Tim Vasquez has posted up a detailed meteorological analysis of the weather conditions associated with the loss of Air France 447 over the Atlantic (h/t SO). He concludes:

Overall it does appear weather was a factor. In the main MCS [mesoscale convective system] alone, the A330 would have been flying through significant turbulence and thunderstorm activity for about 75 miles (125 km), lasting about 12 minutes of flight time. Of course anything so far is speculation until more evidence comes in, and for all we know the cause of the downing could have been anything from turbulence to coincidental problems like a cargo fire.

The complete lack of a radio call, though, and the clear evidence that the plane’s route crossed through an active complex of thunderstorms does make it likely in my view that structural failure from turbulence occurred.

With the proliferation of online votes on questions, blogs and video, the White House website is taking the lead in terms of a government online presence.  The National Science Foundation, which sponsored some of the critical research in the emergence of the Internet, has been slow to respond.  One step toward a stronger web presence is the development of Science Nation (H/T Framing Science), what promises to be a weekly online multimedia resource highlighting research.  The current ‘issue’ focuses on extremophile hunters.  While this may not seem cutting edge to some, it is an additional tool NSF can use to communicate news on the research it supports.  Perhaps for the next edition of Science and Engineering Indicators they can take their charts and graphs to the next level.

The European Environment Agency released a new report last week detailing greenhouse gas emissions in the European Union. Joe Romm lauds the performance of the EU and says that

I fully expect our old friend Roger Pielke, Jr. to weigh in . . .

Not wanting to disappoint Joe, here are some facts that might supplement Joe’s comments on the EU and emissions reductions.

1. The EU has reduced its emissions over the past few years. Why? The EEA explains the recent reductions as follows:

Falling emissions since 2005 have largely resulted from the lower use of fossil fuels (particularly oil and gas) in households and services — these sectors, not covered by the EU Emission Trading System (ETS), are among the largest sources of GHG emissions in the EU. Warmer weather and higher fuel prices were the primary causes for the drop in emissions in 2006–2007, with most of the decrease occurring in households — particularly in Germany.

2. The report’s press release explains that “The EU-15 now stands 5% below its Kyoto Protocol base year levels.” You have to dig a little deeper to learn that that the EU-15 minus the UK and Germany saw its emissions rise by about 10% over its 1990 levels. What happened in the UK and Germany? The report explains (p. 17):

The overall EC GHG emission trend is dominated by the two largest emitters, Germany and the United Kingdom, which account for about a third of total EU-27 GHG emissions. These two Member States have achieved total GHG emission reductions of 393 million tonnes CO2 equivalents compared to 1990.(6)

The main reasons for the favourable trend in Germany were increasing efficiency in power and heating plants and the economic restructuring of the five new Länder after the German reunification. Reduced GHG emissions in the United Kingdom were primarily the result of liberalising energy markets and the subsequent fuel switches from oil and coal to gas in electricity production and N2O emission reduction measures in adipic acid production.

You can see the relative performance in the following graph, from data in Table ES.8.

3. Evaluating specific European climate policies, especially the performance of the ETS is pretty much impossible with the data in the EEA report. The ETS covers only a subset of economic activity that results in emissions. However, the report itself makes no claims about the effectiveness of the ETS, which itself is notable. Further the Kyoto process excludes certain emissions, like those from aviation and shipping.

As I have argued here before, it is not simply emissions that matter, but decarbonization of the economy, as policy makers have a desire to grow the economy while at the same time decreasing emissions.

The following graph shows what rate of decarbonization would be necessary to achieve a 20% reduction in EU-15 emissions below 1990 levels, assuming 2.5% annual economic growth for the period 2007-2020 (which is illustrative in this case, other numbers will of course lead to other results), as well as actual EU-15 decarbonization, with emissions data from the EEA report and GDP data from the EU. It shows a very large task ahead for the EU-15, which has the advantage of a low population growth and sustained rates of historical decarbonization in the absence of climate policies. Whether such rates will continue is an open question.

Decarbonization of the economy is a more meaningful basis on which to evaluate climate policies, and not simply emissions.

The following comments were first posted on this blog in March, 2006. I am reposting them today in response to an email from a kind fellow who saw my name in the paper and wondered if I had ever “done anything” in this area.

Reactions to Searching for a Signal
Originally published March, 2006

I would love to be the first person to conclusively identify the signal of increasing greenhouse gases in the historical record of disaster losses. I have no doubt that such a study, scientifically solid and peer reviewed, would be widely cited, globally reported, and the author(s) would reach near rock star status in the climate science and advocacy communities. The problem is that I (and a number of colleagues) have been looking for such a signal for more than 10 years, recording our efforts in dozens of papers along the way, and so far the signal hasn’t been found.

On Wednesday this week [March, 2006. The paper that resulted from that talk can be seen here in PDF.] I’ll be giving the NRC Ocean Studies Board’s annual Roger Revelle memorial lecture at the Smithsonian in Washington DC in which I’ll provide an overview of this search and what we’ve found to date. The message of the talk is as follows:

Read the rest of this entry »

We haven’t checked in with the guys at CheatNeutral of late. Here is a short documentary on their good work offsetting infidelity that reminds us that in the debate over climate change it is good to keep one’s sense of humor firmly intact.

Last week I was very critical of a report issued by the Global Humanitarian Forum, run by Kofi Annan former Secretary General of the United Nations. Over the weekend I see that Annan described the report as not being a scientific study:

The research was carried out by Dalberg Global Advisers, a consultancy firm, who collated all existing statistics on the human impacts of climate change. The report acknowledges a “significant margin of error” in its estimates.

Mr Annan said the report could never be as rigorous as a scientific study, but said: “We feel it is the most plausible account of the current impact of climate change today.”

Why can’t the work produced by the GHF be “as rigorous as a scientific study”? Well, one answer is that scientific studies on this topic simply don’t give the desired answers. But if it is not a “scientific study” then what is it?

Keith Kloor who is a Scripps Journalism Fellow here at CU at the Center for Environmental Journalism comments on the excellent reporting by Andy Revkin on the report, as compared to the rest of the overly credulous media which essentially reprinted the GHF press release without obtaining any other perspectives. Keith also noted the absolute silence in the blogosphere on the report:

so far, the questionable assertions and exaggerated nature of the Global Humanitarian Forum report have gone unremarked on by environmental bloggers and pundits. Nobody from this side of the spectrum has accused the press of being stenographers, that’s for sure.

Of course, if it was George Will making a few dodgy claims the blogosphere would erupt in a collective fit of indignation. But dodgy numbers about the impacts of climate change? Yawn.

Perhaps one reason for this can be found in the comments of Andrew Freedman, who blogs at the Washington Post, who seems to suggest that the accuracy and truth aren’t really what matter so much here, it is getting lined up behind the proper politics [Update 6/2: Andrew Freedman adds some clarifications in the comments.]:

. . . as policymakers increasingly consider taking major steps to address climate change, it is becoming more important for experts to detail how climate change is already affecting human populations, and whether it poses a truly mortal threat now or sometime in the future. Whether or not any death can be said to have been ’caused by’ climate change is debatable, but the message that climate change may already be adding stress to society, particularly in the developing world, is well-established.

The methodology of the Global Humanitarian Forum’s report may not be something to replicate, but the general aim of bringing the human toll from climate change into a clearer focus should be.

So it appears that Freedman is saying — Well at least the folks at GHF tried, and if they made a few mistakes, it is OK because it shows both their commitment to the issue and helps to bring the threat of climate change into clearer focus.

To the extent that this view is shared, it explains both the credulity of the media and lack of critique in the blogosphere on the GHF report. More broadly, this attitude explains a lot of the collective behavior seen on the climate issue displayed by the intelligentsia.

In what might be a microcosm of the pending struggle over the nation’s health care system, a radiologist has proposed in Nature magazine that stablizing tumors at a manageable size, rather than eliminating them entirely (H/T 60 Second Science Blog).  This is a significant shift in traditional strategy, which is usually to knock out the cancer – sometimes repeatedly, should it recur.  Put another way, treat the disease as chronic and manage it with smaller doses of chemotherapy, rather than seeking the death strike and risk the potential of resistant cells returning with a vengeance.  Robert Gatenby, the radiologist behind this idea, compares this different strategy to the integrated pest management approach to invasive species, which was accepted by the Agriculture Department as far back as the Nixon Administration (as it happens, the beginning of the War on Cancer can be traced to the Nixon Administration as well).

A parallel with the upcoming debates over the U.S. health care system would be the current emphasis in the United States on treatment and prolonging the last years of life over prevention and other longevity measures.  While it may be an open question in either situation whether or not changing tactics would be more effective, there will be significant resistance to entertaining the idea in either case.

I’m not speaking about the ongoing sea changes in print journalism, but about the tendency of researchers to submit, and scientific publishers to print, successful research and ignore the failures.  While anyone in any field can learn from what went wrong, certain areas of research (medicine and engineering come to mind) are in stronger positions to make meaningful contributions to knowledge and to the use of that knowledge from reporting what failed.  The same is true of history, where learning why something didn’t happen can provide insight.  Understanding that something didn’t work in a field can shift choices in products purchased, treatments sought, or services offered.  Yet most published research excludes that kind of result.

One small step to addressing the ignorance of failure is starting with the journal Restoration Ecology.  According to Nature, the editors of Restoration Ecology will host a regular section in their journal for reports on experiments and projects in the field that did not meet expectations.  Understanding the baggage attached to the work failure, the section is titled “Set-Backs and Surprises.”  Perhaps this will catch on with other journals, especially if the setback or surprise is couple with some kind of analysis or discussion of lessons learned.  While policymakers are often focused more on the successes than what didn’t work, they do respond to lessons learned.  In that way, they may have a healthier attitude toward failure than the researchers they support.

The new Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Margaret Hamburg and Joshua Sharfstein, outlined their priorities for the FDA in a recent Perspectives article in the New England Journal of Medicine.  Acknowledging the stumbles of the FDA in the last few years, they seem concerned about making sure the FDA is more of a supporter than a hindrance to action in public health and food safety.

“From our vantage point, the recent salmonella outbreak linked to contaminated peanut butter represented far more than a sanitation problem at one troubled facility. It reflected a failure of the FDA and its regulatory partners to identify risk and to establish and enforce basic preventive controls. And it exposed the failure of scores of food manufacturers to adequately monitor the safety of ingredients purchased from this facility.”

Read the rest of this entry »

I am quoted in today’s NYT on a new report issued by the Global Humanitarian Forum which makes the absurd claim that 315,000 deaths a year can be attributed to the effects of rising greenhouse gas concentrations. Here is what I said:

Roger A. Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studies disaster trends, said the forum’s report was “a methodological embarrassment” because there was no way to distinguish deaths or economic losses related to human-driven global warming amid the much larger losses resulting from the growth in populations and economic development in vulnerable regions. Dr. Pielke said that “climate change is an important problem requiring our utmost attention.” But the report, he said, “will harm the cause for action on both climate change and disasters because it is so deeply flawed.”

Strong comments I know. Shoddy work on disasters and climate change is the norm, unfortunately, and something I’ve been closely following for well over a decade. I have no illusions that this latest concoction will be repeatedly cited regardless.

Below are my comments to the NYT upon reading the report (cleaned up and formatted). Caution, strong views ahead.

Let me apologize for the length of this reply. But it is important to be clear and to set the record straight.

Let me say first that human-caused climate change is an important problem requiring our utmost attention. Second, the effects of disasters, particularly in poorer countries, is also an important problem that to some degree has been overlooked, as I have argued for many years.

However, I cannot express how strongly I feel that this report has done a disservice to both issues. It is a methodological embarrassment and poster child for how to lie with statistics. The report will harm the cause for action on both climate change and disasters because it is so deeply flawed.

It will give ammunition to those opposed to action and divert attention away from the people who actually need help in the face of disasters, yet through this report have been reduced to a bloodless statistic for use in the promotional battle over climate policies. The report is worse than fiction, it is a lie. These are strong words I know.

1. Let me first start by noting that the same group that did the analysis for the UN, the Geo-Risks group in Munich Re, earlier this year published a peer-reviewed paper arguing that the signal of human-caused climate change could not presently be seen in the loss data on disasters. They wrote (emphasis added):

It should be noted when assessing the results of both this paper and Schmidt et al. (2008) that it is generally difficult to obtain valid quantitative findings about the role of socioeconomics and climate change in loss increases. This is because of criteria such as the stochastic nature of weather extremes, a shortage of quality data, and the role of various other potential factors that act in parallel and interact. We therefore regard our results as being an indication only of the extent to which socio-economic and climate changes account for the increase in losses. Both studies confirm the consensus reached in May 2006 at the international workshop in Hohenkammer attended by leading experts on climate change and natural catastrophe losses.

I co-organized the Hohenkammer workshop (referred to in the quote above) with Peter Hoeppe of Munich Re and that workshop concluded (among other things):

Due to data-quality issues, the stochastic nature of extreme event impacts, the lengths of the time series, and various societal factors present in the disaster loss records, it is still not possible to determine what portion of the increase in damage may be due to climate changes caused by GHG emissions.

and

The quantitative link (attribution) between storm/flood loss trends and GHG-induced climate changes is unlikely to be determined unequivocally in the near future.

On p. 84 the GHF report itself says:

However, there is not yet any widely accepted global estimate of the share of weather related disasters that are attributable to climate change.

One would think that would be the end of the story. However, to fill in for the fact that there is no accepted estimate, the report conjures up a number using an approach that is grounded in neither logic, science, or common sense.

2. Specifically, to get around the fact that there has been no attribution of the relationship of GHG emissions and disasters, this report engages in a very strange comparison of earthquake and weather disasters in 1980 and 2005. The first question that comes to mind is, why? They are comparing phenomena with many “moving parts” over a short time frame, and attributing 100% of the resulting difference to human-caused climate change. This boggles the mind. The IPCC itself says that 30 years are needed for the detection of changes in the climate system, and this time frame does not even reach that threshold. More to the point earthquakes and weather events do not have the same variability and earthquake disasters affect only a small part of the total inhabited area of the earth, whereas weather disasters occur much more widely. The assumption that weather disasters should track earthquake disasters is flawed from the outset for both geophysical and socio-economic reasons.

An alternative, more scientifically robust approach would be to look specifically at weather-related disasters, and consider the role of socio-economic changes, and to the extent possible, try to remove that signal and see what trends remain. When that has been done, in every case (US floods, hurricanes, Australia, India TCs, Latin America and elsewhere, all in the peer-reviewed literature) there is not a remaining signal of increasing disasters. In other words, the increase in disasters observed worldwide can be entirely attributed to socio-economic changes. This is what has been extensively documented in the peer reviewed literature, and yet — none of this literature is cited in this report. None of it! Instead they rely on this cooked up comparison between earthquakes and weather related disasters.

(Consider also that in no continental location has there been an observed increase in tropical cyclone landfalls, and yet this accounts for almost all of the windstorm disasters cited in the report. The increase must therefore be due to factors other than geophysical changes. This fact renders the
comparison with earthquakes even more meaningless).

Munich Re’s own peer-reviewed work supports the fact that socio-economic factors can explain the entire increase in global disasters in recent decades.

Consider that in 2005 there were 11 earthquakes magnitude 7 or higher and in 1980 there were 14. by contrast, 1980 was a quiet weather year, and 2005 was very active, and included Katrina.
Source

3. The report cites and undates the Stern Review Report estimates of disaster losses, however, in a peer-reviewed paper I showed that these estimates were off by an order of magnitude and relied on a similar sort of statistical gamesmanship to develop its results (and of course this critique was ignored):

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 2007. Mistreatment of the economic impacts of extreme events in the Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change, Global Environmental Change, 17:302-310. (PDF)

This report is an embarrassment to the GHF and to those who have put their names on it as representing a scientifically robust analysis. It is not even close.

Best regards,

Roger