We are collaborating on a new project with colleagues at the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University. The project is called Science Policy Assessment and Research on Climate or SPARC and it is sponsored by the National Science Foundation’s program on Decision Making Under Uncertainty.

SPARC has a new webpage here. This is how we describe the project,

“Each day, in the face of deep uncertainty, millions of decisions are made that respond to and influence the behavior of climate. How does the nation’s multi-billion dollar investment in climate research affect those decisions? How can the societal value of this scientific investment be enhanced? These are the core organizing questions for Science Policy Assessment and Research on Climate (SPARC) which conducts research and assessments, outreach, and education aimed at helping climate science policies better support climate-related decision making in the face of fundamental and often irreducible uncertainties.”

For those interested in climate science policy, the site offers a number of resources, now in their infancy. There is a library, a weblog – Metis and a guide to our research.

SPARC and its website are evolving. We’d welcome your feedback.

Today’s Baltimore Sun contains an op-ed by Daniel Lyons, a Harvard Law School student, discussing the possibility of a lawsuit against the U.S. government for its role in warning countries affected by the Indian Ocean tsunami. He writes,

“Recently, attorney Edward Fagan announced he would file a class-action lawsuit in New York against the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. Incredibly, Mr. Fagan alleges the Hawaii-based research facility should be held liable for failing to warn the world about an earthquake that happened nearly 7,000 miles away in an ocean the institute does not study.”

For news stories describing the lawsuit see here and here.

A few years ago Bobbie Klein and I collaborated on a set of papers that sought to summarize the issue of legal liability in the public and private sectors for weather forecasts.

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A few weeks ago I wrote about the reorganization of the House Appropriations Committee. This week, the Senate announced changes as well. In general, the Senate side mirrors the House changes. VA/HUD has been disbanded and its jurisdiction spread across the remaining subcommittees.

Of the main science agencies, NASA, NSF, and DoC science are found in Commerce and Science, EPA is now in Interior, and NIH remains in Labor/HHS subcommittee.

A few differences do exist. The Senate choose to keep the DC and Legislative Branch subcommittees and made no changes to Defense. More importantly, the Senate has placed the State Department in Foreign Ops, while the House keeps State with Commerce, Science, and Justice. State was appropriated $8.5 billion last year. This difference may cause some problems when the House and Senate reconcile spending bills, as the Commerce, Science, etc. and Foreign Ops subcommittees now overlap between the two chambers. Overall, however, the changes are similar enough so that the overall appropriations process won’t be threatened.

As for the particular affect on science funding, my comments from last time haven’t changed.

A full list of the new structure follows:

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In 2002 the World Health Organization reported that, “Climate change was estimated to be responsible in 2000 for approximately 2.4% of worldwide diarrhoea, 6% of malaria in some middle income countries and 7% of dengue fever in some industrialized countries. In total, the attributable mortality was 154 000 (0.3%) deaths …” For the sake of discussion lets assume that this number is not only correct, but that each of the 154,000 deaths are the consequence of climate changes resulting from greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere.

Now consider an editorial in The New York Times from earlier this week,

“Throughout the continent of Africa, thousands of people die needlessly every day from diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. One hundred years ago, before we had the medical know-how to eradicate these illnesses, this might have been acceptable. But we are the first generation able to afford to end poverty and the diseases it spawns. It’s past time we step up to the plate. We are all responsible for choosing to view the tsunami victims in Southeast Asia as more deserving of our help than the malaria victims in Africa. Jeffrey Sachs, the economist who heads the United Nations’ Millennium Development Project to end global poverty, rightly takes issue with the press in his book “The End of Poverty”: “Every morning,” Mr. Sachs writes, “our newspapers could report, ‘More than 20,000 people perished yesterday of extreme poverty.’ ” So, on this page, we’d like to make a first step. Yesterday, more than 20,000 people perished of extreme poverty.”

At 20,000 deaths per day, this equates to 7,300,000 deaths per year. So the ratio of poverty deaths to putative climate change deaths is about 50 to 1.

Does this mean that we should not worry about climate change? No.
Does this mean that we should emit greenhouse gases with reckless abandon? No.

What it does mean is that efforts to justify greenhouse gas mitigation policies on preventing human impacts run up against the reality that if it is human lives that you really care about, then there are obvious, straightforward and comparatively inexpensive ways to reduce human death and suffering that do not involve first reordering the global energy system.

Further, reducing greenhouse gases, per se, will do little or nothing to address the 7.3 million deaths from poverty each year, but addressing the conditions that lead to those 7.3 million deaths has the side benefit of also addressing those very same contributing factors that lead to the 0.15 million deaths attributed to climate change.

From this perspective, adaptation to climate change by focusing on reducing societal vulnerability to climate-related impacts deserves a much more prominent role in discussion of climate change. At the same time, advocates of climate mitigation should think carefully about the use of human death and suffering as a justification for adoption of greenhouse gas emissions — the numbers don’t make a strong case.

For further reading:

Sarewitz, D., and R.A. Pielke, Jr., 2005. Rising Tide, The New Republic, January 6. (PDF)

Not too long ago I took Munich Re to task for hyping the connection of disasters and climate change. In stark contrast, Swiss Re, another large reinsurer has issued a report on 2004 disasters that is much more consistent with the current state of scientific knowledge on climate impacts (for a summary see here and here).

Here is what Swiss Re says in its Sigma publication about 2004.

“Is there a connection between high windstorm losses and global warming?

What is the reason for this profusion of windstorm losses in 2004? Is it in some way connected with the global warming that has been so much in evidence in recent decades? It is difficult to say whether and how climate change is having an impact on loss experience, because individual events cannot be cited as proof for or against the effects of climate change.

Rising insured assets and population densities….

More obvious than the influence of global warming is that of ongoing economic, demographic and geographic changes: in the period 1970-2004, the value of insured assets, for example residential, industrial and office buildings, rose rapidly in the industrialized nations. In the line with this rise, insured losses due to natural catastrophes have been following a distinct upward trend since 1970. More and more highly exposed areas, for example storm-prone coast-lines, are being opened up for property development or are becoming even more densely populated.”

Dan Sarewitz and I have a perspective piece out in Population and Environment that provides an updated perspective on ideas that we have been writing about for several years now. The paper is titled, “Bringing Society back into the Climate Debate” and it can be found here.

Here is the abstract:

“Debate over climate change focuses narrowly on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. A common justification for such emissions reductions is that they will lead to a reduction in the future impacts of climate on society. But research from social scientists and others who study environment–society interactions clearly indicates that the dominant factors shaping the impacts of climate on society are societal. A greater appreciation for this body of research would allow for consideration of a broader base of policy options to respond to the challenges of climate change, as well as the composition of climate research portfolios more likely to contribute useful knowledge to decision makers.”

Read the whole thing. We welcome comments and reactions.