically sensitive because the administration has resisted proposals to restrict release of gases that can cause warming conditions.

The reality, as documented in numerous papers and disucssions here and elsewhere, is that greenhouse gases cannot be an effective tool of hurricane policy. So long as advocates against action on greenhouse gases inside the Administration pretend that there is a linkage between future energy policies and future hurricane impacts by micromanaging information on hurricanes, people unfamiliar with the current state of hurricane science and policy, or those looking for a political bludgeon, will easily conclude something like the following:

"There must be a big connection between changes in energy policies and future hurricane impacts, or else why would the Bush Administration try to supress information? Becuase if there is no evidence of a future connection then NOAA and Bush officials must just be stupid by acting as if there is, right?"

I am quite familiar with recent debates on hurricanes, and frequent readers know that I believe that there is an honest, unsettled debate going on. My own research shows that any action on energy policies cannot have a discernible effect on hurricane impacts as far as the eye can see, so you can guess how I'd answer that last question.

Posted on September 26, 2006 07:23 PM View this article | Comments (8)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

To Limit Choice or Expand Choice?

In a paper out yesterday, NASA's Jim Hansen recognizes the difference between a scientist serving as an issue advocate versus as an honest broker of policy alternatives when he writes (PDF):

Inference of imminent dangerous climate change may stimulate discussion of "engineering fixes" to reduce global warming. The notion of such a "fix" is itself dangerous if it diminishes efforts to reduce CO2 emissions, yet it also would be irresponsible not to consider all ways to minimize climate change.

So which is it? Dangerous or irresponsible? Should scientists openly discuss all ways to minimize climate change, including little-mentioned technologies like air capture? Or should scientists seek to limit research agendas in order to take some options off the table and privledge others in political debate?

It can't be both ways at the same time. Should scientists seek to limit choice or expand choice?

Posted on September 26, 2006 01:51 PM View this article | Comments (11)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | The Honest Broker

Follow Up on Royal Society Letter

Last week we discussed a letter from the Royal Society to ExxonMobil. The interesting discussion that followed focused on the role of scientists in general and national academies specifically in contested political issues that involve science. The issue continues to devleop. Apparently, according to Benny Peiser, the author of the Royal Society letter to ExxonMobil is no longer employed by the Royal Society. The Royal Soceity has not said anything publicly that I am aware of -- eagle-eyed readers please share what you learn.

David Whitehouse, formerly with the BBC, has shared another letter with Benny Peiser, which Benny included in his CCNet mailing list today. I have reproduced Dr. Whitehouse's letter below which provides an overview and analysis of the events of the past week.

Dear Benny,

I confess to having pulled the occasional media stunt in my time (all in the cause of good journalism of course) to get a story aired but I think that the climate change debate over the past week is a good example of how manipulating the media can result in unexpected consequences for those who hang on to the tail of this particular tiger, and frankly how some people ought to be a bit more accurate when they pontificate to the public.

As far as I can see it went like this:

Tuesday 19th September.

Posted on George Monbiot's website and the Guardian's website
(http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2006/09/19/the-smoke-behind-the-deniers
-fire-3/) was a column which reported that the Royal Society had had enough of those spreading misinformation about climate change. Monbiot adds, "As I reveal on Newsnight (a BBC TV Current Affairs Programme) tonight, the Society has now attempted to strike at the heart of this campaign by sending its first official letter of complaint to a corporation - the oil company Exxon. And yesterday its president, Lord Rees, sent the Telegraph what must be one of the most damning letters it has ever received."

However, Monbiot's polemic did not air on Newsnight on Tuesday but went out on Wednesday instead. Personally, I thought it was sloppy and lacked intellectual rigour. It was what is termed an "authored" piece which means it is a personal view and not dictated by the BBC's standards of fairness and impartiality. Nethertheless, Exxon's request to have a similar time to put its case was turned down by Newsnight. Monbiot's piece included a brief interview with Bob Ward, filmed at the Royal Society. It was followed by a fruitless discussion hosted by Jeremy Paxman between a scientist and a representative of a US lobby group. The most memorable thing about it was Paxman's repeatedly telling the American chap that "you are not a
scientist." I was rather disappointed not to see an interview with Lord Rees about his letter to the Telegraph.

Oh, by the way, Monbiot has a book to plug, "Heat - How to Stop the Planet Burning." (I think the title is all I need to know but I will read it.)

Now I wonder if the fact that Monbiot's Newsnight rant was a day later than he said it would be upset the choreography of this story's emergence?

Wednesday 20th September.

The front page of the Guardian carried details of the now infamous letter by Bob Ward (Senior Manager, Policy Communication, Royal Society) referred to in Monbiot's column which was sent to Exxon on 4th September. The Guardian Science Podcast available later described this story as an 'exclusive!' On the front page the Guardian mentioned no qualms about the ethics of the Royal Society's actions.

On the BBC Today radio programme that morning there was a discussion about GM technology that involved Lord May, former Chief Scientific Advisor to H.M. Government and past President of the Royal Society. After this debate the presenter asked him about the Guardian story. To my mind Lord May's response was extraordinary and demonstrated the problem in the debate. I wasn't impressed by his accuracy.

Lord May said that in 2005 the science academies of the G8 nations plus India, China and Brazil said that the "basic facts of climate change are certain." Actually they did no such thing. As Bob Ward pointed out in his letter to Exxon what the G8+ actually said was "it is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities." To my mind the words "likely" and "most" do not equate with certainty. Lord May went on to chastise those who "misrepresent the certainties of science" presumably unaware that he had done exactly that! [For reference the IPCC say the same thing - "most of the global warming over the past 50 years is likely due to the increase in greenhouse gases - note the key words "most" and "likely."]

Lord May went on to say that the fact that "humans are changing the climate" is as certain as gravitation or evolution. I find this statement surprising even though it is an obvious one as it is recognised by all that humans are changing the climate - what is in debate is the question is the magnitude of the change. Then a spokesman for Exxon, Nick Thomas (Director Public Affairs Exxon) was brought into the discussion who stated Exxon's position which, to my mind, sounded like a fair summary of the G8+ position and the IPCC position (we agree that the word is warming, that CO2 concentrations are increasing, that glaciers are shrinking and that CO2 emissions are certainly one of the contributors to climate change, we recognise man's activities are responsible for climate change.) This statement didn't quite go as far as many would wish but, given the uncertainties in the science, it was OK, I thought.

But Lord May was unconvinced. He maintained that this contradicted the US National Academy of Sciences and that what he had heard from Nick Thomas was a "misrepresentation of the facts." Having listened to the exchange several times I have to say I think Lord May is wrong about that.

The Guardian story aired on BBC News TV throughout the day (Wednesday 20th) pretty much in the form that the Guardian had used, i.e. the Royal Society - upholder of the consensus - had had enough of lies and misinformation spread by the likes of a big bad energy company like Exxon. There the story would perhaps have lain except for the next edition of the BBC's Today radio programme.

Thursday 21st September.

The Today programme asked if the Royal Society was right to police the scientific consensus this way. Bob Ward defended his actions. You can read the transcript of that discussion in a recent CCNet.

Later.

The coverage thereafter was different, as those who have read CCNet in recent days have seen. Dominic Lawson writing in the Independent on the 22nd wondered if the release of the Royal Society's letter on the 20th was anything to do with Monbiot's book?

Heaven forfend, Bob Ward wrote in a letter to the Independent on the 25th in which he says, "I can absolutely refute Lawson's laughable suggestion that it (presumable the letter) was part of a campaign to promote George Monbiot's new book."

I think this is another example of the sleight of hand that Bob Ward employed in his letter to Exxon. Even if the initial impetus for the letter had nothing to do with Monbiot, it is surely stretching belief beyond credulity that its appearance on the front page of the Guardian at the same time as Monbiot's column and Newsnight piece was unrelated!

So what was achieved?

Bob Ward made the big mistake of writing such a letter to Exxon in completely the wrong way, allowing it to be made public and becoming the topic of discussion. When a senior manager of policy communication becomes the story and not the policy itself, it is, as Alistair Campbell discovered, not a good thing. The Royal Society looks bad having tried to enforce a consensus even though, as many have pointed out, they must have been aware of the role of consensus in science. It also looks bad having sent such disgraceful (and counterproductive) letters to journalists. We also learnt that even those authorities who have scaled the august heights of science and are laden with honours are not immune to being sloppy with the facts and with a false impression of the "certainties of science."

But perhaps the cause of science has been advanced during this week for it has forced a discussion and appraisal of how so-called sceptics are being treated in this important debate and steered the global warming debate towards a scientific course and away from the rocky shoals of you are either for us or against us. It has made many examine the role of the Royal Society in scientific debate and public relations and, perhaps most importantly, once again we have been reminded that as far a science is concerned being an authority, individual or corporate, ultimately means little.

Also Monbiot does have some words of wisdom one can take away from this mess: "Be wary of self-appointed experts." Exactly.

David Whitehouse

Posted on September 26, 2006 07:21 AM View this article | Comments (25)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science Policy: General

September 25, 2006

Thoughts on an Immediate Freeze on Carbon Dioxide Emissions

Last week I discussed Al Gore’s call for an “immediate freeze” on U.S. carbon dioxide emissions. I dismissed this as being in the realm of fantasy, but the notion of freezing U.S. carbon dioxide emissions motivated me to investigate the issue a bit further. The following data and analyses report what I’ve learned.

Data on projected carbon dioxide emissions is available from the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) here (xls). It is presented in tons of carbon dioxide so it needs to be converted to tons of carbon (divide by 3.664). In 2006 the U.S. is projected to emit 1.63 gigatons of carbon (GtC). This is projected to increase to 2.21 GtC by 2030. EIA projections go to 2030, so that is what I use below.

What accounts for this increase? There are two important factors. One is the projected increase in U.S. population and the other is the projected increase in per capita emissions. I gathered data on projected population increases from the U.S. Census here (xls) and data on projected per capita carbon dioxide emissions here (pdf). I also gathered data on projected immigration from the Congressional Budget Office here (pdf) (note that in the calculations below I use the Social Security Administration’s Intermediate projections). These various data allow the projections to be disaggregated. Here is what I found.

U.S. Carbon Dioxide Emissions 2007-2030

Projected population growth accounts for 64% of the increased U.S. carbon emissions.

Of this growth 40.5% comes from births in the U.S. and 23.5% comes from immigration (i.e., 40.5 + 23.5 = 64).

The remaining 36% comes from an increase in the per capita production of carbon dioxide which EIA estimates to increase by 11% by 2030. (Note that the per capita increase is not included in the above estimates of the effects of population growth. If included they raise the values by about 2.9% -- 43.4% -- and 1.1% -- 24.6% -- respectively).

How much carbon emissions are we talking about under an immediate U.S. freeze?

The accumulated U.S. emissions in excess of its 2006 value 2007-2030 equal 7.0 GtC. What would it mean to global carbon emissions if the United States were in fact frozen at their 2006 levels? In 2030 accumulated global emissions would be 228 GtC versus 235 GtC (world data here in xls).

But let’s go further, what if the United States were to become immediately carbon neutral starting in 2007? Through 2030 accumulated global carbon emissions would then be 189.0 GtC. In 2030 global emissions would be 9.72 GtC, or about equivalent to what the world is projected to see with the U.S. under business-as-usual in 2018.

What to conclude from all of this? Here are a few things:

1. The majority of increasing emissions in the United States comes from its population growth. About 37% of this increase (i.e., 23.5/64) is due to emissions from immigration. It is not inaccurate to say that through immigration the United States is "offsetting" the emissions from other parts of the world to some degree, since their net emissions will decrease to to emigration. But it is also true that most (if not all) immigrants are coming to the U.S. from countries with far lower per capita emissions, so there is a net increase in global emissions from immigration to the U.S. Of course, the factors which lead the U.S. to such high emissions in the first place are what drive much of the motivation for immigration. Will policy makers talk of stopping immigration as a climate policy? I doubt it, but it is interesting to consider.

2. Per capita increases in carbon emissions, at 11% by 2030 seem quite small and in principle could be relatively easily addressed through improvements in efficiency. Transfer and adoption of many European practices to the U.S. would I think be more than sufficient to meet an 11% goal.

3. An immediate freeze of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, even if possible, would have exceedingly little effect on the overall challenge of reducing global carbon emissions. It would reduce the accumulated global total by 2030 by about 3% and delay any projected effects of climate change by about 6 months.

4. If we go to the extreme and assume that the U.S. becomes carbon neutral in 2007, this would have a clearly discernible effect on accumulated emissions but really wouldn’t much change the overall challenge of reducing global carbon emissions. If the U.S. were carbon neutral starting in 2007 then it would reduce the accumulated global total by 2030 by about 20% and delay any of the projected effects of climate change by about 12 years. The relative importance of the U.S. as a contributor of to carbon dioxide emissions is projected to decrease from 21.9% of global annual emissions in 2006 to 18.6% in 2030.

All of the projections above from EIA, Census, SSA, and CBO are made in the face of considerable uncertainties. For example, this recent paper (in PDF and peer-reviewed journal version) suggests that, under some scenarios, demographic factors may in fact lead to a decrease in U.S. per capita emissions as the population ages.

Whatever the future holds, it is clear from this data that while the United States is the largest contributor to carbon dioxide emissions, it nonetheless produces a small share of total global emissions. Given that the majority of its emissions come from its growing population, this places the U.S. at a disadvantage with countries with slower rates of population growth when emissions reductions are accounted on a national basis (discussed here). A continued discussion of climate policy in terms of nations seems to be more divisive than anything else from the standpoint of policy development. Politically, however, the focus on the U.S. does serve a function in both domestic and international politics and in my view goes far beyond the issues related to climate change.

Posted on September 25, 2006 09:58 AM View this article | Comments (7)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

September 22, 2006

Prometheus Class Assignment

A university class with about 90 students has been assigned Prometheus, and several other weblogs, as part of its reading assignments this semester. Welcome! The course instructor has emailed me to ask if I would write up a short note about what purpose our weblog serves and to offer some pointers to a few key posts on various topics. This seems like a worthwhile exercise, so here goes.

Prometheus began as a term project of a student, Shep Ryen, who like many of our student since graduated has gone on to power and influence ;-) He named it, came up with the design, and got it off to a running start. We have always seen Prometheus as taking advantage of the blog format to create a place where we can discuss a wide range of issues of science and technology policy. In practice, the site focuses on the subjects on which its contributors write about. I’ve been the most active blogger and since a lot of my work focuses on climate policy (and climate science policy), many of my posts wind up on climate policy issues. A recurring interest of mine, and subject of a forthcoming book, is the role of scientists in policy and politics.

We never anticipated a wide readership, being a niche subject area that sometimes delves into the minutia of science-policy issues. But we do have what I have often characterized as the best commenters in the blogoshpere on any site on any subject. In the comments you’ll find leading academics, reporters, policy makers, and informed general readers. The comments are a tremendous asset and by themselves worth the effort to run the blog. Not everyone agrees with everything written here, and that is I think a compelling strength of the dialogue.

The blog serves many purposes. It obviously serves an outreach function, helping us to promote our Center’s research. It serves as a resource where we’d like to store ideas and references. It serves as a test drive facility for ideas and arguments. It serves as a salon where we can engage in meaningful conversations and learn from each other. It serves as a place where people who disagree on topics, like hockey sticks or hurricanes, have engaged one another directly or indirectly. It also serves as a resource where we can focus attention on issues of science in society, a topical area that does not have too many venues for such open discussion that the blog format is ideally suited for. In short it serves a lot of purposes, and we continue to do it because it has been rewarding for us.

Some specific links requested for the class:

My publications: Here.

About me: Here.

On the hockey stick debate

Is the “Hockey Stick” Debate Relevant to Policy? 17 May 2005

On The Hockey Stick 6 July 2005

Invitation to McIntyre and Mann - So What? 31 October 2005

Challenge Update 1 November 2005

Does the hockey stick "matter"? 14 November 2005 Post by Steve McIntyre

Why Does the Hockey Stick Debate Matter? 14 November 2005 Post by Ross McKitrick

Reflections on the Challenge 21 November 2005

For the full list of "hockey stick" posts, including more recent stuff on the congressional hearings, Wegman and NRC reports, please search the site for "hockey stick."

On the hurricane debate

The Other Hockey Stick 22 August 2005

Consensus Statement on Hurricanes and Global Warming 21 February 2006

Forbidden Fruit: Justifying Energy Policy via Hurricane Mitigation15 March 2006

Climate and Societal Factors in Future Tropical Cyclone Damages in the ABI Reports 24 April 2006

More Peer-Reviewed Discussion on Hurricanes and Climate Change 15 May 2006

Scientific Leadership on Hurricanes and Global Warming 25 July 2006

And there is a ton of stuff not linked here, just search the site for "hurricanes."

Posted on September 22, 2006 09:41 AM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Education

September 21, 2006

David Whitehouse on Royal Society Efforts to Censor

David Whitehouse is a former online science editor for the BBC. He has sent a letter to Benny Peiser, a prominent climate provocateur from the University of Liverpool who oversees the CCNet mailing list. Benny included Dr. Whitehouse’s correspondence on the Royal Society’s letter to ExxonMobil (PDF) in his compilation yesterday (Guardian story here). There is also apparently a second letter from the Royal Society to journalists, asking them to ignore people with perspectives outside the IPCC consensus.

Let me say in no uncertain terms that in my opinion the actions by the Royal Society are inconsistent with the open and free exchange of ideas, as well as the democratic notion of free speech. Here in the U.S. we have recently won a battle to allow scientists employed by government to speak freely even if their views are inconvenient to the current Administration. Such lessons should work in all directions. The Royal Society is seeking to use the authority of science to limit open debate. This is not, to put it delicately, the most effective use of scientific authority in political debates. Climate scientists and advocates confident of their positions should welcome any and all challengers, and smack them down with the power of their arguments, not the weight of their influence or authority. A strategy based on stifling debate is sure to backfire, not just on the climate issue, but for the scientific enterprise as a whole.

Here is Dr. Whitehouse’s letter, which I endorse 100%:

Dear Benny,
I wonder if I am not alone in finding something rather ugly and unscientific about the letter the Royal Society has sent to EssoUK (part of Exxon). It is reproduced in today's Guardian newspaper.

It demands EssoUK stop giving money to groups and organisations who do not believe that human activities are totally responsible for global warming. It also asks EssoUK to provide details of all the groups it funds so that the Royal Society can track them down and vet them, "so that I can work out which of these have been similarly providing inaccurate and misleading information to the public," the letter says.

My disquiet about this is nothing to do with the status of the debate about anthropogenic global warming but about the nature of the debate and the role of the Royal Society in it and the sending of such a hectoring and bullying letter demanding adherence to the scientific consensus.

Theories come and go. Some become fact, others do not. As scientists our ultimate loyalty is not to theory but to reason and to open enquiry even when some think it ill judged. We should value that above all and I am surprised the Royal Society is acting this way. Einstein once said, "Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth."

However the Royal Society sees its role in debates about science, is it appropriate that it should be using its authority to judge and censor in this way?

Yours sincerely,

Dr David Whitehouse

Posted on September 21, 2006 12:08 AM View this article | Comments (107)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | The Honest Broker

September 19, 2006

Al Gore on Climate Policy

Al Gore gave a major speech on climate policy yesterday at NYU. Here are some excerpts and my reactions:

On the nature of climate policy debates:

Merely engaging in high-minded debates about theoretical future reductions while continuing to steadily increase emissions represents a self-delusional and reckless approach. In some ways, that approach is worse than doing nothing at all, because it lulls the gullible into thinking that something is actually being done when in fact it is not.

I could not agree more.

On what we should do first:

Well, first of all, we should start by immediately freezing CO2 emissions and then beginning sharp reductions. . . An immediate freeze has the virtue of being clear, simple, and easy to understand. It can attract support across partisan lines as a logical starting point for the more difficult work that lies ahead.

This seems to be in the realm of fantasy. Carbon dioxide emissions cannot simply be "frozen." This seems like exactly the sort of "high-minded debate about theoretical future reductions" that he just warned us about.

On international climate policy:

A responsible approach to solving this crisis would also involve joining the rest of the global economy in playing by the rules of the world treaty that reduces global warming pollution by authorizing the trading of emissions within a global cap.
At present, the global system for carbon emissions trading is embodied in the Kyoto Treaty. It drives reductions in CO2 and helps many countries that are a part of the treaty to find the most efficient ways to meet their targets for reductions. It is true that not all countries are yet on track to meet their targets, but the first targets don’t have to be met until 2008 and the largest and most important reductions typically take longer than the near term in any case.

The absence of the United States from the treaty means that 25% of the world economy is now missing. It is like filling a bucket with a large hole in the bottom. When the United States eventually joins the rest of the world community in making this system operate well, the global market for carbon emissions will become a highly efficient closed system and every corporate board of directors on earth will have a fiduciary duty to manage and reduce CO2 emissions in order to protect shareholder value.

This is misleading. The Kyoto "bucket" is full of holes, and not just from those countries that are not participating. Most European countries are failing to meet their targets under the treaty. To suggest that if the United States joins the Kyoto Protocol it will lead to an "efficient closed system" fails to mention that most of expected future emissions are not covered by Kyoto and that there are no plans for them to be.

On the practical actions needed:

Third, a responsible approach to solutions would avoid the mistake of trying to find a single magic "silver bullet" and recognize that the answer will involve what Bill McKibben has called "silver-buckshot" - numerous important solutions, all of which are hard, but no one of which is by itself the full answer for our problem.
One of the most productive approaches to the "multiple solutions" needed is a road-map designed by two Princeton professors, Rob Socolow and Steven Pacala, which breaks down the overall problem into more manageable parts. Socolow and Pacala have identified 15 or 20 building blocks (or "wedges") that can be used to solve our problem effectively - even if we only use 7 or 8 of them. I am among the many who have found this approach useful as a way to structure a discussion of the choices before us.

Gore repeats which has become a common myth – that if we reduce emissions by 7 or 8 of Socolow and Pacala’s "wedges" we will "solve the problem effectively." This is incredibly misleading and grossly oversimplifies the challenge of stabilizing carbon dioxide emissions. We discussed this at length here.

On particularly promising options:

First, dramatic improvements in the efficiency with which we generate, transport and use energy will almost certainly prove to be the single biggest source of sharp reductions in global warming pollution. . .
To take another example, many older factories use obsolete processes that generate prodigious amounts of waste heat that actually has tremendous economic value. By redesigning their processes and capturing all of that waste, they can eliminate huge amounts of global warming pollution while saving billions of dollars at the same time. . .

. . . we should develop a distributed electricity and liquid fuels distribution network that is less dependent on large coal-fired generating plants and vulnerable oil ports and refineries.

Small windmills and photovoltaic solar cells distributed widely throughout the electricity grid would sharply reduce CO2 emissions and at the same time increase our energy security. Likewise, widely dispersed ethanol and biodiesel production facilities would shift our transportation fuel stocks to renewable forms of energy while making us less dependent on and vulnerable to disruptions in the supply of expensive crude oil from the Persian Gulf, Venezuela and Nigeria, all of which are extremely unreliable sources upon which to base our future economic vitality. It would also make us less vulnerable to the impact of a category 5 hurricane hitting coastal refineries or to a terrorist attack on ports or key parts of our current energy infrastructure. . .

. . . A second group of building blocks to solve the climate crisis involves America’s transportation infrastructure. We could further increase the value and efficiency of a distributed energy network by retooling our failing auto giants - GM and Ford - to require and assist them in switching to the manufacture of flex-fuel, plug-in, hybrid vehicles. . .

Shifting to a greater reliance on ethanol, cellulosic ethanol, butanol, and green diesel fuels will not only reduce global warming pollution and enhance our national and economic security, it will also reverse the steady loss of jobs and income in rural America. Several important building blocks for America’s role in solving the climate crisis can be found in new approaches to agriculture. . .

Similarly, we should take bold steps to stop deforestation and extend the harvest cycle on timber to optimize the carbon sequestration that is most powerful and most efficient with older trees. . .

His best line:

It is, in other words, time for a national oil change. That is apparent to anyone who has looked at our national dipstick.

On nuclear power:

Many believe that a responsible approach to sharply reducing global warming pollution would involve a significant increase in the use of nuclear power plants as a substitute for coal-fired generators. While I am not opposed to nuclear power and expect to see some modest increased use of nuclear reactors, I doubt that they will play a significant role in most countries as a new source of electricity. The main reason for my skepticism about nuclear power playing a much larger role in the world’s energy future is not the problem of waste disposal or the danger of reactor operator error, or the vulnerability to terrorist attack. Let’s assume for the moment that all three of these problems can be solved. That still leaves two serious issues that are more difficult constraints. The first is economics; the current generation of reactors is expensive, take a long time to build, and only come in one size - extra large. In a time of great uncertainty over energy prices, utilities must count on great uncertainty in electricity demand - and that uncertainty causes them to strongly prefer smaller incremental additions to their generating capacity that are each less expensive and quicker to build than are large 1000 megawatt light water reactors. Newer, more scalable and affordable reactor designs may eventually become available, but not soon. Secondly, if the world as a whole chose nuclear power as the option of choice to replace coal-fired generating plants, we would face a dramatic increase in the likelihood of nuclear weapons proliferation. During my 8 years in the White House, every nuclear weapons proliferation issue we dealt with was connected to a nuclear reactor program. Today, the dangerous weapons programs in both Iran and North Korea are linked to their civilian reactor programs. Moreover, proposals to separate the ownership of reactors from the ownership of the fuel supply process have met with stiff resistance from developing countries who want reactors. As a result of all these problems, I believe that nuclear reactors will only play a limited role.

Gore’s technological optimism on just about every other area of climate change policy does not square with his technological pessimism about nuclear power. My guess – and it is only an uninformed guess – is that Gore’s views on nuclear power provide the strongest signal that he is positioning himself for a run at the Presidency in 2008. His views on nuclear power seem carefully crafted so as not to offend his base of political support. Otherwise, why wouldn’t he call in grand fashion (as he has in every other area) for solving the problems of nuclear power that accompany its abundant carbon free energy? If we can freeze carbon dioxide levels we can sure keep nuclear material safe.

On coal:

The most important set of problems by that must be solved in charting solutions for the climate crisis have to do with coal, one of the dirtiest sources of energy that produces far more CO2 for each unit of energy output than oil or gas. . . Fortunately, there may be a way to capture the CO2 produced as coal as burned and sequester it safely to prevent it from adding to the climate crisis. It is not easy. This technique, known as carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is expensive and most users of coal have resisted the investments necessary to use it. However, when the cost of not using it is calculated, it becomes obvious that CCS will play a significant and growing role as one of the major building blocks of a solution to the climate crisis.

Here we see the technological optimism that is absent in his views on nuclear power.

On adaptation:

Absolutely nothing.

Posted on September 19, 2006 08:01 AM View this article | Comments (13)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

September 18, 2006

Carbon Dioxide Emissions at Stake in the EPA Lawsuit

I put this in the comments of an earlier thread, but I thought worth highlighting as well. What are potential effects of EPA regulation of carbon dioxide from automobiles?

Taking a look at data from the US EIA (here):

It projects out to 2030 that the accumulated global carbon dioxide emissions will be 235 GtC. It also projects that of this total about 15 GtC will come from the use of petroleum in the United States. Let's assume all of this comes from cars. Lets further assume the EPA regulates carbon dioxide such that no emissions are allowed.

This would reduce the global total emissions of carbon dioxide from 235 to 220 GtC by 2030 (assuming regulations start January 1, 2007). (The ratio presumably gets smaller further into the future as global emissions are projected t increase faster than US auto emisssions.) I don't think that current climate models are able to differentate bewteen a world with these two values of carbon dioxide emissions, much less predict how one might be different than another.

In short the effects of EPA regulation would likely be nil. So is the lawsuit about publicity? Compelling U.S. participation in an international agreement? Because it sure does not look like it is about reducing the impacts of carbon dioxide on anything perceptible in the United States.

What have I missed?

Posted on September 18, 2006 05:42 PM View this article | Comments (21)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

September 15, 2006

Michael Griffin on Science in NASA

Here (in PDF) is a refreshingly blunt speech from NASA Administrator Michael Griffin on recent issues of science in NASA. No bureaucratic mombo-jumbo here. Here are some choice excerpts:

On science as a priority:

I have on many occasions heard the accusation that NASA has betrayed the scientific community because, it is said, the Vision for Space Exploration was "sold" as being "affordable", to be “go as you can pay”. To many scientists, that means very explicitly that Exploration is to be funded after, and only after, all prior science commitments were satisfied. The idea seems to be that, after we've done JWST, Europa, SIM, TPF, and every other mission in the pre-VSE NASA budget, then and only then can we embark upon renewed human Exploration of deep space. Well, that is simply not how it works. "Affordable" does not mean that all of Science is of higher priority than anything in Exploration. The programs above were approved in an earlier time, with different budget assumptions for NASA. There have been very significant budget cuts and many unplanned requirements for funding since the Vision for Space Exploration was announced. The impact of those cuts cannot fall to any single entity in NASA's portfolio. “Go as you can pay” applies to all of NASA, not just to isolated pieces of its portfolio.

On exploration having intrinsic and economic benefits apart from science:

But, as always, there is another view, best and most tersely captured by the President’s Science Advisor, Jack Marburger, in his March '06 speech at the AAS Goddard Symposium. Jack noted that the Vision for Space Exploration is fundamentally about bringing the resources of the solar system within the economic sphere of mankind. It is not fundamentally about scientific discovery. To me, Marburger’s statement is precisely right.
So a key point must be made: Exploration without science is not "tourism". It is far more than that. It is about the expansion of human activity out beyond the Earth. Exactly this point was very recently noted and endorsed by no less than Stephen Hawking, a pure scientist if ever there was one. Hawking joins those, including the Chairman of the NASA Advisory Council, who have long pointed out this basic truth: The history of life on Earth is the history of extinction events, and human expansion into the Solar System is, in the end, fundamentally about the survival of the species. So to me exploration is, in and of itself, equally as noble a human endeavor as is scientific discovery.

On complaints about NASA’s spending priorities:

Finally, there is the issue of control. Many members of the scientific community fully understand that the President and Congress have made decisions about the Shuttle and ISS programs that will not be undone. They understand that the proportion of funding at NASA that goes to SMD is at an historic high, and that they should pocket their gains over the last decade and remain quiet, lest someone notice! They understand that NASA is unlikely to grow in real terms, and that therefore many projects which all of us would like to do earlier, will in fact be done later. They get all of that.
The problem is that these folks do understand these real-world limitations, and in a world with such limitations, they want to be in charge of the distribution of resources. Put bluntly, they want to exercise the inherent authority of government to decide what is being done with the money which is available for science at NASA, but without having to come to Washington, put on a NASA badge, make all the associated sacrifices, and live with the consequences of their decisions, which mostly means that when you decide to do one thing, you are also deciding not to do something else that someone else would like to do, and you have to be publicly accountable for that fact.

On scientists as advisors to NASA:

Some of these external folks really seem to believe that NASA program selection and planning should be vetted through “the community" for approval. It is one thing to say that, broadly, we should be guided by the decadal plans of the NAS, the organization to which Congress looks for strategic advice in such matters. I emphatically support this view, while also being of the belief that sometimes, circumstances change on time scales shorter than a decade, and also that sometimes good advice comes from other directions. But it is another thing entirely to suggest that "the community" has an inherent right to review and modify our annual budget. To me, one of the most disturbing aspects of this practice is that the very same people who stand to benefit from particular distributions of NASA funding would be advising NASA as to what those distributions ought to be.
Let us for a moment consider the situation in the abstract. The market for scientific goods and services, while dominated in the space sciences by the government, is nonetheless a market like any other. So, each year the President and Congress (mostly upon the advice of scientists) determine that the pursuit of certain goals in space and Earth science is in the best interests of the United States. Each year, the Congress approves the purchase, through NASA, of scientific goods and services to that end. As with most markets, there are more parties desiring to provide such products than can be procured, and so a variety of closely supervised competitive procurement mechanisms are employed to determine the successful suppliers of these products. Thus, from a legal, contractual, and managerial perspective, members of the external scientific community are suppliers to NASA, not customers.

My point is that if we were to substitute above any other noun besides “science”, the inherent conflict between the role of the scientific community as a purveyor of products to the government, and its role as the primary source of advice as to which products the government should purchase, would not be tolerated. Yet, the scientific community simply must be involved if we are to set intelligent priorities among the nation’s various scientific goals. The whole process is ethically defensible if, and only if, a proper “arm’s length” separation is maintained between advisors and implementers

On NASA scientists seeking to influence the advisory process:

. . . it was my observation that NASA managers have sometimes used these advisory committees to assist in shaping the direction of our programs to a degree that I find unseemly, in view of the inherent potential for conflicts that I have outlined above, and in a manner tending to reduce responsibility and accountability on the part of NASA officials.

On the distinction between advice and authority:

How many of you present here today, and who are organizational managers at any level, would appreciate external advisors – or even other managers – bypassing you to provide “tactical” advice to those who report to you? Any takers for this approach to organizational governance? And if not, would it make a difference if the staff members and the advisors are “scientists” as opposed to other employees?
Moving on, it has also been alleged that, in reshaping the advisory committee reporting structure, I am “preventing scientists from talking to scientists". This is also nonsense. As far as I am concerned, anyone can talk to anyone, and probably should! I desperately hope that the staff of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate converses widely and frequently within the community. The NASA scientific staff absolutely must be of the scientific community, and active in it, to be effective in the planning and execution of their work. But the rendering of formal advice from an advisory committee to officials of a Federal agency is hardly “scientists talking to scientists”, nor should it be.
In fact, with regard to scientific advisory committee input to NASA, the real issue is not whether “scientists can talk to scientists”, but whether the Administrator is to be included in the conversation! By requiring formal advice to be debated in and provided through the NAC, the scientific community’s advice to NASA comes to the Administrator and simultaneously to the Science Mission Directorate. Under the prior structure, with numerous committees reporting directly to lower-level organizational managers, the Administrator usually had no direct knowledge as to the advice being provided to the Agency by external groups. This is not a responsible approach to organizational management.

Thus, at this point, I am back to basic organizational management principles. Responsibility and accountability for planning and executing NASA’s science program must rest with NASA’s managers, not the external scientific community. Execution of these responsibilities must be appropriately informed, and to this end we must, and will, make intelligent use of our advisory committee structure. But the final responsibility and accountability for Agency programs can lie nowhere other than with us, the NASA staff.

Posted on September 15, 2006 04:42 PM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Space Policy

September 14, 2006

What to Make of This?

I'm not sure how to assess this news report:

The Bush administration plans to announce as early as next week a goal of stabilizing carbon dioxide levels in the global atmosphere at 450 parts per million by the year 2106, congressional and non-government sources told Platts Wednesday.
Such an announcement, if true, might lead to the establishment of new regulatory policies -- either voluntary or mandatory -- for the power sector and other sources of CO2 emissions.

But a high-ranking source at the White House Council on Environmental Quality rejected the suggestion, saying the administration has no plans to unveil any new climate-change policies.

Rumors that the White House plans to unveil a new global warming policy have been circulating since August 27, when Time magazine reporter Mike Allen, citing unnamed administration sources, wrote that President Bush's views on the phenomenon "have evolved."

In the news story there is a telling response from a representative of the Sierra Club who apparently has decided that anything the Bush Administration does necessarily is wrong, but in expressing his opposition fails to grasp the fact that the effects of stabilization at a particular level are time invariant -- that is, as far as the effects of carbon dioxide on climate change, the precise path to stabilization is not important, the time-integrated emissions are what matters because of the long atmospheric residence time of carbon dioxide.

Dave Hamilton, director of the Sierra Club's global warming and energy programs, said that while the 450 ppm number was fine, the timeline is not.
"We've got to make 450 [ppm] by mid-century, not next century," he said, adding that the administration's plan "would not stave off the worst impacts of global warming."

I am doubtful that the Bush Administration will suggest dramatic new policies on climate change. But let's see what happens. Meantime, the strategy of advancing incorrect policy arguments to support apparent predetermined opposition to policies not yet proposed might be rethought.

Posted on September 14, 2006 06:14 AM View this article | Comments (35)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

September 12, 2006

The Promotion of Scientific Findings with Political Implications

In the Houston Chronicle today, Eric Berger has a thoughtful article about the state of the debate over hurricanes and global warming. One question that it raises is the degree to which scientists should be actively engaged in partnering with advocacy organizations to promote their work. Here is an excerpt from the Chronicle article:

While nearly all scientists agreed Earth has warmed considerably in the last century, there was no consensus on whether that warming world was causing more and stronger hurricanes to form.
Now some of those scientists have changed their minds, saying a consensus has indeed emerged.

Such talk was sparked Monday when 19 respected climate scientists published a research paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluding that human burning of fossil fuels has warmed the oceans, providing the fuel for tropical cyclones to become monster hurricanes.

"The work that we've done closes the loop," said Tom Wigley, an author of the new paper and a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

The message for the public should be clear, added Robert Correll, a senior fellow of the American Meteorological Society: Humans are the "primary driving force behind increased hurricane activity."

In a post-Katrina world, this is a question public policy-makers and the public have sought an answer to, leading to a flurry of research in the last year.

But some researchers who study the complicated interplay between hurricanes and global warming suggest little has changed in the last few months to suggest that scientists have come to a consensus.

"Honestly, I don't think anyone's changed their mind," said Phil Klotzbach, a hurricane researcher at Colorado State University. "To me, this looks like the same people saying the same thing over and over again."

Earlier this year, Klotzbach published a paper suggesting that, despite a rise in ocean temperatures during the last 20 years, hurricane activity worldwide has decreased.

When Klotzbach published his paper, however, he did not issue a press release or organize a teleconference.

This week's PNAS article was accompanied by a teleconference with Correll, Wigley and two other prominent hurricane scientists, Kerry Emanuel and Greg Holland.

"What concerns me," Klotzbach said, "is the politicization of this issue."

The teleconference being referred to was organized by a group called Resource Media which describes itself as "dedicated to making the environment matter. We provide media strategy and services to non-profits, foundations and other partners who are working on the front lines of environmental protection." Resource Media’s "partners" are a long list of environmental advocacy groups. I’ve personally given money to some of these groups, and in most cases I am not opposed to their advocacy. But I am concerned about scientists who align themselves with one political agenda in a politically contentious debate putatively over science. This feeds the pathological politiicization of science.

On this subject last March I wrote about how a different group of hurricane scientists participated in a media briefing organized by the group TechCentralStation, an organization that values "the power of free markets, open societies and individual human ingenuity to raise living standards and improve lives." Here is what I said then about the self-segregation of scientists according to their political predispositions:

Let’s take a look at this behavior from two perspectives. First, from the perspective of the individual scientist deciding to align with an interest group, it should be recognized that such a decision is political. There is of course nothing wrong with politics, it is how we get done the business of society, and organized interest groups are fundamental to modern democracy. Nonetheless, an observer of this dynamic might be forgiven for thinking when they see scientists self-select and organize themselves according to political predispositions that different perspectives on scientific issues are simply a function of political ideologies. We can see how contentious political debates involving science become when filtering science through interest groups is the dominant mechanism for connecting science to policy.

Aligning with powerful interests can certainly help a scientist to amplify their message in the media and elevate their prominence in political debates. This sort of amplification has long been a tactic of the political right, and it seems that the left is rapidly catching up. But the battle over perceptions of science in the media is not the same as scientific debate.

Resource Media’s campaign is disingenuous because it presents the scientific debate over hurricanes-climate change as if it has been settled, and the climate scientists they are promoting have contributed to this misinterpretation. Consider that the PNAS paper being promoted this week focuses on a subject that has never been at issue in the scientific debate:

National Hurricane Center scientist Chris Landsea said warmer water doesn't lead necessarily to stronger hurricanes.
"I agree with the paper's conclusion that the warming trend in the tropical oceans is likely due, at least in part, to greenhouse gases," Landsea said. "But this paper certainly isn't the 'key link' between hurricanes and climate change. Its focus is on something that I thought was settled quite some time ago."

As far as the scientific debate over hurricanes and climate change. It remains exactly where it has been for the past year – a debate.

On the very professional (but password protected) website that Resource Media has set up to promote the latest paper, they provide a long list of publications related to the hurricane-global warming debate, but conspicuously fail to include any work by Landsea, including his comments on Emanuel’s work, Chan, including his comments on Webster et al., or a link to the joint statement led by Kerry Emanuel and colleagues (including several who participated in the Resource Media teleconference) on the policy significance of this debate. Do they take reporters for rubes? Do they think that reporters are not aware of the broader literature? Do they not know that most reporters know a promotional campaign when they see one?

Such tactics have been criticized as cherrypicking and misrepresentation by critics of the use of science by those on the political right, and appropriately so. It seems to me that cherrypicking and misrepresentation is improper no matter who is doing it. Advocacy groups and politicians will always make the best case they can for their agenda, at the known risk of being called out by the other side.

However, when scientists willingly participate in such tactics to promote their research, and presumably a political agenda hitched to that research, they place their long-term credibility at risk. On the climate issue, many of the scientists who have aligned themselves with the political right have seen their credibility evaporate, even as they have received considerable media attention. The hurricane scientists who are now amplifying their message by aligning with the political left should take a close look at this lesson from recent history, as it may foretell their own future.

Posted on September 12, 2006 07:13 AM View this article | Comments (16)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters | The Honest Broker

September 10, 2006

The Dismal Prospects for Stabilization

The Economist's survey of climate change describes the challenge of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations as follows:

The concentration of CO2 in the air has risen from 280ppm before the industrial revolution to around 380ppm now, and the IPCC reckons that if emissions continue to grow at their current rate, by 2100 this will have risen to around 800ppm. Depending on population changes, economic growth and political will, this could be adjusted to somewhere between 540ppm and 970ppm. The prospect of anything much above 550ppm makes scientists nervous.

But a close examination of research in this area does appear to lend anything but pessimism to the notion that stabilization at 550 ppm is even possible. Forget about 500 or 450.

By contrast, the Economist suggests some optimism for reaching a 550 ppm target. My reading of the Economist survey on climate change suggests that this optimism may be the result of its confusion between stabilizing emissions reductions with stabilization of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide -- a common error in discussions of climate change. This distinction is important because it can lead one to dramatically underestimate the magnitude of the challenge represented by achieving stabilization at levels such as 450, 500, or 550 ppm carbon dioxide.

Indeed, it seems that this misplaced optimism has led the Economist to conclude, "The technological and economic aspects of the problem are, thus, not quite as challenging as many imagine. The real difficulty is political." This line of thinking is the same as that presented in the IPCC’s Working Group III, but it is not at all reflective of a consensus. For instance, the IPCC’s conclusion that climate change is not a technological but a political challenge was strongly criticized by Hoffert et al. (2002) as reflecting a "misperception of technological readiness" and they conclude that "although regulation can play a role, the fossil fuel greenhouse effect is an energy problem that cannot be simply regulated away."

A closer look at the studies referred to by the Economist in its survey on prospects for stabilization of carbon dioxide concentrations is a somewhat sobering exercise. The Economist writes,

If an answer is to be found, it lies in using a combination of economics and a broad range of technologies. Robert Socolow, an economist at Princeton University, offers an encouraging way of thinking about this. His “stabilisation wedges” show how different ways of cutting emissions can be used incrementally to lower the trajectory from a steep and frightening path towards a horizontal one that stabilises emissions at their current level.

What Socolow has proposed is an approach to getting a start on the challenge of stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions at a level that might make stabilization still feasible, not an answer to the challenge of stabilization. A closer look at Socolow’s work suggests less reason for optimism than reported by the Economist.

Socolow suggests that under business-as-usual carbon dioxide emissions will continue to increase at a rate of 1.5% per year. This growth rate would result in an additional 525 gigatons of carbon (GtC) being added to the atmosphere by 2054, and at that time an annual rate of emissions of 15.0 GtC. Socolow argues that to eventually achieve stabilization at 550 ppm requires that the annual rate of emissions 2004-2054 not exceed an annual average of 7.0 GtC. Perhaps the simplest way to think about this is that under Socolow’s assumptions the emissions of carbon dioxide by 2054 would need to be reduced by about 53%. Socolow’s approach is valuable in that it has proposed a wide range of approaches that in some combination might feasibly make some progress toward a reduction of 53% in emissions by 2054.

But even assuming the tremendous achievement of a 53% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions would not be enough to stabilize carbon dioxide emissions at 550 ppm. It is absolutely essential to recognize that constant emissions at the present level will not lead to a stabilization of emissions concentrations in the atmosphere. As Pierre Friedlingstein and Susan Solomon wrote in PNAS last year,

It is worth recalling that constant emissions will lead to a linear increase in atmospheric CO2, not to stabilization. Atmospheric CO2 stabilization can be reached only with an emission scenario that eventually drops to zero.

By "zero" this means net of carbon dioxide "sinks." If the oceans and land serve as "sinks" (i.e., they have a net uptake of carbon dioxide) then in order for the atmosphere concentrations to reach stabilization, then human emissions need not be zero but cannot exceed the net "sink." This is described by Socolow et al. (2004) on pp. 14-15 of this paper in PDF). Socolow et al. suggest that the sink level is about 2.5 GtC per year, although they acknowledge that the figure is highly uncertain. Thus, under Socolow et al.’s sink estimate, in order to achieve stabilization of atmospheric concentrations at below a doubling of pre-industrial levels requires that over the period 2054-2104 annual emissions must be reduced by 4.5 GtC, from the 7 GtC that their scenario has for 2054. This rate of reduction corresponds to about a 2% annual decrease in carbon dioxide emissions.

Based on this scenario, we can then determine the aggregate carbon dioxide emissions implied over 2054-2104, which are about 225 GtC. Thus under Socolow’s assumptions, over the period 2004-2104, to achieve stabilization at 550 ppm requires that total emissions not exceed more than 658 GtC (i.e., 433 + 225, for the figure of 433 GtC allowed 2004-2054 see Table S1 in Pacala and Socolow’s SOM). Under Socolow’s business-as-usual, the total carbon dioxide emissions 2004-2104 are about 1630 GtC. Thus, over this period there needs to be a reduction in total emissions of about 60%.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency’s figures for global carbon dioxide emissions 2004 and 2005 saw about 7.04 and 7.25 GtC of carbon dioxide and 2006 is estimated at about 7.45 GtC. Adding these up results in about 21.7 GtC. Subtracting this from Socolow’s allowable 658 GtC 2004-2104 results in about 636 GtC. One way to think about this is that the world has a carbon dioxide emissions budget of 636 GtC to "spend" by 2104. Under business-as-usual (i.e., EIA estimates to 2030, Socolow’s growth of 1.5% after) this level of aggregate emissions will be exceeded by about 2057. Faster growth rates would of course reach that point faster.

Presumably, those who say that we have no more than ten years to get started on this challenge probably recognize that under business-as-usual by 2015 about an additional 100 GtC will be emitted into the atmosphere, drawing down Socolow’s allowable "budget" to 536 GtC to be "spent" over the following 88 years.

For my part, I fail to see any meaningful difference between 636 GtC to be spent over 98 years (or an average of 6.5 GtC/year) and 536 GtC to be spent over 88 years (6.1 GtC/year). If we can reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the business-as-usual average level of about 16.2 GtC/year 2004-2104 to an average of 6.5 GtC year over that period, then surely squeezing out an additional 0.4 GtC year would not be a show stopper.

Let me suggest another possibility. Under the assumptions presented here (i.e., from Socolow’s recent work) stabilization at 550 is not in the cards. If indeed it is true that waiting ten years is too late, then one has no choice but to conclude that starting immediately is too late as well. This is likely to be an unwelcomed and unacceptable conclusion to many, I know.

What would this conclusion mean for climate policy? Here are a few thoughts.

1. Serious thought and research needs to be given to the prospect of stabilization levels much higher that currently being discussed. What are their policy implications for mitigation and adaptation?

2. The EU, for instance, needs to move discussion beyond its fantasy of stabilization at 450 ppm (see Richard Tol on this here).

3. If stabilization at higher than 550 ppm is determined to be "dangerous interference" in the climate system, then the Framework Convention on climate change needs to be renegotiated from the bottom up. Specifically, its Article 2 needs to be recognized as no longer relevant, and no longer an effective guide to action.

4. Much, much more attention needs to be given to adaptation and its role in climate policy.

5. To continue prospects for successful mitigation policy in the face of the reality that mitigation cannot achieve the goals once set for it will require renewed attention to no-regrets policies.

6. Those who say that abandoning a 550 ppm (or lower) target represents "giving up" or "throwing in the towel" will be setting the stage for a backlash when it inevitably becomes inescapable that those targets are not going to be achieved. At some point policy must be grounded in reality.

7. The longer advocates of mitigation continue to hold unrealistic goals for mitigation policies, the longer it will be before realistic policies are being discussed with a greater chance for policy success.

There are of course a lot of assumptions in the above discussion of Socolow’s work, though I have tried to select those most favorable to stabilization. And there are of course many studies of stabilization paths and scenarios (e.g., as cited by IPCC WGIII). Perhaps this broader literature leads to different conclusions than those presented here. I would be interested in hearing from anyone with a substaintive case to be made for why prospects for stabilization at 550 ppm are more optimistic than the gloomy picture painted here.

Posted on September 10, 2006 07:03 PM View this article | Comments (38)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

September 08, 2006

Ceding the Ethical Ground on Stem Cells

The Washington Post has a good news story on the possibility of "ethically acceptable" stem cell research that helps clarify the confusion created by an over-hyped story in Nature, involving business interests, a misleading press release, and a erroneous reporting of the story by Nature. But the over-hyping may be the least important aspect of this situtation for proponents of stem cell research. Firt, here is an excerpt from the Post story:

Two senators who strongly support human embryonic stem cell research lashed out yesterday at the scientist who recently reported the creation of those cells by a method that does not require the destruction of embryos, saying the scientist and his company have harmed the struggling field by overstating their results.
"It's a big black eye if scientists are making false and inaccurate representations," a combative Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said during a hearing of the Senate Appropriations labor, health and human services subcommittee, which he chairs. . .

Specter and [Senator Tom] Harkin [D-IA] focused on what they said was the main reason for the confusion: the company's [ACT] news release, which said the team had derived stem cells "using an approach that does not harm embryos."

The approach -- removing single cells -- may be harmless when only one cell is removed, the senators agreed. But in this case, it did harm embryos because the scientists, wanting to make the most of the few embryos donated for the work, took many cells from each.

Similarly, the release quoted [ACT scientist Robert] Lanza as saying: "We have demonstrated, for the first time, that human embryonic stem cells can be generated without interfering with the embryo's potential for life." . . .

Harkin said: "ACT should have made it more clear from the beginning that none of the embryos survived." He added that he suspected the wording was intentionally misleading to raise the company's long-suffering stock price. The stem cell field, he said, has "been hyped too much. We need to come back to Earth."

But Ronald M. Green, a Dartmouth University ethicist who was among several who approved the experimental protocol, told the senators they were wrong to belittle the findings or the way they were reported.

"We're speaking here of an enormous breakthrough in American medicine," said Green, who said his only financial link to the company was the approximately $200 per day he was paid -- more than a year ago -- for attending a handful of meetings to review the research.

Not addressed by the senators was a plainly incorrect announcement sent to science reporters by the journal Nature itself.

"By plucking single cells from human embryos, Robert Lanza and his colleagues have been able to generate new lines of cultured human embryonic stem (ES) cells while leaving the embryos intact," the release said.

That erroneous description -- written not by scientists at Nature but by the journal's lay staff -- was corrected after news stories were published.

Nature later apologized to reporters, blaming the mistake on "internal communication problems."

Over-hyped science? Financial ties to industry? Misrepresentation in a peer-reviewed journal? Where is the War-on-Science crowd when you need them? Oh yeah, this doesn’t involve the Bush Administration . . .

Less tongue-in-cheek, and more significantly, what has been completely overlooked here is the complete tactical blunder by ACT, Nature, and the general media in suggesting that in order to be “ethical” stem cell research should not destroy embryos. The acceptance of this point basically legitimizes the central objection to such research advanced by stem cell research opponents. It consequently takes off the table the argument that the benefits of possible medical advances might be balanced against the offense to certain groups in society. Over the long run, it may be that waging the debate over stem cells from the turf occupied by its opponents does more to limit its proponents than their ham-handed efforts to over-hype the science.

As the American Journal of Bioethics writes of this debacle on its blog:

Can't we just be honest and say that we favor embryonic stem cell research, at least for now, since that's what happens at ACT (and since it is true), even though the research destroys embryos?

Posted on September 8, 2006 01:53 AM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Biotechnology

Follow-up on Ceres Report

On August 23 here we took the group Ceres to task for misrepresenting our work in a report on insurance and climate change. I am happy to report that Evan Mills and Ceres have graciously followed up with me seeking to correct the presentation of our work in the report (PDF). Here is what the report now says:

Thanks to a workshop held by Munich Re and the University of Colorado at Boulder, a previous debate has evolved into a consensus that climate change and variability are playing a role in the observed increase in the costs of weather-related damages, although participants agreed that it is still not possible to determine the portion of the increase in damages that might be attributed to climate change due to GHG emissions.

Thanks very much to Evan and Ceres for following up!

Posted on September 8, 2006 12:08 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

September 07, 2006

Substance Thread - IPCC and Assessments

For those who would like to discuss the finer points of my blog writing skills, and the deeper perhaps even sinister implications of my particular word choices, please use this earlier thread;-)

For everyone else, Kenneth Blumenfled has graciously gotten us back on track in a comment reproduced below. For those wanting to discuss the substantive issues associated with my earlier post, the key elements of which I reproduce below, please use this one! Thanks!

Here are some questions worth asking about the hockey stick experience that are not receiving enough attention:

1. The Chronicle article notes that the author(s) of the hockey stick article were responsible for its inclusion in the IPCC report. What are the issues associated with having people (not just limited to the HS, of course) involved with assessing their own work? This would never fly for, say, journal peer review or the drug approval process. Other experience suggests that science can be misrepresented when people review their own work in assesments for policy makers. What are the alternatives? What are the general lessons for the emapnelment of science assessment bodies?

2. The Chronicle article noted of the IPCC's presentation of the HS, "caveats faded from view when leaders of the IPCC boiled down the 994-page scientific report into a 20-page synopsis." Representing complex science in a sound bite necessarily requires simplification, and arguably in this case, and many others, over-simplification of the science. Such over-simplifcations are amplified by the media and used in politically convenient ways by policy advocates on all sides of an issue (as described by the Chronicle, e.g., in the use of the HS by the U.S. National Asssessment and the WSJ). Does it make sense to "boil down" science in a manner that inevitably leads to a mischaracterization of that science? What are the alternatives? This isn't the only example where communication has suffered in the IPCC due to oversimplification of the relevant science.

In my view, both questions raised above might be addressed, at least in part, if the IPCC (or any assessment) were to ask and aswer "So what for action?" of science findings when bringing them to policy makers. The inclusion of any information in a "summary for policy makers" or a "policy relevant" document is based on an assumption that such information is in fact relevant to those policy makers. Scientists should be explcit about why, exactly, they are including some information and not others and what the criteria of relevance actually is. In the case of the IPCC, criteria of relevance are out of sight, and as far as I know completely arbitrary.

Kenneth Blumenfeld offers a reply:

Okay, I'll take a crack at point 1. It seems that IPCC authors may have been selected based on their expertise in a given area, and the intentions were probably better than the outcome suggests, at least in terms of the conflict-of-interest messiness. I would imagine that there was some recognition that the process was going to be a long and arduous one, so the thinking was, "why not have those who have written do the writing?"
I can't think of too many good alternatives. If you have non-experts doing the writing, don't you run the risk of misunderstanding and then misrepresenting the actual science (to at least the same degree as in the conflict-of-interest case)? And if you merely have *different* experts, then you just get the same problem, in a new flavor.

One radical idea would be to have the IPCC funnel money into graduate programs to fund doctoral-level literature reviews on each of the relevant topics. It would be win-win. Everyone knows that graduate students get way too in-depth with literature reviews, and so the chance of them missing something would be small. Students would be happy to compete for something as prestigious as IPCC authorship, and, being so early in their careers, they are all but guaranteed to have no prior investment in whichever topics they end up reviewing and writing about. The IPCC reviewers could be drawn from a pool of largely reading-but-not-writing climate scientists; for example, the sorts of folks who show great promise but then get sidetracked by 15 years of administrative appointments just after getting tenure.

Just a thought. :)

Posted on September 7, 2006 01:08 AM View this article | Comments (29)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

September 05, 2006

A Colossal Mistake

"A colossal mistake" is how Jerry Mahlman describes in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education the IPCC's decision to feature the so-called "hockey stick" in its Summary for Policy Makers.

I am somewhat surprised that discussion of the hockey stick continues to be about the he said-he said conflcit between the camps in Real Climate and Climate Audit, as described by the Chronicle. As much fun as the personalities and politics are, at some point it is probably worth discussing the broader significance of the hockey stick debate for how we think about scientific assessments and their contributions to the needs of decision makers.

Along these lines, here are some questions worth asking about the hockey stick experience that are not receiving enough attention:

Posted on September 5, 2006 07:55 PM View this article | Comments (17)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

September 04, 2006

Politics of Pluto

Excess of Objectivity.
Politicization of Science.
Underdetermination.

Posted on September 4, 2006 03:54 PM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Space Policy

BA on Adaptation

Here is an interesting news story from the BBC on a forthcoming speech today by Frances Cairncross, head of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which will emphasize the need for increased attention to adaptation to climate change.

Posted on September 4, 2006 05:46 AM View this article | Comments (6)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

September 01, 2006

1 Degree

Can this be a correct reporting of the IPCC's forthcoming report?

THE world's top climate scientists have cut their worst-case forecast for global warming over the next 100 years.
A draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, obtained exclusively by The Weekend Australian, offers a more certain projection of climate change than the body's forecasts five years ago.

For the first time, scientists are confident enough to project a 3C rise on the average global daily temperature by the end of this century if no action is taken to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The Draft Fourth Assessment Report says the temperature increase could be contained to 2C by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions are held at current levels.

Is the climate policy debate really about the difference between a global average temperature change of 2+ and 3 degrees C over the next 93 years?

Posted on September 1, 2006 10:50 PM View this article | Comments (25)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

Back to Square One?

The BBC quotes AAAS president John Holdren as saying that the work has already reached the threshold of dangerous climate change. Why does this matter? If scientists actually believe that this is the case then it would mean that the overriding objective of the Framework Convention on Climate Change is obsolete and needs to be revisited. Here is what the BBC reports:

One of America's top scientists has said that the world has already entered a state of dangerous climate change.
In his first broadcast interview as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, John Holdren told the BBC that the climate was changing much faster than predicted.

"We are not talking anymore about what climate models say might happen in the future.

"We are experiencing dangerous human disruption of the global climate and we're going to experience more," Professor Holdren said.

The central objective of the FCCC is described in its Article 2 as:

stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.

But if dangerous anthropogenic interference has already occurred or is inevitably on its way, then "prevention" is not in the cards and Article 2 becomes meaningless as a guide to action. Re-opening up Article 2 for revision and updating would be extremely contentious. But view it is needed. If the science advances, so to should the policy response.

I earlier commented that the political issue of “dangerous” climate change will create incentives for scientists to claim that we are on the brink, but not there yet. Hence we often here claims of "ten years to act" and so on. I’d expect that the politically-savvy IPCC will split this baby by placing us on the brink of dangerous climate change, but not there yet. But the more scientists who speak out as Holdren have, the less tenable Article 2 is as a guide to action. In my view it is just a matter of time before Article 2 needs to be revisited. And the sooner the better.

Posted on September 1, 2006 08:48 AM View this article | Comments (7)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty

August 31, 2006

Climate Mitigation and Adaptation in India

SciDev.net has an excellent article online about climate adaptation and mitigation in India. Here in an excerpt relevant to recent discussions here on Prometheus:

Finance is another problem for government and development agencies. The Global Environment Facility supports adaptation projects with global environmental benefits. But "how do you prove the global benefit of a storm forecasting or cyclone warning system along a specific coastline?" asks Anand Patwardhan, professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai and executive director of the Technology Information Forecasting and Assessment Council.
And even the issue of adaptation itself is contentious. "By shifting the focus to adaptation, major industrialised polluting countries are side-stepping their responsibility towards mitigation" says Sunita Narain, director of the Delhi-based non governmental organisation, Centre for Science and Environment.

Climate change or no climate change, pockets of India face frequent droughts while monsoon floods ravage others. National programmes to improve watershed and ground water management may qualify as adaptation strategies, but they have not been put in place with adaptation in mind.

"It is difficult to distinguish adaptation to climate change from the process of development itself," says Patwardhan.

"In practice, we do not experience climate change—we experience changes in weather patterns," he observes. Local communities find it difficult to visualise life in 2050, or to understand what a half degree rise in temperature will mean. And disadvantaged groups already face pressures from population growth, natural resource depletion and socio-economic inequalities. To these communities in particular, climate change will become an added stress of daily life.

"What we need to do" suggests Patwardhan, "is to link day-to-day choices and activities to the long-term response to climate change"

Amen.

Posted on August 31, 2006 06:59 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

August 28, 2006

Do the Ends Justify the Means?

On climate policy many people apparently believe that the answer is "yes!" I do not. As an example of this perspective, consider the following comment from climate sceintist Andrew Dessler:

As a citizen, there are many issues on which I have a strongly held positions (tax reform, the Iraq war, privacy issues, and yes, AGW). For each of these, I have a preferred policy. I want my policy adopted, and I don't really care why it gets adopted. Not everyone has to agree with *my reasoning* and I don't have to agree with theirs. If some people support action on AGW because they misunderstand the science ... well then they cancel the people that oppose AGW because of a cancelling misunderstanding.
I don't excuse misrepresentation of science, and I correct it wherever possible ... but if, in the final analysis, Katrina helps get a GHG policy enacted, then I'm fine with that. [emphasis added]

[Note: To be perfectly clear, this post is not about Andrew specifically, but about the more general attitude, using Andrew's comment as an example of this perspective, which is apparently widely shared.]

From my perspective, a view that bad policy arguments should be acceptable so long as they help us "win" in political battle is exactly the sort of thinking that motivated the Bush Administration's selling of the Iraq War. Not only did a bad policy result (i.e., one that has not achieved the ends on which it was sold on), but it has harmed the ability of the President to act (maybe a good thing in this case), and certainly diminished the credibility of intelligence. The exact same dynamics are at risk in the climate debate when scientists support their political preferences with bad policy arguments, or stand by silently while others speak for them.

Apparently my perspective is also widely shared. Hans von Storch, Nico Stehr, and Dennis Bray have written (PDF) of this attitude:

The concern for the "good" and "just" case of avoiding further dangerous human interference with the climate system has created a peculiar self-censorship among many climate scientists. Judgments of solid scientific findings are often not made with respect to their immanent quality but on the basis of their alleged or real potential as a weapon by "skeptics" in a struggle for dominance in public and policy discourse.

Oxford's Steve Rayner provides a similar perspective (here):

The danger of using bad arguments for good causes, such as preventing unwanted climate change, is two-fold. Generally, it provides a dangerous opening for opponents who would derail environmental policy by exposing weaknesses in the underlying science. Specifically, it leads to advocating policies for reducing future storm impacts that are likely to be ineffective in achieving their declared aim. With or without greenhouse gas emissions reductions, the costs of storm damage are bound to rise. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions will have far less impact on storm damage costs than moving expensive infrastructure away from coastal margins and flood plains.
For good or ill, we live in an era when science is culturally privileged as the ultimate source of authority in relation to decision making. The notion that science can compel public policy leads to an emphasis on the differences of viewpoint and interpretation within the scientific community. From one point of view, public exposure to scientific disagreement is a good thing. We know that science is not capable of delivering the kind of final authority that is often ascribed to it. Opening up to the public the conditional, and even disputatious nature of scientific inquiry, in principle, may be a way of counteracting society's currently excessive reliance on technical assessment and the displacement of explicit values-based arguments from public life (Rayner, 2003). However, when this occurs without the benefit of a clear understanding of the importance of the substantial areas where scientists do agree, the effect can undermine public confidence.

This is of course an issue much broader than climate change, and at its core is about how science is to operate in a democracy. The practice of science, insofar as it is related to action, is all about questions of means. That is, science can tell us something about the consequences of different possible courses of action. Science however cannot tell us how to value those consequences, which is the territory of ethics, values, religion, ideology, etc..

Once a scientist (a generic scientist!) decides to elevate ends above means in the area of their own expertise then they are in fact giving up on what their science can most contribute to the political process, and that is knowledge relevant to the means we employ in pursuit of desired ends.

If you want insight on the contemporary pathological politicization of science within the scientific community, look no further than the perspective held by many scientists that on issues related to their expertise, the ends do in fact justify the means. In my view this is bad for both democracy and for the sustianability of the sceintific enterprise.

Posted on August 28, 2006 03:50 PM View this article | Comments (47)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | The Honest Broker

August 26, 2006

Hurricane Damage Futures

A futures market called Hedge Street is offering futures contracts on insured hurricane damages for the 2006 season. There are 4 different contracts offered paying out 30 November 2006. The contracts pay out $100 for damage thresholds of $100 million, $1 billion, $10 billion, or $25 billion. As of Friday the contracts last traded at the following values:

>$100M $80.30
>$1B $65.00
>$10B $24.20
>$25B $16.80

According to our research (underway, not peer-reviewed) we are currently about 25% of the way through "damage season" meaning that 75% of the historical damage has occurred after this date. We focus on total economic damages, but if we assume that insured damages are 50% of total economic then according to one of our adjustment methods (we now have 3) the past 106 years would have seen the Hedge Street thresholds exceeded with the following occurrence:

>$100M 70.8%
>$1B 48.1%
>$10B 14.2%
>$25B 5.7%

If we scale each of these figures to 75% of their value to reflect that we are a quarter of the way through damage season then they would be less. What might this mean for investing in hurricane futures?

As of Friday the bid price for each of these thresholds was as follows:

>$100M $75.00
>$1B $62.00
>$10B $15.00
>$25B $10.00

The bid price is that Hedge Street members are willing to buy a contract. If I were investing at Hedge Street (I am not, but thinking about it!) I’d probably be selling at those prices. In particular, selling the $1B contract looks particularly attractive at $62. Based on our current estimates of historical losses, that gives you about a 50% chance of making more than 160% return on your investment. Of course the downside is that you have about a 50% chance of losing your investment. I don’t see an easy way to stop loss, but maybe I am missing something. Anyone?

Posted on August 26, 2006 07:56 PM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Disasters

August 25, 2006

Pop Quiz

Some friday fun:

The follow quote refers to what:

"I guess this is just people holding the correct [political] opinion for the wrong [science/intelligence] reasons and let's accept it with gratitude."

A. Dick Cheney commenting upon learning that a majority of Americans believe that 9/11 is related to Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

B. A commentator at Real Climate upon learning that a majority of Americans believe that the Katrina disaster was caused by global warming.

Hey what is a little public misunderstanding of policy arguments so long as it helps your political agenda?! ;-)

Posted on August 25, 2006 09:21 AM View this article | Comments (37)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science Policy: General

August 24, 2006

Scientific Advice at NASA

The recent resignation of three scientists on the NASA Advisory Panel raises some interesting questions about the nature of advice versus decision making and the interests of those providing the advice in the outcomes of the decisions by those receiving their input. Science magazine makes this all a bit more concrete with some of the details of the brouhaha:

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin yesterday read the riot act to the outside scientists who advise him, accusing them of thinking more of themselves and their research than of the agency's mission. Griffin's harsh comments come on the heels of the resignation of three distinguished scientists from the NASA Advisory Council (NAC), two of whom have questioned Griffin's plan to dramatically scale back a host of science projects (Science, 12 May, p. 824). "The scientific community ... expects to have far too large a role in prescribing what work NASA should do," Griffin wrote council members in a blistering 21 August message. "By 'effectiveness,' what the scientific community really means is 'the extent to which we are able to get NASA to do what we want to do. "
The outside engineers, scientists, and educators on the council traditionally offer advice on the agency's policies, budget, and projects. Placed in limbo for nearly a year after Griffin took over as NASA chief in spring 2005, the NAC was reorganized this spring under the leadership of geologist Harrison Schmitt, a former U.S. senator and Apollo astronaut who is gung ho about President George W. Bush's plans to send humans back to the moon and to Mars. Schmitt replaced Charles Kennel, director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, who resigned last week from his post as chair of the council's science committee. Two other NAC members--former NASA space science chief Wesley Huntress and Rice University Provost Eugene Levy--resigned last week in response to a direct request from Griffin that they step down.

Schmitt and members of that committee have clashed repeatedly in recent months over the role of science at the space agency. In a pointed 24 July memo to science committee members, Schmitt complained that they lacked "willingness to provide the best advice possible to Mike," refused to back Griffin's decision to cut research funds for astrobiology or recommend an alternative cut, and resisted considering the science component of future human missions to the moon. "Some members of the committee," he concluded, "are not willing to offer positive assistance to Mike."

Both Levy, a physicist, and Huntress, an astrochemist now at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, say they support human space exploration but fear that science is now taking a back seat after years of a careful balance between human and robotic efforts. NASA spokesman Dean Acosta acknowledged that the scientists and Schmitt "weren't working well together," and that Griffin telephoned Huntress and Levy last week to ask for their resignations. Griffin's memo points to what he calls "the inherent and long-standing conflict-of-interest" by scientists giving advice to an agency on which they depend for funding. And he gives them a clear way out. "The most appropriate recourse for NAC members who believe the NASA program should be something other than what it is, is to resign."

Huntress says Griffin told him that his advice exceeded the council's charge. "This is a different NAC. Our advice was simply not required nor desired," Huntress told Science. The current council, he adds, "has no understanding or patience for the science community process." Kennel, who had been named chair of the NAC's science committee, was unavailable for comment, but Norine Noonan, a former NAC member and dean of math and science at South Carolina's College of Charleston, called Griffin's action "very distressing" for scientists. "If we can't have a robust debate at the NAC level," she says, "then where in the heck is it supposed to happen?"

Posted on August 24, 2006 07:23 AM View this article | Comments (7)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science Policy: General | Space Policy

August 23, 2006

Dan Sarewitz on Research Questions for Science of Science Policy

Anything Dan Sarewitz writes is worth reading. Here (PDF) is a short essay he prepared for a recent NSF workshop on the "Science of Science Policy" in which he discusses what such a research agenda might look like. Here is an excerpt:

1. We need a conceptual framework, perhaps analogous to "national innovation systems," that can help put some boundaries around, and illuminate structure and dynamics within, the complex institutional setting for knowledge creation and use aimed at goals other than wealth creation.
2. Given that public investments in research are usually justified in terms of particular, desirable outcomes, we need to develop generalized approaches for systems-based institutional analysis and mapping that would allow such justifications to be contextualized and tested simply for plausibility. (For example, we might want to test the idea that more fundamental knowledge about the climate system is important for catalyzing a global technological shift to a decarbonized energy system.)

3. As Toulmin realized 40 years ago, science policy discourse often focuses on trade-offs between various scientific fields, rather than between science and other approaches to a particular social need or goal. Because we don’t understand research institutions ecologically, we still lack a decent analytical basis for understanding the role of research within a broad portfolio of potential policy interventions aimed at some goal. Mapping institutional ecologies of knowledge creation, use, and value could provide a foundation for developing new decision tools that allow policy makers to confront fundamental questions, such as: When is "more research" the right prescription? When is it unlikely to make a difference? What other factors are necessary for it to make a difference? When would a different intervention offer a more efficient or plausible route to a desired outcome? (For example, California voters might have benefited from a discussion of the variety of ways that the $5 billion allocated for CIRM might be applied to improving public health in the state.)

4. We do know that "institutions that do research" are embedded in different ways in broader institutional ecologies. In particular, certain types of research settings—e.g., agriculture; private sector software development; clinical medicine—have been identified as sites where feedback between knowledge creation and use is supposed to be strong. We need many, many more institutional case studies to help map out the variety of designs that are available, and to develop comparative frameworks and metrics based on the relations among institutional design, and knowledge creation, use, and value.

5. And of course we also need to reflect on where our own efforts fit in. "Bring back OTA" is not an adequate prescription. What are the loci of decision making where better understanding of, and discussion about, the institutional ecology of knowledge creation, use and value might make a difference? What types of insights, tools and products might decision makers find useful? This workshop strikes me as a huge opportunity to begin to enhance the public value of science policy and science studies research, but we need to start, needless to say, by attending to the institutional ecologies within which we now operate.

Posted on August 23, 2006 07:31 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science Policy: General

Ceres is Misrepresenting Our Work

A while back we documented in some detail how a publication in Science by Evan Mills grossly misrepresented existing research to make the claim that human-caused climate change was observable in the economic record of disasters. In a just-released report by the group Ceres, an advocacy group focused on the insurance industry, Mr. Mills is again misrepresenting existing research, and this time it is mine.

In the report just out, co-authored by Mr. Mills (here in PDF), they write of the scientific debate over the role of climate change and disaster losses:

Thanks to a workshop held by Munich Re, a previous debate has evolved into a consensus that climate change is playing a role in the observed increase in the costs of weather-related damages.

Well, no. I co-organized the workshop with Peter Hoeppe of Munich Re (to which Mr. Mills was invited to attend but turned down). Here is what the workshop report executive summary (PDF) actually says:

Because of issues related to data quality, the stochastic nature of extreme event impacts, length of time series, and various societal factors present in the disaster loss record, it is still not possible to determine the portion of the increase in damages that might be attributed to climate change due to GHG emissions. . .
In the near future the quantitative link (attribution) of trends in storm and flood losses to climate changes related to GHG emissions is unlikely to be answered unequivocally.

The use of our work in the Ceres report represents either complete incompetence or a deliberate misrepresentation our work. In either case, if they are so cavalier with how they report my work, how can I trust that they are accurately reporting the work of others? Advocacy groups that base their arguments on flawed or erroneous representations of existing research have absolutely no credibility in my book. Science is diverse enough to be able to cherrypick and shade arguments in one’s preferred direction without misrepresentation. Ceres has in fact misrepresented my work. And that is unfortunate, because some of what Ceres has to say looks like it might make sense.

Posted on August 23, 2006 06:16 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

August 20, 2006

Bunk on the Potomac

The Washington Post has published one of the worst op-eds I have ever seen. Arguments such as this one might make one think that the environmental community is hell bent on its own self-destruction (compare). Here is an excerpt:

Barring a rapid change in our nation's relationship to fossil fuels, every American within shouting distance of an ocean -- including all of us in the nation's capital -- will become de facto New Orleanians. Imagine a giant floodgate spanning the Potomac River just north of Mount Vernon, there to hold back the tsunami-like surge tide of the next great storm. Imagine the Mall, Reagan National Airport and much of Alexandria well below sea level, at the mercy of "trust-us-they'll-hold" levees maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers. Imagine the rest of Washington vulnerable to the winds of major hurricanes that churn across a hot and swollen Chesapeake Bay, its surface free of the once vast and buffering wetland grasses and "speed bump" islands that slow down storms.
Because of global warming, this is our future. Oceans worldwide are projected to rise as much as three feet this century, and much higher if the Greenland ice sheet melts away. And intense storms are already becoming much more common. These two factors together will in essence export the plight of New Orleans, bringing the Big Easy "bowl" effect here to the Washington area, as well as to Charleston, S.C., Miami, New York and other coastal cities. Assuming we want to keep living in these cities, we'll have to build dikes and learn to exist beneath the surface of surrounding tidal bays, rivers and open seas -- just like New Orleans.

Weekly World News? Nope. The Washington Post. Here is more:

In the face of this sobering data suggesting we're bringing New Orleans to the Potomac, what should we do? Realistically, there are three major options: 1) abandon our coastal cities and retreat inland, a response too staggering to imagine, 2) stay put and try to adapt to the menacing new conditions, or 3) switch to clean energy as fast as possible.
Adapting, of course, means committing fully to the New Orleans model. It means potentially thousands of miles of levees and floodwalls across much of the region. And that's just to handle the rising sea. For hurricane surge tides, Stevenson thinks the only solution might be to build a floodgate across the Potomac near Mount Vernon. It could be closed during periods of maximum danger, then reopened as the surge ebbs. He envisions another on the Patapsco River to protect Baltimore. The New York Academy of Sciences, meanwhile, has examined the idea of three such floodgates for New York City.

But are we truly ready to become New Orleanians, casting our lot behind ever-higher, unsustainable walls? Once we commit to fortified levees and massive floodgates, there's no turning back. It's an all-or-nothing proposition, as New Orleans has graphically demonstrated.

Alternatively, we can go with the third option. It's less expensive, less risky and overall much better for us: clean energy. It's the option that treats the disease of global warming, not just the symptoms. Only by dramatically reducing greenhouse gas pollution -- by switching to hybrid cars and wind- and solar-powered electricity and high-efficiency appliances -- can we slow the sea-level rise and potentially calm the growth in hurricane intensity.

We must join the rest of the world in this effort because, while the effects are local, the solution can only be global. Some adaptation to global warming will still be necessary, given the momentum built into the warming process. And a national clean-energy overhaul will represent a huge challenge to our society, especially given how little time scientists say we have left -- maybe just 10 years -- before runaway climate effects become a reality.

But switching to clean, efficient energy is a challenge compared to what? Compared to life below sea level with a constant eye on the Weather Channel, waiting for the next Category 5 storm to replicate the horrifying events of last Aug. 29?

There are numerous scientific errors and misstatements in the piece (e.g., confusion of wind speed and power dissipation), but these factual problems pale in the face of its absurd policy arguments. I fully support switching to clean, efficient energy. But to suggest that such a switch can play a perceptible role in modulating the impacts of future hurricanes is simply bunk. It is absolute, utter nonsense.

Leading scientists would do well to recognize that their coy flirting with environmental activists bent on emissions reductions, while at the same time trying to hide their actions behind a fig leaf of policy agnisticism, only serves to feed such absurdities. Anyone wanting to help the environmental community achieve the goal of decarbonizing the global energy system should instead try to stop such poor policy arguments in their tracks.

Posted on August 20, 2006 09:09 PM View this article | Comments (9)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

August 19, 2006

Hurricanes and Global Warming: All You Need to Know

The current issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) has a lengthy commentary (PDF) by Judy Curry, Peter Webster, and Greg Holland offering their opinions on a wide range of subjects related to the recent debate over hurricanes and global warming. Beyond lengthy criticism of (see also Curry's extended comments at Real Climate) the media, meteorologists, engineers, NOAA, NWS, Bill Gray, the AMS, the tropical storms list-serv, and the private sector (Did I miss anyone? How did I escape mention? ;-)), Curry et al. do tell those interested in an appropriate representation of the current debate all we need to know.

In the article, Curry et al. state clearly that the science of hurricanes-climate change is contested and differing expectations for what the future holds based on competing hypotheses won't be resolved for at least a decade:

In summary, the central hypothesis and subhypotheses cannot be invalidated by the available evidence. We anticipate that it may take a decade for the observations to clarify the situation as to whether the hypothesis has predictive ability. In short, time will tell.

This echoes what we wrote in 2005 in BAMS (PDF):

. . .the state of the peer-reviewed knowledge today is such that there are good reasons to expect that any conclusive connection between global warming and hurricanes or their impacts will not be made in the near term.

At last year's AMS meeting Webster and Curry presented an earlier version of this paper and cited Bertrand Russell on skepticism (also cited by RealClimate here):

There are matters about which those who have investigated them are agreed. There are other matters about which experts are not agreed. Even when experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. . . Nevertheless, the opinion of experts, when it is unanimous, must be accepted by non-experts as more likely to be right than the opposite opinion. The scepticism that I advocate amounts only to this: (1) that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain; (2) that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and (3) that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.

The issue of hurricanes and global warming is clearly is in Russell's category (2), and according to Curry et al. will remain there for at least a decade. What this means is that (a) those who claim that science has demonstrated no linkage between hurricanes and global warming and (b) those who claim that science has demonstrated a linkage are both misrepresenting the available science. We should expect scientists in competing camps to argue strenuously for their own perspective. This is what Curry et al. have done as well as those scientists holding a different view. But for those of us not participating in the science, picking sides reflects factors that go well beyond the science. As we wrote in BAMS in 2006 (PDF), "we should not make the mistake of confusing interesting hypotheses with conclusive research results." And as Rick Anthes has written, "it will be a number of years—perhaps many—before we know the relationships between climate change and the various characteristics of tropical cyclones."

The good news is that policy related to hurricanes is in no way dependent upon resolving this ongoing debate, as Curry, Webster, Holland, and seven of their colleagues from various camps in the debate have wisely recognized.

As we have said all along, (1) the debate is contested, and will remain so for the the indefinite future, and (2) the debate is not relevant to policy actions related to hurricanes. And that is all you need to know.

Posted on August 19, 2006 10:21 AM View this article | Comments (20)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

August 17, 2006

Is IPCC AR4 an Advocacy Document?

The IPCC claims that it is "policy relevant, but policy neutral." What this phrase actually means is clear as mud. According to various statements by its chairman Rajendra Pachauri over the past few years (e.g., link), one might be excused for thinking that the IPCC is really an advocacy document clothed in the language of science. Mr. Pachauri’s most recent comments about the report in a Reuters news report today do nothing to dispel that view:

The IPCC review, grouping over 2,000 scientists who advise the United Nations, is published in February and is expected to show stronger evidence for climate change and man's part in it.
"I think the conditions are just right for this report to make a perceptible impact," said IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri. "I think there's enough observed evidence now that certainly will influence the policymakers."

"I've just come back from one of the small mountain states of India, and they regard the melting of the glaciers as the most important problem they're facing. Their entire water supply gets completely distorted."

Talks this year on extending the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol on curbing emissions beyond 2012 could also focus action.

"There is a bit of shadow boxing going on, each group of countries is waiting for what the others are going to do," said Pachauri. "My feeling is that in the next year and a half things will accelerate and perhaps you will see some action."

If the IPCC is being prepared with a goal of making a "perceptible impact" and "influencing policymakers" then no matter what the IPCC says, it is certainly not "policy neutral." Its leadership clearly has a political agenda and it would be appropriate to include that agenda in the report, rather than hiding it behind science. Using science to advance a political agenda, but not openly acknowledging that agenda, is a form of stealth issue advocacy and a recipe for the pathological politicization of climate science. Stealth issue advocacy will severely limit the contributions of the IPCC to debate over climate policy. As an alternative approach, the IPCC should openly discuss a wide range of policy options, rather than perpetuating the continuing, fairly obvious fiction that it is "policy neutral."

Posted on August 17, 2006 07:54 AM View this article | Comments (21)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

August 14, 2006

If “Science of Science Policy” is the answer, then what is the question?

In June, the Bush Administration issued guidance (PDF) for R&D in the FY 2008 federal budget, observing,

The combination of finite resources, the commitment to the American Competitiveness Initiative, and a multitude of new research opportunities requires careful attention to funding priorities and wise choices by agency managers.

OK, then, what does it mean for people who make decisions about science funding to make “wise choices”? The memo continues, explaining that “wise choices” refers to R&D programs that advance national goals through agency missions and priorities. In other words, R&D investments are a means to other ends:

As has been reiterated previously in these annual memos, agencies must rigorously evaluate existing programs and, wherever possible, consider them for modification, redirection, reduction or termination, in keeping with national needs and priorities. They must justify new programs with rigorous analysis demonstrating their merit, quality, importance and consistency with national priorities. Agencies may propose new, high-priority activities, but these requests should identify potential offsets by elimination or reductions in less effective or lower priority programs or programs where Federal involvement is no longer needed or appropriate.
In general, the Administration favors Federal R&D investments that:

• advance fundamental scientific discovery to improve future quality of life;
• support high-leverage basic research to spur technological innovation, economic competitiveness and new job growth;
• align with the efforts of the Academic Competitiveness Council and the National Math Panel to enable superior performance in science, mathematics and engineering education;
• enable potentially high-payoff activities that require a Federal presence to attain long-term national goals, including national security, energy security, and a next generation air transportation system;
• sustain specifically authorized agency missions and support the missions of other agencies through stewardship of user facilities;
• enhance the health of our Nation’s people to reduce the burden of illness and increase productivity;
• ensure a scientifically literate population and a supply of qualified technical personnel commensurate with national need;
• strengthen our ability to understand and respond to global environmental issues and natural disasters through better observation, data, analysis, models, and basic and social science research;
• maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of the science and technology (S&T) enterprise through expansion of competitive, merit-based peer-review processes and phase-out of programs that are only marginally productive or are not important to an agency’s mission; and
• encourage interdisciplinary research efforts that foster advancement, collaboration and innovation on complex scientific frontiers and strengthen international partnerships that accelerate the progress of science across borders.

That is all fine and good, but how does a decision maker looking at alternative possible research portfolios determine if choosing one possible approach represents a “wiser” approach than another possible approach? The Administration memo answers this question by highlighting the importance of a “new science of science policy”:

Determining the effectiveness of Federal science policy requires an understanding of the complex linkages between R&D investments and economic and other variables that lead to innovation, competitiveness, and societal benefits. An interagency process has been established and is now encouraged to promote and coordinate individual agency and collaborative actions needed to develop “new science of science policy” for better assessing the impact of R&D investments, defining appropriate metrics for measuring this impact, understanding the effect of the globalization of science and technology, and improving the basis for national science policy decisions.

The question to be addressed by a “science of science policy” is thus:

What choices do we have in comprising R&D portfolios (from the national - or even international - aggregate to that of the individual program manager in a particular agency, company, or other organization) and what are the expected societal (and more parochial) outcomes associated with each alternative?

Posted on August 14, 2006 10:35 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science Policy: General

August 10, 2006

The Ever Increasing R&D Budget

It is budget time, and with it comes the annual ritual of members of the science and technology community complaining about their fortunes in the budget process. The relative fortunes of different research communities does wax and wane. For instance, biomedical research saw an unprecedented doubling in its budget in the late-1990s/early 2000s, and a ever-so-slight downturn since then (see PDF). NASA, NSF, and DOE's Office of Science are up dramatically this year, after years of small increases, declines, or static budgets.

But when viewed as a whole the R&D community has a track record of perhaps unprecedented success in arguing its case for federal funding. While it is true that aggregate R&D expenditures have tended to track overall trends in federal discretionary spending (see this essay), R&D has achieved a long-term growth in the portion of discretionary spending that it receives. This means that R&D is necessarily fairing better than some other parts of the federal budget.

Consider the following data (sources: here):

By President, the percentage of federal discretionary spending deveoted to R&D:

Reagan 12.5%
Bush I 13.3%
Clinton 13.6%
Bush II 13.7%

By Control of the House, the percentage of federal discretionary spending deveoted to R&D since 1982:

Democrats: 12.8%
Republicans: 13.7%

This data suggests to me first that the S&T lobby has been incredibly successful in increasing the portion of the federal deveoted to R&D. Second, there has been strong bipartisan support for R&D across presidents and congresses. the difference between Ds and Rs in the House I attrbute more to the long-term trend of increasing successes by the S&T lobby arguing for more funding, rather than any partisan signal. It just so happens that Rs have been in control more recently. Finally, for those wanting to discuss not simply the aggregate R&D budget, but what the R&D budget is meant for ... well, that would require asking "So what?" rather than "How much?" (on this point see Sarewitz PDF). And this is a question that the field of science and technology policy is uniquely suited to address.

Posted on August 10, 2006 01:57 PM View this article | Comments (5)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | R&D Funding

James Van Allen: 1914-2006

James Van Allen has died. Here is a provocative excerpt from one of his most recent writings on space policy:

In a dispassionate comparison of the relative values of human and robotic spaceflight, the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure. But only a tiny number of Earth's six billion inhabitants are direct participants. For the rest of us, the adventure is vicarious and akin to that of watching a science fiction movie. At the end of the day, I ask myself whether the huge national commitment of technical talent to human spaceflight and the ever-present potential for the loss of precious human life are really justifiable.
In his book Race to the Stratosphere: Manned Scientific Ballooning in America (Springer-Verlag, New York, 1989), David H. De Vorkin describes the glowing expectations for high-altitude piloted balloon flights in the 1930s. But it soon became clear that such endeavors had little scientific merit. At the present time, unmanned high-altitude balloons continue to provide valuable service to science. But piloted ballooning has survived only as an adventurous sport. There is a striking resemblance here to the history of human spaceflight.

Have we now reached the point where human spaceflight is also obsolete? I submit this question for thoughtful consideration. Let us not obfuscate the issue with false analogies to Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Lewis and Clark, or with visions of establishing a pleasant tourist resort on the planet Mars.

Posted on August 10, 2006 01:02 PM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Space Policy

August 09, 2006

How to Make Your Opponent's Work Considerably Easier

Can someone reading this blog who is plugged in to advising environmental organizations let them know that invoking hurricane impacts generally and Katrina specifically as reasons for greenhouse gas mitigation is not really helping their cause?

Comments like this from Environmental Defense, an organization with an impressive track record of environmental advocacy, often make me wonder if environmental groups are actually looking to give their opponents a justified basis for criticism:

Katrina tragically illustrated how vulnerable we all remain, even in the United States, to nature's devastation. Moreover, given that New Orleans' vulnerability to hurricanes had long been appreciated but never adequately addressed, it seriously calls into question the notion that we can simply adapt to the changes wrought by global warming. The costs from Katrina, still being tallied, are staggering, and the storm's full cost—humanitarian, social, environmental and economic—will be felt for many years to come.
Katrina-like events will become more common and more widespread unless the emissions of global warming pollutants are capped. The link between global warming and hurricanes is yet another reason for Americans to insist on meaningful legislation to cap our greenhouse gas emissions.

To support this statement they cite papers from Emanuel, Webster, Holland, and Curry and disparage work of Klotzbach and Landsea. Here is what these six plus Anthes, Elsner, Knutson, and Mayfield had to say about policies related to hurricanes:

As the Atlantic hurricane season gets underway, the possible influence of climate change on hurricane activity is receiving renewed attention. While the debate on this issue is of considerable scientific and societal interest and concern, it should in no event detract from the main hurricane problem facing the United States: the ever-growing concentration of population and wealth in vulnerable coastal regions. These demographic trends are setting us up for rapidly increasing human and economic losses from hurricane disasters, especially in this era of heightened activity. Scores of scientists and engineers had warned of the threat to New Orleans long before climate change was seriously considered, and a Katrina-like storm or worse was (and is) inevitable even in a stable climate.
Rapidly escalating hurricane damage in recent decades owes much to government policies that serve to subsidize risk. State regulation of insurance is captive to political pressures that hold down premiums in risky coastal areas at the expense of higher premiums in less risky places. Federal flood insurance programs likewise undercharge property owners in vulnerable areas. Federal disaster policies, while providing obvious humanitarian benefits, also serve to promote risky behavior in the long run.

We are optimistic that continued research will eventually resolve much of the current controversy over the effect of climate change on hurricanes. But the more urgent problem of our lemming-like march to the sea requires immediate and sustained attention. We call upon leaders of government and industry to undertake a comprehensive evaluation of building practices, and insurance, land use, and disaster relief policies that currently serve to promote an ever-increasing vulnerability to hurricanes.

Question for Environmental Defense:

OK, I’ll bite. With the "meaningful legislation that caps greenhouse gas emissions" that you are calling for, what effect will this have on hurricane intensities and hurricane impacts over the next 100 years? Here is a hint (PDF) in formulating your answer. Readers feel free to answer as well.

Posted on August 9, 2006 10:22 PM View this article | Comments (11)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

August 08, 2006

A Pielke and Pielke Special

Over at my father's blog we have collaborated on a post titled, "Big Time Gambling With Multi-Decadal Global Climate Model Predictions." The whole thing is posted below. Feel free to comment here or there, we'll both read comments on each other's blog.

Big Time Gambling With Multi-Decadal Global Climate Model Predictions
Roger A. Pielke Sr. and Roger A. Pielke Jr.

Many advocates for action on climate change, including the IPCC assessments and recent documentaries have promoted a view that global warming will continue through the 21st century, with global warming defined as a steady increase in global average temperatures. This prediction of warming is based on the output of multi-decadal general circulation models and is primarily due to the radiative forcing effect of anthropogenic emissions of CO2. In such models only relatively minor year-to-year variations in global average temperatures are forecast in the upward trend, except when major volcanic eruptions cause short-term (up to a few years) of global cooling. For example, see these projections of the most recent IPCC — none of the models has an obvious multi-year (i.e., >2) decrease in global average temperatures over the next century.

Such predictions represent a huge gamble with public and policymaker opinion. If more-or-less steady global warming does not occur as forecast by these models, not only will professional reputations be at risk, but the need to reduce threats to the wide spectrum of serious and legitimate environmental concerns (including the human release of greenhouse gases) will be questioned by some as having been oversold. For better or worse, a failure to accurately predict the changes in the global average surface temperature, global average tropospheric temperature, ocean average heat content change, or Arctic sea ice coverage would raise questions on the reliance of global climate models for accurate prediction on multi-decadal time scales. Surprises or experience that evolve outside the bounds of model output would likely raise questions even among some of those who have so far accepted the IPCC reports as a balanced presentation of climate science. (for a perspective different than the IPCC on applications of climate models see this).

The National Research Council published a report in 2002 entitled "Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises" (of which RP2 was a committee member). The report raised the issues of surprises in the climate system. One of the surprises (to many) may be that the global climate models are simply unable to accurately predict the variability and trends in the climate metrics that have been adopted to communicate human-caused climate change to policymakers. Among the climate metrics with the most public visibility are the long term trends in global average surface temperature, global average tropospheric temperature, summer arctic sea ice areal coverage, and ocean heat content.

There is some emerging empirical evidence to suggest, however, that the concerns expressed here are worth consideration. The recent dramatic cooling of the average heat content of the upper oceans, and thus a significant negative radiative imbalance of the climate system for at least a two year period, that was mentioned in the Climate Science weblog posting of July 27, 2006, should be a wake-up call to the climate community that the focus on predictive modeling as the framework to communicate to policymakers on climate policy has serious issues as to its ability to accurately predict the behavior of the climate system. No climate model that we are aware of has anticipated such a significant cooling, nor is able to reproduce such a significant negative radiative imbalance. Meaningless distinctions between “projections” and “predictions” will be unlikely to convince consumers of climate models to overlook experience that does not jibe with modeled output.

There is no greater danger to support for action on important issues of human impacts on the environment than an overselling of what climate science can provide. If the climate behaves in ways that are unexpected or surprising it will be more than just credibility that is lost. Advocates for action should think carefully when gambling with the unknown predictive abilities of climate models. The human influence on the climate system is real, but the climate may not always cooperate.

Posted on August 8, 2006 11:03 AM View this article | Comments (29)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

The Politics and Economics of Offshore Outsourcing

Anyone wanting to understand the debate over outsourcing should have a look at this paper by former Bush insider Greg Mankiw and Philip Swagel:

The Politics and Economics of Offshore Outsourcing
NBER Working Paper No. 12398
Issued in July 2006
link (free to .gov and universities that subscribe to NBER, follow link titled "Information for subscribers and others expecting no-cost downloads")

Abstract: This paper reviews the political uproar over offshore outsourcing connected with the release of the Economic Report of the President (ERP) in February 2004, examines the differing ways in which economists and non-economists talk about offshore outsourcing, and assesses the empirical evidence on the importance of offshore outsourcing in accounting for the weak labor market from 2001 to 2004. Even with important gaps in the data, the empirical literature is able to conclude that offshore outsourcing is unlikely to have accounted for a meaningful part of the job losses in the recent downturn or contributed much to the slow labor market rebound. The empirical evidence to date, while still tentative, actually suggests that increased employment in the overseas affiliates of U.S. multinationals is associated with more employment in the U.S. parent rather than less.

Posted on August 8, 2006 05:56 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Gathering Storm | Technology Policy

Beyond the Mug's Game

Steven Popper and his colleagues at the RAND Corporation have a thoughtful perspective on computer models and their uses in decision making, which he describes in a letter in this week's Economist:

SIR – Your excellent report on economic models raises troubling questions for both the builders and the consumers of such models ("Big questions and big numbers", July 15th). The root of many problems lies not in the models themselves but in the way in which they are used. Too often we ask "What will happen?", trapping us into the mug's game of prediction, when the real question should be: "Given that we cannot predict, what is our best move today?" This subtle shift in emphasis from forecasting to informing resolves many of the conundrums you raised.
Instead of determining the "best" model that solves optimal strategies we should instead seek the most "robust" model that achieves a given level of "goodness" across myriad models and uses assumptions consistent with known facts. My colleagues and I use such methods to address intractable policy issues fraught with arguments over which model is "right", what assumptions are valid and what is the nature of the good? This method makes the decision to be informed part of the analysis itself and the results are more readily accepted by policymakers.

Steven Popper
Senior economist
RAND Corporation
Santa Monica, California

Posted on August 8, 2006 05:51 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty

August 07, 2006

Hurricanes, Catastrophe Models, and Global Warming

Yesterday’s Boston Globe had an interesting article about catastrophe models in the insurance industry in the context of uncertainties about hurricanes and global warming. The article raises a number of unanswered questions. Here are a few excerpts and a few of my reactions:

An influential but little known segment of the insurance industry is considering whether climate change might be partly to blame for more intense hurricanes in the North Atlantic. The result of this examination, which comes as scientists debate the same question, could be skyrocketing insurance rates in coastal regions from Maine to Texas.
Already, one leading company that forecasts the risk of natural disasters for the insurance industry has revamped the computer model it uses to simulate future weather trends. The model, which looks five years out, now captures the possibility that global warming might be contributing to hurricane activity.

Risk Management Solutions released the new model in May, predicting that average annual insurance losses will increase 25 to 30 percent in the coastal Northeast because of increased hurricane activity.

Florida state officials are researching whether they should add a climate change component to an insurance hurricane risk model they have developed. And Boston-based AIR Worldwide Corp., another top risk modeler, is launching a study with Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist Kerry Emanuel to understand global warming's impact on hurricanes and whether insurance risk will rise as a result.

"It behooves us to research this in a scientific way," said Karen Clark, president and chief executive officer of AIR Worldwide. "We want to quantify the effect of global warming on hurricane activity."

The confidential risk models that private companies like AIR and Risk Management Solutions develop are key factors in the price of homeowners insurance bought by many coastal residents. The modelers calculate the risk from hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural hazards to homes and businesses in a region that takes into account everything from construction material to wind speeds. Insurance providers often use the predictions as an important piece in a complicated formula to set rates.

If global warming is driving more intense hurricanes -- and more of those hurricanes hit land -- it could drastically increase the risk of property loss along crowded coasts.

If catastrophe models are an important factor in insurance rates, and insurance rates are an important factor in insurers bottom line (not to mention a hot-button political issue in U.S. coastal states), then it seems obvious that there is potential for financial conflicts of interest in this area. With respect to pharmaceuticals generally there has been much concern, appropriate in my view, about the role of financial ties to industry among researchers and advisors. And on the climate issue industry funding from the energy sector is tantamount to a scarlet letter. How should we think about insurance industry funding of research related to global warming and insurance risk? [Disclaimer- A few years ago I had a graduate student funded by an insurance company to study uncertainties in catastrophe models.]

Howard Kunreuther, an expert on risk and insurance at the Wharton School, hits the nail on the head when he in quoted in the article:

Ultimately, the problem modelers face is figuring out a short-term prediction from a long-term trend. "The problem is that scientists talk about climate change in terms of 25, 50, or more years; they are not willing to make predictions about five years," said Howard Kunreuther, co-director of the Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. "The insurance industry is most interested in knowing what is likely to happen in the next few years as they determine what premiums to set on their coverage against hurricanes and other natural disasters."

Predictions about the long-term future are of course safe, because they cannot be evaluated in the short term. And there will always be this or that event that is "consistent with" the long term predictions, and absolutely nothing is inconsistent with them. According to the article, some scientists are apparently willing in private to make short-term predictions for the insurance industry (also discussed at length here):

In part to deal with this problem, Risk Management Solutions convened a panel of four specialists, including Emanuel, in Bermuda last October to discuss, among other things, what was causing recent hurricane activity and how many storms might hit land.
Aided by the scientists, RMS came to the conclusion that the current period of hurricane activity is so different from the long-term record it didn't make sense anymore to base its models on only the past. In May, the company announced a new model that incorporated the specialists' opinions and the more recent spate of hurricanes, among other changes.

Telling the rest of us what they told the insurance industry, in the form of peer-reviewed, scientific, short-term predictions, would be good in a number of ways. It would allow for empirical evaluation of the predictive skill of short-term (5 years or less) hurricane/climate science, based on actual events. And importantly, it would provide some transparency and accountability for the insurance industry as it ventures into the complicated, conflicted, and political world of climate science, with implications for their bottom line and their customer's insurance rates.

Posted on August 7, 2006 07:07 AM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters | Risk & Uncertainty

August 04, 2006

Be Careful What You Wish For

Democrats on the House Science Committee have been trying to get the Technology Administration in the Department of Commerce to release a report that Congress had requested and paid for on the impact of "outsourcing" on U.S. science and technology jobs. For some unknown reason, whether hardball politics or simply incompetence, Secretary Carlos Gutierrez ignored requests for release of the study, which was to be delivered in 2004.

Finally a few weeks ago, Science Committee Democrats were able to get the report they had been seeking, and have posted excerpts on their website. What does it contain that DOC or the Administration might want to hide? Not much.

My reading of the report finds the following two statements to be the most interesting, because they are counter to claims of a looming outsourcing crisis:

The effect of offshoring on the competitiveness of the US IT services and software sector appears to be negilible . . .
The present outsourcing and offshoring trends will increase the competitiveness of the U.S. semiconductor industry in the short term . . .

So what gives? The DOC report does provide some strong counter-evidence to the claims of an outsourcing crisis presented in the NRC report Rising Above the Gathering Storm, which has been used in support of a bipartisan push for more science and engineering funding in the name of competitiveness. Maybe the DOC report was being sat on so as not to provide a mixed message on competitiveness. After all, running on the issue of foreigners taking "our" jobs sounds pretty appealing. But I am skeptical about this explanation. After all, Democrats as well as Republicans like to run on the jobs issue and the DOC report doesn't exactly help the Democrats cause (they clearly were looking for evidence that the Administration was hiding evidence of a mass exodus of jobs overseas). And surely there are also behind-the-scenes politics going on that may trump this explanation.

In any case, the Science Committee Democrats are to be applauded for wrestling the report that they paid for out of DOC. However, in the end it provides little help to their cause, and in fact contains data at odds to the recent bipartisan push on addressing U.S. competitiveness through more funding for research. It also suggests that the crisis in offshoring is not as bad as advertised, but this is a result not being told by either party.

Posted on August 4, 2006 07:24 AM View this article | Comments (7)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Gathering Storm

Nisbet and Mooney on Media Coverage of Hurricanes and Global Warming

Matt Nisbet and Chris Mooney have a thoughtful article on media coverage of hurricanes and global warming here.

They have some interesting analysis and quotes, such as this one from Andy Revkin:

"The great strength of the global warming argument lies in the balance of the evidence. The closer you bore into specific impacts like hurricanes, however, the more equivocal the science gets."

They also cite those who would use the issue of hurricanes to argue for and against emissions reductions (see original for links):

On the one hand, a who's who of Democratic leaders including Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Jimmy Carter cited the recent scientific findings to warn that global warming had contributed to the hurricane problem, and to push for action on greenhouse gas emissions.
Variations on this message appeared in two September columns by Nicholas Kristof and two editorials at The New York Times, but also in work by columnists at the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post. Skeptics responded by disputing the scientific evidence and insisting that no serious cuts in emissions were required. "There is no relationship between global warming and the frequency and intensity of Atlantic hurricanes. Period," Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote, rather incautiously, in early September. Others suggested the real focus should be on adapting coastal areas to the likelihood of future disasters. Later would come reports of personal fights between scientists, and allegations of suppression of dissent at government agencies.

They cite some of our work, but I think they fall a bit into the on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand sort of reporting that they criticize when they write:

On the one hand, University of Colorado political scientist Roger Pielke, Jr. and his colleagues argue that by far the most important factors influencing our susceptibility to hurricanes are "growing population and wealth in exposed coastal locations." When viewed in comparison with the urgent need to address this societally-induced vulnerability, they maintain that the question of whether or not hurricanes might themselves be growing stronger is quickly overshadowed in significance. On the other hand, in an article in the May issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, a group of leading climate scientists and hurricane experts claim that the balance of the evidence already suggests a human impact on hurricanes, and urge a more precautionary approach to policy.

In reality there is no apparent difference of views on policy options between the two perspectives cited by Nisbet and Mooney. There is in fact overlap in authorship between the Anthes et al. paper that they cite and the recent Emanuel et al. statement, whcih I strongly support. Nisbet and Mooney could have been a bit more clear on this.

Their article is strong in calling for science reporters, as well as scientists, to establish the policy context of contested issues:

n sum, science writers continue to worry about how the issue of hurricanes and global warming is being used politically, and many also assert that caution demands the publication of more research before they can move ahead on the story. These are all legitimate concerns, and the pressure exerted by both editors and media watchdogs to not "take sides" is real. Yet given their specialization and experience, science writers are perhaps uniquely qualified to shield themselves from allegations of bias, and to interpret the policy implications of the subjects they're covering for readers. As long as they ground their stories in thorough, fair-minded reporting and do not stray into unsupported speculation or unnecessary argumentation, these journalists could provide a true public service. Such changes in how journalists and scientists negotiate what counts as news could mean that, when the next big storm hits, we have a chance to bring the policy questions into sharper focus. Otherwise, the public will be left with an all-too-familiar repeating narrative of conflict and doubt/

Overall, this is a really nice article, but it leaves me wondering, what is the role of a science journalist in a democracy anyway?

Posted on August 4, 2006 01:53 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

August 03, 2006

Who Believes that GHG Mitigation Can Affect Tomorrow’s Climate?

The almost daily use of current weather and climate events to argue for action on greenhouse gases by the media and political advocates is among the most egregious misuses of science in the climate debate. Not only does it redirect attention away from those actions most likely to have an effect on the impacts of weather and climate, but it creates disincentives for action on the longer-term problem of human-caused climate change.

The use of current weather and climate events as a promotional symbol in the climate debate exploits a cognitive heuristic called pattern matching. One reason why there is so little mention of the long time lag between action on energy policies and a perceptible influence on climate is that it would work against exploitation of this cognitive heuristic.

These dynamics are well explained in research conducted by John Sterman of MIT and Linda Booth Sweeny at Harvard (PDF) which concludes that just about everyone – including management, math, and science graduate students at MIT (no slouches there) - believes that changes in energy policies can have an immediate and discernible influence on the climate system. Here is an excerpt from their paper:

We carried out experiments to assess public understanding of basic processes affecting the climate, specifically, whether adults understand the relationships between atmospheric GHG concentrations and flows of greenhouse gases into and out of the atmosphere. Though the subjects, graduate students at MIT, were highly educated, particularly in mathematics and the sciences, results showed widespread misunderstanding of mass balance principles and the concept of accumulation. Instead, most subjects relied on pattern matching to judge climate dynamics. The belief that emissions, atmospheric CO2, and temperature are correlated leads to the erroneous conclusion that a drop in emissions would soon cause a drop in CO2 concentrations and mean global temperature.

Sterman and Booth Sweeney explain why it is that many people think this way:

Why do people underestimate the time delays in the response of climate to GHG emissions? Obviously the average person is not trained in climatology. We hypothesize, however, that widespread underestimation of climate inertia arises from a more fundamental limitation of people’s mental models: weak intuitive understanding of stocks and flows—the concept of accumulation in general, including principles of mass and energy balance. Prior work shows people have difficulty relating the flows into and out of a stock to the trajectory of the stock (Booth Sweeney and Sterman, 2000). Instead, people often assess system dynamics using a pattern matching heuristic (Sterman and Booth Sweeney, 2002), concluding that system outputs (e.g., global mean temperature) are positively correlated with inputs (e.g., emissions). Pattern matching can work well in simple systems but fails in systems with significant stock and flow structures: a stock can rise even as its net inflow falls, as long as the net inflow is positive. For example, a nation’s debt rises as long as its fiscal deficit is positive, even as the deficit falls; debt falls only when the government runs a surplus. Since anthropogenic GHG emissions are now roughly double net removal, atmospheric GHGs would continue to accumulate, increasing net radiative forcing, even if emissions drop, until emissions fall to net removal (of course, removal is not constant; we consider the dynamics of removal below). In contrast, pattern matching incorrectly predicts mean temperature and atmospheric GHGs closely track emissions; hence stabilizing emissions would rapidly stabilize climate, and emissions cuts would quickly reverse warming and limit damage from climate change. People who assess the dynamics of the climate using a pattern matching heuristic will significantly underestimate the lags in the response of the climate to changes in emissions and the magnitude of emissions reductions needed to stabilize atmospheric GHG concentrations.

Stocks and flows may be stunningly obvious to a climate scientist, but it is difficult to comprehend for most people, and it made even more difficult to understand when the point is willfully ignored ot obfuscated by many advocates for energy policy action on climate change. Those who use current climate events like hurricanes or heat waves to justify action on mitigation are thus exploiting pattern matching for a short-term political gain. But my sense is that such exploitation will backfire.

People of good faith can debate the costs and benefits of policies to mitigate climate change, but policy should not be based on mental models that violate the most fundamental physical principles.

Sterman and Booth Sweeney argue that pattern matching is to be expected in how people think,

The difficulties people experience in our experiments should perhaps be expected. It is not necessary to understand stocks and flows to fill a bathtub. It is far more efficient to watch the water in the tub and shut off the tap when it reaches the desired level—a simple, effectively first-order negative feedback process. For a wide range of everyday tasks, people have no need to infer how the flows relate to the stocks—it is better to simply wait and see how the state of the system changes, and then take corrective action.

Sterman and Booth Sweeney suggest that this heuristic lends support to "wait-and-see" policies. This may be the case, but I think it also creates a sense of control over the climate system that simply doesn’t exist. If we can control the climate system, and correspondingly climate impacts, simply by changing our energy policies, then it would be logical to think - "Hey! Drive a Prius and no more heat waves or hurricanes!" The explotation of pattern matching also creates incentives for small, meaningless actions. The poverty of the current policy debate on climate change would be far more apparent if advocates more openly described the time lag between action on energy policies and perceptible influences of the climate system. This also would help to make advocacy for action on energy policies more honest and properly justified.

The hard reality is that the only justifiable use of current weather and climate events as a tool of promotion for action on climate change is in support of improving adaptive responses and reducing vulnerability.

Posted on August 3, 2006 10:20 AM View this article | Comments (16)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

Climate Porn

The BBC has an article today about a new report from the U.K. based Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), which the BBC characterizes as a "Labour-leaning" think tank.

The alarmist language used to discuss climate change is tantamount to "climate porn", offering a thrilling spectacle but ultimately distancing the public from the problem . . .

Simon Retallick, IPPR’s head of climate change, has this to say:

If the public is to be persuaded of the need to act we must understand how climate change is being communicated in the UK. Currently, climate communications too often terrify or thrill the reader or viewer while failing to make them feel that they can make a difference, which engenders inaction.
Government and green groups should avoid giving the impression that 'we are all doomed' and spend less time convincing people that climate change is real. . .

I very much agree with these views, but I do have two quibbles with the overview of the report. First, missing here is a discussion of the role of the climate science community, within which many have taken on as a personal mission the task of convincing people not only that climate change is real, but that anyone who deviates from the "consensus" should be vilified or silenced. Yes, there is a scientific consensus on climate change as described by the IPCC, but it offers little prospect of compelling a political consensus. Consequently, efforts to use science to force political action are in my view one of the driving factors behind "climate porn."

Second, Retallick suggests a focus on "large actions" like hybrid cars or insulation instead of "small actions" like turning down the thermostat. From where I sit hybrid cars and wall insulation are "small actions" when compared to the challenge of stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. The report does not go far enough in discussing the complete transformation of the global energy infrastructure needed to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at anything close to today’s levels. Where is the discussion of nuclear energy, vast investments in energy R&D, or even air capture? The report does not apparently acknowledge that solutions will unlikely to be motivated by climate concerns alone (as I discussed in my recent testimony before the U.S. Congress, PDF), which further underscores the pathological role played by climate porn.

Here is a longer excerpt from the IPPR website which describes the report:

The research analysed more than 600 articles from the UK press, as well as over 90 TV, radio and press ads, news clips and websites to find out how the media, government and green groups are communicating climate change.
The report argues that the discussion on climate change in the UK is confusing, contradictory and chaotic, and with the likely result that the public feels disempowered and uncompelled to act.

The report says that climate change communications should avoid using inflated or extreme language and placing the focus on small actions to solve the problem.

The report identifies ten different ways of talking about climate change, of which the first two are dominant:

*Alarmism ("we’re all going to die"): this pessimistic approach refers to climate change as awesome, terrible, immense and beyond human control. It excludes the possibility of real action – "The problem is just too big for us to take on". Alarmism might even become secretly thrilling – effectively a form of "climate porn". It is seen in almost every form of discussion on the issue.

"A world of climate chaos spiralling out of control"

* Small actions ("I’m doing my bit for the planet – and maybe my pocket"): the "small actions" approach is the dominant one in campaign communications from government and green groups. It asks a large number of people to do a few small things to counter climate change. The language is one of ease and domesticity with references to kettles and cars, ovens and light switches. It is often placed alongside alarmism. It is likely to beg the question: how can this really make a difference?

"20 things you can do to save the planet from destruction"

Posted on August 3, 2006 07:46 AM View this article | Comments (5)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Energy Policy

August 02, 2006

Amar Bhidé on Getting Beyond Techno-Fetishism and Techno-Nationalism

This week’s Economist describes a study by Columbia University’s Amar Bhidé on the production of scientists and engineers, critical of the ideas of "techno-fetishism and techno-nationalism.' According to the Economist, if Mr. Bhidé’s views are correct, "then America's policymakers should worry more about how to keep consumers consuming than about the number of science and engineering graduates, at home or in the East." The analysis presented by Mr. Bhidé is consistent with some of my critiques of the recent focus by the NAS, Bush Administration, and Congress on the production of more scientists and engineers as a palliative for the U.S. economy.

Here is an excerpt from the Economist article, and after that a link and excerpt from Mr. Bhidé’s paper (PDF).

In a marvellously contrarian new paper, Amar Bhidé, of Columbia University's business school, argues that these supposed remedies, and the worries that lie behind them, are based on a misconception of how innovation works and of how it contributes to economic growth. Mr Bhidé finds plenty of nice things to say about many of the things that most trouble critics of the American economy: consumption as opposed to thrift; a plentiful supply of consumer credit; Wal-Mart; even the marketing arms of drug companies. He thinks that good managers may be at least as valuable as science and engineering graduates (though given where he works, perhaps he is talking his own book). But he has nothing nice to say about the prophets of technological doom.
Mr Bhidé says that the doomsayers are guilty of the "techno-fetishism and techno-nationalism" described in 1995 by two economists, Sylvia Ostry and Richard Nelson. This consists, first, of paying too much attention to the upstream development of new inventions and technologies by scientists and engineers, and too little to the downstream process of turning these inventions into products that tempt people to part with their money, and, second, of the belief that national leadership in upstream activities is the same thing as leadership in generating economic value from innovation.

But nowadays innovation—a complex, gradual process, often involving many firms making incremental advances over many years—is not much constrained by national borders, argues Mr Bhidé. Indeed, the sort of upstream innovation (the big ideas of those scientists and engineers) most celebrated by those who fear its movement to China and India is the hardest to keep locked up in the domestic market.

The least internationally mobile innovation, on the other hand, is the downstream sort, where big ideas are made suitable for a local market. Mr Bhidé argues that this downstream innovation, which is far more complex and customised than the original upstream invention, is the most valuable kind and what America is best at. Moreover, perhaps the most important fact overlooked by the techno-nationalists, notes Mr Bhidé, is that most of the value of innovations accrues to their users not their creators—and stays in the country where the innovation is consumed. So if China and India do more invention, so much the better for American consumers.

The most important part of innovation may be the willingness of consumers, whether individuals or firms, to try new products and services, says Mr Bhidé. In his view, it is America's venturesome consumers that drive the country's leadership in innovation. Particularly important has been the venturesome consumption of new innovations by American firms. Although America has a lowish overall investment rate compared with other rich countries, it has a very high rate of adoption of information technology (IT). Contrast that with Japan (the original technology bogeyman from the East) where, despite an abundance of inventive scientists and engineers, many firms remain primitive in their use of IT.

One reason why American firms are able to be so venturesome is that they have the managers capable of adapting their organisations to embrace innovation, says Mr Bhidé. Pressure to be venturesome may have come from America's highly competitive markets. And America's downstream firms are arguably the world's leaders in finding ways to encourage consumers to try new things, not least through their enormous marketing arms and by ensuring that there is a lavish supply of credit.

And here are the opening paragraphs from Amar Bhidé’s paper:

The "techno-fetishism and techno-nationalism" described by Ostry and Nelson in 1995 has apparently drawn strength over the last decade from concerns in the West about globalization. The mindset incorporates two related tendencies. One is the focus on the upstream development of new products and technologies while glossing over their downstream consumption and use. The other is the belief that national prosperity requires upstream international leadership in upstream activities – "our" scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and firms have to better than everyone else’s – they must write more papers, file more patents and successfully launch more products. Otherwise, competition from low-wage countries like China and India will erode living standards in the West especially as they upgrade their economies to engage in more innovative activities.
In this paper I claim that the two tendencies misapprehend the nature and role of innovation as well as the implications of globalization. I argue that the willingness and ability of individuals to acquire and use new products and technologies is as important as – and in small countries more important than – the development of such products and technologies. Moreover nations – unlike many individuals and organizations – don’t have to outperform 'competitors' in order to prosper. Notwithstanding the rhetoric about the competitive advantages of nations – a transplant from the domain of inter-firm rivalry that has displaced references to old-fashioned comparative advantages – countries are not locked into zero-sum trade. An innovation originating in one country does not impoverish other countries. Rather it tends to improve standards of living in all countries that have the downstream capacity to acquire and implement the innovation.

Posted on August 2, 2006 07:25 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Gathering Storm

July 31, 2006

National Journal: Who Turned Out the Enlightenment?

In this week’s National Journal Paul Starobin has an extremely thoughtful cover story on the politicization of science. He appropriately finds that the pathological politicization of science occurs on both the left and the right, but astutely also recognizes that the scientific establishment itself bears some responsibility for today’s hyper-politicization of science:

. . . the modern professional research scientist is not, by any stretch, a blameless figure -- in this tale, that scientist emerges as an increasingly partisan and self-interested figure, dependent on government grants and largely an inhabitant of Blue America.

Starobin does a nice job characterizing how science is used as a tool of politics from the political Left and Right. He registers complaints similar to those that we have expressed about those who would politicize the politicization of science by labeling it only a problem of the Right, or at least, only a problem worth worrying about from the Right. Starobin expresses plenty of concern across the political spectrum, which will likely inevitably mean that his analysis will be dismissed by most partisan observers. But this is good news as the side he aligns with is that of science and democracy. Of the scientific community, Starobin has some strong medicine to offer, and I pull the following excerpt at length:

It is tempting, in this tale, to take pity on the scientist. Assailed from all sides, he -- yes, most top scientists are still men -- may appear to be just as much a casualty as the Enlightenment mind-set itself.
Alas, it is not that simple. Inevitably the scientist has been dragged, or has catapulted himself, into the values and political combat that surround science and has emerged, in certain respects, as just another (diminished) partisan.

This is plainly the case in the matter of the Religious Right's mugging of evolution. Darwin, anticipating just such a beating, had a ready response in the true spirit of science, which was that there was nothing in his scientific observations, nor could there be in any scientific gathering of evidence, that proved or disproved the existence of God. But that sort of agnostic caution seems to have lapsed as an example for today's scientists.

Among neo-Darwinian biologists on both sides of the Atlantic, a kind of counter-militancy has gathered force. Prominent evolutionists such as Richard Dawkins of Britain are proudly proclaiming their atheistic beliefs -- even suggesting that anyone who believes in God is a fool. "Of course it's satisfying, if you can believe it," Dawkins has said about faith in God. "But who wants to believe a lie?"

But it is Dawkins who looks dim for seeking to claim more from science than science can, by definition, provide. "He is an evangelical atheist" and "he is killing us," Alan I. Leshner, the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said in an interview.

If modern scientists were the classical liberals that they like to say they still are, then they presumably would not be clustered on one side of the partisan divide. In fact, they display a deep-blue orientation. A Pew Research Center survey last year found that 87 percent of "scientists/engineers" (representing a random sampling of members of the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering) disapproved of the way Bush was handling his job as president. In the fall of 1997, by contrast, 78 percent of scientists/engineers approved of Bill Clinton's performance.

What gives? The answer, in part, is that scientists have a long-standing tendency to believe that some societal problems -- global warming is a current example -- demand collective solutions of the sort that laissez-faire Republicans tend to be reluctant to support. In the 1930s, scientists widely embraced FDR's New Deal, and a number of researchers, blind to Stalin's crimes, were in fact Communist sympathizers or party members.

Today's Lab-Coat Liberal, as opposed to a Jefferson-style classical liberal, is also a product of the 1960s. Leading research scientists, as National Academy members generally are, inhabit an academic environment that was radicalized by the Vietnam War protest movement and civil-rights struggles. Although most scientists balk at the New Left's fixation on identity politics, science academia, even as it subsists on government grants, tends to take an anti-establishment posture that embraces a false view of science's own purity.

"Through its actions in Vietnam our government has shaken our confidence in its ability to make wise and humane decisions," the Cambridge, Mass.-based Union of Concerned Scientists declared in its founding document in 1968. Never mind that elite research scientists -- members of a secretive government-connected team dubbed "The Jasons" -- advised the Pentagon on certain Vietnam war-fighting strategies.

This mind-set, pitting the purportedly apolitical concerns of scientists against the connivers who wield political power in Washington, endures. In a recent Web posting on the prospect of a confrontation between the U.S. and Iran, the Union of Concerned Scientists declared that Iran "does not represent a direct or imminent threat to the United States." That is a policy judgment, not a scientific conclusion, and it is a dubious one at that, given the clear signs that Iran, a backer of Shiite militias in neighboring Iraq and of Hezbollah in Lebanon, is complicating the mission of U.S. forces in the Middle East.

The Bush administration as a whole, not just its military policies, is in the Cambridge outfit's gun sights. Citing climate change, childhood lead poisoning, reproductive health, drug abuse, and other issues, the group declared in 2004: "When scientific knowledge has been found to be in conflict with its political goals, the administration has often manipulated the process through which science enters into its decisions." Signatories included Edward Wilson, the Harvard entomologist once taken to task by the New Left.

In an interview, Cornell physicist Kurt Gottfried, chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists and a drafter of that founding declaration, denied that the group, or scientists generally, had a pronounced partisan disposition. "I do not believe that 77 percent or 87 percent of scientists vote Democratic normally," he said. But the available data, as scientists like to say, suggest otherwise. In 15 years of polling, scientists "have always stood out as among the most Democratic of the elites," Michael Dimock, associate director of the Pew Research Center, said in an interview.

Thus the science community, even if at times a reluctant warrior, is itself contributing to the polarization that afflicts America's political culture. Viewed by the Founders as part of the glue that binds American democracy, the scientist is in danger of becoming a force for its increasing fragmentation.

The last sentence is exactly the dynamic I was referring to when I criticized scientists at RealClimate last week for serving as agents of divisiveness in political debates.

Starobin, like many of us, loses momentum when talking about what might be done to address the pathological politicization of science. But from where I sit, that means there might be a good audience for The Honest Broker ;-) Jokes aside, Starobin has written an extremely thoughtful article. It will certainly appear on my fall syllabus.

Posted on July 31, 2006 02:29 AM View this article | Comments (13)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | The Honest Broker

Patty Limerick on Wildfire and Global Warming

Patty Limerick, a renowned historian of the American West and valued colleague here at the University of Colorado, has written a thoughtful perspective in the Los Angeles Times on western wildfires, human responsibility, and climate change. In many ways her views on fire in the context of climate change are quite similar to those I express on hurricanes. Here is an excerpt:

The new responsibility had many forms. Homeowners cleared trees and brush around their houses. Local governments adopted tougher rules on development in high fire-risk zones. Insurance companies revised their policies to reward owners who exercised foresight and took action to prevent fire.
But a recent scientific study could easily be misinterpreted as an invitation to go back to sleep. It is also an indicator of how politicized some environmental science has become and the problem that poses for taking responsibility in a region prone to fire.

The authors of "Warming and Early Spring Increases Western U.S. Forest Wildlife Activity," published this month in the journal Science, reach a thought-provoking conclusion: Climate change has been the "primary driver" of the increase in big wildfires in the West, even more than recent changes in land use or the unnecessary suppression of natural fires. Warmer temperatures have melted the snowpack earlier in the spring, producing a longer dry season and more combustible materials. Thus the opportunities for big fires to start have multiplied.

Should we now blame a changing climate for the West's wildfire problem? Or should we continue to change land use and management practices to reduce the fire danger? And how should our answer shape our conduct?

The battle over global warming has far reaching consequences for how we think and act. And for some people, the battle over climate change trumps everything else. Patty expresses some concern that by being sucked in to the maw that is the global warming debate, discussion of climate change might work to derail a fragile consensus of effective practical strategies for dealing with vulnerabilities to forest fires.

After Colorado's 2002 fire season, representatives from environmental groups, federal and state agencies, utilities, insurance companies, universities and county governments convened in the state to find a solution to a problem caused by decades of fire suppression. It was a very mixed group, and I imagine many of them would cancel each other out at the polls. The group's name was a bureaucratic mouthful: the Front Range Fuels Treatment Partnership Roundtable.
The key word in this undertaking was responsibility, and in the judgment of many who participated, myself included, we accomplished something. The "fuel" in forests along the Front Range had reached worrisome levels. In the absence of fire, the density of flammable trees and underbrush had greatly increased. We surmounted mutual distrust and reached a consensus for which fuel areas to target and which strategies would best reduce the danger of future fires.

But now, if we declare climate change the primary driver of increases in wildfires, as the study in Science suggests, what could a plucky group of Coloradans possibly do to find a remedy for this problem?

Of course, if climate change explains the greater frequency and intensity of the West's wildfires, the question of responsibility shifts levels, and we are immersed in one of the most contentious issues of science and public policy. Is human behavior — the use of fossil fuels as the main energy source — warming the planet, or is the rise in temperature part of a natural cycle that has occurred in Earth's past?

She concludes by asserting, correctly in my view, that whatever role climate change has in forest fires does not let anyone off the hook as far as needed on-the-ground actions. Yet the climate scientists who reported the possible connection of fires and climate change abandoned ship when it came time to address questions of policy. In my view, the authors of the recent study set the stage for having their research results to be caught up in the debate over global warming, when they might have diffused such controversy from the start by clearly describing the policy terrain, as did a group of hurricane/climate scientists in recent weeks.

The study's authors skirt this question. "Whether the changes observed in Western hydro-climate and wildfire are the result of greenhouse gas-induced global warming or only a usual natural fluctuation is presently unclear," they write.
But is it possible for a group of scientists in 2006 to study an issue — wildfire — immersed in contention, put forward an explanation based on climate change and then sidestep the question of whether humans bear any responsibility for that climate change?

The question of human culpability is a big roadblock to resolving many environmental dilemmas. Thanks to it, the findings of environmental scientists are often the spark for contention and misinterpretation rather than understanding and discussion. It's not easy to think of a scientific study on the natural world that doesn't have some connection to contested public policy. Biologists who simply want to study wildlife may find themselves enmeshed in political battles over the status of threatened or endangered species. Geologists and hydrologists may be drawn into disputes over the safety and permanence of waste disposal sites.

In such circumstances, these scientists have reason to feel like zookeepers feeding hungry animals: Their study findings barely hit the ground before advocates and rivals pounce on them, snarl and tug at each other over them, then tear the whole into pieces to secure the choicest parts.

This rowdiness is called "data dispute," and it's becoming a popular sport in environmental circles in the West. It doesn't show us at our best. Nor does it make the most of the enormous resources of the natural scientists studying the West's environment.
So let's not dispute data this time.

In too many environmental disputes, we squabble over the management of materials — sewage, spent nuclear fuel, carbon emissions, outdated computer parts. Meanwhile, the question of who will take custody of that unpopular substance called responsibility remains the most contentious and consequential matter of all.

The current condition of the West's forests has multiple causes. Climate, fire suppression, government regulation (or its absence) and the construction of buildings in forested areas all play a part in creating it. Regardless of which factor we accent in our explanations, we still have a big problem before us. And we still must take responsibility for it and find a remedy. The findings of climate scientists do not diminish that responsibility.

Well said!

Posted on July 31, 2006 01:49 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

Andrew Dessler Has a Blog

Frequent Prometheus contributor and Texas A&M professor Andrew Dessler has been bitten by the blog bug. Check out his new site here. We wish Andrew the best as he sets up what will no doubt be a thoughful voice on climate science and politics.

Posted on July 31, 2006 01:36 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

July 28, 2006

Holier Than Thou

The RealClimate folks are all excited about an internal memo from the Inter-Mountain Rural Electric Association (link here in PDF) that details, among other things, that the IREA have donated $100,000 to support the activities of Patrick Michaels, a long-time political advocate on the climate issue. I’m all for disclosure of financial support. But the response to this memo, at RealClimate and elsewhere, suggest to me that many involved in the climate debate would much rather bash their opponents than work with them to find common ground. In a democracy, action occurs most often through compromise rather than complete annihilation of one’s opponents. Until this point is realized by those calling for “action” expect gridlock to continue.

Here are some questions that I have about this episode:

1. So what? In a democracy interests mobilize and support fellow travelers. Where science and politics overlap care must be taken to be aware for the possibility of conflicts of interest, which includes but are not limited to the financial. For example, the Journal of the American Medical Association has recently clarified a policy for disclosing potential conflicts of interest in research papers. The climate community would do well to adopt this practice. That people involved in the political battle over climate change see benefits in supporting people who share their interests is not a surprise, it is democracy at work.

2. Is only some money unclean? Those who are criticized for accepting industry money often observe that Jim Hansen was awarded an unrestricted cash prize of $250,000 from the Heinz Family Philanthropies. Stanford University’s Global Climate & Energy Project has accepted $100 million in support from ExxonMobil and other industry sponsors. Does this mean that we should discount Hansen’s work and that coming from Stanford? Or is it only certain combinations of people and funders that we should be concerned about?

3. Are vows of poverty signs of moral superiority? There does seem to be more than a hint of holier-than-thouness about all of this. One of the RealClimate contributors said in the Washington Post, "We don't get any money; we do this in our free time." He fails to recognize that his "free time" is made possible by an employer and research funders who allow (or look the other way) when RealClimate pursues its political agenda and aggressively attacks those who do not share it. I have no doubts that Pat Michaels holds his values every bit as strongly as the RealClimate folks do. Groups interested in political action usually begin by recognizing the legitimacy of differing value commitments. RealClimate seems to acknowledge this when they write, "It might actually help people engage on the substance of their concerns rather than simply arguing about the science - which, as we are by now well aware, - is simply a path to gridlock." Have they followed this useful guidance when engaging the concerns of the IREA?

4. Do opinions chase dollars, or do dollars chase opinions? I am convinced that it is the latter, a consequence of what Dan Sarewitz has called the "excess of objectivity" which allows political interests to simply survey the landscape and align with convenient experts. With nod to their own apparent moral superiority, RealClimate suggests that the causality goes the other way, writing, "any quote from Michaels should probably be followed with 'So spake the industry's P.R.O, A man who really ought to know, For he is paid for saying so'." In the Washington Post, Donald Kennedy has a more realistic and fair-minded perspective about Michael’s funders, ""I don't think it's unethical any more than most lobbying is unethical," he said. He said donations to skeptics amounts to "trying to get a political message across.""

Finally, what I think is most interesting about the IREA letter, and not discussed by anyone, is their description of how they view different policy options. They view a carbon tax and cap-and-trade system as the least desirable options. They support voluntary programs and investments in technology. They also view the participation of India and China as essential to any international agreement. They want all industries involved in any political action on greenhouse gases, and they don’t want the economy to be harmed. Seems to me that there are real opportunities for a discussion on climate change policies and the possibility that the IREA might be amenable to a course other than business-as-usual. Looking for common ground is consistent with the perspective that I presented in may congressional testimony last week (PDF). I doubt anyone is going to change IREA’s views of science and certainly not their values commitments. If they are to be "brought on board" in a coalition supporting action on climate change, it will be done through compromise – Politics 101.

But rather than seize upon the possibilities for compromise, advocacy groups like RealClimate have decided to use the memo as an opportunity to foster divisiveness and continued gridlock. It really does make me wonder if some actually want action on climate change or simply to score meaningless political points by bashing those who do not share their values. It will get commentators in the blogoshpere nicely agitated, but it won’t in my view contribute positively to progress on climate policy.

Posted on July 28, 2006 08:37 AM View this article | Comments (20)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

Man in a Can

From Reuters:

NASA is considering shutting down all the research programs it conducts aboard the international space station for at least a year to fill a projected budget shortfall of up to $100 million, a top station manager said today.

Research, even space station research, has always been secondary to NASA's long-term vision of somehow someway getting a human on Mars:

Rather than researching materials, fluid physics and other basic microgravity phenomena, NASA decided to fund only those programs that had a direct bearing on human spaceflight beyond low-Earth orbit, which is where the space station and the space shuttles fly. Funding for radiation studies, for example, was to be a key part of the U.S. station research program.
"Cutting science programs would suggest that it is merely a joy ride to the moon," said Katie Boyd, spokeswoman for Alabama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby. "It would mean that we as a national have wasted billions of taxpayer dollars."

The New York Times in an editorial today on NASA's changing mission statement sees part of the story, but fails top recognize that NASA's preference for human spaceflight over science dates back decades. The Times choses instead to pin the source of NASA's focus on human spaceflight on the current Administration, which I think misses the mark. It is to be found instead in the agency's culture and long-term history across different presidents and political eras.

At a time when global warming has become an overriding issue, NASA has been delaying or canceling programs that could shed light on how the climate changes. The shortsighted cutbacks appear to result from sharply limiting NASA’s budget while giving it hugely expensive tasks like repairing the stricken shuttle fleet, finishing construction of the space station, and preparing to explore the Moon and Mars. Something had to give, and NASA’s choices included research into how the planet’s climate is responding to greenhouse gas emissions. . .
The problems in earth sciences are part of a broader slowdown in science missions as NASA tries to do too much with too little. NASA officials sometimes say that they are slowing the rate of growth in science budgets. But Congressional analysts say the agency cut its science spending in 2006 to cover unexpectedly expensive shuttle repairs. It now plans small increases that won’t keep up with inflation or bring spending back to previous levels for many years. One analyst likened NASA to a mugger who takes $100 from a victim and then returns $20 a year, telling the recipient to be thankful.

A Senate committee has approved $1 billion in emergency funds to reimburse programs that were cut to pay for the shuttle repairs. If that doesn’t fly, count home-planet studies and other science programs as a casualty of the administration’s insistence on completing the space station.

Maybe it is time to talk about breaking up NASA and its various missions.

Posted on July 28, 2006 07:02 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Space Policy

July 27, 2006

Hockey Stick Hearing Number Two

Today, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce is hosting its second hearing on the so-called "hockey stick" in the past two weeks.

From last week's marathon hearing TechCentralStation provides an interesting set of quotes. A statement by Representative Jay Inslee (D-WA) to Professor Edward Wegman is particularly telling:

I want you to make sure you understand the reality of this situation. I've given you all the sincerity that I could give to you. But the reason you are here is not why you think you are here, OK? The reason you are here is to try to win a debate with some industries in this country who are afraid to look forward to a new energy future for this nation. And the reason you are here is to try to create doubt about whether this country should move forward with the new technological, clean-energy future, or whether we should remain addicted to fossil fuels. That's the reason you are here. Now that's not the reason individually why you came, but that's the reason you're here. Thank you very much.

Not long ago, we discussed here how scientists are recruited -- sometimes willingly, sometimes not -- in such a manner to serve as pawns in political battles. Rep. Inslee clearly recognizes that science is simply a symbol in ongoing debates about energy policies. Presumably the witnesses that the minority invited to testify were brought in to serve a similar purpuse as those that he described to Dr. Wegman.

Ironically, from all accounts Dr. Wegman's report initiated by the majority staff of the committee and the report led by Dr. North for the NRC apparently agree on all of the statistical and technical aspects of the hockey stick issue. The difference was that the North Committee went to great lengths to minimize the practical significance of their findings and the Wegman report did not. In both cases their characterizations of their findings reflect extra-scientific considerations.

Showing no shame, Representative Inslee asked Dr. Wegman if he could recite the three laws of therodynamics (you can't win, can't break even, and can't get out of the game, courtesy of C.P. Snow). Dr. Wegman, a statistician, replied that he probably could not. Presumably the fact that Dr. Wegman could not recite these laws means that the nation should adopt Rep. Inslee's preferred energy policies, whatever those might be. Of course, Mr. Inslee did not apparently recognize that since Wegman and North agree on the substance of the issues, discrediting one would seem to imply discrediting the other. But Rep. Inslee has already told us that the substance does not matter (See also the question posed by Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) and Han von Storch's quite appropriate response).

On the other side Rep. Barton (R-TX) asked Dr. Wegman who he voted for in 2000, to which he replied Al Gore. Presumably this bit of Texas political trivia means that in fact Dr. Wegman's statistical analysis has credibility, and we should thus favor Rep. Barton's favored energy policies, whatever those are.

All in all last week's hearing was a pretty sad day for science in politics, or more accurately - science as politics. Both parties came off looking pretty bad. And the scientists involved all looked helpless or unwilling to break out of the fix they were in -- with the exception of Hans von Storch whose comments in my view were thoughtful and on target- PDF.) A lot of the blogosphere commentators on this issue have taken political sides just like the members of Congress and seem more than happy to wage their political battles through the science. Exceedingly few people seem concerned about the pathological politicization of science itself, and seem perfectly have to join the fray. I'd expect that we'll see more of the same today. But maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.

Here is my two cents on the whole affair:

On the hockey stick in politics, I wrote here last summer: "Resolving the technical dispute will do little to address the larger issues of climate science policy or the symbolic and real political implications of the hockey stick debate." See the rest of that post for a more detailed description of my views, which I see no reason to change.

On the hockey stick in climate policy, in this post from last fall we came pretty close to a consensus among participants in the debate that it does not matter for climate policy. of course, the policy and politics are interwoven, and my view is that the politics of the issue are an obstacle to policy (see my testimony from last week - PDF).

On the hockey stick in science policy and politics -- here is where I think the most important issues are. The hockey stick debate reflects in microcosm just about everything that is wrong about the climate debate. Scientists who are advocates of action on energy policies, or simply are burdened by outsized egos, could have defused the hockey stick debate a long time ago by taking a conciliatory stance with respect to the critics of the hockey stick and its prominant role in the IPCC. The IPCC deserves a lot of the blame for the issue, first for elevating the hockey stick to an icon and then by circling the wagons when criticized. Hindsight is 20/20, but even the recent NRC report was a missed opportunity to defuse the issue.

The critics of the hockey stick, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, have proven how difficult it is for scientific truths to be kept under wraps, according at least to Drs. North and Wegman. This of course cuts both ways in the climate debate. They also have provided a case study in the power of blogs in today's worlds of science and politics. But they have done themselves no favors by cozying up with conservatives. Perhaps this is a marriage of convenience, but it has served to further politicize the issue.

Finally, the big loser in all of this seems to be the IPCC, which appears to have viewed the hockey stick debate as something to win and survive, rather than learn from and evolve.

Bottom line - after all of the sound and fury over the hockey stick climate policy remains a mess and the politics as intractable as ever. Today's hearing, I'll guess, will continue this trend. Any comments from people watching the hearing would be welcomed.

Posted on July 27, 2006 07:56 AM View this article | Comments (9)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

July 26, 2006

Conflicts of Interest at the National Academies?

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) released a very interesting report (PDF) this week which found substantial conflicts of interest present among members of study panels at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS, and more specifically its National Research Council which oversees its study panels).

Why should we care about conflicts at the NAS? According to CSPI:

Self-interested parties, including Congress, government agencies, and corporate lobbying groups, are increasingly turning to the NAS to define the scientific state of play on controversial topics, whether it is global warming, stem cell research, or a specific toxic chemical. For the NAS to maintain its credibility in this role, it must be vigilant in rooting out even the appearance of conflicts of interest among its committee members.

What did CSPI conclude?

. . . we found serious deficiencies in the NAS’s committee-selection process that could jeopardize the quality of future NAS reports. The NAS has allowed numerous scientists (and others) with blatant conflicts of interest to sit on committees. Compounding that problem, those conflicts of interest usually are not disclosed to the public

The CSPI defines a conflict of interest as "a financial tie within the last five years to a company or industry that is relevant to the committee topic." Under this definition, of the 21 committees it it looked at CSPI found that "Nearly one out of every five scientists appointed to an NAS panel has direct financial ties to companies or industry groups with a direct stake in the outcome of that study." The NAS did not acknowledge publicly many of these financial interests.

The CSPI further alleged that the NAS did not take efforts to balance the perspectives of its committees finding a ratio of more than 7 to 1 appointees favoring industry perspectives over environmental or public interest group perspectives. The CSPI recommends that the NAS "should expand its definition of balance on committees to include bias and point of view, in addition to areas of expertise." This perspective is contrary to that taken by the NAS itself which has supported non-disclosure of information such as "voting record, political-party affiliation, or position on particular policies."

We have periodically raised the issue of NAS committee composition at the NAS, for instance on reports on Hubble Space Telescope, perchlorate, and on the advisory process itself. Advisory committee composition is an important subject, and I agree with the CSPI that in many cases the NAS could be more transparent and balanced. At the same, we should resist the lure of believing that there are heroic philosopher kings out there with no biases except for the truth. As I have argued before (e.g., Washington Post PDF), what an advisory committee is asked to do is as important as who they ask to do it. An advisory committee tasked with placing science into the context of a range of policy options may be less likely than a committee focused only on science or a single course of action to slip from advice into advocacy.

Posted on July 26, 2006 07:37 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | The Honest Broker

July 25, 2006

Rep. Rush Holt on Science Advice

From Represenatative Rush Holt's statement (PDF) prepared for today's House Science Committee hearing on science advice to congress:

There is no shortage of information and no shortage of wisdom. We are swamped with experts. We need help in weaving it into policy-relevant fabric.

Posted on July 25, 2006 12:42 PM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | The Honest Broker

Scientific Leadership on Hurricanes and Global Warming

I have often made the case that one of the best ways for scientists to depoliticze science is to clearly discuss the significance of scientific disputes for policy action. Today's New York Times reports that 10 scientists involved in the sometimes acrimonious debate over hurricanes and global warming have prepared a statement that places their debate into policy context. Here is an excerpt from the NYT story:

The scientists, several of whom had publicly debated the hurricane-climate connection in recent months, said they were concerned that the lack of consensus on the climate link could stall actions that could cut vulnerability — no matter what is influencing hurricane trends.
Philip J. Klotzbach, a hurricane researcher at Colorado State University who disputes the idea that global warming is linked to stronger storms, said the social and economic trends were completely clear.

"There is likely to be an increase in destructiveness from tropical cyclones regardless of whether they are getting more intense or not," he said yesterday. “"his is largely due to the increase in coastal population and wealth per capita in hurricane-prone areas."

Kerry A. Emanuel, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, drafted the statement and conducted one of several recent studies asserting that the building energy of hurricanes in recent decades was probably related to human-driven warming of the seas.

"We as a community have said for a long time that this is a big social problem right now," Dr. Emanuel said in an interview. "A lot of us are tired of the climate question being set up as a bigger conflict than it is."

The full statement can be found here.

Congrats to the authors Kerry Emanuel, Richard Anthes, Judith Curry, James Elsner, Greg Holland, Phil Klotzbach, Tom Knutson, Chris Landsea, Max Mayfield, and Peter Webster. This is scientific leadership at its best.

Posted on July 25, 2006 12:55 AM View this article | Comments (17)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

July 21, 2006

Jim Hansen's Refusal to Testify

According to E&E Daily, James Hansen who was invited to appear at yesterday's House Government Reform Committee, but did not appear, would have attended had John Christy not attended. According to E&E Daily (link, but a subscription site):

In the message Hansen sent to reporters to explain his absence from yesterday’s hearing, the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies said he had a conflicting doctor appointment to deal with a cold that interacts with his asthma to create a drip in his lungs. But he also indicated he would have adjusted his schedule if the witness list did not also include skeptical points of view.

The only person on the witness list who's views could be characterized as skeptical was John Christy. John is widely acknowledged by his peers as a highly qualified and accomplished climate scientist. He was, for example, on the CCSP Temperature Trends Committtee as well as the recent NRC Hockey Stick Committee, and particpates in the IPCC. So I am baffled why Jim Hansen would only appear if other legitimate perspectives are excluded. He might disagree with Christy's views, but they are certainly appropriate to include on a Congressional panel.

Coming from someone who complained about being censored, it sounds like he'd like to do a bit censoring of his own. It also seems a bit odd for a high ranking government employee to refuse to offer testimony when called upon by Congress to do so. This helps to explain Chairman's Davis' obvious pique when mentioning Hansen in his opening comments yesterday.

Posted on July 21, 2006 02:33 PM View this article | Comments (15)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

Follow up on Criticism of AGU Hurricane Assessment

Not long ago I criticized an AGU assessment of hurricane science for its demonstrably inaccurate treatment of seasonal climate forecasts. I hypothesized that the issue of seasonal hurricane forecasts had been caught up in the "hurricane-climate wars" between Bill Gray and Greg Holland. Holland and Peter Webster (who were both involved with preparing the AGU report) took serious issue with my even raising this hypothesis (how dare I!!), flatly denying any such relationship between the AGU report's criticism of Gray's seasonal forecasts and the global warming debate. However, In today's hearing (that I participated in) Judy Curry's testimony completely vindicates my raising this issue (Curry is a collaborator with Holland and Webster). Here is the relevant excerpt from her testimony (PDF):

It may take up to a decade for the observations to clarify the situation as to which explanation, natural variability or global warming, has better predictive ability. In the short term, evaluation of seasonal forecasts for the North Atlantic can provide some insights into the predictive capability of natural variability. Holland (2006) has conducted an assessment of statistical forecasts of North Atlantic tropical storm activity. Seasonal forecasts are based upon the statistics of North Atlantic tropical storms for the period since 1950. W. Gray commenced making seasonal forecasts in 1984. For the first decade (until 1994), Grays forecasts performed well (Figure 10), with a bias error of -0.2 storms per season for the June forecasts and a root mean square error of 1.8. In the period since 1998, Grays forecasts have performed much worse, with a notable low bias averaging -3.1 storms per season and a root mean square error of 5.2. NOAAs seasonal forecasts for the same period show little variation from Grays forecasts. It is argued here that the persistent low bias in the seasonal forecasts since 1995 indicates that the elevated activity in this period cannot be explained solely by natural variability seen in the historical data record since 1950.

Posted on July 21, 2006 02:07 AM View this article | Comments (21)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

July 20, 2006

Congressional Testimony

Here is a PDF of my Congressional testimony today before the House Government Reform Committee. We'll link to the other testmony when available online.

Posted on July 20, 2006 08:53 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

July 18, 2006

Space Shuttle Flight

Congrats to NASA and its astronauts for the safe return of the shuttle yesterday. Here are a few interesting comments I have come across on the mission.

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas and chairwoman of the Senate Commerce subcommittee on science and space, called the mission "an important milestone in our nation’s space exploration history." (link)

Expectations for the space program have really gone down if simply returning astronauts safely is interpreted as an important milestone. On the other hand, it might be a good sign if such a view reflected an honest appraisal of the risks of spaceflight. Call me a cynic, but I doubt this latter explanation explains comments like those of Senator Hutchinson, which probably reflect diminishing expectations more than anything else.

"We don't have any slack," [NASA Administrator Michael Grifin] said. "We have just enough shuttle flights left to do the job, so we can't afford to mess up." (link)

Planning with no "slack" is called "success-oriented planning" and has plagued NASA for decades. Why in the world would NASA create plans with absolutely no slack? As has been seen time and time again, this is a recipe for schedule disruption, cost overruns, and performance shortfalls. Griffin also says: "I think the words 'routine human space flight' don't go in the same sentence. Every one of these (missions) is experimental." In such a circumstance, isn’t a little slack desirable? It is not really going out on a limb to expect that the next 16 missions won’t be carried out as planned today.

"The shuttle remains a fragile, delicate, temperamental vehicle and needs to be operated with extreme care," said John Logsdon, who heads the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University . . . "I think that the most likely future is one in which the shuttle flies out its remaining missions and gets its job done." (link)

If the risks of losing an orbiter are 1 in 100, then there is about a 15% chance of losing an orbiter over its last 16 flights. As I have written before, this is just about the same odds as playing Russian Roulette. If the odds are less in NASA’s favor, then the chances go up. Given NASA's history, I dount that Logsdon is correct about the most likely future. This doesn't mean that there will be a catastrophic loss of an orbiter, but the chances of the less likely futures are not insignificant and they come with a few outcomes with extreme consequences. A more likely future will involve unexpected technical, schedule, and costs issues that disrupt the plans set at any given time.

Posted on July 18, 2006 04:34 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Space Policy

July 15, 2006

Upcoming Congressional Testimony

I'll be testifying before the House Government Reform Committee on Thursday, July 20. Details TBA here. The hearing is titled, "Climate Change: Understanding the Degree of the Problem."

I'll post my prepared testimony here on Thursday.

Posted on July 15, 2006 08:44 PM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

July 08, 2006

Summer Break

We'll be offline for a short while. Kevin is away as well, so we won't have much if any action here. See you in a few weeks!

PS. Comments on existing posts will remain open, behave yourselves;-)

Posted on July 8, 2006 05:01 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R.

July 07, 2006

The Honest Broker, Coming Soon to a Bookstore Near You

This week I shipped off to Cambridge University Press my final revisions on my forthcoming book, The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics. It is scheduled to be published early next year. Consequently, I’ll be shamelessly promoting the book here until then! An article in this week’s Nature on science and advocacy (Thanks CW!) makes me think that the book is well timed, here is an excerpt:

For conservation biologists, it's the question that won't go away. Should they make the leap from describing the facts of a case, to telling people what ought to be done?
Biologist Reed Noss of the University of Central Florida believes they should. Addressing a meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB) in San Jose, California, last week, he tried to convince the crowd that they have a responsibility to be not just scientists dealing in objective facts, but also advocates pushing particular policies.

But Mike Scott of the University of Idaho, organizer of the symposium, thinks the SCB should stick to the facts. "We need to position ourselves as the go-to authority on conservation matters worldwide," he says. "We can more forcefully do that if we do rigorous science, and then leave it for the decision-makers to figure out what to do with that."

The advocacy question is perhaps more difficult for conservation biologists than many other scientists. Their field is already premised on the value of having lots of species around. And most of these scientists got into the field because of their strong feelings about nature, the wilderness and often particular species.

Peter Brussard, a population biologist at the University of Nevada, Reno, points out that the debate goes back to at least 1951. Then the Nature Conservancy split from the Ecological Society of America because of a dispute over whether scientists should do more than just describe.

These days, he thinks, "the debate has been reframed a little bit", with more researchers willing to be advocates. In the end, he says, much depends on the definition of advocacy. "We never seem to get beyond semantics."

For example, does advocacy include sending a paper to policy-makers? Or to the press? Or reiterating your findings if you don't think policy-makers have taken enough notice of them?

Back in San Jose, the US Geological Survey's Susan Haseltine warns the meeting of the harm a scientist can do to their credibility by being an activist. "I don't believe you can be strong in science and in advocacy," she says.

Hopefully my book will help to inform such a discussion about advocacy and the role of scientists in policy and politics.

Posted on July 7, 2006 12:45 PM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | The Honest Broker

Letter to Editor, AZ Daily Star

Yesterday I was asked by a reporter at the Arizona Daily Star to read and offer my thoughts on a just-out paper in Science by Westerling et al. on trends in forest fires and the possible role of climate change. The resulting news story was interesting, not least because it grossly mischaracterizes my views on climate change, despite having been asked directly by the reporter what my views are on the subject. So I just sent in the following letter to the editor of that paper.

Dear Editor-
AZ Star reporter Tony Davis grossly mischaracterizes my views on climate change in a story published July 7, 2006. He writes that I have "been critical of the view that human-caused global warming represents a major environmental threat." To the contrary, much of my research for the past 15 years has been focused on options for dealing with global warming, and in particular, the role of science in policy. In an email to Mr. Davis reponding to his question about my views on the subject I wrote that I seek to "openly confront some of the real but uncomfortable practical challenges involved with reducing emissions and adapting to climate." Instead of sharing what I actually wrote, Mr. Davis came up with something completely different, and incorrect.

Sincerely,

Roger A. Pielke, Jr.
Professor, Environmental Studies
Director, Center for Science and Technology Policy Research
University of Colorado

And here is what I had to say to the reporter about the Westerling et al. paper. Readers can compare what points the reporter chose to include and which ones were left out:

Tony-
I just read the paper. I have a few reactions:

1. They are asking the right questions -- we do need to know the role of climate in the context of the many other factors that lead to climate-related impacts.

2. That being said, I did not see any attention to the role of fire fighting policies. Since 1970 the notion of "let it burn" in some locations has been followed to some degree. I am left wondering what role such policies might have had on fire magnitude and trends over time. Given this apparent oversight, I am not sure that this paper captures all of the important factors shaping fire history.

3. It would be easy to over-interpret this paper. The IPCC notes that 35 years is a pretty short time frame for attribution of any trend to human-caused climate change, and I would think that is especially the case for a complex issue like forest fires.

Bottom line - a useful paper that adds to our knowledge and hopefully will stimulate further research on the integrated effects of climate-society-policy. At the same time I can envisage the paper being used simply as a charicature in the global warming debate -- Global Warming Causes Forest Fires! -- but that would be a shame because fire policy is more complex than that.

Thanks for the chance to respond ...

Best regards, Roger

Posted on July 7, 2006 07:43 AM View this article | Comments (22)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

July 06, 2006

Energy Dependence, Part 2

A recent op-ed by two professors at the Polytechnic University of New York in the Washington Post makes the case that biofuels offer no long-term alternative to fossil fuels. They write:

But as we've looked at biofuels more closely, we've concluded that they're not a practical long-term solution to our need for transport fuels. Even if all of the 300 million acres (500,000 square miles) of currently harvested U.S. cropland produced ethanol, it wouldn't supply all of the gasoline and diesel fuel we now burn for transport, and it would supply only about half of the needs for the year 2025. And the effects on land and agriculture would be devastating.
It's difficult to understand how advocates of biofuels can believe they are a real solution to kicking our oil addiction. Agriculture Department studies of ethanol production from corn -- the present U.S. process for ethanol fuel -- find that an acre of corn yields about 139 bushels. At an average of about 2.5 gallons per bushel, the acre then will yield about 350 gallons of ethanol. But the fuel value of ethanol is only about two-thirds that of gasoline -- 1.5 gallons of ethanol in the tank equals 1 gallon of gasoline in terms of energy output.

Moreover, it takes a lot of input energy to produce ethanol: for fertilizer, harvesting, transport, corn processing, etc. After subtracting this input, the net positive energy available is less than half of the figure cited above. Some researchers even claim that the net energy of ethanol is actually negative when all inputs are included -- it takes more energy to make ethanol than one gets out of it.

But allowing a net positive energy output of 30,000 British thermal units (Btu) per gallon, it would still take four gallons of ethanol from corn to equal one gallon of gasoline. The United States has 73 million acres of corn cropland. At 350 gallons per acre, the entire U.S. corn crop would make 25.5 billion gallons, equivalent to about 6.3 billion gallons of gasoline. The United States consumes 170 billion gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel annually. Thus the entire U.S. corn crop would supply only 3.7 percent of our auto and truck transport demands. Using the entire 300 million acres of U.S. cropland for corn-based ethanol production would meet about 15 percent of the demand.

It is argued that rather than using corn to make ethanol, we can use agricultural wastes. But the amounts are still a drop in the bucket. Using the crop residues (called corn stover) from corn production could provide about 10 billion gallons per year of ethanol, according to a recent study by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The net energy available would be greater than with ethanol from corn -- about 60,000 Btu per gallon, equivalent to a half-gallon of gasoline. Still, all of the U.S. corn wastes would produce only the equivalent of 5 billion gallons of gasoline. Another factor to be considered: Not plowing wastes back into the land hurts soil fertility.

Similar limitations and problems apply to growing any crop for biofuels, whether switchgrass, hybrid willow, hybrid poplar or whatever. Optimistically, assuming that switchgrass or some other crop could produce 1,000 gallons of ethanol per acre, over twice as much as we can get from corn plus stover, and that its net energy was 60,000 Btu per gallon, ethanol from 300 million acres of switchgrass still could not supply our present gasoline and diesel consumption, which is projected to double by 2025. The ethanol would meet less than half of our needs by that date.

And they end with the always-inconvenient issue of trade offs:

Finally, considering projected population growth in the United States and the world, the humanitarian policy would be to maintain cropland for growing food -- not fuel. Every day more than 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes -- one child every five seconds. The situation will only get worse. It would be morally wrong to divert cropland needed for human food supply to powering automobiles. It would also deplete soil fertility and the long-term capability to maintain food production. We would destroy the farmland that our grandchildren and their grandchildren will need to live.

Posted on July 6, 2006 08:15 AM View this article | Comments (6)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Energy Policy

Energy Dependence

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal John Fialka has an interesting article (free) that takes apart the notion of “energy independence.” Here is an excerpt:

The U.S. may be addicted to oil, but many of its politicians are addicted to "energy independence" -- which may be among the least realistic political slogans in American history.
Recently, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, perhaps warming up for another presidential campaign, gave a speech calling for energy independence and invoking the Fourth of July. "For the second time in our history, let's declare and win our independence," he said. Separately, 43 Democratic senators, including Mr. Kerry, launched a program to "Put America on the road to energy independence by 2020."

President Bush, meanwhile, has been talking for three years about setting a goal "to promote energy independence for our country." That is in line with Republican tradition: After the Arab oil embargo in 1973, President Nixon trotted out "Project Independence," a list of synthetic-fuel programs that would meet America's energy needs within 10 years. It failed within two.

Now, energy experts across the political spectrum are criticizing politicians' calls for "energy independence," saying the goal falls somewhere between pipe dream and economic impossibility.

Posted on July 6, 2006 08:08 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Energy Policy

July 05, 2006

Straight Talk on Climate Policy

In a column in today's Washington Post, Robert Samuelson provides a dose of political realism on climate policy:

From 2003 to 2050, the world's population is projected to grow from 6.4 billion people to 9.1 billion, a 42 percent increase. If energy use per person and technology remain the same, total energy use and greenhouse gas emissions (mainly, carbon dioxide) will be 42 percent higher in 2050. But that's too low, because societies that grow richer use more energy. Unless we condemn the world's poor to their present poverty -- and freeze everyone else's living standards -- we need economic growth. With modest growth, energy use and greenhouse emissions more than double by 2050.
Just keeping annual greenhouse gas emissions constant means that the world must somehow offset these huge increases. There are two ways: Improve energy efficiency, or shift to energy sources with lower (or no) greenhouse emissions. Intuitively, you sense this is tough. China, for example, builds about one coal-fired power plant a week. Now a new report from the International Energy Agency in Paris shows all the difficulties (the population, economic growth and energy projections cited above come from the report).

The IEA report assumes that existing technologies are rapidly improved and deployed. Vehicle fuel efficiency increases by 40 percent. In electricity generation, the share for coal (the fuel with the most greenhouse gases) shrinks from about 40 percent to about 25 percent -- and much carbon dioxide is captured before going into the atmosphere. Little is captured today. Nuclear energy increases. So do "renewables" (wind, solar, biomass, geothermal); their share of global electricity output rises from 2 percent now to about 15 percent.

Some of these changes seem heroic. They would require tough government regulation, continued technological gains and public acceptance of higher fuel prices. Never mind. Having postulated a crash energy diet, the IEA simulates five scenarios with differing rates of technological change. In each, greenhouse emissions in 2050 are higher than today. The increases vary from 6 percent to 27 percent. . .

No government will adopt the draconian restrictions on economic growth and personal freedom (limits on electricity usage, driving and travel) that might curb global warming. Still, politicians want to show they're "doing something." The result is grandstanding. Consider the Kyoto Protocol. It allowed countries that joined to castigate those that didn't. But it hasn't reduced carbon dioxide emissions (up about 25 percent since 1990), and many signatories didn't adopt tough enough policies to hit their 2008-2012 targets. By some estimates, Europe may overshoot by 15 percent and Japan by 25 percent. . .

The trouble with the global warming debate is that it has become a moral crusade when it's really an engineering problem. The inconvenient truth is that if we don't solve the engineering problem, we're helpless.

Posted on July 5, 2006 05:27 AM View this article | Comments (39)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

July 03, 2006

How to Break Up NASA

My latest column for Bridges is online: How to Break Up NASA. Comments welcomed!

As usual, there are many good articles in Bridges, and a number of NASA-related articles in the current edition.

Posted on July 3, 2006 07:06 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Space Policy

June 29, 2006

An Honorable Retirement for the Shuttle

At Space.com Leonard David has a great news story on the upcoming shuttle launch with some interesting perspectives:

The soon-to-depart shuttle mission evokes a good news/bad news comeback from Joseph Pelton, a research professor with the Institute for Applied Space Research at George Washington University.
"The good news is that the shuttle is still a relatively safe experimental space vehicle with a 1-in-60 to 1-in-100 chance of a category one failure—loss of vehicle, loss of crew. The bad news is that after $2 billion in expenditures for the reflight effort—and now many years after the Columbia failure—critical objectives set by the CAIB have not been accomplished," Pelton told SPACE.com.

Pelton was lead investigator for Space Safety Report: Vulnerabilities and Risk Reduction In U.S. Human Space Flight Programs an independent assessment prepared and released last year by the Space and Advanced Communications Research Institute (SACRI) of George Washington University.

Pelton singled out several remaining key issues: the stiffening of the shuttle outer hull; the ability perform repairs to the shuttle’s thermal protection system in space; and correction of the foam-shedding problem.

"The mantra that NASA developed after Columbia that said ‘find it, fix it and fly safely again’ rings hollow after so much time and money has been spent with such limited results," Pelton explained.

NASA credibility and space funding

"In truth, the problems that NASA continues to experience with its shuttle and the International Space Station program—really the only reason the shuttle is still flying—goes back at least to the Challenger disaster in 1986," Pelton said.

Two major national space commissions back then—one looking into the Challenger accident, the other delving into the future of the American space program—noted that the shuttle was indeed becoming “obsolescent” and that it had to be replaced by another vehicle within at least 15 years, or 2001, Pelton noted.

"Instead of developing alternative plans for the launch of International Space Station components in smaller and more modular parts at that time," Pelton said, "NASA pushed ahead without developing a new vehicle, nor developing a back-up plan.

Now, not only is NASA’s credibility and space funding at risk, Pelton continued, but also at risk are the agency’s international partners that are engaged in the $100 billion station program. “The now ‘tar baby-like tandem’ of the ISS and the space shuttle has done great harm to space programs around the world."

NASA has over-invested in both the shuttle and station initiatives, Pelton said, taking away money from programs that truly matter to the United States and indeed the world.

Never too late to start over

"The truth of the matter is that the shuttle program—an experimental program when designed in the 1970s—should have been grounded years ago. It should be replaced by better, safer, and more cost efficient programs. The development of private space vehicles that are human-rated, something that NASA is currently actively supporting, is clearly the right step forward," Pelton advised.

Ultimately, it is not NASA that is at fault here, Pelton said, pointing to national leadership that has often overruled the space agency on where and how to spend their limited resources. It is never too late to start over, he said, and develop a NASA program that makes sense, balances expenditures, and set priorities that matter to the person in the street.

"The question is not whether NASA should be grounding the space shuttle and putting them in museums,” Pelton concluded, “but what are its backup plans and how can it restore balance to its overall space programs and give new focus to its various NASA centers?"

It is worth noting that under Pelton's estimates of risk (1/60 to 1/100) this equates to a probability of a catastrophic accident at between 15% an 63%(!) over 16 remaining flights. Lets say this again -- if Pelton's risk estimates are correct there is a rather high probability of another lost shuttle.

Space historian Roger Launius asks, appropriately, about the option of allowing the Shuttle to have an "honorable retirement":

Indeed, there is a lot riding on the next shuttle liftoff, beyond technology.
"This is one of the most significant missions of the shuttle program because of the policy implications that it presents," said Roger Launius, Chair, Division of Space History at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Launius underscored the fact that Griffin has stated clearly that if NASA does not fly successfully this time it would mean the end of the program. "That, of course, begs the question [as to] what defines a successful mission?"

The last mission, for all of its challenges, was successful by most measures. It launched, flew, and returned safely; it delivered its supplies and equipment to the ISS; it undertook several safety tests and repairs.

That being the case, several questions percolate to the surface, Launius said.

"Is a level of success commensurate with the last mission sufficient to conclude that the program will continue? If that is not where the bar is set, is it higher or lower? I confess that I have no idea. I also confess that I hope and pray that this mission is a rousing success, by any standard that one might want to apply," Launius told SPACE.com.

Honorable retirement

Launius also senses there is something present with the forthcoming shuttle flight that he hasn’t necessarily experienced before.

"A sustained and underlying depression seems present among those working in the program, some of them for their entire careers," Launius explained. "There is a sense of ending—as well as an ever-present perception of loss and failure—present among many members of the space shuttle team."

Without question, Launius said, the space shuttle will be retired within something less than a decade, whether it is after this next mission or 2010 or sometime a bit later.

"As the space shuttle enters its home stretch, it should be remembered with both praises for its many accomplishments and criticisms for its shortcomings,” Launius suggested. “I am in favor of giving the shuttle an honorable retirement and to give a full measure of respect and thanks to those charged with its operations over the years for their efforts."

In the process of retiring the space shuttle, "I hope NASA will ensure that the knowledge and expertise gained in the shuttle program is preserved and used for the future," Launius concluded.

In my view NASA is acting like an aging boxer, not knowing when to say when. The end result is often not pretty.

Posted on June 29, 2006 09:43 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty | Space Policy

June 28, 2006

Westword on Bill Gray

Here is a pretty thoughtful article on Bill Gray and a number of familiar folks in the hurricane debate.

Posted on June 28, 2006 04:02 PM View this article | Comments (11)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

June 27, 2006

The Is-Ought Problem

Al Gore obviously hasn't read Andrew Dessler's book:

. . . if you accept the truth of what the scientific community is saying, it gives you a moral imperative to start to rein in the 70 million tons of global warming pollution that human civilization is putting into the atmosphere every day.

This is a fine example of the is-ought problem described by philospoher David Hume. ASU's Brad Allenby has explained why we should care about the is-ought problem in science:

. . . the elite that has been created by practice of the scientific method uses the concomitant power not just to express the results of particular research initiatives, but to create, support, and implement policy responses affecting many non-scientific communities and intellectual domains in myriad ways. In doing so, they are not exercising expertise in these non-scientific domains, but rather transforming their privilege in the scientific domains into authority in non-scientific domains.

Posted on June 27, 2006 03:55 PM View this article | Comments (11)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science Policy: General

Just Barely Unacceptable Risk

The Space Shuttle is set to launch on July 1, 2006. According to NASA officials, this is the first flight being launched in which the risk has been deemed “unacceptable”:

NASA's top safety official and the agency's chief engineer said today they opposed the shuttle Discovery's launch July 1 because of concern about so-called ice-frost ramps on the ship's external tank that could shed foam and cause catastrophic impact damage. In fact, Discovery's flight will be the first in shuttle history with a system formally classified in the "unacceptable risk" category.
Bryan O'Connor, director of Safety and Mission Assurance at NASA headquarters in Washington, and Chris Scolese, the agency's chief engineer, both declined to concur with the decision to launch when signing an official Certificate of Flight Readiness, or CoFR, following a flight readiness review that ended Saturday.

But both men said today they viewed the issue as a threat to the vehicle - not a direct threat to the crew - and as such, they accepted NASA Administrator Mike Griffin's decision to press ahead with launch.

Here is how O’Connor characterized his thinking:

O'Connor today acknowledged a perception problem with the seemingly contradictory positions, but said it was the result of the flight readiness review process and the engineering community's classification of the ice-frost ramps as "probable/catastrophic" in NASA's integrated risk matrix.
"When this first came up, most folks were pretty concerned about it," he said. "That concern level has been going down as we learn more about it, as we refine the models, we look at the data. We haven't changed the design, but there's a little bit of a shift toward more comfort than the other direction.

"I think we're just barely into the unacceptable risk area. I think it's unacceptable to the program to go fly in this condition. But I also believe if it's elevated to the right authority, an administrator (Griffin) who looks at it and with his understanding and his position in the agency who can accept it, then I felt like I was not going to lie down in the flame trench or throw my badge down."

Is NASA playing Russian Roulette with the future of the space program?

Posted on June 27, 2006 03:21 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Space Policy

June 26, 2006

A New Paper

The text that accompanied my public lecture last spring for the NAS Ocean Studies Board has now been published in the magazine Oceanography. Here is a citation and link:

Pielke, Jr., R. A. 2006. Seventh Annual Roger Revelle Commemorative Lecture: Disasters, Death, and Destruction: Making Sense of Recent Calamities, Oceanography, 19:138-147. (PDF)

Comments welcomed.

Posted on June 26, 2006 03:24 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

June 23, 2006

A(nother) Problem with Scientific Assessments

The American Geophysical Union released an assessment report last week titled "Hurricanes and the US Gulf Coast" which was the result of a "Conference of Experts" held in January, 2006. One aspect of the report illustrates why it is so important to have such assessments carefully balanced with participants holding a diversity of legitimate scientific perspectives. When such diversity is not present, it increases the risks of misleading or false science being presented as definitive or settled, which can be particularly problematic for an effort intended to be "a coordinated effort to integrate science into the decision-making processes." In this particular case the AGU has given assessments a black eye. Here are the details:

The AGU Report includes the following bold claim:

There currently is insufficient skill in empirical predictions of the number and intensity of storms in the forthcoming hurricane season. Predictions by statistical methods that are widely distributed also show little skill, being more often wrong than right.

Such seasonal predictions are issued by a number of groups around the world, and are also an official product of the U.S. government’s Climate Prediction Center. If these groups were indeed publishing forecasts with no (or negative) skill, then there would be good reason to ask them to cease immediately and get back to research, lest they mislead the public and decision makers.

As it turns out the claim by the AGU is incorrect, or at a minimum, is a minority view among the relevant expert community. According to groups responsible for providing seasonal forecasts of hurricane activity, their products do indeed have skill. [Note: Skill refers to the relative improvement of a forecast over some naïve baseline. For example, if your actively managed mutual fund makes money this year, but does not perform better than an unmanaged index fund, then your fund’s manager has showed no skill – no added value beyond what could be done naively.] Consider the following:

1. Tropical Storm Risk, led by Mark Saunders finds that their (and other) forecasts of 2004 and 2005 demonstrated excellent skill according to a number of metrics:

Lea, A. S. and M. A. Saunders, How well forecast were the 2004 and 2005 Atlantic and U.S. hurricane Seasons? in Proceedings of the 27th Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology, Monterey, USA, April 24-28 2006. (PDF)
For further details see this paper:

Saunders, M. A. and A. S. Lea, Seasonal prediction of hurricane activity reaching the coast of the United States, Nature, 434, 1005-1008, 2005. (PDF)

2. Phil Klotzbach of Colorado State University, now responsible for issuing the forecasts of the William Gray research team, provides a number of spreadsheets with data showing that their forecasts demonstrate skill:

Seasonal skill excel file
August monthly forecast skill excel file

September monthly forecast skill excel file

October monthly forecast skill excel file

Klotzbach writes in an email: "All three of our monthly forecasts have shown skill with respect to the previous five-year monthly mean of NTC using MSE (mean-squared error as our skill metric). Here are our skills (% value is the % improvement over the previous five-year mean):

August Monthly Forecast: 38%
September Monthly Forecast: 2%
October Monthly Forecast: 33%"

3. NOAA’s Chris Landsea provides the following two figures which show NOAA’s seasonal forecast performance.

He writes in an email: "You can see that we do okay in May (4 out of 7 seasons correctly forecasting number of hurricanes for example), but better in August (6 of 8 seasons correct)."

He also provides a link to this peer-reviewed paper:

Owens, B. F., and C. W. Landsea, 2003: Assessing the skill of operational Atlantic seasonal tropical cyclone forecasts, Weather and Forecasting, Vol. 18, No. 1, pp.45-54. (PDF)

From this information, it seems clear that there are strong claims in support of the skill of seasonal hurricane forecasts and relevant peer-reviewed literature. The AGU statement is therefore misleading and more likely just plain wrong. It certainly is not a community consensus perspective that one might expect to find in an assessment report.

What is going on here? Perhaps the AGU's committee was unaware of this information, which if so would make one wonder about their "expert" committee. Given the distinguished people on their committee, I find this an unlikely explanation. Instead, it may be that the issue of seasonal hurricane forecasting has gotten caught up in the "climate wars." William Gray is the originator of seasonal climate forecasts and has rudely dismissed the notion of human-caused global warming, much less a connection to hurricanes. One of the lead authors of the AGU assessment has been in a public feud with Bill Gray and is a strong advocate of a human role in recent hurricane activity. It is not unreasonable to think that the AGU assessment was being used as a vehicle to advance this battle under the guise of community "consensus." It may be the perception among some that if Bill Gray’s or NOAA’s work on seasonal forecasts, which is based on various natural climatic factors, can be shown to be fundamentally flawed, then this would elevate the importance of alternative explanations.

If this hypothesis explaining what is going on is indeed the case, then it would be a serious misuse of the AGU for the advancement of personal views, unrepresentative of the actual community perspective. It would also represent a complete failure of the AGU’s assessment process. Given that there is peer-reviewed literature indicating the skill of seasonal forecasts, and none that I am aware of making the case for no skill, the AGU has given consensus assessments a black eye, and in the process provided incorrect or misleading information to decision makers.

The AGU case may be isolated, but it does beg the question raised by my father and others, how can we know whether scientific assessments faithfully represent the relevant community of experts versus a subset with an agenda posing under the guise of consensus? I am aware of no systematic approaches to answering this question. It is a question that needs discussion, because as political, personal, and other issues infuse the scientific enterprise, blind trust in disinterested science and science institutions no longer seems to be enough.

Posted on June 23, 2006 06:37 AM View this article | Comments (6)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Scientific Assessments

June 22, 2006

Quick Reaction to the NRC Hockey Stick Report

My reading of the summary of the report and parts of the text is that the NAS has rendered a near-complete vindication for the work of Mann et al. They report does acknowledge that there are perhaps greater uncertainties in temperature reconstructions, reducing Mann et al.'s claim of warmest decade/year in 1,000 years down to 400. Nonetheless, I see nothing in the report that suggests that Mann's research is significantly flawed, nor any calls for release of his data or algorithms, though the report does say in very general terms that such release is a good idea. I am not a climate scientist, but my reading of the section that deals with criticisms of Mann et al.'s work (starting at p. 105) is that while these critiques raise some interesting points, they are minor issues, and the committee find's Mann et al.’s original conclusion to be "plausible." I’d bet that the word "plausible" will be oft invoked as one of the take home messages of the report.

So what to make of this? The NRC has come to the conclusion that the hockey stick debate is much ado about nothing, and make the further point that this particular area of science is not particularly relevant to detection and attribution of human caused climate change. I am certain that research on this subject will continue, but hopefully this NAS report will allow the rest of us to focus on the policy debate rather than this particular issue of science.

I would have liked to see the report get into far more detail on science policy questions, such as release of data, methods, code, etc. and mechanisms of peer review, and IPCC authors reviewing their own work. However, I recognize that these issues may have been interpreted as outside their charge and the committee was not empanelled for this purpose.

Is this the final word on the "hockey stick"? My guess is that for most people, yes, especially if Representative Boehlert, who requested the report, is satisfied with the answers to his questions.

Posted on June 22, 2006 09:07 AM View this article | Comments (45)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

June 21, 2006

Eve of the NAS Hockey Stick Report Release

Tomorrow the National Research Council is going to release its report on the so-called “hockey stick” of global temperature trends that was emphasized in the most recent IPCC report. Not long ago we asked the principles involved in the debate to explain to those of us not involved why this debate matters. On the eve of the NRC report, we thought it might be worth revisiting some comments made by the principles in the debate.

According to Steve McIntyre:

So even if the Hockey Stick did not “matter” to the scientific case, it mattered to the promotion of the scientific case. Scientists may want to “move on”, but institutions cannot, if they want to maintain any credibility. If the Hockey Stick was wrong, it would be as embarrassing as the failure to find WMD in Iraq. In both cases, the policy might well be justified on alternative grounds, but the existence of the alternative grounds does not mean that responsible agencies should not try to isolate the causes of intelligence failure and try to avoid similar failures in the future.

Today, McIntyre provides some pre-release comments on the report.

According to Ross McKitrick:

It matters because it concerns the validity of an influential scientific paper. . .
It matters because it exposes the uncomfortable reality about journal peer review. . .

It matters because it exposes the uncomfortable reality about the IPCC. The IPCC’s use of the hockey stick was not incidental: it is prominent throughout the 2001 report. Yet they did not subject it to any independent checking: revealing an astonishingly cavalier attitude to the quality of their case. This raises the question of whether anything in the report was subject to serious, independent checking. . .

It matters because it exposes the uncomfortable reality about how governments use scientific information Canada (and many other countries) used the hockey stick heavily in their promotion of the Kyoto Accord. . .

It matters because it exposes an uncomfortable reality about the culture of climate science. . .

From Stefan Rahmsdorf and William Connolley of RealClimate:

SR: "The discussions about the past millennium are not discussions about whether humans are changing climate; neither do they affect our projections for the future."
WC: "Why is this fight important to the rest of us? the answer is: you shouldn't. It isn't.."

And finally, here was my two cents of thoughts on the various “so what?” reactions.

Posted on June 21, 2006 12:08 PM View this article | Comments (6)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

June 20, 2006

Please Critique this Sentence

I am working on a new essay on climate policy. I would like your help by critiquing the following sentence, with a particular focus on providing any counter-references from the peer-reviewed literature.

No emissions reduction policy currently under discussion – from changes in personal behavior to those proposed under the Framework Convention on Climate Change – even if successfully implemented will have a discernible effect on the global climate system for at least 50 years.

Now, let me say that this statement, which I believe is scientifically accurate (e.g., see NCAR’s Jim Hurrell testimony) does not mean that we should throw up our hands or stick our heads on the sand about greenhouse gas emissions. But this sentence does have profound implications for thinking about climate policies, their public justifications, and the significance of adaptation. Such implications are typically not front and center in the climate debate, but they should be.

Posted on June 20, 2006 06:27 AM View this article | Comments (47)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

June 17, 2006

We Are Not Ready

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security released a report yesterday (PDF) detailing a review of the state of emergency preparedness across the United States. Bottom line: we are not as ready as we can or should be. My interpretation – the response to Katrina did not necessarily reflect unique circumstances. This report is a sobering read. Here are a few excerpts:

According to U.S. Census data, the average number of people per square mile in Hurricane Belt States is 711, compared to 94 people per square mile in other States. This high-population density is a further impetus to develop and maintain emergency plans that can help warn, evacuate, shelter, and provide care for large numbers of people. p. 35

Only 27% of State and 10% of urban area [emergency operations] plans were rated as Sufficient in terms of adequacy to cope with a catastrophic event. p. 62

Only 18% of State and 11% of urban area plans were rated as having Sufficient feedback mechanisms to ensure the public is taking appropriate action as directed in disseminated forecasts and messages. . . . Although advances in technology (e.g. Internet, cell phones, pagers) have provided several avenues to communicate to the public, many participants have not effectively employed those resources to expedite or expand the provision of emergency public information. p. 66

DHS Peer Review Teams rated less than 20% of State and 10% of urban area plans as Sufficient in providing time estimates and planning for use of multiple modes of transportation for evacuation of people in different risk zones. Both DHS and DOT found that plans do not adequately address evacuation for the most socially vulnerable population segments. Some participants expressed the belief that they will never experience a catastrophic event as defined in IB197 and mass evacuations were not considered a plausible scenario. p. 67

Emergency public information is critical to reduce loss of life and property and to facilitate emergency response operations. Government at all levels does not adequately address pre-incident public education on preparedness measures, alerts and warnings, evacuation, and shelter procedures. Most Review participants do not have a process to evaluate the effectiveness of public education in these areas or for outreach to people with special needs. p. 74

No ironclad guarantees exist in a profession that combats terrorists and nature. Even the best plans will not always deliver success. The historian Henry Adams said, “In all great emergencies, everyone is more or less wrong.” Planners cannot foresee every outcome, and incident managers cannot anticipate every scenario. While disasters have a language of their own and no plan can guarantee success, inadequate plans are proven contributors to failure. The results of the Nationwide Plan Review support fundamental planning modernization. Vince Lombardi said, “We’re going to relentlessly chase perfection knowing full well we will not catch it because perfection is unattainable. But we are going to relentlessly chase it because in the process we will catch excellence.” p. 80

Posted on June 17, 2006 07:18 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Disasters

June 14, 2006

The Climate Policy Equivalent of Graham-Rudman-Hollings

Graham-Rudman-Hollings refers to U.S. legislation in the 1980s that sought to bring the federal budget deficit under control. It didn’t work because it based its "budget cuts" on projected spending, and thus required cuts from some imaginary baseline of what would have happened absent the "budget cuts." As former Bush Administration spokesman Ari Fleisher explained in 2001:

Graham-Rudman-Hollings was, in essence, an approach based on deficit projections of what government had to do to bring deficits into certain lines. And it lead to a lot of gimmickry, and to other issues that were complicating the process of government.

Efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are currently in their "Graham-Rudman-Hollings" phase, and this is a condition, ironically enough, shared by both the current U.S. approach as well as that under the Kyoto Protocol.

Under the Kyoto Protocol there is a complex policy called the "Clean Development Mechanism" that – simplified – provides emissions reductions credits to countries that invest in developing countries to generate clean technologies. According to a recent press release (PDF) from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change:

According to the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat, the Kyoto Protocol’s clean development mechanism (CDM) is as of today estimated to generate more than one billion tonnes of emission reductions by the end of 2012. In addition to the implementation of climate-friendly policies at home, the 1997 landmark treaty allows industrialized countries to meet their emission targets through the treaty’s flexible mechanisms. "We have crossed an important threshold with these emission reductions", said Richard Kinley, acting head of the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat. "It is now evident that the Kyoto Protocol is making a significant contribution towards sustainable development in developing countries".

Emissions reductions are calculated off of a baseline of what would have occurred absent the CDM investment. So it would be more accurate to say that the CDM represents a smaller increase in emissions than otherwise estimated would have occurred. Nonetheless, CDM projects each represent an additive increase in total global GHG emissions.

Now contrast this with the Bush Administration’s stated goal of reducing "greenhouse gas intensity" which is a measure of how much GHGs are produced per unit of economic activity. From an official U.S. government "fact sheet":

In February 2002, President Bush committed the United States to a comprehensive strategy to reduce the greenhouse gas intensity of the American economy (how much we emit per unit of economic activity) by 18 percent by 2012. Meeting this commitment will prevent the release of more than 500 million metric tons of carbon-equivalent emissions to the atmosphere.

The Bush plan has been widely criticized for basically following a business-as-usual approach, as reductions in greenhouse gas intensity are occurring throughout many global economies. According to the White House lead on climate change, James Connaughton, last month:

But when it comes to carbon, what we found is by focusing on intensity we can find the lowest hanging fruit for outcomes. It does not diminish the importance of counting absolute reductions.

One formal difference between the Bush plan (a critique is here) and that of the CDM (a critique is here) is that the CDM is part of a framework that seeks to reduce overall emissions. But the practical reality is that both programs, whatever their positive merits, cannot be honestly be justified as "reducing emissions" as they in fact make very small contributions to reducing the increase in GHG emissions. Consider that most countries participating in Kyoto will all but certainly fail to meet their modest emissions reductions targets.

For advocates of immediate action emissions reductions, under all current and proposed policies (that I am aware of) the future looks like an extended period of uninterrupted growth in greenhouse gas emissions, accounting games notwithstanding. All of the debate about action on emissions will be of little practical effect unless there are policy options on the table that can actually achieve real emissions reductions, not just a reduction in the rate of increase. Right now, there does not seem to be evidence of such options, and so long as the climate debate remains in its Graham-Rudman-Hillings phase, don’t expect to see such options, or much more importantly, significant efforts to create them. The conclusions of one scholarly article on Graham-Rudman-Hollings is worth thinking about:

Gramm-Rudman-Hollings legislation has failed to control the budget deficit. However, the yearly ritual of preparing budgets that conform to the legislated requirements of this Act creates the illusion of deficit control and removes the incentive for developing real deficit controls.

It is great to argue that something should be done, but at some point the discussion has to be moved to what actions are worth doing and with what effects.

Posted on June 14, 2006 07:23 AM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

June 13, 2006

Willful Ignorance

I find this just amazing:

Beginning next month, Florida researchers won't be able to travel to Cuba to carry out any studies. Although the United States allows such interactions, the state has banned faculty members at Florida's public universities from having any contact with the island nation under a law enacted last week. "This law shuts down the entire Cuban research agenda," says Damián Fernández, director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami.
Cuba is one of six countries that the U.S. State Department has designated as a "sponsor of terrorism," although U.S. scholars can travel to Cuba for research if they first obtain a government license. The Florida measure, which passed the state legislature unanimously, essentially closes that loophole by disallowing state-funded institutions from using public or private funds to facilitate travel to such countries. (The list includes North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Sudan.)

"Florida's taxpayers don't want to see their resources being used to support or subsidize terrorist regimes at a time when America is fighting a war on terror," says David Rivera, a Republican Cuban-American state legislator who introduced the bill. Florida researchers won't miss out on anything by not going to Cuba, he adds: "I don't think there's anything there that cannot be studied in the Dominican Republic or other Caribbean islands."

Except Cuba. Duh.

Posted on June 13, 2006 07:29 AM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | International

Hurricane Politics

I like Bill Clinton. I wish he were still president (22nd Amendment aside!). But the following characterization of his remarks on hurricane policy is an inevitable consequence of the ongoing debate over hurricanes and global warming, in which hurricanes are used to justify emissions reductions policies:

As Tropical Storm Alberto threatened to strengthen into the ninth hurricane in 22 months to affect Florida, former President Clinton predicted Monday that Republican environmental policies will lead to more severe storms.

Expect to see more of such nonsense in the coming months.

Posted on June 13, 2006 07:21 AM View this article | Comments (11)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Disasters

June 10, 2006

The Curious Case of Storm Surge and Sea Level Rise in the IPCC TAR

Earlier this year while I was involved in preparing our contribution to an exchange with colleagues for the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society on hurricanes, a particular sentence in the response (PDF) to our paper piqued my interest. The sentence read in full:

As summarized in the Working Group II assessment of McCarthy et al. (2001), model projections of the mean annual number of people who would be flooded by coastal storm surges increase several-fold (75–200 million, depending on the adaptive response) for midrange scenarios of a 0.4-m sea level rise by the 2080s relative to scenarios with no sea level rise.

The sentence caught my attention because it was stunningly ambiguous and unclear. What could it mean? So I set out to learn more about it. What I found and my experiences trying to publish what I have found provides some insights into the increasingly curious world of climate science.

The sentence is actually a direct quote from the IPCC Working Group II Third Assessment Report’s Summary for Policymakers, p. 13 (here in PDF). As such it has been widely quoted in the years since the Third Assessment. But a review of how it has been interpreted shows considerable confusion about what it actually means. For example:

A peer-reviewed article in the British Medical Journal came to one conclusion:
"The number of people at risk from flooding by coastal storm surges is projected to increase from the current 75 million to 200 million in a scenario of mid-range climate changes, in which a rise in the sea level of 40 cm is envisaged by the 2080s."

A report by an oil industry group came to a second interpretation (PDF):

"Even a somewhat conservative scenario of a 40-cm [15.8-in.] sea-level rise by the 2080s would add 75 to 200 million people to the number currently at risk of being flooded by coastal storm surges."

The Red Cross offers still another interpretation,

"The average annual number of people whose houses are flooded by storm surges along coastlines is expected to increase from a few million each year to between 75 and 200 million by the year 2080, estimates the IPCC."

Such differing perspectives are chracteristic of this particular bit of the IPCC consensus. No one, it seems, knows what this sentence means. Now this might not be surprising; after all, the IPCC is written by committee and it would not be surprising to see a confusing sentence come out of such a process. However, this is where it gets considerably more interesting. It appears that the IPCC did not explain what the sentence means, and going back to the original scientific source for the statement does not allow one to arrive at a clear interpretation of what it means.

Given that the IPCC is frequently touted as the most highly peer-reviewed document in climate science I found this quite interesting, and somewhat troubling. So I wrote up what I had learned, only to find after months of trying that publishing such a story can be quite challenging.

But before discussing my attempts to publish, let me describe the source of the sentence and the challenges in interpreting what, exactly, it means.

The IPCC WGII SPM points to Section 4.5 of the full assessment report as the source for the sentence. So going to that section, one finds absolutely nothing related to the sentence. However, thanks to Google and the online availability of the IPCC the trail does not end there. Searching on various combinations of "sea level rise" and "storm surge" leads to Chapter 7 of the IPCC which has this passage:

Worldwide, depending on the degree of adaptive response, the number of people at risk from annual flooding as a result of a 40-cm sea-level rise and population increase in the coastal zone is expected to increase from today’s level of 10 million to 22-29 million by the 2020s, 50-80 million by 2050s, and 88-241 million by the 2080s (Nicholls et al., 1999). Without sea-level rise, the numbers were projected at 22-23 million in the 2020s, 2732 million in the 2050s, and 13-36 million in the 2080s. The 40 cm sea-level rise is consistent with the middle of the range currently being projected for 2100 by Working Group I. In 2050, more than 70% (90% by the 2080s) of people in settlements that potentially would be flooded by sea-level rise are likely to be located in a few regions: west Africa, east Africa, the southern Mediterranean, south Asia, and southeast Asia. In terms of relative increase, however, some of the biggest impacts are in the small island states (Nicholls et al., 1999).

Nowhere in this passage is it clear however where the SPM got the 75-200 million number, or what it might mean.

Nicholls et al. 1999 is this paper:

Nicholls J.N., F.M.J. Hoozemans and M. Marchand, 1999. Increasing flood risk and wetland losses due to global sea-level rise: regional and global analyses, Global Environmental Change, 9:S69-S87. (PDF)

And after several careful readings it turns out that all of the questions lead to Table 7 in that paper which I reproduce below.

My first reaction was that the IPCC confused the cumulative people affected by a 1 in 1000 year storm surge event (People to Respond or PTR in the Table 7) with the "mean annual number of people who would be flooded by coastal storm" (AAPF in the Table 7) because these numbers -- 70-205 million -- look pretty close to those in the SPM (75-200 million) and it would perhaps be easy to confuse the last digits. If so then this would be a huge error, conflating a cumulative number with a cumulative number.

So I emailed Robert Nicholls who graciously responded suggesting that there was another possible interpretation that got one reasonably close to the IPCC numbers. That would be taking the Average Annual People flooded under "Evolving Protection" for the 2080s – 88 million – and subtracting the 13 million for the 2080s under evolving protection with no sea level rise, leaving one with 75 million. Very promising.

However, there is no similar calculation that leads to 200 million. The analogous calculation under the "Constant Protection" column is 228-36 = 192 million. One could confuse the different models to arrive at 237(+4)-36 = 205, but this would be an obvious methodological error (comparing across different models) compounded with a typo. And if not a typo why alter the value from 205 to 200? I can't figure it out.

So where exactly the numbers came from remains a mystery. No one I’ve asked knows the answer. It makes no sense to me that the numbers would be generated through some procedure outside the peer-reviewed literature, as this is outside the scope of the IPCC’s mandate. And there appears to be no logical or intuitive combination of values that result in the values that appear in the SPM from Nicholls et al. Of course, the IPCC is a sprawling document, and the derivation of these numbers may yet be hidden somewhere inside, but I haven’t found them. Maybe there is an obvious or straightforward explanation, but I have not heard it.

OK, so what? The IPCC has a sentence that is confusing at best, and more likely is just nonsense. Nonsense happens, right?

Well, no. When I first searched for information about it last February, I found that the sentence in question has been used in official documents related to climate policy by the Japanese (PDF), Canadian, and British governments. From a follow up search that I just conducted it seems that the UK citation has been superceded, but I am sure that it remains in cyberspace somewhere.

The IPCC SPM is used to justify policy actions on climate change, and thus it would seem pretty important that its information be accurate and understandable. In this case, it appears that neither criterion was met.

So I thought – naively -- that this was a pretty interesting story, particularly given that the IPCC is presently in the midst of preparing its fourth assessment, and wrote a short essay describing what I had found – and more importantly had not found -- about the SPM sentence and the main report, when compared to the original literature. I have tried to publish at two outlets that one would think might have an interest in the accuracy of IPCC assessments, only to be turned down, quickly in one case because it didn’t fit a category, and after an extremely long delay in the second case with the chief editor explaining to me, essentially, that the emperor’s clothes are really quite beautiful. The case of storm surge and sea level rise in the IPCC WGII SPM seems to be so obviously an open and shut case – the facts are readily available for anyone to examine for themselves – that I admit some considerable surprise at the difficultly in getting it published. But I suppose that is what blogs are for.

Here is how I opened my essay that I wrote last February:

In the children’s game of "telephone" a group of children sit in a circle and someone starts the game by whispering a phrase to the person seated neat to them and so on all around the circle. After enough transmissions a phrase that begins as "five stories" might come out the end as "jive turkey" to everyone’s delight. The game of telephone provides a cautionary tale for producers and users of scientific assessments. The case of mistaken and misinterpreted information about storm surge impacts illustrates the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests that the IPCC may have its own "jive turkey" problem minus the delight.

I justified why this issue is important as follows:

The IPCC has great potential to inform policy makers, however its credibility rest on being accurate and faithful to the literature. Errors will inevitably occur, but in this case an error in the IPCC’s most important summaries has been used uncritically in policy documents and academic studies, apparently not having been noticed until now. This problem may be more systemic, e.g., I have elsewhere written about the IPCC’s erroneous treatment of non-peer reviewed studies of the attribution of climate disasters to greenhouse gases (e.g., Pielke, 2005). However broad the problem is, as the IPCC gears up for its fourth assessment report it seems critical to carefully evaluate its procedures for accuracy, and for users of the IPCC to understand the strengths and limits of assessments. There is a more fundamental problem and that is the distilling of complex, nuanced research into one-sentence sound bites that perhaps inevitably cannot accurately capture what is to be found in a lengthy scientific article.

I sought to provide a more accurate summary of Nicholls et al. 1999 than one can find in the IPCC TAR, which in fact leads to conclusions at odds with that distilled by those who have misinterpreted the IPCC sentence. In fact, Nicholls et al. proivide considerable support for the argument tha increasing coasal habitation is a far greater issue than sea level rise when it comes to storm surge (surprise, surprise):

A more accurate summary of Nicholls et al. (1999) would start by observing that the paper used a scenario that had that number of people subjected to 1 in 1000 or greater risk of coastal storm surges increasing from 197 million in 1990 to 575 million in the 2080s without any rise in sea level, due only to population growth and demographic changes. Under this scenarios, with sea level rise (and no societal reaction) the 2085 population-at-risk would be 630 to 640 million. With no sea level rise Nicholls et al. (1999) calculate an increase in the average annual number of people flooded rising from 10 million (1990) to 36 million (2085) with 1990 levels of protection. With protection that evolves as a function of GDP (but not otherwise changed due to sea level rise) the number of people flooded increases only by 3 million, from 10 million (1990) to 13 million (2085), even though population-at-risk increased by 378 million people. This suggests that only 0.8% of the additional people who inhabit the coastal zone by 2085 with a 1 in 1000 or greater risk would on average experience an annual flood. This compares with 5.1% of inhabitants who experience a flood in 1990 based on the assumptions of Nicholls et al.
Putting this together, according to Nicholls et al. (1999) population-at-risk increases by 438 million by 2085 while the average annual number of people flooded increases by 78 million people, from 10 million in 1990 to 88 million in 2085 (and by 3 million, from 10 million to 13 million under the no sea level rise scenario). So the IPCC should have reported that:

Nicholls et al. estimate that of the 438 million additional people expected to inhabit the coastal zone by 2085 with a 1 in 1000 or greater rise of storm surge, about 0.7% - 18% of them, or on average between 3 million and 78 million additional people annually would experience the effects of coast flooding under the assumptions of the sensitivity analysis.

The difference between assuming that only 0.8% of the additional people who inhabit the coastal zone at risk to flooding under a scenario of no sea level rise versus 18% under a scenario of sea level rise results from the fact that the methods assumes an appropriate adaptive response in the first case but not the latter. For instance, to reach the 18% portion requires than many people would move to locations far riskier than they choose to inhabit today. Using the same ratio of people who experience floods to those at risk (i.e., assuming that people adapt where they live according to the contemporaneous risk) as Nicholls et al. use for 1990 (i.e., 5.1%) would suggest an additional 22.3 million people would be exposed to floods with a population increase of 438 million. Using the ratio suggested for 2085 under no sea level rise results in an additional 3.5 million people who experience floods. Nicholls et al. provide no reason to expect that society will be significantly more risk averse in 2085 than today, nor why the presence of sea level rise would change the acceptable risk from a scenario of no sea level rise.

I concluded with some words of caution:

These details for just this one study of storm surge are very complicated and to understand them requires a careful examination of the primary literature. Clearly, what appears in the 2001 IPCC bears only a distant relation to what the original study actually said. For this reason, scientific assessments cannot replace the primary literature, and some thought should be given by scholars to how best to deal with knowledge that is highly simplified through assessment and then recirculated into academic inquiry. Like the children’s game of telephone, this is a recipe for miscommunication, mischaracterization of scientific research, and a foundation of knowledge that rests a few feet above the ground. A more appropriate role for assessments would be to focus more explicitly on the information needs of policy makers and focus attention on a wide range policy options and their possible consequences. Efforts to summarize complex science may not ultimately prove useful to policymakers if they result in oversimplifications and mischaracterizations.

Climate science is a curious business, that’s for sure.

Posted on June 10, 2006 02:04 PM View this article | Comments (34)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

June 08, 2006

Confusion on Science Censorship in US Federal Agencies

There may be a good explanation, but Warren Washington has expressed apparently conflicting views on science censorship in U.S. federal agencies. In today’s Rocky Mountain News Warren Washington, outgoing chairman of the National Science Board (which oversees the National Science Foundation), is quoted as follows:

The American public is not hearing the full story on global warming because Bush administration officials are muzzling government scientists, a top climate researcher said Wednesday.
Warren Washington, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, said that Bush appointees are suppressing information about climate change, restricting journalists' access to federal scientists and rewriting agency news releases to stress global warming uncertainties.

"The news media is not getting the full story, especially from government scientists," Washington told about 160 people attending the first day of "Climate Change and the Future of the American West," a three-day conference sponsored by the University of Colorado's Natural Resources Law Center. . .

Washington said in an interview that the climate cover-up is occurring at several federal agencies, including NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Forest Service. NOAA operates several Boulder laboratories that conduct climate and weather research.

I was in attendance at the workshop and heard Dr. Washington’s allegations. But unless he has some new information (which he might), but has not released, it is difficult to square these allegations with a recent report of the NSB on this issue. A report (available here in PDF, relevant section begins at p. 6) which was chaired by Dr. Washington found no evidence of suppression. Here is an excerpt:

. . . the Board has reviewed statutes, regulations, agency statements and internal documents related to this issue for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and the Departments of Agriculture (USDA), Energy (DOE), and Health and Human Services (HHS). In addition, the Board requested that the Inspector General (IG) of the National Science Foundation (NSF) poll her counterparts at these agencies for additional relevant information.
The Board would like to acknowledge and thank EPA, NASA, NIH, NOAA, USGS, USDA, and DOE for their responses to our request for information. . .

The survey of the agencies’ IGs indicated that no reports were issued to indicate scientific information was suppressed or distorted at the agencies involved with the Board’s review.

It may be that while there are no formal reports from within various agencies, suppression is nonetheless ongoing. However, I would hope that Dr. Washington would provide the evidence of such continuing suppression if he has it. Otherwise, the allegations of suppression risk undermining the credibility of countless hard-working government scientists and their agencies. As a NOAA spokesman said,

Jordan St. John, a NOAA spokesman, said the allegations against his agency are false.
"NOAA is an open and transparent agency," he said. "It's unfair to the people who work at this agency that this kind of characterization keeps being made. Hansen said it once, and it took on a life of its own and just keeps getting repeated."

But Washington insisted that government officials are "trying to confuse the public" about climate change and the scientific consensus that global warming is a real problem.

The only way to reconcile these different points of view is with data. Without data that suppression continues (beyond the well documented cases of Jim Hansen and the NOAA hurricane press release) it is hard to know what is being referred to. If I see Warren today at the conference, I’ll ask him. The NSB does offer a number of useful recommendations, which I provide here in full:

RECOMMENDATIONS
Based on our analysis, we offer the following recommendations:

• A Government-wide directive should be issued by the Administration that provides overarching principles and clearly articulates the requirement for all agencies to develop unambiguous policies and procedures to encourage open exchange of data and results of research conducted by agency scientists, while preventing the intentional or unintentional suppression or distortion of research findings and accommodating appropriate agency review. A developed set of principles should also state the concomitant responsibility of agency employees regarding the advocacy of public policy that might be implied by their research.

• Agency-wide policies covering the public disclosure of an agency’s research results should be issued and uniformly applied, widely communicated, and readily accessible to all employees and the general public. Like those recently released by NASA, these policies should unambiguously describe what is and is not permitted or recommended. Responsibilities for communicating research results by researchers, public affairs officers, policy makers, and other agency employees should be clearly described. A clear distinction should be made between communicating professional research results and data versus the interpretation of data and results in a context that seeks to influence, through the injection of personal viewpoints, public opinion or formulation of public policy.

• An objective dispute resolution mechanism for disagreements involving the public dissemination of agency research findings should be implemented. This will help ensure the public has access to the research and that scientific findings presented are credible and of the highest quality.

• A Government-wide review should be established to ensure that implementation of these recommendations is conducted in a manner that meets the high standards expected and is consistent across agencies.

From where I sit these make good sense, however, I will point out that this aspiration will forever be problematic: “A clear distinction should be made between communicating professional research results and data versus the interpretation of data and results in a context that seeks to influence, through the injection of personal viewpoints, public opinion or formulation of public policy.”

Posted on June 8, 2006 07:15 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science Policy: General

June 07, 2006

Comments on Nature Article on Disaster Trends Workshop

Quirin Schiermeier has an article in the current issue of Nature on our recent workshop on disaster loss trends and climate change. The workshop executive summary can be found here and a PDF here. The article, unfortunately, has a few mistakes and is subject to misinterpretation.

1. The Nature article does not recognize that the workshop participants used the IPCC definition of "climate change" to mean a change irrespective of causes. At several points the author of the Nature article conflates "climate change" and "global warming" which is something we at the workshop were careful not to do. Here is the opening paragraph of the Nature story:

Insurance companies, acutely aware of the dramatic increase in losses caused by natural disasters in recent decades, have been convinced that global warming is partly to blame. Now their data seem to be persuading scientists, too. At a recent meeting of climate and insurance experts, delegates reached a cautious consensus: climate change is helping to drive the upward trend in catastrophes. . .
Delegates seem to have found the record persuasive. Their consensus statement, to be released on 8 June, says there is "evidence that changing patterns of extreme events are drivers for recent increases in global losses".

Clearly climate change has played a role in driving recent increases in losses. On attribution to human causes see below.

2. The article does not distinguish my collaborator’s personal views from those of the workshop consensus, thereby creating room for confusion. Here is the relevant passage:

There was no agreement on how big a role global warming has played, however. "Because of issues related to data quality, it is still not possible to determine the portion of the increase in damages that might be attributed to climate change," the workshop concluded.
"Dissent over the issue is clearly waning," says Peter Höppe, head of Munich Re's Geo Risks department, who co-chaired the workshop with Roger Pielke Jr, director of the University of Colorado's Center of Science and Technology Policy Research. "Climate change may not be the dominant factor, but it has become clear that a relevant portion of damages can be attributed to global warming."

The workshop consensus is worth repeating:

11. Because of issues related to data quality, the stochastic nature of extreme event impacts, length of time series, and various societal factors present in the disaster loss record, it is still not possible to determine the portion of the increase in damages that might be attributed to climate change due to GHG emissions

and

13. In the near future the quantitative link (attribution) of trends in storm and flood losses to climate changes related to GHG emissions is unlikely to be answered unequivocally.

3. Nature unfortunately trots out the worn “skeptic” label to describe my views:

Previously sceptical, Pielke says that he is now convinced that at least some of the increased losses can be blamed on climate: "Clearly, since 1970 climate change has shaped the disaster loss record."
He adds a note of caution, however: "Disaster damage is not the place to look for early indications of climate change," he says. "Policy advocates should exercise caution in using disaster losses to justify climate mitigation, lest they go beyond what science can support."

~~I was accurately quoted, but my use of the term "climate change" was as we used it at the workshop.~~ [Update- Upon checking I was misquoted! See comments. RP] I am increasingly convinced that since 1970 a portion of the increase in disaster losses is due to changes in climate, clearly, and largely due to US hurricanes. But it is less clear that such trends exist if the record dates to 1950 or 1920.

4. Nature cites GermanWatch as a group who has used attributed disaster losses to human-caused climate change, but does not mention that a representative of the group participated in the workshop and signed on to the workshop consensus.

Overall, I am disappointed with this story.

Posted on June 7, 2006 12:13 PM View this article | Comments (8)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

Workshop Executive Summary

Report of the Workshop on
“Climate Change and Disaster Losses - Understanding
and Attributing Trends and Projections”
25-26 May 2006, Hohenkammer, Germany

Introduction

In summer 2005 both Roger Pielke, Jr. of the Center of Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado and Peter Hoeppe of the Geo Risks Research Department of Munich Re learned from each other that each planned to organize a workshop on the assessment of factors leading to increasing loss trends due to natural disasters. Both agreed that such a workshop was timely, especially given the apparent lack of consensus on the role of climate change in disaster loss trends. Roger Pielke, Jr. and Peter Hoeppe decided to have a common workshop in 2006 in Germany to bring together a diverse group of international experts in the fields of climatology and disaster research. The general questions to be answered at this workshop were:

What factors account for increasing costs of weather related disasters in recent decades?

What are the implications of these understandings, for both research and policy?

[click through to read the rest]

The participants were selected by a workshop organizing team that met in December, 2005. Participants were selected for their high level of competence and to represent a wide range of different attitudes to the subject. All participants came into the workshop agreeing that anthropogenic climate change is a concern.

In total 32 participants from 13 countries attended the two day workshop (list of participants attached). “White papers” from 25 participants were submitted in advance and formed the basis of the discussions. The workshop was organized in 4 sessions:

1. Trends in extreme weather events
2. Trends in Damages
3. Data issues – extreme weather events and damages
4. Syntheses discussion

In the syntheses session the discussion was focused on finding consensus positions among the participants on statements about the attribution of disaster losses and the policy implications. These 20 statements are listed in the executive summary and are described in more detail in the full workshop summary report. Specific views of individual participants can be found in their white papers, which each was given the opportunity to revise following the workshop.

The workshop was sponsored by Munich Re, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, and the GKSS Research Center.

Workshop on
“Climate Change and Disaster Losses - Understanding
and Attributing Trends and Projections”
25-26 May 2006, Hohenkammer, Germany

Executive Summary

The focus of the workshop was on two questions:

What factors account for increasing costs of weather related disasters in recent decades?

What are the implications of these understandings, for both research and policy?

Consensus (unanimous) statements of the workshop participants:

1. Climate change is real, and has a significant human component related to greenhouse gases.

2. Direct economic losses of global disasters have increased in recent decades with particularly large increases since the 1980s.

3. The increases in disaster losses primarily result from weather related events, in particular storms and floods.

4. Climate change and variability are factors which influence trends in disasters.

5. Although there are peer reviewed papers indicating trends in storms and floods there is still scientific debate over the attribution to anthropogenic climate change or natural climate variability. There is also concern over geophysical data quality.

6. IPCC (2001) did not achieve detection and attribution of trends in extreme events at the global level.

7. High quality long-term disaster loss records exist, some of which are suitable for research purposes, such as to identify the effects of climate and/or climate change on the loss records.

8. Analyses of long-term records of disaster losses indicate that societal change and economic development are the principal factors responsible for the documented increasing losses to date.

9. The vulnerability of communities to natural disasters is determined by their economic development and other social characteristics.

10. There is evidence that changing patterns of extreme events are drivers for recent increases in global losses.

11. Because of issues related to data quality, the stochastic nature of extreme event impacts, length of time series, and various societal factors present in the disaster loss record, it is still not possible to determine the portion of the increase in damages that might be attributed to climate change due to GHG emissions

12. For future decades the IPCC (2001) expects increases in the occurrence and/or intensity of some extreme events as a result of anthropogenic climate change. Such increases will further increase losses in the absence of disaster reduction measures.

13. In the near future the quantitative link (attribution) of trends in storm and flood losses to climate changes related to GHG emissions is unlikely to be answered unequivocally.

Policy implications identified by the workshop participants

14. Adaptation to extreme weather events should play a central role in reducing societal vulnerabilities to climate and climate change.

15. Mitigation of GHG emissions should also play a central role in response to anthropogenic climate change, though it does not have an effect for several decades on the hazard risk.

16. We recommend further research on different combinations of adaptation and mitigation policies.

17. We recommend the creation of an open-source disaster database according to agreed upon standards.

18. In addition to fundamental research on climate, research priorities should consider needs of decision makers in areas related to both adaptation and mitigation.

19. For improved understanding of loss trends, there is a need to continue to collect and improve long-term and homogenous datasets related to both climate parameters and disaster losses.

20. The community needs to agree upon peer reviewed procedures for normalizing economic loss data.

Posted on June 7, 2006 11:50 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

A Marginal View on Science Policy

Jack Stilgoe at DEMOS has a good post up on their blog referring to Terrence Kealey’s latest call for government to get out of the science funding business. I agree with Jack’s take on this:

Kealey's view is pretty marginal, and doesn't deserve a huge amount of attention. But it's an interesting reminder of how some people view science as a homogenous factor of production. For Kealey, it's about making sure that "science" gets done, rather than wondering about what science should get done and how.

Have a look at Jack’s post for links to Kealy’s op-ed and very useful background information, including a relevant DEMOS report on the public value of science.

Posted on June 7, 2006 06:48 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | R&D Funding

June 06, 2006

Lloyd's on Climate Adaptation

Lloyd's of London has an interesting new report out on the need for the insurance industry to improve their adaptive capacity in the face of climate change (here in PDF). The report is titled "Climate Change: Adapt or Bust." Here is the executive summary:

1. TOO LITTLE BUT NOT yet TOO LATE. The insurance industry must do more now to understand and actively manage climate change risk.
An increasing wealth of scientific evidence is available to predict the impact of changing weather patterns and future climate change on the insurance industry. So far, efforts to do so have been patchy and there is little evidence of industry behaviour changing as a result. Much of the latest science suggests that climate change will take place faster than we thought. Urgent and active management of climate change – starting with investment in research – is now imperative. It is not too late to change, but change is long overdue.

2. Recent events have shown capital and pricing models to be wanting. We must regularly update and recalibrate our models to keep pace with REALITY.

Catastrophe modellers have now reacted to criticisms following the recent record US hurricane seasons. However, much of this work could and should have been done prior to these events. Going forward, the industry must take a new approach to underwriting, looking ahead and not simply basing decisions on historical patterns. Insurer pricing and capital allocation models must be updated regularly – and not just in extremis – to reflect the latest scientific evidence. Our responsibilities in this regard will be increasingly widely drawn: regulators will require the industry to maintain a level of capital adequate for changing levels of climate change risk.

3. Windstorm trends will put particular pressure on businesses and their insurers.

Based on natural cycles alone, we can expect the current trend towards extreme windstorm events to continue and increase over the next decade. Climate change can only exacerbate this, and insurers must plan for a higher frequency of extreme events, over a longer storm season and over a wider geographical area. Insurers must also take advantage of scientific advances to factor forecasts for the season ahead into their planning, instead of relying only on long-term trends.

4. Climate change means Exposures are changing and new ones emerging.
insurers must regularly review and communicate conditions of coverage.

We foresee an increasing possibility of attributing weather losses to man made factors, with courts seeking to assign liability and compensation for claims of damage. Exposures can also be expected to increase in respect of property, business interruption and political risks, demanding the same response. That means the insurance industry will want to regularly review conditions of coverage against risk appetite, and do more to educate the public about changing exposures. The industry can help by creating incentives for policyholders to reduce risk. Opportunities for those insurance markets which are flexible and innovative will emerge too: as society adapts to the impact of climate change, new technologies will be required and insurance of these developments will be needed.

5. Insurers must prepare for the impact of climate change on asset values. Underwriting for profit will be key,

As major corporate investors, insurers rely on returns from assets to boost their own financial performance. We expect climate change not only to produce extreme capital damaging events, but also to increase uncertainty around corporate business plans and potentially reduce asset values. This makes it even more important for the industry to price risk according to exposure and to underwrite for profit. We also see industry players having increased opportunity to use their influence as investors, in order to encourage responsible and climate proof behaviour from the boards of corporations in which they invest, and with which they do business.

6. Effective partnership with business and government will be key to
managing risk. The insurance industry must engage now.

Based on long experience, Lloyd’s believes that insurance markets operate most efficiently when left to free market forces, and the vast majority of natural perils are insurable – as long as the market is free to price risk adequately. However, if this freedom is removed, or if the pace of climate change grows faster than expected, this could change our view. Industry strategists will want to consider the long-term insurability of weather-related risk. We believe that a meaningful partnership with government and business, supported by a series of practical actions, has the best chance of providing solutions. In particular, this should address the issue of increasing concentrations of population and economic wealth in high risk areas, for example on coasts. This report focuses on adaptation but we recognise that mitigation of the risk itself (ie the reduction of CO2 emissions) is crucial.

Posted on June 6, 2006 08:24 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

June 05, 2006

Climate Change is a Moral Issue

Quite unintentionally, Dave Roberts of Grist Magazine provides an incredibly clear statement of the insanity of the climate debate:

Advocating that adaptation play a larger role in U.S. policy, in the current political context, does not increase the odds of sensible, balanced climate policy. It simply, if inadvertently, helps the corporatist right cloud the debate and avoid the difficult steps required to cut GHG emissions.
And whatever else we do, that task is paramount.

In an ideal, abstract policy debate, sure, I'd say we should boost our attention to adaptation. But in the current political situation, I don't want to provide any ammunition for the moral cretins who are squirming frantically to avoid policies that might impact their corporate donors. Until they're gone from the scene -- until we have an administration serious about addressing this problem -- I'm going to focus on cutting emissions.

Dave’s honesty is to be applauded, as his view on this subject is widely shared among those in the climate debate but rarely explained so clearly. However, his focus on sticking it to the “moral cretins” he so despises has the side effect of preventing greater help to people like those pictured below waiting for help in the aftermath of hurricane Mitch. There are hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, who sure could use a little help in improving their adaptive capacity irrespective of emissions reductions.

Climate change is indeed a moral issue. But hey, why advocate policies that can directly help suffering people around the world when you can instead stick to your ideological opponents?

Posted on June 5, 2006 12:26 PM View this article | Comments (24)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

June 02, 2006

Comment from Judy Curry

[Ed.- I want to make sure that Judy's response to my post earlier today is not missed. I will respond in the comments. RP]

Roger,

I make it a practice not to blog, but i want to clarify your misreading of our meeting with Governor Bush. We went to extreme pains NOT to talk about policies or politics. We talked about the science and the risks to Florida. Governor Bush made the important point in our discussion that this whole issue has become very politicized, and said that we needed to take the politics out of this and get to the bottom of the scientific issue of hurricanes and global warming. I wholeheartedly agree.

The most important issue from Florida's point of view is to understand whether the hurricane situation is likely to get worse. We said that there is a considerably risk that it will.
Florida and other coastal cities need to urgently reassess their risk to hurricanes to allow for the risk of increased hurricane activity. No matter what we decide to do about the greenhouse warming issue, the most vulnerable coastal cities need to reconsider their coastal engineering, land use practices, emergency procedures, etc. in view of the risk of increasing hurricane activity and the longer range prospect of sea level rise.

The prospect of increasing hurricane activity has overall raised people's awareness of the global warming issue, but I don't think that many people believe that anything we do re greenhouse gases in the short term will influence the problems that our coastal cities are facing particularly in the next few decades.

The media has often misrepresented my remarks, that is unfortunate but not unexpected I guess. The particular article you refer to was an accurate portrayal of our meeting with Governor Bush. Yes, there are a variety of advocacy groups in Florida that are trying to influence Governor Bush and others to adopt a variety of policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Yes those groups believe that hurricanes can help raise awareness of the global warming issue. But no one that I know of is pushing greenhouse gas reductions as a policy to deal with increasing hurricane activity.

Judy

Posted on June 2, 2006 08:59 PM View this article | Comments (15)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

Petropolitics, MoveOn.org, and The Politics of Decarbonization

Thomas Friedman is brilliant at capturing large-scale dynamics of the international scene. In the current issue of Foreign Policy he has an excellent article on the relationship of oil prices and the “pace of freedom” which he argues always move in opposite directions. His article provides a compelling justification for reducing reliance on fossil fuels:

Let me stress again that I know that the correlations suggested by these graphs are not perfect and, no doubt, there are exceptions that readers will surely point out. But I do believe they illustrate a general trend that one can see reflected in the news every day: The rising price of oil clearly has a negative impact on the pace of freedom in many countries, and when you get enough countries with enough negative impacts, you start to poison global politics.
Although we cannot affect the supply of oil in any country, we can affect the global price of oil by altering the amounts and types of energy we consume. When I say “we,” I mean the United States in particular, which consumes about 25 percent of the world’s energy, and the oil-importing countries in general. Thinking about how to alter our energy consumption patterns to bring down the price of oil is no longer simply a hobby for high-minded environmentalists or some personal virtue. It is now a national security imperative.

Therefore, any American democracy-promotion strategy that does not also include a credible and sustainable strategy for finding alternatives to oil and bringing down the price of crude is utterly meaningless and doomed to fail. Today, no matter where you are on the foreign-policy spectrum, you have to think like a Geo-Green. You cannot be either an effective foreign-policy realist or an effective democracy-promoting idealist without also being an effective energy environmentalist.

Reframing the greenhouse emissions issue beyond global warming is important if effective action is going to take place. Support for this assertion comes from a poll taken by participants in nationwide "house parties" organized by MoveOn.org a liberal advocacy group. From an email in my inbox here are the results of this poll:

Health care for all 65091
Sustainable energy independence 61030

Restored constitutional rights 35675

Guaranteed accurate elections 35133

Diplomacy over militarism 28912

High quality education for all 27874

Solutions to global warming 26306

A guaranteed living wage 25527

Publicly funded elections 21096

A balanced federal budget 20945

Look at that -- global warming is #7 while sustainable energy independence is #2. If global warming doesn’t rank higher with MoveOn.org participants, why would anyone expect that it will it ever rank higher among the general public?

There are good reasons to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. Leading with global warming as a promotional strategy may seem like the right thing to do, but as a matter of political expediency, why not go where the policy arguments and political salience are strongest?

Posted on June 2, 2006 05:54 AM View this article | Comments (6)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Energy Policy

Like a Broken Record

We have made the case many times here that reducing greenhouse gases makes good sense for a wide range of reasons, not just climate change, but that it is a poor policy argument to suggest that greenhouse gas reduction can have any effect on hurricane losses in the near term, and only a small effect in the long term due to the inexorable pace societal development along the coast. Just yesterday I was asked in the comments why it is I that on hurricanes and global warming I always “change the subject” from climate science to hurricane policy. Below are some good reasons why we should always ask “so what?” in the context of scientific debates.

In comments made earlier this month Georgia Tech scientist Judy Curry was quoted as advocating emissions reductions as a means to respond to hurricanes (when I contacted Judy about this she said that the media put together two disconnected thoughts to make it sound like she was advocating emissions reductions as hurricane policy, but that she was not):

"We’re seeing an increase in the sea surface temperatures, and increase in the number of storms and in the intensity of those storms," said Dr. Judy Curry.
The question is why? Dr. Judy Curry says part of the reason is us.

Curry is one of the researchers in the forefront of the contentious global warming debate. She says data clearly shows that greenhouse gases we create with our cars, our industrial plants, our very lifestyles are helping to dissolve the polar ice caps and worse, melt the Greenland ice sheet.

"We have the technologies, we still have some time to reduce our greenhouse gases there is no reason we shouldn’t be doing this," said Curry.

And just yesterday another news story cited how greenhouse gas emissions reductions were being advocated in Florida as a response to hurricanes.

Florida's governor cautiously entered the debate Wednesday over whether rising global temperatures are to blame for an increase in the number of strong hurricanes, meeting with two researchers who say global warming is threatening Florida with a long-term future of more bad storms.
Bush met with Peter Webster and Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology, who published research last year showing an increase in global hurricane intensity, with a doubling of the number of Category 4 or 5 hurricanes since 1970. That increase coincides with a rise of nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit in ocean surface temperatures, they say. . .

The debate is something of a storm itself, and Bush joined it cautiously.

"He said they presented some pretty compelling information," said Bush spokesman Russell Schweiss, declining to say whether Bush agrees that global warming is increasing the number of strong hurricanes. "He encouraged them to continue with their research."

Webster and Curry's meeting came as environmentalists seek to push to the state level efforts to curb the emission of so-called greenhouse gasses that are blamed for causing global temperature increases.

They say President Bush's administration in Washington hasn't done enough to combat greenhouse gas emissions _ and note that Florida could help by cutting emissions since it's the fifth largest producer of such gasses in the United States.

Besides, in hurricane alley, Florida has more to gain from lower emissions than the country as a whole if Webster and Curry's findings are right , said Jerry Karnas of the Florida Wildlife Federation, which set up the meeting.

Bush didn't commit to any policy changes in the meeting.

But Attorney General Charlie Crist, with whom the scientists also met, said he was impressed. Crist is one of several men running to be the next governor.

"It's fairly apparent that (global warming) has increased (hurricane) activity," Crist said after meeting the scientists.

So long as there are bad arguments for good causes valid criticisms of the justifications for those good causes will be enabled from friend and foe alike, and much more importantly, policies might be enacted that cannot do what they are sold on. For some perhaps the ends justifies the means – that is, securing emissions reductions is worth selling them on poor policy arguments. However the irony is that bad arguments are in the end unlikely to be a winning strategy of salesmanship, as you risk being identified as not having a good case to make in the first place. And on greenhouse gas emissions there is a solid policy argument to make, it just doesn’t involve hurricane policy.

Hat tip: Dad

Posted on June 2, 2006 05:39 AM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

June 01, 2006

NOAA Protest

Kevin Vranes has the scoop on the protest by some environmental groups calling for the NOAA administrator and NHC director to resign because they haven’t said the politically correct things about hurricanes and global warming. I don’t have much to add to Kevin’s post which is right on target. However, it is worth adding that NHC Director Max Mayfield has co-authored (with me and 3 others) two peer-reviewed papers on the hurricane-global warming issue over the past year. Here is the conclusion from the first paper, which clearly shows the rantings of madmen unfit for public service (PDF):

. . . looking to the future, until scientists conclude a) that there will be changes to storms that are significantly larger than observed in the past, b) that such changes are correlated to measures of societal impact, and c) that the effects of such changes are significant in the context of inexorable growth in population and property at risk, then it is reasonable to conclude that the significance of any connection of human-caused climate change to hurricane impacts necessarily has been and will continue to be exceedingly small.

Posted on June 1, 2006 04:32 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

May 31, 2006

Cherrypicking at the New York Times

You won’t find more blantantly obvious example of cherrypicked science than in today’s New York Times, which has an article on two new peer-reviewed studies on hurricanes and climate change. Given the debate over climate change and hurricanes the new studies are certainly newsworthy. However, it is what is left out of the Times story that makes the cherrypicking stand out undeniably.

The New York Times makes (and has made) no mention of two other just-published peer-reviewed studies (links here and here) providing somewhat different perspectives on the hurricane-climate issue and its policy significance (I am a co-author on one of the studies. It does not deny a global warming-hurricane link, but instead characterizes the literature in the context of an exchange with others with a different view). These studies, which are two among a larger family of research, are not necessarily "the other side" but they do add important context selectively ignored by the Times. In today's article, for balance the New York Times interviewed NOAA’s Stanley Goldenberg, who is a respected scientist, but who hadn’t seen either of the papers referred to in the article or published a peer-reviewed study this month. Interviewing one of the authors of recent peer-reviewed work would have necessarily required referencing that work.

To the extent that the New York Times has a powerful role in shaping how policy options are framed and discussed, it does a disservice to the public and policymakers when it cherrypicks science. I suppose this is because they have decided to pick sides in the political debate over climate change and that political calculus shapes its editorial decisions.

Posted on May 31, 2006 07:01 AM View this article | Comments (36)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

May 30, 2006

Scenarios, Scenarios: Hansen’s Prediction Part II

After a bit more investigation, motivated by comments on my earlier post on Jim Hansen’s 1988 predictions (thanks all), it turns out that Jim Hansen has two sets of scenarios labeled A, B, and C. This is confusing to say the least. The conclusions of the earlier post remain unchanged, however, the analysis below may help to explain some things.

The first set of scenarios A, B and C are from his 1988 paper and the details can be found in the appendix to that paper. The second set of scenarios named A, B, and C was apparently generated for his 1998 paper in order to rescale emissions projections based on the lack of realism in the 1988 projections. The earlier post of mine therefore is actually a comparison of the 1998 scenarios with what has transpired since, and in that case it is true that Scenario C (let’s call it C98) is clearly the most comparable to how things have evolved since 1998.

For his 1988 paper here then from its appendix are the relevant annual growth rates for each scenario relevant to the time period 1990-2005, which I am now labeling with the year affixed for clarity:

Scenario A88

CO2 1.5%
N2O 0.2% 1990-1999, 0.4% >2000
CH4 1.5%

Scenario B88

CO2 1% 1990-1999, 0.5% >2000
N2O 2.5% 1990-1999, 1.5% >2000
CH4 1.0% 1990-1999, 0.5% >2000

Scenario C88

CO2 1.5 ppm 1990-2000, fixed at 368 ppm after 2000
N2O 0.0%
CH4 0.5% year 1990-2000, fixed at 1916 ppm after 2000

How do these scenarios compare? From the earlier post here again are the actuals:

CH4 0.46%
N2O 0.95%
CO2 -0.52% (Annex 1 Countries 1990-2003)
CO2 >0.45% (Non-Annex 1 Countries 1990-2003) (note typo caught in earlier post)
CO2 1.5 PPM (1990-2005)

How to evaluate these scenarios?

From 1990-2000 Scenario C88 was right on target with respect to CH4 and CO2, and off with respect to N2O (The description of Scenario C88 actually doesn’t mention N2O in the appendix describing the growth rates, so I assumed that it was zero).

Scenarios A88 and B88 were off by factors of 3 and 2 respectively with respect to CO2 and CH4. With respect to N2O Scenario A88 was by a factor of 0.2 too small and B88 was a factor of 2.5 too large. These are large errors, much larger than those documented with respect to the 1998 projections, as would be expected.

So, there are several conclusions to draw from this exercise.

1. With respect to Jim Hansen’s 1988 predictions, his Scenario C88 was the most accurate with respect to emissions 1990-2000. That scenario froze time in 2000, meaning that going forward there are two evolving scenarios which both have dramatically overestimated emissions. The lower of the two is thus “more accurate” than the other. Neither is particularly accurate or realistic. Any conclusion that Hansen’s 1988 prediction got things right, necessarily must conclude that it got things right for the wrong reasons.

2. With respect to Hansen’s 1998 predictions C98 has been the most accurate.

3. In two sets of predictions compared with experience, Jim Hansen’s predictions of emissions have proved to be overly aggressive both times with respect to rates of emissions with his lower estimate proving most accurate.

4. When discussing Hansen’s scenarios make sure that you differentiate between 1988 and 1998 versions.

More comments welcomed!

Posted on May 30, 2006 03:55 PM View this article | Comments (31)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

Dave Roberts Responds on The Climate Debate

Over at the GristMill blog, Dave Roberts continues our exchange on the notion of a “third way” perspective on climate change. Dave is typically thoughtful in his comments in which he is having none of the third way business, arguing:

It's possible, and frequently true, that one side's right and the other is wrong, even if many of the correct people argue poorly or are otherwise annoying. (emphasis in original)

However, I’m not at all sure what he is referring to in terms of "right" and "wrong" because he does not say. He writes,

It is conventional wisdom now that every issue is defined by two shrill, partisan camps, and that it is a mark of intellectual integrity to choose a path between them.
As a heuristic, this may have once had some value, but today it's become a fetish. A tic.

Let's be clear: There is no empirical significance in falling between, or even just outside, two opposing positions. A position's truth value has nothing to do with its number of adherents, or its adherents' rhetorical acumen. The desire not to be a "joiner," not to belong to a "tribe," is a matter of temperament, not empiricism. (emphasis in original)

Let me offer several other criteria – other than "truth value" (which I honestly do not understand what Dave means by – what does it mean to ask "Is a policy option "true"?") -- through which we might evaluate competing policy arguments: realism (is it possible?), practicality (is it doable?), and worth (is it desirable?). From an empirical perspective I am confident that the current approaches to climate policy advocated by both the climate skeptics and alarmists fail according to all three criteria. (To be glib, for "current approaches" simply assume (a) "do nothing" for the skeptics and (b) the approach favored by the FCCC for the alarmists.) I don’t know if the proposals that are frequently advocated here at Prometheus are "in between" or "outside" the current debate and I’m not sure that I care or that such partisan-relative-geography even matters. What matters is that there are basically two approaches to climate policy that take up all the air in the debate under a shared assumption that arguing about science is the appropriate battle ground for the debate. In my view significant progress on climate mitigation or adaptation won’t be made until new options are considered beyond those at the focus of the skeptic-alarmist debate. If that view makes me a temperamental third wayer, then I am guilty as charged.

Given that policy debates almost always boil down to two options – a dynamic recognized long ago by Walter Lippmann – the importance of "third way" thinking should be a function of whether the two options at the center of debate are up to the task of dealing with the problem motivating the policy in the first place. Dave Roberts may deplore third way thinking in general, but there are situations when both of the dominant poles of policy debates are similarly misguided.

Thus far, for all of its bluster the climate debate has been characterized by a paucity of realistic, practical, and worthwhile policy options. I’m all for empiricism, so if Dave wants to engage in an exchange focused on a substantive evaluation of actual climate policy options, I’d be happy to participate.

Posted on May 30, 2006 08:05 AM View this article | Comments (5)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

May 29, 2006

Evaluating Jim Hansen’s 1988 Climate Forecast

A lot of attention has been paid by both sides of the climate debate to a prediction made in 1988 before Congress by NASA scientist James Hansen. Today this forecast is the subject of an op-ed by Paul Krugman in the New York Times in which he accuses a prominent climate skeptic of scientific fraud. For some time I have been interested in various claims about Jim Hansen’s forecast because I am interested in prediction and its use/misuse in policy and politics. But what has been missing to date is a rigorous evaluation of Hansen’s forecast. Here is an initial effort to bring a bit more rigor to such an evaluation. The numbers below are not the last word, may contain errors, and are intended to open a discussion on this subject.

Hansen’s 1988 prediction was based on an analysis presented in this paper:

Hansen, J., I. Fung, A. Lacis, D. Rind, S. Lebedeff, R. Ruedy, G. Russell, and P. Stone 1988. Global climate changes as forecast by Goddard Institute for Space Studies three-dimensional model. J. Geophys. Res. 93, 9341-9364. (Abstract)

The paper generated future climate predictions based on three scenarios, described in the abstract as follows:

Scenario A assumes continued exponential trace gas growth, scenario B assumes a reduced linear linear growth of trace gases, and scenario C assumes a rapid curtailment of trace gas emissions such that the net climate forcing ceases to increase after the year 2000.

In this PDF, Jim Hansen provided an image of the prediction for the three scenarios with an overlay of the actual temperature increase in a response to Michael Crichton. I have reproduced the figure immediately below.

The observations (black) are very closely matched to Scenario B. Consequently, Jim Hansen claimed, "the real world has followed a course closest to that of Scenario B" (PDF). But is this correct? It appears that Jim Hansen may have gotten the right answer on temperature for the wrong reasons because his assumptions about emissions paths were not accurate. Further, Scenario B with the best match to temperature is the most inaccurate with respect to emissions projections.

The three scenarios used by Jim Hansen were based on assumptions about how society would produce emissions forward from 1988. Key assumptions were made for methane (CH4), Nitrous Oxide (N2O), and Carbon Dioxide (CO2) – For scenarios A and B in developing and developed countries, and for the global total in the case of Scenario C. Here are the assumptions from Hansen’s 1988 paper for growth rates in CH4, N2O, and CO2:

Scenario A

CH4 0.5%
N2O 0.25%
CO2 3% developing, 1% developed

Scenario B

CH4 0.25%
N2O 0.25%
CO2 2% developing, 0% developed

Scenario C

CH4 0.0%
N2O 0.25%
CO2 1.6 ppm increase annually

In order to evaluate whether these assumptions played out as projected in the three scenarios I consulted online databases with estimates of increases in CH4, N2O, and CO2.

I found CH4 data for 1990-2005 in an EPA report (PDF) in Appendix A-II.

I found N2O data for 1990-2005 in the same EPA report (PDF) in Appendix A-3.

I found CO2 data from the UN FCCC in a recent report (PDF) , for Annex I countries in table II-3 for 1990-2003.

I found global CO2 levels for 1990-2005 in the U.S. government database.

I used this data to compare growth rates in CH4, N2O, and CO2 to Jim Hansen’s 3 scenarios from 1988. Here is what I found:

Actual Rate of Increase

CH4 0.46%
N2O 0.95%
CO2 -0.52% (Annex 1 Countries 1990-2003)
CO2 >4.5% (Non-Annex 1 Countries 1990-2003)
CO2 1.5 PPM (1990-2005)

Comparison with Scenarios

Most Accurate CH4 Assumption = Scenario A
Most Accurate N2O Assumption = each
Most Accurate CO2 Assumption = Scenario C

In none of the three emissions assumptions did Scenario B contain the most accurate emissions assumptions. From this initial evaluation, it seems that to the extent that Jim Hansen’s Scenario B has accurately anticipated global temperature increases since 1988, it has done so based on inaccurate assumptions about emissions paths. Perhaps the errors cancel out, but an accurate prediction based on inaccurate assumptions should give some pause to using those same assumptions into the future. I am not sure which Scenario would be evaluated as the most accurate, but given the importance of CO2 as a greenhouse gas, I’d lean toward Scenario C. None of this is to doubt that global temperature has increased or will continue to increase as projected by the IPCC.

The usual caveats apply: This analysis provides no support for anyone who would cherry pick one scenario over another to evaluate their accuracy (as Paul Krugman has accused Patrick Michaels and Michael Crichton of doing). Nor does this analysis provide any reason not to support the importance of action on climate policy.

What it does, however, is raise questions about how scientists are treated differently in the public by other scientists and the media, and importantly, how some instances of policy-relevant science are framed critically and other instances are framed quite positively. Take William Gray for example who spent decades warning about a coming increase in hurricane activity, who was proven correct when activity increased, only to be frequently excoriated by his peers for his views on global warming. On hurricanes, Gray may have been right for the wrong reasons, but he was nonetheless right in his warning. Hansen on the other hand, is feted by his peers and the media yet just like Bill Gray may have been right for the wrong reasons.

Posted on May 29, 2006 04:10 PM View this article | Comments (24)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

May 27, 2006

Playground! After School!

Does Science really need to devote letter space to content-free testosterone-laden exchanges that involve no science or science policy?

Donald Kennedy's Editorial "The new gag rules" (17 Feb., p. 917) was quite disturbing. I was offended, not by the unfounded allegations of conspiracy at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), but by the Editorial's reckless disregard for the truth.
Dean Acosta, NASA

His letter is short on facts but rich in rhetoric, presumably to support his central point: that public affairs types need to collaborate with scientists because the latter can't write well.
Donald Kennedy, Science

Posted on May 27, 2006 09:31 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science Policy: General

How Taxonomy is Political

From this week’s Science:

Three of us have published descriptions of new species of restricted-range reptiles and amphibians that tragically aided their commercial exploitation. Immediately after being described, the turtle Chelodina mccordi from the small Indonesian island of Roti (2) and the gecko Goniurosaurus luii from southeastern China (3) became recognized as rarities in the international pet trade, and prices in importing countries soared to highs of $1500 to $2000 each. They became so heavily hunted that today C. mccordi is nearly extinct in the wild (4) and G. luii is extirpated from its type locality (3). The salamander Paramesotriton laoensis from northern Laos was not known in the international pet trade prior to its recent description as a new species (5). Over the past year, Japanese (6, 7) and German collectors used the published description to find these salamanders, and they are now being sold to hobbyists in those countries for $170 to $250 each. Similar cases are known from elsewhere in the world and from other taxa.
Withholding locality information from new species descriptions (8) might hamper profiteers, but it also hampers science and conservation. However, with the aid of the Internet, scientists can now monitor commercial demand for species just as commercial collectors can monitor scientific journals. This means prior information exists on which taxa will likely become commercial commodities (we should become concerned for any newly described species of Chelodina and Goniurosaurus). In such cases, taxonomists should work closely with relevant governmental agencies to coordinate publication of the description with legislation or management plans that thwart overexploitation of the new species. Of course, this will not always be easy or successful, and may lengthen publication time, but alternative solutions that allow taxonomists to continue their work without contributing to species decline are wanting.

Posted on May 27, 2006 09:06 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Environment

Appropriate Advocacy by a Science Association

We have at times here at Prometheus taken issue with scientific organizations that take advocacy positions on certain issues. Today we’d like to highlight a situation where the American Association for the Advancement of Science is engaging in advocacy quite appropriate to its mission and expertise – from its press release:

AAAS, the world’s largest general science society, is urging a British teachers association to withdraw a motion calling on its members to boycott Israeli scholars and academic institutions that do not publicly declare their opposition to Israel’s policies in the territories.
The boycott proposal is scheduled for consideration during the 27-29 May annual conference of the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education, the largest trade union and professional association for lecturers, researchers and others working in higher education and adult education in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. A vote is expected Monday.

What is the difference between the AAAS advocating for a withdrawal of the British teachers association boycott and, say, our previous criticisms of national science academies arguing for certain climate policies? There are three differences:

1. The boycott is a matter of “policy for science”. As the AAAS observes in its statement,

Free scientific inquiry and associated international collaborations should not be compromised in order to advance a political agenda unrelated to scientific and scholarly matters.

The governance of the scientific enterprise is squarely within the expertise and mission of the AAAS.

2. The statement from the science academies on climate change that I referred to went well beyond issues of the governance of science into issues of the governance of the economy, and even more broadly, the governance of global society. Science, and the expertise contained within science academies, which is a subset of expertise and opinion of relevance to climate change, is not a sufficient basis for arguing one course of action over another on climate change.

3. Climate change does not need more advocacy, but more options. When science academies engage in advocacy they eschew the role of honest brokers of policy options – a role that is sorely needed on climate policy because just about everyone n the skeptic-mainstream debate has decided to take sides rather than work toward creating new options that might break down opposition. In the case of the boycott the AAAS is very clear about its value commitments and the basis for its advocacy. It is not claiming that its position is grounded in science and suggests that its perspective is that of a special interest – that of an association interested on the advancement of science. This is entirely appropriate.

Good for the AAAS!

PS. This is my first blog posting from an airplane. Pretty damn cool.

Posted on May 27, 2006 08:43 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science Policy: General

Definately Not NSHers

Joel Achenbach has a long and interesting article on climate skeptics in the Sunday Washington Post, you can read it here.

Posted on May 27, 2006 03:24 AM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

May 26, 2006

The Future Will be Blogged

There is a long and interesting article in today's Chronicle of Higher Education on the role of blogs in contemporary politics. Here is an excerpt:

Media attention to blogging has exploded, in part because of a number of what I call blogthroughs, events that allowed bloggers to demonstrate their powers of instant response, cumulative knowledge, and relentless drumbeating. Those incidents included bloggers' role in challenging the memo about President Bush's National Guard service revealed on CBS, which may have led to Dan Rather's resignation as anchor of the network's evening news; video logs of the tsunami in Southeast Asia; and the high-profile use of blogs by Howard Dean's campaign for the last Democratic presidential nomination. Now, according to various measurement and rating services such as Technorati and BlogPulse, tens of millions of Americans are blogging on all kinds of subjects, like diets, relatives, pets, sports, and sex. Bloggers include journalists, marines in Afghanistan, suburban teenagers, law-school professors, senators, and district attorneys.
Of greatest interest to modern students of politics are the blogs that focus on public affairs. Mainstream political news media regularly check what blogs are saying about a given story — or how they created it. Surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and other organizations have found that most contributors to those blogs follow campaigns and political debates and are extremely likely to vote in elections. Politicians and activists are naturally eager to get their message to such a target audience while also bypassing the mainstream media's editorializing and heavy fees for advertising. Yet, as one political consultant I know put it, "The $200-million questions are: What are blogs? How can we use them? What exactly are they good for?"

Even experts cannot answer those questions because political blogs are in a state of flux. Are they a revolution or an evolution in political speech and activism — or a return to the more partisan press of the nation's early days? Will political bloggers challenge or complement traditional politics, political work, and politicians? Are bloggers representative of other Americans, or are they a minority of politically active citizens? How much impact will blogs have on political discourse and, ultimately, on voting behavior? Are they further Balkanizing American politics, with liberals reading only leftist blogs and conservatives reading only rightist ones?

The author of the article is David D. Perlmutter, of Louisiana State University, who runs a blog here that discusses blogs in politics among other subjects.

Posted on May 26, 2006 05:08 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Technology Policy

May 25, 2006

Reaction to Comments on Non-Skeptic Heretics

My only partially tongue-in-cheek post yesterday on the NSH Club generated many comments here and on Kevin’s NoSeNada blog. As well, my email box filled up with a bunch of comments. Here are a few perspectives on the various comments:

1. Dave Roberts, a commenter whose views I have a lot of respect for as they can always be counted on for being thoughtful and passionate, of Grist Magazine responded with fury to both my post and Easterbrook’s op-ed. Of Easterbrook, Roberts (somewhat bizarrely in my view) takes him to task for coming around to Roberts own views, writing on the GristMill blog:

So all of us who have been warning about it for years -- pushing against dimwits like Gregg Easterbrook -- are now, retroactively, by His Own Centrist Grace, transmuted from "alarmists" to reasonable people.

Of my post Dave similarly pulls no punches in the comments,

You can [Ed- I assume this was supposed to be and. RP] Easterbrook share then tendency to set up strawmen and then proclaim your own intellectual heroism for disagreeing with them. Your eagerness to seen as a maverick completely distorts your perceptions.
This is a complicated discussion. There are a whole range of positions, defended by various people in good faith. Defining your little team seems like the least productive way of engaging the issue.

A few responses to this: First, Dave’s assertion on his blog that "there's no substitute for political engagement" does not seem to apply to my attempt to stake out a distinct political position on climate change that is different from the existing dominant two camps. Third way political campaigns are often castigated in exactly the manner that Dave has dismissed my views -- i.e., if you are not with us, then you must be against us!

Second, Dave, unlike many of the NSHers I pointed to and commenters reacting to my post has come out firmly against adaptation except, as he writes in the comments here, for that climate change already committed to, explaining on his blog:

Once we "adapt" to the new climate we have in 2040, the changes will keep coming. We'll have to adapt all over again to the climate of 2060, and the climate of 2080, etc. Human society, no matter how clever, no matter how wealthy, simply isn't equipped to live in a constantly, dramatically changing climatic situation. Economic development depends on stability and predictability. . . We need to commit unreservedly to halting our acceleration of that instability. We all need to be pulling in the same direction, and that won't happen until arguments like [The atmosphere is warming, and it's attributable to human activity, but the "cure" (substantial CO2 emissions cuts) would be worse than the disease. It would be easier, and cost less, simply to adapt to a warmer world.] die a richly deserved death.

But for all of his complaining about my views, he doesn’t offer up any policy options (aside from denying value of adaptation), relying instead on heated political rhetoric and empty appeals to mitigate. So Dave, if you are reading, you are invited to share your specific policy recommendations here.

2. Andrew Dessler, whose views I also have a lot of respect for, commented (along with many others) here that he is:

-extremely pro-mitigation --- we need to begin to institute policies to reduce GHG emissions
-extremely pro-adaptation --- we also need to begin to institute policies to reduce our vulnerability to climate change

This immediately presents a very different perspective than Dave Roberts, hence Andrew’s NSH status ;-) But Andrew then says, "overall, I'm indifferent to the Kyoto Protocol."

Sorry Andrew, but you can’t have it both ways! The Kyoto Protocol, as is the FCCC under which it was negotiated, is in fact strongly biased against adaptation. If you are indeed strongly pro-adaptation and pro-mitigation at the same time, a view which I share, then it seems only logical and consistent to observe that Kyoto and the FCCC don’t share this same commitment. There is of course a need for some international framework to help shape and coordinate climate policies, and the FCCC is a monumental achievement, but it is not beyond evolving in positive ways. And the difference between evolution and revolution may not be large. Simply ask people about the value of reopening FCCC Article 2 for discussion to see what I mean. Opening up the discussion of balance of adaptation and mitigation, and the institutional incentives for each under the FCCC, would be a good place to start, but seems pretty far off.

3. Over at NoSeNada, Kevin provides a good characterization of my initial intent of the NSH post suggest of NSHers: "these are some people who aren't afraid to dissent from the conventional wisdom, even when dissenting gets them a lot of flak" rather than "here's a new club of people who all feel the same way". I haven’t asked anyone if they agree or not with my characterization of NSHers, I just lumped in folks whose views do not appear to be well characterized by the existing Manichean debate. And from my email inbox, it seems there are a lot of such people!! At the same time, it is important to recognize that there are also many people whose views are reflected by the two-sided debate and who (on both sides) are not at all excited by the prospect of a third way position, whatever it is called, tongue-in-cheek or not.

Overall it has been a surprising conversation, not least because of all of the apparent latent support for the notion that there is in fact a third way position on climate change. Keep the comments coming; this has been a valuable exchange, thanks all!

Posted on May 25, 2006 12:22 AM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

May 24, 2006

Gregg, Welcome to the NSH Club!

In the New York Times today, author and commentator Gregg Easterbrook renounces his “climate skeptic” credentials in favor of accepting that there is a consensus on climate science. This qualifies him for membership in the burgeoning club of non-skeptic heretics (NSH). Here is an excerpt from Gregg says in his op-ed:

Yes: the science has changed from ambiguous to near-unanimous. As an environmental commentator, I have a long record of opposing alarmism. But based on the data I'm now switching sides regarding global warming, from skeptic to convert.

But what is it that I mean by “non-skeptic heretic”? These are people who accept the science of climate change but do not engage in meaningless exhortations or bland political statements, and instead openly confront some of the real but uncomfortable practical challenges involved with reducing emissions and adapting to climate. Easterbrook writes,

President Bush was right to withdraw the United States from the cumbersome Kyoto greenhouse treaty, which even most signatories are ignoring. But Mr. Bush should speak to history by proposing a binding greenhouse-credit trading system within the United States.

Easterbrook has previously commended the Bush Administration’s Methane to Markets program, which granted him immediate heretic credentials, coupled with his new NS status, qualify him to be in the NSH Club. Saying anything remotely non-negative about Bush Administration is a fast ticket to the NSH Club. Commenters here have almost gone so far as to call me a Republican (ouch!;-) for questioning certain firmly held "truths." NSH members don’t seem to fall on partisan lines, though most so far are defectors from the climate policy mainstream, which helps to explain why they do seem to receive a chilly reception from the mainstream non-skeptics. There are nonetheless growing members from the traditional skeptic crowd as well.

A brief foray into the archives provides the following list of people whose writings suggest strong canadacies for membership in the NSH Club:

Myself
Dan Sarewitz
Steve Rayner
Kevin Vranes
Richard Tol
Hans von Storch
Nico Stehr
Steve Rayner
Myanna Lahsen
Bjorn Lomborg
Ted Nordhaus
Michael Shelleberger
Andrew Dessler
Indur Goklany
David Keith
Tim Dyson
Roger Pielke, Sr.
Michele Betsill
Chris Landsea
Karen O’Brien
Robert Lempert

There are of curse many more out there as well. And there seem to be others who are occasionally testing the waters of the NSH Club (the water is HOT!), such as reporter Andy Revkin, as well as some folks from the traditional skeptic community, such as John Christy.

For the mainstream climate advocates the NSH Club is a threat not only because it undercuts their primary point of authority in scientific cum political disputes, but it risks proposing practical and meaningful policy options that might in fact make a difference and thus allow them to leapfrog into a position of new authority on the climate issue. Consequently, there have been efforts to frame this group as traditional skeptics in new clothes, which are sometimes labeled as "impact skeptics" -- who have the temerity to suggest that some future impacts of climate change might be less-than-catastrophic (for some), or might be best handled by adaptation, and "policy skeptics" -- who have some doubts that the framework of the FCCC and its Kyoto Protocol are the last word on climate policy. And there are of course traditional skeptics who stand by their views, such as represented in he recent CEI commercials or by Senator James Inhofe (R-OK). Through such evolving framings of the debate we are seeing a mighty struggle to hold on to the status quo, which has been a fun and rewarding debate for many, but hopelessly ineffective from the standpoint of policy action.

The NSH Club seems to be here to stay and drawing members from both sides of the heretofore gridlocked debate. Expect much angst from those o both sides who will try very hard to preserve the old debate. At the same time expect much interesting discussion about policy, as science begins to take a backseat. Such discussion, like all important political discussions will sometimes uncomfortable and challenging, but it will be a breath of fresh air from the burgeoning ranks of the NSH!

Update: You can find Andy Revkin's blog here, where he has some writings along NSH lines.

Posted on May 24, 2006 06:16 AM View this article | Comments (31)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

Juice or No Juice? Who Decides?

With Barry Bonds under the specter of steroids allegations on the brink of passing Babe Ruth in home runs, on another subject of sports and technology Arthur Caplan has a thought-provoking op-ed in the San Jose Mercury News about a new effort to classify sleeping in oxygen tents as a doping violation. He writes:

Should the bureaucrats who set the rules for the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sports extend their critical eye to where athletes are allowed to sleep? This past weekend in Montreal, the bureaucrats, otherwise known as the World Anti-Doping Association, indicated that they are going to try to do exactly that. Bad idea. . .
Many athletes in amateur endurance sports such as skiing, running and cycling use altitude tents. These tents simulate thin mountain air. By sleeping in them, athletes who live at sea-level can get the benefits enjoyed by those who live in mountainous areas. Mountain air has less oxygen, so the body makes more red blood cells to compensate. Those extra red blood cells can provide a slight boost if you are running a marathon or skiing cross-country for 15 miles. That is one of the reasons the U.S. Olympic training facility is located in the Rocky Mountains at Colorado Springs, Colo.

So why is WADA worried about tents? There seems to be one main reason -- sleeping in a tent is a passive activity producing benefits that athletes do not "earn" or "merit." The idea that athletes ought to train to gain improvements in performance, not just lie snoozing in an artificial environment while their bodies make more red blood cells, is at the core of WADA's concern. WADA is worrying about tents not for reasons of safety or even fairness but on ethical grounds -- athletes should strive, not snooze, to succeed.

Linking the virtues to athletic success has some appeal. But when WADA uses a moral view of what makes sport worthwhile it is imposing a set of values rather than reflecting what athletes or the public want. Moreover, drawing a line at high-altitude tents is a boundary that cannot hold.

It is not possible to know who is sleeping in a tent unless WADA officials are prepared to get a lot more up close and personal with athletes than they are likely to tolerate. And if you ban altitude tents, are saunas, steam rooms, massages, ankle wraps and vitamins soon to follow?

Modern athletes long ago brought technology into their lives, and WADA holding its breath and pouting about those who are lazing around in altitude tents will not change that fact. We need to keep an eye on technology and its impact on sports. WADA has, however, nodded off at the switch with its threat to ban sleeping in altitude tents.

It would be a meaningless exhortation to say that athletics should be “pure,” and an unregulated playing field seems undesirable. How then should decisions be made about the role of science and technology in athletic achievements? Should some S&T sport policies be made democratically by government institutions, e.g., such as those focused on the Olympics or NCAA? Or should sport be a private affair internally policed, leaving open the possibility of competing professional sport leagues – the JMLB (Juiced- MLB) vs. the JFMLB (Juice-Free MLB)? (Though there is that anti-trust thing.)

I’m not sure what I’d recommend on where and how to draw lines in sport, but it does seem clear that the processed used to make decisions about S&T in sport are at least as important as the outcomes that result from such processes.

Posted on May 24, 2006 03:24 AM View this article | Comments (5)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science Policy: General

May 23, 2006

If You Want to Comment . . .

A reminder following several emails: If you want to comment you will need to register (click the link from the comment page).

The site remains unmoderated for registered users. We won't be moderating comments from those who are unregistered.

Posted on May 23, 2006 10:34 AM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Site News

Decisions Matter

From today's New York Times:

"People didn't die because the storm was bigger than the system could handle,and people didn't die because the levees were overtopped. People died because mistakes were made and because safety was exchanged for efficiency and reduced cost."
Raymond Seed, University of California at Berkeley

Prof. Seed is the lead author of a report released yesterday on Hurricane Katrina. The NYT covered the release of the report in this article yesterday.

Posted on May 23, 2006 07:49 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Disasters

May 22, 2006

Off by 6 Orders of Magnitude

In an ABC News story on changing hurricane intensities NCAR scientist Greg Holland asserts,

"Remember, for each 10 mph increase of wind speed," says atmosphere scientist Greg Holland, "there's about 10 times more damage, and 20 times more financial loss."

There are those who argue that damage is proportional to the sqaure or even the cube of changes in wind speed, but no one I am aware of who argues that there is a factor of 10 or 20 per 10 mph. This would equate to a difference of 10^8 or 10,000,000 times more damage beween a category 1 and a category 5 (i.e. from 75 mph to 155 mph).

Empircally, when we look at normalized hurricane damage over the past 106 years, we find about 100 times more damage in category 4/5 storms than category 1.

Posted on May 22, 2006 03:46 PM View this article | Comments (6)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Disasters

Climate Change and Disaster Losses Workshop

With Munich Re, we are co-organizing a workshop this week outside of Munich that will bring together experts from around the world to deal with two questions:

The economic costs of weather-related disasters have increased dramatically in recent decades. However, experts disagree about the reasons for this increase. Some think that the trend can be explained entirely by the ever-growing numbers of people and value of property in harms way. Others think that human-caused climate changes have led to more frequent and intense weather events and therefore account for some part of the increased damage.
We are organizing a workshop to bring together experts from around the world to address the following two questions:

1. According to the research currently available, what factors account for the increased costs of disasters in recent decades?

2. And what are the implications of these understandings, for both research and policy?

Participants have been selected not only because they can bring value to the discussion, but because they bring to the workshop different answers to these questions. Our goal is not to reach a complete consensus, but what one member of the Workshop Organizing Team appropriately called a “consensus dissensus” – agreement on areas where there is remaining disagreement, the research necessary to resolve those differences, and the significance for research and action.

The Workshop is sponsored by Munich Re, GKSS Research Centre, the Tyndall Centre, and the U.S. NSF.

We expect to produce a report and a paper for publication on the workshop. Meantime those interested in learning more can access a library that we have started to put together with literature relevant to the discussion. If you would like to suggest additions to the workshop, we would be happy to add them.

Posted on May 22, 2006 06:45 AM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

May 21, 2006

How to Register to Comment

We've activated the sign up function for posting comments on Prometheus. It takes about 2 minutes and need only be done once.

Here is is the sign up link. We hope that you'll sign up and participate in discussions. Should you have any trouble signing up or commenting please send me an email: pielke@colorado.edu.

Thanks!

Posted on May 21, 2006 06:33 AM View this article | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R.

May 20, 2006

Signs of Change?

The New York Times has an op-ed today that makes a point that we’ve been arguing for a long time:

Clearly, it's time for some radical ideas about solving global warming. But where's the radical realism when we need it?

Is this evidence that mainstream discussion of climate policy is beginning to reflect the realties of the impoverished political debate narrowly focused on science and largely irrelevant policy options? Lets hope so.

Posted on May 20, 2006 10:04 AM View this article | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

Comment Policy Issues

All- 99% of our commenters are respectful and thoughtful. We have had a recent increase in nasty comments, and today a somewhat threatening and disturbing comment, from an anonymous commenter named Eli Rabbett who even after several requests from Kevin and I has continued this pattern of behavior.

Unfortunately if these posts continue we will likely have to go to a registration-based comment policy, to ban certain URLs from commenting if they refuse to follow our rules, or publicly expose the identities of anonymous posters who engage in such behavior (and yes, we will). We do not want to go down this route, and would prefer an open site and to allow anonymous comnents.

We respectfully ask that all commenters here help to enforce the comment policy and that we all engage in respectful discussions, even on topics that we disagree about. That is the value of the site, and it would be a shame to see it suffer because of the efforts of very few.

For the immeediate future, Kevin and I will ruthlessly delete any comment deemed out of bounds as we see fit. For just about everyone, this doesn't matter. For those few others, keep it respectful and substantive, and you are welocme to participate.

Thanks!

Posted on May 20, 2006 09:47 AM View this article | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Site News

May 18, 2006

Fox News Documentary

On Sunday Fox News will air their second documentary about climate change at 10PM EST. Details can be found here. Several months ago they were out in Colorado interviewing people for this, me and my father included. I gave a long interview presenting my standard stuff that Prometheus readers are familiar with by now. Even so, I will be interested to see how (or if) they use my interview in the documentary. I have my reactions Monday. I'd welcome yours as well, and we can discuss.

Posted on May 18, 2006 09:47 AM View this article | Comments (49) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

May 17, 2006

A Few Reactions to the Bonn Dialogue on the FCCC

This week the International Institute for Sustainable Development continues its invaluable service of providing summaries of international meetings and negotiations by providing a summary of the “UNFCCC dialogue on long-term cooperative action.” Here are a few reactions to that summary, focused mainly on issues of adaptation. The IISD summary suggests that serious problems remain with consideration of adaptation under the FCCC and that some developing countries are not satisfied:

ADAPTATION: Tanzania and the Philippines said adaptation should have the same status as mitigation, expressing concerns that it had not yet been seriously addressed. Tuvalu underscored adaptation as a crucial issue, and called for urgent action rather than studies or pilot projects, implementation of UNFCCC Article 4.4 (developed country support for adaptation for vulnerable developing countries) and a process to ensure a rapid response to help countries suffering damage. The Philippines highlighted the need for innovative ways of financing. Egypt noted that mitigation efforts in developing countries are receiving more support than adaptation measures through the CDM.

We have discussed this subject frequently. The FCCC has a built-in bias against adaptation and characterizes it as being in opposition to mitigation. Bizarrely, under the FCCC adaptation has costs but not benefits (and the IPCC follows this cooking of the cost-benefit books), because under its view of the world adaptation would be unnecessary if climate change could be prevented. Under this way of thinking, adaptation projects reflect costs that would be avoided with mitigation, hence, preventing adaptation represents a benefit of mitigation. Think about that for a minute, and ask yourself, how can adaptation and mitigation really be complements under the FCCC if the case for the latter depends in no small part on preventing the former?

Under the FCCC adaptation to climate change means something very specific, it does not mean adaptation to climate, but only to those marginal effects of climate changes directly attributable to greenhouse gas emissions. If this strikes you as unrealistic and confusing, you’d be right. The reality is that in many, if not most, places in developed and developing countries adaptation to climate (broadly, not just the marginal effects of GHGs on climate) makes good sense as societal is extremely vulnerable to the impacts of climate, whatever the underlying causes. As we have stated here many times, it is scientifically untenable to tease out the GHG contribution to human disasters like Katrina. It is nonsensical to try to implement policies that address only those marginal impacts of GHGs, rather than the root causes of disasters themselves, which lie primarily in societal vulnerability.

We discussed this sort of nonsense following COP-10 in December, 2004 based on another IISD report which included the following telling explanation of why it is that developing countries have difficulty receiving funding for adaptation projects:

. . . adaptation projects are generally built on, or embedded in, larger national or local development projects and, therefore, the funding by the GEF would only cover a portion of the costs. In other words, if a country seeks funding for a project on flood prevention, the GEF would only be able to finance a portion proportional to the additional harm that floods have caused or will cause as a result of climate change, and the rest would have to be co-financed by some other body. The plea from LDCs, particularly the SIDS, lies precisely on this paradox, in that even if funds are available in the LDC Fund, their difficulty of finding adequate co-financing, and the costly and cumbersome calculation of the additional costs, renders the financial resources in the LDC Fund, in practice, almost inaccessible.

At this weeks meeting a comment by the UK summarized by the IISD suggests that little has changed in this regard:

The UK identified some cross-cutting themes, including financing and scientific uncertainty, which is particularly problematic for adaptation.

Why is scientific uncertainty problematic for adaptation? Because unless there is a way to attribute the impacts of GHG-caused climate change on developing countries, under the FCCC there is no vehicle for action, as the FCCC is not an all-purpose framework for reducing vulnerabilities to the effects of climate. How ironic is this? Adaptation is all about decision making under uncertainty and preparing for a future that is unknown. So in the face of uncertainties adaptation should make good sense, because its benefits are broad. Yet, under the FCCC the arbitrary rules have been set up in such a way as to mostly exclude adaptation as a policy response.

Of course, this gets back to the fact that the FCCC has been and continues to be a vehicle for changes to global energy policies and considerations of adaptation simply get in the way. Approaching climate change in this fashion makes about as much sense as telling someone that because we don’t know when they will be struck by heart disease we can provide little assistance helping them to adopt of a healthy lifestyle.

To be fair, I have many friends and colleagues who are far more sanguine about the prospects for adaptation under the FCCC, and are willing to debate this point strenuously with me when I raise comments like those above. They use words like “mainstreaming” and “sustainable development” to make their case, and cite Article 4.4 of the FCCC, among others. I respect their views and perhaps our differences in views have a bit of glass half full/half empty about them. But even so I have been convinced for some time now that the FCCC is much more of an obstacle to effective action on adaptation than a facilitator. Much of its efforts on adaptation seem to be an effort to provide a fig leaf of competence in order gloss over what increasingly appears to be a fatal flaw in the framework. The recent report from the IISD provides no reason for me to change my views.

Until the very core of the FCCC is opened up for discussion (and by core I mean Article 2 and its gerrymandered definition of climate change), the bias against adaptation is likely to persist, and adaptation policies will continue to be presented as counter to the goals of mitigation and will continue to be considered in that manner in formal negotiations (statements to the contrary notwithstanding). If this is anywhere close to the mark then people will suffer and die more than they might otherwise because of the words used to frame the climate debate as an issue of energy policy, and energy policy only.

For further reading:

A short essay:

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 2004. What is Climate Change?, Issues in Science and Technology, Summer, 1-4. (PDF)

Peer-reviewed studies with lots of detail:

Pielke, Jr., R.A., 2005. Misdefining “climate change”: consequences for science and action, Environmental Science & Policy, Vol. 8, pp. 548-561. (PDF)

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 1998. Rethinking the Role of Adaptation in Climate Policy. Global Environmental Change, 8(2), 159-170. (PDF)

May 15, 2006

More Peer-Reviewed Discussion on Hurricanes and Climate Change

In the May issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, a group of distinguished scientists have written a response to our 2005 article on Hurricanes and Global Warming. The scientists include Rick Anthes, Bob Correll, Greg Holland, Jim Hurrell, Mike MacCracken, and Kevin Trenberth. Our response is co-authored by the same group that brought you Pielke et al. 2005 – Pielke, Landsea, Mayfied, Laver, and Pasch. Links to the entire set of papers are below in reverse chronological order. I’ll be happy to address comments and questions on this exchange in the comments. Overall, I think that this is a fruitful exchange that clearly delineates some of the differing positions on this subject. Have a look!

Reply to Comment by Anthes et al. 2006: Pielke, Jr., R. A., C. W. Landsea, M. Mayfield, J. Laver, R. Pasch, 2006. Reply to Hurricanes and Global Warming Potential Linkages and Consequences, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 87:628-631. (PDF)

Comment on Pielke et al. 2005: Anthes, R. A., R. W. Corell, G. Holland, J. W. Hurrell, M. C. McCracken, and K. E. Trenberth, 2006 Hurricanes and global warming: Potential linkage and consequences. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 87:623-628. (PDF)

Original paper: Pielke, Jr., R. A., C. Landsea, M. Mayfield, J. Laver and R. Pasch, 2005. Hurricanes and global warming, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 86:1571-1575. (PDF)

Posted on May 15, 2006 10:46 AM View this article | Comments (9) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

May 12, 2006

Science Studies: Cheerleader, Marketer, or Critic?

A former colleague of mine used to say that social scientists were the equivalent of "lap dogs" for the broader scientific community.

By that, he meant that social scientists were around to entertain, look good, but nothing more. My experiences suggest that there is some element of truth in his description of the relationship of science studies with the broader scientific community, especially in those situations where the funding of the science studies scholars depends upon the largesse of the broader scientific community that they are working with. It is a difficult issue because one of the lessons from science studies research is the need for a close relationship with stakeholders, which for many science studies scholars are the scientists themselves.

I was motivated to blog on this after reading a column in the Philadelphia Inquirer by Arthur Caplan, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist, discussing the challenges of putting limits on science. He observes,

The moral standoff that will quickly come to characterize the 21st century is becoming clear. It is not the teaching of intelligent design vs. evolution in American schools. Almost no one but biblical literalists takes the ID position with any seriousness as science. Nor will it be the heated squabble over embryonic stem-cell research. That scrum is actually over as well: Many nations around the world are doing this type of research, so the question is only where not whether.
The real battle - the battle that will come to occupy the moral center stage of American politics, morality, law, public policy, editorial pages, and water-cooler discussions - will be waged over where genetic engineering ought to take us and whether we are satisfied to leave it to scientists to guide us there.

Caplan acknowledges that "there here are plenty of reasons to worry about the misapplication and misuse of genetics." But even with such concern, Caplan quickly turns to a defense of the inexorable advance of research, and allaying of concerns about the role of scientists in shaping such advances,

Still it is a grave, grave mistake to argue that we must put all forms of genetic engineering off limits. Too much good will be lost. Our only hope of combating some of the worst pests and plagues that beset us and will torment our grandchildren is through genetic manipulation and engineering. The genetic revolution you and I are witnessing is humankind's last, best hope since it offers the prospect of more and safer food; the repair and elimination of genetic maladies like Tay-Sachs, juvenile diabetes, sickle cell disease, and hemophilia; the conquest of TB, malaria, avian flu, SARS, HIV, and many other plagues. And it will allow us to rebuild broken, worn out, or injured body parts.
Any of these alone would be enough reason to pursue genetic research. Together, they all but obligate us to do it. They are an all but unanswerable reply to those who say "No" to genetic research and engineering. Our society would be foolish and cruel to forbid or ban genetic research given the needs of the sick, starving, impaired and those of future generations for solutions and treatments. Will we really turn away from those who literally are dying before our eyes, or who will die before our children's eyes, simply out of fear of scientists guiding public policy?

Caplan offers a defense of scientific advancement much like the old saw, "guns don’t kill people, people kill people,"

I do not believe we have much to fear from the actions of any individual scientist. Few, contrary to the pope's concern, aspire to play God. Science has no tolerance for such fantasies.
Geneticists know how little they know individually and how hard it is to manipulate nature. Moreover, none of them, not even the best and brightest, is capable of transforming a discovery from the lab into the real world by himself or herself. That sort of power is reserved for the deity, governments or the market.

What the deity does is beyond our control. But what government or the market does or is allowed to do is very much a matter of politics, regulation and oversight. When theologians or members of the public point the finger of moral worry at scientists, they need to redirect it. It is governments and the marketplace that we need to shape and hold accountable for how genetic knowledge is or is not applied.

I generally agree with Caplan that genetic technologies may hold great promises and that almost every scientist is a good and decent person. But these general feelings about the science and scientists are no substitute for the fact that (a) genetic technologies may pose unknown risks (e.g., concerns raised about GMOs and the environment) and simply be morally wrong (e.g., chimeras), and (b) scientists, like any group in society, are not above democratic accountability.

Caplan suggests that the an unfulfilled role for scientists – and their science studies lapdogs – is to communicate the importance of research so that the public will allow it to go forward and support it.

What scientists need to do - and quickly - is come out of their laboratory lairs and be seen in public. You need to know about their aspirations, dreams, hopes, and values. You need to know they stand shoulder to shoulder with all of us in wanting a better world. They see a better future and a way to get there.
Genetic research in the hands of those who practice is not aimed at power, fame, ambition, or transforming oneself into a god. If it is about anything, it is about love: the love of life, the love of people, the drive to make a better life for the sick and those at risk of becoming so.

These last few statements are pretty incredible. The Hwang Woo-Suk and Gerald Schatten stem cell affair (see the University of Pittsburgh report in PDF) may have been an aberration but it did provide a window into a world where power, fame, and ambition are not so uncommon. In light of this recent experience, for an ethicist to suggest otherwise is a bit pollyannaish, and quite a bit too much cheerleadering from where I sit.

Caplan is of course right on when he asks us to

Hold your politicians accountable. Ask them to explain how funding for genetics is allocated and accounted for. Insist that they ensure that commercial interests do not succeed in keeping private genetic applications and products that might offend the moral sense of the community or, worse, our health and well-being.

But part of such accountability in my view is public engagement in the process of deciding on what research is and is not appropriate, not simply engaging abroader set of stakeholders in decisions about commercialization after the research is well underway or completed in the form of products. Along these lines, a perspective of "upstream engagement" has been discussed here in the context of the excellent work of a UK think tank called DEMOS. (Have a look at their most recent report on governing nanotechnology here.) Caplan goes too far when he asserts, "The genetic genie is out of the bottle. There is not much anyone can do to put it back nor, once we understand its potential for good, ought we to do so." There are many genies and many bottles. Deciding which genies to free and which to keep in their bottle is an important part of the democratic governance of science and technology.

Caplan’s piece reminded me of Langdon Winner’s comments about the societal aspects of nanotechnology in Congressional testimony in 2003. Winner had some strong things to say about science studies scholars,

The professional field of bioethics, for example, (which might become, alas, a model for nanoethics) has a great deal to say about many fascinating things, but people in this profession rarely say "no."
Indeed, there is a tendency for career-conscious social scientists and humanists to become a little too cozy with researchers in science and engineering, telling them exactly what they want to hear (or what scholars think the scientists want to hear). Evidence of this trait appears in what are often trivial excercises in which potentially momentous social upheavals are greeted with arcane, highly scholastic rationalizations. How many theorists of "intellectual property" can dance on the head of a pin?

One way to avoid the drift toward moral and political triviality is to encourage social scientists and philosophers to present their findings in forums in which people from business, the laboratories, environmental organizations, churches, and other groups can join the discussion. It is time to reject the idea there are only a few designated stakeholders that are qualified to evaluate possibilities, manage the risks, and guide technology toward beneficial outcomes.

As issues of science and technology continue to occupy an even more central role in important societal questions, there will be difficult questions raised about the role of science studies with respect to their relationship with science, politics, and policy. Science studies scholars will have to confront questions about what sorts of roles they ought to play and under what institutional, financial, and social dynamics. To oversimplify, what will it be, cheerleader, marketer, or critic?

May 11, 2006

Scientific Communication and the Public Interest

Often here at Prometheus we have made the argument that science does not take place in a vacuum. Efforts to communicate science to the public and policy makers are inherently social and political acts. The UK Royal Society has just released an important report titled “Science and the Public Interest” (PDF) which shares this perspective and discusses the challenges facings scientists communicating their results in the context of policy and politics. From the Preface, Lord Rees describes the significance of the report,

Usually, new research results are disseminated within the research community via conference presentations and journal papers; wider communication is usually an afterthought. However, the way this is done – by, for instance, press conferences or media releases – can strongly colour public reactions and attitudes, especially if there are immediate implications for people’s health or way of life. Recent episodes such as the high-profile discrediting of papers on cloning are likely to bring the quality and reliability of all research under greater scrutiny. And even when a result is firm, it is important to convey its impact fairly – neither over-hyping potential spin-offs, nor exaggerating potential risks.

The report argues that scientists have two primary responsibilities when communicating their science:

The first is to attempt an accurate assessment of the potential implications for the public. The second is to ensure the timely and appropriate communication to the public of results if such communication is in the public interest. These twin responsibilities should be embedded within the culture of the research community as a whole, and all practices should take them into account and respect them.

Communication of the significance of scientific results necessarily involves considerations that go well beyond the focus of the research that led to the results in the first place. I discussed this in a 2002 essay in Nature (PDF,

. . . it is essential to differentiate scientific results from the policy significance of those results. To illustrate the distinction, consider the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s conclusion that the global average temperature in 2100 will increase from 1.4 C to 5.8 C. Explaining what this scientific result means to the non-specialist may take some effort — it may require explaining the origins of the estimates, how ‘global average’ is defined, trends, conditions and the confidence levels of the projection. Yet, crucially, all this is different from an assessment of the significance of this conclusion for action (‘policy’), which depends on how the results (‘science’) are related to valued outcomes, such as human health, environmental sustainability, economic prosperity and so on.
Assessing the significance of science for policy requires a clear distinction of policy analysis from political advocacy. The former increases the range of alternatives available to decision-makers by clearly associating scientific results with a range of choices and outcomes. The latter seeks to decrease the range of alternatives (often to a single desired outcome). Because scientific results typically have a degree of uncertainty, and because a range of alternatives can achieve particular policy outcomes, commitment to a particular policy involves considerations that go well beyond science.

In its extremely valuable checklist for researchers seeking to communicate the Royal Society acknowledges that scientists may need assistance when seeking to describe the significance of their science for society:

7. Do you need any advice to help you to provide appropriate context for your results, and if so whom do you need to assist you?
8. How might your results be used by other individuals or organisations, such as campaigners or policy-makers?

Question 8 suggests raises a crucially important question but the report provides no guidance for scientists to help them determine what it means to act in the public interest versus as an advocate for a particular special interest group. For many scientists the route to influencing the public interest is simply align themselves with a “side” in a debate – based on money, politics, or other values. We see that a lot in the blogoshpere where people (including scientists) align themselves according to tribal-like affinities. This sort of self-segregation may lead to effective communication which is counter to public interests. We discuss such ideological self-segregation here. As an example, if all scientists align ideologically, as for instance the vast majority do on climate change, it may reduce science to simply a tool for marketing competing bad policy options, as scientists largely forgo the more effective role of introducing innovative new policy options into debate.

The Royal Society report is important because it highlights the importance of communication as an inevitable political and social act. It also provides valuable guidance for scientists seeking to communicate. However, it does not go far enough in providing guidance on how scientists might negotiate the minefield of special interests seeking to appropriate scientific authority for their special cause. Before communicating, scientists have choices in how they orient themselves and their institutions with respect to public interests and these choices can be as important as the process of communication itself.

Posted on May 11, 2006 07:18 AM View this article | Comments (16) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science Policy: General

May 10, 2006

A Bizarro GCC and The Public Opinion Myth, Again

A story in today’s Wall Street Journal provides additional evidence of the fantasy world that is climate politics:

An educational group that former Vice President Al Gore is helping to launch intends to spend millions of dollars convincing Americans that global warming is an urgent problem.
The U.S. hasn't enacted mandatory limits on greenhouse-gas emissions, a situation many environmentalists attribute to slim public awareness of the consequences of rising temperatures.

The group, which yesterday adopted the name Alliance for Climate Protection, plans to use advertising and grass-roots organizing to try to raise awareness, particularly among labor groups, hunters, evangelicals and conservatives in general.

The effort, still in the planning stages, will look "like a political campaign," predicts Lee M. Thomas, who ran the Environmental Protection Agency during President Ronald Reagan's second term and has agreed to be a board member.

This is a wasted effort for a number of reasons. First, as we’ve documented here many times (e.g., here and here) while he public does not have a deep grasp of the technical details of global warming, it does have an overwhelming awareness of the issue. Not only is there awareness, but an overwhelming majority already favor action. Public education to achieve awareness and support for action that already exist will be efforts wasted on the convinced (e.g., here).

A second reason is that any effort to elevate the intensity of public opinion (not mentioned in the article, but necessary to elevate one issue over another in the public’s eye) will run a very real risk of making policy arguments that are misleading and perhaps simply incorrect. Assertions that future hurricane damages can be modulated via emissions policies are an example of this type of policy over-promising. The reason for this is that global warming is not an issue for which immediate action can lead to tangible short-term benefits (e.g., discussed here), so for many people it simply does not compare to the importance of other issues that do have short-term effects, like gas prices and hurricane reinforced roofs.

The Alliance for Climate Protection seems to me to simply be a Bizzaro version of the now-defunct Global Climate Coalition and I suspect that it will have much the same effectiveness on public opinion and ultimate fate..

Posted on May 10, 2006 07:03 AM View this article | Comments (57) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change

May 09, 2006

11,000 Deaths a Day, Page 8, Ho Hum

In a world where influential leaders commonly claim that it is terrorism or global warming that is the world’s greatest problem, I was struck by this page 8 article from today’s New York Times, which contained the following:

More than four million newborns worldwide die each year in their first month of life, comparable to the number of babies born in the United States annually, Save the Children reported Monday.
Many of those infants could be saved with simple, inexpensive items, like sterile blades to cut the umbilical cord, antibiotics for pneumonia and knit caps to keep them warm, the group said in "State of the World's Mothers 2006," a new report. Ninety-nine percent of newborn deaths are in developing countries, where such items are often not widely available.

The deadliest time for children is in the hours after birth, and the deadliest places are the poorest corners of world. South Asia and Africa have the highest rates of newborn deaths, Save the Children said. "The first day of life is the most dangerous day a human being has," said Charles MacCormack, president of Save the Children.

While many countries have significantly lowered mortality rates for children younger than 5 in recent decades, the group said, little progress has been made globally in preventing the deaths of newborns and their mothers.

Four million a year is 11,000 children a day. Every single day. And this is not a problem of high technology, but low-tech diffusion and adoption. It is a solvable problem with tangible costs and benefits in the near term sharply weight towards the benefits.

What is the role of the United States government in helping to deal with this problem? According to the New York Times:

“President Bush's budget for the 2007 fiscal year proposes spending $323 million on maternal and child health programs in the United States Agency for International Development, less than the $356 million Congress appropriated last year. Save the Children is supporting a House bill that would instead increase financing. Mr. [Charles] MacCormack [president of Save the Children] said the amount of such aid had been flat through the past three administrations.”

Posted on May 9, 2006 12:42 PM View this article | Comments (15) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Health

May 08, 2006

Myths of the History of Ozone Policy

I have heard the case of ozone depletion invoked time and time again by advocates for mitigation action on climate change. Such invocations are not only like the old adage of generals fighting the last war, but worse, because they are like old generals looking to fight the old war as they wish it had been, rather than how it really was.

Here is a True/False quiz on the history of ozone policy. Keep track of your answers and the key will be provided after the jump:

1) Science provided a clear message.
2) Policy makers relied on consensus science to take action.
3) Public opinion was intense and unified.
4) Ozone skeptics remained mute and high-minded.
5) Science reached a threshold of certainty that compelled action

If you answered False to each of these then give yourself 100%. The ozone story is documented in this paper:

Betsill, M. M., and R. A. Pielke, Jr., 1998: Blurring the Boundaries: Domestic and International Ozone Politics and Lessons for Climate Change. International Environmental Affairs, 10(3), 147-172. (PDF)

Here are some brief comments on the questions above:

1) Science provided a clear message.

The science of ozone depletion was quite uncertain all the way through (and beyond) the Montreal Protocol in 1987, but especially so during the late-1970s/early-1980s adoption of the Toxic Substances Control Act, Clean Air Act Amendments, and Vienna Convention. Similarly, the settlement of the NRDC lawsuit that paved the way for the U.S. participation in the Montreal protocol took place before the discovery of the ozone hole.

2) Policy makers relied on consensus science to take action.

Policy makers used science as an indication of a possible problem and then very much followed a "no regrets" strategy. They first regulated "non-essential" uses of CFCs, for which substitutes were more readily available, and then took on essential uses later. In this way policy makers did what was relatively easier first, and left the more politically difficult challenges for later. In this way they reduced the scope of the problem. Climate change has seen the opposite strategy with the most difficult challenge and largest framing (regulating global energy use) at the center of the debate. Consensus science really did not play a role in ozone policy until after the Montreal Protocol when the issue was mature and fine-tuning was possible in the policy responses.

3) Public opinion was intense and unified.

According to the official UN history of the ozone issue there were exceedingly few news stories on ozone depletion in the U.S., China, U.K., or Soviet Union from 1977-1985, when much of the policy framework for the issue was developed (Figure 8.1, p. 293). The NYT had about 20 stories in 1982, and in no other year were there that many stories combined in 10 different leading newspapers during that period. This was also a period of intense (and legitimate) scientific debate. In fact, many people believed after the aerosol spray can ban in the late 1970s that the problem had been solved. It is hard to imagine ozone having anywhere near the salience and uniformity of opinion that we now see among the public on climate change.

4) Ozone skeptics remained mute and high-minded.

According to that same UN history (p. 295) one British scientist commented in 1975 that [Ozone-depletion theory is] "a science fiction tale . . . a load of rubbish . . . utter nonsense." There were plenty of skeptics on this issue, buoyed by fundamental uncertainties in the science in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The focus on "no regrets" strategies kept the attention off of science and onto policy options, which led to a breakthrough in the invention of substitutes for CFCs.

5) Science reached a threshold of certainty that compelled action.

Action on ozone proceeded incrementally with many decisions taken, first in the U.S. and then internationally. There was no "threshold for action" that we see so often called for in the context of climate change. Action took place based on what the political dynamics would allow. Science played a very important role in placing ozone depletion on the decision making agenda and then again in fine tuning the international protocol once it had been widely accepted. In between it was effective politics and a healthy policy process that compelled action, not science.

On the ozone issue we seem to have learned the wrong lessons – those that never existed in the first place. Progress on climate change mitigation might be more effective if many of today’s advocates actually fought the last war, rather than the one that they seem to have think that they won.

Posted on May 8, 2006 01:38 PM View this article | Comments (56) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Environment

May 04, 2006

Prometheus at 2

We've been online for two years. Who would have guessed that Shep's term project would wind up like this? Thanks once again to our commenters, by far the best on any blog on the web. Keep it up.

For my part, I'm going to celebrate by going offline for a few days. See you next week. ;-)

Posted on May 4, 2006 02:10 AM View this article | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Site News

FEMA Disaster Database

Rick Sylves of the University of Delaware sent me this link to an online database of FEMA disaster declaration information, supported by the Public Entity Risk Institute. I haven't had a chance to explore it, but it looks quite valuable. Have a look.

Posted on May 4, 2006 02:05 AM View this article | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Disasters

May 02, 2006

The Next IPCC Consensus?

Yahoo Asia has a news story on the on the forthcoming IPCC report. Here is an excerpt:

A United Nations panel on climate change noted for the first time the likelihood that global warming resulting from human activities is causing heat waves and other abnormal weather phenomena as well as Arctic ice mass loss, according to a draft report seen by Kyodo News on Sunday.
"It is very likely that greenhouse gas forcing has been the dominant cause of the observed warming of globally averaged temperatures in the last 50 years," says the draft fourth assessment report of Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

I haven’t see the draft of the report so I don’t know if it is accurate or not, but assuming that it is, it raises a few interesting issues in the context of our recent discussion of the notion of consensus.

First, it is worth comparing the quoted sentence by Yahoo Asia to its companion in the IPCC TAR (here in PDF):

In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.

One key difference is the change from “likely” (meaning 64-90%) to “very likely” (meaning >90%). They did not use “virtually certain” (>99%). (For the terms, see this PDF). From where I sit, a 10% chance that a greenhouse gas forcing is not the dominant cause of warming seems to allow plenty of room for healthy skepticism to exist. I’m interested in understanding why the IPCC is confident at the 90% level and not the 99% level. Clearly many scientists who have sp[oken out publicly on climate change are 99% certain.

A second key difference is the substitution of the phase "dominant cause" for the word "most." IPCC terms are not chosen arbitrarily and my reading of this is that as far as GHGs, it represents a step back from the statement in 2001. I equate "most" with a majority (>50%) and "dominant" with a plurality. I am sure commentators will have a field day with that. Were I a betting person I'd wager that "dominant" won't last until the end.

Of course, it should be said that the news story is referring to a draft and these statements may well be substantially modified before the report’s official release. However, if accurate, the preview of what the IPCC will say seems to allow considerable room for healthy skepticism, meaning that for the foreseeable future climate policy must develop in the context of a lack of absolute certainty. Less prosaically, we can fully expect the mainstream-skeptic debate to be with us for a long time, so we’d better develop policy responses that are robust to that conflict, efforts to scour the debate of such voices notwithstanding.

Posted on May 2, 2006 02:35 PM View this article | Comments (38) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty

Nowotny on Curiosity and Control

Helga Nowotny, science studies scholar and Vice-Chair of the European Research Council’s Scientific Council, has an interesting op-ed in which she discusses the challenges of managing scientific curiously in the context of the broader society wishing to control the direction of science in various ways. Here is an excerpt:

The dilemma – and it is a decisive one – is that today we cherish the passionate curiosity of an Albert Einstein. But we still want to control the unforeseeable consequences to which curiosity leads. The dilemma must be overcome by allowing curiosity to be protected and supported, while trying to capture those of its fruits that will benefit society. How we accomplish this must be continuously negotiated in the public sphere. Irreducible contradictions will remain, and therein lie the ambivalence that characterises modern societies’ stance toward science.

Posted on May 2, 2006 02:31 PM View this article | Comments (5) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Science Policy: General

May 01, 2006

Really, Really, Really Bad Reporting

Time magazine has named MIT’s Kerry Emanuel one of the world’s 100 most influential people. Congrats to him, I certainly think he is brilliant and the honor is well deserved. However, I can’t imagine that Kerry is too happy with the unfortunate blurb Time put together to describe him.

It's easy to argue about the hypothetical causes and effects of global warming. It's a lot harder for any serious disagreement to continue when extreme weather is demolishing a major American city. The U.S. experienced just such a moment of clarity last year when Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans, awakening all of us to the true cost of climate change. It was Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who helped us make the connection.

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« Author: Pielke Jr., R. »

January 30, 2008

Witanagemot Justice And Senator Inhofe’s Fancy List

January 29, 2008

Eugene Skolnikoff on The Honest Broker

January 28, 2008

Two New Blogs to Check Out

January 26, 2008

Updated IPCC Forecasts vs. Observations

January 23, 2008

The Authoritarianism of Experts

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I'm So Confused

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Temperature Trends 1990-2007: Hansen, IPCC, Obs

Worldwatch Wants You to Think

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New Paper on Normalized Hurricane Damages

January 16, 2008

UKMET Short Term Global Temperature Forecast

January 15, 2008

Verification of IPCC Sea Level Rise Forecasts 1990, 1995, 2001

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James Hansen on One Year's Temperature

Updated Chart: IPCC Temperature Verification

Pachauri on Recent Climate Trends

Verification of IPCC Temperature Forecasts 1990, 1995, 2001, and 2007

January 11, 2008

Real Climate's Two Voices on Short-Term Climate Fluctuations

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Verification of 1990 IPCC Temperature Predictions

Radio Interview with Radio Radicale

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Forecast Verification for Climate Science, Part 3

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Forecast Verification for Climate Science, Part 2

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Forecast Verification for Climate Science

Deja Vu All Over Again

January 05, 2008

My Comments to Science on Hillary Clinton's Science Policy Plans

January 02, 2008

Technology ,Trade, and U.S. Pollution

Natural Disasters in Australia

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Is there any weather inconsistent with the the scientific consensus on climate?

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End-of-2007 Hurricane-Global Warming Update

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On the Political Relevance of Scientific Consensus

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Laboratories of Democracy? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Laboratories of Democracy

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Rajendra Pachauri, IPCC, Science and Politics

A Follow Up on Media Coverage and Climate Change

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New Data on the Global Economy

Climate Policy as Farce

Technology Assessment and Globalization

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Shellenberger on Bali

A Second Reponse from RMS

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China's Growing Emissions

Parable About the Precariousness of Monoculture

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Chris Green on Emissions Target Setting

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AGU Powerpoint with Steve McIntyre

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