- Prometheus: Author: Vranes, K. Archives

Kevin Vranes is a CIRES Visiting Fellow, based at the Center. He also co-owns Point380, a climate and energy consulting company.

Contents:

November 07, 2008

The House race to watch

Now that the election is over there's one House race left to watch: Dingell v. Waxman.

John Dingell is the Ann Arbor/Detroit Rep who chairs the Energy and Commerce Committee. He's also been fairly unabashed in his reluctance to moving climate policy forward, and E&C is the key House committee for climate policy. For those playing in climate and climate-energy policy, he's been the main bottleneck on moving policy forward within the Dem caucus in advance of January 2009. Considering the aggressive moves by other Congressional Dems, particularly Bingaman, Boxer and Markey, Dingell has been notably slow to the table.

Now, the always-aggressive Henry Waxman, #2 on the committee, has started a push to wrest the gavel from Dingell. The differences in philosophy and approach between the two men are quite clear, especially on climate. Dingell has been upfront about protecting the auto industry at all costs and being reluctant on carbon regulations (see for example), while Waxman is clearly itching to move forward on carbon caps.

The politics behind this will be fascinating as it is no secret that many Dems, including Ms. Pelosi, would like to see Dingell relinquish control of the committee and the attendant control it will have over climate policy in the coming term. Pelosi tried to go around Dingell in 2006 by creating an ad hoc committee on climate change (chaired by Markey), only to see Dingell win a fight that ensured the ad hoc commitee would have no legislation-writing authority. Apparently Dingell is taking this challenge so seriously that he's formed a "whip team" to help him fight off Waxman.

You can bet that savvy watchers of climate policy are watching this "race" more closely than anything else in DC right now. Ultimately, the ramifications of this fight will have serious and long-lasting implications for the direction and scope of thr country's first real foray into carbon regulations.

Posted on November 7, 2008 01:09 PM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change | Energy Policy | government

May 13, 2008

NFIP revamp moving through the grinder

The literature on the myriad problems with the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) is long and deep. One of the main problems is that the program is not insulated from politics and thus is prevented from acting like a real market by setting actuarially-sound rates on its customers. Other problems exist but the premium-setting problem is the most significant and no matter how Congress tinkers with the NFIP, if it doesn't address the premium issue then the NFIP will continue to be a taxpayer money-sucking problem child.

A NFIP reauthorization has been moving through Congress and yesterday the Senate passed its version. Predictably they moved the current $18+ billion NFIP deficit to general revenues (i.e. the U.S. taxpayer), a move that has a long history in Congress. But some good was included in the bill and the House's version does not have the $18+ billion shift. The Senate was able to pass an annual premium increase cap from 10% to 15%, which is more significant than it probably sounds. They also authorized $2B for updated floodplain mapping, which is also much more significant than it probably sounds, as currently premiums are not always based on physical reality. (We'll see how much actually gets appropriated out of that $2B.)

(And hey all, sorry for the non-controversial post.)

Posted on May 13, 2008 01:18 PM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Water Policy

November 20, 2007

Energy? Climate change? Linked? Huh?

How does a high-level federal policymaker go on and on about energy policy, energy "balance," energy technology, clean coal, etc. without the slightest nod to climate change? I'm not sure how it can be done with a straight face, but Texas Senator John Cornyn tried it here Monday in a Dallas Morning News op-ed, and it really is a work of art.

I won't reproduce the 700-word screed here, but it is captivating reading. The word "energy" appears 33 times. Climate? Warming? Not once.

It's not that the Senator ignores the climate change link. It's not even that I think a discussion of energy policy must in all cases discuss climate. No, what's fascinating is the pains it took to dance around the issue in the article without once mentioning it, as if trying to pretend the issue doesn't exist. You can't read the article without knowing that its entire existence owes itself not to the debate over energy security (as Cornyn pretends in the article) but to the debate over climate change responses running through the Senate and House. Senator Cornyn's article is really about the current field of play on climate change politics and how it does and will affect energy policy for Texas, yet he manages to rant on the subject without ever mentioning the climate context. The pointed stand I'm sure is lost on nobody. To his Texas constituents it says, No matter what we do on carbon, I'm fighting for unrestricted, even expanded fossil energy extraction.

At this point, with RGGI, then the WCI and now the MGA, almost the entire country except for the south/southeast is throwing down the gauntlet. Even Kansas is making bold moves in the energy/climate policy area. A look at Pew's map of regional climate initiatives is pretty telling. Hell, Senator, even OPEC is talking about climate change now.

Senator Cornyn's op-ed does one thing: it paints very clearly the climate policy battle lines, and provides a strong reality check for the attitudes that are and are not changing. If you can't get a U.S. Senator to deign to mention climate in a 700-word piece on energy balance, you can see dirt flying from the trenches as they get dug deeper. Of course, not everybody in Texas sees things the same way. When the private equity market speaks that loudly, it makes me wonder who the Senator is getting his advice from.

Posted on November 20, 2007 02:38 PM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change

November 05, 2007

An appreciation of Mr. Bloomberg

NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg is now out in favor of a carbon tax (see also this post by Charlie Komanoff). This is significant because it makes him one of the very few nationally-prominent (or at least nationally-known) politicians to stake out for a C tax over cap-and-trade.

Bloomberg's support for a C tax is important both because he is seen as a technocrat's technocrat and because he presides over eight million carbon consumers. Unfortunately, as Redburn illustrates well in his article, carbon tax proponents have more than an uphill battle to get their way on climate mitigation legislation.

It's not that the carbon tax or cap-and-trade? debate is over already (which, really, would be before it even began), it's that there is a strong perception in the community that it is over. Wonky types (which in my usage are political realists, not optimists), especially those with some influence on the policy development process, have been telling me personally and conference crowds (like this one) that it's all over and cap-and-trade is a done deal. This perception might be more important than (the way I see) reality, which is that nobody wants to deal with this problem and because of this, all options are still on the table. It's not that I am full bore on the C-tax train either, but I would like to see an honest, complete national debate on the two approaches before the "elites" declare the policy problem solved. In particular, I would love to see this issue come out during primary debates for both parties, to at least introduce the average Joe to the issue. Of course, the vagaries of carbon economics will be viewed by party handlers as too nuanced and difficult to explain during debate, but I'll preemptively call bullshit on that line. Try us.

Speaking of Mr. Bloomberg, I was flying back from NYC on Halloween and, caught in the captive state of the miserable United economy passenger, had nothing better to do but read deep into the nether regions of the NY Times metro section. There I found this article about a public stumble between the mayyuh and a deceased NYPD officer, James Zadroga, who had worked long hours at the World Trade Center site. Zadroga passed away a few years later and his family wanted the cause of his death to be declared working at the WTC site.

Before going further, I should explain this: there is emotion involved in the environmental problem of the WTC site that goes beyond the attacks. I lived in NY during the WTC attacks and the smell of the burning pile was strong for at least two weeks and was noticeable even far uptown (north) when the prevailing winds are westerly. My recollection is that near the site the smell was strong even a month after the attacks. Everybody in that city knows the smell of the WTC site, and I think that experience triggers an immediate sympathy in citizens for the workers (many of whom stayed on the site for weeks without going home) and what they were exposed to. The EPA debacle with air quality testing and the public relations of it didn't help. So the fact that a family claims that one of their sons was killed by WTC air after working on the site is bound to garner immediate sympathy for the claim.

Bloomberg perhaps forgot this context when he addressed Zadroga's case. A pathologist had declared Zadroga's death a direct result of WTC air, but NYC's medical examiner recently rejected that finding. In a clear case of dueling experts, Bloomberg picked his. Despite this strong statement from the NYC employee:

"Our evaluation of your son’s lung abnormality is markedly different than that given you by others," Dr. Hirsch wrote in the letter, dated Tuesday and also signed by Dr. Michele S. Stone, another medical examiner. "It is our unequivocal opinion, with certainty beyond doubt, that the foreign material in your son’s lungs did not get there as the result of inhaling dust at the World Trade Center or elsewhere."

the excess of objectivity problem is clear. The family's response:

"We knew the city was going to say this," Mr. Zadroga said. "They’ve been lying since Jimmy got sick. They've been lying about all these W.T.C. people getting sick. They would never admit that Jimmy got sick. They treated him like a dog all those years."

Instead of recognizing the excess of objectivity problem, and forgetting all of the other political context to this case, Bloomberg simply said Zadroga was "not a hero." Oops.

All of this isn't really what caught my eye, though. It was the way Bloomberg handled the backlash:

The tone of Mr. Bloomberg's comments yesterday veered sharply from statements he made on Monday after receiving an award from the Harvard School of Public Health. Asked why science could be unpopular, he said that it sometimes provided answers that people did not want to hear, as in the case of Mr. Zadroga. Referring to Dr. Hirsch’s finding, he said, "Nobody wanted to hear that."
"We wanted to have a hero, and there are plenty of heroes," he said. "It's just in this case, science says this was not a hero."

Yesterday, Mr. Bloomberg described Detective Zadroga as "a dedicated police officer" with an impressive record who "volunteered to work downtown, and I think that the odds are that he clearly got sick because of breathing the air — but that's up to the doctors."

So he doesn't exactly grasp that the word "hero" is loaded and dripping with emotion, especially in this case, and especially in NY where the tabloids use the word as an interchangeable synonym for police officers and firefighters. But at least he gets why he's being attacked for his statements and what science and the popular perception and acceptance of science has to do with it.

Posted on November 5, 2007 01:53 PM View this article | Comments (10)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

October 22, 2007

Water in the west

In case you missed it, the NY Times Sunday Magazine cover story yesterday was the western water problem. Brad Udall, director of the Western Water Assessment, which is closely affiliated with our Center, got a lot of ink, as did other CU and NOAA affiliates.

One thing (among many) hinted at in the article that deserves highlight: Western agriculture is done. Not tomorrow, not even in the next decade or two, but eventually. Without a check on urban expansion and with every drop of water spoken for, the economics are obvious: people in urban areas need water and have the cash to buy it from the agricultural senior rights holders.

Over on the Post-Normal Times, Sylvia adds the variable to the west's water equation that the Sunday Mag article left out: the ecosystems and endangered species angle (here and here).

Posted on October 22, 2007 04:20 PM View this article | Comments (7)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Water Policy

October 19, 2007

Citing carbon emissions, Kansas rejects coal plants

Hard to say what John Marburger would say about this (more on him in a minute), but yesterday Kansas' Secretary of Health and Environment cited carbon emissions in rejecting the application to install two 700MW coal plants in western Kansas.

The move may be more about politics than about climate, but whatever the reasons, the decision was sold on climate and that's as important as it is surprising. It's also another loud declaration that the states aren't going to wait around for a national-level policy to move on climate mitigation. Here's hoping that the losers on this decision give more thought to developing a profitable wind project on the plains than to giving lawyers millions to argue the coal case. (The quote from the coal plant developer's spokesman, "We are extremely upset over this arbitrary and capricious decision" invokes the legal key phrase that spells l-a-w-s-u-i-t.)

News on the Kansas move comes on the heels of some bizarre statements on climate change from Mr. Marburger. I'm not sure what his agenda is, exactly, but the Washington Post today has him saying

...the target of preventing Earth from warming more than two degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, "is going to be a very difficult one to achieve and is not actually linked to regional events that affect people's lives."

and

Marburger said that while there is general agreement that human activity is producing too much carbon dioxide and "you could have emerging disasters long before you get to two degrees. . . . There is no scientific criterion for establishing numbers like that."

I'm wondering what the point of saying this is. Is he trying to pave the way for the Bush White House to say, "We're not going to target 2 degrees, we're going to target 3."? Certainly his "not linked to regional events" statement is an absurd misdirection, completely ignoring risk while seeming to make a case for inaction due to incomplete information. His second statement essentially does the same, this time acknowledging risk but implying that it is not well-enough characterized to make policy choices. Are Mr. Marburger's statements part of a White House communication strategy or is this really how he is approaching and advising the problem?

Posted on October 19, 2007 03:07 PM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change

October 18, 2007

NFIP reauthorization moving along

In what could become the most significant change to the National Flood Insurance Program since it started in 1968, yesterday Senate Banking unanimously passed out of committee its markup of H.R. 3121, which passed the House on September 27. H.R. 3121, the Flood Insurance Reform and Modernization Act of 2007, pushes through a small but significant number of changes to the NFIP, including some to address the biggest problem with the NFIP: that it does not (and cannot, because it is not isolated from political interference) charge actuarially-sound rates on the policies it writes.

The bill has 36 sections so I'm not going to pick it apart here, but here are a few things I latched on to (the Senate bill isn't available yet so the section numbers refer to H.R.3121.EH):

- Quite a few authorizations for studies or reports (yea, I know, I know, but it's something) on charging actuarially-sound rates, increasing policy holding, including building codes in flood management criteria (go figure); and the creation of a National Flood Insurance Advocate whose main purpose is to write reports.

- Section 4 specifically phases in actuarially-sound rates for non-primary residences and nonresidential properties. This is a great start, but of course specifically and purposefully leaves out setting actuarially-sound rates for most policy holders! It also caps the increase for buildings built before 1974 (known as "pre-FIRM" properties) at 20% and 25% for nonresidential and non-primary residences respectively.

- Section 11 raises the cap on annual policy rate increases from 10% to 15%. Again, at least it's something.

- The House bill carried Section 7, adding coverage for wind in addition to flood. This would be a major, major change. The Senate Banking-passed bill, perhaps responding to a White House veto threat over the provision, left that out with a marker (an amendment offered and withdrawn by Schumer and Martinez).

- Section 36 gives authorization for adding a neat little warning on flood maps. For any area within the 100-yr floodplain that is protected by a dam or levee the maps "may" carry the following disclaimer: "NOTE: This area is shown as being protected from at least the 1-percent-annual-chance flood hazard by levee, dike, or other structure. Overtopping or failure of any flood control structure is possible. Property owners are encouraged to evaluate their flood risk, based on full and accurate information, and to consider flood insurance coverage as appropriate." (A similar warning for the 500-yr floodplain is also included.) In the language of the legislative, the section uses "may" instead of "shall" for the warning. In other words, it authorizes but does not mandate a warning. That means it may never reach the flood maps and whether or not it does will be open to political pressure, but considering that mapmakers are geeks I can only assume that warning will appear on every map.

I haven't seen the Senate Banking-passed bill and of course we will have to wait for the bill that comes out of the full Senate and then the Conference Committee, but in general these are very positive developments. They don't go far enough in reforming the NFIP, but they are a solid start.

Posted on October 18, 2007 04:44 PM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Disasters

August 29, 2007

Twenty years of public opinion about global warming

Matt Nisbet has a good paper out now about polling results on global warming. The pdf is here and general paper link here.

The polling supports what we've been saying for a while: the public is there. They believe (even if they think the scientific consensus isn't as strong as it really is).

The science community has been freaking out for years about trying to answer the "we're screaming at them about this problem, why aren't they doing anything about it???" question. The stock answer from climate scientists is either about skeptics sowing doubt, or the problem is too complicated, or something like that, but it usually comes down to, "the public just isn't convinced that it's a problem." Matt's paper shows that clearly the public is aware of global warming and does think it is a problem.

So why are we (through our electeds) still not doing anything about it then? Because even the public realizes that the solutions are very, very difficult and will probably mean considerable pain. (And no politician wants to inflict pain on his/her constituents.) Perhaps the collective is making its own collective calculation: a world without potentially disruptive-to-catastrophic global warming or a world without coal-fired electricity and 20mpg family sedans?

This is really my insidious way of making a strong plea to the climate science policy (funding) community: stop spending money on GCMs. Start spending those billions we spend on basic climate research on climate solutions. We do not need 21 models feeding the IPCC process to see the risks. In a resource-limited science funding world, we know enough already about how climate works to see the risks.

What we don't see is how we're going to shovel ourselves out of this mess. We would do quite well to quit crying about science budgets, climate skeptics and inaccurate media representations and finally turn our energies to usable, useful science for a very uncertain future. Our politicians and policymakers will listen if we give them useful solutions, especially if we work with them to figure out what kind of information is useful to them. They will continue to NOT listen if we decide to pad our status quo by indefinitely giving them journals filled with GCM studies and 500-page IPCC reports that are all science and no ways out.

Posted on August 29, 2007 01:09 PM View this article | Comments (5)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change

August 20, 2007

New Changnon paper on winter storm losses

Keeping in line with similar research being done here on hurricanes (Roger and colleagues) and earthquakes (me), Stanley Changnon has a new paper out on winter storm losses. The abstract:

Winter storms are a major weather problem in the USA and their losses have been rapidly increasing. A total of 202 catastrophic winter storms, each causing more than $1 million in damages, occurred during 1949–2003, and their losses totaled $35.2 billion (2003 dollars). Catastrophic winter storms occurred in most parts of the contiguous USA, but were concentrated in the eastern half of the nation where 88% of all storm losses occurred. ... The time distribution of the nation’s 202 storms during 1949–2003 had a sizable downward trend, whereas the nation’s storm losses had a major upward trend for the 55-year period. This increase over time in losses, given the decrease in storm incidences, was a result of significant temporal increases in storm sizes and storm intensities. Increases in storm intensities were small in the northern sections of the nation, but doubled across the southern two-thirds of the nation, reflecting a climatic shift in conditions producing intense winter storms.

The interesting zeroth- or first-order conclusion is that when using damage trends as a proxy for climatic trends, no climatic trends can be seen in hurricanes while a strong one can be seen in winter storms. From the latest Pielke et al. hurricane paper:

...it should be clear from the normalized estimates that while 2004 and 2005 were exceptional from the standpoint of the number of very damaging storms, there is no long-term trend of increasing damage over the time period covered by this analysis.

Whereas from the Changnon paper on winter storms:

Significant temporal increases in storm losses, storm sizes, and storm intensity have occurred in the United States. The national increase over time in losses, given the decrease in storm incidences, was a result of the increases over time in storm sizes and intensities. The marked temporal increases in storm sizes and storm intensities were greatest across the southern two-thirds of the nation.

Posted on August 20, 2007 02:38 PM View this article | Comments (6)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change | Disasters

July 17, 2007

Where is public confidence in science?

Coming in a little late to this one, but on 30-June the WSJ ran an op-ed by Roy Grinker of George Washington University on the vaccines-autism circus. The article is moneywalled, of course, so you'll need special access to see it, but a couple of snippets should give a good idea of his arguments.

I base my opinion on scientific literature and no court decision is going to change it. Neither will a court decision change the minds of the antivaccine advocates. Two distinct communities have emerged, and though they both employ the language of science, their ideas are simply incommensurable. The two groups co-exist, like creationism and evolutionary biology, but they operate on such different premises that a true dialogue is nearly impossible.

The real problem here, as we have pointed out a few thousand times, is Dan Sarewitz's excess of objectivity. There is enough ammunition for both sides to keep firing.

We should not expect too much out of this trial, or the next eight. The scientific community and antivaccine parent groups will each continue to look for clues under their own lampposts, because that is where the light is. But we should pay careful attention to this conflict. The antivaccine movement may be evidence that public confidence in science is eroding, which means that public health is at risk too.

Grinker may be right here, but I think something else is important that he misses. The vaccines debate is not and has never been about the science, and it will continue to not be about the science. It is about whether it is reasonable for the government to mandate (whether it does so explicitly or implicitly) that all children receive vaccines. This is a social liberty and public health policy question, not a science question. The antivaccine movement has been forced to debate in the world of science when they want to be debating in the world of social policy. But science as a machine is a hard thing to stand up to, and the antivaccine movement must have sensed that they would get more traction making arguments about bad science than about social liberty. Clearly the argument "I don't want the government to force my kid to get a shot" is a lot less compelling than "the government is poisoning our kids and covering it up with bad science."

Posted on July 17, 2007 08:27 AM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Health

June 27, 2007

The nothingness that is the new energy bill

First, as an aside, my favorite quote on the new web in a long time: 'This is what happens, he suggests, "when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule."' From this review of Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur. I suspect Roger will agree with that sentiment as applied to blogs (the review specifically singles out blogs as fitting that mold). I actually don't. I think it takes some combing, but some blogs provide just as much insight and detailed intellectual analysis on our societal issues as the best full-time "professional" commentators.

Second, you've probably realized that Prometheus is now in the midst of its normal summerly slowdown. We are academics after all, and we like to take the summers off. I (and probably Roger, despite his telling y'all that he was done) will be throwing posts up here and there throughout the summer, but it's going to be slow until late August or early September.

Finally, to the subject of this post. For now I'll let Thomas Friedman say it for me about the "new" energy bill that the Senate passed last week:

The whole Senate energy effort only reinforced my feelings that we’re in a green bubble — a festival of hot air by the news media, corporate America and presidential candidates about green this and green that, but, when it comes to actually doing something hard to bring about a green revolution at scale — and if you don’t have scale on this you have nothing — we wimp out. Climate change is not a hoax. The hoax is that we are really doing something about it.

Then again, the debate on this energy bill was a lot less about climate than about energy independence. Watching how hard it was to get even this pidly little bill passed, that Congress will address energy independence and climate simultaneously now seems as remote as ever. It really makes you wonder who is talking to the editorial page writers of the major papers, some of whom ate the bait and ponied up that this was a significant new change in energy policy. The weakness of this bill tells me more than ever that we better start thinking a lot harder about adaptation to anthropogenic climate change, lest we follow the fate of Jared Diamond's not-so-shining examples.

Posted on June 27, 2007 08:32 PM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Energy Policy

June 12, 2007

Aren't new problems always old problems?

Congress is back at trying to reform the problematic National Flood Insurance Program. What's curious is the claim that NFIP's problems are recent and related to the 2005 hurricane season. This CQ article says:

The program, which provides virtually all water-damage insurance in the country, had to borrow that amount to pay out the unprecedented number of claims generated by Hurricane Katrina and the other 2005 storms that ravaged the Gulf of Mexico coast.
Lawmakers and experts say the 2005 storms revealed weaknesses in the program that must be addressed to put it back on sound financial footing.

The number of claims may have been unprecedented but the borrowing from the federal treasury to back up the insurance pool certainly was not unprecedented. And it is absurd to suggest that it took the 2005 storm year to "reveal weaknesses in the program." The literature is deep on the NFIP's problems and one of the biggest is that rate-setting isn't protected from political tinkering, so NFIP can't charge actuarially-sound premiums. So it's nice to see that Congress is trying to address NFIP's problems, but the question is will Congress protect NFIP from Congress?

Posted on June 12, 2007 04:42 PM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Disasters

June 11, 2007

A little percolation on energy policy

Two things I noted today:

1- From the No S#%@! category, the Bush Administration seems eager to let everybody know that there will be no movement whatsoever on regulating carbon until January 2009 at the earliest. If you caught even a bit of the G8 news you already knew that (and somebody got me saying as much before G8). But apparently the Bush Administration wants to drive the point home, so last week they turned EPA Administrator Johnson loose at a House hearing:

U.S. President George W. Bush wouldn't sign into law an anti-global warming bill that includes a so-called cap and trade program, the Environmental Protection Agency Administrator told U.S. lawmakers Friday.
During a congressional hearing, Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash. asked Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson if the president would sign into law legislation that would create the nation's first cap and trade program aimed at specifically limiting climate change-causing pollutants.

Johnson simply replied, "No."

In response, Inslee, a cap and trade policy proponent, criticized Johnson, saying he hopes Johnson has his prediction wrong.

"I hope you're premature. I hope you haven't checked with the president," he said, during a hearing held by the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. "I hope you're not authorized to say that."

Two things caught my attention here. As far as I can tell, Johnson's appearance before this House Select Committee was entirely voluntary [that's the first item of note] since this is a select committee with no legislation-writing authority, no subpoena power, no budget authority, and no jurisdiction over any federal agency. So Johnson's willingness to appear was either:

a) a really nice gesture, showing that he, the EPA, and the Bush Administration genuinely want to discuss climate change in the open in front of this House committee; or

b) a way for the Bush Administration to make a strong and very public statement to Congress to not bother wasting anybody's time on trying to pass a carbon tax or cap-and-trade [that's the second item] because it's going to be vetoed faster than Bush can click-click his ballpoint pen.

2- Senator Bingaman has been crazy busy getting energy legislation to the floor. His package passed cloture today and will start seeing floor action tomorrow. I am still very interested in how the whole coal synfuel mess will play out. I won't be surprised if the final bill includes either mandates or heavy subsidies for liquid coal synfuels without mandating that any coal-derived liquid fuels include carbon capture and sequestration. If this happens Congress will essentially be encouraging a strong ramp up in the carbon intensity of our fuel supply.

Secondly, if you peruse the legislation on the floor and the ancillary materials out there you might notice the conspicuous absence of yesterday's hot energy item: hydrogen. Hydrogen hype has apparently been replaced with biofuels hype, perhaps because there is a natural constituency for biofuels (the entire Midwest) and a much diminished one for hydrogen production. Or perhaps because energy thinkers finally got through to the speech writers that hydrogen is and always will be EROI negative?

Finally, I note the sad passing of Senator Craig Thomas of Wyoming. His absence might change the tenor of the coal debate as he was a strong supporter of coal, the Powder River Basin being in his state. This change in debate might be a good thing, but Senator Thomas' passing was not, obviously for his family but also for the Senate in general. He was one of the nicest men I came across in my short time there, I had great interactions with his staff and I know he was well respected across both sides of the aisle.

Posted on June 11, 2007 10:59 PM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Energy Policy

June 06, 2007

Curious quote from the recalcitrant

It's nothing new: rather than make better cars Detroit would lobby. So it's no surprise that the big-3 chiefs are running to DC together to beg that they not be held to even the most milquetoast efficiency regulations. What is curious, though, is GM's CEO's choice of words:

"It looks like within the climate that's being experienced now, it's very likely there will be increases in CAFE," Rick Wagoner, General Motors Corp. chairman and chief executive, said Tuesday in Wilmington, Del. "I think our concern is, let's make sure that we also fix the real problems while we're doing that."

Of course he meant "political climate" not "Earth's climate," which makes his quote ironic. But what I'm really curious about is what he sees as "the real problems" that Congress should be addressing instead of getting America far more energy efficient than it is, both for climate and energy supply reasons. It never ceases to impress me that Detroit can scream and cry about how being forced to improve the efficiency of their product will lead to a loss of jobs, without being challenged in the slightest. As if fewer cars will be sold because the cars are made slightly more efficient? Somebody explain....

Posted on June 6, 2007 11:47 AM View this article | Comments (19)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Energy Policy

May 30, 2007

Here comes the rain, kids. NASA administrator says global warming ain't no stinking problem.

Hat tip (and bow and all praise thee) to Mr. Fleck who passed it along. NPR just sent out a press release previewing a Steve Inskeep interview airing on tomorrow's Morning Edition with NASA Administration Michael Griffin. The title of the press release? How about

NASA ADMINISTRATOR MICHAEL GRIFFIN NOT SURE THAT GLOBAL WARMING IS A PROBLEM

Ok. The rest of the press release goes on to say [my bolds]

May 30, 2007; Washington, DC – NASA Administrator Michael Griffin tells NPR News that while he has no doubt “a trend of global warming exists, I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with.”
In an interview with Steve Inskeep airing tomorrow on NPR News’ Morning Edition, Administrator Griffin says “I guess I would ask which human beings - where and when - are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.”

Oh my. Here is the transcript that NPR released:

STEVE INSKEEP: One thing that’s been mentioned that NASA is perhaps not spending as much money as it could on is studying climate change, global warming, from space. Are you concerned about global warming?
MICHAEL GRIFFIN: I am aware that global warming -- I’m aware that global warming exists. I understand that the bulk of scientific evidence accumulated supports the claim that we’ve had about a one degree centigrade rise in temperature over the last century to within an accuracy of 20 percent. I’m also aware of recent findings that appear to have nailed down -- pretty well nailed down the conclusion that much of that is manmade. Whether that is a long term concern or not, I can’t say.

MR. INSKEEP : And I just wanted to make sure that I’m clear. Do you have any doubt that this is a problem that mankind has to wrestle with?

MR. GRIFFIN: I have no doubt that global -- that a trend of global warming exists. I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of earth’s climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change. First of all, I don’t think it’s within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown, and second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings - where and when - are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.

MR. INSKEEP : Is that thinking that informs you as you put together the budget? That something is happening, that it’s worth studying, but you’re not sure that you want to be battling it as an army might battle an enemy.

MR. GRIFFIN: Nowhere in NASA’s authorization, which of course governs what we do, is there anything at all telling us that we should take actions to affect climate change in either one way or another. We study global climate change, that is in our authorization, we think we do it rather well. I’m proud of that, but NASA is not an agency chartered to quote “battle climate change.”

Ok, let's start with the last -- and least important -- point. Griffin is right: nobody is asking NASA to battle climate change, only study it. (Somebody should be asking the DoE to battle it and we shouldn't need the Supreme Court to direct that EPA try to address it, but that's another issue.) Inskeep lets the issue blend into NASA "battling it" as a funding issue when he should have kept up on the more salient point that Griffin led him directly to: does your personal opinion that global warming isn't a problem translate into deemphasizing the study of global warming and climate change across NASA's budget? Inskeep let Griffin get away without answering that question directly.

The next question could have been: 'were you picked for this job because of this opinion? Before offering you the post did Bush Administration officials give you a litmus test that included your views on climate change?'

The next question might be: 'On your statement, "I understand that the bulk of scientific evidence accumulated supports the claim that we’ve had about a one degree centigrade rise in temperature over the last century to within an accuracy of 20 percent." Are you trying to downplay scientific certainty by saying this (the "within an accuracy of 20 percent" part); or do you really not have a solid grasp of the science basics; or did you just slip up?'

There are a lot of avenues Griffin could have gone down in this interview, but the one he chose seems to me be only slightly better than the worst tack he could have taken (denying outright that there is a problem). Although I don't agree, even with this statement I don't have a huge problem: "I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with." But what comes next,

To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of earth’s climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change. First of all, I don’t think it’s within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown, and second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings - where and when - are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.

indicates to me that Griffin has absolutely no appreciation for the risk that anthropogenic climate change poses. Risk implies both knowledge and uncertainty and if Griffin simply wanted to make a point about uncertainty I'd concede it. But instead he seems to simply cast out the severe risks that do exist in favor of some sort of fig leaf that says "we may have altered the climate but we're too arrogant if we think we should stop altering it because our alterations might be good for other people." Unbelievable.

Posted on May 30, 2007 04:30 PM View this article | Comments (28)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change

May 29, 2007

The messy and messier politics of AGW solutions

Back on May 2nd I wrote about the looming coal vs. global warming fight in Congress. Today the NY Times put the issue up as its lead article (at least in the national edition). Edmund Andrews covers the issue well, bringing out various issues of price, competing priorities and constituent politics. (To recap my post: despite Senate ENR staffers trying to paint a rosy picture about a four-bill markup of some easy and no-brainer energy packages, coal state Senators still made a big stink about mandating coal synfuels.)

This is an issue setting itself up well (and early) to be one of the major boondoggles in crafting policy that effectively brings down GHG emissions. It essentially pits energy independence goals against GHG reduction goals when they should be addressed simultaneously in the same direction. Smart policy will reduce exposure to global warming risk and energy provenance issues together; bad policy will allow the two issues to battle each other.

The elephant in this room, only hinted at in Andrews' article and only briefly mentioned in my post, is setting government targets for specific fuels. Coal state Members want to write into any energy/climate legislation either mandated volume purchase targets for liquefied coal fuels or heavy subsidies for the industry. But the coal-to-liquid conversion process releases a lot of carbon dioxide, and when confronted with this, coal supporters point out that carbon dioxide can be captured during the process and sequestered (known as carbon capture and storage, or CCS).

The key here is "can be" as in can be captured. It should be appended with "but won't" unless any legislation mandating or heavily subsidizing liquefied coal also provides a mandate that any fuel derived from coal captures CO2, and also provides the subsidies to make that CCS possible. Will legislators go that far? Listening to Congress, especially the language coming out of Jeff Bingaman's committee, I've heard a lot of discussion of subsidies to build synfuel plants and a lot of discussion about mandating fuel quotas or providing generous per-gallon tax credits, but nothing about also footing the bill for CCS. Keeping in mind that some lawmakers already want to give coal synfuels a $0.50/gal subsidy before even considering the carbon capture issues, requiring carbon CCS on the coal synfuel process means pricing coal synfuels well out of economic competitiveness.

The coal issue illustrates again the problems with government picking winners and losers instead of setting generalized targets to be met across a wide swath of economic players. Doing this with ethanol has already led to a international socioeconomic backlash, rightly or wrongly drawing in Mexican citizens decrying the rising price of the corn they depend upon for food. Anything close to a mandate for coal synfuels will mean a new avenue for climate change politicization. Have we learned yet from past lessons? Edmund Andrews hints that we probably haven't:

But some energy experts, as well as some lawmakers, worry that the scale of the coal-to-liquid incentives could lead to a repeat of a disastrous effort 30 years ago to underwrite a synthetic fuels industry from scratch.
When oil prices plunged in the 1980s, the government-owned Synthetic Fuels Corporation became a giant government albatross that lost billions and remains a symbol of misguided industrial policy more than 25 years later.

Posted on May 29, 2007 03:41 PM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change | Energy Policy

May 09, 2007

--It's sort of a screw-up--

From the LA Times today:

California homeowners are rejecting new rebates for solar power equipment, saying the state has made installing the rooftop panels far more costly than expected.
As a result, Public Utilities Commission reports show a decline of 78% in rebate requests in the first three months of this year, compared with last year, and the solar installation industry says it is threatened with collapse across much of California.

At issue is a requirement the state added Jan. 1 for getting a rebate under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Million Solar Roofs program. Applicants must first sign up for costly pricing plans offered by utilities that charge more for their electricity during hours of peak demand.

etc....

Posted on May 9, 2007 10:39 AM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Energy Policy

May 04, 2007

Proxmire alive and well reports Enquirer

There was a minor storm in the science community over the past couple of days as two Republican House members offered amendments (here's one, here's the other) to the NSF authorization bill (H.R. 1867) to strip funding for existing projects.

This kind of debate has been going on for decades, really since the beginning of post-WWII science policy, but it's important to revisit the issue. Should Congress step in for peer-review panels of experts in determining project funding? Maybe. It's an open values question that we are constantly rehashing, and for good reason. Elected politicians should constantly question how the taxpayer's money is spent. That's their job. But should individual Members perhaps read past the title and abstract of a project they object to when speaking on the House floor? Probably.

The latest iteration of this long-running fight is covered well by Jeffery Brainard in a Chronicle of Higher Ed story posted today.

Posted on May 4, 2007 10:31 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Science Policy: General

May 02, 2007

A preview of things to come

In case you were one of those optimists thinking that the change in Congressional control meant a coming slew of passed legislation dealing with GHGs, or that January 2009 means welcome to the new era of GHG regulations or even clear sailing for logical no regrets policies that address oil dependence and carbon mitigation, you got a nice preview today of battles to come.

Senate Energy and Natural Resources, now chaired by Senator Bingaman of New Mexico, tried to hold an easy combined markup on four bills that deal with biofuels (S.987), energy efficiency (S.1115) and carbon CCS (S.962 and S.731). There was apparently a "divisive" roadblock in that the coal-state Senators wanted a new mandate on coal-derived transportation fuels (apparently they think we should be adding more CO2 to the atmosphere per VMT rather than less). There was a tentative deal to allay that issue until the bill package went to the floor, where it could be debated by the full Senate, but the deal broke down in a rather nasty way and forced a party-line vote, with some Dems voting against the coal fuels amendment that they otherwise supported. Ah, the era of bipartisan cooperation to solve our nation's most pressing problems.... (CQ story here) (And if you think the politicking on this was constrained to the ENR hearing room, see the players deployed to lobby in this story.)

That this package could not pass easily, with the contentious issues worked out before markup, is certainly a sign that meaningful climate mitigation legislation is going to be bloody and a long time in coming. It also illustrates some of the messy compromises that will come with climate legislation, some of which may actually increase carbon emissions. Sure, CO2 could be captured at the coal-to-synfuel plant, thus preventing the extra CO2 that coal synfuel production emits from hitting the atmosphere and leaving a zero-sum between burning synfuel or gasoline. But with a liquefied coal mandate sitting alongside a biofuels mandate who actually thinks that in the end a requirement for capturing CO2 at the coal synfuels production site is going to happen? With all the people who want to make it and want to use it (i.e. the military), the economic pressures on not driving up the price by requiring carbon CCS are already clear.

Posted on May 2, 2007 02:27 PM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change | Energy Policy

May 01, 2007

taking options off the table....

Interesting exchange between Bill Maher and Sheryl Crow and Laurie David. Or not. I saw it on the NEI Nuclear Notes blog, so you can go there to get the exchange, or see it on youtube. Basically the upshot that NEI reports is yes yes yes we need to cut GHG emissions but no no no way do we need nuclear to do that.

What's interesting to me is not the content but the tone of the conversation. Listen to Crow adamantly cut off Maher from bringing nuclear into the discussion. We want to talk about low-carb energy but we don't want you to talk about nuclear. When Crow stalls out on giving good reasons to disavow nuclear David comes in with a little misdirection, laying fuel economy standards down as a step to be taken to avoid bringing nuclear into the picture.

I'll give Crow/David the benefit of the doubt that they didn't have the time or the prep to really get into the hidden subsidy issues that make nuclear a more expensive option than it appears. But for being so concerned about GHGs, a staunchly anti-nuclear stance -- taking a major GHG reduction option off the table -- is curious.

The non-idealist reality is that all options need to be on the table, and all options -- including nuclear -- need to be honestly accounted for. Hidden subsidies of nuclear, including insurance issues (the U.S. government insures nuclear plants because private companies won't -- Price-Anderson was just renewed through 2025), should be compared to the true cost of solutions like wind, which currently gets a generous PTC to keep it competitive.

Wind and solar are not viable options for baseload power, which is what coal provides. What we should be talking about is replacing the dirty, old baseload coal plants with nuclear plants while also bringing renewables online. And while David is right that [aggressive] efficiency and waste issues would make a big dent in demand, thinking that we're going to solve our energy supply issues through efficiency gains shows a pretty deep misunderstanding of the way incentives and the market works here. You can wait and wait for efficiency gains to significantly reduce GHG emissions and you're going to be waiting for a very long time.

Beyond the sound bites, fairly thorough studies on the competing economics (and other issues) of nuclear, coal and renewables are here and here.

Posted on May 1, 2007 11:45 AM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Energy Policy

April 30, 2007

What's a poor science type to do?

I saw in Point Carbon's daily update today the following headline:

"ENVIRONMENTALISTS CALL FOR IPCC TO PROVIDE STRONG MESSAGE ON CLIMATE CHANGE"

So you already know what this is about. The subline on Point Carbon's article is

Environmental groups today called on the world’s scientists not to water down a long-awaited report on mitigating climate change when it is published this Friday

But I wonder if the advocacy groups pushing this kind of message have really thought through the consequences of such advocacy. The message is unequivocal: make the science report say what we want it to say. Oh, and do it by Friday. Thanks! But what if the IPCC WGIII authors were to respond to Greenpeace et al.'s pressure?

Changing the report at the last minute in either direction as a result of interest group pressure would mean an instant loss of credibility for what should be the single most credible document on climate change. Advocacy groups must realize that they rely on the IPCC's credibility when they talk about climate change. Without a credible third-party document to point to, advocacy groups are left to preach to the choir. With an international consensus document behind them they can stand on its results to push their message to a larger audience.

Although it doesn't exactly happen this way in practice, scientists have cachet because they have the reputation of responding to scientific results, not political pressure. Respond to Greenpeace et al.'s pressure now would mean tanking their credibility (the news would most definitely get out), taking Greenpeace's with it. So why are the let's do something about climate change now! advocates trying to undercut the credibility of their strongest pillar?

My guess is that advocacy groups know this already. They don't expect the IPCC to change anything based on their advocacy, but are simply looking for a quick route to broad media coverage (which hasn't happened yet ... Point Carbon is the only site I found the news on). But I suspect there are smarter ways to garner media attention than by publicly asking a group of ostensibly independent scientists to change a major report to their liking.

Posted on April 30, 2007 01:23 PM View this article | Comments (11)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change

April 10, 2007

The series of tubes pumps internets and horses and oil and gas

A few days ago Roger had seen everything when Jim Hansen came out with some STSish words. This morning I heard an NPR interview with Alaska Senator Ted Stevens made me think the same thing – now I've heard everything.

I've been watching Alaska's R electeds dance around climate change for a while now – my experience starting with a Senate EPW markup of a transportation bill in 2003 where Sen. Murkowski tried to attach an amendment to study the effects of permafrost melting on infrastructure. (Stay with me now – it's in Section 502(c)(14)(D) of this bill and reads in total "develop better methods to reduce the risk of thermal collapse, including collapse from changes in underlying permafrost" in a section about research. Sniffing even the barest hint of global warming legislation, then-Chair Inhofe tried to kill the amendment but it passed with all of the Democrats and (I think) Senator Chaffee's vote.)

What to do in a state built on oil royalties but suffering under noticeable warming? Well, one thing you can do (especially if your name is Ted Stevens) is say that you have a problem while denying that you are in any way part of the problem. And so that's what Senator Stevens did this morning on NPR:

INSKEEP: "...Senator, you've been speaking out more and more about climate change." (minute 1:50)

Stevens then goes on to say that the noticeable effects on Alaska are that the storms are greater, the trees are growing further north and the permafrost is thinner. ("...we see the effects of change...")

And then it gets weird. Stevens starts talking about the results of climate change and that "we want to deal with the results now and let other people argue about the causes." Then, "the causes, if there are causes, are caused in Chicago and New York and not caused by our small population in Alaska."

Ok. Then it gets indecipherable. At minute 2:47 Inskeep asks if that explains why Stevens has signed on to a fuel economy bill. It slides into something about people "trying to shut down the area that is not any part of the cause" (he means North Slope oil). Inskeep presses again and you can hear Stevens get heated at 3:29 and then say (no joke), "oil and gas doesn't have anything to do with global warming! How do you make the connection between producing oil in Alaska and global warming?!? That global warming comes from the millions of automobiles that are burning the oil!" And so on... He tries to make the point that if the US didn't get it from Alaska it would get it from somewhere else (true I suppose, but totally missing the point) and that Alaska isn't part of the problem because there are only a couple of roads in the whole state. Truly bizarre.

Note to Senator Stevens' staffers: you are paid to prevent things like this episode. You just made it worse.

Posted on April 10, 2007 01:58 PM View this article | Comments (12)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Energy Policy

April 06, 2007

Still responding to the last disaster

Eric Berger, the Houston Chron's SciGuy has a Q&A up with David Paulison, the current FEMA chief. There are some interesting things in there:

Q. At some point do you advise someone in the federal government that programs like federal flood insurance should be revisited?
A. We need to re-look at the whole flood insurance program itself. How we provide flood insurance, what we're going to charge for it, what requirement we're going to have to get flood insurance. I don't have all the answers for that right now, I can tell you that.

From what I've seen, the main problem is that NFIP is not allowed to be a true insurance market because political interference from Congress will not allow NFIP to charge actuarially-sound rates. Maybe Mr. Paulison is just being demure in not wanting to poke at Congress in describing the true problem here, but if he's not going to do it who is?

What really catches my eye in the interview, though, is the last question and answer:

Q. Is there a particular disaster scenario that keeps you up at night?
A. What keeps me up at night is a category-4 or 5 coming into this area (New Orleans.) It really does. We could talk about the terrorist issues, with the nuclear bombs, or pandemic flu, but we know we're going to have hurricanes. We've got so many people in travel trailers, so many people in mobile homes, an area that the infrastructure is so fragile. For another category-4 or 5 storm to come in here would be devastating for this entire country. That keeps you awake at night.

There it is. You need no other evidence that FEMA is still fighting the last war. I sincerely hope that FEMA is being a lot more forward thinking than just worrying about another hurricane hit on New Orleans. Just to bring up one example, the next earthquake in LA or SF that rivals the shaking of the 1906 San Francisco quake is projected to do $200 billion in damage, roughly double what Katrina brought to New Orleans.

Posted on April 6, 2007 02:24 PM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Disasters

What to think about (western) water?

Wednesday's NYT had a long article about western water by Randal Archibold and Kirk Johnson. The issue is nothing to new to us out here, but holds important lessons for the rest of the country as well.

First read the article. Then realize the most important lesson not discussed in the article: this is not just a western issue. I and colleagues at Eastern Kentucky University and Columbia University are conducting research which I'll describe here over the next few months on New York City and drought (part of our project is developing the paleoclimatology of Hudson River precip, the other is the policy implications). NYC has declared drought emergency after emergency over the past twenty years in what has been a relatively wet two decades compared to the previous five centuries. This has happened not amid increasing use, but decreasing use. New York City isn't the only example of a perhumid region experiencing drought or water availability crises, as areas of the southeast and Pacific Northwest battle over water.

Second, perhaps inadvertently the article perfectly illustrates the shortsighted response to water supply issues under future climate. Many communities over the past decades have put strong focus on consumption reductions (see that NYC water page again, which shows a steady decline in total consumption and per capita consumption). But when water supply issues come out and politicians start getting asked about the response, one keyword is thrown like a ninja star at the reporter: concrete. More steel, more infrastructure, more technology. In other words, more serial engineering.

If you've flown into Los Angeles or Las Vegas with a window seat you know the real problem. Every backyard in LA has a large turquoise rectangle and the number of golf courses in Las Vegas seems to equal the number of slot machines. But these are just small manifestations of the real problem: mentality. It would be hard to dispute the west's unlimited consumption mentality, starting from the grass roots of lawn watering at single family homes and spreading all the way up to the top:

In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has sounded alarm bells by pushing for a ballot measure in 2008 that would allocate $4.5 billion in bonds for new water storage in the state. The water content in the Sierra Nevada snowpack has reached the lowest level in about two decades, state hydrologists have reported, putting additional pressure on the nation’s most populous state to find and store more water.

That paragraph neatly sums up the engineering response mentality for western water. The keywords are alarm bells, pressure, and store. Alarm bells are appropriate and it's good to see water/climate change risk translated into political concern. Pressure is also appropriate, but only if responded to intelligently. But store should be replaced with leadership, creativity and management. Four point five billion dollars in concrete will create a lot of jobs, but will not solve California's water issues.

The curious left-right fight on these issues always seems to slide back to growth, with clear anti- and pro-growth lines. In this context water supply issues are taken as a proxy on growth; if you're for limiting water consumption you must be anti-development (and thus a dirty Communist?). But beyond the rhetoric are two clear realities: we will continue to grow, sometimes even where there appears to be too little water; we're running toward a brick wall of water supply and continuing to live a no-questions-asked consumptive lifestyle that is at best shortsighted. In the future political leadership must raise and address the consumptive issues first as the primary challenge to tackle, and then see extra concrete only as a consequence of policy failure.

Posted on April 6, 2007 10:26 AM View this article | Comments (7)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Water Policy

March 28, 2007

if you want an example of selling science...

...see this post by Eric Berger. Eric details AccuWeather's chief hurricane forecaster making ... well, you can see for yourself what he's doing. Real solid work.

Posted on March 28, 2007 12:22 PM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Disasters

March 24, 2007

a little slowdown....

Roger is still spring breaking for a while and I'm going to be traveling a lot for the next three weeks, so Prometheus is going to get a bit thin, unless we can corral the occasional posters around here to get some material up. I'll try to post from the road but some of my travel will be computerless.

For you NY-based readers I'll be giving an earthquake mitigation policy talk at Lamont-Doherty on April 9th to the CHRR.

And I'll be in northern Michigan week of April 2 ... anybody up there want to invite me to give a talk so I can call that a business trip? 8-)

Posted on March 24, 2007 02:24 PM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K.

March 23, 2007

Who is SAIC?

I'm guessing that most of you inside or slightly inside or have-been inside the DC circuit know about SAIC and what they do for the government, but even those who know about SAIC probably don't know much. Vanity Fair has a long, detailed and fascinating piece up on SAIC and how they basically are the government. It's well worth the time. My favorite line:

Whether SAIC actually possesses all the expertise that it sells is another story

Right. That is, I suppose, the essence of the contracting scene. You want somebody to pay you to figure out how to do something so you can sell it to the next person at a profit....

Posted on March 23, 2007 02:23 PM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | government

March 22, 2007

Who is talking national cat insurance now?

The Florida Senators, of course. The Palm Beach Post has a story up about a new bill package from Sens. Nelson and Martinez. The bills aren't up yet in the Congressional tracking system so all we have is the PBP article, but there are some tantalizing clues in there:

But Sen. Bill Nelson, a Democrat, and Sen. Mel Martinez, a Republican, said their main legislative vehicle would be a bill Nelson filed in January that would create an advisory commission to recommend a federal catastrophic insurance program.
...

Among the bills introduced Tuesday is a proposal to create a national catastrophic insurance fund financed through insurance premiums.

Such a fund would operate as a national reinsurance program to backstop commercial reinsurance plans and state catastrophic insurance funds in the event of a major disaster.

This is a good start, but I hope they are planning on dealing with the underinsurance and adjustment problems in the other bills. The thinking might be that with federal backstop reinsurance, premiums offered by the direct insurers can be lower and the options greater, thus leading to higher rates of policyholding, but it's not clear. If that's not the thinking that I'm wondering what they are going for here, because I didn't see much problem with the reinsurance world absorbing Katrina's payouts.

The other measures include a Martinez bill, with Nelson co-sponsoring, to give a 25 percent tax credit to property owners for home improvements designed to help a the home withstand the impact of a natural disaster.

Nice to see somebody thinking about how to get individual homeowners to voluntarily undertake resilience upgrades. A point I've been making about the quake policy outlook is that it's focused far too heavily on basic and applied research and not on implementation strategies. And by implementation, I'm talking about issues just like this – how to get homeowners, business owners and municipalities to build resilience into their infrastructure based on the hazards knowledge we've already developed.

Martinez also offered a bill to streamline insurance regulation and a plan to create a 10-year, $4.3 billion national hurricane research initiative through the National Science Foundation.

That sounds good, but maybe not so good in the context of the $7B Pres. Bush asked for avian flu and the $8B the Senate authorized for it in 2005? (It was in the Senate-passed H.R. 3010 in the 109th session but the $8B didn't survive conference with the House.) Avian flu? Hurricanes? Hmmm.... You're going to argue that we can do both. I'm arguing that the message sent is that avian flu is a bigger direct and potential threat than hurricanes. Is it?

Posted on March 22, 2007 01:48 PM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Disasters

March 21, 2007

Al Gore's appearance before Senate EPW

Today's climate change hearing at Senate EPW with Al Gore as sole witness just finished. A few thoughts.

The hearing had a format slightly altered from the usual, with Chair Boxer and Ranking Member Inhofe giving opening statements, Mr. Gore getting 30 minutes to talk, Inhofe getting 15 minutes to question him, then the rest of the Senators getting their chances.

Sen. Inhofe tried hard to clown the hearing into irrelevance but Boxer struggled successfully to keep him in line and Gore did a good job of battling back. By the end of the hearing it was pretty clear that Inhofe has been pushed out to the fringes. He already was, of course, but previously he has had caucus members either behind him or willing to read directly from his sheaf of talking points. This time when the dust settled he looked startlingly alone.

During his talk Mr. Gore pushed a bunch of ideas, some of which were new and worth highlighting.

• The biggest bombshell was his second proposal: eliminate employment/payroll taxes and replace the revenue with a new carbon/pollution tax. This is the first time I've heard Mr. Gore specifically endorse a carbon tax, which automatically gives it new life in the policy debate. But more startling is the proposed revenue offset by eliminating payroll taxes.

• Mr. Gore's fourth proposal was to place an immediate moratorium on any new coal plant that is not outfitted with carbon capture and storage (sequestration) technology (CCS). This point was refreshed again and again throughout the hearing, especially as coal-state Senators asked their questions. This proposal is perhaps most interesting because it is not currently feasible and doesn't look like it'll be able to be implemented any time soon, so essentially Mr. Gore is saying, "stop building coal plants right now."

• The sixth proposal was to create an "electronet," meaning a distributed power system where small scale (to the level of individual homes) generators could put their power on the grid. This is an idea that has been around for a while and is the current buzz in clean energy policy, pushed pretty strongly by Amory Lovins and RMI. The thought is that centralized power in the form of massive coal and nuke plants is less efficient than distributed energy that can be used directly by the producer with excess sold back to the grid.

• The eighth proposal was to create a new federal mortgage lender that specifically deals in carbon neutral energy upgrades to homes (and call it "Connie Mae" following Fannie Mae). It was hard for me to grasp where he was going with this, but as far as I could tell it would be a lending instrument to borrow money for efficiency upgrades against the saving in energy costs produced by the upgrades. The loan would become a market-tradable financial instrument like home loans.

• Finally, Mr. Gore pressed for corporations to be required to disclose their carbon emissions to shareholders. He didn't say it, but I assume he meant that it would go on corporate SEC filings. This is something that has already been going around in the business world a bit, with companies starting to wonder if they need to disclose.

On the science: I was disappointed to see Mr. Gore stretching the science to his audience of Senators, but I'm willing to concede to Tom Yulsman (made in the 3rd comment to this post) that: "Should Gore be faulted for being an advocate? By definition, that's what politicians do. He is making a strong case for action, so of course he is going to emphasize some of the worst-case scenarios while downplaying less dire possibilities." Still, in his hearing testimony Mr. Gore highlighted recent sightings of manatees in unusual places, fires in Oklahoma and fires "raging out of control" all over the west as prime examples of global warming. I'm sticking to my point: Mr. Gore is representing the science now in a far more prominent way than any scientist, his words and presentations are based on many, many meetings with top climate scientists, and thus in a very real way, Mr. Gore is representing scientists. This time it wasn't even future projections but current events. No scientist would call the sighting of one manatee far up the Atlantic coast a clear indication of global warming. (These things happen –my graduate school advisor wrote a note in Nature describing why it wasn't strange to find coelacanths in the Sulawesi Sea.) The use of those examples to say "this is global warming, right here, right now!!" is perhaps not representing the science well.

Finally, some quick thoughts on Mr. Gore's interactions with the individual Senators on the panel. As the hearing went on I started to focus more on the R's than the D's and I finally realized why: the D's have been on board for a while, but up to this point the R's have been stalling. They aren't any longer, and almost to a person the R's made loud and positive noises about accepting the science and wanting to do something about it. So I started wanting to hear the next R, to hear how he (no female R's on EPW right now) was positioning himself on climate change, knowing that the R's are playing catch up.

Inhofe vs. Gore: Mr. Inhofe tried to trap Mr. Gore into a pledge to not use more energy than the average American household and to not use offsets/credits to buy off his increased energy use. This was a direct hit on the either well- or under-publicized (depending on your politics) blog post from the TN Center for Policy Research that Mr. Gore's house in TN uses more than twice the energy in one month than the average American family uses in one year. It seemed tough to wiggle out of but Mr. Gore responded by saying he buys wind power. Should have ended the conversation right there, but Inhofe had to keep clowning about it, of course. Still, I think Gore made his point.

Sen. Isakson (R-GA) was the first of many to push nuclear. Roger discussed Gore and nuclear previously here and Gore hasn't shifted much. He held throughout the hearing that nuclear would be part of the energy solution but only a small part. When pushed by the many pro-nuclear Senators he said the biggest reason for his bearish attitude was the cost. But I have to say: the cost-per-BTU of nuclear vs. the cost-per-BTU of coal with full CCS installed? I'm not sure CCS-coal is going to win that one.

Sen. Lieberman (I-CT) made a point I've been pushing for a while: that we are already passed the political tipping point for movement on climate change. I think if you consider the rhetoric and tone of the debate both among the elected and in the press, we are passed a tipping point on moving on climate change. Lieberman made the point that we better get past that political tipping point before we hit the climatological tipping point, which I suppose is a reference to a sudden Atlantic meridional overturning shutdown (few believe this is an immediate threat). Gore, however, disagreed that we've reached a political tipping point. But if we are not yet passed a tipping point, that implies that we could still slide back down, forget about all this and do nothing on climate change. I don't think that's going to happen; I think action is inevitable.

Sen. Craig (R-ID) pushed nuclear again (Idaho has a big national nuke lab) and accused the Clinton/Gore administration of killing some important nuclear funding. I find that pretty comical considering that Congress appropriates and Senator Craig has a very plush position on the approps committee. Craig also mentioned a new Dorgan/Craig bill on CAFE standards, but when I looked on Thomas I didn't see anything yet.

Sen. Baucus (D-MT) is an important voice in this debate because he is Chair of the Finance Committee. Remember Gore's proposal to kill payroll taxes and replace them with pollution (carbon) taxes? Anything like that would start and end with Baucus. And I have to say, Gore reiterated instituting a carbon tax and Baucus actually looked interested and engaged in thinking about it. Baucus also proclaimed his support for a cap-and-trade system and was adamant that it be economy-wide (i.e. not sector-based) without exemptions. Gore ended the interaction by saying, "put a price on carbon – tax is the best way, cap-and-trade will also do it."

Sen. Clinton (D-NY) is clearly engaged in the meat of these issues, regardless of her D'08 status. She asked pointed questions about whether we would need both a carbon tax and a cap-and-trade and when Gore said we should have both, she wanted to know how and why it would work to have both. (Kudos to her, I was wondering the same thing.) She also wanted more detail on the Connie Mae mortgage scheme and got into a quick back-and-forth with Gore on the details. Clinton's questions on the detail reminded me of her portrait in Joshua Green's Atlantic Monthly article.

Sen. Thomas (R-WY) – Here's where I saw the best bit of psychology of the afternoon. You could just tell from his first question/comment and demeanor that Thomas, like almost everybody else, was on board with trying to do something about climate. That he's from a coal state is only part of the equation; every time coal came up Gore went straight to the CCS card. But then Thomas, suddenly reading from his crib sheet, had to go to the standard dumb question about if weather prediction is bad so why can we rely on climate models? followed on by another ill-prepared skeptic standard. His staff should be fired.

Sen. Carper (D-DE) (one of my favorite policy wonk Senators) got into an exchange with Gore about the allocation of carbon pollution permits and input vs. output based caps. Gore had a chance to reiterate that if a cap-trade scheme comes along the permits should be auctioned, not distributed. Fine bit of inside policy there.

I've skipped a few of the more mundane exchanges. The hearing ended back with Sen. Boxer remarking that, "Senator Inhofe was waiting for this chance to have this conversation." And I'm sure he was. And he got rooked.

Posted on March 21, 2007 05:02 PM View this article | Comments (29) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change

The state push to the federal push

It seems pretty likely that we won't see anything signed on carbon emission restrictions (tax or cap-and-trade) at the federal level before January 2009, so once again we have the somewhat familiar situation of states leading the federal government on sticky issues.

You probably know about RGGI, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative formed by the New England and upper Mid-Atlantic states that sets a cap-and-trade system to reduce CO2 from power plants. You might have heard that the Guvernator recently corralled four other western state governors (OR, WA, AZ and NM) to join in to form their own cap-and-trade program, this one targeting not just electricity generators, but economy-wide emissions. And as the dominoes keep falling so come the other high population states like Illinois (thanks Jim A), who wants to join the CCX.

The environmental policy buzz is how this regionalism will, as usual, force federal action as businesses put hard pressure down on their duly electeds to create one system that they have to comply with instead of a patchwork of systems. The pressure seems to be coming hard already. In January, Alcoa and nine other companies formed the US Climate Action Partnership and yesterday

A dozen U.S. companies and dozens of institutional investors managing $4 trillion in assets have called on Washington to enact strong federal legislation to curb the pollution causing global climate change. The group outlined the business and economic rationale for climate action as they called for a national policy that reduces greenhouse gas emissions consistent with targets scientists say are needed to avoid the impacts of global warming.

Despite the pressure I'll reiterate the first sentence of this post: having anything signed on carbon emissions before January 2009 is unlikely at best, a pipedream at worst. But I think this delay creates an interesting scenario: what if a federal cap-and-trade scheme becomes irrelevant by the time it can pass?

With the announcement of the western five-state partnership, Gov. Schwarzenegger all but dared the RGGI states to expand their program and join with the western states. The western five plus the RGGI states represents 39% of the U.S. population and the addition of Illinois brings it to 43%. It's not hard to see other states falling in turn as the utilities and businesses in their states see the benefits to being part of the game and the drawbacks to being left out of it. Here we run into a couple of snags, though. First, the western and RGGI states, for the most part, represent a Democrat-heavy mix and today we saw fresh evidence of an unfortunate and widening D-R split within the voting public on attitudes about considering climate change a threat. Second, the southeastern (R-dominated) and Ohio Valley states (D-R mixed) that would be the next logical joinees in a regional-become-de facto national cap-and-trade system are coal-dominated, thus CO2-to-BTUs heavy.

Most curious to me is to track not only where the western state and RGGI partnerships take us on climate regulation, but what this regionalism does to the power structure in the U.S. as a whole. Robert Salladay on an LA Times blog covers the thoughts of Gar Alperovitz:

"The bold proposals that Mr. Schwarzenegger is now making for everything from universal health care to global warming point to the kind of decentralization of power which, once started, could easily shake up America’s fundamental political structure."
The United States, he says, is simply too big for meaningful democracy. Now, Alperovitz says, a new wave of regional devolution could also build on the more than 200 compacts that now allow groups of states to cooperate on environmental, economic, transportation and other problems. He adds:

"Governor Schwarzenegger may not have thought through the implications of continuing to assert forcefully his 'nation-state' ambitions. But he appears to have an expansive sense of the possibilities: this is the governor, after all, who brought Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain to the Port of Long Beach last year to sign an accord between California and Britain on global warming."

I'm not one for bold proclamations of radical changes or conspiracy theories or doomsday scenarios, but this is the kind of change that can happen subtly and slowly. And it would be fascinating to watch what should be a federal, nationwide system on carbon emissions instead be emplaced through decentralized but cooperative regional partnerships that work just as well or better than a federally-run system. If the feds wait too long on passing a nationwide system and the states have their own mechanisms in place covering more than 50% of the U.S. population by the time the feds get around to it, is that what will happen?

[UPDATE: as if on cue, I just got this news from Point Carbon: "The Climate Registry, an effort by members of existing US greenhouse gas registries in various regions, sent a letter to the governors of all 50 US states Friday requesting participation in the initiative to build a unified national registry for the entire US."]

Posted on March 21, 2007 10:17 AM View this article | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change | Energy Policy

March 15, 2007

Rep. McNerney in Wired

Here's a brief interview in the March issue of Wired with Rep. Jerry McNerney, the wind engineer who pulled off a huge upset over Dick "I hate endangered animals" Pombo in California's 11th District. (My sister lives in that district and a good friend knows somebody on McNerney's staff, so we're tight.)

McNerney's ascension to a nice little office in Cannon is noteworthy for us science policy and politics types because he becomes only the third Hill resident with a science Ph.D. (well, his is in math, but close enough), along with Rep. Holt (D-NJ) and Rep. Ehlers (R-MI).

The interview is short, but the best part is this:

What's the biggest difference between science and politics? Science is all about truth. You gather your evidence and logically prove your claims. Congress is all about people, relationships, and rules. There are a lot of rules.

[cough cough ahem] That's what a lot of pure scientists want to think, anyway. The STS and SSS people find that ... well ... not really the way science works.

More to the pure politics:

You don’t have any political experience. Isn't that a liability? It's an asset. People are looking to me for help on certain issues, and I'm getting a lot of respect for what I bring to the table. It would be even better to bring in scientists when they're 29 years old — they’d know the science but would have time to learn all the rules.

I don't disagree with that, but I've always found it interesting that darkhorse, politically inexperienced candidates (Ross Perot?) always run on how it's good to have no experience. Then once they've been there of course they have to run on how it is good that they do have political experience. Good for the constituents, good for the process, the nation, etc... The incumbent will always run on how you need an incumbent in Washington who knows how the system works and how to get things done so (s)he can bring home the bacon.

Finally,

So we should be combing university labs for political prospects? Sure. But you’d have to teach them to be nice to people. That’s not part of the job description in science.

(or in blogging.....?) I went from a Ph.D. program in the physical sciences straight into the DC world and I was fascinated by how both universes are extremely adversarial, but in very different ways. You really don't have to be nice in science, but the stakes of getting an equation slightly wrong or interpreting a figure incorrectly aren't really that high. The stakes in writing a tax bill, or negotiating an amendment on a public works bill that will create 1000 jobs in one state and take them away in another, or sending the military overseas are something else, but these things must be negotiated calmly. I often think about that when I'm sitting in an academic talk that gets heated between the presenter and a questioner.

Posted on March 15, 2007 10:30 AM View this article | Comments (39)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Science + Politics

March 14, 2007

Since nobody around here does the GMO thing....

An article came across one of my inboxes and grabbed my attention: apparently a genetically modified maize strain developed by Monsanto has shown some concerning tendencies to cause liver and kidney toxicity in rats fed the GM'd corn. (Can't get the study online yet but it was published in Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology.)

I guess this may be of concern because the maize has been approved for use and is being grown in seven countries and the EU? From what I can gather from the limited info available, to this point Monsanto has done all the safety studies on the strain, and despite some indications of problems (see here...warning, hard advocate site citing other hard advocate group, but you take what you can get) has declared its own product safe. The researchers of the new study say

"Our counter-evaluation show that there are signs of toxicity and that nobody can say scientifically and seriously that consumption of the transgenic maize MON863 is safe and good for health," lead author of the study, Professor Gilles Eric Séralini told France's TF1 television station.

You know what's coming next, right? That's right, Data Wars XXVI:

Monsanto France has rejected the concerns. Yann Fichet, Monsanto France's director of external relations told TF1: "[MON863] has already been examined by competent authorities and scientific experts in more than 10 countries worldwide, including the European Union and France, and all the experts concluded unanimously that the maize in question is as safe as traditional maize."

The problem for Monsanto is that the new study is published in a peer-reviewed journal, which gives it loads of legitimacy no matter what the author's funding was (could be a national lab, could be Greenpeace, but I can't read French so I don't know). Further compounding their problem is the previous notice of a Monsanto study on this same strain, noting the liver and kidney issues (can you spell Vioxx?). However, I also get the feeling from a bit of googling on MON863 that the study author basically works for Greenpeace, so who knows where this is going to lead. Anybody who tracks the GMO policy game care to comment?

Posted on March 14, 2007 07:44 PM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Biotechnology

The future of coal

Interesting stuff just released by a group at MIT on the outlook for coal in the US. Their main page is here and the executive summary is here.

They start with two realistic premises and take it from there:

Our first premise is that the risks of global warming are real and that the United States and other governments should and will take action to restrict the emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Our second and equally important premise is that coal will continue to play a large and indispensable role in a greenhouse gas constrained world.

They also give a rather sobering factoid right off the bat:

If 60% of the CO2 produced from U.S. coal-based power generation were to be captured and compressed to a liquid for geologic sequestration, its volume would about equal the total U.S. oil consumption of 20 million barrels per day.

Perhaps because it is about as interdisciplinary as can be, with participants from political science to chemical engineering to economics, the report is refreshingly policy-prescriptive, urging specific government actions in dozens of ways, and even goes so far as

A more aggressive U.S. policy appears to be in line with public attitudes. Americans now rank global warming as the number one environmental problem facing the country, and seventy percent of the American public think that the U.S. government needs to do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Willingness to pay to solve this problem has grown 50 percent over the past three years.

and is as politics/policy/current events aware as noting that

There is the possibility of a perverse incentive for increased early investment in coalfired power plants without capture, whether SCPC or IGCC, in the expectation that the emissions from these plants would potentially be “grandfathered” by the grant of free CO2 allowances as part of future carbon emissions regulations and that (in unregulated markets) they would also benefi t from the increase in electricity prices that will accompany a carbon control regime. Congress should act to close this “grandfathering” loophole before it becomes a problem.

We should note that the grandfathering loophole isn't a problem right now because it doesn't exist. It will only exist once cap-and-trade or carbon tax legislation is passed and only if a grandfather clause it written in. But their point is made: some coal plant builders think there is a good chance they will be grandfathered, although Senators Boxer and Bingaman have been telling them to fuhhggetaboutit. But it's a minor point and the report is good reading.

Posted on March 14, 2007 03:14 PM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Energy Policy

March 13, 2007

Point made: it's the icon not the issue

William Broad has an article out today in the NYT on Al Gore as climate change icon that quotes Roger and myself. I think Roger's quote basically sums up the problem:

Very quickly, these discussions turn from the issue to the person, and become a referendum on Mr. Gore.

I am quoted thusly:

Kevin Vranes, a climatologist at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, said he sensed a growing backlash against exaggeration. While praising Mr. Gore for “getting the message out,” Dr. Vranes questioned whether his presentations were “overselling our certainty about knowing the future.”

The backlash thing, a.k.a. the ominous tension, comes from this post. The rest is a better way to sum up what I was trying to get across in that AGU post. In talking about overselling the science I was talking about overselling the future, not the past or present. I have no problem with the state of consensus on past and present climate and our imprint on it. I do have a problem with giving the non-technician public the impression that climate models give us some crystal ball into the future that warns with some degree of certainty about coming catastrophes. Risk, yes. Certainty, no. My message remains the same as it has been since my days in DC: deal with the risk but realize that it means acting on incomplete and imperfect information.

For the rest of the article Mr. Broad bounces back and forth between the avowed skeptic crowd and what I'd call the headlights of the climsci field, finding either praise for Gore or disdain based on how the questioned views the science.

Tits for tats and tête-à-têtes aside, my biggest problem lies here:

Mr. Gore depicted a future in which temperatures soar, ice sheets melt, seas rise, hurricanes batter the coasts and people die en masse. “Unless we act boldly,” he wrote, “our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes.”

Clearly this is not science, this is agenda. But it is agenda sold on science, and if/when it doesn't come true, you have diminished the credibility of those producing the science. It's a big gamble to take. I think perhaps what is neatly illustrated by Mr. Broad in this article is that many big-name climate scientists are willing to take this risk by hitching their wagons to a non-scientist who is doing the selling for them.

It's a choice for individual scientists to make and I'm not faulting them or Al Gore for running down this path. In fact, I'd bolster my quote in the article praising Gore for getting the message out. I think Gore plays a very important and valuable role in public knowledge on climate change risk. (And FWIW, I'm betting with Roger that Gore will jump into the race, very late, will get all the money that the Clintons and Obama are raising now without having to stress himself to burn-out stage too early, and will stomp Rudy to get the WH. And yea Steve B, by saying this I'm angling for a position in the Gore White House.) But for the scientists they need to realize that Mr. Gore has a great cover if/when the dire predictions don't materialize: "Hey, I'm not a scientist, I'm just a concerned citizen politician." The scientists hitching their wagons to the dire messages have no such cover (except for tenure?).

[UPDATE: Read Matt Nisbet's very good analysis of the most important lessons of Broad's article. Matt's analysis is an interesting contrast to the other -- let's say more predictable -- reactions on Grist and RC.]

Posted on March 13, 2007 12:18 AM View this article | Comments (22)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change

March 12, 2007

Montana and water and the strange case of science and politics

You probably don't know who Eloise Kendy is, but you should. She's a hydro consultant up in Helena, Montana, now with the Nature Conservancy, who writes nifty little papers exploring the collision of hydrologic realities with political and policy dream worlds (if you can get it, see pages 14-20 of Issue #19 of The Water Report). I covered one of her papers last summer in this post.

For a while Eloise has been writing about how the state of Montana doesn't think that groundwater and surface water are connected. Well, everybody knows that the two are usually so connected that they are inseparable, but the state of water policy in Montana deems them connected only if a groundwater withdrawal directly removes water from a stream. Your withdrawal creates a cone of depression that allows for less recharge of groundwater into surface water, but as long as the cone of depression doesn't intersect with the stream and thus directly draw from the stream you aren't considered to be depleting the surface water. (If you want the science on this, try here, especially this circular.)

This legal alternate reality arose when the state legislature defined groundwater in 1993 as water that "is not immediately or directly connected to surface water." Immediate or directly connected is not a hydrologic term, which left it open to interpretation by the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation (DNRC). According to Kendy et al. in the Water Report paper I linked above:

As documented by a series of departmental memos, DNRC determined that groundwater is “immediately or directly” connected to surface water only if groundwater pumping pulls surface water into the aquifer, or “induces surface water infiltration.” According to this nterpretation, even if a well captures groundwater that would otherwise discharge into a stream, such groundwater is not “immediately or directly” connected to surface water, and the permit application may be processed as a groundwater exception to the basin-closure.

In other words, when you pump groundwater you aren't depleting surface water, even when your groundwater pumping is in reality indirectly drawing down streamflows. What this means is that Johnny-come-latelies who put in new groundwater wells can seriously impact people who hold senior rights on surface water without being subject to the time honored legal tradition of first-in-time, first-in-right. This is a serious problem in watersheds that are not fully appropriated, but is legally catastrophic in watersheds (like most important Montana rivers) that are.

The problem finally worked itself up to the Montana Supreme Court last
year and they made the shocking decision that, hey, surface water and groundwater really are connected. Go figure. The losers of that decision were actually ranchers with plans to install new wells, but the ruling has deep implications for housing developers, especially on the Gallatin River out of Bozeman.

Arising from the court decision, last month two bills were discussed in the MT state legislature to deal with the connectivity issue, covered amply in this article. One bill, promoted by Trout Unlimited and the DNRC

would require that anyone in a closed basin seeking a groundwater permit do a hydrologic study first, a step not currently necessary. If the study shows a new well would take water from senior surface-water rights holders, then the applicant must explain how that water would be replaced – a process known as augmentation.

The other bill, promoted by the Stockgrowers and Farm Bureau

would require that new groundwater users replace the water they use only when it has an immediate and harmful impact on senior water rights.

which gets us squarely back to the problem created by DNRC's weird mid-1990's interpretation of connectivity, and essentially tries to write into law the unreality that if groundwater withdrawals don't lead immediately to surface water impacts, then there must be no impact at all.

Of course, hearing both bills simultaneously was a bit problematic:

The committee heard testimony for both bills simultaneously, as opponents for one were generally in favor of the other. But that procedure made for hours of confusion with landowners, scientists and attorneys sometimes forgetting to make clear which bill they favored, or if they opposed both.

And so it's no wonder that in the depth of that kind of confusion these disputes can flare up:

The Stockgrowers and Farm Bureau bill, Frantz said, “maintains the legal fiction that groundwater withdrawals only affect surface water if water is induced directly from the stream.”
“I’m not really sure what we accomplish by maintaining that legal fiction,” she added.

But one of the next speakers, David Schmidt, a scientist with the consulting firm Water Rights Solutions Inc., said the Stockgrowers and Farm Bureau bill is more inline with accepted science.

All parties are arguing on the science, projecting that the science better supports one bill or the other. But curiously, which bill you "believe in" seems to square pretty well with whether you hold senior water rights or junior rights, which is a pretty damn good indication where the science lies.

Many landowners and farmers from the Gallatin Valley spoke in support of the DNRC bill.

Meanwhile upstart stakeholders (developers, for instance) aren't so happy with the Trout Unlimited/DNRC bill.

The interesting question here is whether there is an excess of objectivity problem or not. The quote by David Schmidt ("more inline with accepted science") seems to indicate that there is, even if Schmidt is far off-base. For even if Schmidt is flat-out wrong, he has access to the forum and thus access to talk about the science, which has suddenly become his science in this context. Fun stuff.

Posted on March 12, 2007 05:04 PM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Water Policy

March 06, 2007

The assessors assessing the assessments

Fresh out of the National Academies, commissioned by the CCSP, is a fabulous new climate-related assessment: Analysis of Global Change Assessments: Lessons Learned. The report

identifies for the U.S. Climate Change Science Program the essential elements of effective global change assessments, including strategic framing, engagement of stakeholders, credible treatment of uncertainties, and a transparent interface between policymakers and scientists. The report reviews lessons learned from past assessments, which are intended to inform policymakers about the scientific underpinnings of critical environmental issues such as climate change, loss of biodiversity, and ozone depletion.

Which would be great, but. But for two things we can identify right off the bat:

1- The most identifiable end user of a climate change assessment is the federal-level (and perhaps state-level) policy maker. You'd think that if you want to assess assessments and make sweeping recommendations on how in the future they can best be presented and utilized, you'd involve the very end users that the assessments target. But the participant list is a roster dominated by the very people who produce the information, not the people who consume it. The report did hear from a few end users in a couple of sessions, but the list (pg. ix-x of the full report) is very thin. So how are the producers to know what the consumers really need if the consumers were not intimately involved in the project? Which leads us to ...

2- Many of the people assessing the assessments are themselves involved in the original assessments. Further, the reviewers of the report (pg, ix) are all themselves information producers (save one). This is fine, but it leads me to wonder about the ultimate usefulness of the report. The point of this exercise should be to ensure that the information produced in assessments is useful to the end users. (That is mentioned as a goal, but as one goal in a list.) I'm not sure that scientists, essentially auditing themselves, are the best judge of whether their information is maximally useful to non-technical decision makers.

Nevertheless, it is important that we assess how we are giving technical information to decision makers. My argument is that we need to very closely involve decision makers themselves in that process. From what I can tell in the report's preface and other front matter, this was mostly a scientist-driven process.

Posted on March 6, 2007 12:43 PM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change

March 01, 2007

Finally something for us to really fight about!

Or just virtually arm wrestle over? Anyway, the American Meteorological Society has just created a new climate policy blog. Judging from the witness list (Oppenheimer, MacCracken, Kammen, and others), it shouldn't be too long of a rise into the Technorati charts. It will be fun to see what this excellent list of cats, herded together by Paul Higgins, has to say over the next few months and years. (Good work, Paul.)

Of course, y'all can already see some places where we're going to differ. From climatepolicy's about page:

Policy choices will likely serve the interests of society most effectively if they are grounded in the best available knowledge and understanding. Therefore, we will promote objective understanding of climate change related issues rather than specific policy options.

For us around here, that statement is particularly timely. Lisa Dilling was talking about that very issue this past week. Lisa, is this what you meant by the "loading dock" approach?

Posted on March 1, 2007 07:18 PM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change

February 23, 2007

ASLA wrap-up on House IPCC hearings

Kate Von Holle in AGU's Public Policy shop provides a wrap-up of the Feb 8th IPCC hearings before House Science, starring Susan Solomon, Kevin Trenberth, Richard Alley, and Gerald Meehl. Some interesting tidbits in there.... (Bolds are mine.)

**************************************************** ASLA 07-03: House Committee Considers IPCC Climate Change Report ****************************************************
On 8 February, co-Chair Susan Solomon and three of the authors of the Working Group 1 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report testified before the House Science and Technology Committee. The hearing followed the release on 2 February of the Summary for Policy Makers of the first volume of the report, titled "Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis" (http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf).

Susan Solomon, an atmospheric chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), was the first to testify. She summarized the major findings, namely that atmospheric CO2 levels are currently at unprecedented levels, and there is a 90% chance global warming is caused by human activity. In addition, the rate of increase in CO2 levels in the last 10 years has been the greatest ever seen. When questioned after her testimony Rep. Rohrabacher (R-CA) accused Solomon of not providing an "honest" response when he asked "What percentage of the CO2 in the atmosphere is generated by human activity?" Solomon did not provide a percentage but answered the question by stating that the 100 ppm increase in CO2 levels in post industrial times is predominantly caused by human activity.

We already knew how politicized climate change has become, but now not giving specific [is:is not] ratios is "dishonest" in the political sphere? You can read this more generously or less generously to Rep. Rohrabacher: either he just doesn't understand that science can't always give clear-cut, black-and-white answers, or he doesn't care.

Kevin Trenberth, Richard Alley, and Gerald Meehl also testified. Their testimony included information about how the increase in CO2 levels will affect the planet in the future through an increase in heavy rain events, droughts, heat waves, floods, and a rise in sea levels. All witnesses stressed that the severity of these events will depend greatly on how aggressively policymakers begin to address mitigation of CO2 emissions. When asked their opinions regarding policy, economics or CO2 mitigation issues, they repeatedly stated that they were physical scientists, not policymakers, and referred to the reports of IPCC Working Groups II (Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability) and III (Mitigation), due for release later this year.

Ok, I'll bite. Was this good politics? Not straying into what will become a very political fight? (How to deal with climate change will become far more political than the science itself; good for them if they understand this and want to stay clear.) Or IPCC politics? Not wanting to step on the toes of the other WG conveners?

The Republican and Democratic reaction varied dramatically. Many Republicans questioned the findings. Rep. Rohrabacher raised several objections including the idea that humans have not been the biggest contributors to CO2 in the atmosphere. He maintained that this warming trend was a part of a natural cycle that included a mini ice-age' back in the 1700's. He also stated that he knew hundreds' of scientists that reject the idea of global warming being caused by humans. [see comment #32 on this post] The Democrats responded by supporting the findings of the Report, and their inquiries were directed towards increasing their understanding of the implications of the Report, as well as possible effects on their constituents. Several representatives, both Republican and Democrat, participated in a trip to Antarctica, and many of them mentioned the experience as being quite enlightening on the subject of global warming and climate change.

Trust me, as soon as Congress gets something passed on carbon, this left science/right science on climate change science will subside in favor of fighting over the regulations.

The beginning of the hearing was marked by the unusual appearance of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Pelosi read a statement strongly in favor of the IPCC report and its findings. She also stated that it was her intention to form a separate committee which would focus on climate change and how to relay information about it to the public. Before Pelosi addressed the committee, Rep. Sensenbrenner (R-CA) objected to allowing the Speaker be dismissed after giving her testimony. He demanded that Pelosi submit to the Committee's mandatory 5-minute-questioning rule. Due to the objection by Sensenbrenner, the Committee required Pelosi to stay to answer questions after her testimony rather than allowing her to be dismissed as originally planned.

To read more about the release, see the news article in 13 February Eos: http://www.agu.org/journals/eo/eo0707/2007EO070003.pdf#anchor.

This last passage may not seem like much. What it tells me is that the carbon regulation fight is going to be as politically nasty as you can imagine, down to pulling petty parliamentary tricks like Sensenbrenner's. Not surprising, but a preview of fights to come.

Posted on February 23, 2007 09:54 AM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change

left science/right science on....?

Getting back to an old friend in the scientized-politicized world, stem cells/embryo research. In a story on stem cells and embryonic research in NPR's All Things Considered last night, UC San Francisco researcher Susan Fisher said, "Because the federal government has prohibited academic institutions from working on embryos, we really know almost nothing about human embryos in the beginning stages."

The difference between a federal government prohibition on a certain type of academic research (which very obviously did not happen) and a removal of federal funding from a certain type of research on moral grounds (which did) is not subtle or nuanced, it's quite clear, and it stretches my credulity to believe that Dr. Fisher doesn't know the difference.

Posted on February 23, 2007 09:22 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Biotechnology

February 21, 2007

Earthquake hazards policy talk tomorrow

Anybody ready for some non-climate stuff?

For those of you around here I'm giving a talk on my earthquake mitigation policy work tomorrow here at the Center (noon). I'll be covering the earthquake damages data and what it says about mitigation success (out of a paper that is still – ahem – "under review" after – ahem – eight months – at a certain natural hazards journal). I'll also be covering details of the NEHRP program, why Congress has been schizophrenic on the issue, when we can expect the next Big One and how much it's going to cost, what our damages look like compared to the rest of the world, and the winning PowerBall numbers for this Saturday's draw. Whew!

After the talk I'll post my PPT and an accompanying white paper (because it's hard to get the full message from a PPT, isn't it?).

For what it's worth, yes, I am dabbling pretty hard here. In addition to the quake stuff I've got a pre-print/submission coming soon on abandoned mine policy and a talk on that in the late spring, and an upcoming set of papers on the NYC water supply and policy implications (details to be blogged about over the next couple of months), and the background climate policy stuff that's always there.

Posted on February 21, 2007 09:06 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Disasters

February 05, 2007

Sterman and Sweeney paper on public attitudes and GHG mitigation

Back in August, when you are were on summer vacation, we highlighted a John Sterman and Linda Booth Sweeney preprint titled "Understanding public complacency about climate change: adults’ mental models of climate change violate conservation of matter." Their paper is now out in Climatic Change and is well worth the repeat notice here.

Between last August's post and today we've seen the November midterms sweep in a Congress seemingly committed to addressing climate change, six months more of consistent media coverage of the issue, ten industry titans push the federal government for limits on CO2, and the release of the IPCC Summary for Policymakers. Does that translate into the American public demanding action on climate change? Apparently not yet.

To help understand why, here's the Sterman/Sweeney abstract:

Public attitudes about climate change reveal a contradiction. Surveys show most Americans believe climate change poses serious risks but also that reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions sufficient to stabilize atmospheric GHG concentrations can be deferred until there is greater evidence that climate change is harmful. US policymakers likewise argue it is prudent to wait and see whether climate change will cause substantial economic harm before undertaking policies to reduce emissions. Such wait-and-see policies erroneously presume climate change can be reversed quickly should harm become evident, underestimating substantial delays in the climate’s response to anthropogenic forcing. We report experiments with highly educated adults – graduate students at MIT – showing widespread misunderstanding of the fundamental stock and flow relationships, including mass balance principles, that lead to long response delays. GHG emissions are now about twice the rate of GHG removal from the atmosphere. GHG concentrations will therefore continue to rise even if emissions fall, stabilizing only when emissions equal removal. In contrast, most subjects believe atmospheric GHG concentrations can be stabilized while emissions into the atmosphere continuously exceed the removal of GHGs from it. These beliefs – analogous to arguing a bathtub filled faster than it drains will never overflow – support wait-and-see policies but violate conservation of matter. Low public support for mitigation policies may arise from misconceptions of climate dynamics rather than high discount rates or uncertainty about the impact of climate change. Implications for education and communication between scientists and nonscientists (the public and policymakers) are discussed.

Posted on February 5, 2007 11:02 AM View this article | Comments (6)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change

January 25, 2007

SOTU '07: An A or a D+ ?

David Friedman of the Union of Concerned Scientists appeared in the NY Post yesterday, giving Prez. Bush an A on energy during the SOTU Tuesday night. I only knew that because the same reporter got a hold of me, but didn't print my response. I gave him a D+. Then again, I was looking at the combined energy/climate change picture, not just energy; perhaps Mr. Friedman was only referring to energy.

On energy and climate change it was hard to find an A in that performance, unless you take the pre-speech talking points released by the White House as saying something new. In the speech itself Bush barely mentioned energy and gave only the briefest gloss to climate.

The only thing new from past SOTU's was his 20/10 initiative: 20% less gasoline use in 10 years. Problem is, that is 20% less than the projected increase in ten years, not a 20% decrease from 2006 consumption. The release says, "The President's Plan Will Help Confront Climate Change By Stopping The Projected Growth Of Carbon Dioxide Emissions From Cars, Light Trucks, And SUVs Within 10 Years." Ok, fine, a worthy goal. But transport from the gasoline-burning vehicles is obviously only one small part of the emissions portfolio. Emissions from electricity generation, diesel-burning transportation, commercial flight, etc. are not addressed. Further, if some of the new alt fuels are coming from coal-derived liquid synfuels then we're talking about increases in GHGs, not decreases. California's EPA is already raising this flag.

There were a couple of things to like in the SOTU: new attention on CAFE, more attention on plug-in hybrids, and a heap of new (proposed) funding for alternative fuels. Unfortunately each of those comes with a "but." Plug-in hybrids I see as one of the best ways to reduce fuel consumption, but without a strong commitment to cleaner grid electricity plug-ins don't mean much, and I didn't hear anything of substance on electricity. Dealing with alternative fuels had better mean finding economically and energetically viable non-corn sources of ethanol, and there was some attention placed there with some proposed funding for biofuels, but history tells me that watching us develop alternative fuels will be like watching Bill Murray waking up every morning in Groundhog Day. In other words, corn, corn and more corn. As one expert is quoted in that Times article:

Mr. Goldstein said that rather than speed up the process of producing more ethanol, Congress should “step back and reflect on the damage we have already done.”

Briefly, some other issues with SOTU:

- The President's proposal on cutting gasoline consumption includes a safety valve clause. The EPA, DoE and Dept. of Ag. all have the authority to waive or modify a proposed Alternative Fuel Standard, which obviously weakens it.

- From the White House release: "By establishing such a visible and ambitious fuel standard, America's global leadership will help encourage our friends and allies to consider similar policies." Is that what we're relying on to solve a global problem? Hoping that bringing up an ambitious fuel standard "encourages" similar behavior from other countries?

- "Congress Should Not Legislate A Particular Numeric Fuel Economy Standard. The Secretary of Transportation should be given the authority to set the fuel standard, based on cost/benefit analysis, using sound science, and without impacting safety." Whether Congress or the DoT sets a standard is less important than whether it is set so as to be as protected as possible from political interference. I see an excess of objectivity problem creeping up here, with competing C/B analyses and fights over whose "sound science" is "sounder."

In short, I'm not sure where the UCS is coming up with an "A" for Bush's old/new proposals, and the NY Times clearly agrees with me. Other mixed reactions are summed up here.

Posted on January 25, 2007 01:38 PM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change | Energy Policy

January 22, 2007

Notes in the Houston Chronicle

Roger and I are quoted in an article by Eric Berger (who has a good science/science journalism blog of his own) running today in the Houston Chronicle. It's an outgrowth of my AGU/climate scientist tension post from late December.

It's interesting that I learned that the article was up from dueling emails in my inbox this morning – one from a (non-skeptic) climate scientist saying that I was right on, another saying that I must be in the pocket of Exxon.

My take home message is this:

But within the broad consensus are myriad questions about the details. How much of the recent warming has been caused by humans? Is the upswing in Atlantic hurricane activity due to global warming or natural variability? Are Antarctica's ice sheets at risk for melting in the near future?
To the public and policymakers, these details matter. It's one thing to worry about summer temperatures becoming a few degrees warmer.

It's quite another if ice melting from Greenland and Antarctica raises the sea level by 3 feet in the next century, enough to cover much of Galveston Island at high tide.

and then later in the article:

Much of the public debate, however, has dealt in absolutes. The poster for Al Gore's global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth, depicts a hurricane blowing out of a smokestack. Katrina's devastation is a major theme in the film.

The details matter. So does the risk. As Roger says in the article:

"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."

Are we risking our credibility? The point I'm trying to get across is that as a community we might not be giving the public and policy makers enough credit. We are shying away from giving them the details, perhaps worried that if they have the details they might not see climate change as a big threat, and might not be compelled to address the risk. This is C.P. Snow's two-cultures tension. Have we in the climate sciences internalized C.P. Snow's lessons yet? I think not.

Posted on January 22, 2007 10:28 AM View this article | Comments (8)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change

January 19, 2007

Heidi needs a lifeboat

If you think we, RealClimate, ClimateAudit, etc. have it bad with the occasional troll, you have to see what happened to Heidi Cullen.

Heidi is the Weather Channel's on-air climate expert with a Ph.D. in oceanography/climate from Lamont-Doherty (yes, same degree as me; yes, same place; yes, she's a friend). She started up the Climate Code, which has a weekly TV component and an in-depth web component, including a blog.

Heidi might be excused for not having been in this game for long. In her third post she went out on a limb and basically said that if an on-air meteorologist can't be bothered to get themselves educated about the science of AGW before spouting off about it from their position of authority, then they don't deserve to carry the AMS seal of approval:

I'd like to take that suggestion a step further. If a meteorologist has an AMS Seal of Approval, which is used to confer legitimacy to TV meteorologists, then meteorologists have a responsibility to truly educate themselves on the science of global warming. (One good resource if you don't have a lot of time is the Pew Center's Climate Change 101.)
Meteorologists are among the few people trained in the sciences who are permitted regular access to our living rooms. And in that sense, they owe it to their audience to distinguish between solid, peer-reviewed science and junk political controversy. If a meteorologist can't speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS shouldn't give them a Seal of Approval. Clearly, the AMS doesn't agree that global warming can be blamed on cyclical weather patterns. It's like allowing a meteorologist to go on-air and say that hurricanes rotate clockwise and tsunamis are caused by the weather. It's not a political statement...it's just an incorrect statement.

OK, maybe not what I would have said, but not deserving of the absolute thrashing Heidi has received from the universe of "climate change is a socialist plot" types. If you think tribalism is bad on the main-line climate-related blogs, page through a few comments on Heidi's original post. At last count there were 1349 comments, and most appear to originate out of Rush Limbaugh's audience of renowned climate experts (Rush apparently mentioned Heidi on a show). If you haven't been paying attention, Limbaugh is an expert in solar influence on climate and a renown expert on Joseph Stalin and Stalinism (equating it with ultra-liberalism in his post...), and he has a very large audience of climate and Stalinism/socialism experts that follow his teachings (yes, they're not the same thing, but both terms are being thrown about freely). They, en masse, took the opportunity to educate Dr. Cullen on climate and weather, which I'm sure Dr. Cullen has appreciated (although you can draw your own conclusions from reading her follow-up post).

It's up to you to decide whether what Heidi wrote was over-the-line (I don't agree with her idea, but I don't think it was over-the-line either). But if you're a climate scientist reading this you may take a strong between-the-lines message home:

a) As Roger has argued many times, and as I have argued in different ways, you do not perform science in a box. The level of attention that Heidi is getting on this shows that our society cares very deeply about this issue – if not always for the same reasons that you care.

b) Like it or not, you are involved in a science where the results may catalyze political and cultural fights far beyond anything you can imagine. Even if you don't engage in the fights yourself, you need to understand your connection to them.

c) Putting the focus on climate skeptics instead of climate science, as Heidi did, is a recipe for this kind of explosion. This level of controversy is clearly counterproductive, serving as a compelling distraction from "moving this discussion forward" (Heidi's words). We could do very well to stop engaging skeptics as skeptics, and simply engage climate policy on its own merits. (see also)

d) It should be obvious that these explosions of controversy emerge because the perceived stakes of climate change regulation are so high. Many fear that this isn't really about climate change at all, but about controlling lifestyles. 'Envirohippies want to change our way of life, just like Islamic terrorists do. They both must be battled.' Climate scientists need to fully absorb the fact that many laypeople view the climate "debate" in precisely these terms. It would be far more effective for our community to engage this fear head-on than to continue to engage, debate and highlight the remaining "skeptics" for being "skeptics."

Posted on January 19, 2007 11:38 AM View this article | Comments (45)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change

January 18, 2007

Putting climate change on the Hill's front burner

There is no doubt that Congress is (belatedly) ramping up interest in climate change policy. I wrote about EIA's reaction to Sen. Bingaman's cap-and-trade proposal here (note: don't misinterpret what I wrote just because certain people linked to it).

Now via CQ, Majority Leader Pelosi is setting up "a special task force to examine global warming issues, but the panel will not have legislative authority."

Pelosi’s decision to create a task force without bill-drafting powers followed days of pushback by some Democratic committee chairmen who feared her plan would encroach on their panels’ powers.
The Speaker has ordered the eight or so chairmen whose panels have jurisdiction over some part of the global warming issue to produce legislation addressing the problem by June.

(Interesting aside for those of you who aren't familiar with the inner workings of Congress: for the most part, a bill will only have one committee of jurisdiction in the Senate, but may have many in the House. Which obviously makes Pelosi's cat-herding job on this that much tougher.)

For those that want to move forward, the problem is, as I mentioned last month, Rep. Dingell. Again from the CQ story:

Among those opposed to creating a new panel is John D. Dingell, D-Mich., who heads the Energy and Commerce Committee. Dingell, dean of House Democrats, has consistently fought efforts to tighten the Clean Air Act in ways that could hurt the domestic auto industry.

And insofar as Detroit wants him to stall climate change legislation, or find ways to make it as friendly as possible to Detroit, he will certainly be there to oblige.

So the D's have a problem in Dingell as an internal gatekeeper, and considering his seniority, I'm guessing that Ms. Pelosi doesn't have a lot of power to hold him in line. What will be interesting is what Detroit gets out of it. Ah, sausage.

Posted on January 18, 2007 05:12 PM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change

January 12, 2007

For the Science News subscribers

Sid Perkins of Science News did a nice little write up of the poster I presented at AGU. Unfortunately it's moneywalled, but if you get the paper copy or have e-access it's on page 14 of the Jan 6, 2007 issue.

The poster and SN write-up cover what is in a paper I currently have under review at Natural Hazards Review on earthquake damages. As I teaser I'll tell you this: it looks like quakes do about $2.5B in annual average damages in the U.S., which is far less (by about a third) than the catastrophe models (HAZUS) estimate.

Posted on January 12, 2007 03:17 PM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Disasters

January 11, 2007

EIA releases analysis on Bingaman's carbon cap-and-trade leg

You wonky wonks who have nothing better to do but follow the ins and outs in D.C. will remember what happened on climate change in the Energy Policy Act of 2005. (The quick answer is, "nothing." The more astute answer is, "horsetrading.")

Then-Ranking Member (now Chair) of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Jeff Bingaman, wanted to offer a cap-and-trade amendment to the Energy Bill. He initially had then-Chair Domenici's support, but without House support, and watching previous energy bills derailed due to irreconcilable differences in Conference, Domenici pulled his support late. That led Bingaman to agree to withdraw the cap-and-trade amendment in exchange for a promise to discuss the issue in-depth in the following year. (Good recap by the AIP here.)

Sen. Bingaman then sent a letter with five other Senators (3 D's, 3 R's) to the Energy Information Administration (which resides in DoE), requesting that the EIA examine how Sen. Bingaman's cap-and-trade proposal would affect the U.S. economy.

The EIA is now done with the analysis and you can get the just-released 80-page report here.

The results came to me in a Dem-side press release from Senate Energy with the title, "EIA Analysis of Mandatory Climate Legislation Shows: Detailed Plan Won’t Harm U.S. Economy" and that seems to be true, but at the same time, reductions in CO₂ are minor. In fact, over the 20-year life of the proposal what we see is a cut in emissions growth, from 44% to 21%. Again, we're still talking about a (very significant) growth in U.S. emissions.

In the reference case, total power sector CO2 emissions are projected to increase 44.4 percent between 2004 and 2030 as the industry increases its use of fossil fuels, particularly coal (Figure 5). However, in the Phased Auction case, CO2 emissions are forecast to increase by less than half that amount, about 21 percent between 2004 and 2030, because of a greater reliance on nuclear and renewable and a less carbon-intensive fossil fuel mix.

It does appear that the changes in GDP are modest over the life of the proposal, but I don't see any gains in GDP, only losses.

The image is Figure 20 from the report and the relevant text from page 30:

The higher delivered energy prices and the collection of additional government revenues lower real output for the economy in both the Phased and Full Auction cases. They reduce energy consumption, but also indirectly reduce real consumer spending for other goods and services due to lower purchasing power. The lower aggregate demand for goods and services in the both the Phased and Full Auction cases results in lower real GDP relative to the reference case (Figure 20). Relative to the reference case, total discounted GDP over the 2009 to 2030 time period is $232 billion (0.10 percent) lower in the Phased Auction case and $462 billion (0.19 percent) lower in the Full Auction case. Projected GDP impacts generally increase over time, as the cap-and-trade program requires larger changes in the energy system. Relative to the reference case, real GDP in 2030 is $59 billion (0.26 percent) lower in the Phased Auction case and $94 billion (0.41 percent) lower in the Full Auction case.

I'm guessing that an economist would call this minor, but then I'm not an economist. (It certainly is cheaper than war, isn't it?)

The question is, does a reduction from a 44% increase in CO₂ to a 21% increase in CO₂ really do anything for us? We can get into the whole "it's a first step!" vs. "why waste our time with meaningless steps?" debate again, but the fact remains: under this plan CO₂ is still going up 21% to 2030, and the impacts on global temperatures from this "decrease in emissions growth" will be negligible. The impacts on the economy also seem minor, but by pushing a press release with the title, "Detailed Plan Won’t Harm U.S. Economy" without mentioning that the plan won't have much of an impact on climate, either, is an unfortunate omission. The political incentive to not ask for major pain from average Americans is quite clear (as GW has so beautifully shown, pushing ahead on an absurd war and cutting taxes at the same time). But we have two choices: do nothing or do something (for the record, I strongly favor the latter). I read the EIA analysis as, essentially, "doing nothing while saying that we're doing something."

Posted on January 11, 2007 11:45 AM View this article | Comments (15)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change

December 20, 2006

So what happened at AGU last week?

[this is a cross-post from this original]

With thirteen thousand people at a confab of geophysicists and geophysicists-in-training, a few thousand of whom work on something related to the climate system, you expect to hear about climate change. In perhaps a short decade, climate change has rapidly surpassed seismology as the primary membrane between the public and the geophysics research world. Climate is now what most makes the American Geophysical Union relevant to non-members; climate is now what essentially drives the meeting despite the presence of dozens of other specialties represented.

As a physical oceanographer (which by definition also means "climatologist")- become-enviro policy guy, though, I wasn't so much interested in the details of climate science at this year's AGU. What I was (and am) interested in is seeing the conference as a whole. My interest in AGU has strayed from the hardrock science, moving into something more to do with feelings and hunches. That's right, feelings. Hunches. Intuition. The squishy, soft underbelly of the human mind; the part we want to ignore in pursuing geophysical data analysis. What I want to know is attitude. More than the state of the science, I now want to know about the state of the scientists.

I will grant that talking to the people I did at AGU represents a small fraction of all the attendees. I will grant that there is no way to know whether my averaging of attitudes in the climsci world, as sensed by talking with a few people over a few days, scales up to represent the true feelings of the collective. But I will tell you what I found, and what I felt, and whether you think it might represent the current attitude of climsci world is up to you.

To sum the state of climsci world in one word, as I see it right now, it is this: tension.

What I am starting to hear is internal backlash. Sure, science is messy and always full of tension between holders of competing positions, opinions and analyses. That has always been the nature of science, and of course extends to climate science. Tensions come out at meetings, on listservs, on letters pages, and in the press. But these tensions normally surround a particular paper, or a particular question. While much more broadly-based tensions have existed for years on the state of understanding on global warming, they haven't really been tensions internal to the climsci community, but tensions between the climsci community and interested outsiders.

What I am sensing now is something much broader and more diffuse, something that has less to do with particular components of the science in the field and is much more about how the field is composing itself.

What I see is something that I am having a hard time labeling, but that I might call either a "hangover" or a "sophomore slump" or "buyers remorse." None fit perfectly, but perhaps the combination does. I speak for (my interpretation) of the collective: {We tried for years – decades – to get them to listen to us about climate change. To do that we had to ramp up our rhetoric. We had to figure out ways to tone down our natural skepticism (we are scientists, after all) in order to put on a united face. We knew it would mean pushing the science harder than it should be. We knew it would mean allowing the boundary-pushers on the "it's happening" side free reign while stifling the boundary-pushers on the other side. But knowing the science, we knew the stakes to humanity were high and that the opposition to the truth would be fierce, so we knew we had to dig in. But now they are listening. Now they do believe us. Now they say they're ready to take action. And now we're wondering if we didn't create a monster. We're wondering if they realize how uncertain our projections of future climate are. We wonder if we've oversold the science. We're wondering what happened to our community, that individuals caveat even the most minor questionings of barely-proven climate change evidence, lest they be tagged as "skeptics." We're wondering if we've let our alarm at the problem trickle to the public sphere, missing all the caveats in translation that we have internalized. And we're wondering if we’ve let some of our scientists take the science too far, promise too much knowledge, and promote more certainty in ourselves than is warranted.}

I came to this place in a few ways. One was a colleague describing a caveat he put into his poster abstract out of fear --- yes, fear! (He strongly called into question widely-quoted data supporting a decline in snowpack and advance in spring peak runoff in the northern Rockies.) Another was multiple colleagues giving me independent but similar blistering accounts of the GCMs they work on (upcoming post on this). Yet another was listening to competing ideas presented by Torn (GC22A-02) and Knutti (-04) in this session. It was in these and other events and conversations that a theme arose that pervaded my meeting.

None of this is to say that the risk of climate change is being questioned or downplayed by our community; it's not. It is to say that I think some people feel that we've created a monster by limiting the ability of people in our community to question results that say "climate change is right here!" It is to say that a number of climsci people I heard from are not comfortable enough with the science to want our community to push to outsiders an idea that we have fully or even adequately bounded the risk. I heard from a few people a sentiment that we need to stop making assumptions and decisions for decision-makers; that we need to give decision-makers only the unvarnished truth with realistic bounds on our uncertainty, and trust that the decision-makers will know what to do with it. These feelings came of frustration that many of us are downplaying uncertainties for fear of not being listened to.

I don't play in the weeds of climate change anymore, I play in the weeds of how the science gets to policy makers and how the nature of policy-making gets back to the scientists. My own feeling of self-responsibility in this field is to be that translator in any small way I can; to hear what each sides thinks and needs and to play go-between. (I am certainly not the only one, but there aren't many of us, either.) It is for that reason that what I heard concerns me greatly, because I see negative implications for the credibility of the climsci world.

In upcoming posts I will give concrete examples of events and discussions from which I draw these conclusions. For now I leave the concerned climsci community with the thoughts of one former Congressional science fellow who is now back in research science (with some additions of my own): dealing with uncertainty is exactly what Congresspeople do, and they do it a lot better than we do. For scientists, uncertainty is an abstract concept, something that feeds into an academic study, a place where the stakes are low and time-scale is long-term. For politicians and unelected decision-makers, uncertainty is life-or-death, yet decisions must still be made. Politicians constantly make decisions amid levels of uncertainty that would stifle the publication of any academic climate change paper. We need to realize that, give the politicians their due, and get the hell out of their way. Give them the science and the uncertainties and let them make the decisions. Overplaying our hand is a dangerous gambit, and may spell big trouble for us in the future.

I realize that many of you will disagree with the notion that we are overplaying our hand, or are not giving full voice to our uncertainties. I'm not sure the answer to this question myself. But I write all this because I sense a sea change in attitudes amongst climsci people that I know as good scientists without agendas. These are solid scientists, and some told me in no uncertain terms that we are not giving full voice to uncertainties; others implied as much. Therein lies the tension. Where we go from here is anybody's guess, but I tend to agree with the Oracle in the second Matrix movie: we already know the answer to that question, our task is to understand why we are going to do what we are going to do.

Posted on December 20, 2006 02:16 PM View this article | Comments (24)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change

November 21, 2006

Collins and Lieberman fire another missile at DHS/FEMA

Yesterday Sen. Lieberman's office, on behalf of him and Susan Collins, chair of the Senate committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, released a letter to DHS head Mike Chertoff. The title of the Lieberman press release says it all:

COLLINS, LIEBERMAN EXPRESS CONCERN ON DHS SITUATIONAL AWARENESS DEFICIENCIES
Little Progress Seen Since Hurricane Katrina

The letter is long. In essence, Lieberman and Collins are accusing DHS of making little to no progress toward having a solid, functioning, and competent center of operations for the next disaster. They use the term "situational awareness" over and again throughout their letter. What they mean is that DHS has not built sufficient capacity to be able to gather on-the-scene reports from the myriad and scattered agencies and first responders on a disaster. This letter is the latest in body of work from HSGAC trying to light a fire under DHS's heels (written about here).

Of course, there's another interesting sideshow to notice here. After the WTC attacks and the creation of the new Department of Homeland Security, both chambers of Congress created a new committee to match the new executive branch agency. The Senate wrapped up its Homeland Security committee into its existing Committee on Government Affairs, creating the horribly awkward acronym HSGAC. [his-GACK? hus-GACK? H-S-GACK? HIS-gack?] The House created a standalone Committee on Homeland Security and didn't touch the existing Committee on Government Reform (which I believe was a creation of the 1994 Republican takeover...not that the committee was new, just that it was renamed, adding the "reform" part).

With Henry Waxman taking over the Government Reform Committee in the House, it's clear what that committee is going to be spending its time on. Namely, the same thing that Rep. Waxman has been doing as a sort of unseated power unto himself for the past few years. Except now he'll have the power to actually hold oversight hearings, which are sure to include hearings on the misuse of science.

But judging by what it has taken on over the past year, Senate HSGAC doesn't seem to be headed that way. HSGAC has seemed to delve exclusively into the HS of HSGAC, although they've filed their inquiries into Iraq reconstruction under GA instead of HS. You can get a sense of what they've been doing by clicking through the links on this page. HSGAC has had two main issues of concern: the spate of DHS's responsibilities (including how DHS is handling their disaster response responsibilities under FEMA), and how Iraq reconstruction is being managed. Those of you clamoring for a Democrat counterassault to the "Republican War on Science" will probably be seeing it out of the House and not out of the Senate.

Posted on November 21, 2006 01:05 PM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Disasters

September 28, 2006

Scientists forming a 527 but will it be relevant?

"A number of America's leading scientists" have started a 527 called Scientists & Engineers for America which was covered by the NY Times today.

Their raison d'entrée is, "...electing public officials who respect evidence and understand the importance of using scientific and engineering advice in making public policy."

Good: a group of concerned citizens banding together to advocate their issue.

Bad: Despite a stated aim to be nonpartisan, the group's very birth is a response to partisan politics, which makes it political by default.

The bad doesn't necessarily outweigh the good for SEforA, but it does illustrate what will be its biggest challenge. The challenge won't be affecting races or having an impact on the process, but on becoming staunchly nonpartisan and burnishing time and again its nonpartisan credentials. If it can successfully manage that, then SEforA can become relevant and salient, partnering with politicians from both parties. If not, then SEforA will become a de facto Democrat advocacy group, ignored by the Republicans whenever they are in power. Unfortunately the origins of SEforA speak to its partisan upbringing by using two Clinton Administration science advisors as headliners and using language that sounds like it came straight from Chris Mooney's book and the UCS report: "...when the nation’s leaders systematically ignore scientific evidence and analysis, put ideological interests ahead of scientific truths, suppress valid scientific evidence and harass and threaten scientists for speaking honestly about their research."

Here's hoping that SEforA works immediately toward nonpartisanship, realizing that they will have some work to do in convincing Republicans that their early, seemingly inherent links to the Democratic Party are nonbinding.

Posted on September 28, 2006 09:57 AM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Science + Politics

September 18, 2006

FEMA will remain within DHS but ...

... with new authority and independence. Senators Collins and Lieberman, Chair and Ranking Member of the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs negotiated with a few House committees and the Senate Homeland Security Appropriations subcommittee to insert most of their S.3721 (the "Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006") into the conference report of the Homeland Security appropriations bill.

(As far as I can tell none of this language got a committee markup or saw floor debate or markup in either chamber. It may be good language, but it is authorization language being inserted without debate into an appropriations bill.)

A press release out of the committee can be found here, and in part says:

...FEMA would be strengthened and become an independent entity within the Department of Homeland Security with the same protections currently provided to the U.S. Coast Guard, nearly identical to the Collins-Lieberman FEMA legislation.
...

FEMA becomes a distinct entity within DHS – as are the US Coast Guard and the Secret Service - and is therefore protected from future reorganizations by DHS.

The Administrator of FEMA is the principal advisor to the President for emergency management. The language is modeled after the Joint Chiefs of Staff language.

The Administrator has authority to report directly to Congress and may be designated as Cabinet level at the President’s discretion during disasters.

Reunites Preparedness and Response with FEMA so that the Administrator is responsible for all phases of emergency management (preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation).

Stricter qualification requirements for Administrator of FEMA.

...

It creates a system for ensuring that FEMA is engaged in appropriate planning, training and exercise programs with its counterparts at the federal, state and local levels. It also requires that FEMA establish specific performance measurements against which to measure progress in planning, training and exercises towards establishing readiness.

Establishes a national disaster recovery strategy to assist with the recovery from future catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina.

Posted on September 18, 2006 02:31 PM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Disasters

September 13, 2006

Abandoned mine language making its way through the Senate again

At the behest of corporate actors in the west, for the past few years Congress has been nipping at the edges of one of the thornier environmental policy issues in the west -- abandoned mines. Today the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee marked up S.1848 -- the "Cleanup of Inactive and Abandoned Mines Act" -- sponsored by Colorado Senators Salazar and Allard (neither of whom sit on EPW -- Allard did in the last Congress).

Abandoned mines are a contentious issue out west. You can get a sense of the issues here, here or here. (Or maybe since there's no wikipedia page on it, it's not such an important issue?)

Congress originally dealt with AM's in the 1999 Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) bill. Sec. 560 of S.507 allowed the federal government to "to address water quality problems caused by drainage and related activities from abandoned and inactive noncoal mines." (Note the word "noncoal.") It demanded a 50-50 federal/non-federal cost-share when the AM was not on Federal land. But in the end the provision was doomed to be ineffective from the start as it only authorized a total of $5M.

In 2004 the Senate moved AML in Section 4401 of S.2773, the Water Resources Development Act of 2004. That provision moved a bigger portion of the clean-up to the non-federal party (now a 25-75 split) and directed that the non-federal interest pay 100% of the operation and maintenance of the site, but it increased the authorization for the program almost ten times to $45M. One of the more interesting additions in that provision, however, was the "No effect on liability" provision: "The provision of assistance under this section shall not relieve from liability any person that would otherwise be liable under Federal or State law for damages, response costs, natural resource damages, restitution, equitable relief, or any other relief."

In the end, the AML in the 2004 WRDA bill was not contentious, but WRDA has had trouble passing for other reasons. But the AML issue has remained and
gained enough traction to warrant its own bill.

Today's markup of S.1848 moves forward a new wrinkle in the AML situation: exempting "good Samaritans" from liability when they move toward cleaning up a mine problem not of their own making. (Background needed: in American law when a party buys land they are assuming the liability of the former owners for any environmental problems that exist or were caused downstream. In some cases companies have purchased such tainted property anyway, but in others it prevents sale. When the original party goes bankrupt the land becomes abandoned and this usually leaves taxpayers in the lurch for cleaning up the mess.) In the proposed bill, a "good Samaritan":

(A) is unrelated, by operation or ownership (except solely through succession to title), to the historic mine residue to be remediated under this section;

(B) had no role in the creation of the historic mine residue;

(D) is not liable under any Federal, State, or local law for the remediation of the historic mine residue.

The contentious part of the bill is the exemptions it gives to good Samaritans in mine clean-up. Sect 3(g)(1)(C), "provides to the permittee, in carrying out the activities authorized under the permit, protection from actions taken, obligations, and liabilities arising under the environmental laws specified in the permit." Where "environmental laws" are defined in Sect 3(a)(3)(A-J) as:

(A) the Toxic Substances Control Act (15 U.S.C. 2601 et seq.);
(B) the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (33 U.S.C. 1251 et seq.);
(C) the Safe Drinking Water Act (42 U.S.C. 300f et seq.);
(D) the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (42 U.S.C. 4321 et seq.);
(E) the Solid Waste Disposal Act (42 U.S.C. 6901 et seq.);
(F) the Clean Air Act (42 U.S.C. 7401 et seq.);
(G) the Uranium Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act of 1978 (42 U.S.C. 7901 et seq.);
(H) the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (42 U.S.C. 9601 et seq.);
(I) applicable environmental laws of a State; and
(J) applicable environmental ordinances of a political subdivision of a State.

Concern over blanket exemption from liability under these law seems reasonable. However, the bill also sets out a very strict permitting process in which a mine may only be cleaned up in a state which has a "State Remediation Program" and any good Samaritan must apply through this program. Fines for violating the permit are set at $10K/day. Permits must also run through the EPA and may only be granted if the EPA determines, "the project will not degrade any aspect of the environment in any area to a significant degree" and "the project will meet applicable water quality standards, to the maximum extent reasonable and practicable under the circumstances." [Sect 3(f)(1)(A)(i-iv)]

According to Congressional Quarterly, Senator Boxer (CA) offered a substitute amendment that would have created a federal grant program for clean-up without the liability waivers, but it was rejected 7-11 (that would be party-line with one D voting against her, for those keeping score at home).

It's not clear to me where this legislation is going from here, but I suspect it'll be fairly non-contentious and get through the Senate. Enviro groups have their concerns (see this article) but to my eye the EPA permitting provisions seem a pretty solid backstop to the liability relief provisions. I have no idea where the House will take this, but I expect the western reps will try to run it through.

Posted on September 13, 2006 03:07 PM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Environment

June 08, 2006

New anti-wind politics details. Oh the irony, Senator Warner.

My last post about the politics of wind discussed the Cape Wind project and the cockamamie excuses -- some wrapped in science (surprise!!) -- being used to justify political interference with the project. (For what it's worth, politicians both left and right are fighting both for and against Cape Wind, although from what I can tell the only side to use dubious science as cover so far are the Kennedy's.)

Unfortunately it now appears that a recent Senate stall tactic on Cape Wind has caused a slew of other projects -- nowhere near Cape Cod -- to be stalled. The culprit? Senator John Warner (chair of Armed Services), who put this wordy one-liner in Section 358 (Title III, Subtitle F) of PL 109-163 (FY06 supplemental Defense approps):

Not later than 120 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Defense shall submit to the Committee on Armed Services of the Senate and the Committee on Armed Services of the House of Representatives a report on the effects of windmill farms on military readiness, including an assessment of the effects on the operations of military radar installations of the proximity of windmill farms to such installations and of technologies that could mitigate any adverse effects on military operations identified.

Apparently Warner's dubious addition (both the FAA and the Air Force had already signed off on Cape Wind) has delayed projects all over the country. The ironic thing about Warner's add? This line from the (original, non-supplemental) FY06 Defense Appropriations Act (HR 2863 / PL 109-148):

That of the funds made available under this heading, $4,250,000 is available for contractor support to coordinate a wind test demonstration project on an Air Force installation using wind turbines manufactured in the United States that are....

So, um, a wind farm out in the middle of the bay could block radar but one in the middle of an Air Force installation is not just ok, it's so ok that we're going to pay a contractor $4.25M to build one there? Brilliant.

Posted on June 8, 2006 12:45 PM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Energy Policy

May 19, 2006

Tinkering at the edges of NSF (again)

I got two interesting emails from a high-traffic list I'm on. I'm not going to identify the list or the email authors, but the list includes lots of beltway and former beltway types that also have connections to science. First, parts of the emails, then some scintillating science policy discussion.

email 1:

Your help is needed in stopping an amendment that Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) is planning to offer TODAY that would direct the National Science Foundation (NSF) to make "physical science, technology, engineering and mathematics" priorities in its funding decisions.

In addition to being unprecedented Congressional interference into NSF functions that have for more than 50 years been set by scientists, the amendment would de facto set low priority for BIOLOGICAL, ENVIRONMENTAL, and SOCIAL SCIENCES, as well as SCIENCE EDUCATION PROGRAMS. If adopted, this amendment could limit funding for these important fields.
The amendment is to be offered on Thursday May 18 during the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation's mark up of S. 2802 the "American Innovation and Competitiveness Act of 2006." A "mark-up" is when the committee considers amendments to legislation prior to sending a measure to the full Senate for a vote.

We urge you to contact your Senator's office right away (see below) and ask that your Senator oppose the Hutchison amendment and instead support an amendment from Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), which would remove the section about priority-setting at NSF from the bill. Lautenberg's amendment would be a positive change as it would allow the NSF the greatest latitude in making sound investments in fundamental research.

email 2:

I'm happy to report that this situation has improved.
In an attempt to increase America's economic competitiveness, Sen. Kay
Bailey Hutchinson (R-Tex.) originally proposed an amendment to Senate
Bill 2802 that would require NSF to give priority to research in the
physical sciences, engineering and mathematics. However, before
yesterday's markup, Senators Hutchinson and Lautenberg reached a
compromise. The final language encourages NSF to give priority to
research that contributes to innovation and competitiveness, but
recognizes that NSF should not be restricted from funding other areas of
research.

AAAS wrote to the members of the Senate Commerce, Science, and
Transportation Committee to urge the committee to "support peer-reviewed
research across the broad spectrum of disciplines as currently
administered by the National Science Foundation and other agencies."
More information, and the text of the letter, is at http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2006/0518letter.shtml.

What's it all mean? First, let's dispense with the cry from the first email that this is "unprecedented Congressional interference into NSF functions that have for more than 50 years been set by scientists" because that's garbage. Let's not forget who created NSF (Congress), who reauthorizes NSF and makes appropriations for NSF (Congress), who must approve the top brass of NSF (the Senate), and who has tinkered at the edges of NSF since it's very start (Congress). If you don't believe that Congresspeople have been nibbling at NSF for a long time, you might start with a google search for "Senate Proxmire."

The item of actual interest here, however, is how we might read Sen. Hutchinson's intentions. The cynical would argue that she simply doesn't want the U.S. gov to fund social science research, especially when it's culturally messy or otherwise conflicts with her values. There is likely a strong component of that, but the arguments she put forth in a May 2 hearing and the actual language she agreed to in the compromise amendment, tell a different story. The Hutchinson/Lautenberg compromise "language encourages NSF to give priority to research that contributes to innovation and competitiveness." Interestingly, this compromise does two things:

1- brings Sen. Lautenberg into the fold of attempting to focus NSF on results, which was in part Hutchinson's priority (Sen. Lautenberg started by trying to derail the Hutchinson amdt outright without an alternative, as far as I know)

2- brings Sen. Hutchinson away from diminishing social science research for its own sake and pushes her toward a proactive (for results) focus rather than one reactive (against social science research)

Interestingly, the compromise amendment contradicts the comments of another strong conservative at the May-2 hearing, Sen. Sununu (R-NH):

Sununu added that “if you can identify an economic benefit [for research] you shouldn’t be funding it, that’s what we have a venture capital community for.”

If NSF tries to read both messages at once, the only conclusion it can reach is, "They want us to be useful and prioritize research that will have economic benefits, but if we can identify what those benefits might be [which, logically, they'd have to do to be effective under the Hutchinson/Lautenberg amendment] then we shouldn't be funding the research."

Curious. What's a poor NSF-thing to do?

The heart of the matter, it seems to me, is whether the government should only fund activities which clearly pay economic benefits, or whether the Fed should also be in the business of funding the interesting research that nobody else will fund (e.g., do wives or husbands initiate divorce more often?). Unfortunately for NSF, at the May-2 hearing Director Bement couldn't come up with a strong justification for continued social science research, other than "[Social sciences] compress the lead time from discovery to application." With an answer like that, I'm not surprised Sen. Hutchinson feels that social science research "burdens" NSF from focusing on what might be more useful.

[NOTE: cross-posted here.]

Posted on May 19, 2006 11:35 AM View this article | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Science Policy: General

May 05, 2006

NASA and balance

If you haven't seen it yet, a NRC panel released a report today titled "An Assessment of Balance in NASA's Science Programs." Their news release is here.

Here are some excerpts:

Finding 1. NASA is being asked to accomplish too much with too little. The agency does not have the necessary resources to carry out the tasks of completing the International Space Station, returning humans to the Moon, maintaining vigorous space and Earth science and microgravity life and physical sciences programs, and sustaining capabilities in aeronautical research.
Recommendation 1. Both the executive and the legislative branches of the federal government need to seriously examine the mismatch between the tasks assigned to NASA and the resources that the agency has been provided to accomplish them and should identify actions that will make the agency’s portfolio of responsibilities sustainable.

Finding 2. The program proposed for space and Earth sciences is not robust; it is not properly balanced to support a healthy mix of small, moderate-size, and large missions and an underlying foundation of scientific research and advanced technology projects; and it is neither sustainable nor capable of making adequate progress toward the goals that were recommended in the National Research Council’s decadal surveys.

The question I would raise out of this: Is it time for a government-wide reorg of Earth and space sciences that would include scrapping NASA as it now exists?

The committee is concerned that the big-ticket items (i.e. manned moon/Mars) are being emphasized at the expense of the smaller projects, especially in the Earth sciences. My question is, when we already have NSF and NOAA exploring Earth science questions, why do we need NASA to be pursuing that research as well?

If we want to do high-tech exploration, which is much more an engineering challenge than a basic research endeavor, let's separate out the functions. Let's have one agency that focuses on exploration and an agency or two that pursues the basic research questions. It no longer makes sense (if it ever did) that we have an agency focused both on the engineering challenges of flying the ISS or getting people back to the moon and on Mars, while also trying to do basic research on Earth's climate system.

Asking NASA to do both missions without much specific direction from Congress, or directions from Congress that often contradict direction from the White House, sends confusing messages to NASA about their mission. A similar problem is occurring within NIST, where Congressional appropriators have made no specific appropriations for various programs in favor of giving NIST a pool of money and telling them "we expect you to carry out programs X, Y and Z with this."

Posted on May 5, 2006 10:38 AM View this article | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Space Policy

May 04, 2006

PeakOil: whom do you believe? ChevronTexaco or ExxonMobil?

[Note: read the byline! I haven't posted on Prometheus in a while, and sometimes when I do Roger gets all the hate mail that should be sent to me.]

Although it's a favorite subject of mine, I haven't written about Peak Oil in a while. Last time I did it was to note Chevron's public education campaign to tell everybody about the Peak. Of course, Chevron isn't coming right out and saying "The Peak is here!" but if you know enough about the subject it's pretty easy to read between the lines.

Not surprisingly, Big Oil isn't too sure where to take the Peak Oil question, and that uncertainty might mirror the uncertainty in Peak Oil science. (Sound like any other issues we talk about around here?) Even though it seems clear from the quotes Matt Savinar posts that most involved closely in oil see the peak coming (link and link for example, and for what its worth a few people I have talked in oil have told me they all know it's coming soon, too...this includes an American who lived in Saudi Arabia for many years), Big Oil is trying to figure out how to frame the issue to a public more concerned about $3.15^9/10 gas than anything else.

Much like the climate change debate, on Peak Oil you have two sides with staunchly staked-out positions. Each side includes their own petroleum geologists, resource economists, energy investment bankers and multinational oil companies. Of course it is the latter we'll listen to most closely, since they ostensibly are in the best position to know about a peak and perhaps to drive policy toward or away from it.

So what are the majors saying and doing about Peak Oil? Chevron is clearly embracing the tactic of warning the public so that when the public eventually sees the light, Chevron can say, "Hey, we've been telling you about this for a while!"

But not so ExxonMobil. XOM is taking exactly the opposite tactic: "With abundant oil resources still available ... peak production is nowhere in sight."

This difference in opinion has interesting parallels to how these two companies have approached other environmental issues over the past few years. Chevron has been running ad campaigns touting their environmental stewardship while Exxon has been pouring money into muddying the climate change science waters. Further, many assume that XOM is well-aware of climate change risk, but has their own internal logic and reasons to muddy the debate. If so, it parallels their attitudes on Peak Oil, for while they are running NY Times op-ed ads saying "peak production is nowhere in sight," they apparently don't really believe that themselves.

Thankfully, although positions are staked out on Peak Oil, there does not seem to be a Left/Right, Republican/Democrat slant on the positions, which may make political action easier if/when this issue's time has come. And that might be the best indication that this isn't a clear "winners and losers" issue. If the Peakists are right, we're all losers.

Posted on May 4, 2006 10:06 AM View this article | Comments (34) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Energy Policy

February 28, 2006

Senators Seeking Response to Climate Change White Paper

From the AGI monthly update:

In early February, Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chair Pete Domenici (R-NM) and Ranking Member Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) released a white paper designed "to lay out some of the key questions and design elements of a national greenhouse gas program in order to facilitate discussion and the development of consensus around a specific bill."

Rather than advocate specific viewpoints on a potential greenhouse gas reduction program, the white paper poses four key questions that Senate staff hope will induce discussion between policymakers, industries, and environmentalists.

The questions are:

Should regulations apply to specific sectors or to the economy as a whole, and should the regulatory process be “upstream” (targeting energy producers and suppliers) or "downstream" (targeting emitters)?
Should regulatory costs be mitigated through allocation or auction of allowances, and who should receive allocated allowances?
Should the U.S. system be designed to eventually allow trading with other systems worldwide?
Should the U.S. system encourage “comparable actions” by major trading partners?

The committee is currently seeking public comments in response to the White Paper. Comments should be submitted to Climate_Conference@energy.senate.gov by 5 pm EST on Monday, March 13th following the guidelines.

A limited number of responders will be invited to participate in the Conference on Climate Change being held on Tuesday, April 4th.

The full text of the Climate Change White Paper is available here.

Posted on February 28, 2006 01:55 PM View this article | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Energy Policy

February 24, 2006

Reporting on the Jay Keyworth visit

It's a little stale at this point, I realize, but I wanted to give a brief report from our visit with Dr. George Keyworth, science advisor to President Reagan from 1981 -1986. Dr. Keyworth visited Boulder on Jan 31/Feb 1, the main event of which was a public lecture. I went to Dr. Keyworth's talk and interacted with him in a few other venues throughout his visit and here are some of the take-home messages as I heard them.

As national security is the most important issue facing any president, science advisors who are not involved closely in national security issues are not as relevant to the White House decision making process. Dr. Keyworth had multiple security clearances from his long tenure at Los Alamos, which gave him access to national security information and thus made him relevant to a president dealing with the Cold War.

To illustrate what happens when a science advisor is not directly involved in national security issues, Dr. Keyworth pointed to an exchange with a former Vice President. The VP asked something to the effect of, "Who was science advisor when we were in?" Keyworth's take-home message was that this long-serving advisor was unknown because he wasn't working on the top priority for the administration.

Dr. Keyworth made clear his Libertarian inclinations and called President Reagan a "true Libertarian." Arising from these views were a few observations and preferences, the most strident of which was:

-The government does well when it is a consumer and not when it is a producer of technology.

NASA illustrates this well. In the early days of the space station, nothing in NASA's rationale for its construction was significant or justifiable. NASA proposed a space lab for creating protein crystals in microgravity, and other such, but neither NASA nor the American government needed or needs protein crystals. [And the ISS floats along, irrelevant as ever....]

- The one thing that government can do right is to fund basic research.

People here question the effectiveness of the "linear model" (science $$ into a black box leads to economic benefits for the nation). But Dr. Keyworth was adamant that Vannevar Bush's ideas on funding basic research are still very important and relevant and that history shows the linear model to be right on.

There is a widespread consensus that we are declining rapidly in basic research funding and capability. Dr. Keyworth strongly backed up the message of Rising Above The Gathering Storm and discussed the purpose of basic research as a training ground of scientists. Roger should have a long post on this in the near future....

Strong views on NASA, including, "NASA is rotten to the core." The U.S. does not have a civil space policy, hasn't had one since Apollo, and out of this is a lack of a existence rationale for NASA.

Posted on February 24, 2006 11:36 AM View this article | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Science Policy: General

February 07, 2006

Lindell on evacuation

This morning I sat in on the first half of the National Science Board meeting in Boulder on "Toward a National Agenda for Hurricane Science and Engineering" (agenda link).

I have a couple of thoughts that I'll spread out over two or three posts. (Roger gave a presentation at the meeting so he'll probably have his own thoughts, too.) Here's my first thought:

In a powerpoint presentation, Professor Michael Lindell of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M threw out a bullet point that said, "Evacuation is a sign of policy failure."

This was said in a context of presenting evacuation as a very expensive, unpredictable, and largely unmanageable undertaking. He went on to say that the necessity for emergency evacuation means that intelligent pre-event planning was not in place and that building structures were not designed or retrofitted to withstand the hurricane event (obviating the need for evacuation).

I focused on the last. I can buy labeling "evacuation" as a "policy failure." But I wonder if it's possible that evacuation is actually less expensive than the total cost that would be involved in preventing its necessity, especially on the engineering side. Retrofitting buildings is extremely expensive (price per square foot to retrofit buildings for earthquake resilience is so much more expensive than new construction that generally only historical buildings are retrofitted....great example is this awesome building and retrofit project).

So it's possible that in not addressing the evacuation vs. resilience problem, decision makers are getting the right answer (coming out on the cheaper side) for the wrong reason (not even addressing the issue). I discussed this with Michael after his panel discussion and he agreed that the numbers should be examined but haven't yet been.

Posted on February 7, 2006 01:54 PM View this article | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Disasters

January 20, 2006

Senator Craig and the Fish Passage Center

I've written a good bit on salmon issues in the Columbia and Snake River systems (see Prometheus posts 1 and 2, and nosenada posts). I last left the issue with news of Senator Larry Craig's (R-ID) annoyance at a broker of information in the system.

Litigation has been running for years over the Federal government's obligations to protect various ocean-bound species of salmon and their inevitable conflict with the 11 major dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers. In this case, the federal government means the Army Corps (who run the dams), the Bonneville Power Administration (who oversee the power ops), and NOAA-Fisheries (who are supposed to be watching out for the salmon under the ESA). NOAA-Fisheries has negotiated compromise solutions with BPA and the Corps on protecting both salmon and power issues. Environmentalists have sued, claiming that under the ESA, NOAA-Fisheries is only supposed to be protecting the salmon without taking economic considerations in account.

The federal interests in this case are simply an extension of one side of the interest triangle on Columbia/Snake salmon. The three major stakeholders are power consumers, farmers and fish lovers. The first category is represented by BPA because BPA sells the power and hears about it when that power gets expensive. Power consumers are both residential users and their co-ops, as well as major industries, such as Alcoa. Farmers' interests are obvious. Fish lovers include the various tribes of the region with treaty rights, sport fishermen and commercial catch operators. The basic issue is that fish lovers want BPA to spill water over the tops of the dams in the summer to help salmon smolts safely get out to sea. But that spilt water is water BPA cannot use for power generation and thus represents lost revenue and, by extension, higher rates for consumers.

(Worth noting, we are talking about summer power and the demand then is not from the Pacific Northwest but from out-of-market California for air conditioning. In other words, BPA doesn't actually lose money by spilling water in the summer, rather it loses revenue it could gain by selling power to another market.)

To this point, the presiding judge on the case, James Redden of the Federal District Court in Portland, OR, has usually sided with the plaintiffs and found the government's salmon recovery plans inadequate. The latest ruling came in October, with Redden stating in his decision:

I found NOAA's opinion that DAM operations would not jeopardize the continued existence of listed salmon species was arbitrary and capricious because it was based on a flawed framework of analysis that improperly segregated elements of the proposed action NOAA deemed to be nondiscretionary.... In addition, I found NOAA's analysis of the effects of the proposed action on critical habitat was arbitrary and capricious, and its analysis of the likelihood of recovery as well as survival of the listed species was inadequate.

The decision continues in even more scathing language on pages 3 and 4. This is entirely consistent with Redden's many decisions throughout the history of this issue and his exasperation at the federal agencies comes through clearly.

Redden's series of rulings has led Senator Craig to (predictably?) call Redden an "activist judge." This is an extension of Senator Craig's political decision on choosing up sides of the interest triangle. In this case he avoided the tack taken by every other Senator in the region -- all of whom have avoided publicly favoring one side -- and chose to side with power interests over sporting interests (who also have a strong Republican base).

Beside the name calling, Senator Craig's decision to favor one side has led to finding a way to influence the outcome of the policy decisions in the system more directly. He has done so by going after the data used by the plaintiffs to inform the Redden decisions. Specifically, Senator Craig targeted the BPA-funded Fish Passage Center (FPC), which aggregates fish count data and provides analyses of the health of the salmon stocks.

This is language that appears on pages 178 and 179 of S. Rep. 109-84 in the Energy and Water Appropriations bill (PL 109-103) :

The Committee is concerned about the increasing cost of salmon recovery efforts in the Columbia River Basin, and about the potential adverse impact of those increased costs on customers of the Bonneville Power Administration. The Committee also is concerned about the quality and efficiency of some of the fish data collection efforts and analyses being performed. As a result, during fiscal year 2006, the Bonneville Power Administration may make no new obligations from the Bonneville Power Administration Fund in support of the Fish Passage Center. The Committee understands that there are universities in the Pacific Northwest that already collect fish data for the region and are well-positioned to take on the responsibilities now being performed by the Fish Passage Center, and that the universities can carry out those responsibilities at a savings to the region’s ratepayers that fund these programs.

This language does not square with Craig's and his staff's early statements on the FPC, in which they derided it as a political agency with an pro-fish agenda. This mirrored the public comments of a prominent stakeholder on the pro-energy, anti-spill side. Only after Craig was skewered by local press did the story change to one of efficiency and overlap.

Of course, no metric exists to test whether the FPC is an honest broker or an advocacy organization, but my reading of their work places them clearly on the side of honest broker. Editorials from throughout the Pacific Northwest written in response to Senator Craig's actions seem to back me up. Senator Craig did not like the data coming back; data which supported the contention that federal agency plans to help salmon survival were not helping the salmon. So he found a way to kill the messenger.

There is something that clearly does not stand close scrutiny in the report language above. If the committee is concerned about the quality and efficiency of data collection, why is it decentralizing the collection and analysis, while "hoping" that PNW universities will take up the role? Furthermore, why is the committee de-funding the one organization that the federal agencies and other stakeholders in the system can turn to for on-demand aggregated information? Although individual scientists may do it as part of grant-supported research projects, the universities in the area have no charter or mandate to collect, analyze and provide this information on demand. The clear implication here is that some players in the system do not want the information available.

Senator Craig's staff tried halfheartedly to justify the decision to de-fund the FPC based on the above reasoning, but their early comments very clearly pushed this as a political decision, rather than a prudent policy decision. The timing could not have been more clear, as Craig's anger was palpable on the heels of a summer Redden decision that yet again found for the plaintiffs and against the agencies.

However, all the above said, somewhere in the Conference Committee (the process that reconciles the House and Senate bills and leads to final passage), somebody chose to temper Senator Craig's language. The report language of the Energy and Water Appropriations bill as passed out of Conference (H.Rep. 109-275, pg. 174) reads a bit differently:

The Bonneville Power Administration may make no new obligations in support of the Fish Passage Center. The conferees call upon Bonneville Power Administration and the Northwest Power and Conservation Council to ensure that an orderly transfer of the Fish Passage Center functions (warehouse of smolt monitoring data, routine data analysis and reporting and coordination of the smolt monitoring program) occurs within 120 days of enactment of this legislation. These functions shall be transferred to other existing and capable entities in the region in a manner that ensures seamless continuity of activities.

Clearly the committee was uncomfortable with cutting the FPC free and letting the data fall into the sea. Although this final language is not substantially different from the Senate language, the last sentence above is an important directive that seems to make this issue more about efficiency and overlap and less about simply killing the FPC for the sake of killing the FPC.

[Final note: if you're confused about all the Senate report this and House report that and PL 109-xxx's, the appropriations bills are all summarized here. The Public Law (PL) is the passed legislative language; the reports are the plain-English explanations by the Committees of their actions. The most relevant report is the Conference Report.]

Posted on January 20, 2006 10:01 PM View this article | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Environment

January 17, 2006

NEHRP fears came true

I spent some time in early 2004 working on the Senate's part in reauthorizing the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP) in the 108th session. It eventually became law as PL 108-360.

NEHRP is a research direction and interagency coordination bill, with funding pieces in FEMA, USGS, NIST, and NSF. As the House Science Committee writes in its report on the NEHRP reauthorization bill (H.Rep. 108-246):

Currently the agency responsibilities within NEHRP include:
FEMA—overall coordination of the Program, education and outreach, and implementation of research results;

USGS—basic and applied earth science and seismic research;

NSF—basic research in geoscience, engineering, economic, and social aspects of earthquakes;

NIST—problem-focused earthquake engineering research and development programs aimed at improving building design codes and construction standards.

NEHRP was first created in 1977 as PL 95-124. The biggest change in this reauthorization was a switch from FEMA to NIST as lead coordinating agency. This change was requested by stakeholders such as the groups who joined the NEHRP coalition. These stakeholders saw an alarming disconnect by FEMA on natural hazards and disasters after FEMA was swallowed by the Department of Homeland Security in the post- World Trade Center executive branch reorganization. When stakeholders began asking Congress to take the lead role on NEHRP away from FEMA and give it to NIST, and when FEMA didn't even bother to dissent, Congress seemed happy to agree.

But during my experiences on the NEHRP reauthorization, one senior staffer on the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee did try to put the brakes on the lead agency shift. She voiced strong concern over appropriations battles that were leaving NIST underfunded. This was a fear shared by the House Science Committee, as seen in H.Rep. 108-246:

NIST is fully capable of carrying out the lead agency responsibilities as the Chair of the Interagency Coordinating Committee, but NIST will have difficulty fulfilling its duties under sections 5(b)(1) and (5) of the Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act, as amended, unless it receives appropriations at the level authorized by this bill.

Well, the Science/State/Justice/Commerce appropriations bill is done (PL 109-108) and the fears of the authorizers have been realized. While NIST gets a 5% increase for the Scientific and Technical Research and Services (core programs), no direct appropriations are made for NEHRP. Report language states:

The Committee encourages NIST to allocate funding available under this account to carry out responsibilities under the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (Public Law 108–360).

Forcing NEHRP to compete internally with other programs within the core. These "competitors" include national security programs highlighted and prioritized by the committee:

The Committee expects NIST to continue to prioritize funding for programs associated with standards and guidelines relating to the national security of the United States, including efforts relating to biometric and cyber security and programs relating to improvements to the nation’s manufacturing and services sectors. The recommendation also continues funding for a telework project and a critical infrastructure program, at the same funding levels as in fiscal year 2005.

Given this loose language and no clear direction to pursue NEHRP priorities set out in the authorization bill, it is unclear whether NIST will step up to the coordinating agency role it took from FEMA. This issue was actually anticipated by House Science in the NEHRP report:

However, the Committee also believes that the Program’s potential has been limited by the inability of NEHRP agencies to create synergy through coordinated efforts—a necessary part of any truly successful interagency program. It is because of these concerns that the Committee is modifying the structure of NEHRP. The Committee believes that, while NEHRP has been a successful undertaking, a great deal of room for improvement exists.

Where NEHRP goes from here remains to be seen, but if Congressional appropriators read the recently released Multihazard Mitigation Council (MMC) report -- a report commissioned by Senate appropriators in the 106th Congress -- they will find language like this:

The analysis of ... FEMA grants awarded during the study period indicates that a dollar spent on mitigation saves society an average of $4.

A summary of the numbers can be found here. And while the study was done on FEMA numbers and not the NEHRP program in general, the take home message is that money spent on mitigation (the overall purpose of NEHRP) is money saved over the long term.

Posted on January 17, 2006 03:14 PM View this article | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Disasters

November 18, 2005

IPCC Hockey Stick Matters

At some point over the past couple of years, the motivation behind the hockey stick (HS) battles (played both in journal and blog) in most of its guises slipped from "science for science's sake" to "science for public policy's sake." Where it initially concerned a question of validating the original science for a specific study, it later became a question of validating what we think we know about climate change in general, and how we disseminate that knowledge to the policy-making community. Now the hockey debate has slipped further, becoming almost exclusively about credibility (according to some) legitimacy (according to others, although they are not mutually-exclusive groups). The scientific relevance of the HS is still there, but it has become subsumed by the more interesting and easier-to-follow political debate. I'll go further here and also address questions of salience; the distinctions of all three were highlighted aptly by Roger in comment #57 here and in this paper that Roger summarizes.

Perhaps those engaged in the science debate over the HS have belatedly come to realize the larger political reality that shrouds their debate: nobody in the policy-making world cares (in other words, its salience is gone). This does not completely destroy the relevancy of the debate, but it raises an unfortunate problem for the players: they are engaged in the debate because of its perceived effects on the policy-making world. (If the HS had not been included in the TAR SPM, would we be talking about this?) If the debate is irrelevant in any context other than science, the motivations behind the fight should change to something more academic and pastoral. That it has not yet done so, that it continues to invite personal attacks, invective and name-calling among other more relevant commentary, raises a question: do the players still see political advantage to be gained by keeping up the fight?

Hidden between the lines is a stark reality at the intersection of the policy world and science world: as we move closer and closer to the early 2007 release of IPCC 4th Assessment Report (AR4), the 3rd Assessment Report (TAR) hockey stick becomes more and more irrelevant. Inaction was the political response to the 2001 SPM presentation of the hockey stick. The hockey stick both as science and icon could not have been more hyped. But They saw it and They didn't care. By that inaction, the HS lost its salience. The next question is, will they care about the 2007 results?

If not salient to the policy consumer, salient to whom? Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntryre posted lengthy justifications of why their participation in the hockey stick debates matters and why the details of the debate should matter to the rest of us. Despite Stefan's post, Mann and RealClimate authors do the same on their blog, even if not directly answering the current question (e.g.). The dialogue has been revealing, and you can glean what the participants in the debate (commenters especially) care about and thus what this debate has really come to signify.

With its salience gone and with a real need to hash out the science for the science's sake questionable at best, the only reason left for continuing the debate is because the debate has become about something else entirely. To address the ways in which it the HS debate is now solely about credibility and legitimacy, moving from the very obvious to the more subtle:

1- The HS debate is about the credibility of Drs. Mann/Bradley/Hughes (but mostly Dr. Mann since as lead author and the stats jockey of the group, he has logically become the focus of procedural science questions). The credibility of Dr. Mann is crucial for his ability to continue to do science, for his ability to defend his original work and for his ability to comment on the work of others. He has fought hard in the pages of RealClimate and elsewhere to maintain his credibility both by engaging in a science debate and calling on more peripheral and even irrelevant issues such as the funding sources of M&M. (Supporters will likely disagree with this, but face it: if the science is right, the science is right, no matter who funded it.)

2- The debate has enshrouded the legitimacy of the process in constructing the IPCC TAR WG1 report and by extension, in constructing the upcoming AR4 chapters. All sides have a compelling interest in swaying the opinion of the general policy-making body toward questioning or accepting the legitimacy of the assessment process. In this both sides are effectively behaving as lobbyists, and blog commenters might be considered the individual constituents lobbying their local representatives for highway bill money.

3- The debate is also about the credibility of the skeptic community. The debate has encompassed the credibility of two outsiders and their ability to enter an esoteric debate as outsiders, but there's something more subtle at play here. The debate does not reflect on the credibility of individuals in the skeptic community and their ability to comment on climate change science as much as the debate has come to highlight the viability of the very existence of a credible skeptic community.

In this debate, the skeptic community found a legitimate science question to argue, and made a point to which not a few experts in the system said, "you have something there." Whether or not in the end there was much there, there, the point raised by Mr. McIntyre and Mr. McKitrick was appropriate to the scientific discussion. This occurred in the context of gradual diminution of credible skeptic science, illustrated starkly by the harsh reaction to publication of the Baliunas/Soon Climate Research paper. As most reasonable people realize, there is no vast conspiracy to block skeptic papers, a conspiracy that would have to span all the various publishers of all the various journals. Skeptic science is not being published because it's either not there or is not publishable. So to find a worthy item to publish is a crucial step toward credibility for the skeptic community.

4- One of Mr. McIntyre's most prominent talking points in the HS debate concerns access to data (e.g.1, e.g.2, e.g.3). There is a perception from those within academic circles and their funding sources, I think, that repeated requests for data sharing by outsiders is annoying and can be ignored. The researcher's attitude on this may not ever change, but what if the attitude does change for the NSF program manager? Or when will a PM's decision on how far to push his PIs to allow open access shift from his hands to a higher-level directive? This is also a credibility question. If the outsider and/or politically-loud skeptic community gains credibility as capable of solid science, it becomes harder to justify denying either access to data.

This also invites politics back into science from on high: although NSF is largely insulated from election cycle politics, NOAA and NASA, two other major funders of climate change science, as well as other federal agencies with more minor roles, are headed by political appointees. A greater positive collective sense of the credibility of the outsider/skeptic community will give political appointees, should they decide to go in this direction for political reasons, more justification for throwing the doors open to "skeptic science" (whatever that means).

5- It is clear that willingly or unwillingly, the hockey science players on both sides have become political pawns used by sides who have fixed policy positions in mind that will not be swayed by scientific results. It can be said with some confidence that Senator Inhofe and Representative Barton care little what the science says, and one must assume that left-side politicians who have also already staked out a position on climate change (Lieberman and others) would also be loath to switch positions based on murkiness of the science. Because the positions are set for many, the political players now must troll for evidence to support their positions. To do so with a straight face, they must also address the credibility of the science they are citing in Senate/House floor speeches and hearing statements. In this case, the credibility of both sides of the hockey stick debate affects the credibility of politicians engaged in a policy debate.

6- Interestingly, this debate has now produced downchain effects, influencing members of the science community quite removed from the direct hockey debate. Questions raised about the legitimacy of the TAR WGI and SPM writing process have amplified questions about the political or value statements by people closely involved with IPCC, such as Drs. Trenberth and Pachauri. Roger has, quite appropriately, warned Dr. Pachauri here and here and discussed Dr. Trenberth in these posts. At stake is the legitimacy of a product for policy-makers which is supposed to be policy and value neutral.

7- The science always moves on, but its use by non-scientists cycles, filters and percolates its way through the aquifer of public policy. Perhaps grasping this concept consciously or intuitively, all players seem to be trying to position themselves favorably to influence the process in the future. How they do in this debate affects that outcome.

To finish: Intuitively, the players in the game know that their battle is a battle for credibility and that in science, as well as in politics, credibility is the most important requirement to being heard and included. Secondarily, in examining the credibility of the HS, Steve McIntryre has found that there are questions to be raised about the legitimacy of an IPCC process that highlighted the HS so brightly. This is why what began as a technical fight over the meaning of esoteric statistical tests has become so important to so many. Unfortunately, that "many" does not include the audience for which the SPM and the use of the HS therein was originally intended.

Posted on November 18, 2005 08:36 AM View this article | Comments (33) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change

September 21, 2005

On Burying the Lead

The Webster/Holland/Curry/Chang work in Science this week received a load of press coverage. Little of it was intelligent. (Roger slammed one piece last Friday here.)

In my experience, often one of the most important sections of any Science or Nature paper is the last two paragraphs. Here's what the last two paragraphs say in Webster et al.:

"We deliberately limited this study to the satellite era because of the known biases before this period (28), which means that a comprehensive analysis of longer-period oscillations and trends has not been attempted. There is evidence of a minimum of intense cyclones occurring in the 1970s (11), which could indicate that our observed trend toward more intense cyclones is a reflection of a long-period oscillation. However, the sustained increase over a period of 30 years in the proportion of category 4 and 5 hurricanes indicates that the related oscillation would have to be on a period substantially longer than that observed in previous studies.
"We conclude that global data indicate a 30-year trend toward more frequent and intense hurricanes, corroborated by the results of the recent regional assessment (29). This trend is not inconsistent with recent climate model simulations that a doubling of CO2 may increase the frequency of the most intense cyclones (18, 30), although attribution of the 30-year trends to global warming would require a longer global data record and, especially, a deeper understanding of the role of hurricanes in the general circulation of the atmosphere and ocean, even in the present climate state."

Among many crucial caveats in both paragraphs, the second half of the last sentence is especially crucial to how this paper was covered. Not only is 35 years of data in an ocean-atmosphere climatology context is too short to say much of anything, 35 years effectively becomes zero years placed in the context of the multi-decadal cycling of the Tropical Atlantic Variability (itself interacting with the North Atlantic Oscillation and Meridional Overturning Circulation). This crucial caveat is obvious to Webster and his colleagues and so was mentioned in their paper, but it was not discussed in any popular media coverage that I could find. Instead, all popular media accounts picked up the message of abstract, which had no such caveats:

"We examined the number of tropical cyclones and cyclone days as well as tropical cyclone intensity over the past 35 years, in an environment of increasing sea surface temperature. A large increase was seen in the number and proportion of hurricanes reaching categories 4 and 5. The largest increase occurred in the North Pacific, Indian, and Southwest Pacific Oceans, and the smallest percentage increase occurred in the North Atlantic Ocean. These increases have taken place while the number of cyclones and cyclone days has decreased in all basins except the North Atlantic during the past decade."

And so the media coverage went, even while briefly interviewing dissenters, not examining the whole paper. The NY Times picked up the AP story which reports controversy according to Roger's formula but does not discuss the real issue: does 35 years of data in an environment with strong multi-decadal variability say anything? Roger highlighted the 9/16 Juliet Eilperin Washington Post story, which similarly missed the issue. Newsday wrote their own story here.

The climatology community will easily discern for themselves how much or little importance to place on the Webster et al. study, but the public and policy-making communities rely on somebody else for that kind of insight. Invariably the non-expert community relies upon media coverage to form their opinion. And in this case, instead of giving a complete picture, reporting both on the abstract and the last paragraph, the media has portrayed all abstract. In this they do a great disservice, deemphasizing the big picture in order to make a printable story.

Where does the fault lie? With Webster et al. for not mentioning the caveat more prominently, or with journalists for being too lazy to read and absorb the entire study? In my opinion, both.

The journalists are an easy target, so I'll forgo that discussion. As for researchers, they ordinarily get a free pass when simply reporting research while keeping their political opinions mostly to themselves. But this is not an ordinary case. Webster, Holland and Curry have been in this game for years. They know they are publishing compelling research in the U.S.'s most prominent science journal on a very sensitive topic with heightened current relevance, within a larger controversial political context. They would have anticipated the interest their article received, and should have anticipated the likelihood of their main results being parroted without the special caveat any climatologist would immediate recognize and accept. To write a paper with such a charged backstory while burying its most important caveat is in my opinion irresponsible.

Posted on September 21, 2005 07:53 AM View this article | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change

August 02, 2005

NASA's New Rockets

Yesterday I wondered about NASA risk-taking by comparing asteroid risk to discovery risks, and wondered how these high risk - high cost choices get made. I guessed that most science policy people consider the current shuttle risk of about 1 in 100 (proven at 1 in 57) to be absurdly high for such a pricey program, and I wondered what level of risk might be acceptable for the next generation of launch vehicles.

Well, here's the first lick at the answer: 1 – 1000. William Broad reported in the NY Times today about NASA's preliminary plans for orbit entry redesign – or at least the plans that industry is pushing and NASA is listening to closely. Here are some quotes:

Just as important, officials and private experts say, the small rocket for astronauts would be at least 10 times as safe as the shuttle, whose odds of disaster are estimated at roughly 1 in 100. The crew capsule atop the rocket would rendezvous in orbit with gear and spaceships that the bigger rocket ferried aloft, or with the International Space Station.
"It's safe, simple and soon," said Dr. Horowitz, an industry executive since he left the astronaut corps in October. "And it should cost less money" than the shuttles. Their reusability over 100 missions was originally meant to slash expenses but the cost per flight ended up being roughly $1 billion.

So at least one industry connection considers 1 in 1000 to be "safe."

After January 2004, when Mr. Bush announced a national effort to "extend a human presence across our solar system," Dr. Horowitz hit on the idea of using the shuttle's booster rocket as a first stage. He did the math and found it ideal. Moreover, the booster rocket was already approved for human flight and - despite its role in the 1986 Challenger disaster - had earned an excellent safety record.

I'm not sure I consider one catastrophic failure in 114 events to be evidence of "an excellent safety record."

And finally we get to the meaty stuff:

Dr. Horowitz said industry studies put the risk of catastrophic failure for the newly envisioned crew rocket at 1 in 1,000 to 3,000. "It's never going to be like driving your car," he said. "But it's a huge step in the right direction."
After leaving the astronaut corps, he went to work for the booster maker, ATK Thiokol, where he now leads the company's effort to develop the new family of rockets. An ATK Web site, www.safesimplesoon.com, discusses the shuttle-derived vehicles. The giant cargo rocket would feature a large fuel tank atop throwaway shuttle engines and, hanging on its side, a pair of shuttle booster rockets.

Even if the numbers are right, the conflict of interest here is apparent. A spokesman for the $3B company that wants to sell NASA the rockets to be used in future human spaceflight is also pushing the company-derived risk data that will be critical for political approval. Obviously NASA will eventually do its own risk estimates if the decide to use ATK products, but NASA has proved in the past to be lax on contractor oversight.

Posted on August 2, 2005 08:21 PM View this article | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Space Policy

August 01, 2005

Summer Spill, Part II

In the long run, for the intersection of politics and policy in climate change, the defining problem will likely be balancing energy needs with climate change mitigation needs. In the short term this is already happening in the Pacific Northwest, with endangered salmon standing in for climate change. I've introduced the problem in these posts (link, link, link and link).

The crux of the issue is continuing to return cheap power on a major investment in hydroelectric infrastructure, while protecting and restoring endangered salmon – species that have been severely impacted by building that hydroelectric infrastructure. Both facets of this intersection have broad impacts on the regional economy, with jobs-intensive industries reliant on cheap power (e.g.: story) and a burgeoning fishing industry (sport and food) reliant on healthy fish stocks. But lurking just beyond the competing economics, which smells like the fight between farmers and the gold mining industry in late 19th century California, is the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and its disregard for the economics of species protection. Illustrative of just one aspect of this convoluted game, the complication of managing the power system under the influence of protecting endangered species is summed up well in this article.

For reasons I covered here, the politics of salmon and power generation in the Pacific Northwest is not easily defined along party lines (also see this letter for more evidence of bipartisan politics in the issue). That may be changing. I wrote that Senator Craig was the first Pacific Northwest Senator to become directly involved (beyond just speeches and letters, in other words) in the fight over science and policy for endangered salmon, trying to kill the federally-funded Fish Passage Center (FPC) that consolidates and analyses fish survival data.

Craig at first never hid that his move to kill the FPC was in direct response to Judge Redden's ruling that BPA and the Army Corps must do more to protect salmon. But after he was hammered by the editorial shop of almost every media outlet in the region, a broad and diffuse response that seems to make clear that the priorities of Idaho citizens tip toward the fish side of this dispute, Craig's justification for moving to eliminate the FPC has become defensive.

The Idaho Statesman published a Craig op/ed on his move to kill the FPC, in which he claimed that it's simply a tax-saving move: "The FPC meets the exact description of a redundant federal program." The claims made in Craig's letter are strenuously disputed both by Washington State's Department of Fish and Wildlife and by salmon interest groups.

In response, regional House Democrats are asking their Approps chair and ranking member to oppose Craig's language and save the FPC (see this Seattle P-I story:

" 'With so much uncertainty surrounding salmon recovery presently and in the future, now is simply not the time to curtail agency access to the best available science,' says a July 20 letter to the Republican chairman and the ranking Democratic member of the House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee. The letter, circulated by Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., also was signed by Democrats Jim McDermott, Jay Inslee, Brian Baird and Rick Larsen of Washington and Earl Blumenauer, David Wu and Darlene Hooley of Oregon. "

It is unclear yet whether the summer spill issue will further break down along party lines; as yet no Pacific Northwest Senators or Representatives have publicly supported Craig's maneuver. Both parties walk a fine line, with the rise in political clout of conservation groups with conservative sympathies (e.g.) and the necessary political goal of keeping power prices low.

Perhaps the most fascinating indication of the convoluted politics on the issue can be seen in trying to find political letters written by Governors, Representatives and Senators. While all of these representatives proudly post letters and press releases to their websites on almost every issue they are involved in, trying to find their signed letters to agency heads, committee chairs and other policy players on summer spill is near impossible.

Posted on August 1, 2005 07:44 AM View this article | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Environment

July 11, 2005

Summer Spill(over)

Two major Congressional interjections into science, two tales of coverage and interest by the press and by the science policy blogs. While Rep. Barton was causing a lot of noise in the blogoworld and little in the mainstream press for the past two weeks, another issue was being played hard on the north side of the Capitol. This issue made more mainstream news but I haven't heard a peep out of other science policy writers or commentators, even though it has to be one of the most beautiful examples of the intersection of science, policy and politics.

If all you want to know is the basics, here they are: Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) has inserted language into the Energy and Water Appropriations bill (S.Rep. 109-084) to kill the Fish Passage Center (FPC) because he doesn't like the science they've been doing. FPC is a small shop based in Portland, OR that does science for the Federal hydro system in support of measures to save ESA-listed salmon. The language that Sen. Craig inserted in the bill is here and decent synopses of the issues are here and here. This GoogleNews search will give good local Pacific Northwest coverage (which is the only place it was covered beyond the WP and CSM). Craig's action is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of politics/science intersections in this issue, but its boldness makes for a very instructive departure point.

If you want to go deeper into the story, read on.

The overarching issue is called "summer spill" and here are the particulars in brief: the mainstem Columbia and Snake Rivers are straddled by 11 major dams. Adult returning salmon can get upstream to spawning grounds relatively easily thanks to fish ladder projects built into the dams, but smolts (juveniles) returning to the Pacific have a harder time getting past the dams. Since many salmon species in this system are endangered, extraordinary steps are required to be taken to ensure survival. At this point, the main method is to collect the smolts upstream and barge them below the lowest dam. The best way to ensure survival, however, is to spill water over a spillway and allow the smolts to pretend it’s just a big waterfall. This presents a loss in potential revenue for the Bonneville Power Administration, who would rather keep the water in reservoirs to be released as needed by power consumers (through the turbines), not fish (over the spillway).

Where policy, politics and science collide is in managing the entire western Montana-to-Pacific Ocean system for both fish and hydropower. The ultimate executor of the system is the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) in close collaboration with the Army Corps of Engineers (who operate the dams) and NOAA Fisheries (who 'operate' the fish). The balance between fish and power have been controlled by a Biological Opinion (BiOp), constructed originally in 1995 by NOAA Fisheries to satisfy the Endangered Species Act, which tells BPA how they must operate the system for the benefit of ESA-listed salmon species. The BiOp is written with input from local tribes that have treaty rights over the fisheries, the state Fish and Wildlife Services of ID, OR and WA and an affiliation of power consumers. Confused yet?

It's called "summer spill" because BPA spills water in the spring willingly, but would like to keep the water in reservoirs when power demand is high during hot summer months in California. So the quibble is over spilling water late into summer when most smolts have already gone down stream. The fish groups (e.g. and e.g. 2) say something like, 'spill until every last smolt has passed' and the power interests say something like, 'give me a break, we're only talking about a couple of fish here.'

The BiOp was originally issued in 1995 and is revisited when new science comes in. Litigation has been brewing over a year 2000 version of the BiOp and subsequent attempts to alter the flow regimes established therein, with the tribes and pro-salmon groups claiming that NOAA Fisheries/BPA/ACE isn't doing enough to protect listed fish. Litigation is under Federal district judge James Redden, based in Portland, OR.

Unfortunately for the power side, for the past three years NOAA Fisheries and BPA have tried to curtail some spill, and Judge Redden has consistently ruled that they are ignoring the best science in coming to their decisions. The latest rulings were in mid June and ordered that BPA adhere to the 2000 BiOp (i.e., not curtail summer spill).

Enter Sen. Craig. At first Senator Craig talked openly of attaching a rider to an appropriations bill that would simply overturn Judge Redden's order. Then his staff had a better idea: remove the funding from the Fish Passage Center, preventing them from continuing to provide data on fish/dam survival. Redden's original order came down 6/10/05, after the Bush Administration appealed the 9^th Circuit allowed the decision to stand on 6/21/05 and Craig's report language went in 6/24/05. The cause and effect went something like this:

Cause: judge rules that based on best available science, federal agencies aren't doing enough to protect ESA listed-salmon

Effect: Senator moves to kill center collecting science data on fish

Craig's main justification is that the FPC either isn't doing good work or their work is politically skewed. Since the FPC posts their memos here and all of their reports here that claim is fairly easy for the reader to examine. From a 6/24/05 Greenwire story:

"Craig's move against the spill is 'a shot across the bow,' said Sid Smith, a spokesman for the senator. 'Power rates are going up, we think ratepayers ought to have some answers for how their money is being spent.' "

But here is the irony of all ironies:

Craig spokesman: "There is a lot of science behind the biological opinion, and we believe the biological opinion will lead to the recovery of salmon," Whiting said. "One judge, with a stroke of his pen, changed the work of all the scientists. I think it's safe to say Larry Craig isn't going to sit idly by." (The Columbian, 6/24/05, pg C1)

So Craig's response is to try to kill the very shop that produces the "science behind the biological opinion." The FPC helped produce the data that went into the BiOp and is the one entity responsible for continuing to produce data in support of the BiOp. Joseph Heller would be proud.

As I said above, this is a very nuanced and complicated situation, with more angles than is possible to cover here. I will be posting more in-depth stories - including going much deeper into the politics - over the next few days here.

Posted on July 11, 2005 01:17 PM View this article | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Environment

June 28, 2005

The Barton Letters

As reported briefly yesterday, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce has requested information from Michael Mann (and collaborators) and the heads of IPCC and NSF. The tone of the letters places House E&C essentially in ethics investigation mode. (That the committee has any staffers available to pursue this while armoring up for the energy bill conference is partially the subject of this post.)

The letters have been discussed a bit in the science policy blogoworld (link, link and link), but not yet picked up by any media outlets except for, curiously, the stalwart Electricity Daily. (Come on Rick W. and Andy R., this story is waiting for you!)

Here are my thoughts on why this inquiry is both reasonable and unreasonable:

Reasonable

First, this is not a subpoena. Letters of this nature are common and usually begin the process of holding a hearing on a particular topic. While the tone of the letter is accusatory and probably will be construed as alarming by its academic recipients, NSF will be used to this kind of inquiry and will see the letter to Director Bement for what it is: the way Congress often requests information. Keep in mind that Congress is a body used to getting what it wants and loves to play the indignant, outraged, pounding-on-the-table, concerned Congressman role. So while some bloggers are worried that Congress is trying to stifle climate research or stem the flow of climate studies that show that humans are changing the climate, I think that's a misreading. Joe Barton wants to hold an anti-climate change hearing and this is the first step in that process. Hearings aren't that bad.

Second, whatever their hidden, potentially nefarious motivations, House E&C is asking directly for one thing primarily:

"The concerns surrounding these studies reflect upon the quality and transparency of federally funded research and of the IPCC review process – two matters of particular interest to the Committee."

...

"As you know, sharing data and research results is a basic tenet of open scientific inquiry, providing a means to judge the reliability of scientific claims. The ability to replicate a study, as the National Research Council has noted, is typically the gold standard by which the reliability of claims is judged. Given the questions reported about data access surrounding these studies, we also seek to learn whether obligations concerning the sharing of information developed or disseminated with federal support have been appropriately met."

On its face this is a completely legitimate request and concern. In fact, this is exactly what Congress is supposed to do but has not been doing much of in the past few years. However, it would more properly be a concern of the NSF authorizing committees (House and Senate), not an authorizing committee clearly peripheral to science integrity in general and paleoclimatology in particular.

Third, the letters raise the issue of conflict of interest (without calling it that):

"For example, one concern relates to whether IPCC review has been sufficiently robust
and independent. We understand that Dr. Michael Mann, the lead author of the studies in question, was also a lead author of the IPCC chapter that assessed and reported this very same work, and that two co-authors of the studies were also contributing authors to the same chapter." (from the letters to IPCC and NSF)

Whatever climatology scientists think of this concern, and whatever IPCC insiders know about its legitimacy, this is absolutely an appropriate concern of Congress, which should be doing a lot more oversight into conflict of interest (especially in writing of Executive Branch regulations and recommendations, but that's a different story). The ultimate consumer of IPCC information is Congress and other major decision-making bodies. If Congress hears that there are questions about the information that they have been given, especially concerning such a politically touchy issue, it is their prerogative to investigate.

Unreasonable

Now what I really think of the E&C letters. First, if House E&C had made the same request of S. Baliunas and W. Soon or the Idso's, we'd be having a different conversation (although we'd certainly still be having it). By any reasonable measure of the consensus of the climatology community, the Baliunas and Soon papers were far more controversial and scientifically questioned than the Mann et al. papers. That this request is being made of one group of authors concerning one study out of thousands of studies and authors makes this clearly motivated not by fact-finding but by the politics of climate change.

Second, the letters to Drs. Mann, Bradley and Hughes stop just short of accusing them of scientific fraud. If the committee was truly interested in investigating such, it could start with investigating something much closer to its purview. How about starting with Hubbert's Peak and how various sources, some funded by the U.S. taxpayer, have come to wildly different conclusions about remaining reserves of light crude?

Third, Congressional meddling in science research has been happening science Senator Proxmire (D-WI) began giving away Golden Fleece Awards in 1975. By ridiculing specific NSF awards (among myriad other federal expeditures, see this link), Sen. Proxmire was essentially putting pressure on the scientific community to fund more "relevant" work. Senator Inhofe's proclamations of hoaxes and other comments on climate change are in a similar vein. However, this is congressional meddling taken to a whole new level and has the potential to set a bad precedent for the future, when the topic and stakes are different and the parties in power have switched. Furthermore, while some Sens and Reps have spoken vociferously against climate change, expressing their opinions of the research, none have yet used the dais to harass climate researchers.

Which brings me to my final point: the letters are primarily meant to embarrass and harass and the hearings, if they ever happen, could be seen as an abuse of power. The science policy system in the U.S., largely unchanged since Vannevar Bush's day, gives the science community the ability and obligation to police its own ethics. In extreme cases, such as questions of fraud that cannot be resolved internally by NSF/NIH, Congress should make their own inquiries. This case does not come anywhere close to fraud (see the affirmations of Mann et al.'s work here), is clearly a technical dispute of data analysis, and thus plainly belongs within the scientific community.

Barton's letters denigrate this self-governing system and signal that any technical dispute is worth a look from the top. I doubt that in the long run this will serve as a chilling effect on climate research, but it is another extraordinary event in a interannual trend toward increasing politicization of science.

Posted on June 28, 2005 08:57 PM View this article | Comments (17) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change

June 27, 2005

Breaking-ish News

The House Energy Committee, apparently not busy enough tweaking the details of the upcoming conference report on H.R. 6, has sent letters to various players in climate change studies requesting information on how their research was done. Link to the letters is here.

The letters were dated last Thursday but it's unclear when they were posted to the House E&C webpage. Probably a classic Friday afternoon release.

I'll comment more on this and other topics in a short while, but first one note: the four-page request to Mann seems to be entirely based upon (or least take off from) a February article in the WSJ written by Antonio Regaldo. I posted here about the Regaldo WSJ article. In the post I came down hard on Mann while essentially stating that Regaldo's analysis was correct. But when this issue goes from public newsprint quibbling to Congressional hearing grandstanding (and this is obviously nothing more noble than that), we have big problems.

More later.
---
This post also appears on Kevin's blog here.

Posted on June 27, 2005 03:35 PM View this article | Comments (6) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change

June 14, 2005

A New Easily Digested Summary on Climate Actions

Thank god for the colored fishwrap. If the USA Today hadn't told me today that "The debate is over: Globe is warming" (link), I'd have to keep posting on Prometheus, hunting for nuggets of insight on the current state of consensus.

My snickering on USA Today headline writing aside (I think I prefer The Onion), Dan Vergano does a decent job of summing up some recent corporate attitudes and actions on climate change. None of it is surprising; a few of us had expected the American corporate machine to start moving on climate change when they realized that their international business interests were at stake post-Kyoto (link). But the article tries to go inside the heads of some affected corporations and includes this pearl from Big Coal:

" 'On the business side, it just looks like climate change is not going away,' says Kevin Leahy of Cinergy, a Cincinnati-based utility that reports $4.7 billion in annual revenue and provides electricity, mostly generated from coal, to 1.5 million customers. Most firms see global warming as a problem whose risks have to be managed, he says. "

This is what some climate/science policy people have been saying for a while. We're beyond the science and now into the risk realm. That is, we've identified a risk, which implies both knowledge and uncertainty. The risk, however you perceive it, isn't going away. So you better decide whether you want to be proactive or indifferent. This is boilerplate for regular readers of Prometheus, but it is interesting to hear a representative of "the problem" say the same thing.

The article is also interesting for trotting out the now infamous Rick Piltz, attributing to him expertise in energy conservation (he did publish a paper about it in 1989), without really showing whether Vergano actually interviewed Piltz for the article. It will be interesting to watch whether Piltz becomes a recognized and oft-quoted expert on climate change for the next two weeks. (While Revkin gets to sit back and bask in the glory of originality. Nice job, Andy.)

Posted on June 14, 2005 04:09 PM View this article | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change

June 09, 2005

Issues of Integrity in Climate Science

Rick Weiss reports in the Washington Port today about a study appearing in the latest Nature on scientific integrity (link and link).

Two points I'd like to make:

1- The study was done on NIH-funded scientists and so doesn't immediately lend much insight into integrity in climate science (not that Prometheus is focused away from health sciences, but the expertise of the authors trend toward Earth and space sciences, so most posts are in that realm). Health sciences researchers have different challenges in collecting and interpreting data than do Earth scientists. It's not too much of a stretch to point out that climate science is based on interpreting the past and the future while hoping that both shed light on the present (the present is weather, after all). Medical studies are almost wholly focused on the present. While this perhaps is a subtle distinction, my feeling is that it is likely crucial in how it affects the integrity of research processes.

2- Despite what I write above, the authors of the Nature article (Martinson et al.) make a point relevant for climate studies:

"Our findings suggest that US scientists engage in a range of behaviours extending far beyond FFP [fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism] that can damage the integrity of science."

Ethical and value issues have been raised repeatedly in the climate sciences (if you're not a regular reader of Prometheus, just spend ten minutes in the archives), but in the published literature the problem has been often portrayed as a problem of the selective construction and interpretation of models (see the Paul Edwards paper and his citations in Science as Culture, 1999, 8(4), 437-472.).

Edwards points out in his paper that:

"To a large degree these debates are in fact about the model/data relationship: whether model results agree with observations, how much each of these can be trusted, and what sort of role model projections should play in policymaking. I will argue that some parties to these debates have relied upon a conceptual separation between models and data that is, at best, misleading. The interdependent, even symbiotic, relationship between theory and observation in global climate science requires a different conception of the nature of scientific work. Uncertainties exist not only because of quantifiable, reducible empirical and computational limits, but also because of unquantifiable, irreducible epistemological limits related to inductive reasoning and to the nature of model-based global science. These uncertainties can be, and have been, employed as political resources."

I would argue that this is where the integrity of climate scientists must be examined, and it will be a far more subtle effect than in simply asking about dropping a few data points or any of the ten questions asked by Martinson et al. in the Nature study. For example, the dividing line between judging initial model output as likely or unlikely and then following certain research lines based on initial output is one place likely to be influenced by a "consideration of the wider research environment" as pointed out by Martinson et al.

Martinson et al. go on to say:

"In ongoing analyses, not yet published, we find significant associations between scientific misbehaviour and perceptions of inequities in the resource distribution processes in science. We believe that acknowledging the existence of such perceptions and recognizing that they may negatively affect scientists' behaviours will help in the search for new ways to promote integrity in science."

The question becomes: do climate scientists also "misbehave" because of their perceptions on how the political system is treating the climate change question? And if they are misbehaving at anywhere near the rate found by Martinson et al. for medical researchers, what does it say, if anything, for the future intersections of politics and climate science? The question should also be asked in the context of Edwards' points and so also becomes: If climate scientists are "misbehaving," where in the process are they most likely to do so? And is this a result of poor scientific training, poor or a lack of ethical training, or some deliberate, evil malfeasance?

The question most fascinating to me is: How are climate scientists "misbehaving" unwittingly, if at all, as a result the various influences of values they are swimming in?

Posted on June 9, 2005 02:25 PM View this article | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change

May 12, 2005

Wake-up Calls

There was an interesting wake up call in the Letters section of Science this week.

It was along a familiar theme: federal science funding is being axed in an alarming way, and the United States risks a slew of (undefined in this short letter) future maladies if we forget that strong support for basic science and tech research is a key ingredient in our economic health. It’s a point that was also made in the masthead editorial by Lazowska and Patterson.

The difference between the featured editorial and the short letter is that the author of the latter is Bart Gordon, the ranking member of the Committee on Science in the U.S. House of Representatives. Rep. Gordon repeats a familiar (of late) theme: “[misguided budget priorities] puts our nation’s strong global standing in science and technology at risk now and in the future.” But he is doing so from an unfamiliar podium to most readers of Science, a podium perhaps much more relevant than that from which most scientists usually hear the same message.

The fact that this letter was even written signals to me a new urgency in Congress over science funding. This is a member of Congress practically begging the community of federally-funded researchers to speak up, to slough off their hesitation and embarrassment, and to place a call to their elected representatives. It is a member of Congress saying, “Hey, despite what you’ve heard about how things work around here, individuals calling on their representatives actually does have a large impact.” In other words, this is an ironic role reversal: an elected representative lobbying the U.S. science and tech community to lobby other members of Congress on federal funding priorities.

The science and technology community hears this message from time to time, but how often do they hear it from a member of Congress directly? That should be both a neat insight into how Congress works and how people can influence the system, and a strong wake-up call. According to one of the best-placed members in science policy and politics, the science and tech community has a large role to play in shaping federal research priorities but is abrogating that role.

Any researcher in the U.S. should meditate on Rep. Gordon’s closing words:

“Researchers, students, faculty, this affects you. Write, call, e-mail, and speak on the importance of what you do for this nation’s economy. Help us help you by being your own unrelenting advocates.”

It is easy to dismiss this message as self-serving when from another science-based commentator, but when the message comes directly from the horse’s mouth (conflicts of interest in protecting committee turf aside), it is something all federally-funded researchers should take note of.

Posted on May 12, 2005 06:48 AM View this article | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | R&D Funding

February 25, 2005

New Entrants in Climate Change Debate

Author: Kevin Vranes (website. email)

The first shot has been fired in the post- Kyoto-in-effect-for-everybody-else United States. A new package of climate change bills (S.386, 387 and 388) was introduced last week by Senators Hagel, Alexander, Craig, and Dole, all of the R persuasion. Two eye-opening excerpts from Hagel’s floor speech:

"I rise today to introduce three pieces of legislation which I believe can help contribute to a new domestic and international consensus on climate change. This legislation builds upon three principles: the need for shared responsibilities between developed and developing countries; the linkages between environmental, economic, and energy policies; and the employment of greenhouse gas intensity as the best measurement upon which to build an effective climate policy."

"We all agree on the need for a clean environment and stable climate. The debate is about solutions. The question we face is not whether we should take action, but what kind of action we should take. Climate change initiatives should include commitments to research and development, technology, and a more efficient and productive use of energy and resources."

Why is this eye opening? For starters, I wonder if Senator Hagel's press secretary equates "we" with "everybody" or with "the four of us cosponsoring this legislation." Certainly Senator Inhofe, and many others who like to defer to Mr. Inhofe's expertise on climate change, would be loathe to agree that "the debate is [now] about solutions." Sen. Inhofe is still talking about hoaxes.

Since the text of the new bills have not yet been released by the General Printing Office, it is impossible to get into the weeds of the first post-Kyoto foray into U.S. climate policy. But the introduction alone, coupled with Hagel's floor speech, signals that a group of Republican Senators are willing become proactive in the climate change policy, rather than reactive. It brings a new group of legislators into the debate, already attempting to wield compromise. It takes the biggest R-side knock on Kyoto ("developing countries are excluded from emissions controls at our expense") head on.

Hagel, Craig, Dole and Alexander all voted against the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act in October 2003, as the bill went down 43-55. During the debate and vote, the word amongst all staffers on the floor was, "my boss is very close to being able to vote for this, it just needs to change a little." Hagel el al.'s legislation now ensures that at least four Senate R's are guaranteed to work behind the scenes for passage of a climate change bill.

The introduced legislation was covered by nobody beyond the Southwest Nebraska News and the Lincoln Journal. But if these bills are the first sign that American multinational businesses see the Kyoto train leaving the station without them (credit Steve Schneider) and are putting pressure on their electeds to get on board, much more media coverage is in store for S.386 – 388.

Posted on February 25, 2005 07:48 AM View this article | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change

February 18, 2005

Open Season on Hockey and Peer Review

Author: Kevin Vranes (website. email)

The recent 2/14 WSJ article (“Global Warring...” by Antonio Regaldo) addresses the debate that most readers of this site are well familiar with: the Mann et al. hockey stick. The WSJ is still asking – and trying to answer – the basic questions: hockey stick or no hockey stick? But the background premise of the article, stated explicitly and implicitly throughout, is that it was the hockey stick that led to Kyoto and other climate policy. Is it?

I think it’s fair to say that to all of us in the field of climatology, the notion that Kyoto is based on the Mann curve is utter nonsense. If a climatologist, or a policy advisor charged with knowing the science well enough to make astute recommendations to his/her boss, relied solely on the Mann curve to prove definitively the existence of anthropogenic warming, then we’re in deeper trouble than anybody realizes. (This is essentially what Stephan Ramstorf writes in a 1/27 RealClimate post.) And although it’s easy to believe that national and international policy can hinge on single graphs, I hope we give policy makers more credit than that.

But maybe we are in that much trouble. The WSJ highlights what Regaldo and McIntyre says is Mann’s resistance or outright refusal to provide to inquiring minds his data, all details of his statistical analysis, and his code. The WSJ’s anecdotal treatment of the subject goes toward confirming what I’ve been hearing for years in climatology circles about not just Mann, but others collecting original climate data.

As concerns Mann himself, this is especially curious in light of the recent RealClimate posts (link and link) in which Mann and Gavin Schmidt warn us about peer review and the limits therein. Their point is essentially that peer review is limited and can be much less than thorough. One assumes that they are talking about their own work as well as McIntyre’s, although they never state this. Mann and Schmidt go to great lengths in their post to single out Geophysical Research Letters. Their post then seems a bit ironic, as GRL is the journal in which the original Mann curve was published (1999, vol 26., issue 6, p. 759), an article which is now receiving much attention as being flawed and under-reviewed. (For that matter, why does Table 1 in Mann et al. (1999) list many chronologies in the Southern Hemisphere while the rest of the paper promotes a Northern Hemisphere reconstruction? Legit or not, it’s a confusing aspect of the paper that should never have made it past peer review.)

Of their take on peer review, I couldn’t agree more. In my experience, peer review is often cursory at best. So this is what I say to Dr. Mann and others expressing deep concern over peer review: give up your data, methods and code freely and with a smile on your face. That is real peer review. A 12 year-old hacker prodigy in her grandparents’ basement should have as much opportunity to check your work as a “semi-retired Toronto minerals consultant.” Those without three letters after their name can be every bit as intellectually qualified, and will likely have the time for careful review that typical academic reviewers find lacking.

Specious analysis of your work will be borne out by your colleagues, and will enter the debate with every other original work. Your job is not to prevent your critics from checking your work and potentially distorting it; your job is to continue to publish insightful, detailed analyses of the data and let the community decide. You can be part of the debate without seeming to hinder access to it.

Posted on February 18, 2005 10:33 AM View this article | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change

January 24, 2005

Total Recall II

Author: Kevin Vranes (website. email)

One day last year while, with some astonishment, listening to Sean O'Keefe blithely tell his Senate overseers whatever they wanted to hear, I couldn't help but wonder how O'Keefe was ever able to talk the White House upper echelon into his nutty manned Mars vision. GW already had the reputation - if not yet the direct sobriquet from Senator McCain - of spending like a drunken sailor (although of course it is Congress that spends, not the President, but editorial writers and talking heads never seem to remember that). It was apparent to most that putting a few people on Mars might be measured in the trillions of dollars (the White House and NASA have sidestepped putting a price tag on moon/Mars, but hinted at about $180B by 2020, which is when the moon bases will be completed and we might be ready to launch to Mars). With the U.S. already in heavy debt and the Chinese and Japanese buying up American dollars just as fast as the Philadelphia mint would print them, spending huge new sums on exploration visions seemed curious.

But no sooner was POTUS running over America with a new grand space vision (which, incidentally, was timed suspiciously close to the Chinese announcement of an intention to go to the moon - causing some to wonder if we were in a new race to repeat something we accomplished forty years previously), than the trickle down began at NASA. Previous grumblings about NASA running NOAA's satellites were renewed, and most Earth scientists who had received NASA grant money were warned of a tighter future (which was later made reality in the FY05 budget).

Somewhere buried in the calculations of the new moon/Mars paradigm is one of NASA's most successful science missions: the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble is aging, its orbit decaying, and in order to keep HST from presenting itself upon some random city, NASA has two choices: boost it and fix it, or fly it into the Indian Ocean. Fixing it adds a new wrinkle, however: financing O'Keefe's new moon/Mars calculus means backing out of the ISS as fast as possible. To O'Keefe, this meant (referring to his Senate testimony last Spring and conversations with NASA employees) that not even one Shuttle flight could be spared to fix Hubble. The only option would be a robotic mission to prevent Hubble from sharing the fate of the Andrea Gail. But a robotic mission to save Hubble is understandably distasteful, with a high price and very high risk.

O'Keefe has always covered his distaste for manned Hubble repair under the cloak of a deep fear for astronaut safety. O'Keefe may honestly fear for astronaut safety, but he never explained the difference in safety between servicing Hubble and continuing to build ISS over the next decade, which will also use the shuttle. His determination to not send astronauts to HST has continued despite the clamoring for a repair mission from most astronauts(the ones who take the risks), the National Research Council, the American Astronomy Society, and dozens of other interested expert groups. After the weight of these communities have done nothing to sway his proclivities, Sean O'Keefe's steadfast refusal to even consider saving the Hubble seems obviously connected to his devotion to retooling NASA for Total Recall II.

News accounts today (link, link, and link) confirm the new prioritization. NASA now plans a robotic mission to Hubble solely designed to de-orbit the telescope, spitting in the face of the nearly $300 million Congress appropriated in FY05 to service Hubble. The reports also confirm that NASA continues to shy away from paying $1 billion to save a highly successful and proven program in favor breaking the bank on a much more expensive project - perhaps eventually in the many trillions - that may never fly anyway.

Now that O'Keefe has announced a move to more lucrative employment in order to send his kids to college, the rest of the scientific community might have expected a manned mission to save Hubble to be back on the table. Apparently it won't be back on the table for the Office of Management and Budget and NASA. The NASA locomotives have begun to lumber away toward manned moon/Mars, and even though the chief engineer has bailed out, not even the astronauts who are volunteering to risk their lives for Hubble can stop the train.

Posted on January 24, 2005 07:31 AM View this article | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Space Policy

Category:

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November 07, 2008

The House race to watch

May 13, 2008

NFIP revamp moving through the grinder

November 20, 2007

Energy? Climate change? Linked? Huh?

November 05, 2007

An appreciation of Mr. Bloomberg

October 22, 2007

Water in the west

October 19, 2007

Citing carbon emissions, Kansas rejects coal plants

October 18, 2007

NFIP reauthorization moving along

August 29, 2007

Twenty years of public opinion about global warming

August 20, 2007

New Changnon paper on winter storm losses

July 17, 2007

Where is public confidence in science?

June 27, 2007

The nothingness that is the new energy bill

June 12, 2007

Aren't new problems always old problems?

June 11, 2007

A little percolation on energy policy

June 06, 2007

Curious quote from the recalcitrant

May 30, 2007

Here comes the rain, kids. NASA administrator says global warming ain't no stinking problem.

May 29, 2007

The messy and messier politics of AGW solutions

May 09, 2007

--It's sort of a screw-up--

May 04, 2007

Proxmire alive and well reports Enquirer

May 02, 2007

A preview of things to come

May 01, 2007

taking options off the table....

April 30, 2007

What's a poor science type to do?

April 10, 2007

The series of tubes pumps internets and horses and oil and gas

April 06, 2007

Still responding to the last disaster

What to think about (western) water?

March 28, 2007

if you want an example of selling science...

March 24, 2007

a little slowdown....

March 23, 2007

Who is SAIC?

March 22, 2007

Who is talking national cat insurance now?

March 21, 2007

Al Gore's appearance before Senate EPW

The state push to the federal push

March 15, 2007

Rep. McNerney in Wired

March 14, 2007

Since nobody around here does the GMO thing....

The future of coal

March 13, 2007

Point made: it's the icon not the issue

March 12, 2007

Montana and water and the strange case of science and politics

March 06, 2007

The assessors assessing the assessments

March 01, 2007

Finally something for us to really fight about!

February 23, 2007

ASLA wrap-up on House IPCC hearings

left science/right science on....?

February 21, 2007

Earthquake hazards policy talk tomorrow

February 05, 2007

Sterman and Sweeney paper on public attitudes and GHG mitigation