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:

(more…)

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.

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

Over at Seed Magazine in a collection of views on “framing,” Penn State climatologist Michael Mann explains why it was necessary to misrepresent what the IPCC does on the cover of his co-authored book titled “Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming”:

Often, in our communication efforts, scientists are confronted with critical issues of language and framing. A case in point is a book I recently co-authored with Penn State colleague Lee Kump, called Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming. The purists among my colleagues would rightly point out that the potential future climate changes we describe, are, technically speaking, projections rather than predictions because the climate models are driven by hypothetical pathways of future fossil fuel burning (i.e. conceivable but not predicted futures). But Dire Projections doesn’t quite roll off the tongue. And it doesn’t convey — in the common vernacular — what the models indicate: Climate change could pose a very real threat to society and the environment. In this case, use of the more technically “correct” term is actually less likely to convey the key implications to a lay audience.

As one of those “purists” who would like to receive information that is technically “correct” I probably can judge that book by its cover.

In contrast, in another commentary on framing at Seed, ASU science policy expert Clark Miller suggests an alternative, richer view of framing:

Two competing models of framing exist. The first views framing as a tactical choice in communication. Spinning information to comport with culturally embedded narratives purportedly raises its credibility with target audiences. This model presumes an ignorant and uninformed public, with all the dangers that implies for democracy. I reject this model.

The second model views framing, instead, as how humans make sense of and give meaning to events in the world — the lens through which they interpret disparate observations, models, data, and evidence in light of their values. This model posits framing as an ineradicable element of reasoning, even in science, and a facility for rich, nuanced storytelling as a foundation for human community.

Both models recognize that humans structure their understanding of policy through narrative and story. Rather than exploiting this structure for political gain, however, the second model acknowledges that any specific policy frame is, at best, partial and incomplete. Any frame reflects only one way of looking at a policy problem, leaving out potentially critical pieces of knowledge and significance.

I’ve come to depend upon Joe Romm for ideological rigidity and his unwavering faith in his own infallibility. Such commitment provides a useful touchstone in the climate debate. So I have been dismayed to see Romm not just abandon some of his most firmly held views, but sprint in the opposite direction while at the same time lambasting those who would have the gall to espouse views that he only recently held. Such relativism smacks of kowtowing to political expediency while ignoring policy outcomes or even something even more sinister, maybe even involving the . . . deniers.

Perhaps the real Joe Romm has been kidnapped, and an offset-loving, climate-delayer-eq, fossil fuel drinking replacement has been quietly spirited into his place? A look at the recent flip-flopping by Joe Romm might help us understand the transformation, and with some luck, locate the real Joe Romm and return him to his proper place in the climate debate.

When a coalition of middle-of-the-road environmental groups and large businesses came out with the USCAP proposal for cap and trade, Joe Romm came out in his usual forceful way against their proposal (and especially its reliance on offsets):

The U.S. Climate Action Partnership — a coalition of businesses and enviros once though to be important — have released their wimpy Blueprint for Legislative Action.

I can sort of understand why, say, Duke Energy, signed on to this, but NRDC and EDF and WRI have a lot of explaining to do. As we will see, this proposal would be wholly inadequate as a final piece of legislation. As a starting point it is unilateral disarmament to the conservative politicians and big fossil fuel companies who will be working hard to gut any bill. Kudos to the National Wildlife Federation for withdrawing from USCAP rather than signing on.

It turns out that the USCAP proposal “was the basis for the Waxman-Markey” bill, according to Romm. At some point Romm’s views changed, and not just by a little — his rhetoric on USCAP/Waxman-Markey has flip-flopped 180 degrees, going from labeling USCAP/Waxman-Markey as representing “unilateral disarmament to the conservative politicians and big fossil fuel companies” to a cryptic message explaining “How I learned to stop worrying and love Waxman-Markey.” Particularly odd is Romm coming out in strong defense of the potential use of domestic and international offsets to fulfill the bulk of the “emissions reduction” requirements of Waxman-Markey, given that Romm has been/was among the most vocal opponents of the use of offsets to represent “emissions reductions” — and rightly so in my view.. Has Romm joined the board of Duke Energy? What gives? Is he now a “denier-eq 1000″ (to speak in Romm-ese)?

To remind readers of what Joe Romm had once said about offsets, here are a few selected quotes that leave absolutely no ambiguity:

On the use of offsets generally:

Q: What is the difference between carbon offsets and mortgage-backed securites?

A: Lipstick.

Carbon offsets and mortgage-backed securities are quite similar in that is impossible for the vast majority of people, even experts, to know what value they have, if any.

On the use of offsets in last year’s Lieberman-Warner bill:

Now when I redo the math, it seems the most likely outcome of this bill is that U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions in 2025 would we about the same as they are now, and possibly higher. If that’s the best we can do for a piece of legislation that’s deader than a dead parrot — it is a dead parrot whose body has been given to a veterinary anatomy class for dissection and had its heart removed — why bother?

On the use of offsets in the USCAP proposal:

The USCAP plan would call for a reduction of 1.0 to 1.4 billion tons of U.S. GHGs in 2020, while allowing 2 billion or more tons of offsets, at least half of which don’t even have to be in this country. When would US carbon dioxide emissions see serious reductions under this plan? Who knows?

And on offsets via forestry:

Offset projects should simply not include tree planting.

On an earlier McCain cap and trade plan:

If emissions reductions can be done through a rigorous and verifiable process, then they can and should be included in the overall cap. The probability that there are offset-like emissions reductions floating around the ether that are both abundant and cheap is quite small. That is why a major offset-based strategy would “involve substantial issuance of credits that do not represent real emissions reductions,” as the Stanford study concluded. That report’s policy conclusion:

We argue that the U.S., which is in the midst of designing a national regulatory system, should not rely on offsets to provide a reliable ceiling on compliance costs….

Offsets can play a role in engaging developing countries, but only as one small element in a portfolio of strategies….

The entire foundation of McCain’s climate plan is built on quicksand.

On the use of offsets in cap and trade:

Let’s hope Congress actually listens to GAO and sharply scales back the use of offsets in future climate bills.

So please, help us find the real Joe Romm. He was right on offsets and USCAP/Waxman-Markey before he was wrong about offsets and USCAP/Waxman-Markey.

In my just accepted paper on the UK Climate Change Act (prepub version here in PDF) I argue that:

Policy should focus less on targets and timetables for emissions reductions, and more on the process for achieving those goals, and the various steps along the way. Setting targets and timetables for sectoral efficiency gains and expansion of carbon-free energy supply would be a step in the right direction.

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu would seem to agree with at least some of this line of argument, based on this quote in a Reuters story:

Energy Secretary Stephen Chu said on Tuesday that setting exact targets for carbon dioxide emissions had led to an “over-obsession” with numbers, as the United States moved closer to overhauling its energy policy.

The comment came less than a week after a congressional panel approved President Barack Obama’s landmark draft bill on climate change, bringing it closer to debate in Congress.

“There was a great deal of discussion on the Kyoto targets, and I’m not really sure which fraction of the countries that took part in that actually met their targets,” Chu, a Nobel laureate for physics, said at a conference in London. “In terms of the targets, whether it’s 17 percent or 20 or 25 percent, I think there’s perhaps … an over-obsession on these percentages.”

However, somehow I think that we are a long way from breaking from the auctioning of empty promises in the debates over targets and timetables for emissions reductions.

Robert Allen, an Oxford professor, has a new book out with Cambridge University Press titled “The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective.” Allen has a precis up over at VoxEU which provokes a few thoughts about efforts to spark a new green global economy.

Allen argues that a combination of factors led to the industrial revolution, among them international trade associated with the British Empire, an educated and wealthy populace which created a demand for the fruits of technology as well as the skills necessary to produce them, and, crucially, cheap energy. Allen provides the following graph, showing a comparison of energy costs across Europe in the early 1700s.

Allen writes:

The famous inventions of the Industrial Revolution were responses to the high wages and cheap energy of the British economy. These inventions also substituted capital and energy for labour. The steam engine increased the use of capital and coal to raise output per worker. The cotton mill used machines to raise labour productivity in spinning and weaving. New technologies of iron making substituted cheap coal for expensive charcoal and mechanised production to increase output per worker.

These technologies eventually revolutionised the world, but at the outset they were barely profitable in Britain, and their commercial success depended on increasing the use of inputs that were relatively cheap in Britain. In other countries, where wages were lower and energy more expensive, it did not pay to use technology that reduced employment and increased the consumption of fuel.

The French government was very active in trying to promote advanced British technology in the eighteenth century, but its efforts failed since the British techniques were not cost effective at French prices. James Hargreaves perfected the spinning jenny, the first machine that successfully spun cotton, in the late 1760s. In 1771, John Holker, an English Jacobite who held the post of Inspector General of Foreign Manufactures, spirited a jenny into France. Demonstration models were made, but the jenny was only installed in large, state supported workshops. By the late 1780s, over 20,000 jennies were used in England and only 900 in France. Likewise, the French government sponsored the construction of an English style iron works (including four coke blast furnaces) in Burgundy in the 1780s. The raw materials were adequate, the enterprise was well capitalised, and they hired outstanding and experienced English engineers to oversee the project. Yet it was a commercial flop because coal was too expensive in France.

Since the technologies of the Industrial Revolution were only profitable to adopt in Britain, that was also the only country where it paid to invent them. The ideas embodied in the breakthrough technologies were simple; the difficult problem was the engineering challenge of making them work. Responding to that challenged required research and development, which emerged as an important business practice in the eighteenth century. It was accompanied by the appearance of venture capitalists to finance the R&D and a reliance on patents to recoup the benefits of successful development. The Industrial Revolution was invented in Britain in the eighteenth century because that was where it paid to invent it.

The Economist reviews Allen’s new book this week, writing that “when governments from America to Japan are reinventing industrial policy with each off-the-cuff bail-out, this study offers some useful reminders.” Cheap energy and ample wealth as the mothers of invention appear to be among them. The importance of R&D in creating both should not be overlooked either.

My paper on the Uk Climate Change Act has been provisionally accepted for publication by Environmental Research Letters, so it can now be cited as in press.

Here are the details:

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 2009 (in press). The British Climate Change Act: A Critical Evaluation and Proposed Alternative Approach, Environmental Research Letters.

Here in PDF is a link to the pre-publication revision following review. And here is the Abstract:

This paper evaluates the United Kingdom’s Climate Change Act of 2008 in terms of the implied rates of decarbonization of the UK economy for a short-term and long-term target established in law. The paper uses the Kaya Identity to structure the evaluation, employing both a bottom-up approach (based on projections of future UK population, economic growth, and technology) as well as a top-down approach (deriving implied rates of decarbonization consistent with the targets and various rates of projected economic growth). Both approaches indicate that the UK economy would have to achieve annual rates of decarbonization in excess of 4% or 5%. To place these numbers in context, the UK would have to achieve the 2006 carbon efficiency of France by about 2015, a level of effort comparable to the building of about 30 new nuclear power plants, displacing an equivalent amount of fossil energy. The paper argues that the magnitude of the task implied by the UK Climate Change Act strongly suggests that it is on course to fail, and discusses implications.