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January 17, 2008

New Paper on Normalized Hurricane Damages

Normalized Hurricane Damage.png

Our paper on normalized hurricane damages 1900 to 2005 has now been published. By "normalized" we mean taking damages as recorded in the year that they occurred in that year's dollars, and adjusting them to account for societal changes such as population growth, building stock, tangible wealth, and inflation. The figure above shows the results of one of the two approaches to normalization presented in our paper.

The full paper can be found at the link below and an Excel dataset can be found here.

Pielke, Jr., R. A., Gratz, J., Landsea, C. W., Collins, D., Saunders, M., and Musulin, R., 2008. Normalized Hurricane Damages in the United States: 1900-2005. Natural Hazards Review, 9:29-42. (PDF)

A few brief comments follow.

For those who might be interested in the debate over hurricanes and global warming, there is nothing added to the debate from this paper. Here is what we say that is most relevant:

Pielke and Landsea (1998) found no trends in normalized losses, a finding subsequently replicated by Katz (2002). Recent analyses of longitudinal geophysical data find that there are no trends on hurricane frequency and intensity at U.S. landfall (see, Landsea 2005; Emanuel 2005; Landsea 2007). Because the normalization methodology is subject to assumptions, differences in which can lead to significant changes in results, there is general agreement that normalized data are in general not the best first place to look for changes in underlying geophysical variables, and such changes are best explored using the geophysical data directly (cf. Höppe and Pielke 2006). However, when climate trends or variability have sufficiently large effects on losses, they can be detected in damage data (e.g., Pielke and Landsea 1999).
The two normalized datasets reported here show no trends in either the absolute data or under a logarithmic transformation: the variance explained by a best fit linear trend line = 0.0004 and 0.0003 respectively for PL05, and 0.0014 and 0.00006 respectively for CL05. The lack of trend in twentieth century normalized hurricane losses is consistent with what one would expect to find given the lack of trends in hurricane frequency or intensity at landfall. This finding should add some confidence that, at least to a first degree, the normalization approach has successfully adjusted for changing societal conditions. Given the lack of trends in hurricanes themselves, any trend observed in the normalized losses would necessarily reflect some bias in the adjustment process, such as failing to recognize changes in adaptive capacity or misspecifying wealth. Because we do not have a resulting bias suggests that any factors not included in the normalization methods do not have a resulting net large significance.

Below is an image showing the top 50 storms for one of the normalization methods. For the details on the methods and a whole bunch of analysis, please see the paper.

Normalized Damage Top 50.png

Posted on January 17, 2008 02:54 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Disasters

January 02, 2008

Natural Disasters in Australia

Here (in PDF) is an interesting analysis by researchers at Macquarie University in Australia:

The collective evidence reviewed above suggests that social factors – dwelling numbers and values – are the predominant reasons for increasing building losses due to natural disasters in Australia. The role of anthropogenic climate change is not detectable at this time. This being the case, it seems logical approach that in addition to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent investments be made to reduce society’s vulnerability to current and future climate and climate variability.

We are aware of few policies explicitly developed to help Australian communities adapt to future climate change (Leigh et al., 1998). One positive example is improved wind loading codes introduced in the 1980s as part of a National Building Code of Australia. These codes have been mentioned already and were introduced for all new housing construction following the destruction of Darwin by Tropical Cyclone Tracy in 1974. As a result, dramatic reductions in wind-induced losses were observed following Tropical Cyclones Winifred (1986) and Aivu (1989) (Walker, 1999) and most recently, Larry (2006) (Guy Carpenter, 2006). While these measures were introduced in response to the immediate threat from current climatic events, the benefits will hold true under any future.

An increased threat from bushfires under global climate change is often assumed. However, our analyses suggest that while the prevalence of conditions leading to bushfires is likely to increase, the impact is unlikely to be as dramatic as the combined changes of all of the other factors that have so far failed to materially affect the likelihood of bushfires losses over the last century. This is not to ignore the threat posed by global climate change, but, at least in the case of fire in Australia, the main menace will continue to be the extreme fires. The threat to the most at-risk homes on the bushland-urban interface can only be diminished by improved planning regulations that restrict where and how people build with respect to distance from the forest. Again these are political choices.

Posted on January 2, 2008 02:17 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

December 26, 2007

End-of-2007 Hurricane-Global Warming Update

There are a few new papers out on hurricanes (or more generally, tropical cyclones) and global warming that motivate this update.

Before sharing these new papers, let me provide a bit of background.

Regular readers will know that I began studying hurricanes during my post-doc years at NCAR, and even co-authored a book on them (PDF) with my father. I've been fortunate to get to know many of the people in the science community who study hurricanes and also to become familiar with the literature on hurricanes and climate change.

Let me also remind readers that I believe that there is little policy significance in the debate over hurricanes and global warming. Why not? Because no matter who is right, it won't do much to alter the ranking of alternative policies focused on addressing future storm impacts. This is an argument I make in this recent paper, which I'll point to for interested readers:

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 2007. Future Economic Damage from Tropical Cyclones: Sensitivities to Societal and Climate Changes, Proceedings of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 365:2717-2729.(PDF)

But from a political perspective, the issue remains of considerable importance, as those advocating action on energy policies based on stemming the impacts from future cyclones place themselves far out on a thin limb. As tempting as it is to invoke the impacts of hurricanes as a justification for action on climate-related energy policies, it really should be a "no go zone."

In 2004, I along with Chris Landsea, Max Mayfield, Jim Laver, and Richard Pasch decided to prepare a short, accessible summary on the state of the debate over hurricanes and climate change, which ultimately was published as a peer-reviewed paper in 2005 in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (PDF). In that paper we concluded that the debate over hurricanes (and their impacts) and climate change would not be resolved anytime soon, and we provided three reasons for this:

First, no connection has been established between greenhouse gas emissions and the observed behavior of hurricanes (Houghton et al. 2001; Walsh 2004). Emanuel (2005) is suggestive of such a connection, but is by no means definitive. In the future, such a connection may be established [e.g., in the case of the observations of Emanuel (2005) or the projections of Knutson and Tuleya (2004)] or made in the context of other metrics of tropical cyclone intensity and duration that remain to be closely examined. Second, the peer-reviewed literature reflects that a scientific consensus exists that any future changes in hurricane intensities will likely be small in the context of observed variability (Knutson and Tuleya 2004; Henderson-Sellers et al. 1998), while the scientific problem of tropical cyclogenesis is so far from being solved that little can be said about possible changes in frequency. And third, under the assumptions of the IPCC, expected future damages to society of its projected changes in the behavior of hurricanes are dwarfed by the influence of its own projections of growing wealth and population (Pielke et al. 2000). While future research or experience may yet overturn these conclusions, the state of the peer-reviewed knowledge today is such that there are good reasons to expect that any conclusive connection between global warming and hurricanes or their impacts will not be made in the near term.

If I might pat ourselves on our collective backs for a moment, these conclusions that we reached in 2005 were echoed in 2006 by a much more comprehensive assessment report prepared by the World Meteorological Organization:

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

And then in 2007 by the IPCC. IPCC lead author Neville Nicholls characterized the report's conclusions on hurricanes and climate change as follows:

We concluded that the question of whether there was a greenhouse-cyclone link was pretty much a toss of a coin at the present state of the science, with just a slight leaning towards the likelihood of such a link.

So our 2005 paper has held up really well. Did we get some recognition from the IPCC for providing an accurate assessment of the state of the scientific debate and its relevance? Well, no. But maybe we at least could point to a citation in the relevant IPCC chapter, which of course summarized all of the peer-reviewed literature? Actually the IPCC ignored our review. It is not that they were unaware of it. The lead author for the relevant chapter (Chapter 3 of WG 1), Kevin Trenberth, said of our paper at the time it was released:

I think the role of the changing climate is greatly underestimated by Roger Pielke Jr. I think he should withdraw this article. This is a shameful article.

So, despite providing an accurate assessment of hurricanes and global warming in 2005 which was ultimately backed up by WMO and IPCC, given Kevin Trenberth's obvious bias against our views, we weren't really surprised to see our paper go uncited by the IPCC chapter that Kevin was lead author on. I did notice that Trenberth was somehow able to find room to mention his own work 95 times in that chapter, but I digress.

So our assessment of the state of the hurricane-global warming has held up really well. And in fact, I'd say that our assertion of the lack of a conclusive connection seems even stronger today. Over recent weeks I have become aware of 4 significant new papers on hurricanes and climate change that raise important questions about many aspects of the debate. I highlight these four papers not because they point toward certainty in the debate, quite the opposite: they indicate that the debate is alive and well, and uncertainty continues to reign on this subject. And unless you are paying attention to the literature, you'll probably never hear of these papers.

The first paper is one I mentioned a few weeks ago by Vecchi/Soden published in Nature . That paper suggested that identifying the signal of global warming in tropical cyclone behavior would be challenging in the context of ongoing climate variability. I wondered why that paper escaped media attention, despite being published in Nature and being a major contribution to the ongoing debate. Here are three other papers that will probably also escape media attention.

Statistician William Briggs has two new papers. One is in press with the Journal of Climate, and is titled "On the changes in number and intensity of North Atlantic tropical cyclones" (PDF). That paper concludes:

We find that to conclude that there has been an increase in the number of tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic basin depends on from what date you start looking. Looking from 1900 gives strong evidence that an increase has taken place; however, data early from that period are certainly tainted by inadequate and missing observations, so the confidence we have in this evidence is greatly reduced. Starting from (the years around) 1966 does not give evidence of a linear increase, but starting from (the years around) 1975 does. These potential increases are noted after controlling for the effects of CTI, NAOI, and the AMO. These differences due to start date could be real, perhaps because of some underlying cyclicity in the data that coincidentally bottomed out around 1975 (after controlling for AMO etc.), or it may just be a good lesson that it's possible to pick and choose your starting date to argue either way: yes, there's been an increase, or no, there hasn't been.

Briggs is presenting a second paper at the upcoming AMS meeting in which he applies the same technique to other basins, in a paper titled, "Changes in number and intensity of tropical cyclones" (PDF). That paper concludes:

We find little evidence that the mean of the distribution of individual storm intensity, measured by storm days, track length, or individual storm PDI, has changed (increased or decreased) since 1975 over all the oceans. Again, there were certain noted increases in the Indian oceans, which may be real or may be due to flaws in the data: this is evidenced by the posteriors from these oceans being very sensitive to the priors used. We did, however, find an unambiguous increase in the variance of the distribution of storm intensity over all oceans. We also found that two components of intensity, storm days and track length, have likely decreased since 1990 over most oceans. Thus, we conclude that mean intensity has not been increasing, at least since 1975, and certainly not since 1990.

A fourth paper has just been published in the journal Risk Analysis by Kenneth Bogen, Edwin Jones, and Larry Fischer, titled, "Hurricane Destructive Power Predictions Based on Historical Storm and Sea Surface Temperature Data." That paper concludes:

Results obtained clearly challenge recent hypotheses about the effect of rising SST on future hurricane destructive potential . . .In contrast to a significant post-1970 positive trend in NAO SST and previous claims that this trend is linked to increased hurricane activity (Goldenberg et al., 2001; Emanuel, 2005; Trenberth, 2005; Webster et al., 2005; Hoyos et al., 2006; Santer et al., 2006; Trenberth & Shea, 2006), this study found little evidence of APDI trend or of a substantial APDI correlation with SST.

These papers suggest that the science of hurricane and global warming is healthy and new voices are bringing new ideas and methods to the debate. This is all good news. But it should also be apparent that the issue remains highly uncertain and contested. If anything, uncertainties have increased since we published our 2005 paper.

So I am going to stand pat with our conclusions first presented in 2005 in that shameful (but accurate) article:

[T]here are good reasons to expect that any conclusive connection between global warming and hurricanes or their impacts will not be made in the near term.

That is where things stand on this subject at the close of 2007.

Posted on December 26, 2007 05:22 AM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

December 17, 2007

A Second Reponse from RMS

A few weeks ago I provided a midterm evaluation of the RMS 2006-2010 US hurricane damage prediction. RMS (and specifically Steve Jewson) responded and has subsequently (and graciously) sent in a further response to a question that I posed:

Does RMS stand by its spring 2006 forecast that the period 2006-2010 would see total insured losses 40% above the historical average?

The RMS response appears below, and I'll respond in the comments:

Yes, we do stand by that forecast, although I should point out that we update the forecast every year, so the 2005 forecast (for 2006-2010) is now 2 years out of date. Apart from questions of forecast accuracy, there's no particular reason for any of our users to use the 2005 forecast at this point (that would be like using a weather forecast from last week). It is, of course, important to understand the correct mathematical interpretation of the forecast. In your original post you interpreted the forecast incorrectly in a couple of ways. Over the last 2-3 years we've issued this forecast to hundreds of insurance companies, and discussed it with dozens of scientists around the world, and none of them have misinterpreted it, so I don't think our communication of the intended meaning of the forecast is unclear. However, some explanation is required and I realise that you probably haven't had the benefit of hearing one of the many presentations we've given on this subject. The two things that need clarifying are: 1) This forecast is a best estimate of the mean of a very wide distribution of possible losses. Because of this no-one should expect to be able to verify or falsify the forecast in a short period of time.
This is a typical property of forecasts in situations with high levels of uncertainty. I think it's pretty well understood by the users of the forecast.

One curious property of the loss distribution is that it is very skewed. As a result the real losses would be expected to fall below the mean in most years. This is compensated for in the average by occasional years with very high losses.

In fact the forecast that we give to the insurance industry is a completely probabilistic forecast, that estimates the entire distribution of possible losses, but it's a bit difficult to put that
kind of information into a press release, or on a blog.

2) Your conditional interpretation of the forecast is not mathematically correct. Neither RMS, nor our clients, expect the losses to increase in 2008-2010 in the way you suggest just because they were low in 2006-2007. I can't think of any reason why that would be the case. To get the (roughly) correct interpretation for 2008-2010 you have to multiply the original 5 year mean values by 0.6. That's what the users of our forecast do when they want that number.

I hope that clarifies the issues a bit.

Posted on December 17, 2007 01:36 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Disasters | Prediction and Forecasting | Scientific Assessments

December 14, 2007

A Question for the Media

I've generally thought that the media has done a nice job on covering the climate issue over the past 20 years. There are of course leaders and laggards, but overall, I think that the community of journalists has done a nice job on a very tough issue. However, there are times when I am less impressed. Here is one example.

news.stories.png

Nature magazine, arguably the leading scientific journal in the world, published a paper this week by two widely-respected scholars -- Gabriel Vecchi and Brian Soden -- suggesting that global warming may have a minimal effect on hurricanes. Over two days the media -- as measured by Google News -- published a grand total of 3 news stories on this paper. Now contrast this with a paper published in July in a fairly obscure journal by two other respected scholars -- Peter Webster and Greg Holland -- suggesting that global warming has a huge effect on hurricanes. That paper resulted in 79 news stories stories over two days.

What accounts for the 26 to 1 ratio in news stories?

December 10, 2007

AGU Powerpoint with Steve McIntyre

Here is a link to a PPT file providing an overview of a paper by Steve McIntyre and I titled, "Changes in Spatial Distribution of North Atlantic Tropical Cyclones," which he will be presenting this week at the AGU meeting.

Here are our conclusions:

Spatially descriptive statistics can contribute to analysis of controversial hurricane issues.
There has been no statistically significant increase in cyclone activity in the western Atlantic basin; the entire increase in measured storm and hurricane activity has taken place in the mid-Atlantic;

Lack of trend in landfall and normalized damage reconciles perfectly with lack of trend in western quartile storm and hurricane indices

The eastward shift cannot be attributed merely to earlier detection.

The shift could be technological or climatological or some combination; there is no plausible statistical basis for saying that the shift to the mid-Atlantic is not as important or relevant as the overall increase.

If the trend only occurs in the mid-Atlantic, should policy-makers care?

Comments welcomed.

Posted on December 10, 2007 11:16 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Disasters | Risk & Uncertainty

December 07, 2007

RMS Response to Forecast Evaluation

Robert Muir-Woods of RMS has graciously provided for posting a response to the thoughts on forecast verification that I posted earlier this week. Here are his comments:

Scientifically it is of course not possible to draw any conclusion from the occurrence of two years without hurricane losses in the US, in particular following two years with the highest level of hurricane losses ever recorded and the highest ever number of severe hurricanes making landfall in a two year period. Even including 2006 and 2007, average annualized losses for the past five years are significantly higher than the long term historical average (and maybe you should also show this five year average on your plot?)
The basis for catastrophe loss modeling is that one can separate out the question of activity rate from the question as to the magnitude of losses that will be generated by the occurrence of hurricane events. In generating average annualized losses we need to explore the full 'virtual spectrum' of all the possible events that can occur. The question about current activity rates is a difficult one, which is why we continue to involve some of the leading hurricane climatologists, and a very wide range of forecasting methodologies, in our annual hurricane activity rate update procedure. In October 2007 an independent expert panel concluded that activity rates are forecasted to remain elevated for the next five years. While this perspective was announced and articulated by RMS, we did not originate it. Each year we undertake this exercise, we ensure that the forecasting models used to estimate activity over the next five years also reflect any additional learning from the forecasting of previous years, including the low activity experienced in 2006 and 2007. We don't 'declare success' that the activity rate estimate that has emerged from this procedure over the past three years (using different forecast models and different climatologists) has scarcely changed, but the consistency in the three 5 year projections is interesting nonetheless.

You may also be surprised to learn that our five-year forward-looking perspective on hurricane risk does not inevitably produce higher losses than all other models, which use the extrapolation of the simple long-term average to estimate future activity. This is as shown in a comparison published in a report prepared by the Florida Commission on Hurricane Loss Projection Methodology for the Florida House of Representatives (see the Table 1 on page 25 of the report, which can be downloaded from here: http://www.sbafla.com/methodology/announcements.asp?FormMode=Call&LinkType=Section&Section=0)

Robert Muir-Wood
RMS

Posted on December 7, 2007 08:56 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Others | Disasters | Prediction and Forecasting | Scientific Assessments

December 06, 2007

Precipitation and Flood Damage

I was just contacted by a reporter who is doing a story based on a news release put out by a group called Environment Colorado. The news release says that Colorado has seen a 30% increase in extreme precipitation over the past 60 years, based on a new study called "When it Rains, It Pours" (PDF).

The thing is, there has been no increase in flood damage in Colorado (from 1955-2003 in our dataset), as can be seen in the following graph.

CO Flood.png

This data has only been adjusted for inflation. Given the pace of growth and development in Colorado, one could make a strong case that flood impacts have gone down pretty sharply in per capita or per unit wealth terms. So it may very well be the case that extreme precipitation has increased, but these measures of precipitation are not well correlated with flood damage, which is what Mary Downton and I found in a 2000 study.

Just for fun I also looked at California, which was the subject of a different press release put out by Environment California, and guess what? Extreme precipitation is up 26% in California, and there is no statistically significant trend in damage, even without considering population growth and development.

CA Flood.png

So while human caused climate change may be responsible for changes in "extreme" precipitation, these measures are not well correlated with damaging floods.

Posted on December 6, 2007 08:02 AM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Disasters

Revisiting The 2006-2010 RMS Hurricane Damage Prediction

In the spring of 2006, a company called Risk Management Solutions (RMS) issued a five year forecast of hurricane activity (for 2006-2010) predicting U.S. insured losses to be 40% higher than average. RMS is an important company because their loss models are used by insurance companies to set rates charged to homeowners, by reinsurance companies to set rates they charge to insurers, by ratings agencies for evaluating risks, and others.

We are now two years into the RMS forecast period and can thus say something preliminary about their forecast based on actual hurricane damage from 2006 and 2007, which was minimal. In short, the forecast doesn't look too good. For 2006 and 2007, the following figure shows average annual insured historical losses (for 2005 and earlier) in blue (based on Pielke et al. 2008, adjusted up by 4% from 2006 to 2007 to account for changing exposure), the RMS prediction of 40% more losses above the average in pink, and the actual losses in red.

RMS Verification.png

The RMS prediction obviously did not improve upon a naive forecast of average losses in either year.

What are the chances for the 5-year forecast yet to verify?

Average U.S. insured losses according to Pielke et al. (2008) are about $5.2 billion per year. Over 5 years this is $26 billion, and 40% higher than this is $36 billion. A $36 billion dollar insured loss is about $72 billion in total damage, and $26 billion insured is about $52 billion. For the RMS forecast to do better than the naive baseline of Pielke et al. (2008) total damage in 2008-2010 will have to be higher than $62 billion ($31 billion insured). That is, losses higher than $62B are closer to the RMS forecast than to the naive baseline.

The NHC official estimate for Katrina is $81 billion. So for the 2006-2010 RMS forecast to verify will require close to another Katrina-like event to occur in the next 3 years, or several large events. This is of course possible, but I doubt that there is a hurricane expert out there willing to put forward a combination of event probability and loss magnitude that will lead to an expected $62 billion total loss over the next 3 years. Consider that a 50% chance of $124 billion in losses results in an expected $62 billion. Is there any scientific basis to expect a 50% chance of $124 billion in losses? Or perhaps a 100% chance of $62 billion in total losses? Anyone wanting to make claims of this sort, please let us know!

From Pielke et al. (2008) the annual chances of a >$10B event (i.e., $5B insured) during 1900-2005 about 25%, and the annual chances of a >$50 billion ($25 billion insured) are just under 5%. There were 7 unique three-year periods with >$62B (>$31B insured) in total losses, or about a 7% chance. So RMS prediction of 40% higher than average losses for 2006-2010 has about a 7% chance of being more accurate than a naive baseline. It could happen, of course, but I wouldn't bet on it without good odds!

So what has RMS done is the face of evidence that its first 5-year forecast was not so accurate? Well, they have declared success and issued another 5-year forecast of 40% higher losses for the period 2008-2012.

Risk Management Solutions (RMS) has confirmed its modeled hurricane activity rates for 2008 to 2012 following an elicitation with a group of the world's leading hurricane researchers. . . . The current activity rates lead to estimates of average annual insured losses that will be 40% higher than those predicted by the long-term mean of hurricane activity for the Gulf Coast, Florida, and the Southeast, and 25-30% higher for the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast coastal regions.

For further reading:

Pielke, R. A., Jr., Gratz, J., Landsea, C. W., Collins, D., Saunders, M. A., and Musulin, R. (2008). "Normalized Hurricane Damages in the United States: 1900-2005." Natural Hazards Review, in press, February. (PDF, prepublication version)

November 26, 2007

John Quiggin on Adaptation

Last week I took strong issue with a view of climate adaptation put forward by Australian economist John Quiggin. After some discussion, John has graciously provided an extended and considerably more nuanced view of his thoughts on adaptation, which we are happy to highlight here. (Thanks, John!):

There is no reason to expect too little adaptation in developed countries, assuming that individuals and firms act in their own interests, and that governments follow standard policy procedures aimed at selecting policies that promote the welfare of their constituents. To the extent that these things don’t happen, international negotiations won’t help.
There is a big reason to expect excessive emissions by all countries (and the excess is much greater for the rich countries) because of the externality problem. Those making the emissions don’t bear more than a tiny fraction of the costs.

Finally, poor countries won’t have enough adaptation because they don’t have enough of anything. The best solution to this is to increase aid (and access to trade) across the board. Given sufficient resources, poor countries can their own decisions on how to allocate them.

Climate change negotiations provide a chance to put pressure on rich countries to compensate poor countries for the damage caused by climate change, or to pay them to participate in mitigation. In the former context, it may be possible to get finance for adaptation projects as part of the global negotiation process and if so, I welcome it.

Taking all of that together, this means the primary focus of international negotiations should be on emissions reductions and mitigation. But if aid for adaptation can be included in the package, that would be a good thing.

While I disagree with John, I can appreciate that his view is identical to that espoused in the Framework Convention on Climate Change, and a logical consequence of its Article 2.

My own view is that Article 2 leads to a devaluing of sustainable development; specifically, it makes little sense in practice to try to separate "climate change adaptation" (where climate change is narrowly defined as those changes resulting from greenhouse gas emissions) from the more general challenge of sustainable development. I argue this point in the following paper:

Pielke, Jr., R.A., 2005. Misdefining "climate change": consequences for science and action, Environmental Science & Policy, Vol. 8, pp. 548-561. (PDF)

I suspect that the tensions between rich world countries wanting to focus on emissions and developing countries focusing on development will be a central feature of the upcoming FCCC Bali negotiations.

Posted on November 26, 2007 06:09 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

November 20, 2007

Optimal Adaptation?

Thomas Henry Huxley once described science as "organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact." The same can be said of economics.

In a unpublished letter to Nature posted as a comment on the Nature Climate Feedback blog Australian economist John Quiggin responds to the recent Prins/Rayner piece in Nature. He explains how economics theory indicates that we really have no reason to worry about adaptation to climate change, because economics theory says so:

Prins and Rayner also assume that because adaptation is as important as mitigation, it should receive equal attention as a focus of public policy. But emissions of greenhouse gases represent a market failure. No individual or nation has a strong incentive to reduce their own emissions. Hence, mitigation requires a global policy response so that this externality is taken into account. By contrast, private parties, in deciding how to adapt to climate change, will, in the absence of policy intervention, bear the costs and receive the benefits of their decisions in most cases. There is no reason to expect too little adaptation.

I suppose one could argue that this thesis is supported by the obvious fact that the world today does indeed have an optimal level of climate adaptation.

But then again, one might also take a look at Bangladesh and the effects of Cyclone Sidr over the past week to see that such an argument is not only wrong but wrongheaded, and perhaps even morally bereft. The two "private parties" in the photo to the left (courtesy of The Boston Herald) are obviously practicing "optimal adaptation" in the "absence of policy intervention."

Yeah, right.

Posted on November 20, 2007 10:32 AM View this article | Comments (10)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

November 15, 2007

The Technological Fix

On Monday we had Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus kindly give a lecture on their new book Break Through. It was great to have them stop by, and nice to have an opportunity to get answers to questions about their book. Turnout was in the 100 range, judging by the size of the room. If you haven't read the book yet, you can either buy it, camp out in Borders with a cup of joe, or check out a three minute overview given by Geoff McGhee and Andrew Revkin of the NY Times covering the "New Environmental Centrists."

I want to respond to at least one of their claims, as well as a claim that appears to be circulating in the blogo-ether as what Revkin is calling the "Centrist" position, regarding the thought that we should encourage technological fixes to our problems. The reason I want to respond to this claim is both because I think it's right; and because I think it's, well, not right.

So let's talk about technological fixes.

I'm something of a technology buff. I like gadgets. I like science. And I like what technology does for me and the world. I also like what came about as a result of the ramped up R&D funds during the nineties. Moreover, I've never been totally enthusiastic about some of the neo-luddite language that once passed as environmentalist, so I agree with Shellenberger and Nordhaus (S&N) that we should all be encouraging, funding, supporting, and promoting technologies that help our civilization and our country advance. In fact, I also agree that environmentalists should be considerably more aspirational than desperational.

S&N argue persuasively that the "politics of limits" -- which is, roughly, the idea that regulation can serve as a cure-all to the world's environmental problems -- ought to be replaced with a "politics of possibility" -- which is kind of hopeful thinking about new possible worlds. Their argument runs primarily along political strategy lines and is buttressed by many studies that show that Americans don't respond well to the pessimism and "scare tactics" of environmentalism. The book's central idea should be familiar to anyone who has read their earlier work, Death of Environmentalism. In the end, it hangs on this dichotomy of political orientations: limits versus possibility.

And in this dichotomy lies the problem. It's a false concretism, supported mainly by S&N's choices of what counts as an environmental issue. Much of their book is geared to address concerns that relate to climate change. That's fine and well, of course, because climate change is one of the major hurdles that has been motivating the environmental movement for the past ten years or so. But it is also true that environmentalists have been dealing with many more problems than climate change for quite some time now. To declare the death of environmentalism, or to suggest that the positive panacea to the chicken-little environmental frame of mind is through technological and economic fixes, and that these fixes run contrary to the politics of limits, is to undermine a critical ethical thread that runs through environmental thinking altogether.

The greatest real-world instance of this thread is the relatively wide range of environmental issues that don't fall under the category of climate change; that were, prior to Al Gore and the Prius, central environmental issues. Here I'm thinking of issues like deforestation, desertification, extinction, habitat encroachment, water depletion, and so on. Environmental issues span the gamut, and many of them deal with human activities in and around nature. These issues can never be handled by technological or economic fixes, precisely because they are not problems of technical or economic failure. Some issues, for instance, relate to the problem of urban sprawl or to overconsumption, which cannot possibly be solved by appeal to technological or economic fixes. The "over" in 'overconsumption' isn't determined by what other people don't have (though that, surely, is part of it); it's determined by how much a person is entitled to and how much a person can reasonably use. Even Locke recognizes prohibitions against spoilage. These are primarily ethical and philosophical notions.

A second problem is that many of the classic environmental issues, among which climate change is only one, are best characterized as conflicts of interest, not just between two actors, but also between one actor and the environment. I want a cherry dining set, you want a cherry dining set, and there ain't enough cherry growing fast enough to give us both what we want. Moreover, when I take that cherry for my cherry dining set, I deprive the world of that cherry tree. In this case, it's not just any cherry tree; it's that cherry tree; that cherry tree under which Harold kissed Maude, under which Abe told his truth, under which Erma held her bowl. So too for many environmental problems: I want a ski slope, so I take that mountain. I want a fountain, so I take that reservoir. I want a McMansion development, so I take that open space. Taking specific features of nature yields particularized conflicts of interest; but even more than this, particularized clashes over what is and what is not permissible. Again, permissibility is an ethical issue, only loosely and tangentially related to the so-called "politics of limits."

What I'm expressing here isn't at all pessimism about technology. Far from it. As I've said, I like and support technological innovation. I'd even root for a budget that included a lot of it. I'm hoping to point out that S&N's "politics of limits vs politics of possibility" dichotomy has many rough edges; inattention to which heralds a premature call for the death of environmentalism.

For more on this, my colleague Michael Zimmerman, Professor in the Philosophy Department and the Environmental Studies Program, as well as an outspoken advocate of an expansively multidisciplinary approach to environmental issues, Integral Ecology, has his own new blog and has further comments on S&N here: http://integralecology-michaelz.blogspot.com/

November 02, 2007

Confronting Disaster Losses

From today's Science:

L. M. Bouwer, R. P. Crompton, E. Faust, P. Höppe, and R. A. Pielke Jr. 2007. Confronting disaster losses, Science 318, 753.

Here is an excerpt from the Supporting Online Material:

Societal change and economic development are mainly responsible for increasing losses in recent decades, as convincingly shown in analyses of long-term records of losses (S1). After adjusting for societal changes, resulting time series accurately reflect documented trends (or lack thereof) and variability consistent with the observed climatological record of weather events (S1, S5). This implies that the net result of the adjustments has to a significant degree successfully removed the signal of societal change from the loss record. . .
Within the next 20 years projected changes in the intensity and frequency of extreme events—depending on the time scale and hazard—remain uncertain. The most severe effects of human-caused climate change are expected in the second half of the century
(S6). In the immediate future, disaster losses will increase as a result of societal change and economic development, independent of climate change.

We'll provide the full text as soon as it is posted on our site. Meantime, subscribers to Science can find it here.

UPDATE: Full text here in PDF.

Posted on November 2, 2007 07:59 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Disasters

November 01, 2007

The Young and the Mindless

As virtually anybody who has flipped on the news in the past ten days knows, residents of Southern California have experienced something not unlike Dante’s fiery sixth circle of hell. Short story: Big fire, at least fourteen dead, 138 injured, a million displaced, and billions of dollars in property damage. Shorter story: pretty awful. As usual, speculations about causal origin immediately spread (like wildfire) throughout the modern mess media. Fox news reported several times, presumably non-speculatively, that the fires might have been deliberately set by Al Qaeda. Scary stuff. On the other end of the spectrum, Matt Drudge slung the mud that some high-level producer at CNN had circulated a memo that commentators should use the fires to “push” the Planet in Peril series, but that they shouldn’t do so “irresponsibly.” Here’s an illuminating series of comments from the ever-entertaining Free Republic. Today, as a matter of fact, the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming is holding a hearing on the intensity and frequency of forest fires as tied to global warming. Coincidence? Probably not.

Sigh. It would appear from the shenanigans that nothing is immune from politics.

It came to light yesterday that a young boy, age uncertain, in what can only be described either as a child’s act of pyro-curiosity or as a defiant act against an overly paternalistic Smokey the Bear, has claimed responsibility for -- wait for it -- playing with matches. Denying Smokey’s sage advice, the boy was being a boy; and playing with matches. As most kids with scout badges know, playing with matches can cause forest fires. So here we have our cause of the fire. Or at least we have one cause of one of the fires.

Smokey the Bear Now that we know that a careless young boy was the cause of so much heartache, we are left with the undesirable question of how to make sense of this news. There are plenty of ways to think about kids who play with matches. Discussion in many circles (probably not far from the sixth circle) has already shifted to arguments about whether the boy should get the gallows or the guillotine. That’s a point for a different but not unrelated discussion. For some reason, however, it appears that many are inclined to view this revelation as one that confirms the absurdity of whatever offensive political view was brought to bear on explanatory accounts of the event. Progressives are calling foul on terror-mongers and reactionaries are calling foul on chicken-littles.

Let’s talk about causes below the fold.

Start with a bit of cocktail party name-dropping: our homeboy Aristotle. As his Physics is one of the mainstay texts in your library -- it is in your library, isn’t it? -- you’ll probably recall that Aristotle identifies four causes: the material, the formal, the efficient, and the final cause. For those sad souls who’ve lost their copy of Aristotle in the fire, you can read philosopher Marc Cohen’s notes on the causes here. (They’re pretty good.) These causes are more or less each supposed to provide answers to the question: What causes X? You don’t really need to understand all four causes in order to get the point I’m going to make, just that they each provide plausible answers to the question “what causes X” and that they don’t necessarily run at odds with one another.

What caused the fire? Good question. Fire is kind of tricky, but let’s aim for a plausible answer. It has come to our attention that what caused the fire was a little boy who was playing with matches. That answers some questions, but it doesn’t answer all of our questions. For instance, we know that a boy caused the fire, so it appears that a human was behind the event. That’s our efficient cause. We also know that matches caused the fire, so somehow there was some material causal chain unrelated to humans. That’s our material cause. Along with this, we know that there was low-lying brush and some high branchy-trees, creating a nice little furnace for our fire. So there we have our formal cause as well. What we also know is that what caused the fire was a lot of dry branches and stuff, all of which ‘likes to burn’, which is a natural cycle of any forest. That sounds pretty reasonable too: our final cause. A quartet of causes leading to a cacophony of disaster.

If we stop at the beginning, with the efficient cause, we see that our questions quickly open up along the axis of responsibility. Was the boy really aware of what he was doing? Did he have intent? Could he have done otherwise? Was the boy trained by Al Qaeda? And so on, and so on. We could go on for quite a long time down this road. I say, spare him the gallows. It’s likely that he’s just a normal kid.

Those questions, I daresay, are a pretty divergent distraction from the much more central question that readers of this blog will likely seek an answer for. What readers here probably want to know is the underlying formal cause, the reason that Southern California went up like Bambi’s bedroom. Joseph Romm has a pretty informative essay suggesting that global warming may be partly responsible. I’m not qualified to judge Romm’s science, but I find his argument plausible. Just as with the axis of responsibility, we could go on for quite a long time down that road too. Formal causes are pretty hard to nail down.

What strikes me as important here is not which of the many different kinds of causes are responsible for the fire. We can come up with several explanations, none of which are contradictory. No, what’s important is that we recognize that we can’t just wipe other causal explanations off our list when we’ve identified a single causal explanation like, say, a child with a matchbook. Setting aside the thought that the fires could have been set by a single young boy or several young terrorists-in-training, there is the important question about what formal arrangement facilitated the event. These form

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