« March 2007 »

Response to Nature Commentary: Insiders and Outsiders

Three leaders in the adaptation community submitted a letter to Nature responding to our commentary published last month (here in PDF). Nature won't be publishing their letter, but we are happy to reproduce it here. Below is the letter and our response to it, followed by a bit more commentary from me.

We take issue with the commentary by Pielke et al. (Nature 445: 597). The authors accuse mitigation advocates of incorrectly arguing that efforts on adaptation detract from mitigation. We agree that the argument is spurious. Yet, the authors make the opposite argument which we also take issue with: that mitigation detracts from adaptation. The notion that the UNFCCC allows investments in adaptation to be reduced by investments in mitigation is unfounded.

Both mitigation and adaptation are needed. Global warming threatens to destabilize ice sheets, causing sea level rise to rise for centuries. It also threatens to cause widespread disruption of ecosystems and loss of biodiversity. It is not clear how adaptation will offset these impacts. Thus, mitigation is needed to slow down global warming and avoid its worst effects.

As the authors note, adaptation is also needed because climate change is underway and further warming is inevitable. The climate change adaptation community has long recognized that effective adaptation has to address shortcomings in natural resource management as well as addressing the added risks introduced by climate change. This is not a diversion, but a necessary response to an unprecedented threat facing humanity.

Joel B. Smith
Stratus Consulting Inc.
Boulder, CO USA

Ian Burton
University of Toronto
Toronto

Saleemul Huq
International Institute for Environment and Development
London

And here is our response, which we shared with the authors by email:

A criticism from arguably the three leading voices on adaptation for our not paying sufficient attention to mitigation underscores our point. You letter fails to acknowledge our main point -- that two views of adaptation are present in the current discourse. Of course, you are all well aware of this because it is you who has done the most to introduce the broader definition!

The narrow view of adaptation that we describe is indeed linked tightly to mitigation (as for instance reflected in the Stern Report) and does indeed compete with the broader view of adaptation as sustainable development (this tension is reflected in the IPCC reports which use both definitions inconsistently). Some of your own work arguing for the broader definition makes this absolutely clear. Our article was about how these two framings of adaptation compete with one another.

To fail to recognize this distinction is I think to mischaracterize our piece. If every response to advocacy for a greater emphasis on adaptation as sustainable development is countered by a criticism that describes the importance of mitigation, it is fair to ask who is creating the perception of a trade-off.

In response to climate change, we can (and must) do more than one thing at once. But to do so requires that we stop defending mitigation reflexively every time someone makes a strong argument for adaptation. Our piece argued that these agendas should be decoupled which is what the broad definition of adaptation helps to achieve. By not acknowledging this distinction, your letter in response brings them together again and creates ambiguity.

We do appreciate the feedback and it is indeed a sign of progress on this issue if we can begin debating the dimensions of adaptation, rather than if we should be adapting at all.

And I would further point to a recent Pew Center report co-authored by Joel Smith and Ian Burton (PDF) which included the following argument indicating that adaptation is indeed tightly tied to mitigation under the FCCC:

. . . .the adaptation effort has suffered from ambiguities in the [FCCC] regime. One concerns the very definition of adaptation, which is nowhere explicit in the Convention. In that adaptation is referenced only in the context of climate change, the implication is that support under the Convention must be directed to activities addressing primarily if not exclusively human-induced impacts. Yet, as noted earlier, and in expert meetings convened under the Convention, adaptation strategies often are most effective when addressing the full continuum of climate risk. In addition, there appears significant confusion over the terms for adaptation funding through the GEF. As the GEF was established to address global environmental issues, projects supported through its principal trust fund must deliver a "global environmental benefit." In the area of adaptation, most funding flows through the separate dedicated funds established under the Convention and the Kyoto Protocol. Although guidance from the parties is not explicit on the point, the GEF’s position is that the "global environmental benefits" test does not apply to these funds. Yet there remains a widespread perception among potential recipients that it does.

This is identical to the argument that we made in the Nature commentary and that I analyze in depth in this paper (in PDF)!

And Saleemul Huq (with Hannah Reid) write:

For example, the six case studies on adaptation to climate change undertaken under the auspices of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (see Agrawala, this Bulletin) define adaptation to climate change narrowly so that it refers to only those climate change impacts that are deemed to be directly attributable to human-induced climate change, rather than to adaptation to the broader range of impacts associated with "climate variability". A narrow definition of climate impacts would tend to then only produce a small range of adaptation responses as being necessary and hence requiring funding – in essence addressing only a very narrow set of examples of adaptation development linkages (i.e. the "tip of the iceberg" in Figure 2) and hence missing the much larger set of relevant adaptation-development linkages where there are additional co-benefits.

It is difficult for me to see how these perspectives differ at all from our own expressed in Nature as follows:

The focus on mitigation has created policy instruments that are biased against adaptation. Under the Kyoto Protocol to the UNFCCC, rich countries pay costs that poor countries incur by adapting to the marginal impacts of climate change — but they can in principle avoid these costs through enhanced mitigation efforts. This provision of the Protocol exemplifies the failure to take adaptation seriously: not only are the funds involved provided on a voluntary basis by rich countries but they are held hostage to mitigation. The logic is that greenhouse-gas reductions will, in turn, reduce marginal adaptation costs. In practice, this means that the UNFCCC will pay "costs that lead to global environmental benefits, but not those that result in local benefits". To those experiencing devastating losses from climate impacts in developing countries, such logic must sound surreal: policy 'success' means not investing in adaptation even as climate impacts, driven mainly by non-climate factors, continue to mount.

The only difference that I can see between Smith, Burton, and Huq and Pielke, Prins, Rayner, and Sarewitz is that we are a bit less polite about discussing the big fat elephant in the room. And that just might be attributed to a difference between insiders and outsiders in the FCCC community.

Interview at ClimateandInsurance.Org

I am interviewed by the website ClimateandInsurance.org, check it out here.

Now I've Seen Everything

NASA's Jim Hansen has discovered STS (science and technology studies, i.e., social scientists who study science), and he is using it to justify why the IPCC is wrong and he, and he alone, is correct on predictions of future sea level rise and as well on calls for certain political actions, like campaign finance reform.

In a new paper posted online (here in PDF) Dr. Hansen conveniently selects a notable 1961 paper on the sociology of scientific discovery from Science to suggest that scientific reticence can be used to predict where future research results will lead. And he finds, interestingly enough, that they lead exactly to where his views are today.

What evidence does Dr. Hansen provide to indicate that his views on sea level rise are correct and those presented by the IPCC, which he openly disagrees with, are wrong? Well, for one he explains that no glaciologist agrees with his views (as they are apparently reticent), suggesting that in fact his views must be correct (a creative use of STS if I've ever seen one;-). If holding a minority view is a standard for predicting future scientific understandings then we should therefore apparently pay more attention to all those lonely skeptics crying out in the wilderness, no?

I find it simply amazing that Dr. Hansen has the moxie to invoke the STS literature to support his scientific arguments when that literature, had he looked at maybe one more paper, indicates that Bernard Barber's 1961 essay, while provocative is not widely accepted (see, e.g., this book or this paper). And even if one accepts Barber's article at face value which argues that scientists resist new discoveries (Thomas Kuhn, hello?), what Dr. Hansen doesn't explain (as he is throwing out the IPCC model of scientific consensus) is why his views are those that will prove to be proven correct in the future rather than those other scientific perspectives that are not endorsed by the IPCC. (Dr. Hansen appears to ignore Barber's argument in the same paper suggesting that older scientists are more likely to be captured by political or other interests when presenting their science.)

If we can use the sociology of science to foretell where science is headed, we could save a lot of money not having to in fact do the research. The climate issue is full of surprises and this one just about takes the cake for me. Now I've seen everything!

Cashing In

At least one IPCC lead author appears to be trying to cash in on concern over climate change. With the help of several University of Arizona faculty members, including one prominent IPCC contributor, a company called Climate Appraisal, LLC is selling address specific climate predictions looking out as far as the next 100 years. Call me a skeptic or a cynic but I'm pretty sure that the science of climate change hasn't advanced to the point of providing such place-specific information. In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest that if such information were credible and available, it'd already be in the IPCC. The path from global consensus to snake oil seems pretty short. I wouldn't deny anyone the chance to make a buck, but can this be good for the credibility of the IPCC?

if you want an example of selling science...

...see this post by Eric Berger. Eric details AccuWeather's chief hurricane forecaster making ... well, you can see for yourself what he's doing. Real solid work.

Why is Climate Change a Partisan Issue in the United States?

Several people asked me to comment on this Jonathan Chait essay from the L.A. Times last week in which he sought to explain the partisan nature of the climate issue. While I think there are some elements of truth in Chait's perspective, I think that he misses the elephant in the room.

Climate change is indeed a partisan issue. This is confirmed time and again by opinion polls, most recently this poll released last week.

Chait seeks to explain this partisanship as follows:

How did it get this way? The easy answer is that Republicans are just tools of the energy industry. It's certainly true that many of them are. Leading global warming skeptic Rep. Joe L. Barton (R-Texas), for instance, was the subject of a fascinating story in the Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago. The bottom line is that his relationship to the energy industry is as puppet relates to hand.

But the financial relationship doesn't quite explain the entirety of GOP skepticism on global warming. For one thing, the energy industry has dramatically softened its opposition to global warming over the last year, even as Republicans have stiffened theirs.

The truth is more complicated — and more depressing: A small number of hard-core ideologues (some, but not all, industry shills) have led the thinking for the whole conservative movement.

Your typical conservative has little interest in the issue. Of course, neither does the average nonconservative. But we nonconservatives tend to defer to mainstream scientific wisdom. Conservatives defer to a tiny handful of renegade scientists who reject the overwhelming professional consensus.

National Review magazine, with its popular website, is a perfect example. It has a blog dedicated to casting doubt on global warming, or solutions to global warming, or anybody who advocates a solution. Its title is "Planet Gore." The psychology at work here is pretty clear: Your average conservative may not know anything about climate science, but conservatives do know they hate Al Gore. So, hold up Gore as a hate figure and conservatives will let that dictate their thinking on the issue.

Chait's suggestion that non-conservatives defer to the scientific mainstream while conservatives do not gets the cart and horse mixed up. Chait falls victim to the idea that for some people -- those rational beings in the reality-based community -- political perspectives flow from a fountain of facts. And if one's entire view of the relationship of science and politics is grounded in very recent Republican-Democrat conflict it is easy to see how this perspective might be reinforced. On the very hot-button issues of climate change and the teaching of evolution, Republican political agendas require confronting current scientific consensus.

But a broader look at science and politics shows that challenges to a current scientific consensus occurs across the ideological spectrum. Consider genetically modified agricultural products and the European Union. The EU has strongly opposed these products for political and cultural reasons (sound familiar?) in the face of a scientific consensus that indicates little risks. Consider also smoking, where a robust scientific consensus exists, yet far more people smoke in left-leaning Europe than in the United States. When I testified before Congress last February I pointed out that the Democrats organizing the hearing had decided not to invoke a recent consensus statement on hurricanes and global warming in favor of relying on a few selected studies most convenient to their political agenda. The reality is that we all filter facts through our pre-existing values and biases, and each of use is perfectly capable of ignoring or selectively interpreting facts as is convenient. Those who stubbornly refuse to accept the previous sentence would be a good example of these dynamics.

The blindingly obvious and somewhat banal answer to the question why climate change is a partisan issue is that climate change is a partisan issue because it has evolved as a partisan issue. The fact that at some point the issue took on partisan characteristics has led to a reinforcement of the partisanship. The important question to ask is how it is that climate change became a partisan issue. There are several answers to this question.

1. George W. Bush. Everything George Bush touches becomes a partisan issue (and seems to break). George Bush squandered an opportunity to become a great president in the aftermath of 9/11 and instead will be remembered as one of the worst presidents in U.S. history. In this context, his early-2001 decision to unceremoniously abandon the Kyoto process and flip the bird at Europe more than anything fed the partisan nature of the climate debate. In the 1992 presidential election climate change first became a high-level partisan issue as Al Gore and George H. W. Bush used the issue to score political points, with GHWB calling Gore "ozone man" and promising to counter the greenhouse effect with the "White House effect." Of course the deeper history, back to the 1970s, involves the Republicans as the party of the extractive resources industries and the Democrats as the party of alternative energy. These debates conveniently mapped right onto the 1980s emergence of climate change as Dan Sarewitz and I documented in 2000 in the Atlantic Monthly. Of course, if one were to go back to the 1950s and 1960s these partisan roles were somewhat reversed, as Frank Laird documents in his excellent book on the history of solar energy.

2. Al Gore. Long before George W. Bush was in politics Al Gore was in the business of politicizing the climate issue. I have no doubt that he feels strongly about climate change, but his actions for several decades bely his oft-stated claim that climate change is not a partisan issue. Today Al Gore's leadership on this issue is by its very nature a partisan issue:

Appearing before a Congressional Committee, Gore said that Global Warming is "not a partisan issue; it’s a moral issue." However, polling data suggests that among the general public it’s a very partisan issue. By a 65% to 9% margin, Democrats say that Gore knows what he’s talking about. By a 57% to 11%, Republicans say he does not. Those not affiliated with either party are evenly divided.

So long as the main protagonists in the U.S. climate issue are the opponents from the overwhelmingly partisan 2000 presidential election, how in the world can the climate issue be anything other than partisan?

3. The Chorus. Given the dynamics described above, it is entirely natural that the climate debate attracts participants ranging from experts to the lay public, who together I call the chorus. And people are attracted to the issue because of its partisan nature, and the nature of blogs and media coverage amplify the voice of the chorus. And in turn the chorus reinforces the partisan nature of the debate through several forms of dynamics.

First, climate change is a perfect issue for the scientization of politics. This refers to the tendency to characterize political debates in terms of technical disputes -- remember the Hockey Stick? There is an endless supply of climate science to debate and discuss and always the presence of irritating skeptics who challenge the current consensus (see discussion at RealClimate). This situation elevates the authority of subject matter experts in political debates, which makes it appealing for some experts, but also inevitably politicizes the expert community as they self-segregate according to political perspectives.

Second, self-segregation is not unique to experts. A short tour around the web reveals the truth of Cass Sunstein's notion of internet-based "echo chambers" in which people talk only with those who share their views and lambaste as evil subhumans those who they disagree with. It is a rare discussion on climate change that involves a thoughtful exchange of ideas from people who hold fundamentally different political views. The self-segregation has the effect of increasing the partisan nature of the debate as people come to believe more strongly of the absolute truth in their views and the absolute lack of morals in their opponents.

Third, forced segregation. For those who do not fit easily into the partisan nature of the climate debate, partisans go to great effort to force these perspectives into a partisan framework. For instance, here at Prometheus we've consistently advanced views on climate policy (held long before George Bush came around) that emphasize the importance of adaptation and immediate, no-regrets mitigation to occur in parallel (see my 2006 Congressional testimony for the full spiel), and we've experienced a steady effort by some to frame our views as "right-leaning" simply because they are not "left-leaning." The repeated attacks on us from the environmental Gristmill blog are a case in point, despite the fact that there appears to be an enormous substantive agreement in our views. Of course, if the political right actually accepted the views on policy that we have been advocating then those on the political left would probably be rejoicing! On the climate issue, because the chorus has little stomach for perspectives that deviate in any sense from the partisan framing, it is any surprise that the partisan framing dominates?

The bottom line is that climate change is a partisan issue. It will likely remain so in the United States for a long time. Political action will happen nonetheless simply because the Democrats have succeeded in making it a political issue during a time of their ascendancy. If Al Gore runs for president, as I suspect he will, it will further increase the partisan nature of the debate. To the extent that Democrats continue to raise expectations that climate change is central to their agenda, action will inevitably occur. Republicans will eventually accept that action will occur and will do the best to use it as a vehicle to advance their own interests, as typically occurs in all political situations. For those interested in effective policy action, as opposed to scoring political points real or symbolic, there will be a continuing need to keep a focus on policy options and their likely consequences. Die hard partisans will do there best to make that task difficult as discussion of options requires the sort of nuance not present in political horse races.

Soon climate politics in the United States will come to resemble the current dynamics in the EU, in which the issues will be messier and more complicated. When that occurs, like old Cold Warriors the climate partisans will long for the days of good guys and bad guys, and will likely hang on too long to the past.

So Long as We Are Discussing Congressional Myopia . . .

I had a chance to meet Congressman Wayne Gilchrest (R-MD) last year at an informal dinner at the home of Thomas Lovejoy, head of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment. In my conversations with Mr. Gilchrest I found him to be extremely thoughtful and exactly the sort of person that anyone would welcome representing them in Congress, Republican or Democrat. My views were reinforced when I saw Mr. Gilchrest sitting with Congressional committees looking into global warming even though he wasn’t on those committees but was attending simply to educate himself, one time when I was testifying.

So it was with some surprise that I read the following about Mr. Gilchrest in a news story last week:

House Republican Leader John Boehner would have appointed Rep. Wayne Gilchrest to the bipartisan Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming — but only if the Maryland Republican would say humans are not causing climate change, Gilchrest said.

"I said, 'John, I can't do that,'" Gilchrest said in an interview.

Gilchrest didn't make the committee. Neither did other Republican moderates or science-minded members, whose guidance centrist GOP members usually seek on the issue. Republican moderates, called the Tuesday Group, invited Boehner to this week's meeting to push for different representation.
. . .
Gilchrest expressed his interest in the committee several times to Boehner and Minority Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri, telling them the best thing they could do for Republican credibility was to appoint members familiar with the scientific data.

"Roy Blunt said he didn't think there was enough evidence to suggest that humans are causing global warming," Gilchrest said. "Right there, holy cow, there's like 9,000 scientists to three on that one."

The fact that the Republican leadership seeks to ensure political unanimity via a litmus test on the science of climate change should be a surprise to no one. More troubling is the fact that the participation of one of our most thoughtful public servants on an important select committee is a casualty of such political myopia. Not only will policy discussions be impoverished by such actions, but it is also hard to see how it works in the favor of the Republican political agenda.

Pay No Attention to Those Earmarks

According to a column in the Wall Street Journal Congress, in its wisdom, has decided to prohibit the ability of its Congressional Research Service (CRS) to publish reports documenting congressional earmarks, or targeted spending inserted in appropriations bills (aka "pork-barrel spending"). This is a bad decision.

The thinking in Congress must be that if they don't report the existence of earmarks then no one will know what is going on. As has been documented time and again here we see an effort to shape political outcomes by manipulating the availability of information. In this case the incentives are not partisan, but institutional, as members of both political parties in Congress have a shared incentive to keep earmarks out of the public eye. Earmarks are often associated with irresponsible public spending (e.g., the Alaska "bridge to nowhere") and are especially problematic in the R&D enterprise, as I've discussed here previously.

Congress is doing the public a disservice by seeking to aggressively limit information on spending that it makes available to the public. This behavior is likely to be counterproductive when at the same time several Congress committees are conducting useful investigations of the Executive branch's heavy-handed information management strategies. In general, openness and transparency are good principles, and that is the case here as well.

Here is an excerpt from the WSJ column:

Nothing highlighted Congress's spending problem in last year's election more than earmarks, the special projects like Alaska's "Bridge to Nowhere" that members drop into last-minute conference reports leaving no opportunity to debate or amend them. Voters opted for change in Congress, but on earmarks it looks as if they'll only be getting more smoke and mirrors.

Democrats promised reform and instituted "a moratorium" on all earmarks until the system was cleaned up. Now the appropriations committees are privately accepting pork-barrel requests again. But curiously, the scorekeeper on earmarks, the Library of Congress's Congressional Research Service (CRS)--a publicly funded, nonpartisan federal agency--has suddenly announced it will no longer respond to requests from members of Congress on the size, number or background of earmarks. "They claim it'll be transparent, but they're taking away the very data that lets us know what's really happening," says Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn. "I'm convinced the appropriations committees are flexing their muscles with CRS."

Indeed, the shift in CRS policy represents a dramatic break with its 12-year practice of supplying members with earmark data. "CRS will no longer identify earmarks for individual programs, activities, entities, or individuals," stated a private Feb. 22 directive from CRS Director Daniel Mulhollan.

When Sen. Coburn and Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina submitted earmark inquiries recently, they were both turned down. Each then had heated conversations with Mr. Mulhollan. The director, who declined to be interviewed for this article, explained that because the appropriations committees and the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) were now preparing their own lists of earmarks, CRS should no longer play a role in the process. He also noted that both the House and Senate are preparing their own definitions of earmarks. "It is not appropriate for us to continue our research," his directive states.

That is sophistry. The House rule making earmarks public, which was passed in January, doesn't apply to earmarks for fiscal year 2007, the year Mr. Coburn wanted his report on. There is no Senate rule, and a proposed statute defining earmarks hasn't become law. OMB's list of earmarks applies only to fiscal year 2005.

And in any case, CRS works for Congress, so it is bizarre for it to claim work being done by the executive branch as a reason to deny members information it was happy to collect and release in the past. When I asked a CRS official if the new policy stemmed from complaints by appropriations committee members, she refused to answer the question, citing "confidentiality" concerns. . .

Today squeeze plays on CRS are not uncommon, and they have come from both parties. In the 1990s, GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey was so angry with a CRS report questioning the workability of a flat tax that he temporarily zeroed out the agency's budget. Rep. Henry Waxman, as a member of a Democratic minority, demanded and got revisions to CRS reports on how prescription drug pricing rules in his bills would work. "Everyone expects Waxman and others to be even more insistent on getting what they want now [that he's in the majority]," says another CRS staffer.

Unpublished Letter to the San Francisco Chronicle

A few weeks ago Henry Miller had an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle that discussed our recent commentary in Nature on adaptation (PDF). We sent in a letter in response that for whatever reason the Chronicle decided not to publish. So we have reproduced it here:

Dear Editor-

We appreciate that Henry Miller (Sunday, March 11, 2007) highlighted our recent commentary in Nature magazine which called for greater attention to adaptation in climate policy. In that article we argue that advocates of mitigation (i.e., reducing greenhouse gas emissions) frequently go too far when they present energy policies as an alternative to societal adaptation to the impacts of a changing climate. Unfortunately, Dr. Miller commits an equally grave mistake by suggesting that adaptation can take the place of mitigation. Any effective approach to climate policy will require that we both mitigate and adapt. The urge to present adaptation and mitigation as somehow in opposition is a reflex shared by those on opposing sides of the debate over greenhouse gas emissions. On climate policy we must walk and chew gum at the same time.

Roger Pielke, Jr., University of Colorado
Gwyn Prins, London School of Economics and Columbia University
Steve Rayner, Oxford University's James Martin Institute
Daniel Sarewitz, Arizona State University

Whose political agenda is reflected in the IPCC Working Group 1, Scientists or Politicians?

Recent discussion here on Prometheus and elsewhere has indicated two very different perspectives on who controls the IPCC’s Working Group I on the science of climate change. The different views reflect various efforts to legitimize and delegitimize the IPCC. However, the different perspectives cannot be reconciled for reasons I describe below, placing scientists in an interesting double bind.

The first view is that the IPCC is subject to governmental control at the start and at the finish, and thus is an overtly political document. It is after all the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. From this perspective the IPCC is very much a political document with political officials setting its agenda in the form of of the questions that it is to address and political officials also acting as gatekeepers on the resulting scientific report.

This view on the back end was expressed by Michael Mann, of Penn State University and RealClimate, who commented in New Scientist earlier this month:

Allowing governmental delegations to ride into town at the last minute and water down conclusions after they were painstakingly arrived at in an objective scientific assessment does not serve society well.

On the front end of the report, Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M, suggested that this too was controlled by politicians and not scientists, writing in the comments on another Prometheus post:

. . . you have to conclude that the [IPCC chapter] outline represents the questions member gov'ts want to know in order to respond to climate change.

The second view is that the IPCC is squarely in the control of the scientific community with governmental officials having a right to approve the IPCC report on the front and back ends but with no authority to alter it’s substance in any way for political purposes. Twenty distinguished climate scientists who participated in drafting of the recent IPCC Summary for Policymakers wrote a letter objecting vehemently to an article in the New Scientist suggesting that political officials had any influence whatsoever on the report.

At all stages, including at the final plenary in Paris, the authors had control over the text . . In particular, our co-chair Susan Solomon is robustly independent and has been determined to maintain the credibility of the science throughout the four-year process. . . The wide participation of the scientific community, the scientific accuracy and the absence of any policy prescription in this report are the characteristics that render this report so powerful. . . Another related misconception, promulgated by [New Scientist], is that the Summary for Policymakers was written by and for the government delegations, and changes were made to the scientific conclusions before and during the Paris plenary for political purposes. In fact, the Summary for Policymakers was written by the scientists who also wrote the underlying chapters. The purpose of the Paris plenary was to make clarifications in order to more succinctly and accessibly communicate the science to the policy-makers. The scientists were present in Paris to ensure scientific accuracy and consistency with the underlying report. Those of us also involved in previous assessments were pleasantly surprised that there were far fewer alterations made to the text at this final meeting, and that there were very few attempts at political interference.

So here is the double bind that scientists find themselves in: Some scientists, like Andrew Dessler (cited above), wish to assert that the IPCC is essentially value-free reflecting the revealed truths of the climate system as discerned by objective climate scientists with no political agenda. From this perspective, the only political agenda that the IPCC reflects is that imposed upon it by governments on the front end in the form of questions that they would like to see answered. It is otherwise scientifically pure. Other scientists, like Michael Mann (cited above), hold a very different view seeing the IPCC as reflecting a political agenda of member governments who have in fact corrupted the objective views of the climate scientists. From this perspective, the IPCC does in fact reflect a political agenda that shaped it on the back end.

If governmental representatives in fact have no influence on content of the IPCC only an ability to approve, as suggested by the twenty authors of the letter to the New Scientist, then all decisions made by the IPCC about what information to present in the report reflect the values and judgments of the scientists participating. Many scientists do not like this assertion because it suggests that the IPCC is not accountable to anyone, and stands as a technocratic exercise far from any sort of democratic governance of science. If instead governmental officials do in fact have influence, then the IPCC has some greater accountability and perhaps meets some criteria of democratic governance, but at the same time many scientists do not like this assertion because then the IPCC risks losing its legitimacy as its conclusions would then reflect the political agendas of its overseers. So does the IPCC Working Group I reflect a political agenda or not?

The only way that this double bind could be broken would be for the IPCC to do two things. First, on its front end it would need to have a formal, transparent, and systematic process for eliciting the demands for information from policy makers in the forms of questions asked and information sought. (Dan Sarewitz and I describe such a process in this paper: PDF.) There was in fact no such process on the front end.

Second, on the back end the IPCC would need an accepted process that allowed member governments to ask questions seeking to clarify and focus the report, opposed to changing its content. The IPCC authors suggest that this is in fact what happened, but its critics assert the opposite. So whatever the reality, it seems clear that the following statement from the twenty IPCC letter-writers holds up: "A legitimate criticism perhaps is the poor communication to the general public of IPCC procedures."

Everyone seems to agree that the IPCC reflects a political agenda, the question is who’s political agenda? Is it that of the participating scientists? Do participating scientists in fact have a "political agenda" or instead do they have many competing political agendas? Or is the political agenda of the IPCC that of the participating governments? But do participating governments in fact have a "political agenda" or many competing political agendas?

The answers to the questions are all unclear. The IPCC tries to have things both ways by asserting governmental participation without governmental influence. This makes no sense, and participation is meaningless absent influence. As a result, how people view the legitimacy of the IPCC will therefore most likely be an inkblot test on their views of governance by experts versus the democratization of knowledge. One thing seems clear, global governance of the IPCC would be much more straightforward, and its role far easier to understand, with some explicit answers to who controls the IPCC, scientists or governments?

a little slowdown....

Roger is still spring breaking for a while and I'm going to be traveling a lot for the next three weeks, so Prometheus is going to get a bit thin, unless we can corral the occasional posters around here to get some material up. I'll try to post from the road but some of my travel will be computerless.

For you NY-based readers I'll be giving an earthquake mitigation policy talk at Lamont-Doherty on April 9th to the CHRR.

And I'll be in northern Michigan week of April 2 ... anybody up there want to invite me to give a talk so I can call that a business trip? 8-)

Praise for The Honest Broker

Three people who I have a lot of respect for have read my book and offered some kind (far too kind, actually) words:

With an analytical honesty unmarred by hidden agendas, Roger Pielke brilliantly brings the murky interface of science and politics into perfect focus. Scientists and policy makers alike need to read this book, and need to absorb its wisdom.

Michael M. Crow, President, Arizona State University

Roger Pielke Jr. has produced a beautifully clear account of the often murky relationship between scientific advice and the policy process. While his distinction between pure scientist, science arbiter, issue advocate, and honest broker may not fully satisfy purists in Science and Technology Studies (STS), it ought to be compulsory reading for every science graduate and all decision makers in government, business, the judiciary, or campaigning groups who claim that their decisions are rooted in scientific evidence. It is also an invaluable guide to the ordinary citizen who just wants to navigate through the confusion and contradiction that often seems to surround the use of science in policy debates.

Steve Rayner, James Martin Professor of Science and Civilization, University of Oxford

Decision-making can be an important problem, both in everyday life and when science, politics and policy are involved. The Honest Broker broadens the options of decision-making by going beyond the traditional roles of the 'pure scientist' or the 'issue advocate'. Scientific knowledge can be integrated with stakeholder concerns if the policy context is taken into account in an adequate way. Based on extensive experience in the analysis of decision-making relating to scientific and technological issues, Roger Pielke Jr. goes a long way to be an honest broker himself: between science and democracy.

Helga Nowotny, Vice-President of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council and Fellow at Wissenschaftszentrum Wien

Should be available in a week or so, here is the Amazon link to order the paperback version.

Who is SAIC?

I'm guessing that most of you inside or slightly inside or have-been inside the DC circuit know about SAIC and what they do for the government, but even those who know about SAIC probably don't know much. Vanity Fair has a long, detailed and fascinating piece up on SAIC and how they basically are the government. It's well worth the time. My favorite line:

Whether SAIC actually possesses all the expertise that it sells is another story

Right. That is, I suppose, the essence of the contracting scene. You want somebody to pay you to figure out how to do something so you can sell it to the next person at a profit....

Who is talking national cat insurance now?

The Florida Senators, of course. The Palm Beach Post has a story up about a new bill package from Sens. Nelson and Martinez. The bills aren't up yet in the Congressional tracking system so all we have is the PBP article, but there are some tantalizing clues in there:

But Sen. Bill Nelson, a Democrat, and Sen. Mel Martinez, a Republican, said their main legislative vehicle would be a bill Nelson filed in January that would create an advisory commission to recommend a federal catastrophic insurance program.

...

Among the bills introduced Tuesday is a proposal to create a national catastrophic insurance fund financed through insurance premiums.

Such a fund would operate as a national reinsurance program to backstop commercial reinsurance plans and state catastrophic insurance funds in the event of a major disaster.

This is a good start, but I hope they are planning on dealing with the underinsurance and adjustment problems in the other bills. The thinking might be that with federal backstop reinsurance, premiums offered by the direct insurers can be lower and the options greater, thus leading to higher rates of policyholding, but it's not clear. If that's not the thinking that I'm wondering what they are going for here, because I didn't see much problem with the reinsurance world absorbing Katrina's payouts.

The other measures include a Martinez bill, with Nelson co-sponsoring, to give a 25 percent tax credit to property owners for home improvements designed to help a the home withstand the impact of a natural disaster.

Nice to see somebody thinking about how to get individual homeowners to voluntarily undertake resilience upgrades. A point I've been making about the quake policy outlook is that it's focused far too heavily on basic and applied research and not on implementation strategies. And by implementation, I'm talking about issues just like this – how to get homeowners, business owners and municipalities to build resilience into their infrastructure based on the hazards knowledge we've already developed.

Martinez also offered a bill to streamline insurance regulation and a plan to create a 10-year, $4.3 billion national hurricane research initiative through the National Science Foundation.

That sounds good, but maybe not so good in the context of the $7B Pres. Bush asked for avian flu and the $8B the Senate authorized for it in 2005? (It was in the Senate-passed H.R. 3010 in the 109th session but the $8B didn't survive conference with the House.) Avian flu? Hurricanes? Hmmm.... You're going to argue that we can do both. I'm arguing that the message sent is that avian flu is a bigger direct and potential threat than hurricanes. Is it?

Al Gore's appearance before Senate EPW

Today's climate change hearing at Senate EPW with Al Gore as sole witness just finished. A few thoughts.

The hearing had a format slightly altered from the usual, with Chair Boxer and Ranking Member Inhofe giving opening statements, Mr. Gore getting 30 minutes to talk, Inhofe getting 15 minutes to question him, then the rest of the Senators getting their chances.

Sen. Inhofe tried hard to clown the hearing into irrelevance but Boxer struggled successfully to keep him in line and Gore did a good job of battling back. By the end of the hearing it was pretty clear that Inhofe has been pushed out to the fringes. He already was, of course, but previously he has had caucus members either behind him or willing to read directly from his sheaf of talking points. This time when the dust settled he looked startlingly alone.

During his talk Mr. Gore pushed a bunch of ideas, some of which were new and worth highlighting.

• The biggest bombshell was his second proposal: eliminate employment/payroll taxes and replace the revenue with a new carbon/pollution tax. This is the first time I've heard Mr. Gore specifically endorse a carbon tax, which automatically gives it new life in the policy debate. But more startling is the proposed revenue offset by eliminating payroll taxes.

• Mr. Gore's fourth proposal was to place an immediate moratorium on any new coal plant that is not outfitted with carbon capture and storage (sequestration) technology (CCS). This point was refreshed again and again throughout the hearing, especially as coal-state Senators asked their questions. This proposal is perhaps most interesting because it is not currently feasible and doesn't look like it'll be able to be implemented any time soon, so essentially Mr. Gore is saying, "stop building coal plants right now."

• The sixth proposal was to create an "electronet," meaning a distributed power system where small scale (to the level of individual homes) generators could put their power on the grid. This is an idea that has been around for a while and is the current buzz in clean energy policy, pushed pretty strongly by Amory Lovins and RMI. The thought is that centralized power in the form of massive coal and nuke plants is less efficient than distributed energy that can be used directly by the producer with excess sold back to the grid.

• The eighth proposal was to create a new federal mortgage lender that specifically deals in carbon neutral energy upgrades to homes (and call it "Connie Mae" following Fannie Mae). It was hard for me to grasp where he was going with this, but as far as I could tell it would be a lending instrument to borrow money for efficiency upgrades against the saving in energy costs produced by the upgrades. The loan would become a market-tradable financial instrument like home loans.

• Finally, Mr. Gore pressed for corporations to be required to disclose their carbon emissions to shareholders. He didn't say it, but I assume he meant that it would go on corporate SEC filings. This is something that has already been going around in the business world a bit, with companies starting to wonder if they need to disclose.

On the science: I was disappointed to see Mr. Gore stretching the science to his audience of Senators, but I'm willing to concede to Tom Yulsman (made in the 3rd comment to this post) that: "Should Gore be faulted for being an advocate? By definition, that's what politicians do. He is making a strong case for action, so of course he is going to emphasize some of the worst-case scenarios while downplaying less dire possibilities." Still, in his hearing testimony Mr. Gore highlighted recent sightings of manatees in unusual places, fires in Oklahoma and fires "raging out of control" all over the west as prime examples of global warming. I'm sticking to my point: Mr. Gore is representing the science now in a far more prominent way than any scientist, his words and presentations are based on many, many meetings with top climate scientists, and thus in a very real way, Mr. Gore is representing scientists. This time it wasn't even future projections but current events. No scientist would call the sighting of one manatee far up the Atlantic coast a clear indication of global warming. (These things happen –my graduate school advisor wrote a note in Nature describing why it wasn't strange to find coelacanths in the Sulawesi Sea.) The use of those examples to say "this is global warming, right here, right now!!" is perhaps not representing the science well.

Finally, some quick thoughts on Mr. Gore's interactions with the individual Senators on the panel. As the hearing went on I started to focus more on the R's than the D's and I finally realized why: the D's have been on board for a while, but up to this point the R's have been stalling. They aren't any longer, and almost to a person the R's made loud and positive noises about accepting the science and wanting to do something about it. So I started wanting to hear the next R, to hear how he (no female R's on EPW right now) was positioning himself on climate change, knowing that the R's are playing catch up.

Inhofe vs. Gore: Mr. Inhofe tried to trap Mr. Gore into a pledge to not use more energy than the average American household and to not use offsets/credits to buy off his increased energy use. This was a direct hit on the either well- or under-publicized (depending on your politics) blog post from the TN Center for Policy Research that Mr. Gore's house in TN uses more than twice the energy in one month than the average American family uses in one year. It seemed tough to wiggle out of but Mr. Gore responded by saying he buys wind power. Should have ended the conversation right there, but Inhofe had to keep clowning about it, of course. Still, I think Gore made his point.

Sen. Isakson (R-GA) was the first of many to push nuclear. Roger discussed Gore and nuclear previously here and Gore hasn't shifted much. He held throughout the hearing that nuclear would be part of the energy solution but only a small part. When pushed by the many pro-nuclear Senators he said the biggest reason for his bearish attitude was the cost. But I have to say: the cost-per-BTU of nuclear vs. the cost-per-BTU of coal with full CCS installed? I'm not sure CCS-coal is going to win that one.

Sen. Lieberman (I-CT) made a point I've been pushing for a while: that we are already passed the political tipping point for movement on climate change. I think if you consider the rhetoric and tone of the debate both among the elected and in the press, we are passed a tipping point on moving on climate change. Lieberman made the point that we better get past that political tipping point before we hit the climatological tipping point, which I suppose is a reference to a sudden Atlantic meridional overturning shutdown (few believe this is an immediate threat). Gore, however, disagreed that we've reached a political tipping point. But if we are not yet passed a tipping point, that implies that we could still slide back down, forget about all this and do nothing on climate change. I don't think that's going to happen; I think action is inevitable.

Sen. Craig (R-ID) pushed nuclear again (Idaho has a big national nuke lab) and accused the Clinton/Gore administration of killing some important nuclear funding. I find that pretty comical considering that Congress appropriates and Senator Craig has a very plush position on the approps committee. Craig also mentioned a new Dorgan/Craig bill on CAFE standards, but when I looked on Thomas I didn't see anything yet.

Sen. Baucus (D-MT) is an important voice in this debate because he is Chair of the Finance Committee. Remember Gore's proposal to kill payroll taxes and replace them with pollution (carbon) taxes? Anything like that would start and end with Baucus. And I have to say, Gore reiterated instituting a carbon tax and Baucus actually looked interested and engaged in thinking about it. Baucus also proclaimed his support for a cap-and-trade system and was adamant that it be economy-wide (i.e. not sector-based) without exemptions. Gore ended the interaction by saying, "put a price on carbon – tax is the best way, cap-and-trade will also do it."

Sen. Clinton (D-NY) is clearly engaged in the meat of these issues, regardless of her D'08 status. She asked pointed questions about whether we would need both a carbon tax and a cap-and-trade and when Gore said we should have both, she wanted to know how and why it would work to have both. (Kudos to her, I was wondering the same thing.) She also wanted more detail on the Connie Mae mortgage scheme and got into a quick back-and-forth with Gore on the details. Clinton's questions on the detail reminded me of her portrait in Joshua Green's Atlantic Monthly article.

Sen. Thomas (R-WY) – Here's where I saw the best bit of psychology of the afternoon. You could just tell from his first question/comment and demeanor that Thomas, like almost everybody else, was on board with trying to do something about climate. That he's from a coal state is only part of the equation; every time coal came up Gore went straight to the CCS card. But then Thomas, suddenly reading from his crib sheet, had to go to the standard dumb question about if weather prediction is bad so why can we rely on climate models? followed on by another ill-prepared skeptic standard. His staff should be fired.

Sen. Carper (D-DE) (one of my favorite policy wonk Senators) got into an exchange with Gore about the allocation of carbon pollution permits and input vs. output based caps. Gore had a chance to reiterate that if a cap-trade scheme comes along the permits should be auctioned, not distributed. Fine bit of inside policy there.

I've skipped a few of the more mundane exchanges. The hearing ended back with Sen. Boxer remarking that, "Senator Inhofe was waiting for this chance to have this conversation." And I'm sure he was. And he got rooked.

The state push to the federal push

It seems pretty likely that we won't see anything signed on carbon emission restrictions (tax or cap-and-trade) at the federal level before January 2009, so once again we have the somewhat familiar situation of states leading the federal government on sticky issues.

You probably know about RGGI, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative formed by the New England and upper Mid-Atlantic states that sets a cap-and-trade system to reduce CO2 from power plants. You might have heard that the Guvernator recently corralled four other western state governors (OR, WA, AZ and NM) to join in to form their own cap-and-trade program, this one targeting not just electricity generators, but economy-wide emissions. And as the dominoes keep falling so come the other high population states like Illinois (thanks Jim A), who wants to join the CCX.

The environmental policy buzz is how this regionalism will, as usual, force federal action as businesses put hard pressure down on their duly electeds to create one system that they have to comply with instead of a patchwork of systems. The pressure seems to be coming hard already. In January, Alcoa and nine other companies formed the US Climate Action Partnership and yesterday

A dozen U.S. companies and dozens of institutional investors managing $4 trillion in assets have called on Washington to enact strong federal legislation to curb the pollution causing global climate change. The group outlined the business and economic rationale for climate action as they called for a national policy that reduces greenhouse gas emissions consistent with targets scientists say are needed to avoid the impacts of global warming.

Despite the pressure I'll reiterate the first sentence of this post: having anything signed on carbon emissions before January 2009 is unlikely at best, a pipedream at worst. But I think this delay creates an interesting scenario: what if a federal cap-and-trade scheme becomes irrelevant by the time it can pass?

With the announcement of the western five-state partnership, Gov. Schwarzenegger all but dared the RGGI states to expand their program and join with the western states. The western five plus the RGGI states represents 39% of the U.S. population and the addition of Illinois brings it to 43%. It's not hard to see other states falling in turn as the utilities and businesses in their states see the benefits to being part of the game and the drawbacks to being left out of it. Here we run into a couple of snags, though. First, the western and RGGI states, for the most part, represent a Democrat-heavy mix and today we saw fresh evidence of an unfortunate and widening D-R split within the voting public on attitudes about considering climate change a threat. Second, the southeastern (R-dominated) and Ohio Valley states (D-R mixed) that would be the next logical joinees in a regional-become-de facto national cap-and-trade system are coal-dominated, thus CO2-to-BTUs heavy.

Most curious to me is to track not only where the western state and RGGI partnerships take us on climate regulation, but what this regionalism does to the power structure in the U.S. as a whole. Robert Salladay on an LA Times blog covers the thoughts of Gar Alperovitz:

"The bold proposals that Mr. Schwarzenegger is now making for everything from universal health care to global warming point to the kind of decentralization of power which, once started, could easily shake up America’s fundamental political structure."

The United States, he says, is simply too big for meaningful democracy. Now, Alperovitz says, a new wave of regional devolution could also build on the more than 200 compacts that now allow groups of states to cooperate on environmental, economic, transportation and other problems. He adds:

"Governor Schwarzenegger may not have thought through the implications of continuing to assert forcefully his 'nation-state' ambitions. But he appears to have an expansive sense of the possibilities: this is the governor, after all, who brought Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain to the Port of Long Beach last year to sign an accord between California and Britain on global warming."

I'm not one for bold proclamations of radical changes or conspiracy theories or doomsday scenarios, but this is the kind of change that can happen subtly and slowly. And it would be fascinating to watch what should be a federal, nationwide system on carbon emissions instead be emplaced through decentralized but cooperative regional partnerships that work just as well or better than a federally-run system. If the feds wait too long on passing a nationwide system and the states have their own mechanisms in place covering more than 50% of the U.S. population by the time the feds get around to it, is that what will happen?

[UPDATE: as if on cue, I just got this news from Point Carbon: "The Climate Registry, an effort by members of existing US greenhouse gas registries in various regions, sent a letter to the governors of all 50 US states Friday requesting participation in the initiative to build a unified national registry for the entire US."]

Rep. McNerney in Wired

Here's a brief interview in the March issue of Wired with Rep. Jerry McNerney, the wind engineer who pulled off a huge upset over Dick "I hate endangered animals" Pombo in California's 11th District. (My sister lives in that district and a good friend knows somebody on McNerney's staff, so we're tight.)

McNerney's ascension to a nice little office in Cannon is noteworthy for us science policy and politics types because he becomes only the third Hill resident with a science Ph.D. (well, his is in math, but close enough), along with Rep. Holt (D-NJ) and Rep. Ehlers (R-MI).

The interview is short, but the best part is this:

What's the biggest difference between science and politics? Science is all about truth. You gather your evidence and logically prove your claims. Congress is all about people, relationships, and rules. There are a lot of rules.

[cough cough ahem] That's what a lot of pure scientists want to think, anyway. The STS and SSS people find that ... well ... not really the way science works.

More to the pure politics:

You don’t have any political experience. Isn't that a liability? It's an asset. People are looking to me for help on certain issues, and I'm getting a lot of respect for what I bring to the table. It would be even better to bring in scientists when they're 29 years old — they’d know the science but would have time to learn all the rules.

I don't disagree with that, but I've always found it interesting that darkhorse, politically inexperienced candidates (Ross Perot?) always run on how it's good to have no experience. Then once they've been there of course they have to run on how it is good that they do have political experience. Good for the constituents, good for the process, the nation, etc... The incumbent will always run on how you need an incumbent in Washington who knows how the system works and how to get things done so (s)he can bring home the bacon.

Finally,

So we should be combing university labs for political prospects? Sure. But you’d have to teach them to be nice to people. That’s not part of the job description in science.

(or in blogging.....?) I went from a Ph.D. program in the physical sciences straight into the DC world and I was fascinated by how both universes are extremely adversarial, but in very different ways. You really don't have to be nice in science, but the stakes of getting an equation slightly wrong or interpreting a figure incorrectly aren't really that high. The stakes in writing a tax bill, or negotiating an amendment on a public works bill that will create 1000 jobs in one state and take them away in another, or sending the military overseas are something else, but these things must be negotiated calmly. I often think about that when I'm sitting in an academic talk that gets heated between the presenter and a questioner.

Since nobody around here does the GMO thing....

An article came across one of my inboxes and grabbed my attention: apparently a genetically modified maize strain developed by Monsanto has shown some concerning tendencies to cause liver and kidney toxicity in rats fed the GM'd corn. (Can't get the study online yet but it was published in Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology.)

I guess this may be of concern because the maize has been approved for use and is being grown in seven countries and the EU? From what I can gather from the limited info available, to this point Monsanto has done all the safety studies on the strain, and despite some indications of problems (see here...warning, hard advocate site citing other hard advocate group, but you take what you can get) has declared its own product safe. The researchers of the new study say

"Our counter-evaluation show that there are signs of toxicity and that nobody can say scientifically and seriously that consumption of the transgenic maize MON863 is safe and good for health," lead author of the study, Professor Gilles Eric Séralini told France's TF1 television station.

You know what's coming next, right? That's right, Data Wars XXVI:

Monsanto France has rejected the concerns. Yann Fichet, Monsanto France's director of external relations told TF1: "[MON863] has already been examined by competent authorities and scientific experts in more than 10 countries worldwide, including the European Union and France, and all the experts concluded unanimously that the maize in question is as safe as traditional maize."

The problem for Monsanto is that the new study is published in a peer-reviewed journal, which gives it loads of legitimacy no matter what the author's funding was (could be a national lab, could be Greenpeace, but I can't read French so I don't know). Further compounding their problem is the previous notice of a Monsanto study on this same strain, noting the liver and kidney issues (can you spell Vioxx?). However, I also get the feeling from a bit of googling on MON863 that the study author basically works for Greenpeace, so who knows where this is going to lead. Anybody who tracks the GMO policy game care to comment?

The future of coal

Interesting stuff just released by a group at MIT on the outlook for coal in the US. Their main page is here and the executive summary is here.

They start with two realistic premises and take it from there:

Our first premise is that the risks of global warming are real and that the United States and other governments should and will take action to restrict the emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Our second and equally important premise is that coal will continue to play a large and indispensable role in a greenhouse gas constrained world.

They also give a rather sobering factoid right off the bat:

If 60% of the CO2 produced from U.S. coal-based power generation were to be captured and compressed to a liquid for geologic sequestration, its volume would about equal the total U.S. oil consumption of 20 million barrels per day.

Perhaps because it is about as interdisciplinary as can be, with participants from political science to chemical engineering to economics, the report is refreshingly policy-prescriptive, urging specific government actions in dozens of ways, and even goes so far as

A more aggressive U.S. policy appears to be in line with public attitudes. Americans now rank global warming as the number one environmental problem facing the country, and seventy percent of the American public think that the U.S. government needs to do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Willingness to pay to solve this problem has grown 50 percent over the past three years.

and is as politics/policy/current events aware as noting that

There is the possibility of a perverse incentive for increased early investment in coalfired power plants without capture, whether SCPC or IGCC, in the expectation that the emissions from these plants would potentially be “grandfathered” by the grant of free CO2 allowances as part of future carbon emissions regulations and that (in unregulated markets) they would also benefi t from the increase in electricity prices that will accompany a carbon control regime. Congress should act to close this “grandfathering” loophole before it becomes a problem.

We should note that the grandfathering loophole isn't a problem right now because it doesn't exist. It will only exist once cap-and-trade or carbon tax legislation is passed and only if a grandfather clause it written in. But their point is made: some coal plant builders think there is a good chance they will be grandfathered, although Senators Boxer and Bingaman have been telling them to fuhhggetaboutit. But it's a minor point and the report is good reading.

Point made: it's the icon not the issue

William Broad has an article out today in the NYT on Al Gore as climate change icon that quotes Roger and myself. I think Roger's quote basically sums up the problem:

Very quickly, these discussions turn from the issue to the person, and become a referendum on Mr. Gore.

I am quoted thusly:

Kevin Vranes, a climatologist at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, said he sensed a growing backlash against exaggeration. While praising Mr. Gore for “getting the message out,” Dr. Vranes questioned whether his presentations were “overselling our certainty about knowing the future.”

The backlash thing, a.k.a. the ominous tension, comes from this post. The rest is a better way to sum up what I was trying to get across in that AGU post. In talking about overselling the science I was talking about overselling the future, not the past or present. I have no problem with the state of consensus on past and present climate and our imprint on it. I do have a problem with giving the non-technician public the impression that climate models give us some crystal ball into the future that warns with some degree of certainty about coming catastrophes. Risk, yes. Certainty, no. My message remains the same as it has been since my days in DC: deal with the risk but realize that it means acting on incomplete and imperfect information.

For the rest of the article Mr. Broad bounces back and forth between the avowed skeptic crowd and what I'd call the headlights of the climsci field, finding either praise for Gore or disdain based on how the questioned views the science.

Tits for tats and tête-à-têtes aside, my biggest problem lies here:

Mr. Gore depicted a future in which temperatures soar, ice sheets melt, seas rise, hurricanes batter the coasts and people die en masse. “Unless we act boldly,” he wrote, “our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes.”

Clearly this is not science, this is agenda. But it is agenda sold on science, and if/when it doesn't come true, you have diminished the credibility of those producing the science. It's a big gamble to take. I think perhaps what is neatly illustrated by Mr. Broad in this article is that many big-name climate scientists are willing to take this risk by hitching their wagons to a non-scientist who is doing the selling for them.

It's a choice for individual scientists to make and I'm not faulting them or Al Gore for running down this path. In fact, I'd bolster my quote in the article praising Gore for getting the message out. I think Gore plays a very important and valuable role in public knowledge on climate change risk. (And FWIW, I'm betting with Roger that Gore will jump into the race, very late, will get all the money that the Clintons and Obama are raising now without having to stress himself to burn-out stage too early, and will stomp Rudy to get the WH. And yea Steve B, by saying this I'm angling for a position in the Gore White House.) But for the scientists they need to realize that Mr. Gore has a great cover if/when the dire predictions don't materialize: "Hey, I'm not a scientist, I'm just a concerned citizen politician." The scientists hitching their wagons to the dire messages have no such cover (except for tenure?).

[UPDATE: Read Matt Nisbet's very good analysis of the most important lessons of Broad's article. Matt's analysis is an interesting contrast to the other -- let's say more predictable -- reactions on Grist and RC.]

Montana and water and the strange case of science and politics

You probably don't know who Eloise Kendy is, but you should. She's a hydro consultant up in Helena, Montana, now with the Nature Conservancy, who writes nifty little papers exploring the collision of hydrologic realities with political and policy dream worlds (if you can get it, see pages 14-20 of Issue #19 of The Water Report). I covered one of her papers last summer in this post.

For a while Eloise has been writing about how the state of Montana doesn't think that groundwater and surface water are connected. Well, everybody knows that the two are usually so connected that they are inseparable, but the state of water policy in Montana deems them connected only if a groundwater withdrawal directly removes water from a stream. Your withdrawal creates a cone of depression that allows for less recharge of groundwater into surface water, but as long as the cone of depression doesn't intersect with the stream and thus directly draw from the stream you aren't considered to be depleting the surface water. (If you want the science on this, try here, especially this circular.)

This legal alternate reality arose when the state legislature defined groundwater in 1993 as water that "is not immediately or directly connected to surface water." Immediate or directly connected is not a hydrologic term, which left it open to interpretation by the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation (DNRC). According to Kendy et al. in the Water Report paper I linked above:

As documented by a series of departmental memos, DNRC determined that groundwater is “immediately or directly” connected to surface water only if groundwater pumping pulls surface water into the aquifer, or “induces surface water infiltration.” According to this nterpretation, even if a well captures groundwater that would otherwise discharge into a stream, such groundwater is not “immediately or directly” connected to surface water, and the permit application may be processed as a groundwater exception to the basin-closure.

In other words, when you pump groundwater you aren't depleting surface water, even when your groundwater pumping is in reality indirectly drawing down streamflows. What this means is that Johnny-come-latelies who put in new groundwater wells can seriously impact people who hold senior rights on surface water without being subject to the time honored legal tradition of first-in-time, first-in-right. This is a serious problem in watersheds that are not fully appropriated, but is legally catastrophic in watersheds (like most important Montana rivers) that are.

The problem finally worked itself up to the Montana Supreme Court last
year and they made the shocking decision that, hey, surface water and groundwater really are connected. Go figure. The losers of that decision were actually ranchers with plans to install new wells, but the ruling has deep implications for housing developers, especially on the Gallatin River out of Bozeman.

Arising from the court decision, last month two bills were discussed in the MT state legislature to deal with the connectivity issue, covered amply in this article. One bill, promoted by Trout Unlimited and the DNRC

would require that anyone in a closed basin seeking a groundwater permit do a hydrologic study first, a step not currently necessary. If the study shows a new well would take water from senior surface-water rights holders, then the applicant must explain how that water would be replaced – a process known as augmentation.

The other bill, promoted by the Stockgrowers and Farm Bureau

would require that new groundwater users replace the water they use only when it has an immediate and harmful impact on senior water rights.

which gets us squarely back to the problem created by DNRC's weird mid-1990's interpretation of connectivity, and essentially tries to write into law the unreality that if groundwater withdrawals don't lead immediately to surface water impacts, then there must be no impact at all.

Of course, hearing both bills simultaneously was a bit problematic:

The committee heard testimony for both bills simultaneously, as opponents for one were generally in favor of the other. But that procedure made for hours of confusion with landowners, scientists and attorneys sometimes forgetting to make clear which bill they favored, or if they opposed both.

And so it's no wonder that in the depth of that kind of confusion these disputes can flare up:

The Stockgrowers and Farm Bureau bill, Frantz said, “maintains the legal fiction that groundwater withdrawals only affect surface water if water is induced directly from the stream.”

“I’m not really sure what we accomplish by maintaining that legal fiction,” she added.

But one of the next speakers, David Schmidt, a scientist with the consulting firm Water Rights Solutions Inc., said the Stockgrowers and Farm Bureau bill is more inline with accepted science.

All parties are arguing on the science, projecting that the science better supports one bill or the other. But curiously, which bill you "believe in" seems to square pretty well with whether you hold senior water rights or junior rights, which is a pretty damn good indication where the science lies.

Many landowners and farmers from the Gallatin Valley spoke in support of the DNRC bill.

Meanwhile upstart stakeholders (developers, for instance) aren't so happy with the Trout Unlimited/DNRC bill.

The interesting question here is whether there is an excess of objectivity problem or not. The quote by David Schmidt ("more inline with accepted science") seems to indicate that there is, even if Schmidt is far off-base. For even if Schmidt is flat-out wrong, he has access to the forum and thus access to talk about the science, which has suddenly become his science in this context. Fun stuff.

We Interrupt this Spring Break . . .

. . . to bring you a link to an article titled "The Convenient Truth" by Jonathan Rauch in the National Journal on climate policy. Now back to the blogging break . . .

The assessors assessing the assessments

Fresh out of the National Academies, commissioned by the CCSP, is a fabulous new climate-related assessment: Analysis of Global Change Assessments: Lessons Learned. The report

identifies for the U.S. Climate Change Science Program the essential elements of effective global change assessments, including strategic framing, engagement of stakeholders, credible treatment of uncertainties, and a transparent interface between policymakers and scientists. The report reviews lessons learned from past assessments, which are intended to inform policymakers about the scientific underpinnings of critical environmental issues such as climate change, loss of biodiversity, and ozone depletion.

Which would be great, but. But for two things we can identify right off the bat:

1- The most identifiable end user of a climate change assessment is the federal-level (and perhaps state-level) policy maker. You'd think that if you want to assess assessments and make sweeping recommendations on how in the future they can best be presented and utilized, you'd involve the very end users that the assessments target. But the participant list is a roster dominated by the very people who produce the information, not the people who consume it. The report did hear from a few end users in a couple of sessions, but the list (pg. ix-x of the full report) is very thin. So how are the producers to know what the consumers really need if the consumers were not intimately involved in the project? Which leads us to ...

2- Many of the people assessing the assessments are themselves involved in the original assessments. Further, the reviewers of the report (pg, ix) are all themselves information producers (save one). This is fine, but it leads me to wonder about the ultimate usefulness of the report. The point of this exercise should be to ensure that the information produced in assessments is useful to the end users. (That is mentioned as a goal, but as one goal in a list.) I'm not sure that scientists, essentially auditing themselves, are the best judge of whether their information is maximally useful to non-technical decision makers.

Nevertheless, it is important that we assess how we are giving technical information to decision makers. My argument is that we need to very closely involve decision makers themselves in that process. From what I can tell in the report's preface and other front matter, this was mostly a scientist-driven process.

Finally something for us to really fight about!

Or just virtually arm wrestle over? Anyway, the American Meteorological Society has just created a new climate policy blog. Judging from the witness list (Oppenheimer, MacCracken, Kammen, and others), it shouldn't be too long of a rise into the Technorati charts. It will be fun to see what this excellent list of cats, herded together by Paul Higgins, has to say over the next few months and years. (Good work, Paul.)

Of course, y'all can already see some places where we're going to differ. From climatepolicy's about page:

Policy choices will likely serve the interests of society most effectively if they are grounded in the best available knowledge and understanding. Therefore, we will promote objective understanding of climate change related issues rather than specific policy options.

For us around here, that statement is particularly timely. Lisa Dilling was talking about that very issue this past week. Lisa, is this what you meant by the "loading dock" approach?

. . . Meantime, Buy This Book!

Out any day now:

Spring Break . . .

I'll be taking a spring blogging break . . . back in April! But stay tuned, Kevin is in charge while I'm offline.