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

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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:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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:

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

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For our readers across the pond, you’ll get it first (available here and here). We look forward to comments and criticisms!

We discussed the lawsuit in depth here at Prometheus not long ago (here and here). Now the Supreme Court has rendered a judgment. The outcome is along the lines that we anticipated (see Office Pool 2007), with the Supreme Court deciding 5-4 that EPA has authority to regulate carbon dioxide, but seemingly withholding judgment on whether EPA must regulate CO2. But a close reading of the majority opinion (warning: by this non-expert) suggests that the ruling in fact leaves EPA little alternative other than to promulgate regulations on greenhouse gas emissions.

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In a paper by Jim Hansen that we discussed last week, he called for a consensus statement to be issued on global warming, West Antarctica and sea level rise, from relevant scientific experts. A group of scientists have beat him to the punch issuing a consensus statement last week:

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