Our newsletter, Ogmius, is out today with an essay by Mike Rodemeyer, Director of the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, titled, “Science, Genetically Modified Foods, and the Rumsfeld Doctrine”. He writes,

“The lack of prior experience with biotech foods, combined with the perceived lack of benefit and the absence of any trusted proxy on the safety issue, has led to the current skepticism about safety and hostility toward biotech foods in Europe and other parts of the world. More assurances from scientists that such concerns are misplaced are unlikely to change the dynamic. Fears about the “unknown unknowns” can be overcome only through experience and trust, neither of which can be earned overnight.”

Read the whole thing here.

ASU’s Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes has their email newsletter just out as well. The feature a perspective by Oxford University’s Steve Rayner titled, The International Challenge of Climate Change: Thinking Beyond Kyoto. He writes,

“Unfortunately, support for Kyoto has become a litmus test for determining those who take the threat of climate change seriously. But, between Kyoto’s supporters and those who scoff at the dangers of leaving greenhouse gas emissions unchecked, there has been a tiny minority of commentators and analysts convinced of the urgency of the problem while remaining profoundly sceptical of the proposed solution. Their voices have largely gone unheard. Climate change policy has become a victim of the sunk costs fallacy. We are told that Kyoto is “the only game in town”. However, it is plausible to argue that implementing Kyoto has distracted attention and effort from real opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect society against climate impacts.”

Read the whole thing here.

I have an op-ed in today’s Washington Post on science advisory committees.

“The current debate over these panels reinforces the old myth that we can somehow cleanly separate science from politics and then ensure that the science is somehow untainted by the “impurities” of the rest of society. Yet paradoxically, we also want science to be relevant to policy. A better approach would be to focus our attention on developing transparent, accountable and effective processes to manage politics in science — not to pretend that it doesn’t exist.”

Read the whole thing here.

Part I made the case for a clear conflict of interest when reinsurers attribute or project increasing disasters because of climate change. Part III will explore the question, to what extent will climate change be responsible for increasing disasters and disaster costs in the future?

Now in Part II we turn to the merits of these claims, which are made by many beyond just some in the reinsurance industry. This post looks backwards and asks, is climate change responsible for the growth in disasters and disaster costs up to the present? The answer, detailed below, is “Not at all.” There is no scientific basis for attributing the increasing trend in disasters to changes in climate, regardless of cause. This is for two reasons. First, the IPCC has found very little evidence for trends in weather extremes, both in its 1996 and 2001 reports. Second, given the magnitude of growth in disasters, there is clearly much going on beyond any possible changes in climate. The reason for increasing loses lies entirely with changes in societal vulnerability to disasters. Dan Sarewitz and I make this case in an article in The New Republic this week.

I was first drawn to this subject in 1995 when I was working at the National Center for Atmospheric Research with Mickey Glantz as a post-doc on a project on extreme weather events and impacts. At that time the trend of increasing disasters and disaster costs was clear. Munich Re observed this in a 1996 press release:

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Many scientists, policy makers and activists are quick to point out when industry misuses science or has a conflict of interest when making scientific claims. And right they should. Examples are familiar –smoking, drug approval tests, Erin Brockovich, the fossil fuel industryand climate change and so on. Even though conflicts in interest abound, Iam sure that the vast majority of folks in industry don’t misuse science. But because industry can bring so many resources to promote its interests, its advocacy efforts can have a disproportionate impact.

However much to my surprise, not only does the reinsurance industry get what amounts to a free pass from scientists and advocates when they make claims about climate change and disasters, but the United Nations, home to the venerable IPCC, and advocacy groups often partner with reinsurance experts to advance their agenda. Not only does this not make sense for intellectual reasons, as the UN’s IPCC is supposed to be the authority of climate science (why do they need reinsurance industry backup?) but also for pragmatic reasons. Doesn’t the UN realize that if it partners with a conflicted reinsurance industry, whether or not its claims are correct, itsets the stage for people (like me in this post) to point out this uncomfortable fact? Before evaluating the substance of claims made by reinsurance companies about climate change and disasters, let’s first ask if reinsurance has ac onflict in interest when making claims of increasing disasters related to climate change.

The reinsurance industry makes money, by and large, through income that it earns on its investments, and not through the differences between what it collects in premiums and pays out for disasters. But its premiums are important from the standpoint of not just being able to pay out when disasters strike, but crucially for creating a reserve of funds that can be invested and thus generate income for shareholders. The greater the reserve, then the greater the potential income. It seems like pointing out the obvious that the reinsurance industry has a powerful vested interest in charging the highest rates that the market will bear for its products. And the prospect of more disasters means a basis for charging higher rates. Thus, for the moment setting aside whether or not recent disasters are caused by climate change, it seems pretty clear that when the reinsurance industry say that disasters will get worse in the future, they have a clear conflict in interest. The following statements would appear to bear this out:

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Author: Naomi Oreskes

Dear Colleagues,

Some folks have been commenting unfavorably about a press release issued by Voice of America, to accompany a recent interview I did with them. I would urge you to listen to the interview, because the press release misrepresented my comments. In my interview, I was at pains to emphasize that the recent tsunami has nothing to do with global warming, and it would be a mistake to imply that it did. I did say, however, and stand by the comment, that these events do illustrate the extreme vulnerability of millions of impoverished people, who live in coastal areas, to the kinds of effects that global warming may produce, and that poor countries are less able than wealthy ones to protect themselves.

The press release also misquoted me with respect to the causes of global warming, saying that I said that “agriculture also contributes to Global Warming by producing carbon dioxide.” In fact, I said that agriculture contributes to global warming through methane production, which was part of trying to make the point that we are all implicated in global warming, rich and poor, industrialized and non-industrialized, and therefore it behooves us to work together, rather than to point fingers.

Naomi Oreskes

With the exception of hand-wringing about intellectual diversity on campuses, the contemporary S&T policy community spends precious little time on “social sciences policy” – that is, (a) policies for the social science and (b) how the social sciences contribute to decision making. Frances Fukuyama thinks that this is a mistake. He writes in a recent essay,

“The scandal that the media has thus far failed to cover is the utter failure of the American academy to train adequate numbers of people with deep knowledge about the world outside the United States. This failure is linked to the decline of regional studies in American universities over the past generation and the misguided directions being taken by the social sciences in recent years, particularly political science and economics.

The story here is one of colonization of the study of politics by economics. Known as the “queen of the social sciences,” economics is the only discipline that looks like a natural science. Economists are carefully trained to gather data and build causal models that can be rigorously tested empirically. The data that economists work from are quantitative from the start and can be analyzed with a powerful battery of statistical tools.

Economists’ powerful methodology has been a source of envy and emulation on the part of other social scientists. The past two decades have seen the growth of what is known as “rational choice” political science, in which political scientists seek to model political behavior using the same mathematical tools (game theory, for the most part) used by economists. Economists tend to believe that regularities in human behavior are universal and invariant across different cultures and societies (for example, the law of supply and demand is the same in Japan and Botswana). Similarly, rational choice political science seeks to create broad, universally applicable laws of political behavior by generalizing across large numbers of countries rather than focusing intensively on the history and context of individual countries or regions…

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Pew Center on Global Climate Change: Arlington, Virginia

The Pew Center on Global Climate Change seeks a highly qualified and committed person to coordinate activities on the science and environmental impacts of climate change in coordination with the Center’s Director of Policy Analysis. The position will manage Pew’s work on determining the state of the knowledge about the science and environmental impacts of climate change and to communicate this knowledge to policy-makers by publishing reports, conducting conferences, and communicating findings.

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