This week’s issue of The Economist has an interesting quote from Al Gore in an article about how environmentalists are coming to embrace adaptation:

“I USED to think adaptation subtracted from our efforts on prevention. But I’ve changed my mind,” says Al Gore, a former American vice-president and Nobel prize-winner. “Poor countries are vulnerable and need our help.” His words reflect a shift in the priorities of environmentalists and economists.

For years, greens said adaptation—coping with climate change, rather than stopping it—was a bit like putting out a fire on the Titanic: desirable, no doubt, but the main thing was to change course.

Gore, of course, was quite vocal in his opposition to adaptation in his book, Earth in the Balance. The image above of Al Gore with fangs comes from the cover of the July, 2000 issue of The Atlantic Monthly issue that carried Dan Sarewitz’s and my plea for adaptation to play a much greater role in climate policy (available here in PDF).

Gore was not pictured in such a manner because he was snarling at adaptation. But he (and many fellow travelers on this issue) very well could have been. Long-time readers of this blog will be very familiar with the abuse that adaptation advocates get from some quarters. Perhaps with Gore’s backing adaptation can rightly take its place alongside mitigation as a central element of climate policy.

The Economist article prompted me to send in this letter:

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No doubt, environmentalists are counting down the days until President Bush leaves office. However, is this parting bittersweet? Consider the following figure on the number of Americans that claim to belong to an environmental organization.

According to this dataset, the number of American’s that belong to an environmental organization correlates with presidential party affiliation; claimed membership is approximately 50% greater during a Republican presidency.

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[UPDATE (9/15): RMS estimates $6 to $16 billion in insured losses for onshore + offshore losses, with "most" onshore. AIR estimates a range of $8 to $12 billion for onshore losses, with a best guess of $10 billion. Both estimates are lower than initial reports.]

The major cat modeling companies are being a bit more circumspect in announcing projected losses from Ike, perhaps due to some overestimates of losses associated with Gustav.  As we had anticipated, RMS has revised downward their estimates for Gustav:

On Friday, catastrophe risk modelling firm Risk Management Solutions (RMS) issued revised estimates for insured losses as a result of Gustav, dropping its predictions to $2.5 billion to $4.5 billion from the previously estimated $3 billion to $7 billion.

Now the AIR and RMS estimates for Gustav appear quite similar. There are some estimates for losses associated with Ike:

Hurricane Ike, the storm that smashed into the Texas coastline today, may cost insurers as much as $18 billion, said Eqecat Inc., a firm that predicts the effects of disasters.

Ike may cause $8 billion to $18 billion in insured losses on land as it moves from coastal Galveston to Houston and further inland, the Oakland, California-based firm said in an e-mailed statement today. Disruption to energy production is “not expected to be extensive,” the firm said. Flagstone Reinsurance Holdings Ltd., the Bermuda-based insurer, predicted damage of $10 billion to $16 billion industrywide.

It is too early to estimate the losses from Ike, but if you are interested in analogues, Jeff Master’s suggests that damages in Houston proper will be less than Alicia (1983), but losses elsewhere higher. Another possible analogue is Carla (1961), which was a category 4 storm at landfall.

In our normalized datasets these two storms represent about $7 billion and $14 billion in total damage respectively (i.e., $3.5 to $7B insured). There are plenty of uncertainties in the damage at present, and it could fall within this range or even lower (and maybe higher). Time will tell.

The debate over new oil drilling in the United States usually breaks down into a debate over the effects of any new supplies on the price of oil. Some say that the effects are marginal, and thus pretty much irrelevant to the longer-term challenge of transitioning away from fossil fuels, while others say that the the effects are positive and work toward getting the U.S. off of foreign sources. In this debate, there are valid arguments on both sides, but the “drill or not to drill” debate itself misses what seems to be the elephant in the living room, which has been discussed in today’s Wall Street Journal:

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Last spring, Ottmar Edenhofer (newly elected co-chair of IPCC WGIII) and colleagues of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research (PIK) wrote a letter to Nature responding to the Pielke, Wigley, and Green paper “Dangerous Assumptions” (PDF).  In it Edenhofer et al. made the claim:

Over the past 30 years, the decrease in energy intensity has been 1.1% a year — well above the 0.6% a year assumed in 75% of the energy scenarios assessed by the IPCC.

At the time I expressed some concern that the value of 0.6% didn’t make sense. When Edenhofer et al. repeated this number in a discussion paper that we mentioned earlier this week, I emailed Dr. Edenhofer to see if we could clarify the issue. I received a thoughtful email in response, and while Edenhofer et al. declined an invitation to participate in the blog discussion, I am happy to report that the dialogue has resulted in a consensus among us on the assumptions.

Specifically, the SRES scenarios shows a mean/median for energy intensity decline of just under 1.3% per year, and, further, 75% exceed ~1.1%, and no more than 10% are at or below 0.6%. Edenhofer et al. have agreed to correct their discussion paper, and I have asked that they also send a correction to Nature. We appreciate the correspondence.

I criticized the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation earlier for framing an event strictly around faulting the science behind a competitiveness report released by RAND.  The event in question took place earlier today in Washington, and I attended to follow up on my criticism.  The ITIF rebuttal report to the RAND competitiveness report is also available online, and you’re free to review both documents and respond to my analysis.  (Roger is quoted from Prometheus deep in the document – page 16 – about connections between student achievement and economic competitiveness.)

My initial concern – that the event would be used to try and close out a policy debate by appealing to science (or criticizing ‘bad’ science) – did not materialize, or at least in the way I initially suspected.  What happened is 90 minutes of presentation and discussion that had absolutely nothing to do with policy recommendations.  This is what I think Al Gore – circa 2000 – would pejoratively describe as an “academic exercise.”

The bulk of the presentation (and the report) is a listing of various historical and economic data points that the authors contend were not considered or effectively addressed in the RAND report.  However, the list ITIF has of the report’s ‘key limitations’ (page 2) indicates that the major disagreements with the RAND document are in framing and not really in science.  After all, ITIF agrees with the RAND report conclusion that the U.S. currently leads the world in science and technology, and RAND does make specific policy recommendations to maintain or improve the nation’s scientific and engineering enterprise – something I don’t think ITIF would object to, but they don’t even mention RAND’s recommendations in the report.

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A jury in Kingsnorth, UK, has decided that 6 Greenpeace activists who caused $60,000 of damage to a coal plant are not guilty of violating any crime. According to Greenpeace:

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I just heard an interesting talk by Michael Celia, chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton. The talk (abstract in PDF) was remarkably bullish on the idea of geologic sequestration, even though Prof. Celia emphasized that he did not see his role as an advocate for CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage, e.g., from coal plants). Points that I took from the lecture:

1. Storage reservoirs are not an issue for CCS to make a major contribution to the problem. Celia spoke of 2-3 “wedges” but this was not expressed as a ceiling.

2. Leakage seems to be a non-issue, in some respects, but a lot hinges on how the policy process defines “leakage”. From the standpoint of contributing to less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, leakage appears to be rather small, based on his research.

3. When asked about costs, he said that he cost is a “non issue” (though he said that his response was a bit flippant). he observed that he understood the costs of CCS to add about $0.06 kW/hr, and pointed out that there is no reason for anyone to pay these costs without some price of carbon emissions.

4. He was pretty dismissive of ocean sequestration when asked, but didn’t offer much more than suggesting that it was politically not viable.

Overall, it was a very bullish presentation on CCS.

Last week’s Economist provided a characterization of debates over climate change as being “alarmingly prone to zealotry and taboos.” One such taboo surrounds observations that the dominant policy approach is bankrupt, which evokes a squeamish reaction among many.

In a paper just out in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A (PDF) Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows disregard taboos and squeamishness and observe that the current approach to mitigation policies focused on specific targets and timetables (i.e., 2 degrees, 450 ppm) does “not, in isolation, have a scientific basis and are likely to lead to dangerously misguided policies .” (Many thanks to HD for the pointer.) This provocative paper ends by suggesting that “it is difficult to envisage anything other than a planned economic recession being compatible with stabilization at or below 650 ppmv CO2e.”

The squeamish will say not to talk about such things, and the analysis by Anderson and Bows ultimately may not stand up to close scrutiny (though its analysis is quite consistent with Pielke, Wigley, and Green’s “Dangerous Assumptions”). On the other hand, others will laugh at the notion of “planned economic recession” and say we should just give up the idea of decarbonization. Both reactions would be wrong — the continuing comprehensive failure of mitigation policies, and its consequences, should be the subject of serious discussion, especially the introduction of radically new options beyond those that have yielded little progress over the past few decades.

Here is an excerpt from the paper, but do read the whole analysis for the basis for the following conclusions:

It is increasingly unlikely that an early and explicit global climate change agreement or collective ad hoc national mitigation policies will deliver the urgent and dramatic reversal in emission trends necessary for stabilization at 450 ppmv CO2e. Similarly, the mainstream climate change agenda is far removed from the rates of mitigation necessary to stabilize at 550 ppmv CO2e. Given the
reluctance, at virtually all levels, to openly engage with the unprecedented scale of both current emissions and their associated growth rates, even an optimistic interpretation of the current framing of climate change implies that stabilization much below 650 ppmv CO2e is improbable.

The analysis presented within this paper suggests that the rhetoric of 2 C is subverting a meaningful, open and empirically informed dialogue on climate change. While it may be argued that 2 C provides a reasonable guide to the appropriate scale of mitigation, it is a dangerously misleading basis for informing the adaptation agenda. In the absence of an almost immediate step change in mitigation (away from the current trend of 3% annual emission growth), adaptation would be much better guided by stabilization at 650 ppmv CO2e (i.e. approx. 4 C).14 However, even this level of stabilization assumes rapid success in curtailing deforestation, an early reversal of current trends in non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions and urgent decarbonization of the global energy system.

Finally, the quantitative conclusions developed here are based on a global analysis. If, during the next two decades, transition economies, such as China, India and Brazil, and newly industrializing nations across Africa and elsewhere are not to have their economic growth stifled, their emissions of CO2e will
inevitably rise. Given any meaningful global emission caps, the implications of this for the industrialized nations are bleak. Even atmospheric stabilization at 650 ppmv CO2e demands the majority of OECD nations begin to make draconian emission reductions within a decade. Such a situation is unprecedented for economically prosperous nations. Unless economic growth can be reconciled with unprecedented rates of decarbonization (in excess of 6% per year15), it is difficult to envisage anything other than a planned economic recession being compatible with stabilization at or below 650 ppmv CO2e.

Ultimately, the latest scientific understanding of climate change allied with current emission trends and a commitment to ‘limiting average global temperature increases to below 4 C above pre-industrial levels’, demands a radical reframing16 of both the climate change agenda, and the economic characterization of contemporary society.

In the Nature paper (PDF) that I co-authored with Tom Wigley and Chris Green last spring, we pointed to a disturbing reversal of global trends in energy intensity (energy consumption per unit GDP) and carbon intensity (carbon emissions per unit energy).

The recent UK National Rail Review (PDF) helps to explain why this trend matters in a very specific context in a developed country setting:

Total carbon emissions from fuel consumption increased by 31 ktonnes (less than 1%) in 2006-07. When the data is normalised to take account of increases in traffic volumes – passenger kilometres and net freight tonne kilometres – this shows reductions of 5.8% for passengers and 1.4% for freight.

There were reductions in rail’s total electricity and diesel fuel consumption (by 2.7% and 0.2% respectively). But because of the high price of gas during 2006-07 the electricity industry switched its fuel supply to make greater use of coal, a more carbon-intensive source. As a result the CO2 emissions involved in providing electricity for rail increased. Had the carbon intensity of electricity generation remained constant, CO2 emissions from traction electricity would actually have fallen by 40 ktonnes (2.7%).

So even as rail travel has become less energy intensive (reductions in total electricity and fuel consumption as passenger and freight miles increased), the total carbon emissions from rail nonetheless increased due to the reemergence of coal as a source of electricity.

The UK Rail experience offers a sobering lesson: efficiency gains as a source of carbon dioxide emissions reductions in the context of growing demands for energy are limited when coal is priced cheaper than alternatives, and decision makers and the public care about having cheap energy. In this context, making coal more expensive seems pretty unlikely, since a much less carbon-intensive fuel (natural gas) is already available at a higher cost but disfavored as being too expensive, even by a government with ambitious emissions reductions goals and a general public very concerned about climate change. Does anyone really think that policy makers anywhere will meaningfully increase the costs of energy?

And if you think the increasing carbon intensity in the UK is a temporary blip, think again. The Center for Global Development projects continuing increases in carbon intensity in both the United States and Europe.