« February 2007 »

Spinning Science

We have had a lot of discussion here about the process of producing press releases. Last month, I participated in a congressional hearing in which several scientists argued strongly that official press releases should be faithful to the science being reported. A press release put out by the University of Wisconsin today is a case of a press release completely misrepresenting the science in the paper that it is presenting. I am going to speculate that because the press release errs on the side of emphasizing a global warming connection where there is in fact none indicated in the paper that there will be little concern expressed by the scientific community about its inaccuracies.

UPDATE: NSF issues its own release "New Information Links Atlantic Ocean Warming to Stronger Hurricanes" compounding the misrepresentation. The NSF release (like the UW version) contradicts its own headline:

The Atlantic is also unique in that the physical variables that converge to form hurricanes--including wind speeds, wind directions and temperatures--mysteriously feed off each other to make conditions ripe for a storm. But scientists don't understand why, Kossin adds.

The press release is titled: "New evidence that global warming fuels stronger Atlantic hurricanes." The first paragraph of the release says:

Atmospheric scientists have uncovered fresh evidence to support the hotly debated theory that global warming has contributed to the emergence of stronger hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean.

The paper, by Jim Kossin and colleagues appears in today's Geophysical Research Letters and actually says nothing like this (paper here in PDF). It does say the following:

**Over the past 23 years there are no global trends in tropical cyclone activity in any basin except the Atlantic. This is an important finding because it contradicts the findings presented in 2005 by Webster et al. that there have been global trends. Kossin et al. call into question a straightforward relationship of SST and tropical cyclone activity. This is news.

**The paper does find the Atlantic to be more active over the past 23 years. No one in the world has ever questioned whether or not the Atlantic has been more active over the past 3 decades. Any assertion that the Atlantic has become more active is hardly "fresh evidence." This is not news.

*The paper does not engage in attribution, and openly admits that a 23-year record is too short for attribution studies (i.e., that indicate causes of trends).

Here is what Kossin et al. say in their conclusion:

Efforts are presently underway to maximize the length of our new homogeneous data record but at most we can add another 6–7 years, and whether meaningful trends can be measured or inferred in a 30-year data record remains very much an open question. Given these limitations of the data, the question of whether hurricane intensity is globally trending upwards in a warming climate will likely remain a point of debate in the foreseeable future. Still, the very real and dangerous increases in recent Atlantic hurricane activity will no doubt continue to provide a heightened sense of purpose to research addressing how hurricane behavior might change in our changing climate, and further efforts toward improvement of archival data quality are expected to continue in parallel with efforts to better reconcile the physical processes involved. If our 23-year record is in fact representative of the longer record, then we need to better understand why hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin is varying in a fundamentally different way than the rest of the world despite similar upward trends of SST in each basin.

The University of Wisconsin press release is either a cheap publicity grab or a deliberate attempt to spin the paper's results 180 degrees from what it actually says.

Success-Oriented Planning at NASA

NASA is delaying the next launch of the space shuttle due to a hail storm that damaged the external tank. However, according to NASA this delay won't cause any problems meeting their launch schedule this year:

[N. Wayne Hale Jr., the shuttle program manager, in a briefing from Cape Canaveral, Fla.] said that despite the latest delay he believed that the launching schedule had enough flexibility to allow the five flights that are planned for this year.

Anyone want to bet that NASA will in fact launch the shuttle 5 times in the last 7 months of 2007? Consider the following data from a paper we did in 1992 (PDF):

NASA is either fooling themselves or fooling us. Neither is a particualrly good way to run the nation's space program.

Science, Politics, Variability, Change, Learning, Uncertainty

The issue of floodplain management in the city of Boulder reflects in microcosm many of the themes that we discuss on this site. Here is an excerpt from an article in the Daily Camera today:

Boulder's water board approved a flood plan Monday that predicts hundreds more homes and businesses will be inundated in a 100-year flood than previously believed.

But the new flood study predicts the University of Colorado's South Campus property will stay dry in a 100-year flood, worrying residents who don't want to see the former gravel mine developed.

The city's current map places 363 structures in the flood plain. The new study predicts more than three times as many buildings — 1,137 — would take on some level of water in a 100-year flood, which has a 1 percent chance of occurring in any year.

Some issues raised by this circumstance:

1. The climate varies and changes faster than the built environment. Yesterday's "100-year flood" is today's "50-year flood." Any flood policy based on the assumption of long-term stasis in climate is bound to fail.

2. Scientific understandings change faster than the built environment. Policies should be flexible to the possibility that we may learn more in the future, and such learning may result in revisions to our expectations for risks and vulnerabilities. Any policy that is based on an assumption that we know all we are going to is likely to fail.

3. People have different vested interests in particular scientific outcomes. In Boulder, people with different views about development have strong feelings about how the floodplain should be designated, based on how they think that will affect the chances of development. It would be foolish to think that such considerations can be ignored or kept separate from the political process of designating floodplain restrictions.

4. All important decisions are characterized by some degree of uncertainty. An important analytical question is not whether we can remove uncertainty (we can of course by chose to ignore it), but to design decision processes that are robust in the face of uncertainties.

The case study of flood policy in Boulder, Colorado reflects all of these issues.

University of Colorado Sustainability Initiatives

Not long ago we raised some questions about how well the University of Colorado's commitment to sustainability was actually being reflected in actions. Recent remarks by our Chancellor, G.P. "Bud" Peterson, at a conference on sustainability last week suggest that our campus leadership is in fact now taking this issue seriously. Here is an excerpt:

First, on behalf of CU-Boulder I have pledged to participate in the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment (PCC), which will solidify our goal of reducing Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. CU-Boulder will begin immediately, a detailed inventory of our current emissions; then, within two years, the campus will outline short and long-term strategies for emission reductions to reach the PCC goal of "climate neutrality" - zero net GHG.

This is a bold challenge, but CU-Boulder has an excellent record to build upon. Today, the University purchases 10 percent of the campus's electricity from renewable sources, and we have reduced our electrical consumption by 13 percent per square foot since 2001. In addition, CU-Boulder has helped to generate 3.2 million rides per year on RTD buses through participation in RTD's Ecopass program, created a recycling program that is diverting 1600 tons from landfills annually (and has saved the campus about $2.4 million in avoided costs over the past three years alone) and pioneered water conservation programs that save over 110 million gallons annually on campus.

Most of all, our students are to be credited for their leadership in helping to make the recently completed ATLAS building at CU-Boulder the first public building in the state of Colorado to achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold Certification - one of only seven buildings statewide to achieve such a designation.

With the need for a centralized heating and cooling facility to be built, we must take new and stronger measures to offset our purchase of electricity from sources that increase our carbon output. To assist in this process, I am pleased to announce that in the next fiscal year, we will begin investing $250,000 annually in projects to reduce campus energy consumption, particularly electrical consumption. At some point in the near future, we expect we may seek new funds or a reallocation of a portion of the $250,000 for renewable energy production systems on campus properties or close to the campus.

I am also asking that investments beyond the $250,000 per year be considered for future funding as a pressing campus priority in order to aggressively pursue options for greatly reducing CU-Boulder's GHG emissions. To offset our carbon output in the meantime, our campus has committed to spending an additional $50,000 per year for the purchase of renewable wind energy.

Finally, I am pleased to announce one more measure that I believe will lay the groundwork for even more progress toward sustainability. That is the establishment of the Chancellor's Committee on Energy, Environment and Sustainability (CCEES), a working group to be led by Vice Chancellor for Administration Paul Tabolt, charged with setting sustainability goals for the campus and advising the university on all environmental matters.

State Climatologists Redux

Let's start by acknowledging that the position of "State Climatologist" is problematic simply because it is federally designated role and not an official state government position. So there is ample room for confusion as to who the person in the position actually speaks for, and NOAA should indeed address this -- which could easily be done by changing the title to "NOAA-designated climate services extension officer" or something inscrutable like that. Even so, a statement like the following should concern anyone, regardless of their views on climate change:

Your views on climate change, as I understand them, are not aligned with those of my my administration.

. . . from a 13 February 2007 letter (PDF) from Delaware Governor Ruth Ann Minner to Delaware's State Climatologist, as designated by the federal government and approved by the State of Delaware (PDF), David Legates.

It seems fairly obvious to me that if Governor Minner is truly concerned about the confusion between the federal designation and the Delaware executive branch, then she should be discussing with NOAA options for changing its use of the designation "State Climatologist" rather than telling Mr. Legates not to use the federal designation, which the state has previously approved under her own signature. The letter she has written to Mr. Legates makes it look like her concern is in fact not possible confusion about the designation, but instead the fact that David Legates holds different views on policy than those of her administration. If she wants to have advisers on climate change determined by political criteria, that is of course her right.

I can imagine that if the Bush Administration sent the exact same letter to Jim Hansen, there might be some greater reaction than we have seen to Ms. Minner's letter.

My reactions to this letter, and (non) reactions to it, echo my concerns with the approach that Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) has take to overseeing the issue of the politicization of science. If the concern is really procedural -- that is, who gets to speak what information under what designation -- then the response should be focused on improving those procedures. The selective focus on certain individuals and certain perspectives instead makes these complaints about the "politicization of science" themselves politicized. While this might work to the short-term advantage of certain agendas in political debate, what won't be addressed by this approach are those processes that foster the pathological politicization of science.

Science and the Developing World

At SciDev.net, David Dickson has a thoughtful editorial on how the scientific community and others advocating increased investments in S&T in the developing world should temper expectations on what these investments in alone can achieve. Here is an excerpt:

The current danger lies in promoting policies that see S&T as drivers of social progress and economic development, rather than components of innovation programmes in which other factors — from regulatory policy to education and training — are just as important.

The scientific community is particularly prone to this one-dimensional approach. Arguing that heavy investment in research and development is enough to promote economic growth naturally appeals to those keen to see scientific laboratories flourish across the developing world.

But experience has shown that such investment is only part of the solution. The real challenge lies in embedding science in all spheres of government policy, and introducing educational, regulatory and fiscal measures to enable innovation to flourish across the economy.

Until this happens, demands for more money for science will inevitably be seen as little more than self-interested pleading from the scientific community. [emphasis in original]

IPCCfacts.org Responds

Here is the prompt and satisfactory response I received late today:

We regret that your views were misrepresented on IPCCfacts.org, and have removed the post.

The intent of the site is to follow the conversation around the IPCC
report and, where mischaracterizations about the report are made,
clearly and directly present the IPCC findings. We stand behind our
presentation of the IPCC report findings.

We regret the error.

Sincerely,

Joel Finkelstein

ASLA wrap-up on House IPCC hearings

Kate Von Holle in AGU's Public Policy shop provides a wrap-up of the Feb 8th IPCC hearings before House Science, starring Susan Solomon, Kevin Trenberth, Richard Alley, and Gerald Meehl. Some interesting tidbits in there.... (Bolds are mine.)

**************************************************** ASLA 07-03: House Committee Considers IPCC Climate Change Report ****************************************************

On 8 February, co-Chair Susan Solomon and three of the authors of the Working Group 1 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report testified before the House Science and Technology Committee. The hearing followed the release on 2 February of the Summary for Policy Makers of the first volume of the report, titled "Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis" (http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf).

Susan Solomon, an atmospheric chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), was the first to testify. She summarized the major findings, namely that atmospheric CO2 levels are currently at unprecedented levels, and there is a 90% chance global warming is caused by human activity. In addition, the rate of increase in CO2 levels in the last 10 years has been the greatest ever seen. When questioned after her testimony Rep. Rohrabacher (R-CA) accused Solomon of not providing an "honest" response when he asked "What percentage of the CO2 in the atmosphere is generated by human activity?" Solomon did not provide a percentage but answered the question by stating that the 100 ppm increase in CO2 levels in post industrial times is predominantly caused by human activity.

We already knew how politicized climate change has become, but now not giving specific [is:is not] ratios is "dishonest" in the political sphere? You can read this more generously or less generously to Rep. Rohrabacher: either he just doesn't understand that science can't always give clear-cut, black-and-white answers, or he doesn't care.

Kevin Trenberth, Richard Alley, and Gerald Meehl also testified. Their testimony included information about how the increase in CO2 levels will affect the planet in the future through an increase in heavy rain events, droughts, heat waves, floods, and a rise in sea levels. All witnesses stressed that the severity of these events will depend greatly on how aggressively policymakers begin to address mitigation of CO2 emissions. When asked their opinions regarding policy, economics or CO2 mitigation issues, they repeatedly stated that they were physical scientists, not policymakers, and referred to the reports of IPCC Working Groups II (Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability) and III (Mitigation), due for release later this year.

Ok, I'll bite. Was this good politics? Not straying into what will become a very political fight? (How to deal with climate change will become far more political than the science itself; good for them if they understand this and want to stay clear.) Or IPCC politics? Not wanting to step on the toes of the other WG conveners?

The Republican and Democratic reaction varied dramatically. Many Republicans questioned the findings. Rep. Rohrabacher raised several objections including the idea that humans have not been the biggest contributors to CO2 in the atmosphere. He maintained that this warming trend was a part of a natural cycle that included a mini ice-age' back in the 1700's. He also stated that he knew hundreds' of scientists that reject the idea of global warming being caused by humans. [see comment #32 on this post] The Democrats responded by supporting the findings of the Report, and their inquiries were directed towards increasing their understanding of the implications of the Report, as well as possible effects on their constituents. Several representatives, both Republican and Democrat, participated in a trip to Antarctica, and many of them mentioned the experience as being quite enlightening on the subject of global warming and climate change.

Trust me, as soon as Congress gets something passed on carbon, this left science/right science on climate change science will subside in favor of fighting over the regulations.

The beginning of the hearing was marked by the unusual appearance of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Pelosi read a statement strongly in favor of the IPCC report and its findings. She also stated that it was her intention to form a separate committee which would focus on climate change and how to relay information about it to the public. Before Pelosi addressed the committee, Rep. Sensenbrenner (R-CA) objected to allowing the Speaker be dismissed after giving her testimony. He demanded that Pelosi submit to the Committee's mandatory 5-minute-questioning rule. Due to the objection by Sensenbrenner, the Committee required Pelosi to stay to answer questions after her testimony rather than allowing her to be dismissed as originally planned.

To read more about the release, see the news article in 13 February Eos: http://www.agu.org/journals/eo/eo0707/2007EO070003.pdf#anchor.

This last passage may not seem like much. What it tells me is that the carbon regulation fight is going to be as politically nasty as you can imagine, down to pulling petty parliamentary tricks like Sensenbrenner's. Not surprising, but a preview of fights to come.

left science/right science on....?

Getting back to an old friend in the scientized-politicized world, stem cells/embryo research. In a story on stem cells and embryonic research in NPR's All Things Considered last night, UC San Francisco researcher Susan Fisher said, "Because the federal government has prohibited academic institutions from working on embryos, we really know almost nothing about human embryos in the beginning stages."

The difference between a federal government prohibition on a certain type of academic research (which very obviously did not happen) and a removal of federal funding from a certain type of research on moral grounds (which did) is not subtle or nuanced, it's quite clear, and it stretches my credulity to believe that Dr. Fisher doesn't know the difference.

IPCCfacts.org has its Facts Wrong

There is a webpage called IPCCfacts.org that is grossly misrepresenting my views on hurricanes and climate change, which is bizarre given my strong endorsement of the recent IPCC report. Anyone wanting to get "facts" on the IPCC should look elsewhere than IPCCfacts.org, like to the actual IPCC. Here I set the record straight and request that IPCCfacts.org correct their mistakes.

It is always nice to know who is misrepresenting one’s views and it this case the group’s origins are a bit hard to discern, but it is connected to Fenton Communications, which coincidentally is also associated with RealClimate. IPCCfacts.org receives funding from the United Nations Foundation.

Anyway, IPCCfacts.org misrepresents my views on the recent IPCC report on the subject of hurricanes and climate change. As anyone who reads Prometheus knows, I was quite complementary of the IPCC’s judgment on this issue. Nonetheless, IPCCfacts.org sees fit to cite my views as representing a "myth":

Myth: The report shows that the overall number of hurricanes is expected to decline, undercutting the argument that global warming produces extreme weather events.

"So there might be a human contribution [to increased hurricanes] ... but the human contribution itself has not been quantitatively assessed, yet the experts, using their judgment, expect it to be there. In plain English this is what is called a ‘hypothesis’ and not a ‘conclusion.’ And it is a fair representation of the issue." –Roger Pielke Jr. climate scientist, University of Colorado, Blog post, February 2, 2007.

First, the report indicates that there is little confidence in estimates of how the number of hurricanes will change—up or down.

Second, the really important issue is not frequency, but intensity and damage potential. Hurricanes and other tropical cyclones draw their energy from warm ocean waters, which typically, under the right conditions, lead to increases in the size and intensity of hurricanes. The warmer ocean waters that result from global warming thus provide an environment suitable to the generation of larger hurricanes.

And larger hurricanes are characterized by all the elements that increase potential destructiveness: higher wind speed, greater intensity of rainfall and higher storm surges in advance of landfall.

In response, first a minor point -- they call me a "climate scientist" which is only accurate if one includes climate impacts under that designation, which is typically not done. I don’t characterize myself as such. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) certainly does not.

Second, the quote from me that they suggest represents a "myth" comes from this blog post. The part that they ellipsis out is the following parenthetical:

(and presumably this is just to the observed upwards trends observed in some basins, and not to downward trends observed in others, but this is unclear)

At no point (in the post that they reference or anywhere else) do I suggest that there will be less hurricanes, nor do I suggest that such a decline undercuts the argument for an increase in extreme events in the future. Where they get this impression I have no idea. This is simply a gross misrepresentation. In fact, my writings say much the opposite, such as the following (PDF):

For future decades the IPCC (2001) expects increases in the occurrence and/or intensity of some extreme events as a result of anthropogenic climate change.

Peer-reviewed papers I have co-authored (here in PDF and here in PDF) that survey the literature on tropical cyclone science, impacts, and policy are actually 100% consistent with the IPCC SPM.

And of the blog post of mine that they cite summarizing the IPCC SPM, here is what one of the scientists on the U.S. delegation had to say:

Thank you for your thoughtful and balanced assessment of what the IPCC SPM says. You have got it right. Your careful analysis on what the report says and how it compares to the WMO consensus statement is most appreciated.

Then IPCCfacts.org start talking about the size of hurricanes, a discussion which is nowhere to be found in the IPCC SPM. In short, IPCCfacts.org have got their facts wrong and are spinning some "myths" of their own.

Al Gore on Adaptation

From the International Herald Tribune,, Al Gore reiterates that despite many efforts to characterize adaptation and mitigation as complementary, he prefers to persist in viewing them as competing:

Trying to prevent global warming is certainly worthwhile, said Roger Pielke, Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado.

But he said capable people are not adequately putting their minds to the challenge of adapting to climate change, which is inevitable in coming decades because of continuing emissions and because of the damage done already.

"If all we do is try to mitigate we're going to miss a big part of the challenge," Pielke said.

The world's leaders also need to address other problems that are likely to be aggravated by global warming, such as tropical diseases, drinking water supply and increasing storm vulnerability, Pielke and several colleagues argued in the scientific journal Nature.

Many global warming activists are suspicious of such recommendations. They feel that too much reliance on adaptation will lull the world into a false sense of security, decreasing the motivation to reduce greenhouse gases.

"We really have to focus on prevention," Al Gore said on Tuesday during a question-and-answer session at Columbia University in New York City.

He warned that if we fail to avert the worst of global warming, the dire environmental consequences will overwhelm any adaptive measures.

We've had a number of prominent people react in private to our recent article on adaptation in Nature (PDF) by suggesting that we really should have emphasized mitigation instead.

I wonder how many criticisms of Mr. Gore's exclusive focus on "prevention" (sorry, prevention is not in the cards, ask the IPCC) we will hear about. My guess is not more than one -- and you're looking at it. Lots of inconvenient truths to go around, it seems.

Catastrophic Visions

The last time that we pointed to an essay by Brad Allenby of ASU it generated much thoughtful discussion. I expect no different from this provocative piece in the latest CSPO Newsletter from ASU titled Dueling Elites and Catastrophic Visions. Here is an excerpt:

. . . consider two of the primary dialogs of our times that, while superficially quite different, are in fact disconcertingly similar in intent and tone. One is the current U.S. Administration’s insistence on a continuing and inescapable threat of ubiquitous and unpredictable terrorism, a campaign which appears designed to create on-going fear and insecurity in the population. (That the cultural animosity underlying increases in anti-US attitudes is to a significant degree a result of Administration choices and policy is either supreme irony or Machiavellian brilliance, depending on who one listens to.) This campaign is characterized by constant reference to worst case scenarios (e.g., nuclear attack on an American city), patterns of government intervention in common activities that reinforce a siege mentality while providing no obvious additional protection against threats (e.g., certain TSA procedures and requirements at airports), few public details regarding actual threats or specific situations, and the implicit message that the current state of affairs will persist for the indefinite future.

The second is the significant acceleration in stories and publicity regarding predictions of planetary disaster as a result of human activities, especially global warming. This challenge is characterized in remarkably similar terms as the terrorist threat: ubiquitous and uncertain with a potential for unexpected disaster, an emphasis on worst case scenarios, and suggestions that extraordinary government intervention is required and justified because all other values pale in comparison to the threat. So, for example, Vice President Gore recently stated that global warming was "infinitely" worse than the Iraq quagmire, while UK environment secretary David Miliband suggests issuing all British adults with annual carbon allowances. Indeed, the UK government has formed a study group to report back on the idea; Nature (442:340) reports that researchers favor such quotas as "a sensible way to extend emissions trading to the personal level." The connection between social engineering and environmental disaster as lever could scarcely be clearer. Similarly, a recent report in Science notes the reluctance of some climate scientists to consider geoengineering solutions to global climate change not because they don’t work, but because they don’t require social engineering (314:401-403). As one European climate scientist complains, "You’re papering over the problem [by even considering geoengineering options] so people can keep inflicting damage on the climate system without having to give up fossil fuels." Whether scientists should arrogate to themselves the responsibility for deciding for everyone that fossil fuels should be given up, as opposed to other alternatives to managing climate change, is apparently not to be subject to dialog.

Where Stern is Right and Wrong

The Christian Science Monitor adds a few interesting details to Nicolas Stern's recent U.S. visit. On mitigation Stern explains why the debate over the science of climate change is in fact irrelevant:

Even if climate change turned out to be the biggest hoax in history, Stern argues, the world will still be better off with all the new technologies it will develop to combat it.

If mitigation can indeed be justified on factors other than climate change, which I think it can, then why not bring these factors more centrally into the debate?

Stern also dismissed two other arguments for inaction: that humans will easily adapt to climate change and that its effects are too far in the future to address now. Putting the burden of dealing with climate change on future generations is "unethical," Stern said.

Once again adaptation is being downplayed as somehow being in opposition to mitigation. Stern may in fact believe that we need to both adapt and mitigate, but that is certainly not what is conveyed here. The Stern Review itself adopted a very narrow view of adaptation as reflecting the costs of failed mitigation. When framed in this narrow way there is no alternative than to characterize adaptation and mitigation as trade-offs, and in today's political climate guess which one loses out?

A Defense of Alarmism

[The thoughtful comment below is from David Adam, Environment correspondent for The Guardian was made in response to Mike Hulme's letter to Nature on press coverage of the IPCC report in the UK media. -RP]

Alarmist and proud of it
(Alarm: to fill with apprehension; to warn about danger, alert)

David Adam
Environment correspondent
The Guardian

Some definitions from the Collins English dictionary

Catastrophic: a sudden, extensive disaster or misfortune

Shocking: Causing shock

Terrifying: extremely frightening

Devastating: to confound or overwhelm

Can anyone explain to me why any of those are inappropriate for a report than said human society will 'most likely' raise temperatures by 4C by 2100 unless it takes drastic action (my words, but how else would you desribe a complete overhaul of the lifestyles of millions, if not billions of people) to cut emissions?

here's another:

news: interesting or important information not previously known.

attacking newspapers for picking out the bits of the report that appear to take the debate forwards (the effects of carbon cycle feedbacks for example, which only seem to be shifting the estimates in one direction) is as pointless and idiotic as complaining that a library won't sell you fish.

does the 2006 report not paint a picture that is "worse" than the 2001 report?

again, to the dictionary:

worse: the comparative of bad

Mike accuses us of "appealling to fear to generate a sense of urgency"

Guilty as charged. Is it not frightening? Is it not urgent?

Alarmist and proud of it
(Alarm: to fill with apprehension; to warn about danger, alert)

Mike Hulme in Nature on UK Media Coverage of the IPCC

Nature published a letter in its current issue on media coverage of the recent IPCC report. The book he refers to is co-edited by our own Lisa Dilling. Here is an excerpt from the letter:

Nature 445, 818 (22 February 2007) | doi:10.1038/445818b; Published online 21 February 2007

Newspaper scare headlines can be counter-productive

Mike Hulme
Tyndall Centre, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK

. . . Communicating science to wider, public audiences, however — in this case on matters of important public policy — is an art that requires careful message management and tone setting. It seems that confident and salient science, as presented by the IPCC, may be received by the public in non-productive ways, depending on the intervening media.

With this in mind, I examined the coverage of the IPCC report in the ten main national UK newspapers for Saturday 3 February, the day after the report was released. Only one newspaper failed to run at least one story on the report (one newspaper ran seven stories), but what was most striking was the tone.

The four UK 'quality' newspapers all ran front-page headlines conveying a message of rising anxiety: "Final warning", "Worse than we thought", "New fears on climate raise heat on leaders" and "Only man can stop climate disaster". And all nine newspapers introduced one or more of the adjectives "catastrophic", "shocking", "terrifying" or "devastating" in their various qualifications of climate change. Yet none of these words exist in the report, nor were they used in the scientists' presentations in Paris. Added to the front-page vocabulary of "final", "fears", "worse" and "disaster", they offer an insight into the likely response of the 20 million Britons who read these newspapers.

In contrast, an online search of some leading newspapers in the United States suggests a different media discourse. Thus, on the same day, one finds these headlines: "UN climate panel says warming is man-made", "New tack on global warming", "Warming report builds support for action" and "The basics: ever firmer statements on global warming". This suggests a more neutral representation in the United States of the IPCC's key message, and a tone that facilitates a less loaded or frenzied debate about options for action.

Campaigners, media and some scientists seem to be appealing to fear in order to generate a sense of urgency. If they want to engage the public in responding to climate change, this is unreliable at best and counter-productive at worst. As Susanne Moser and Lisa Dilling point out in Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), such appeals often lead to denial, paralysis, apathy or even perverse reactive behaviour.

The journey from producing confident assessments of scientific knowledge to a destination of induced social change is a tortuous one, fraught with dangers and many blind alleys. The challenging policy choices that lie ahead will not be well served by the type of loaded reporting of science seen in the UK media described above.

Earthquake hazards policy talk tomorrow

Anybody ready for some non-climate stuff?

For those of you around here I'm giving a talk on my earthquake mitigation policy work tomorrow here at the Center (noon). I'll be covering the earthquake damages data and what it says about mitigation success (out of a paper that is still – ahem – "under review" after – ahem – eight months – at a certain natural hazards journal). I'll also be covering details of the NEHRP program, why Congress has been schizophrenic on the issue, when we can expect the next Big One and how much it's going to cost, what our damages look like compared to the rest of the world, and the winning PowerBall numbers for this Saturday's draw. Whew!

After the talk I'll post my PPT and an accompanying white paper (because it's hard to get the full message from a PPT, isn't it?).

For what it's worth, yes, I am dabbling pretty hard here. In addition to the quake stuff I've got a pre-print/submission coming soon on abandoned mine policy and a talk on that in the late spring, and an upcoming set of papers on the NYC water supply and policy implications (details to be blogged about over the next couple of months), and the background climate policy stuff that's always there.

Have We Entered a Post-Analysis Phase of the Climate Debate?

The New York Times today has an interesting summary of a debate between Sir Nicolas Stern and Professor William Nordhaus of Yale University on the economics of climate change. The article raises the question, for me at least, at what point do policy analyses cease to matter? In the language of my forthcoming book -- The Honest Broker -- has climate politics become "abortion politics"? The answer to my own question is that, yes, we may indeed be in a situation where analysis is viewed as being more useful as a tool of persuasion than clarifying the consequences of a wide range of alternative courses of action. In such a situation policy analyses will be far less important than the political dynamics.

A recent example of such a situation that will be familiar to most readers is when the Bush Administration decided to invade Iraq and then fixed the intelligence to meet the policy. Any analysis that supported invasion, regardless of its intellectual merits, then became "right" even if for the "wrong reasons." Sure, some policy analyses were still needed after that decision, for instance, to determine whether 110,000 versus 130,000 troops would be needed. But I view this as a far different sort of analysis than focusing analytical attention on the broad question of what might have been done about Saddam Hussein. In that situation, once the politics were settled, then such wide-ranging analyses became completely irrelevant. But arguably that is exactly the sort of analysis that mattered most of all and for the lack of which were are suffering today Climate change, of course some will say, is different.

Here is an excerpt from the Times article, which describes these dynamics:

Technically, then, Sir Nicholas’s opponents win the debate. But in practical terms, their argument has a weak link. They are assuming that the economic gains from, say, education will make future generations rich enough to make up for any damage caused by climate change. Sea walls will be able to protect cities; technology can allow crops to grow in new ways; better medicines can stop the spread of disease.

No one knows whether this is true, let alone desirable, because no one knows what life will be like on a planet that is five degrees hotter. "If ever there was an example where there was uncertainty, this is it," said Martin L. Weitzman, a Harvard economist who attended the debate.

While sitting there, I was reminded of the speeches that Alan Greenspan gave a few years ago about the risks of deflation. It wasn’t the most likely outcome, he said, but the consequences of it could be so bad that policy makers had to take steps to prevent it. Focusing attention on this point — the catastrophic risks of climate change — is Sir Nicholas’s biggest accomplishment, whatever you think of his math.

As Mr. Weitzman puts it, the Stern Review is "right for the wrong reasons."

Even its critics seem open to this idea. When Mr. Nordhaus and Sir Nicholas were exchanging e-mail messages before the debate — to their credit, some academics keep their arguments from becoming personal — Mr. Nordhaus sent a note that summed up his view. “I think it’s a great study, but it’s 50 years ahead of its time,” he recalled writing. "Since everybody else is 50 years behind the times, if you average the two, you might come out just right."

In other words, it’s time for a tax on carbon emissions.

Once your have the political answer in hand, analysis then ceases to be a tool that provides insight on alternatives and then becomes a tool of marketing, and sometimes a way to limit debate. Harvard's Martin Weitzman acknowledges this explicitly in the review paper (here in PDF) on Stern cited in the Times article:

The Stern Review is a political document –in Keynes’s phrase an essay in persuasion –as much as it is an economic analysis, and in fairness it needs ultimately to be judged by both standards. To its great credit the Review supports very strongly the politically- unpalatable idea, which no politician planning to remain in office anywhere wants to hear, that the world needs desperately to start confronting the reality that burning carbon has a significant externality cost that should be taken into account by being charged full-freight for doing it. (This should have been, but of course was not, the most central “inconvenient truth”of all in Al Gore'’s tale about inconvenient climate-change truths.) As the Review puts it, “establishing a carbon price, through tax, trading, or regulation, is an essential foundation for climate-change policy.” One can only wish that U.S. political leaders might have the wisdom to understand and the courage to act upon the breathtakingly-simple relatively-market-friendly idea that the right carbon tax could do much more to unleash the decentralized power of greedy, self seeking, capitalistic American inventive genius on the problem of developing commercially-feasible carbon-avoiding alternative technologies than all of the command-and-control schemes and patchwork subsidies making the rounds in Washington these days. As I have made clear here, a generous interpretation might also credit the Stern Review with intuiting the greater significance of insuring against catastrophic uncertainty than of consumption smoothing for the climate problem, even if this intuition remains subliminal and does not formally enter the analysis through the front door.

To be honest about the economic-analysis side, the Stern Review predetermines the outcome in favor of strong immediate action to curtail greenhouse gas emissions by creating a very low value of r ~1.4% via the indirect route of picking parameter values   p ~ 0 and n~ 1   1that are more like theoretically-reasoned extreme lower bounds than empirically-plausible estimates of representative tastes. In this sense, it must be said staightforwardly that the subconsiously-reverse-engineered output of PAGE and the goal-oriented formal economic analysis of the Review are not worth a great deal. But we have also seen that a fair recognition of the truth that we are genuinely uncertain about what interest rate should be used to discount costs and benefits of climate changes a century from now brings discounting rates down from conventional values r  6% to much lower values of perhaps r ~  2-3%, which would create a more intermediate sense of urgency somewhere between what the Stern
Review is advocating and the more modest measures to slow global warming advocated by its mainstream critics. The important remaining caveat is that such an intermediate position is still grounded in a conventional deterministic consumption-smoothing approach to the
economic analysis of climate change that, at least formally, ignores the issue of what to do about catastrophe insurance against the possibility of rare disasters.

On the political side of the Stern Review, my most charitable interpretation of its urgent tone is that the report is an essay in persuasion that is more about gut instincts regarding the horrors of uncertain rare disasters whose probabilities we do not know than it is about economic analysis as that term is conventionally understood. Although it is difficult enough to analyze people’s motives, much less the motives of a 600-page document, I can’'t help but think after reading it that the strong tone of morality and alarm is mostly reflecting a fear of what is potentially out there with greenhouse warming in (using ponderous terminology here to make sure the thought is exact) “the inherently-thick left tail of the reduced-form posterior-predictive probability distribution of the growth rate of a comprehensive measure of consumption that includes the natural environment.” I have argued that this inherently- thick left tail of g is an important aspect of the economics of climate change that every analyst –Stern and the critics of Stern –might do well to try to address more directly. History will judge whether the economic analysis of the Stern Review was more wrong or more right, and, if it was more right, whether as pure economic analysis it was right for the right reasons or it was right for the wrong reasons.

Al Gore 2008, Part 3: Washington Post on California Energy

The Washington Post has an excellent article on California’s energy policies (Thanks BK!), which adds some context to our ongoing analysis explaining why Al Gore will be the next president of the United States. Here are several key excerpts:

Do 2004 Blue states in fact have higher energy costs?

The reason for California's success is no secret: Electricity there is expensive, so people use less of it. Thanks to its use of pricey renewables and natural gas and its spurning of cheap coal, California's rates are almost 13 cents a kilowatt hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. The other most-energy-frugal states, such as New Jersey and New Hampshire, charge about 12 cents and 14 cents a kilowatt hour, respectively. Hawaii, which relies on oil-fired plants, tops EIA's list at about 21 cents.

"If the history of energy consumption in the U.S. has taught us anything, it is that cost drives conservation," says Chris Cooper, executive director of the Network for New Energy Choices.

Three of the nation's most profligate users of energy -- Wyoming, Kentucky and Alabama -- have one thing in common: low prices. Their electricity prices range from 5.25 cents a kilowatt hour to 7.06 cents, according to the EIA.

"What's dirt cheap tends to get treated like dirt," Rosenfeld says.

The District, also a wasteful user of energy, has a rate of 10.70 cents a kilowatt hour, only after recent rate increases. Virginia charges average 6.78 cents, and Maryland is at 10.03 cents.

Answer: Yes, consider:

CA, NJ, NH, HI, MD = Blue
WY, KY, VA, AL = Red

What are some of the effects of increasing energy prices?

Many manufacturers complain that the high electricity prices make the state an unappealing place to do business. Since 2001, California has lost 375,000 manufacturing jobs, a 19.9 percent drop that slightly exceeded the nationwide decline of 17 percent. Some firms -- such as Buck Knives, with 250 jobs, or bottle manufacturer Bomatic, with 100 jobs -- moved to states such as Idaho or Utah, where they said expenses, including energy, were lower.

Gino DiCaro, a spokesman for the California Manufacturers and Technology Association, says manufacturing investment is also "stalled" because of uncertainty about how the new legislation authorizing limits on greenhouse gases will affect energy costs.

"We've lost a lot of manufacturing jobs and we can't replace them," says DiCaro. While it's hard to blame the state's high energy costs alone, he says, "we know that . . . energy is one of the largest portions of a manufacturer's operating budget."

But at some point do high prices become a virtue?

But for those homeowners and businesses staying in California, the high prices have provided a big incentive for greater efficiency.

Laura Scher, chief executive of Working Assets, a wireless, long distance and credit card company that donates part of its revenue to socially progressive organizations, said she checked her home's meter every week during the electricity crisis in the summer of 2001 and unplugged her family's second refrigerator. "Part of it is our prices got really high," she said. But she added that California's habits go back much further. "It's sort of a culture to be an energy conserver here," she said.

Prediction in Science and Policy

In the New York Times today Corneila Dean has an article about a new book by Orrin Pilkey and Linda Pilkey-Jarvis on the role of predictions in decision making. The book is titled Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future.

Here is an excerpt from the book’s description at Columbia University Press:

Writing for the general, nonmathematician reader and using examples from throughout the environmental sciences, Pilkey and Pilkey-Jarvis show how unquestioned faith in mathematical models can blind us to the hard data and sound judgment of experienced scientific fieldwork. They begin with a riveting account of the extinction of the North Atlantic cod on the Grand Banks of Canada. Next they engage in a general discussion of the limitations of many models across a broad array of crucial environmental subjects.

The book offers fascinating case studies depicting how the seductiveness of quantitative models has led to unmanageable nuclear waste disposal practices, poisoned mining sites, unjustifiable faith in predicted sea level rise rates, bad predictions of future shoreline erosion rates, overoptimistic cost estimates of artificial beaches, and a host of other thorny problems. The authors demonstrate how many modelers have been reckless, employing fudge factors to assure "correct" answers and caring little if their models actually worked.

A timely and urgent book written in an engaging style, Useless Arithmetic evaluates the assumptions behind models, the nature of the field data, and the dialogue between modelers and their "customers."

Naomi Oreskes offers the following praise quote:

Orrin H. Pilkey and Linda Pilkey-Jarvis argue that many models are worse than useless, providing a false sense of security and an unwarranted confidence in our scientific expertise. Regardless of how one responds to their views, they can't be ignored. A must-read for anyone seriously interested in the role of models in contemporary science and policy.

In an interview the authors comment:

The problem is not the math itself, but the blind acceptance and even idolatry we have applied to the quantitative models. These predictive models leave citizens befuddled and unable to defend or criticize model-based decisions. We argue that we should accept the fact that we live in a qualitative world when it comes to natural processes. We must rely on qualitative models that predict only direction, trends, or magnitudes of natural phenomena, and accept the possibility of being imprecise or wrong to some degree. We should demand that when models are used, the assumptions and model simplifications are clearly stated. A better method in many cases will be adaptive management, where a flexible approach is used, where we admit there are uncertainties down the road and we watch and adapt as nature rolls on.

I have not yet read the book, but I will.

Orrin participated in our project on Prediction in the Earth Sciences in the late 1990s, contributing a chapter on beach nourishment. The project resulted in this book:

Sarewitz, D., R.A. Pielke, Jr., and R. Byerly, Jr., (eds.) 2000: Prediction: Science, decision making and the future of nature, Island Press, Washington, DC.

Our last chapter can be found here in PDF.

Al Gore 2008, Part 2: A Comparison with the 2004 Evangelical Wedge

Last Friday I speculated that Al Gore will win the 2008 presidency in no small part due to the emergence of climate change as a wedge issue. A wedge issue well used in a political campaign will serve to split your opposition's base and lead to a turn-out advantage among those motivated to vote. As a Pew Research analysis explained:

In electoral politics, however, what often matters most in measuring an issue's potential impact is not whether a great many people care about it, but whether even a relatively small number care about it enough to base their vote on it. Indeed, the classic "wedge issue" is one that draws more of one kind of partisan than another to the polls.

So to explore this issue further I thought I'd compare the climate issue to evangelicals in the population. In the 2004 election the mobilization of evangelical voters was widely attributed as a successful strategy for George W. Bush. Here is what I found.

First, I gathered data on the self-described proportion of voters who call themselves 'evangelical" from a poll taken in 2003-200 by the Annenberg Center (here in PDF). The following graph, left panel, compares the ranking of Evangelical voters with rank in percentage of 2004 presidential vote received by George W. Bush. Note that data was available for only 34 states. The right panel repeats the graph I presented in the earlier Gore post comparing the ranking of per capita CO2 emissions with rank in percentage of 2004 presidential vote received by George W. Bush.

The rank correlation between evangelicals and Bush vote is 0.69. Recall that it was 0.67 between per capita CO2 and Bush vote. Very interesting! (Note Ohio and Florida in that swing-state zone.)

Now compare the distribution of states in the following chart, color coded to represent the vote outcome in the 2004 election.

So what should you take from this comparison? If evangelical issues did indeed serve as a "wedge issue" in 2004 to the benefit the Republicans and George W. Bush, then the baseline conditions for the climate issue leading to 2008 suggest that it is equally amenable to exploitation for political gain among the Democrats, but particularly (and perhaps uniquely) for Al Gore.

Some Sunday NASA News Vignettes

A few items on NASA stitched together . . .

In a Q&A with the New York Times Sunday Magazine, NASA’s Drew Shindell predicts that we’ll know less about the climate system if his group at NASA doesn’t get more funding:

If your department is that politicized, how does that affect research? Well, five years from now, we will know less about our home planet that we know now. The future does not have money set aside to maintain even the current level of observations. There were proposals for lots of climate-monitoring instruments, most of which have been canceled.

To understand NASA’s budget priorities doesn’t require one to be a rocket scientist. This Reuter’s news story contains what may be the most laughable cost estimate from NASA that I’ve seen in a long time, for deflecting a killer asteroid from hitting the Earth.

[Former NASA astronaut Rusty] Schweickart wants to see the United Nations adopt procedures for assessing asteroid threats and deciding if and when to take action.

The favored approach to dealing with a potentially deadly space rock is to dispatch a spacecraft that would use gravity to alter the asteroid's course so it no longer threatens Earth, said astronaut Ed Lu, a veteran of the International Space Station.

The so-called Gravity Tractor could maintain a position near the threatening asteroid, exerting a gentle tug that, over time, would deflect the asteroid.

An asteroid the size of Apophis, which is about 460 feet long, would take about 12 days of gravity-tugging, Lu added.

Mission costs are estimated at $300 million.

NASA’s track record of cost and schedule performance does not lead one to optimism about any projection of costs, as indicated by this report from the Seattle Times:

Boeing received a bonus of $425.3 million — 92 percent of the potential award — for work on the international space station that ran eight years late and cost more than twice what was expected, according to federal auditors.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a report set for release today that the fee was paid on a $13.4 billion so-called "cost-plus" contract where NASA reimburses all costs and pays a bonus for exceptional performance. Raytheon and Lockheed Martin received similar bonuses for troubled programs.

"NASA paid most of the available fee on all of the contracts we reviewed — including on projects that showed cost increases, schedule delays and technical problems," the GAO said in its report for U.S. Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., who chairs the House Science Committee.

Maybe they should have instead sent that bonus money to Dr. Shindell’s lab. Alternatively, if in fact we’ll know less in five years, maybe we should stop climate research altogether, as it seems like we know a lot right now . . .

Should I Care About Cognitive Misers Fighting Over My Wikipedia Biography?

Some time ago a few of my students emailed me (from a bar somewhere I believe) to alert me to the fact that I had a Wikipedia biography page. I had known this already because one of the site administrators had emailed me for a photo. I never though much of it, but my students seemed to think it was cool (or maybe they were laughing at me, it is sometimes hard to tell;-).

It has recently come to my attention that over the past few months some folks are engaged in a minor skirmish over my biography, something I assume is fairly common on biographies, and elsewhere in Wikipedia (Politicization of knowledge? Go figure). It appears that some anonymous people are using the biography to try to paint me as a . . . Republican (cue breaking glass!;-). (Perhaps they are some of the less thoughtful Grist readers, as opposed to most who comment there, where character assassination in mainline posts appears to be accepted behavior.)

First, let’s state for the record that such insinuations are simply wrong. I suppose they are advanced by the disingenuous for the benefit of a small set of cognitive misers for whom such labels are useful shortcuts that help to avoid actually engaging in the substance of my academic policy work. Apparently some feel threatened enough by my work enough to try to influence how I am publicly perceived. To get a sense of the sort of juvenile editorial changes taking place over there, one recent edit removed references to liberal-leaning groups who had favorably cited my work.

I typically don’t pay much attention to such things because the folks who care only about assigning political labels in litmus-test fashion are probably not the ones who are going to be too interested in policy analyses anyway. After all, why spend the time understanding nuances of a complex topic when a pejorative political label is available as a convenient mental shortcut? We saw some of this from the rabid right in the (mostly deleted) comments here on my recent post about Al Gore.

I have also recently learned that Wikipedia frowns upon an individual editing their own biography, which seems fair, so rather than seek to create a more accurate page myself, I have decided to ask Prometheus readers if this is an issue I should even be concerned about, and if so, what to do about it.

I don’t have much quibble about the details of the specific facts presented in the current entry. But the facts selected for highlighting do cherry pick one of literally hundreds of media appearances (i.e., Fox News) and one of hundreds of articles (i.e, Regulation), I suppose the selectivity is to make the point that I have at times interacted with people on the political right. (Shock! Horror!) For the record, I was happy to accept an interview with Fox News (as I do with most all requests from the media) as their viewers (in my opinion) would benefit from hearing about the stuff we do, just like CNN viewers (for whom I have also appeared). And I also happily accepted an invitation to rework one of my peer-reviewed articles for Regulation (published by the libertarian Cato Institute) as their readers (in my opinion) would also benefit from hearing about the stuff we do, just like The New Republic readers (for whom I’ve also published).

To be absolutely clear, as a policy scholar I am happy to have people from any political persuasion show in interest in our work, and I’ll continue to write for and speak with people who are interested that come from a range of perspectives -- Democrat, Green, Libertarian, Republican, Socialist, Labour, Liberal Democrat, Conservative, etc. etc.. I won't give in to efforts to intimidate by casting perjorative political labels. Ideally, members of all of these political parties will see the inescapable wisdom is our work, though I won't hold my breath;-) And for the most part I’ll also continue to ignore the more inane criticisms.

So my question, Prometheus readers, is: should I care about the Wikipedia biography?

Why Al Gore Will be the Next President of the United States

Al Gore will be the next president of the United States. He will win with at least 293 electoral votes, and perhaps in a landslide. This post explains why.

Last week I posted up a graph from The Economist that I found intriguing. The graph showed how California’s electricity usage was about half the national average and even less than the average in the "Red States" (i.e., those that voted Republican in the 2004 Presidential election). In the comments astute Prometheus readers pointed out some important issues, and this motivated me to look at some data a bit more closely and here is what I found and why I think it is important. This post is intended to motivate discussion and comment. My students can tell you how well I predicted the last presidential election;-)

The difference in per capita carbon dioxide emissions between Red and Blue states (from the 2004 elections) is startling (data on CO2 emissions expressed in million metric tons available here in xls. and state population data available here in .xls, and in this analysis I use 2003 values. Election data is from CNN.com).

Red State

Mean (state): 31.7
Median (state): 24.4

Blue State

Mean (state): 15.2
Median (state): 14.4

This means that in 2004 the per-state carbon dioxide emissions in states that voted for George Bush were about twice as large on a per capita basis than those in states that voted for John Kerry. The figure below shows a scatter plot of where each of the 50 states ranks (from 1 to 50) on per capita carbon dioxide emissions and the share of the popular vote won by George W. Bush in 2004. The correlation is a stunning 0.67.

Global climate change was a non-issue in the 2004 elections, so this relationship was a correlate of other factors that determined the election and therefore not a direct factor in the election outcome. It does however provide a baseline for understanding the role of carbon dioxide emissions in the politics of the 2008 election.

2008 will be different than 2004. Elites have decided that global climate change is an issue worth politicizing, that is to say, worth making an issue in politics. Therefore, carbon dioxide emissions will be an issue in the 2008 election.

Obvious point #1: Policy proposals focused on reducing carbon dioxide emissions all involve placing a cost on carbon. Proposals that have been advanced include a cap (on total emissions) and trade (of permits to emit under the cap), a carbon tax, incentives to adopt renewables (e.g., RPS), and others. The specifics matter less than the fact that all involve adding costs to emissions that today are not present (other than as externalities).

Obvious point #2: Additional costs on carbon dioxide emissions will disproportionately hit those voters (and businesses that employ voters) in states with high carbon emissions per capita. Now individual voters may not be so sensitized to this issue. But industry, professional associations, state elected officials and agency officials, national politicians, and others whose careers are based on the provision and use of energy will surely be aware of this issue and its consequences. It is true that some in industry, even in the energy industry, have joined the calls for action on carbon dioxide. But it seems reasonable to think that the smaller the cost (or perceived cost) of policies on carbon dioxide, the more likely that such policies will be accepted. Similarly, the higher the costs, the greater the likelihood of opposition.

Consider the following table which shows the 50 states listed with highest per capita carbon dioxide emissions at the top to the lowest at the bottom, shaded to indicate how they voted in the 2004 presidential election. With few exceptions the higher per capita emitting states voted Republican and vice versa.

It is likely that no matter what happens, in 2008 the reddest red states will likely stay red and the bluest blue states will stay blue. This leaves two categories of states to consider, outliers and swing states.

The outliers include Idaho (50th in per capita CO2 emissions, 2nd highest in 2004 vote share to George Bush), Pennsylvania (19 and 33), Florida (40 and 15), Arizona (37 and 25), Delaware (22 and 39), and Virginia (35 and 23). I am going to assume that ID, DE, and PA are unlikely to change in 2008, and while FL, AZ, and VA may be in play, they don’t have to be in the scenario I am here developing.

This leaves the swing states, defined as the states in which the difference between Republican and Democrat in 2004 was less than 5%. These states and their per capita CO2 emissions are (bold indicates a 2004 Red State):

Oregon 11.3
New Hamp. 15.8
Michigan 18.1
Wisconsin 18.9
Nevada 19.1
Colorado 19.5
Minnesota 19.7
Pennsylvania 21.6
Ohio 22.8
Iowa 26.3
New Mexico 30.3

If climate change is a major issue in 2008 then there is a decided advantage in these states to the Democrats, both for holding on to the 2004 state victories and for changing the others from Red to Blue. Colorado and Nevada are below the national average for carbon dioxide emissions and Ohio and Iowa stand to benefit immensely from an ethanol bidding war (already underway). New Mexico has less to gain but also less to offer in terms of electoral votes.

If it seems a stretch to use per capita carbon dioxide emissions as a factor in thinking about electoral politics, consider the following in the aftermath of the 2006 mid-term congressional election:

States with 2 Republican Senators

Average CO2 emissions 36.3 (median = 28.4)

States with 2 Democratic Senators

Average CO2 emissions 14.7 (median = 14.4)

States with 1 Democratic and 1 Republican Senator

Average CO2 emissions 23.1 (median = 22.2)

How will Al Gore win the presidency?

He will continue to take actions that will keep climate change an important issue that cannot be neglected in political discourse. This will involve congressional testimony, a book release, a global set of coordinated concerts, and other actions. He has been nominated for an Oscar and a Nobel Prize. He'll get some help, whether intended or not as the international community is focused on climate change and even the Bush Administration is now helping to keep the topic in play. These factors together will ensure that the issue remains salient and Mr. Gore remains at the fore. He will enter the race late and dramatically. The "will he or won't he" story will overshadow his competition. And on the major campaign issue of the Iraq War he is exceedingly well positioned.

Hillary Clinton cannot compete with Mr. Gore on climate change (and she has an Iraq vote to explain, plus other issues), and is probably weaker on this issue than John McCain, and not much different than other Republicans who might gain the nomination, especially those who still have time to articulate an aggressive position of climate change. By comparison, consider how the three parties in the U.K. are falling over each other to be viewed among voters as the more aggressive on climate change. For John Edwards and Barak Obama, climate change is just not their gig. If Al Gore can win his party’s nomination, which is certainly not guaranteed, the general election would be his to lose.

If he does run, and he does win his party’s nomination, then as of right now I predict that he will get at least 293 electoral votes, comprised of the 2004 blue states plus NV, CO, OH, and IA. Add in a surprise or two (e.g., FL – two hurricane seasons between now and the 2008 election, AZ, VA) and it is then a landslide.

2008 will be the climate change election and Al Gore will be the next president of the United States.

Another Reason to View Adaptation as Sustainable Development

This news story from Reuters highlights the consequences of neglecting certain areas of research and policy:

One billion poor suffer from neglected diseases: WHO

Last Updated: 2007-02-14 9:44:10 -0400 (Reuters Health)

JAKARTA (Reuters) - One billion people in tropical countries are still suffering from debilitating and disfiguring diseases associated with poverty, but many remain untreated due to official neglect, health officials said on Wednesday.

Despite the existence of inexpensive and safe treatment, those who suffer from diseases such as leprosy, elephantiasis and yaws remain untreated due to a lack of resources and political will, said Jai Narain, South East Asia director of communicable diseases at the World Health Organization (WHO).

"These tropical diseases have been neglected by policy makers, by the research community and also by the international community," Nairan told a news conference at the start of an international meeting to tackle tropical diseases.

"But at the same time these diseases cause considerable amount of suffering, disability, disfigurement and even social economic impact, particularly for populations which are extremely marginalised," he said.

Nairan said the fact that the diseases were not in the headlines and not global problems like polio, HIV/AIDS and malaria contributed to the lack of attention.

"These diseases are closely related to poverty. The elimination of such diseases would be a significant step toward poverty reduction," he said. Many who contract the diseases suffer from discrimination and are shunned by their communities, said Nyoman Kandun, director general for communicable disease control at the Indonesian health ministry. . . .

Benny Peiser Handicaps Climate Politics

Benny Peiser kindly offered a number of comments on a recent thread in which we were less-than approving of the Bush Administration's trans-Atlantic diplomacy on climate change. In order to provide a range of perspectives on the current state of climate politics, which is very much in flux, we have asked Benny Peiser to expand on these comments and offer a perspective on climate politics, particularly U.S.-Europe relations. We welcome posting a range of other perspectives here as well, simply send them to me by email and we'll post them up. Here are Benny's comments:

Post-Kyoto: A whole new ballgame

By Benny Peiser, Liverpool John Moores University (UK)

It is hard these days to keep up with the accelerating reworking of national and international climate policies. On Monday, the US Administration pre-empted a preparatory G8/climate meeting between Angela Merkel and Tony Blair by announcing, in Berlin no less, an energetic, new approach to international climate policy: 'We're doing better in recent years on reducing greenhouse gas emissions than you folks - so why don't you join our technology-driven path to success instead of sending Chinese communists billions of Euros for worthless carbon credits? ' (excuse my rather rough translation of diplomatic niceties)

Today, the European Parliament, in one of its emblematic consensus votes, decided by a majority of 615 - by 25 votes against - that instead of getting wobbly on Kyoto, the EU should enforce a 30% emissions cut by 2020 - and a staggering 80% reduction by 2050. (http://euobserver.com/9/23496). Not that anybody in Europe would take note, given the routine nature of such show of hands.

Tomorrow, Canada's three opposition parties will most likely succeed in winning its Kyoto vote in the House of Commons, thus possibly triggering new elections that may be decided on the contentious climate treaty. http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=2de17e3f-76c1-4cd4-8d8c-849c5d7c872a&k=5894

What these developments have in common is that they are taking place in a significantly reshaped political landscape where traditional positions and habutual disparities on climate change policies have been diluted beyond recognition - if not abandoned for good. In short, what we are witnessing is the internationalisation of what I call the 'Cameron-Effect.'

By this I mean the greening of the conservative parties of the Anglo-Saxon world. This strategy is a mainly PR driven restyling of conservative parties in the European fashion that has transpired over the last ten years or so. What Australia's, Canada's and America's political right is beginning to learn from their British counterparts (and have had to learn under pressure from political opponents) is the need for environmental camouflage - in more or less exactly the same mode socialist, labour and even traditional free market liberals have painted themselves in populist green varnish.

Now that everyone is outdoing each other in green spin and rhetoric, now that every single government on the planet is clamouring for the green vote (left, right and centre), it has become increasingly frustrating for the political left to attack their opponents on environmental credentials. This is one of the reasons why the ostensible conversion of Presidents Bush as a champion of environmental protection is regarded as suspicious if not outrageous as David Cameron's original scheme to don the eco-mantle and call Labour's green bluff.

Which brings us to the touchy Kyoto game. As the economic burden and hurt of EU's Kyoto experiment becomes progressively palpable for ordinary citizens, common businesses and whole sectors of European industries, the opposition to Europe's unilateral policy is mounting. Whether it is growing hostility by the energy intensive manufacturing industry, Europe's airline or Germany's car industries, the traditional ritual of keeping tight-lipped on Kyotoy owing to political correctness has been shattered in recent months. Even Germany's once powerful trade unions have begun to publicly voice their concern about (and started to march in protest against) the detrimental impact of Europe's unilateral climate policy on economic stability and job security.

All things considered, Europe seems to be suffering from a severe bout of Kyoto-schizophrenia. Its governments and political elite (not to mention its science establishment) have invested incalculable amounts of political capital and prestige on the Kyoto Protocol. In more than one way, it has become the foremost and tragic symbol of Europe's "leadership role." A political failure of the Kyoto process would, without a shadow of doubt, cause incalculable trauma to European pride and standing.

Which is why the widely anticipated climb-down on Kyoto-style mandatory emissions cuts and short-term targets that will almost certainly feature in any post-Kyoto agreement that aspires to include China, India and the US is now carefully presented as Angela Merkel's accomplishment or Tony Blair's lasting legacy, etc. In reality, international climate policy will have to become much more realistic (as in Realpolitik). It will almost have to start from scratch if a truly global, transparent and cost-effective agreement is to be achieved in the real world of highly disparate and conflicting interests. As far as I can judge, it remains to be seen whether a face-saving and economically viable compromise can be achieved in the next few years among the world's superpowers.

Final Chapter, Hurricanes and IPCC, Book IV

Two years ago NOAA's Chris Landsea resigned from participating in the IPCC citing concerns that the chapter on hurricanes had been politicized, specifically citing the role that Kevin Trenberth, IPCC convening lead author for the chapter that covered hurricanes, had playing in an October, 2004 media event hyping a hurricane-global warming connection.

With this post we'd like to follow up and in the process close the book on this particular dispute -- at least for us here at Prometheus. The "hurricane wars" are probably far from over, but we should acknowledge that both Chris Landsea and Kevin Trenberth both come out of this situation looking pretty good. Both can and should feel vindicated. Read on if you are interested in a few final details from the last chapter in this story.

The first signs that there might be a happy ending to this saga were evident in June, 2005 when Kevin Trenberth authored a commentary in Science in which he wrote:

[T]here is no sound theoretical basis for drawing any conclusions about how anthropogenic change affects hurricane numbers or tracks, and thus how many hit land.

This led me to conclude at the time:

Landsea and Trenberth are scientifically on the same page, and the perspectives now being espoused by Trenberth [in Science] are (in my interpretation) entirely consistent with what Landsea argued at the time he stepped down from the IPCC.

So it shouldn't have been too surprising when the IPCC accurately reported the state of scientific understandings of tropical cyclones and climate change in its recent summary for policy makers, despite some last-minute concerns. (Of course, the WMO Consensus Statement was probably the most significant factor shaping the IPCC's final judgments.) When the full IPCC WG I report comes out, I have no doubts there will be some room for quibbling about the details on this subject, but the big picture presented in the SPM appears to me to be just about right.

Yesterday in an online Q&A with the public organized by the Washington Post Kevin Trenberth addressed an explicit question about this issue:

Washington, D.C.: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Chris Landsea resigned a year ago from the IPCC and leveled charges that the IPCC, and you in particular, had a overly-politicized view of global warming trends. (link to washingtonpost.com here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29397-2005Jan22.html). Specifically, I believe that Landsea objected to the fact that some on the IPCC would "utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming." I assume that you disagree with Mr. Landsea. Do you believe that recent hurricane patterns have been negatively affected by global warming?

Kevin Trenberth: This is what the IPCC says in the Policy Makers Summary: "There is observational evidence for an increase of intense tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic since about 1970, correlated with increases of tropical sea surface temperatures. There are also suggestions of increased intense tropical cyclone activity in some other regions where concerns over data quality are greater. Multi-decadal variability and the quality of the tropical cyclone records prior to routine satellite observations in about 1970 complicate the detection of long-term trends in tropical cyclone activity. There is no clear trend in the annual numbers of tropical cyclones. " This was agreed to by the US Govt and crafted by the lead authors present (including me). Landsea's comments were not correct.

Dr. Trenberth stuck to what the IPCC concluded and did not take the bait offered by this questioner. He was also taking the high ground in claiming that the IPCC SPM accurately reflected the current state of the science. But Chris Landsea should feel good as well because there can be no doubt that his actions helped to ensure that the IPCC got things right in the end.

Kudos to both, but it's time to move on.

Words of Wisdom in The Daily Camera

There is an excellent letter to the editor in today's Daily Camera (our local newspaper) by Robert Davis, who comments favorably in reaction to a recent op-ed by Chris Mooney and Alan Sokal. Mr. Davis wisely distinguishes advice as policy analysis, and underscores the importance of honest brokers of policy alternatives. Here is Mr. Davis' letter in full:

Your editorial pages for Feb. 11 contained an abundance of thoughtful and relevant writing. In particular, the piece by Mooney and Sokal offers a welcome defense of science as evidence-based reasoning that deserves protection from ideologues ("Taking the spin out of science," Feb. 11).

As a policy analyst who worked as a civil servant in the office of one of the president`s cabinet secretaries through three administrations, I would offer the caution that scientists themselves can become ideologues and need to be reminded of their roles in the decision-making apparatus of a government.

Effective and helpful policy analysis for the head of an agency includes laying out all of the alternatives for addressing a particular problem and exploring the consequences of each alternative. It is in this phase that scientists make their most valuable contribution.

In the case of global warming, we need desperately to know the consequences of the actions we might take. I include costs as one of the consequences, and, of course, probabilities must be addressed, because, in any policy-making, certainty is the rarest of commodities.

Scientists are least helpful when they try to short-cut the policy analysis by prescribing what we must do. At this point, they stop being scientists and the most visible among them become pontificating celebrities. Any government has an obligation to keep its scientists from making fools of themselves, but it is a fine line to hoe.

Certainly, we want the opinions of scientists at the appropriate point in the process of making policy. Without judging the Bush administration or its critics, I would maintain that we have a right to expect that scientists be held to the rules of rational, effective and disciplined policy analysis.

ROBERT DAVIS
Boulder

An Evaluation of U.S. Self-Evaluation on Climate Policy

The Bush Administration has provided the most substantive presentation of its climate policies (that I have seen at least) in the form of a speech yesterday by Kurt Volker, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs before the German Marshall Fund in Berlin, Germany. With this post are a few reactions to this self-evaluation of U.S. climate policies presented by the Bush Administration. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I come to a different conclusion than the Bush Administration when evaluating U.S. climate policies.

The speech begins by acknowledging that the US policies on climate change are not so warmly received in Europe, with Mr. Volker suggesting that the U.S. is "misunderstood." Then there is this unfortunate spin:

As all of you know, President Bush devoted a significant portion of his State of the Union address last month to the subject of climate change-and to what the U.S. intends to do about it.

Here is that "significant portion" in full:

America is on the verge of technological breakthroughs that will enable us to live our lives less dependent on oil. And these technologies will help us be better stewards of the environment, and they will help us to confront the serious challenge of global climate change.

The Bush Administration seems yet to appreciate that being well understood requires a basis in trust, a condition that is hard maintain in the face of constant spin and heavy-handed information management. Those still following Mr. Volker after this statement were treated to an in depth self-evaluation of U.S. policies, well worth reading.

Mr. Volker starts out with "some clear, simple statements":

*The United States, and this Administration, care deeply about climate change.

*We agree that human activity contributes to global warming.

*We support the recent IPCC report, in which U.S. scientists played a leading role.

*We are committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

*We have made tremendous investments in reducing emissions.

*We are working multilaterally to do so.

*We are continuing these efforts.

*These efforts are producing results that stand up favorably against anyone in the world.

Just because we haven't joined the Kyoto Protocol doesn't make any of these statements less true.

Mr. Volker then directly confronts the U.S.-Europe split on climate change:

Now, I know there is a deeply held view among many in Europe that the U.S. Government doesn't get it. That we don't care about climate change, that we are doing nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and that Europe, while perhaps not perfect, is doing a far better job of tackling the issue than the United States. This proposition--no matter how simple, no matter how widely held, and no matter how much it fits a pop-culture "blame-the-United States" paradigm--is completely wrong, on every point.

This statement (remember, delivered in Germany) is quite bold and aggressive. What accounts for this new-found self-confidence and aggressiveness? Mr. Volker does not make his audience wait long for the answer:

Let me start first with the data, because it is important to have the facts on the table. No question: The United States is the world's largest emitter of CO2. Everybody in the room knows this. But this fact says no more about the United States, than the fact that Germany leads Europe in emissions says about Germany.

The United States is number one in greenhouse gas emissions primarily because it is the number one economy in the world. With 5% of the world's population we produce 25% of global wealth. And despite being relatively clean and green, Germany leads Europe in emissions, because it is Europe's largest economy. Our emissions are not out of line with the size of our economy. And it's worth noting: the International Energy Agency is forecasting that China, with a smaller economy, is expected to surpass U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2009.

More important than current emissions is the trend line. What is actually happening to emissions? Are they being reduced? This, after all, is what Kyoto is supposed to address.

According to data from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, from 2000-2004--the most recent period for which we have good, comparative data--U.S. greenhouse gas emissions increased by 1.3 percent. This is an increase, but a very modest increase. The EU-25, on the other hand, increased collective emissions by 2.1 percent.

And, no, this is not because the new EU members added since the 2004 expansion run dirtier economies than the previous 15 members, and this then bumps up the numbers. Actually, the new members have the opposite effect. Those nations--by moving away from some older energy technologies like brown coal--are part of the good news story. If the new EU members did not bring down the average, the old EU-15 would get a worse report card--having increased emissions by 2.4 percent during this same time period.

Germany, I should state, had an admirable record of actually cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 0.7 percent during this time period--but Germany's efforts were overshadowed by increases in most other EU economies.

Now let's be honest--even a 2.4 percent increase for the EU-15 is a very modest increase. But given the way this issue gets talked about publicly in Europe, I would venture to say that few people in Europe know that from 2000 to 2004, EU-15 emissions grew at nearly double the U.S. rate, and that Europe, at least during this period, has been moving away from-not towards-its Kyoto target of an 8 percent cut.

The Bush Administration has finally, clumsily, begun moving toward a realpolitik approach to climate change, one that I recommended almost three years ago:

. . . consider this amazing fact: if President Bush in 2001 had, instead of pulling out of the Kyoto process, simply committed the United States to participate and then did nothing else differently since that time, then the United States would be closer to meeting its Kyoto targets than EU members Ireland, Spain, Austria, Portugal, and about even with Denmark.

Ironically, expressing support for the Kyoto process but not taking dramatic action to implement it is the exact climate policy pursued by the Administration of Bill Clinton whose approach to climate policy is substantively very similar to the approach of the Bush Administration. But the two administration's approaches to climate politics could not be more different.

Of course, success in international politics does not necessarily mean good policy will result. . .

The Bush Administration’s new, aggressive approach is based on the surprising discovery that European greenhouse gas emissions have increased faster than those in the United States. Mr. Volker’s talk is even suggestively titled "Post-Kyoto Surprise: America's Quiet Efforts to Cut Greenhouse Gases Are Producing Results." Because the United States over 2000-2004 did relatively better than Europe in the rate of greenhouse gas emissions growth, this has apparently given the Bush Administration the sense that they can thumb their nose at the Europeans and say "nya-nya-nya." An approach more politically effective (from the perspective of the Bush Administration) might have instead been to share in the difficulties of reducing emissions, rather than presenting the US-EU as being opposed to one another. I have doubts that the Bush Administration will ever learn the merits of diplomacy.

What goes unsaid by Mr. Vokler is that a more relevant metric of policy success (as compared, say, to political posturing) in reducing greenhouse gas emissions is not the level of emissions of the EU, but rather the absolute amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And on this count both the United States and Europe are performing quite poorly, the small differences between the two over 2000-2004 is pretty much irrelevant.

More fundamentally, a reduction in the growth rate of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions has occurred not by policy design, but by happenstance. To be fair, the Bush Administration has always emphasized reducing the amount of greenhouse gas emissions per unit of economic output, but its targets have been no more aggressive than the long-term rate of transformation of the economy to being less energy intensive. The Bush Administration would be on more solid ground claiming policy success for reductions in emissions intensity greater than the background trend if it had actually presented such outcomes as policy goals at sometime in the past. Instead, it has stumbled upon an outcome that it never actually sought and claimed it as the result of intentional policy action.

It surely must be uncomfortable for the EU to see the Bush Administration trumpeting its greenhouse emissions reductions "successes" after rudely pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001. And on the count the Bush Administration once again demonstrates its utter incompetence in international relations to the detriment of its own political agenda. Upon learning that U.S. greenhouse gas emissions were less than that of the EU over a short 4-year period, rather than rubbing the European’s noses in their own struggles over climate policy, the Bush Administration might have instead taken a more conciliatory approach. It has once again favored playing politics rather than focusing on the real policy challenges presented by climate change. Ironically, those favoring a more aggressive approach to emissions reductions should welcome the Bush Administration’s ham-handedness in helping to keep the issue alive. A more politically sophisticated approach might not have the same results.

Finally, the notion of adaptation does not appear in the Bush Administration’s self-evaluation. Any climate policy that purports to be comprehensive but does not discuss adaptation must be considered incomplete at best and more likely a failure.