I have heard the case of ozone depletion invoked time and time again by advocates for mitigation action on climate change. Such invocations are not only like the old adage of generals fighting the last war, but worse, because they are like old generals looking to fight the old war as they wish it had been, rather than how it really was.

Here is a True/False quiz on the history of ozone policy. Keep track of your answers and the key will be provided after the jump:

1) Science provided a clear message.
2) Policy makers relied on consensus science to take action.
3) Public opinion was intense and unified.
4) Ozone skeptics remained mute and high-minded.
5) Science reached a threshold of certainty that compelled action

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The Skeptics Society hosts an annual conference on a topic of their choosing. This year’s conference is entitled “The Environmental Wars: The Science Behind the Politics” and will be held 2-4 June, 2006 at CalTech.

From the conference website:

“Why are we still debating climate change? How soon will we hit peak oil supply? When politics mix with science, what is being brewed? Join speakers from the left & the right, from the lab & the field, from industry & advocacy, as we air the ongoing debate about whether human activity is actually changing the climate of the planet.”

From what I know of the Skeptics Society, they would welcome people from any perspective on the issue. The speaker lineup bears this out:

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Karen O’Brien, of the University of Oslo’s Department of Sociology and Human Geography, has a very thoughtful editorial in the current issue of the journal Global Environmental Change. She suggests, quite appropriately in my view, that debate and discussion on global environmental issues focuses too narrowly on “science” and not on important issues of “human security.” She is asking us to consider reframing how we think about and organize to act on environmental issues. In my view, O’Brien is absolutely correct in her analysis, but her perspective, and that of Oxford’s Steve Rayner which we discussed yesterday, are far removed from the center of the current politicized and scientized debates over global environmental issues. Here is an excerpt from her editorial:

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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.

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I have often joked that the solution to increasing greenhouse gases was simple: simply invent a tabletop device (solar powered of course) that turns the CO2 in ambient air into diamonds and releases oxygen. While I am still awaiting this invention, the issue of “air capture” of CO2 is becoming less and less far-fetched. Whether or not air capture proves technologically, economically, or politically feasible in the long run, the technology, or more precisely the idea of the technology, has the potential to fundamentally transform debate on climate change.

The idea of air capture of CO2 is simple in principle: ambient air is taken in, CO2 is taken out, and air is released. (Those interested in an introduction to the technical details should see this PDF by David Keith and Minh Ha-Duong. For a look at a a prototype system see this PDF.)

Currently air capture of CO2 is a political third rail of climate policy. Here is why:

For most of those people opposed to greenhouse gas regulation advocating air capture would require first admitting that greenhouse gases ought to be reduced in the first place, an admission that most on this side of the debate have avoided. When so-called climate skeptics start advocating air capture (which I have to believe can’t be too far off), then you will have a sign that the climate debate is really changing.

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The amazing 2005 hurricane season continues with Wilma bearing down on Florida, currently as a S/S category 5 storm. I noticed an interesting difference in presentation between the AP and the NHC discussions of Wilma’s intensity. Here is what the AP reported:

“Hurricane Wilma doesn’t stop making history: It is the strongest, most intense Atlantic hurricane in terms of barometric pressure and the most rapidly strengthening on record. A hurricane hunter plane flying through the Category 5 storm’s eye found a minimum central pressure of 882 millibars, National Hurricane Center forecasters said Wednesday.”

Here is what the NHC said,

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In his column yesterday, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof jumps on the bandwagon suggesting that greenhouse gas policies can be used as a tool to modulate future hurricane behavior. We’ve covered this subject in some detail here, but there are two points worth making on this column.

First, Kristof goes out of his way to avoid the obvious issue of societal vulnerability. He quoted Kerry Emanuel as follows: “My results suggest that future warming may lead to … a substantial increase in hurricane-related losses in the 21st century.” Kristof’s ellipses significantly change the meaning of Emanuel’s statement. Here is the full quote from Emanuel’s paper (PDF), including the information replaced by Kristof with ellipses, “My results suggest that future warming may lead to an upward trend in tropical cyclone destructive potential, and-taking into account an increasing coastal population- a substantial increase in hurricane-related losses in the twenty- first century.” This is playing a bit fast and loose with Emanuel’s statement, given that Emanuel says elsewhere, “For U.S.-centric concerns over the next 30-50 years, by far the most important hurricane problem we face is demographic and political.” Of course, as we’ve documented here, for at least the next half century and probably longer, societal vulnerability to hurricanes dominates any projected greenhouse gas effects, so in an essay advocating greenhouse gases as a tool of disaster management, it is obvious why Kristof would want to pretend that this issue doesn’t exist.

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For further reading:

Downton, M., J. Z. B. Miller and R. A. Pielke, Jr., 2005. Reanalysis of U.S. National Weather Service Flood Loss Database, Natural Hazards Review, 6:13-22. (PDF)

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 2000: Flood Impacts on Society: Damaging Floods as a Framework for Assessment. Chapter 21 in D. Parker (ed.), Floods. Routledge Press: London, 133-155. (PDF)

Pielke, Jr., R. A., and R. A. Pielke, Sr. (eds.), 2000: Storms: a volume in the nine-volume series of Natural Hazards & Disasters Major Works published by Routledge Press as a contribution to the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction. Routledge Press: London.

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 1997: The Social and Economic Impacts of Weather Workshop Report, ESIG/NCAR, Boulder, CO, May.

Accurate estimates of the economic impacts of a disaster’s impacts are important for a number of practical reasons. In 1999, the National Research Council (NRC) issued a report titled, “The Impacts of Natural Disasters: A Framework for Loss Estimation” which stated that such data would be useful in making decisions about disasters:

” … a baseline set of loss data, together with cost and benefit estimates of alternative mitigation measures, would allow the federal government and individuals and firms in the private sector to design and implement cost-effective strategies for mitigating the losses from natural disasters. Insurers could certainly use the data to improve their estimates of future payouts associated with disasters. And researchers and experts in disaster loss estimation could benefit from a standardized data base that would enable them to improve estimates of both the direct and indirect losses of disasters. These improvements in turn would assist policymakers in their efforts to devise policies to reduce the losses caused by future disasters. Beyond providing an indicator of total natural disaster losses to the nation, the framework for loss estimation described in this report would also provide detailed information on losses. A better understanding of issues such as who bears disaster losses, what are the main types of damages in different disasters, and how those losses differ spatially, are of critical importance in making decisions about allocating resources for mitigation, research, and response.”

However, the NRC also found, “Despite the frequency and expenses of natural disasters, there exists no system in either the public or private sector for consistently compiling information about their economic impacts.” The NRC’s conclusions have been echoed by reports from the Heinz Center, Rand (prepared for OSTP), and from scholars such as Mileti, Hooke and Changnon. To date, no such database exists. A good deal of my own research over the past ten years has been motivated by this situation.

Tabulating economic losses is not straightforward. Damage estimates are a function of what is counted, how it is counted, over a certain time and space. In what follows, I present an excerpt from our 1997 book on hurricanes that briefly describes some of the methodological challenges of damage estimation and tabulation. Tomorrow we’ll start looking at some actual data.

For those of you who would like a reference to the discussion below, a version of the below also appeared as a short essay in 1997. Here is that reference:

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 1997: Trends in Hurricane Impacts in the United States. Crop Insurance Today, 30(3), 8-10,18. ( PDF, apologies for the poor quality of the copy)

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On Saturday the New York Times ran a story that described efforts to total the economic impacts of Katrina. The story described the work of a catastrophe modeling firm which estimated that Katrina’s costs could top $100 billion. What does this mean? What does this tell us about Katrina in historical perspective? About what we should expect for the future? What knowledge is grounded in peer-reviewed science? What is the significance of understanding Katrina in context for actions that we (and who is we?) might take to increase the odds of better ourcomes in the future?

For those of us interested in policies with respect to hurricanes and other extreme events it is important to accurately place Katrina into historical and future context, so that decisions about the future might be well calibrated with respect to risks and vulnerabilities.

We have conducted a wide range of research over the past 10 years on hurricane and flood impacts, and over the next week or so I will be working through this research so that people interested in impacts and policy can get a better sense of the work that lies behind the discussions that often appear on this site.

There are a lot of possible topics to discuss, and below is the list of subjects that I am starting out with. If you don’t see a subject on this list that you’d like to have discussed, just let us know and we’ll do the best to accommodate the request.

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The Bush Administration’s complete lack of preparedness for responding to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans is one of the most significant intelligence failures in history, ranking right up there with Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Ii will be important in the coming months for Congress to investigate this policy failure with every bit of effort that it did after 9/11. Let me say that I have every expectation that the government professionals now fully engaged in the rescue and recovery operations will do an outstanding job. The question that needs to be asked, and it is not too soon to begin asking, is why was the federal government so unprepared for the disaster in the face of robust scientific knowledge about the disaster at all time scales? This is especially in light of the fact that the government completely reorganized itself after 9/11 to improve the nation’s preparedness and response to catastrophes.

Like many people, I too was buoyed by the reports in the immediate aftermath of Katrina that New Orleans had dodged another bullet. It is understandable that government officials not involved with disaster preparedness and response (including the President) might have seen these reports and felt the same way. But to learn that the federal government agencies responsible for disaster preparation and management had taken very little action in the days and hours before Katrina’s landfall to prepare for the possibility of flooding of New Orleans is simply amazing. I study disasters and find this incredible.

Statements by Bush Administration officials reveal the depth of this intelligence failure. Consider the following comments from Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and FEMA’s Michael Brown:

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