« December 2006 »

2007 Office Pool

Happy New Year everyone! A 2007 office pool for your enjoyment:

1. In 2007 the space shuttle will fly (a) once, (b) twice, (c) 3 or more times, (d) its last mission.

2. Academic earmarks on non-defense discretionary spending for FY2007 will (a) be held to near zero as Democrats hold steadfast to their year-long continuing resolution, (b) will quietly creep up to their FY2006 levels as supplemental spending bills are laden with pork, (c) will not formally appear in appropriations or reports but will somehow appear out of existing agency appropriations as agency officials seek to keep congressional appropriators happy.

3. The number of hurricanes in the North Atlantic will be (a) less than 10, (b) between 10 and 15, (c) 16 to 20, (d) more than 20.

4. The IPCC will be released in three installments in the first half of 2007. The big news story from the IPCC will be (a) actually nothing, as nothing new will be reported, (b) a change in the IPCC and its leaders to an explicit advocacy role, (c) that it spells the end of the climate convention as it presents “dangerous interference” as inevitable, (d) provides much fodder for those wanting to “go slow” on climate policy by presenting an image of climate change far more conservative than found in the media, (e) will totally botch the issue of economic losses from extreme events, and especially hurricanes.

5. Al Gore will enter the 2008 presidential race (a) in the spring with his speech accepting the Oscar for best documentary, (b) in the late summer or early fall following the devastation of southern Florida by Hurricane Jerry, (c) not at all and Roger will owe Lisa lunch, (d) in 2008.

6. The U.S. budget for R&D in FY2007 will (a) represent the first cut in decades as Democrats hold fast to their year-long continuing resolution, (b) increase from FY2006 level through several targeted supplemental appropriations bills, most notable passage of some version of the ACI/PACE legislation, (c) so frustrate some scientists that they will begin speaking of a “Democratic war on science”.

7. The most notable S&T legislation to be passed by Congress in 2007 and vetoed by President Bush will be focused on (a) federal funding for stem cell research, (b) mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions, (c) prohibition of the transfer of nuclear technologies to India, (d) repeal of certain aspects of the Patriot Act focused on surveillance

8. The Supreme Court will rule in EPA vs. Massachusetts that (a) Massachusetts in fact has no standing to file the lawsuit, (b) that EPA has authority to regulate carbon dioxide and leave to EPA’s discretion whether regulation is required, (c) EPA must regulate emissions under the Clean Air Act, (d) that some call greenhouse gases a “pollutant” while others simply call it “life”

9. Internationally, the biggest news of 2007 will be (a) the introduction and then termination of carbon rationing cards in the U.K., (b) Germany’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, (c) the announcement by Hugo Chavez that Venezuela will conduct a nuclear test, (d) China’s devaluation of its currency sending the dollar into a tailspin

10. In 2007, here at Prometheus we will see (a) an angel bequeathing a massive endowment to our Center, (b) the blog reinvented at another university far, far away, (c) new authors and new contributors, and an ever-expanding readership (d) enough on climate change already, .and a shift to The Honest Broker.

My guesses below.

1. (a) 30%, (b) 60%, (c) 10%, (d) 50%
2. (c)
3. (a) 10%, (b) 50%, (c) 30%, (d) 10%
4. all of the above
5. (b), but maybe (d), (c) no way
6. (b), (a) is possible but unlikely
7. (a), almost certainly
8. (a) or (b), probably (b)
9. none of the above
10. (a) were still waiting on this one;-), (b), (c), and (d) – stay tuned!

Happy New Year!

Draft Paper for Comment: Decreased Proportion of Tropical Cyclone Landfalls in the United States

Below you will find a short, draft paper on the decreasing proportion of U.S. hurricane landfalls to total North Atlantic hurricanes from 1851-2006 that I will soon submit for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. I am not worried about pre-publication on the web and the policies of the big journals as Nature has already declined to send it out for review, suggesting that the specialty journals are a more appropriate venue. I have shared earlier versions of the paper with a range of different scientists inside (and outside of) the tropical cyclone research community, and I thank those who have so far responded for their helpful suggestions. I welcome any comments readers here may have as well.

Decreased Proportions of Tropical Cyclone Landfalls in the United States: Data Artifact, Blind Luck, Natural Variability, and/or Global Warming?

Roger A. Pielke, Jr.
28 December 2006
DISCUSSION DRAFT

Introduction

This short note is motivated by several recent studies that examine Atlantic tropical cyclone statistics over the past century and a half finding a significant upward trend (Holland and Webster, 2007; Mann and Emanuel, 2006). Both studies attribute an observed increase in North Atlantic (NATL) tropical cyclone activity to anthropogenic causes. This paper uses a simple approach to examine trends in U.S. hurricane landfalls 1851-2006. The annual number of U.S. hurricane landfalls has remained remarkably constant over this period exhibiting no trend. However, out of the total NATL storm activity, the proportion of landfalling storms making landfall in the United States has exhibited a marked decrease. These trends raise important but heretofore largely unexamined research questions about tropical cyclone landfall theory, data, and analyses.

North Atlantic Tropical Cyclone Data

Two datasets in this analysis are kept by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The first dataset includes all tropical cyclones of at least tropical storm strength (i.e., maximum winds >17 meters/second) in the NATL 1851-2006 (1). The second dataset includes all such storms that affected the U.S. coastline at hurricane strength (i.e., maximum winds of >33 meters/second) (2). It is widely accepted that the number of landfalling storms is among the most accurate metrics available for tropical cyclones in the Atlantic (Landsea 2005, Emanuel 2005).

Issues about data quality are at the center of a vigorous and scientifically productive debate within the tropical cyclone research community (e.g., Landsea et al. 2006, Kossin et al. in press). This paper proceeds under the same assumptions on data quality used by Holland and Webster (2007),

Before 1945 the overall statistic of total tropical cyclones numbers contains useful information . . . In summary, we consider that the veracity of the NATL tropical storm data base is sufficient to enable the broad brush analysis that we undertake in this study. Prior to 1945 we concentrate on the total number of tropical cyclones, irrespective of intensity.

And also Mann and Emanuel (2006),

A reasonably reliable record of annual North Atlantic tropical cyclone counts is thus available back into the late nineteenth century.

The point here is not that these conclusions about data quality are necessarily correct, but to argue that if one accepts the analyses in these studies predicated on the fidelity of long-term counts of NATL tropical cyclones, then it follows logically that one also has to accept the analysis presented here using the exact same data.

Analysis

Figure 1 shows the total number of United States hurricane landfalls 1851-2006.

There is no trend in the data. This finding is generally accepted, and is supported by the lack of trend in normalized U.S. hurricane damage over the past century (Pielke, et al. under review). Figure 2 shows the percentage of total storms that affected the United States as hurricanes from 1851-2006 (3).

There is a decrease in the proportion of storms striking the United States from any starting point prior to about 1970. This decrease increases in statistical significance as the record is extended further into the past. A linear trend line is presented on the graph for both the raw data and the 9-year moving average (4). Apparent in Figure 2 starting in 1944, which is considered to be the most accurate data period in the Atlantic (Neumann et al. 1999, Landsea et al. 1999), is a decrease in the proportion of storms striking the coast over this time period as well (statistics discussed below). Holland and Webster (2007) identify three climatic regimes, 1905-1930, 1931-1994, and 1995-2005. The proportion of landfalling storms for each of the three eras indicates a steady decline, respectively at 31.8%, 17.0%, and 14.6%.

Figure 3 shows for 1950-2006 the relationship of the percentage of landfalling storms and NATL August-September-October (ASO) sea surface temperatures (5).

On this time scale at least there is no significant relationship, though perhaps a more comprehensive statistical analysis that goes beyond the present focus may yet reveal a relationship (cf. Jagger et al. 2007).

Discussion

The data presented here suggests some interesting possibilities which cannot be resolved based on the data presented here.

First, it is possible that the decreasing trend in U.S. landfalls as a percentage of total storms is a statistical artifact resulting from an undercount of historical storms. The number of landfalling storms is certainly known with much higher certainty than the total number of storms. Thus, an undercount of the total number of storms would artificially increase landfalling storms as a percentage of total storms. This first interpretation is consistent with a view that the NATL record is most accurate since 1970, and that inaccuracies exist prior to that time. This view on data quality would also be inconsistent with those who argue that the NATL record is complete since 1944 (cf. Landsea et al. 1999). If the decreasing trend is an artifact of the datasets, then it would obviously call into question any analysis of trends based on the total number of storms over thuis time period.

Second, it is possible that the decreasing trend in U.S. landfalls as a percentage of total storms is (at least in part) a reflection of the actual behavior of the climate system. That is, if one accepts the trends reported by Holland and Webster (2007) and Mann and Emanuel (2006), then logically, it follows that one also has to accept the trends reported here. In this case, if NATL tropical cyclone activity has indeed increased, then there has also been a significant decrease in the proportion of storms that strike the U.S. coast.

Under this second possibility there is then the question of attribution. Figure 3 indicates that, at least since 1950, there is in fact no obvious relationship between NATL ASO SST and the proportion of total storms that make landfall. Given this finding, if SSTs are indeed the principle factor explaining increasing tropical cyclone activity, as some studies have suggested (e.g., Holland and Webster (2007), Mann and Emanuel (2006), Hoyos et al. (2006)) and SSTs are largely forced by greenhouse gases (Santer et al. 2006), then it follows that explaining the decreasing proportion of landfalling storms requires further investigations of climate processes beyond trends in SSTs. In other words, if global warming is increasing the incidence of NATL tropical cyclones, then the same dataset that indicates this result also suggests that global warming, and/or some other factors, are acting to diminish the proportion of total storms that strike the United States.

Emanuel (2005) raises the possibility that simple randomness might explain the lack of a trend in landfalling storm intensities in the presence of such a trend in the entire NATL. This may very well be the case (Pielke 2005); however, Emanuel’s point was made with respect to an integrated index of power dissipation, for which the landfalling component was only about 1% of the total NATL data. In the case of total storms, about 20% of the total storms make landfall over the entire dataset. It is therefore quite unlikely that randomness alone explains these results.

This conclusion is unavoidable if one accepts the results of Holland and Webster (2007) that "data errors cannot explain the sharp, high amplitude transitions between the climatic regimes in the North Atlantic, each with an increase of around 50% in cyclone and hurricane numbers." With an increase of 50% in total hurricane numbers in two transitions among three climate regimes, and landfalling storms representing approximately 20% of the long-term total, it is statistically improbable that these changes would not manifest themselves in increased landfalls, all else being equal. Consider that that 31.8% of all storms that made landfall during 1905-1930 (Holland and Webster’s first NATL TC climate regime). Under a binomial distribution the probability of subsequently observing 131 or fewer landfalls out of 788 in the period 1931-2006 (i.e., the actual observations) at the earlier period’s probability of landfall is less than 0.00001. Thus, it necessarily must be true that either the data is flawed or there are real changes in the landfall characteristics of NATL climatology.

More recently, from 1944 to 1974 17.9% (31 years, 55/307) of total NATL storms made landfall in the U.S., and from 1975-2006 (31 years, 51/360) 14.2% of total NATL storms made landfall in the U.S.. The probability of observing 51 or less landfalls in the second period at the earlier period’s landfall rate is 0.054. Thus, there is reason to believe that even in the most recent half century where storm counts have been assumed to be most accurate there are either data problems or real changes have occurred in the climatology of NATL tropical cyclone landfalls.

Conclusion

This short note has revisited trends in U.S. landfalling hurricanes both as annual totals and as a proportion of total North Atlantic tropical cyclone activity from 1851-2006. The data indicate that there are no trends in landfall numbers but a marked decrease in the proportion of storms that make landfall. There are several possibilities for this decrease.

•One explanation is that earlier data fails to accurately represent the total actual number of tropical cyclones, thereby artificially increasing landfalling storms as a proportion of the total.

•A second explanation is that the trends in the total number of storms are in fact reflective of increasing Atlantic activity and the decreasing proportion that make landfall results from some yet unknown climate process that may or may not have a relationship to human activity. There is no obvious relationship between SSTs and landfall proportions.

•A third possibility, that the remarkable stability of landfall numbers over time is due to randomness, is highly unlikely simply for basic reasons of probability if one assumes that landfall proportions are constant over the long run.

Scientists are nonetheless in agreement that the coming decades will see landfall numbers that exceed the average from 1970-1994. Decision makers should take care not to overlook the possibility that future landfall rates may exceed that observed in the historical record, whether due to global warming, randomness, natural causes, or some combination. A lack of knowledge about the future means that surprises should be expected. Given the importance of landfalling storms to decision makers, a concluding recommendation is that the research community should place even greater attention to the challenging and important scientific questions of hurricane landfall climatology.

Footnotes

1. http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Storm_pages/Atl/ATLdate.dat

2. http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/ushurrlist18512005-gt.txt See the NOAA WWW page for a discussion of "affected the U.S. coastline."

3. The use of a ratio based on total storms follows the similar use of a ratio by Holland and Webster (2007) to examine trends in storm intensity.

4. Note that a 9-year moving average is used simply because this is the smoothing used in Holland and Webster (2007).

5. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center provides NATL SST indices by month from 1950 here: http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/data/indices/sstoi.atl.indices

References to be added

Calling Carbon Cycle Experts

We'd welcome an explanation of the possible (or non) significance of this new paper in Science for understandings of the global carbon cycle. A news story contained the following interesting paragraph (italics added):

Scientists say the discovery could bear on estimates of the pervasiveness of exotic microbial life, which some experts suspect forms a hidden biosphere extending miles underground whose total mass may exceed that of all surface life.

Happy Holidays Prometheus Readers!

All of us here at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado/CIRES would like to send our readers best wishes for the holiday season and a happy new year!

We greatly value the excellent feedback, comments, suggestions, and contributions from the readers/commentors on our blog, who we believe are the best you will find on any blog on any subject. We look forward to 2007 and a chance to continue to learn from our many substantive interactions with our knowledgeable readers. For our part you can expect that we'll continue to provide analysis and commentary in the new year, and you can expect that some things you'll agree with, some you won't, and sometimes we'll make really excellent arguments and sometimes we won't!

Over the holidays we'll be paying attention, and maybe blogging if the occasion is right. So during the next 10 days or so, if your comment gets held up, just drop us an email and we'll get it online as soon as we can.

Happy Holidays!!

Swiss Re on 2006 Disaster Losses

It was a good year to be in the insurance and reinsurance industries. Swiss Re has released their preliminary assessment of 2006 catastrophe losses which are spectacularly low.

According to one industry official, "will see further rate increases even though 2006 has been a remarkably catastrophe-free year. 2005 was so bad that catastrophe rates must rise further."

According to our analysis, 2006 ranks 18th in terms of normalized hurricane damage years since 1987. According to Swiss Re, "Among the last 20 years, 2006 has produced the third-lowest insured losses, after 1997 and 1988. This is attributable mainly to the quiet hurricane season in the US and surrounding countries." But there were remarkably few other disasters as well.

And I'm focused on adaptation?

An excellent and eye-opening story from Keith Bradsher in yesterday's NYT provides a new angle on the economics of the Kyoto Protocol:

Foreign businesses have embraced an obscure United Nations-backed program as a favored approach to limiting global warming. But the early efforts have revealed some hidden problems.

Under the program, businesses in wealthier nations of Europe and in Japan help pay to reduce pollution in poorer ones as a way of staying within government limits for emitting climate-changing gases like carbon dioxide, as part of the Kyoto Protocol.

Among their targets is a large rusting chemical factory here in southeastern China. Its emissions of just one waste gas contribute as much to global warming each year as the emissions from a million American cars, each driven 12,000 miles.

Cleaning up this factory will require an incinerator that costs $5 million — far less than the cost of cleaning up so many cars, or other sources of pollution in Europe and Japan.

Yet the foreign companies will pay roughly $500 million for the incinerator — 100 times what it cost. The high price is set in a European-based market in carbon dioxide emissions. Because the waste gas has a far more powerful effect on global warming than carbon dioxide emissions, the foreign businesses must pay a premium far beyond the cost of the actual cleanup.

The huge profits from that will be divided by the chemical factory’s owners, a Chinese government energy fund, and the consultants and bankers who put together the deal from a mansion in the wealthy Mayfair district of London.

It seems that mitigation pays.

So what happened at AGU last week?

[this is a cross-post from this original]

With thirteen thousand people at a confab of geophysicists and geophysicists-in-training, a few thousand of whom work on something related to the climate system, you expect to hear about climate change. In perhaps a short decade, climate change has rapidly surpassed seismology as the primary membrane between the public and the geophysics research world. Climate is now what most makes the American Geophysical Union relevant to non-members; climate is now what essentially drives the meeting despite the presence of dozens of other specialties represented.

As a physical oceanographer (which by definition also means "climatologist")- become-enviro policy guy, though, I wasn't so much interested in the details of climate science at this year's AGU. What I was (and am) interested in is seeing the conference as a whole. My interest in AGU has strayed from the hardrock science, moving into something more to do with feelings and hunches. That's right, feelings. Hunches. Intuition. The squishy, soft underbelly of the human mind; the part we want to ignore in pursuing geophysical data analysis. What I want to know is attitude. More than the state of the science, I now want to know about the state of the scientists.

I will grant that talking to the people I did at AGU represents a small fraction of all the attendees. I will grant that there is no way to know whether my averaging of attitudes in the climsci world, as sensed by talking with a few people over a few days, scales up to represent the true feelings of the collective. But I will tell you what I found, and what I felt, and whether you think it might represent the current attitude of climsci world is up to you.

To sum the state of climsci world in one word, as I see it right now, it is this: tension.

What I am starting to hear is internal backlash. Sure, science is messy and always full of tension between holders of competing positions, opinions and analyses. That has always been the nature of science, and of course extends to climate science. Tensions come out at meetings, on listservs, on letters pages, and in the press. But these tensions normally surround a particular paper, or a particular question. While much more broadly-based tensions have existed for years on the state of understanding on global warming, they haven't really been tensions internal to the climsci community, but tensions between the climsci community and interested outsiders.

What I am sensing now is something much broader and more diffuse, something that has less to do with particular components of the science in the field and is much more about how the field is composing itself.

What I see is something that I am having a hard time labeling, but that I might call either a "hangover" or a "sophomore slump" or "buyers remorse." None fit perfectly, but perhaps the combination does. I speak for (my interpretation) of the collective: {We tried for years – decades – to get them to listen to us about climate change. To do that we had to ramp up our rhetoric. We had to figure out ways to tone down our natural skepticism (we are scientists, after all) in order to put on a united face. We knew it would mean pushing the science harder than it should be. We knew it would mean allowing the boundary-pushers on the "it's happening" side free reign while stifling the boundary-pushers on the other side. But knowing the science, we knew the stakes to humanity were high and that the opposition to the truth would be fierce, so we knew we had to dig in. But now they are listening. Now they do believe us. Now they say they're ready to take action. And now we're wondering if we didn't create a monster. We're wondering if they realize how uncertain our projections of future climate are. We wonder if we've oversold the science. We're wondering what happened to our community, that individuals caveat even the most minor questionings of barely-proven climate change evidence, lest they be tagged as "skeptics." We're wondering if we've let our alarm at the problem trickle to the public sphere, missing all the caveats in translation that we have internalized. And we're wondering if we’ve let some of our scientists take the science too far, promise too much knowledge, and promote more certainty in ourselves than is warranted.}

I came to this place in a few ways. One was a colleague describing a caveat he put into his poster abstract out of fear --- yes, fear! (He strongly called into question widely-quoted data supporting a decline in snowpack and advance in spring peak runoff in the northern Rockies.) Another was multiple colleagues giving me independent but similar blistering accounts of the GCMs they work on (upcoming post on this). Yet another was listening to competing ideas presented by Torn (GC22A-02) and Knutti (-04) in this session. It was in these and other events and conversations that a theme arose that pervaded my meeting.

None of this is to say that the risk of climate change is being questioned or downplayed by our community; it's not. It is to say that I think some people feel that we've created a monster by limiting the ability of people in our community to question results that say "climate change is right here!" It is to say that a number of climsci people I heard from are not comfortable enough with the science to want our community to push to outsiders an idea that we have fully or even adequately bounded the risk. I heard from a few people a sentiment that we need to stop making assumptions and decisions for decision-makers; that we need to give decision-makers only the unvarnished truth with realistic bounds on our uncertainty, and trust that the decision-makers will know what to do with it. These feelings came of frustration that many of us are downplaying uncertainties for fear of not being listened to.

I don't play in the weeds of climate change anymore, I play in the weeds of how the science gets to policy makers and how the nature of policy-making gets back to the scientists. My own feeling of self-responsibility in this field is to be that translator in any small way I can; to hear what each sides thinks and needs and to play go-between. (I am certainly not the only one, but there aren't many of us, either.) It is for that reason that what I heard concerns me greatly, because I see negative implications for the credibility of the climsci world.

In upcoming posts I will give concrete examples of events and discussions from which I draw these conclusions. For now I leave the concerned climsci community with the thoughts of one former Congressional science fellow who is now back in research science (with some additions of my own): dealing with uncertainty is exactly what Congresspeople do, and they do it a lot better than we do. For scientists, uncertainty is an abstract concept, something that feeds into an academic study, a place where the stakes are low and time-scale is long-term. For politicians and unelected decision-makers, uncertainty is life-or-death, yet decisions must still be made. Politicians constantly make decisions amid levels of uncertainty that would stifle the publication of any academic climate change paper. We need to realize that, give the politicians their due, and get the hell out of their way. Give them the science and the uncertainties and let them make the decisions. Overplaying our hand is a dangerous gambit, and may spell big trouble for us in the future.

I realize that many of you will disagree with the notion that we are overplaying our hand, or are not giving full voice to our uncertainties. I'm not sure the answer to this question myself. But I write all this because I sense a sea change in attitudes amongst climsci people that I know as good scientists without agendas. These are solid scientists, and some told me in no uncertain terms that we are not giving full voice to uncertainties; others implied as much. Therein lies the tension. Where we go from here is anybody's guess, but I tend to agree with the Oracle in the second Matrix movie: we already know the answer to that question, our task is to understand why we are going to do what we are going to do.

Ryan Meyer in Ogmius

Ryan Meyer, whose letter to Science we highlighted a few days ago, also has the cover story in our Center's latest newsletter which has just been put online. Ryan's article is titled, "Arbitrary Impacts and Unknown Futures: The shortcomings of climate impact models" and be found here.

The newsletter, called Ogmius, can be found here in html and here in PDF. Have a look!

Misrepresenting Literature on Hurricanes and Climate Change

Greg Holland and Peter Webster have a new paper accepted on the statistics of Atlantic hurricanes. While there are many interesting questions that might be raised about the data and statistics in the paper, here I comment on the paper’s treatment of the existing literature, some of which involves work I have contributed to. In this instance I find their characterization of the literature to grossly misrepresent what the existing research actually says. I have shared my comments with Drs. Holland and Webster, to which I received the following reaction from Greg Holland: "We shall not be modifying the paper as a result of your comments."

Below I present their original text and my comments. We think that readers can judge for themselves whether a mischaracterization of the literature has occurred. I promised Peter Webster that I wouldn’t speculate on their motivations, and so I’ll stick to the facts in what I present below. I do know that when scientists misrepresent each others work, it is likely to stymie the advancement of knowledge in the community, and thus should be of general concern. When such misrepresentations are missed in the peer review process this also should raise some concerns. In this case I find the misrepresentations obvious to see and egregious, occurring in just about every sentence in the relevant paragraph.

Do note that the comments below do not get into their statistical analysis, which is worth considering separately on its own merits, but which goes beyond the focus of this post. Both Drs. Holland and Webster are widely published and respected scientists with admirable track records. They are welcome to respond here if they’d like. And I do note that different people can interpret the literature in different ways, so the below is my reading only.

Holland and Webster’s new paper can be found here in PDF and the text I have excerpted below in bold comes from their pp. 5-6. My comments are interlaid within their text.

Questions have been raised over the quality of the NATL data even for such a broad brush accounting. For example, a recent study by Landsea et al (2006) claimed that long-term trends in tropical cyclone numbers and characteristics cannot be determined because of the poor quality of the data base in the NATL even after the incorporation of satellite data into the data base. Landsea et al. also state unequivocally that there is no trend in any tropical storm characteristics (frequency or intensity) after 1960, despite this being established in earlier papers by Emanuel (2005) and Webster et al. (2005), and more recently by Hoyos et al. (2006).

Here is what I read in Landsea et al. (2006) (PDF): "There may indeed be real trends in tropical cyclone intensity . . ." Holland and Webster report the opposite of what Landsea et al. (2006) actually says. Landsea et al. (2006) state that they do not believe that the data record is of sufficient quality to definitively detect trends. They do not say that there are no trends. Holland and Webster ascribe a claim to Landsea et al. that they do not make.

Figure 1 shows a strong statistically significant trend since the 1970s similar to that found by Hoyos et al. (2006) and Curry et al. (2006). The overall Landsea et al. analysis is curious and is based on the premise that the data must be wrong because the models suggest a much smaller change in hurricane characteristics relative to the observed SST warming (e.g., Henderson-Sellers et al 1998).

Here is what Landsea at al. (2006) actually say: "Theoretical considerations based on sea surface temperature increases suggest an increase of ~4% in maximum sustained surface wind per degree Celsius (4, 5). But such trends are very likely to be much smaller (or even negligible) than those found in the recent studies (1-3)." Landsea et al. (2006) are reporting a finding accepted in the community. Indeed, the recent WMO statement (written and signed by Greg Holland) states, "The more relevant question is how large a change: a relatively small one several decades into the future or large changes occurring today? Currently published theory and numerical modeling results suggest the former, which is inconsistent with the observational studies of Emanuel (2005) and Webster et al. (2005) by a factor of 5 to 8 (for the Emanuel study)." Holland and Webster do not cite the WMO statement.

In contrast, Michaels, Knappenberger and Landsea (2005) argue the opposite, that the models must be wrong because they do not agree with the data. We shall show later that there are factors not included in the models that may explain some of the differences between model and observed trends.

Michaels et al. (2005) do not say that "the models must be wrong because they do not agree with the data." They say that if you run the models with different inputs you get different results. They write (PDF), "when [Knutson and Tuleya’s model is] driven by real-world observations rather than unrealistically parameterized and constrained model conditions, the prospects for a detectable increase in hurricane strength in coming decades are reduced to the noise level of the data." Michaels et al. are not comparing data with models, but looking at modeled output using different inputs.

Further, noticeable by omission is that Holland and Webster ignore relevant work that discusses the relationship of models, theory, and observations that includes Landsea as an author (which seems to be the focus of this paragraph). In particular the following paper discusses this subject explicitly:

Pielke, Jr., R. A., C.W. Landsea, M. Mayfield, J. Laver, R. Pasch, 2006. Reply to Hurricanes and Global Warming Potential Linkages and Consequences, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Vol. 87, pp. 628-631. (PDF)

It particular Pielke et al. (2006) responds to a statement in a related paper (Anthes et al., Greg Holland included in the et al., PDF), that says that there is "broad consistency between observations, models, and theory." This statement is contradicted by Pielke et al. (2006) and WMO (2006), the latter is actually signed by Holland.

Of greater concern is that the conclusions in the Landsea et al. paper are at odds with several previous publications that include the same authors (e.g. Owens and Landsea 2003, Landsea et al. 1999), without introducing any additional evidence. These papers state clearly that the author’s considered that the period of reliable and accurate NATL records commenced in 1944 with the implementation of aircraft reconnaissance.

I coauthored Landsea et al. (1999) (PDF) and in that paper there are indeed statements on concerns about post-1944 hurricane data (e.g., at p. 94). Further, Landsea et al. (2006) cite a range of post-1999 studies acknowledging new uncertainties in data and methodologies, (e.g., C. Velden et al., Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc., in press.; J. A. Knaff, R. M. Zehr, Weather Forecast., in press). To say that there has been no additional evidence cited by Landsea et al. (2006) (when Holland and Webster’s work is key to that new evidence) is simply misleading and wrong.

The bottom line here is that while this is just one paragraph in one paper, there is perhaps reason to be concerned about the fidelity of the literature, whatever the underlying causes may be. We have documented other shortfalls in the literature on several occasions on this site. To the extent that these data points are representative of broader problems in the climate literature, scientists should redouble their efforts to exert high standards of quality control. For if I can spot these misrepresentations in the literature, then others will as well.

Climate Change Hearings and Policy Issues

Ryan Meyer, a PhD student at ASU's Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes and collaborator in our SPARC project, has a letter in the current issue of Science.

Here is Ryan's letter:

The Random Samples item "As earth warms, Congress listens" (6 Oct., p. 29) ends with a proclamation by the National Resources Defense Council's David Doniger that climate change hearings "don't do anything." Although Doniger's frustrations are understandable, his lament misses a crucial point: In fact, it is precisely what climate hearings actually do that so badly hinders policy progress.

Climate change hearings are held because the issue is deeply divisive. As Nobelist Herbert Simon reminded us, "when an issue becomes highly controversial--when it is surrounded by uncertainties and conflicting values--then expertness is very hard to come by, and it is no longer easy to legitimate the experts" (1). Studies of discourse in these settings, including my own analysis of examples from the last 15 years (2-4), show, for example, that discussions of uncertainty have had the dual effect of justifying increased research funding while delaying policy decisions--a win for both the scientists and the politicians!

Scientists must recognize that when they testify at such hearings, they are participating in a political event, not a scientific one. When issues are highly polarized, a hearing may be a useful tool for adding to the public record or building support for a particular policy position, but it should not be seen as a way to impose scientific rationality on politics.

Ryan M. Meyer
Consortium for Science Policy and Outcomes
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-4401, USA

References

1. H. A. Simon, Reason in Human Affairs (Stanford Univ. Press, Stanford, CA, 1983), p. 97.
2. S. Shackley, P. Young, S. Parkinson, B. Wynne, Clim. Change 38, 159 (1998).
3. J. van der Sluijs, J. van Eijndhoven, S. Shackley, B. Wynne, Social Stud. Sci. 28, 291 (Apr. 1998).
4. R. Meyer, Perspect. Public Affairs 3, 85 (Spring 2006).

The article of Ryan's that he refers to is titled, "Intractable Debate: Why Congressional hearings on climate fail to advance policy" and can be found here in PDF. Do pay attention. Ryan is someone I expect that we'll be hearing much more from.

Useable Information for Policy

Twenty-two members of Congress have written a letter to the head of the Climate Change Science Program observing that the program is failing to fulfill its mandate under Public Law 101-606 to deliver useable information for policy makers. This is good news.

The letter observes that the Bush Administration has failed to produce an assessment as required by the law, which is supposed to be delivered every four years. This situation is analogous to the behavior of the Clinton Administration which produced a single assessment in 2000, which was six years overdue. The assessment produced by the Clinton Administration was produced within OSTP under the nominal leadership of Al Gore which – rightly or wrongly – put a partisan tint on the product. Some – both on the right and the left -- continue to use the 2000 assessment six years later as a political wedge device.

The letter from the members of Congress observes:

. . . the current CCSP [Climate Change Science Program] website acknowledges that the law directs the agencies to "produce information readily useable by policy makers attempting to formulate effective strategies for preventing, mitigating, and adapting to the effects of global change," . . . The failure of the CCSP to produce a National Assessment report within the time frame required by law has made it more difficult for Congress to develop a comprehensive policy response to the challenge of global climate change.

The CCSP is currently producing 20 different assessment reports but according to the program’s previous direction, the CCSP does not engage in discussion of policy options. It is pretty difficult to produce usable information for policy makers without discussing policy options.

Does the Bush Administration want to avoid disucssion of policy options on climate change? Yes. Did the Clinton Administration also want to avoid discussion of policy options on climate change? Yes. Has much of the scientific community also wanted to avoid discussion of policy options on climate change? Yes. Sounds like a perfect situation for congressional oversight.

The policy failures of the CCSP have nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans, and everything to do with the structure of scientific advice implemented under the CCSP and its predecessor organization. Why do I say this? Because in 1994 I defended my doctoral dissertation on implementation of the climate science program under Public Law 101-606, and the exact same issues involving "usable information for policy" identified by the current letter from the 22 members of Congress existed at that time as well.

It is good to see Congress finally invoking the language in P.L 101-606 calling for usable information for policy makers. This is a matter of the effective governance of science in support of decision making, and it should not be dragged into partisan political bickering. The bipartisan letter from 22 members of Congress is a good place to start.

For details see:

Pielke Jr., R. A., 1995: Usable Information for Policy: An Appraisal of the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Policy Sciences, 38, 39-77. (PDF)

Letter from 22 members of Congress to CCSP, courtesy of E&E Daily (PDF)

Reactions to Report on Al Gore at AGU

This news report of Al Gore’s speech at the American Geophysical Union yesterday is interesting for at least three reasons.

Here is the relevant excerpt from the news story:

"We have somehow persuaded ourselves that we really don't have to care that much about what we're doing to future generations," he said.

"We have to find a way to communicate the direness of the situation."

James Hansen, director of NASA'S Goddard Institute for Space Studies, had a front row seat to Gore's hour-long talk. His name often comes up when talk turns to the need in science for a standard-bearer; more than any scientist, he has generated headlines for his spars with the White House on climate change.

He agreed fully with Gore's call. "Scientists have not done a good job communicating with the public," he said in an interview.

The "huge gap" between where the science is and what the public knows, Hansen added, "is partly our fault and part of the problem."

Dan Kammen, co-director of the University of California's Institute of the Environment and a professor in the Energy and Resources Group, said being a scientist activist has its price. He's lost out on grants because of his political positions on energy and climate issues, he said.

"Some of us have been doing this for some time and at some risk," Kammen said.

Are more scientists likely to heed Gore's call? In a few weeks, a pack of climate scientists and politicians are planning a demonstration in front of the White House.

First interesting item: James Hansen asserts that scientists have not done a good job communicating with the public. Of course there is a huge gap between what climate experts know and what the public knows. There are similar gaps between what experts know about the history of Iraq and what the public knows, how a modern automobile works under the hood and what the public knows, functioning of cancer cells and what the public knows, and every single other issue for which experts have specialized knowledge. I will speculate that Dr. Hansen is making a political point, as Mr. Gore did, suggesting that if the public only knew what they knew, then they’d act exactly like Mr. Gore or Dr. Hansen. This of course is the public understanding of science (PUS) fallacy that we have discussed many times here. There are two responses to the PUS fallacy on climate change. First, for many years, and especially 2006 there has been overwhelming awareness of the public about climate change and support for action. What is it that Mr. Gore and Dr. Hansen think will happen if the public becomes more educated? The only place for opinion polls on this issue to go is down. Consider that the EU public overwhelming supports action on climate change and yet EU performance closely resembles that of the United States. There is more to this issue than public opinion. Of course, public opinion matters a great deal if one, hypothetically, is using the global warming issue for some larger goal, like running for president. (Disclaimer: I’ve bet Lisa D. lunch that Mr. Gore will run. We shall see.)

Second interesting item: Berkeley’s Dan Kammen suggest that he has lost out on grants because of his political views? Prof. Kammen is a darling of the climate community, and based on what I’ve seen and read, it is well deserved. I find it hard to believe that he has been punished for his popular and widely accepted views. As I had earlier stated about Bill Gray’s claims about funding, I’d need some evidence to buy such claims.

Third interesting item: "In a few weeks, a pack of climate scientists and politicians are planning a demonstration in front of the White House."

Senator Coal and King Coal

A few items on my desk related to coal are worth mentioning.

First, there has been some recent discussion about a letter from Senators Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) to Exxon-Mobil. I saw it and didn’t think much of it. Politicians politicize. I don’t see the letter as an affront to free speech, quashing Exxon’s right to speech, or having much at all to do with science. What I did find interesting however was Senator Rockefeller’s response to a hometown newspaper taking him to task for writing the letter. In the letter Senator Rockefeller makes the following comment:

We didn't "attempt to squelch debate," as the Daily Mail suggested. Rather, our letter was, in fact, an attempt to create and foster greater debate.

And part of that debate, I believe, requires calling attention to Exxon-Mobil's funding of a pseudoscientific community whose purpose is to prevent us from tackling global climate change.

ExxonMobil is out of step even with its own industry. Other oil companies have explicitly acknowledged global climate change and are moving to develop and support new energy technologies and solutions.

Thankfully for West Virginia, clean coal technology is at the heart of these solutions. And I don't intend to allow deliberate misinformation to undermine our push for major national investments in the clean coal research and facilities that can help solve this problem.

The reality is that we need to have a free and honest debate about how we're going to address a problem that threatens to be of epic proportions.

So Mr. Rockefeller is using the issue of scientific integrity as a means to advance the interests of the coal industry over the oil and gas industry. In other words, he is politicizing the politicization of science. Presumably, Exxon doesn’t have too many jobs in West Virginia. Politics makes strange bedfellows, of course, but I do wonder how Mr. Rockefeller’s views play with those who don’t buy into the idea of "clean coal" such as Dave Roberts at Grist Magazine who keeps telling us that "Coal is the enemy of the human race." It seems like the strongest political consensus on climate change these days is that Exxon is bad; after that, it all breaks down.

This brings me to my second point on coal. I have sitting on my desk yet-to-be-read a book titled Sustainable Fossil Fuels: The Unusual Suspect in the Quest for Clean and Enduring Energy (Cambridge, 2007) by Marc Jaccard of Simon Fraser University. The book’s blurbs include positive statements from a crowd of people as varied as Bill Hare (formerly Greenpeace, now PIK) who recommends the book but "remains unconvinced," David Hawkins (NRDC), and the CEO of the World Coal Institute. Spiked-Online has a short essay from Prof. Jaccard, and here is an excerpt:

Some argue that fossil fuels should be abandoned because there are superior alternatives - energy efficiency, nuclear power and renewables such as wind, solar and hydropower. The aggressive pursuit of energy efficiency is desirable. But around the world, humans continue to crave ever-greater access to energy. The global energy system was 16 times larger in 2000 than in 1900. Two billion people today are without electricity and modern fuels, and by 2100 their offspring will be four billion. These people use less than one gigajoule of energy per year while a typical American uses over 300. Even with dramatic energy efficiency gains in wealthier countries, a subsistence level of 30 gigajoules for the planet’s poorer people will still require a three-fold expansion of the energy system during this century. Scale-up is the major challenge for nuclear power and renewable energy. Fossil fuels currently account for 84 per cent of the global energy system. Nuclear is at two per cent and renewables - mostly burning of wood and agricultural residues - at 14 per cent.

The wholesale replacement of fossil fuels in just one century will require a phenomenal expansion. The nuclear industry should grow, but its pace is limited by challenges in siting new facilities, storing radioactive waste and preventing nuclear weapons proliferation. Most renewable energy has low energy density and variable production, which increases land-use conflicts and capital costs.

An essential effort in research and development will decrease the costs of renewables. But zero-emission fossil fuels will remain cost competitive for at least this century. Acceptance of this economic reality means admitting that fossil fuels should be not be regarded as a foe, but rather humanity’s best friend in its quest for a clean, enduring and affordable energy system. Long live the king!

I’ll have more comments after I’ve read his book, but it is safe to say that we’ll be with fossil fuels for a long while.

The Importance of Evaluation

A story in the New York Times today on the effectiveness of colonoscopy highlights the importance of evaluating the effectiveness of action. One of the biggest areas of study in academic policy research is evaluation, and the federal government has an entire agency that focuses on evaluation in the Government Accountability Office.

But in policy as in medicine – as the colonoscopy case illustrates -- it is amazing how often evaluation of the effectiveness of action is overlooked or simply not done. Evaluation matters because it indicates what is working and what works. In the case of colonoscopy, improved health outcomes are apparently achieved with only a minor change in medical practice.

New Bridges Article on 110th Congress

The December issue of Bridges is out, and it includes my column, this time on what we might expect on science and technology policy from the 110th Congress.

But do read the whole issue. Bridges is one of the top publications you'll find anywhere on science and technology policy.

Follow Up to Flood Policy Presentation

I had the opportunity to give a presentation yesterday at the National Flood Risk Policy Summit to an audience which included many national leaders on flood policy. I promised the audience that I’d post a short entry here with links to relevant background papers and other materials. This post provides these links.

First, here are the main points of my presentation:

*The "100-year flood" is not a good basis for a successful national flood policy.

*Losses provide a basis for evaluating long-term policy success.

*Political factors play a large role in the disaster declaration process.

*Population and development drive loss trends.

*As yet, no link established between human-caused climate change and flood/storm damages

EMERGING ISSUES?
OR THE SAME OLD ISSUES?

Here are relevant background links:

We have created a WWW site – www.flooddamagedata.org -- that presents a range of U.S. flood data and analyses. As I mentioned at the talk, we would gladly turn this over to any agency or organization that is interested in keeping it updated, publicly available, and of use to researchers and policy makers. For now it is not being updated.

Several papers of ours are relevant:

On national flood policies:

Pielke Jr., R.A., 1999: Nine fallacies of floods. Climatic Change, 42, 413-438. (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)

On climate and flood damage:

Pielke, Jr., R. A. and M.W. Downton, 2000. Precipitation and Damaging Floods: Trends in the United States, 1932-97. Journal of Climate, 13(20), 3625-3637. (PDF)

On the politics of flood disaster declarations:

Downton, M. and R.A. Pielke, Jr., 2001. Discretion Without Accountability: Politics, Flood Damage, and Climate, Natural Hazards Review, 2(4):157-166. ((PDF)

On disaster losses and flood damage:

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)

Downton, M. and R. A. Pielke, Jr., 2005. How Accurate are Disaster Loss Data? The Case of U.S. Flood Damage, Natural Hazards, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 211-228. (PDF)

On flood disasters related to tropical cyclones:

Pielke, Jr., R. A. and R. Klein, 2005. Distinguishing Tropical Cyclone-Related Flooding in U.S. Presidential Disaster Declarations: 1965-1997, Natural Hazards Review, May 2005, pp. 55-59. (PDF)

On the role of demographics in hurricane losses:

Pielke, Jr., R.A., Gratz, J., Landsea, C.W., Collins, D., Saunders, M., and Musulin, R., 2007. Normalized Hurricane Damages in the United States: 1900-2005. Natural Hazards Review, (submitted). (link)

For a global perspective, see the report of our Hohenkammer Workshop, in parthership with Munich Re, GKSS, and the Tyndall Centre.

More along these lines can be found here.

Dan Sarewitz - Lies We Must Live With

Dan Sarewitz, a professor at ASU and faculty affiliate at the CU Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, has penned a thought-provoking essay on science and religion in the latest CSPO Newsletter. Here is an excerpt, but do read the whole thing (and bring your thinking cap).

Now the most serious conflicts among humans are all, at root, conflicts about how to balance a variety of moral concerns such as justice, equality, and liberty. So, when scientists argue that the world would be better off without religion, then they are also arguing that humans would be better able to solve their deepest and most vexing problems in the absence of religion. A slightly different way to make the scientific claim is this: Moral discourse among those who don’t believe in ultimate meaning will yield more satisfactory results for society than if such discourse also includes believers.

But what difference does it make if you trace your morals and values to a non-existent supernatural authority, or if you trace them to biochemically and culturally determined cognitive processes? There may be a psychological difference—the difference between delusion and realism—but neither position, according to the scientific perspective, can make a claim to moral authority; both are irrational in the scientific sense. So the key point here cannot be the fact that believers are delusional about the source of their beliefs, rather it must be that, in being delusional, believers’ beliefs are less good than nonbelievers’ beliefs.

Why, then, should scientists expect that the world would be a better place if moral discourse was dominated by people who don’t believe in god than if it was dominated by believers? The answer is obvious: because the scientists making this argument are people who don’t believe in god! So of course they think that if they made all the important choices the world would be better!! They’d be making the choices!!! In other words, this is a political claim, not an a priori statement about rationality. This must be the case because there is, from the serious scientific perspective, no authoritatively rational solution to moral dilemmas, there are only political solutions. Put somewhat differently, science’s claim to ultimate knowledge is precisely what robs it of any legitimate claim to special privilege in public, and moral, discourse.

Dan ends the piece as follows:

The challenge here to scientism is as profound as the challenge to fundamentalism. From a scientific perspective, views rooted in supernatural explanations are views rooted in lies. This may be factually correct, but the rigors of pluralistic discourse demand that these lies have a seat at the table, right along side the neurologically and evolutionarily contingent preferences of the highly rational. This is not a matter of principle but of logic tempered by experience. There is no reason to believe that good moral reasoning derives from the scientific rigor of one’s views of ultimate causation. There are some lies that society cannot do without.

The antidote to irrationality is not its contrary, but its plural. It’s about inclusiveness, pluralism, democracy, not about rationality versus irrationality. The problem with fundamentalists is not God but fundamentalism. Conflating fundamentalism with all of religion is like conflating particle physics with all of science. Fundamentalists and physicists might like to claim that they alone occupy the solid ground of ultimate authority, but the rest of us know differently. A world run by like-thinking scientists is as horrific to contemplate as one run by like-thinking evangelicals.

The only questions I have is, when is this guy going to get a MacArthur Grant already?

Read the whole thing.

WMO Press Release on Hurricanes and Climate Change

This press release (.doc) from the World Meteorological Organization yesterday:

A consensus of 125 of the world’s leading tropical cyclone researchers and forecasters says that no firm link can yet be drawn between human-induced climate change and variations in the intensity and frequency of tropical cyclones.

The WMO is of course one of the parent bodies of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Given this pedigree and the importance of this consensus statement, I'm sure that we'll now see this widely discussed on science-related weblogs and in the media. For details on the consensus statement, see our earlier discussion here.

You Just Can't Say Such Things Redux

From today's Rocky Mountain News still more evidence that the climate debate is spiraling out of control:

A federal climate scientist in Boulder says his boss told him never to utter the word Kyoto and tried to bar him from using the phrase climate change at a conference.

The allegations come as federal investigators probe whether Bush administration officials tried to block government scientists from speaking freely about global warming and attempted to censor their research.

The Kyoto Protocol is an international agreement - never ratified by the United States and opposed by the Bush administration - that requires nations to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming.

Pieter Tans, a senior scientist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Boulder laboratory, said the ban on using the word Kyoto was issued about four years ago.

"We were under instructions not to use the word Kyoto, which of course is absurd," said Tans, who measures levels of carbon dioxide at NOAA's Global Monitoring Division. He has worked for the agency since 1990.

Tans said the order was issued verbally by his boss, David Hofmann, the division director. Another senior researcher at the Boulder laboratory, NOAA physicist James Elkins, said Hofmann told him the same thing.

Elkins studies greenhouse gases and has worked at NOAA for more than 20 years. He said he can't remember when the directive was issued, but it was "probably in 2000 or 2001."

"When I asked why we weren't supposed to use Kyoto, I was told that we're not supposed to use it in the policy context," Elkins said. "I'm not supposed to be talking about policy."

Hofmann, however, called the allegations "nonsense" and said there was no ban on using the word Kyoto.

"I never said it specifically in those words," Hofmann said. "I probably said that since the Kyoto Protocol is not ratified - is not part of the U.S. program - stay away from talking about Kyoto when you give a presentation."

"It has nothing to do with the science we're doing here," Hofmann said of Kyoto.

The Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997 and went into effect in February 2005, following ratification by Russia.

Elkins said the prohibition against using the word was lifted after Russia ratified the protocol.

"Once Russia signed Kyoto, it was a done deal," he said.

Posted on December 11, 2006 06:01 PM View this article | Comments (9)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Science + Politics

You Just Can’t Say Such Things

Larry Summers learned the hard way that there are some things that you just don’t do in a university setting. Nancy Greene Raine, Chancellor of Thompson River University in Canada who also was a gold medalist skier in the 1960s, is learning the same lessons.

From the Kamloops Daily News last Saturday via a weblog:

University professors outraged by comments from TRU chancellor Nancy Greene Raine, who expressed doubt on climate change in a national media broadcast, met with her in a hastily called session Friday afternoon.

The meeting was arranged by senior administration at Thompson Rivers University following a cascade of e-mails among faculty concerned that her opinion reflects poorly on the university.

Penny Powers, a professor in the school of nursing confirmed earlier Friday she had been called to the meeting with Raine.

'One of the most important goals of a university is to instill in the students an ability to assess the evidence for and against claims of any kind,' she wrote in an e-mail to faculty.

'What kind of role model do we put in place when the chancellor herself gives poorly-considered credence to widely discredited extremist opinions such as these?' . . .

Charles Hays a professor of journalism at TRU, wrote in a message to colleagues that Greene Raine cannot be the symbolic head of the university and make statements that run counter to the overwhelming weight of scientific opinion.

'And as chancellor, she has accepted a role as the symbolic head of the university. In that role, she owes it to the university not to make statements of opinion and expect that they will be perceived as merely the words of a private citizen.'

The Daily News was unable to reach anyone for comment on what took place during the meeting between faculty and Greene Raine.

What was it that the Chancellor said that set off this firestorm?

. . . another big name in Canadian skiing cautioned that people shouldn't push the panic button.

"I am very suspicious now when I see people make blanket statements because there are two sides to every issue," said Nancy Greene Raine, an Olympic gold medallist in the 1960s who has helped develop some of the top skiing resorts in British Columbia since her retirement.

"And in science there's almost never black and white. We don't know what next week's weather going to be. To say in 50 or 100 years, the temperature is going to do this, is a bit of a stretch for me."

Disquiet on the Hurricane Front

[This op-ed by Dan Sarewitz and Roger Pielke, Jr. on the 2006 hurricane season was not published by a number of major newspapers. So we are happy to share it here. Anyone interested in publishing it before a wider audience, please send us an email. -Ed.]

The 2006 hurricane season has ended without a single hurricane landfall along the Gulf or East coasts. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans, journalists, politicians, and even some scientists were proclaiming that the catastrophe of global warming was upon us. A quiet year later, perhaps there is some room for clearer thinking about hurricanes, about global warming, and about society’s vulnerability to climate.

Before this year, the last years without a U.S. hurricane landfall were 2000 and 2001, just a blink of an eye in climate terms, but an eternity in the politics of global warming. In all, hurricane behavior over the past century and more has been highly variable, with periods of great intensity followed by lulls. Scientists remain deeply divided about the role of greenhouse gas emissions in hurricane behavior. But scientists have appreciated for decades the inevitability of a Katrina-like hit on New Orleans. The city was doomed for reasons that have nothing at all to do with global warming: it lies on a subsiding river delta in the heart of hurricane country.

Increasing damages from U.S. hurricane landfalls in the U.S. over the past century are entirely explained by growing socioeconomic vulnerability—that is, by coastal development trends that continually expose more people, more infrastructure, and more economic activity, to hurricanes. If one accounts for the effects of socioeconomic change, then there has been no observable increase in U.S. hurricane damage since data were first collected in 1900.

The future may indeed hold more frequent or intense hurricanes. However, the science at this point shows unambiguously that the effects of any such changes in storm behavior will be completely dwarfed by the effects of continued coastal development.

As Katrina made devastatingly clear, the hurricane problem is one of unsustainable coastal development combined with unconscionable socioeconomic vulnerability. Katrina’s blood relatives are the 2004 south Asian tsunami (220,000 dead) and the 2005 Pakistan earthquake (80,000 dead), not the Earth’s slowly warming atmosphere.

Feel-good appeals to buy hybrid vehicles cannot reduce the entrenched social inequities, irresponsible development trends, and inadequate hazard reduction policies that led to the worst of Katrina’s depredations and that are the cause of rising disaster vulnerability worldwide. Neither can the Kyoto Protocol, carbon trading markets, or other energy policies. There is simply no evidence that reductions in greenhouse gas emissions—as important as they are for other reasons—will lead to any discernible reduction in hurricane impacts over the next 50 to 100 years. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is about as relevant to controlling the impacts of hurricanes and other natural disasters as a nuclear non-proliferation treaty is to protecting public health.
Yet many well-tested policies are available to help reduce vulnerability to natural disasters. These range from building codes that can keep structures from collapsing in a storm or earthquake, to land use regulations that limit construction in disaster-prone areas, to environmental laws that preserve natural features, such as wetlands and forested slopes, that act as buffers against extreme events. The rising toll of disasters around the world demonstrates that nations are greatly underinvested in applying such policies, despite the fact that they are known to be effective, and despite the certainty that more disasters will soon occur.

From a political perspective, it is tempting to exploit the tragedy of Katrina and other natural disasters to promote action on greenhouse gas reductions. But no matter how strongly advocates may feel about global warming, if climate policies are based on the false expectation that emissions reductions will reduce hurricane losses, then political failure is inevitable, because the problem will get worse, not better. (To grasp this point, just consider the political impact of falsely linking Iraq to terrorism).

During this quiet hurricane season, more people moved to the coasts and other locations vulnerable to disasters, ensuring that future losses will be larger than those of the past. At the same time, more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were emitted into the atmosphere. These are separate problems that demand separate solutions. But by turning hurricanes into a greenhouse gas problem, we fail to focus sufficient attention and resources on reducing disaster vulnerability, and thus turn our backs on the victims of future disasters as well.

Hurricane Trends, Frequency, Prediction

This post is a slightly edited version of some random musings on hurricane science that I have shared with the Tropical Storms discussion list.

A few thoughts come to mind from the latest round of exchanges on the list.

1. Detection of trends

I call your attention to a recent paper by Rob Wilby:

Wilby, R. L. 2006. When and where might climate change be detectable in UK river flows? Geophys. Res. Lett., Vol. 33, No. 19, 14 October. (PDF)

. . .under widely assumed climate change scenarios, expected trends in UK summer river flows will seldom be detectable within typical planning horizons (the 2020s). Even where climate driven changes may already be underway, losses in deployable resources will have to be factored into long-term water plans long before they are statistically detectable.

Specifically, Wilby finds that "Assuming no change in variance, annual mean [river flow] must change by 38-46% by 2025 or 28-33% by 2055 to be detectable." These are huge numbers for changes in means and they assume perfect data quality. Wilby explains this result as "The long detection times for trends in UK river flow are due to the low signal-to-noise ratio of hydro-climatic time series at basin scales."

What does this mean for detection of trends in tropical cyclone intensity?

Assuming as the recent WMO report does that there is a 3-5% increase in windspeed for every degree increase in SST, and given that (a) windspeeds are, to date at least, measured with certainties that are arguably not at this level of precision (sometimes using S/S categories that are up to 5 times as large as these values), and (b) SSTs themselves are a noisy series, see e.g. this paper, this community may be in a situation where the science is fundamentally "underdetermined." I think that everyone in this community would benefit from an understanding of the notion of "underdetermination" in science and what it signifies for scientific debates. For an intro see this brief discussion.

For these reasons I have come to the conclusion that the search for detection of trends in TC activity will no doubt motivate much interesting research, but cannot result in a comprehensive community consensus anytime soon.

2. A Theory of (Maximum Potential) Frequency

If the above points may seem pessimistic (well, they are;-) the community need not throw up its hands. It seems to me that a way out of this quandary is for even greater attention to be paid to the development of a theory of maximum potential frequency to parallel MPI (maximum potential intensity) theory. I may be mistaken, but as an outsider looking in, it seems that much of the community is quite comfortable with existing MPI theory and is largely hopeless about a theoretical understanding of frequency (those working on further exploring MPI and developing a theory of frequency, please forgive, I am making a general point).

It also seems to me, perhaps naively, that intensity and frequency cannot be treated as independent, and continuing to treat TC research in this manner is an obstacle to further advances.

I would be interested in any efforts to develop a basin-by-basin theory of maximum potential frequency. For the Atlantic basin for instance, what is the maximum theoretically possible number of TCs that can develop during a single hurricane season, and why? Even starting with the classic six (?) conditions for development provides an upper constraint on the number of developing systems in a particular season. Inherent in the notion of a "season" are the seeds of an MPF theory. Consider that in the Atlantic 2005 saw 28 named storms, could there be 35? Why or Why not? 40? How about 5? Zero?

How about it?

3. The Importance of Prediction

In recent decades, Bill Gray, and others, have drawn a line in the sand, by arguing that in a particular basin the best that can be done in terms of expecting future activity is not to be found based on theory-based models but based on an understanding of statistical relationships which may not be fully understood from a theoretical standpoint. Debates about statistical vs. dynamical approaches to prediction occur across the sciences, and are no different here.

It seems to me that if this community wants to make progress on the debate over hurricanes and climate, it will necessarily have to engage in predictions of the future to a far greater degree that it does now, much as the ENSO community has done. There will be limited successes at first and successes and failures determined by luck. There will also have to be the careful management of public and policy makers expectations.

By predictions I mean - can anyone devise a methodology that can systematically beat out Gray, Saunders, Elsner, NOAA, climatology etc.? Such predictions might be seasonal, multi-year, or longer, but they should be verifiable by actual data on time scales that allow for feedback into the process of research. The experiences of the ENSO community are very instructive (and somewhat humbling) along these lines. If the long-term climate (i.e., over several years and longer) of TCs is indeed nonstationary, then over time those who base their predictions on historical statistical relationships will produce predictions whose skill should be easily exceeded by those using dynamical methods. In practice, in many fields, achieving such success has been difficult -- compare managed mutual fund performance to the naive baseline of the S&P 500, for instance!

Generic predictions about what will happen under 2XCO2 in 2100 are great, but they are unfalsifiable by experience on research timescales, feeding the problem of underdetermination. The alternative to making scientific predictions is that we perpetuate the state of underdetermination in this community and risk detaching ourselves from the fundamentals of this important aspect of the scientific method.

Inside the IPCC's Dead Zone

Climate scientist James Annan has related a tale of angst and suffering as a result of peer reviews that will, in broad terms, sound familiar to most academics. His experience raises a question that I’d like to ask of the folks familiar with the IPCC.

I have no idea what James’ paper is about, except that it argues that very high values of climate sensitivity can be ruled out, which I take it is contrary to the views of some others in the field. This situation leads me to consider several general questions about the IPCC:

How does the IPCC handle information that appears after its deadline for citation of peer-reviewed papers that may contradict literature which appears before that deadline?

Doesn’t this create a potential conflict of interest for contributors to the IPCC who are reviewing papers that appear during the drafting process?

Take hurricanes and climate change for example. Whatever the IPCC reports next March, it certainly won’t be as current as the recent WMO consensus report because the IPCC cannot cite literature that appeared after some point early in 2006, and the WMO can. And I'd bet there will be more studies released between now and march. On hurricanes the IPCC may wind up creating confusion by taking the scientific discussion back to early 2006 when in reality much has happened since. Similarly, its discussion of climate sensitivity and other areas could, in principle, suffer from the same lag effects. Now James’ paper was rejected, and for all I know, correctly. But on highly sensitive topics, I find myself agreeing with the AAAS – trust alone is no longer enough.

Scott Saleska on Tuning the Climate

[Scott Saleska of the University of Arizona has asked an interesting question in the comments of a post from last week. We have elevated it so that it does go unnoticed. Thanks Scott! -Ed.]

Let's say air capture, or any of the many geoengineering options being widely discussed (e.g. my colleague here at the UofA, Roger Angel's recent idea* to block 1.8% of the incoming energy with a gadget at the L1 Lagrange orbital point), ends up being feasible in a few decades. And let’s say we actually reach the point where we can, as Roger [Pielke, not Angel] suggested, tune the atmosphere’s CO2.

What level do we tune it to? And who gets to decide that level? The "worst off" individual (to follow Rawls famous "Theory of Justice")? Then we probably let the Maldivians decide, since under current projections, sea level rise could completely wipe them off the map. Places like Russia, on the other hand, would probably prefer to have some moderate global warming, because that probably would give them better agriculture in Siberia, and ice-free ports on the north Atlantic.

[* Roger Angel, 2006. Feasibility of cooling the Earth with a cloud of small spacecraft near the inner Lagrange point (L1), PNAS: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/103/46/17184 (subscription require). Or see the free podcast of his recent talk at our Global Climate Change series at University of Arizona, in which he reviewed a whole range of options from solar cells to Paul Crutzen’s aerosols, to his satellites: http://podcasting.arizona.edu/globalclimatechange.html or any of the others who spoke, focusing mostly on science of climate change]

That Didn't Take Long -- Misrepresenting Hurricane Science

Now that the WMO has issued a consensus statement on the state of climate science, scientists should be careful in how they characterize the overall state of the science. I have complete respect for scientists who have strong views on what the data, models, and theory shows, and fully expect them to make their case to their colleagues and others. However, scientists also should be careful not to represent their own views as in fact representing a consensus of the community when they do not, especially when making arguments for political action.

Here is an example of a scientist involved in the hurricane debate, Michael Mann of Penn State, making a demonstrably incorrect statement about the state of understanding of hurricanes and climate change six days after the WMO issued its consensus statement on tropical cyclones and climate change:

It is the increasingly widespread belief by researchers that increasing sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are leading to increases in various measures of Hurricane activity over time, both globally, and for the tropical North Atlantic region whose storms influence the Gulf coast and East Coast of the U.S..

Here is what the WMO says:

The possibility that greenhouse gas induced global warming may have already caused a substantial increase in some tropical cyclone indices has been raised (e.g. Mann and Emanuel, 2006), but no consensus has been reached on this issue.

And on the existence of trends in storm intensity the WMO says:

This is still hotly debated area for which we can provide no definitive conclusion.

This is a situation that Dr. Mann should understand well, as he has argued strongly for adherence to scientific consensus on his weblog, RealClimate. Dr. Mann's characterization about what researchers increasingly believe about hurricanes and climate change is not backed up by what the researchers themselves are saying. Why does this matter? Because Dr. Mann is using his characterization of the community's views on hurricanes and climate change as a basis for arguing for particular policy actions. As Dr. Mann writes:

We are likely to see only increased warming and increased Hurricane activity, if we continue to increase atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations through fossil fuel burning.

To be clear -- I take no issue with Dr. Mann making an argument that reducing greenhouse gas emissions will reduce hurricane intensity. That is what he believes, and as a scientist conducting research in this area he is someone we should listen to. But when he characterizes the community's views as "widespread" and "increasingly" supporting his perspective, he has engaged in a mischaracterization. Mischaracterizations of science, by themselves, are perhaps of only scholarly interest. But when the mischaracterizations are used as tools of political advocacy they are no longer simply mischaracterizations of science, but instead, they are bad policy arguments.

For scientists wanting to use the notion of consensus as a tool of political advocacy, they risk being perceived as inconsistent when their actions change when they are the ones on the outside looking in.

Andy Revkin on Media on Climate Change

[Andy Revkin shares these comments by email on the media and climate change, which I have reproduced here with his permission. He is blogging them here where he has additional comments, including some specific to today's hearing heald by Senator Inhofe on the media and climate change. Our view here at Prometheus is that Senator Inhofe's hearing, which we watched in full, was a dud all around. We appreciate Andy sharing these comments. -Ed.]

I do think the media have sometimes screwed up in covering climate, in three ways. For a long time they ignored the story because they saw it as a "he says, she says" dispute. Then they ignored it as simply too complex and incremental (not good ingredients for a news story).

Lately, some have presumed that because disagreement is gone on the basics (more carbon dioxide will warm the world) there is now no aspect of the problem that is uncertain. That's led to a lot of "be worried" coverage that really, to my eye, has gone way beyond the science.

After covering human influence on climate for 20 years, through more than one cycle of public engagement and disengagement, I stand by my assertions in The Times and public talks and my new book, The North Pole Was Here, that everyone in this polarized discourse is missing the powerful middle.

There is no serious disagreement in the scientific community at all on the main point -- that humans are exerting a growing influence on the thermostat of the home planet.

To me, that's more than enough to justify a lot of attention, while perhaps not amounting to the kind of real-time disaster that the media tend to get excited about.

There is a tendency of some media to try to fit human-driven warming in the old-style template for an environmental crisis that we grew up with in the 20th century. That is a bad fit. It is harder than that. This problem, and possible solutions, all relate to the future.

Old problems that were dealt with effectively were realtime threats to health and welfare (soot, smog, untreated sewage). Add a filter and they go away.

Even if we turned off every engine on Earth today, there would be no discernible impact on climate for many, many years, if not decades. It'd be great if this issue was easier to understand, and write about, but we're stuck with it the way it is.

The best tonic of course: consider giving as a holiday gift The North Pole Was Here, the one book out there that powerfully conveys this, and is the first to do so for everyone 10 and up (a range including Senators!). It was just named one of the Outstanding Science Books of 2006 by the Childrens Book Council & National Science Teachers Assn.

The Future of Climate Policy Debates

How about this comment from George Monbiot today, a columnist for The Guardian:

[E]very time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned.

Or this not long ago from NASA Scientist James Hansen (PDF):

. . . a certain shock treatment is needed, but it would best be delivered with a two-by-four as a solid whack to the head of politicians who remain oblivious to fundamental physical facts.

Allusions to murder and beatings kind of puts a chill on discussing options for climate policy, doesn't it? Maybe that is the point. It certainly makes me think.

In my view people who fashion themselves as public intellectuals have an even greater obligation than everyone else to encourage civil debate and discussion. This applies to people on all sides of political debates. It is all too easy for leaders to incite people to actual violence on issues that they are passionate about. Mr. Monbiot and Dr. Hansen (and others, again on all sides) may not have that outcome in mind as they write such statements, but if they don't watch out, that may be what they get.

So how about we all encourage some common civility in public discussions of climate change, especially from (but not limited to) our public intellectuals?

Fiscal Caution on NASA’s New Moon Plans

According to the New York Times NASA has announced that it wishes to return to the moon and set up a permanent base 50 years after its first landing. NASA’s proposal should raise an eyebrow among anyone who understands NASA’s past failures at successfully budgeting human spaceflight programs.

Here is an excerpt from the Times story by Warren E. Leary:

NASA announced plans on Monday for a permanent base on the Moon, to be started soon after astronauts return there around 2020.

The agency’s deputy administrator, Shana Dale, said the United States would develop rockets and spacecraft to get people to the Moon and establish a rudimentary base. There, other countries and commercial enterprises could expand the outpost to develop scientific and other interests, Ms. Dale said.

Ms. Dale and other officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said the agency envisioned a base at one of the lunar poles, to take advantage of the near-constant sunlight for solar power generation. It would have an "open architecture" design to which others could add the capabilities they want.

Scott Horowitz, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration, said crews of four astronauts would make weeklong missions to the Moon starting around 2020.

As more equipment was set up, human stays would eventually grow to 180 days, and become permanent by 2024. By 2027, officials said, a pressurized roving vehicle on the surface would take people on expeditions far from the base.

NASA gave no cost estimate for the program and no design details for the base. Ms. Dale said all plans assumed that the agency would continue operating from a fixed budget of about $17 billion a year.

The space shuttle fleet is to be retired by 2010, and the United States plans to scale back its involvement in the International Space Station. The station is still under construction, with a mission by the shuttle Discovery to lift off on Thursday. Ms. Dale said money would be shifted to the lunar exploration program from the shuttle and the station.

It was this last part that caught my attention. Assuming that NASA spends half of its budget on human exploration, and that all of this will be devoted to the new Moon program, this would total about $75 billion by 2020 when NASA plans to return to the moon. This sounds like a lot of money, and it is. But let’s put the planned costs into historical perspective of other human spaceflight programs.

Costs of Human Exploration Programs in 2005 Dollars

Apollo $110-$125 billion (source in PDF)

Mercury, Gemini, Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz $20 billion (source in PDF)

Space Shuttle $150 billion (updated from here)

Space Station $100 billion (cited in NYT article today by John Schwartz)

With its new program NASA is proposing to do far more than Apollo accomplished on a similar timescale, with far less resources, and an annual equivalent expenditure of much less than half of what was spent during the brief Apollo era. On its surface, this sounds like a great bargain. But is it too good to be true?

Consider that NASA in the past promised (in 1984) that the Space Station would be completed by 1994 at the cost of $8 billion ($13.3 in 2005). It missed this estimate by at least 16 years and $90 billion, without discussing the reduction in capabilities. NASA promised (in 1972) that the shuttle would fly 48 flights per year at a cost of $20 million (2005$) per flight. Reality has seen something more like 4 flights per year at a cost of over $1 billion per flight. Numbers like these suggest that NASA can indeed accomplish its moon base plans, perhaps at a cost of $1 trillion and by 2050. And I say this only partially tongue-in-cheek.

NASA’s political strategy in the past has been to win Congressional approval for its desired programs by underestimating costs and schedule, overpromising capabilities, and then complaining to Congress about being underfunded. When reality sets in NASA has reduced planned capabilities and cut other parts of its budget – like science. The entire suite of NASA programs are disrupted, leading to huge inefficiencies and a lack of progress. The NYT today has an article reporting that many experts are asking what the space station is for anyway. The promises made in 1984 no longer have meaning, so NASA wants a do-over.

NASA has purposely created long-term programs with few mid-term milestones, thereby making it difficult for Congress to wield a carrot or stick in the budget process. For instance, most debates about the space station in the 1990s were about termination or continuation. The distribution of lucrative NASA contracts around the country stacks the deck against a drastic approach like termination. One lesson from this should be that NASA must have annual milestones with consequences for budget overruns or cost delays.

Congress by now should be wise to these strategies. It is indeed exciting and visionary to think about human colonization of the solar system. Nonetheless, we should all hope that the next Congress will apply some rigorous oversight to NASA’s planning. The lack of such oversight is one reason why the U.S. human space flight program in only now discussing catching up to where it was 35 years ago.