[This op-ed by Dan Sarewitz and Roger Pielke, Jr. on the 2006 hurricane season was not published by a number of major newspapers. So we are happy to share it here. Anyone interested in publishing it before a wider audience, please send us an email. -Ed.]

The 2006 hurricane season has ended without a single hurricane landfall along the Gulf or East coasts. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans, journalists, politicians, and even some scientists were proclaiming that the catastrophe of global warming was upon us. A quiet year later, perhaps there is some room for clearer thinking about hurricanes, about global warming, and about society’s vulnerability to climate.

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This post is a slightly edited version of some random musings on hurricane science that I have shared with the Tropical Storms discussion list.

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Climate scientist James Annan has related a tale of angst and suffering as a result of peer reviews that will, in broad terms, sound familiar to most academics. His experience raises a question that I’d like to ask of the folks familiar with the IPCC.

I have no idea what James’ paper is about, except that it argues that very high values of climate sensitivity can be ruled out, which I take it is contrary to the views of some others in the field. This situation leads me to consider several general questions about the IPCC:

How does the IPCC handle information that appears after its deadline for citation of peer-reviewed papers that may contradict literature which appears before that deadline?

Doesn’t this create a potential conflict of interest for contributors to the IPCC who are reviewing papers that appear during the drafting process?

Take hurricanes and climate change for example. Whatever the IPCC reports next March, it certainly won’t be as current as the recent WMO consensus report because the IPCC cannot cite literature that appeared after some point early in 2006, and the WMO can. And I’d bet there will be more studies released between now and march. On hurricanes the IPCC may wind up creating confusion by taking the scientific discussion back to early 2006 when in reality much has happened since. Similarly, its discussion of climate sensitivity and other areas could, in principle, suffer from the same lag effects. Now James’ paper was rejected, and for all I know, correctly. But on highly sensitive topics, I find myself agreeing with the AAAS – trust alone is no longer enough.

[Scott Saleska of the University of Arizona has asked an interesting question in the comments of a post from last week. We have elevated it so that it does go unnoticed. Thanks Scott! -Ed.]

Let’s say air capture, or any of the many geoengineering options being widely discussed (e.g. my colleague here at the UofA, Roger Angel’s recent idea* to block 1.8% of the incoming energy with a gadget at the L1 Lagrange orbital point), ends up being feasible in a few decades. And let’s say we actually reach the point where we can, as Roger [Pielke, not Angel] suggested, tune the atmosphere’s CO2.

What level do we tune it to? And who gets to decide that level? The “worst off” individual (to follow Rawls famous “Theory of Justice”)? Then we probably let the Maldivians decide, since under current projections, sea level rise could completely wipe them off the map. Places like Russia, on the other hand, would probably prefer to have some moderate global warming, because that probably would give them better agriculture in Siberia, and ice-free ports on the north Atlantic.

[* Roger Angel, 2006. Feasibility of cooling the Earth with a cloud of small spacecraft near the inner Lagrange point (L1), PNAS: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/103/46/17184 (subscription require). Or see the free podcast of his recent talk at our Global Climate Change series at University of Arizona, in which he reviewed a whole range of options from solar cells to Paul Crutzen’s aerosols, to his satellites: http://podcasting.arizona.edu/globalclimatechange.html or any of the others who spoke, focusing mostly on science of climate change]

Now that the WMO has issued a consensus statement on the state of climate science, scientists should be careful in how they characterize the overall state of the science. I have complete respect for scientists who have strong views on what the data, models, and theory shows, and fully expect them to make their case to their colleagues and others. However, scientists also should be careful not to represent their own views as in fact representing a consensus of the community when they do not, especially when making arguments for political action.

Here is an example of a scientist involved in the hurricane debate, Michael Mann of Penn State, making a demonstrably incorrect statement about the state of understanding of hurricanes and climate change six days after the WMO issued its consensus statement on tropical cyclones and climate change:

It is the increasingly widespread belief by researchers that increasing sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are leading to increases in various measures of Hurricane activity over time, both globally, and for the tropical North Atlantic region whose storms influence the Gulf coast and East Coast of the U.S..

Here is what the WMO says:

The possibility that greenhouse gas induced global warming may have already caused a substantial increase in some tropical cyclone indices has been raised (e.g. Mann and Emanuel, 2006), but no consensus has been reached on this issue.

And on the existence of trends in storm intensity the WMO says:

This is still hotly debated area for which we can provide no definitive conclusion.

This is a situation that Dr. Mann should understand well, as he has argued strongly for adherence to scientific consensus on his weblog, RealClimate. Dr. Mann’s characterization about what researchers increasingly believe about hurricanes and climate change is not backed up by what the researchers themselves are saying. Why does this matter? Because Dr. Mann is using his characterization of the community’s views on hurricanes and climate change as a basis for arguing for particular policy actions. As Dr. Mann writes:

We are likely to see only increased warming and increased Hurricane activity, if we continue to increase atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations through fossil fuel burning.

To be clear — I take no issue with Dr. Mann making an argument that reducing greenhouse gas emissions will reduce hurricane intensity. That is what he believes, and as a scientist conducting research in this area he is someone we should listen to. But when he characterizes the community’s views as “widespread” and “increasingly” supporting his perspective, he has engaged in a mischaracterization. Mischaracterizations of science, by themselves, are perhaps of only scholarly interest. But when the mischaracterizations are used as tools of political advocacy they are no longer simply mischaracterizations of science, but instead, they are bad policy arguments.

For scientists wanting to use the notion of consensus as a tool of political advocacy, they risk being perceived as inconsistent when their actions change when they are the ones on the outside looking in.

[Andy Revkin shares these comments by email on the media and climate change, which I have reproduced here with his permission. He is blogging them here where he has additional comments, including some specific to today's hearing heald by Senator Inhofe on the media and climate change. Our view here at Prometheus is that Senator Inhofe's hearing, which we watched in full, was a dud all around. We appreciate Andy sharing these comments. -Ed.]

I do think the media have sometimes screwed up in covering climate, in three ways. For a long time they ignored the story because they saw it as a “he says, she says” dispute. Then they ignored it as simply too complex and incremental (not good ingredients for a news story).

Lately, some have presumed that because disagreement is gone on the basics (more carbon dioxide will warm the world) there is now no aspect of the problem that is uncertain. That’s led to a lot of “be worried” coverage that really, to my eye, has gone way beyond the science.

After covering human influence on climate for 20 years, through more than one cycle of public engagement and disengagement, I stand by my assertions in The Times and public talks and my new book, The North Pole Was Here, that everyone in this polarized discourse is missing the powerful middle.

There is no serious disagreement in the scientific community at all on the main point — that humans are exerting a growing influence on the thermostat of the home planet.

To me, that’s more than enough to justify a lot of attention, while perhaps not amounting to the kind of real-time disaster that the media tend to get excited about.

There is a tendency of some media to try to fit human-driven warming in the old-style template for an environmental crisis that we grew up with in the 20th century. That is a bad fit. It is harder than that. This problem, and possible solutions, all relate to the future.

Old problems that were dealt with effectively were realtime threats to health and welfare (soot, smog, untreated sewage). Add a filter and they go away.

Even if we turned off every engine on Earth today, there would be no discernible impact on climate for many, many years, if not decades. It’d be great if this issue was easier to understand, and write about, but we’re stuck with it the way it is.

The best tonic of course: consider giving as a holiday gift The North Pole Was Here, the one book out there that powerfully conveys this, and is the first to do so for everyone 10 and up (a range including Senators!). It was just named one of the Outstanding Science Books of 2006 by the Childrens Book Council & National Science Teachers Assn.

How about this comment from George Monbiot today, a columnist for The Guardian:

[E]very time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned.

Or this not long ago from NASA Scientist James Hansen (PDF):

. . . a certain shock treatment is needed, but it would best be delivered with a two-by-four as a solid whack to the head of politicians who remain oblivious to fundamental physical facts.

Allusions to murder and beatings kind of puts a chill on discussing options for climate policy, doesn’t it? Maybe that is the point. It certainly makes me think.

In my view people who fashion themselves as public intellectuals have an even greater obligation than everyone else to encourage civil debate and discussion. This applies to people on all sides of political debates. It is all too easy for leaders to incite people to actual violence on issues that they are passionate about. Mr. Monbiot and Dr. Hansen (and others, again on all sides) may not have that outcome in mind as they write such statements, but if they don’t watch out, that may be what they get.

So how about we all encourage some common civility in public discussions of climate change, especially from (but not limited to) our public intellectuals?

According to the New York Times NASA has announced that it wishes to return to the moon and set up a permanent base 50 years after its first landing. NASA’s proposal should raise an eyebrow among anyone who understands NASA’s past failures at successfully budgeting human spaceflight programs.

Here is an excerpt from the Times story by Warren E. Leary:

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[It is our pleasure to provide a rebuttal by William Sweet, author of Kicking the Carbon Habit, to a review on Mr. Sweet's recent book by Roger Pielke, Jr. which recently appeared in Nature. Mr. Sweet's book can be found online here and purchased through at a discount through Amazon and other online retailers. Pielke's review can be found here in PDF. We thanks Mr. Sweet for his contribution and welcome your comments. -Ed.]

What Just Ain’t So…Also Just Wasn’t Said in the First Place

In a review that appeared in the Oct. 19, 2006 issue of Nature, Roger A. Pielke Jr. praised my Kicking the Carbon Habit for recognizing that there are uncertainties in climate science and yet arguing convincingly that a reasonable person can “still believe that human influence on climate is a problem worth our attention and action.” But then he proceeds to claim that the book’s discussion of policy is “regrettably grounded in a fundamental error that surprisingly was not caught in the review process” — an error having supposedly to do with the way the Pacala-Socolow carbon mitigation wedges is presented.

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“Air capture” refers to the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Leading work on this technology has been done by David Keith at the University of Calgary, his recent Ph.D. student Joshua Stolaroff, and separately by Klaus Lackner at Columbia University. Motivated by recent discussions on this site about the Massachusetts vs. EPA lawsuit, I wondered what the costs would be of neutralizing the carbon dioxide emissions of U.S. autos via air capture, and indeed all of U.S. emissions. Here is what I have come up with.

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