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April 11, 2008

Kudos to Kerry Emanuel

I have always held Kerry Emanuel in high regard, because he calls things like he sees them, but he also listens to others who might not share his views. He is, in short, a great scientist.

So it was not too surprising to see that Kerry's views have evolved on the issue of hurricanes and climate change, as science has progressed. A Houston Chronicle story reports today the following:

One of the most influential scientists behind the theory that global warming has intensified recent hurricane activity says he will reconsider his stand.
The hurricane expert, Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this week unveiled a novel technique for predicting hurricane activity. The new work suggests that, even in a dramatically warming world, hurricane frequency and intensity may not substantially rise during the next two centuries.

The research, appearing in the March issue of Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, is all the more remarkable coming from Emanuel, a highly visible leader in his field and long an ardent proponent of a link between global warming and much stronger hurricanes.

His changing views could influence other scientists.

"The results surprised me," Emanuel said of his work, adding that global warming may still play a role in raising the intensity of hurricanes but what that role is remains far from certain.

I emailed Kerry to ask if the story accurately reflected his views. He replied that it was a bit exaggerated, but basically OK. Those engaged in the political debate over climate change who are skeptical of a link between hurricanes and climate change might try to make some hay from this news report. But here at Prometheus we'd suggest viewing Kerry's evolving view in the much broader context, which we have shared on multiple occasions, namely:

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.

So don't get to excited about the latest paper in hurricane climatology, the field evolves slowly, and the views of of our best scientists evolve with it.

April 08, 2008

Green Car Congress on PWG

Here is a link to an excellent summary and thoughtful discussion of our Nature Commentary (PWG) at Green Car Congress written by Jack Rosebro.

Posted on April 8, 2008 08:44 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Energy Policy | Risk & Uncertainty

April 02, 2008

Commentary in Nature

[Update #4: The guys at Grist Magazine apparently have not yet read our paper, which probably explains why one of their commentators explains that everything we say is right but common wisdom, while another says that everything we say is wrong. At least they have their bases covered. Why don't these guys at Grist actually read the paper before commenting? One wonders.]

[Update #3: Andy Revkin of the NYT provides some comments as well here.]

[Update #2: John Tierney of the NYT times provides excerpts of an extended set of comments that I shared with him here.]

[Update: Here is a short interview I did with Scitizen link.]

Tom Wigley, Chris Green, and I have a Commentary in today's Nature on the technology challenge of stabilization. It has already generated some discussion and this discussion will be the focus of some of my posts over the next weeks.

Meantime, please have a look at this summary that Tom, Chris, and I prepared:

PWG on PWG

The challenge of stabilizing the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere may be much more difficult that currently realized. In a commentary published April 3, 2008 in Nature, Roger Pielke, Jr. (University of Colorado), Tom Wigley (National Center for Atmospheric Research) and Chris Green (McGill University) argue that the magnitude of the technology challenge associated with stabilizing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may have been significantly underestimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The reason for this underestimate lies in the assumptions of decarbonization common to all scenarios of future emissions growth used by the IPCC. These assumptions may be far too optimistic, and if so, will hide from view the magnitude of the technology challenge associated with stabilizing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In this commentary the authors reveal these assumptions, and discuss their significance for policy making.

Indeed, the authors present evidence that the first decade of the 21st century has seen greater emissions of CO2 than projected by IPCC due to rapid economic development, particularly in Asia. In recent years, the world as a whole has begun to re-carbonize, breaking a long-term trend in which carbon dioxide per unit energy was assumed instead to continue to decline indefinitely.

Stabilization of the concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases is the primary objective of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), approved by almost all counties, including the USA. Stabilization requires, eventually, reducing the emissions of these gases by large amounts relative to today, a task commonly referred to as "mitigation." For CO2, mitigation requires replacing current and likely future fossil-fuel-based energy systems by carbon neutral energy sources -- that is, sources of energy that are either fossil-fuel free, are accompanied by the capture and storage of CO2, or are otherwise carbon-neutral.

The costs of mitigation are generally estimated by comparing emissions under a baseline scenario where emissions evolve in the absence of climate policies, with a scenario in which the emissions are reduced (via climate policy) to achieve a chosen atmospheric concentration, called a stabilization target. Pielke, Wigley and Green note that the standard baseline scenarios considered for these calculations already include large amounts of carbon-neutral technologies that are assumed to be developed and implemented spontaneously. In the cases the authors consider, 57 to 96% of the cumulative emissions reduction required for CO2 stabilization at around 500 ppm have been assumed by IPCC to occur automatically, meaning that the majority of the emissions reduction needed to stabilize concentrations is assumed to occur automatically..

Rather than starting with assumptions about future spontaneous technological innovations, the authors’ calculations begin with a set of "frozen technology" scenarios as baselines, i.e., emissions scenarios in which energy technologies are assumed to remain at present levels. This contrasts with previous approaches, which use baselines that already include major technology changes, and, consequently, large spontaneous increases in carbon-neutral energy sources. With a "frozen technology" approach, the full scope of the carbon-neutral technology challenge is placed into clear view.

With the full scope of the technology challenge placed into view, the question then arises as to how much of this challenge will occur spontaneously, and how much must be driven by new policies. Pielke and his colleagues suggest that the amount of spontaneous development of carbon-neutral energy sources has been overestimated in previous analyses, diverting attention away from technological innovation, thereby underestimating the need for policy-driven technology development.

The authors conclude by saying "… there is no question whether technological innovation is necessary – it is. The question is, to what degree should policy focus explicitly on motivating such innovation? The IPCC plays a risky game in assuming that the spontaneous advancement of technological innovation will carry most of the burden of achieving future emissions reductions, rather than focusing on those conditions necessary and sufficient for such innovations to occur."

Posted on April 2, 2008 12:56 PM View this article | Comments (8)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty | Technology Policy

March 26, 2008

LA Times on Adaptation

Pielke LA Times.gif

The image above is from a LA Times story by Alan Zarembo and is based on some of our reserach on future hurricane damages under changes in both climate and society. Zarembo provides a perspective on a group of scholars and advocates that I once called "nonskeptical heretics." Nonskeptical because they accept the science presented by the IPCC (as noted by Zarembo), and heretics because they take strong issue with many of the closely held assumptions that have come to frame the debate over climate policies.

Zarembo characterizes one of the most insidious assumptions -- that support for adaptation necessarily means a loss of support for mitigation:

Other scientists say that time is running out to control carbon dioxide emissions and that the call to adapt is providing a potentially dangerous excuse to delay. . . Although most scientists agree that adaptation should play a major role in absorbing the effects of climate change, they say that buying into the heretics' arguments will dig the world into a deeper hole by putting off greenhouse gas reductions until it is too late.

Well, no. It is a strawman to argue that strong support for adaptation means that one cannot also provide strong support for mitigation. A problem arises for mitigation-first proponents when they invoke things like hurricanes, malaria, and drought as justification for mitigation when clearly adaptive responses will be far more effective. Those who persist in linking mitigation to reducing such climate impacts will always find themselves on the wrong side of what research has shown -- namely, climate change is a much smaller factor in such impacts than societal factors (compare the graph above). It is true. Get over it.

The best arguments for mitigation were presented by Zarembo coming from Steve Schneider, who rightly pointed to the uncertain but highly consequential impacts of human-caused climate change:

"You can't adapt to melting the Greenland ice sheet," said Stephen H. Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University. "You can't adapt to species that have gone extinct."

If advocacy for action on mitigation emphasized these very large scale long-term impacts, rather than disasters, disease, etc., then there would be no need for adaptation and mitigation to be presented as opposing approaches. Consider that none of the people quoted in the Zarembo story who I know (including me) have suggested that adaptation can replace mitigation, particularly for issues like sea level rise and specifies extinction. So the argument that adaptation can't deal with sea level rise over a century or more is somewhat of a strawman as well.

The reality is that whatever the world decides to do on mitigation, we will have no choice but to improve our adaptation to climate. Humans have been improving their adaptation to climate forever and will continue to do so. Since we are going to adapt, we should do it wisely. And this means rejecting bad policy arguments when offered in the way of substitutes for adaptation, like the tired old view that today's disaster losses are somehow a justification for changes to energy policies. Misleading policy arguments and should be pointed out as such, because they hurt both the cause of adaptation, but ironically the cause of mitigation as well.

If mitigation advocates do not like being told that their misleading arguments poorly serve policy debate, well, they should probably try to come up with a more robust set of arguments. Arguing that support for adaptation undercuts support for mitigation is a little like making the argument that support for eating healthy and getting exercise (adapting one's lifestyle) undercuts support for heart surgery research (mitigating the effects of heart disease). Obviously we should seek both adaptation and mitigation in the context of heart disease.

If the case for action on energy policy is so overwhelmingly strong (and again, I think that it is), then there should be no reason to resort to misleading arguments completely detached from the conclusions of a wide range of analyses. Misleading arguments may be politically expedient in the short term, but cannot help the mitigation cause in the long run. And dealing with the emissions of greenhouse gases will take place over the long run. Meantime, we'll adapt.

Posted on March 26, 2008 07:28 AM View this article | Comments (15)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty | Science + Politics

March 15, 2008

Update on Falsifiability of Climate Predictions

UPDATE 2:40PM 3-15-08: Within a few hours of this post, as we might have expected, rather than contributing to the substantive discussion, a climate scientist chooses instead to tell us how stupid we are for even discussing such subjects. We are told that "until the temperature obviously and unambiguously turns up again, this kind of stuff is going to continue." Isn't that what this post says? For the "stuff" read on below.

Regular readers will recall that not long ago I asked the climate community research community to suggest what climate observations might be observed on decadal time scales that might be inconsistent with predictions from models. While Real Climate has decided to take a pass on this question other scientists and interested observers have taken up the challenge, no doubt with interest added by the recent cooling in the primary datasets of global temperature.

A very interesting perspective is provided by Lucia Liljegren, who has several interesting posts on observations versus predictions. The figure above is from her analysis. Her complete analysis can be found here. She has several follow up posts in which she discusses other aspects of the analysis and links to a few other, similar explorations of this issue. She writes:

No matter which major temperature measuring group we examine, or which reasonable criteria for limiting our choices we select, it appears that possible that something not anticipated by the IPCC WG1 happened soon after they published their predictions for this century. That something may be the shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation; it may be something else. Statistics cannot tell us.
It may turn out that this something is a relatively infrequent but climatologically important, feature that results in unusually cold weather . Events that happen at a rate of 1% do happen– at a rate of 1%. So, if recent flat trend is the 1% event, then 30 year trend in temperatures will resume.

For what it’s worth: I believe AGW is real, based on physical arguments and longer term trends, I suspect we will discover that GCM’s are currently unable to predict shifts in the PDO. The result is the uncertainty intervals on IPCC projections for the short term trend were much too small.

Of course, the reason for the poor short term predictions may turn out to be something else entirely. It remains to those who make these predictions to try to identify what, if anything, resulted in this mismatch between projections and short term data. Or to stand steadfast and wait for La Nina to break and the weather to begin to warm.

Those wanting to quibble with her analysis would no doubt observe that the uncertainty around IPCC predictions for the short term is undoubtedly larger that then IPCC itself presented. Lucia in fact suggests this in her analysis, making one wonder if uncertainties are indeed larger than presented, why didn't the IPCC say so?

In 2006 my father and I wrote about the possible effects on the climate debate of short-term predictions that do not square with observations:

predictions represent a huge gamble with public and policymaker opinion. If more-or-less steady global warming does not occur as forecast by these models, not only will professional reputations be at risk, but the need to reduce threats to the wide spectrum of serious and legitimate environmental concerns (including the human release of greenhouse gases) will be questioned by some as having been oversold. For better or worse, a failure to accurately predict the changes in the global average surface temperature, global average tropospheric temperature, ocean average heat content change, or Arctic sea ice coverage would raise questions on the reliance of global climate models for accurate prediction on multi-decadal time scales.

In one of the comments in response to that post a climate scientist (and Real Climate blogger) took us to task for raising the issue suggesting that there was no really reason to speculate about such things given that, "I’ve pointed out that in the obs, there is no sign of > 2 yr decreasing trends."

Another climate scientist commented that climate models were completely on target:

Re the possibility that the Earth is acting in a way that the models hadn’t predicted, I must say I’m pretty relaxed about that. Let’s wait a few more years and see, eh?

I have not yet seen rebuttals to Lucia's analysis, or others like it (she points to a few), which are not peer-reviewed analyses, yet certainly of some merit and worth considering. There continues to be good reasons for climate scientists to begin more openly discussing the limitations of short-term climate predictions and the implications for understanding uncertainties. They have these discussions among themselves all of the time. For example, with a view quite similar to my own, Real Climate's Gavin Schimdt suggests that if the full context of a prediction from a climate model is not understood, then:

model results have an aura of exactitude that can be misleading. Reporting those results without the appropriate caveats can then provoke a backlash from those who know better, lending the whole field an aura of unreliability.

None of this discussion means that the basic conclusion that greenhouse gases affect the climate system is wrong, or that action to mitigate emissions do not make sense. What it does mean is that we should be concerned about the overselling of climate predictions and the corresponding risks to public credibility and advocacy built upon these predictions.

Posted on March 15, 2008 06:15 AM View this article | Comments (22)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Prediction and Forecasting | Risk & Uncertainty

February 20, 2008

Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Spy Satellite Shootdown Attempt

t1home.ship.missile.gi.jpg

The Navy is apparently going to try to shoot down that wayward spy satellite sometime in the next 48 hours. The attempt to shoot it down is justified in terms of protecting human life from the risk of harm caused by the satellite's uncontrolled reentry. This post discusses whether or not the shoot down attempt can be justified in cost-benefit terms. I don't think it can, at least in terms of the formal justifications provided by the U.S. government. There must be other factors involved. The costs per expected life saved are about $2-$3 billion dollars! Read on for details.

CNN reports how the U.S. government has justified the shoot down attempt:

Pentagon officials argue the effort is worth the expense because of the slim -- but real -- chance that the satellite's unused fuel, 1,000 pounds of toxic hydrazine, could land in a populated area.
Because the super-secret spy satellite malfunctioned immediately after launch in December 2006, its fuel tank is full, and it would probably survive re-entry and disperse harmful, even potentially deadly fumes over an area the size of two football fields.

Here are the details of a cost-benefit calculation.

In early 2001 I was asked by NASA to organize a workshop to examine the risks and benefits associated with the reentry of the TRMM (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission) satellite. NASA faced a choice between using the satellite's remaining fuel to conduct a controlled reentry into the Pacific, or allow the orbiter to continue gathering data on tropical cyclones and other weather and eventually plunge to earth in an uncontrolled manner. What option had the most benefits as compared to the risks?

Our workshop report can be found here. What is relevant for this current discussion is that NASA prepared an analysis of the probability of casualty due to an uncontrolled reentry of TRMM, which is roughly of the same size as the spy satellite. The NASA presentation can be seen here in PDF.

The area affected by the re-enetering TRMM satellite was estimated by NASA to be about 110 square feet. Because the fuel tank was to be empty there was no concern about a toxic cloud of hydrazine, as is apparently the case with the spy satellite which is carrying a full tank of fuel. As the CNN article cited above notes, the concern is that the ruptured fuel tank might affect an area as large as two football fields, or about 115,000 square feet, or about 1050 times larger than the area that was expected to be affected by TRMM.

In the NASA presentation at our TRMM workshop a risk of human casualty associated with an uncontrolled re-entry was calculated to be 1 in 5,000 (please see the PDF for details of the calculation), based on the size of the debris field and the population density of the area under the orbital path. A risk of 1 in 5000 is pretty small, hence in the end NASA decided to let TRMM fall in uncontrolled fashion (which will happen in a few years).

But the much larger potential debris field associated with the spy satellite suggests a risk of casualty -- using the NASA risk estimate for TRMM scaled to the larger debris field -- of about a 1 in 4.8 risk of casualty, or a bit worse than the odds of surviving Russian Roulette.

Now at an estimated cost of $40-$60 million to shoot down the satellite results in an expected cost per casualty avoided of about $190-$290 million (i.e., $40M*4.8 - $60M*4.8). Given that the vast majority of the casualties might be temporary discomfort from inhalation of hydrazine gas this is a very high cost, this is a very high figure (I'd probably inhale a bit of hydrazine gas for $250 million;-). If we consider the cost per life saved, say, by avoiding a direct hit on a person by the satellite, the cost per life saved rises to $2-$3 billion! (That is, 5000*$40M - 5000*$60M.)

In any reasonable calculation of the costs and benefits to human life of the spy satellite reentry, it does not seem justifiable in terms of human safety according to standard measures of the economic value of lives saved (which tend to be measured on the order of $10 million). So there must be other perceived benefits as well -- such as testing the U.S. military's ability to hit a satellite, showing adversaries U.S. military prowess, and simply eliminating uncertainty associated with the satellite's reentry. The odds may be tiny, but if it happens to land on the Russian Embassy in Ecuador, or some other highly inconvenient place, there would certainly be a huge diplomatic crisis.

Being rich sometimes means that you can afford to eliminate uncertainty via decision making, regardless of the cost. But don't be fooled by the justification, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny, which seems fairly typical of the current administration.

Posted on February 20, 2008 01:13 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty | Space Policy

January 07, 2008

Deja Vu All Over Again

The Washington Post had a excellent story yesterday by Marc Kaufman describing NASA’s intentions to increase the flight rate of the Space Shuttle program. This is remarkable, and as good an indication as any that NASA has not yet learned the lessons of its past.

According to the Post:

Although NASA has many new safety procedures in place as a result of the Columbia accident, the schedule has raised fears that the space agency, pressured by budgetary and political considerations, might again find itself tempting fate with the shuttles, which some say were always too high-maintenance for the real world of space flight.

A NASA official is quoted in the story:

"The schedule we've made is very achievable in the big scheme of things. That is, unless we get some unforeseen problems."

The Post has exactly the right follow up to this comment:

The history of the program, however, is filled with such problems -- including a rare and damaging hailstorm at the Kennedy Space Center last year as well as the shedding of foam insulation that led to the destruction of Columbia and its crew in 2003. . . "This pressure feels so familiar," said Alex Roland, a professor at Duke University and a former NASA historian. "It was the same before the Challenger and Columbia disasters: this push to do more with a spaceship that is inherently unpredictable because it is so complex."

John Logsdon, dean of space policy experts and longtime supporter of NASA, recognizes the risks that NASA is taking:

Every time we launch a shuttle, we risk the future of the human space flight program. The sooner we stop flying this risky vehicle, the better it is for the program.

Duke University’s Alex Roland also hit the nail on the head;

Duke professor Roland said that based on the shuttle program's history, he sees virtually no possibility of NASA completing 13 flights by the deadline. He predicted that the agency would ultimately cut some of the launches but still declare the space station completed.
"NASA is filled with can-do people who I really admire, and they will try their best to fulfill the missions they are given," he said. "What I worry about is when this approach comes into conflict with basically impossible demands. Something has to give."

It is instructive to look at the 1987 report of the investigation of the House Science Committee into the 1986 Challenger disaster, which you can find online here in PDF (thanks to Rad Byerly and Ami Nacu-Schmidt). That report contains lessons that apparently have yet to be fully appreciated, even after the loss of Columbia in 2003. Here is an excerpt from the Executive Summary (emphasis added, see also pp. 119-124):

The Committee found that NASA’s drive to achieve a launch schedule of 24 flights per year created pressure throughout the agency that directly contributed to unsafe launch operations. The Committee believes that the pressure to push for an unrealistic number of flights continues to exist in some sectors of NASA and jeopardizes the promotion of a "safety first" attitude throughout the Shuttle program.
The Committee, Congress, and the Administration have played a contributing role in creating this pressure. . . NASA management and the Congress must remember the lessons learned from the Challenger accident and never again set unreasonable goals which stress the system beyond its safe functioning.

One would hope that the House Science Committee has these lessons in mind and is paying close attention to decision making in NASA. It would certainly be appropriate for some greater public oversight of NASA decision making about the Shuttle flight rate and eventual termination. Otherwise, there is a good chance that such oversight will take place after another tragedy and the complete wreckage of the U.S. civilian space program.

For further reading:

Pielke Jr., R. A., 1993: A Reappraisal of the Space Shuttle Program. Space Policy, May, 133-157. (PDF)

Pielke Jr., R.A., and R. Byerly Jr., 1992: The Space Shuttle Program: Performance versus Promise in Space Policy Alternatives, edited by R. Byerly, Westview Press, Boulder, pp. 223-245. (PDF)

Posted on January 7, 2008 12:21 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty | Science Policy: General | Space Policy

December 21, 2007

On the Political Relevance of Scientific Consensus

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) has released a report in which he has identified some hundreds of scientists who disagree with the IPCC consensus. Yawn. In the comments of Andy Revkin's blog post on the report you can get a sense of why I often claim that arguing about the science of climate change is endlessly entertaining but hardly productive, and confirming Andy's assertion that "A lot of us live in intellectual silos."

In 2005 I had an exchange with Naomi Oreskes in Science on the significance of a scientific consensus in climate politics. Here is what I said then (PDF):

IN HER ESSAY "THE SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS on climate change" (3 Dec. 2004, p. 1686), N. Oreskes asserts that the consensus reflected in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) appears to reflect, well, a consensus. Although Oreskes found unanimity in the 928 articles with key words "global climate change," we should not be surprised if a broader review were to find conclusions at odds with the IPCC consensus, as "consensus" does not mean uniformity of perspective. In the discussion motivated by Oreskes’ Essay, I have seen one claim made that there are more than 11,000 articles on "climate change" in the ISI database and suggestions that about 10% somehow contradict the IPCC consensus position.
But so what? If that number is 1% or 40%, it does not make any difference whatsoever from the standpoint of policy action. Of course, one has to be careful, because people tend to read into the phrase "policy action" a particular course of action that they themselves advocate. But in the IPCC, one can find statements to use in arguing for or against support of the Kyoto Protocol. The same is true for any other specific course of policy action on climate change. The IPCC maintains that its assessments do not advocate any single course of action.

So in addition to arguing about the science of climate change as a proxy for political debate on climate policy, we now can add arguments about the notion of consensus itself. These proxy debates are both a distraction from progress on climate change and a reflection of the tendency of all involved to politicize climate science.

The actions that we take on climate change should be robust to (i) the diversity of scientific perspectives, and thus also to (ii) the diversity of perspectives of the nature of the consensus. A consensus is a measure of a central tendency and, as such, it necessarily has a distribution of perspectives around that central measure (1). On climate change, almost all of this distribution is well within the bounds of legitimate scientific debate and reflected within the full text of the IPCC reports. Our policies should not be optimized to reflect a single measure of the central tendency or, worse yet, caricatures of that measure, but instead they should be robust enough to accommodate the distribution of perspectives around that
central measure, thus providing a buffer against the possibility that we might learn more in the future (2).

ROGER A. PIELKE JR.
Center for Science and Technology Policy Research,
University of Colorado, UCB 488, Boulder, CO
80309–0488, USA.

References
1 D. Bray,H. von Storch, Bull.Am.Meteorol. Soc. 80, 439 (1999).
2. R. Lempert, M. Schlesinger, Clim. Change 45, 387 (2000).

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 06, 2007

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 20, 2007

So-kalled WiFi research

Last week it was the Journal of Geoclimatic Science and benthic bacteria, this week it's the Australasian Journal of Clinical Environmental Medicine and autism. The Sokal phemonemon is back with a vengeance, though this time it appears to be just plain fakery.

Matt Drudge has is viewers linking to an article that was, for a short stint this afternoon, published on the Computer Weekly website. The article warned of the dangers of WiFi for children. It cited an article by Dr. George Carlo in the Australasian Journal of Clinical Environmental Medicine claiming that WiFi causes heavy metals to be caught in brain cells. Only problem? Journal no existy.

Here's a slightly cynical overview. You can also check out the authors at the
Quackometer.

Posted on November 20, 2007 02:01 PM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Hale, B. | Health | Risk & Uncertainty | Testing

May 11, 2007

State of Florida Rejects RMS Cat Model Approach

According to a press release from RMS, Inc. the state of Florida has rejected their risk assessment methodology based on using an expert elicitation to predict hurricane risk for the next five years. Regular readers may recall that we discussed this issue in depth not long ago. Here is an excerpt from the press release:

During the week of April 23, the Professional Team of the Florida Commission on Hurricane Loss Projection Methodology (FCHLPM) visited the RMS offices to assess the v6.0 RMS U.S. Hurricane Model. The model submitted for review incorporates our standard forward-looking estimates of medium-term hurricane activity over the next five years, which reflect the current prolonged period of increased hurricane frequency in the Atlantic basin. This model, released by RMS in May 2006, is already being used by insurance and reinsurance companies to manage the risk of losses from hurricanes in the United States.
Over the past year, RMS has been in discussions with the FCHLPM regarding use of a new method of estimating future hurricane activity over the next five years, drawing upon the expert opinion of the hurricane research community, rather than relying on a simplistic long-term historical average which does not distinguish between periods of higher and lower hurricane frequency. RMS was optimistic that the certification process would accommodate a more robust approach, so it was disappointed that the Professional Team was "unable to verify" that the company had met certain FCHLPM model standards relating to the use of long-term data for landfalling hurricanes since 1900.

As a result of the Professional Team’s decision, RMS has elected this year to submit a revised version of the model that is based on the long-term average, to satisfy the needs of the FCHLPM.

This is of course the exact same issue that we highlighted over at Climate Feedback, where I wrote, "Effective planning depends on knowing what range of possibilities to expect in the immediate and longer-term future. Use too long a record from the past and you may underestimate trends. Use too short a record and you miss out on longer time-scale variability."

In their press release, RMS complains correctly that the state of Florida is now likely to underestimate risk:

The long-term historical average significantly underestimates the level of hurricane hazard along the U.S. coast, and there is a consensus among expert hurricane researchers that we will continue to experience elevated frequency for at least the next 10 years. The current standards make it more difficult for insurers and their policy-holders to understand, manage, and reduce hurricane risk effectively.

In its complaint, RMS is absolutely correct. However, the presence of increased risk does not justify using an untested, unproven, and problematic methodology for assessing risk, even if it seems to give the "right" answer.

The state of Florida would be wise to err in the decision making on the side of recognizing that the long-term record of hurricane landfalls and impacts is likely to dramatically understate their current risk and exposure. From all accounts, the state of Florida appears to be gambling with its hurricane future rather than engaging in robust risk management. For their part, RMS, the rest of the cat model industry, and insurance and reinsurance companies should together carefully consider how best to incorporate rapidly evolving and still-uncertain science into scientifically robust and politically legitimate tools for risk management, and this cannot happen quickly enough.

Posted on May 11, 2007 01:14 PM View this article | Comments (8)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Disasters | Prediction and Forecasting | Risk & Uncertainty

April 01, 2007

Sea Level Rise Consensus Statement and Next Steps

In a paper by Jim Hansen that we discussed last week, he called for a consensus statement to be issued on global warming, West Antarctica and sea level rise, from relevant scientific experts. A group of scientists have beat him to the punch issuing a consensus statement last week:

Polar ice experts from Europe and the United States, meeting to pursue greater scientific consensus over the fate of the world’s largest fresh water reservoir, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, conclude their three-day meeting at The University of Texas at Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences with the following statement:

Read the whole thing, but the take home point is that there remain substantial uncertainties, as indicated in the following parts of the consensus statement:

*Satellite observations show that both the grounded ice sheet and the floating ice shelves of the Amundsen Sea Embayment have thinned over the last decades.
*Ongoing thinning in the grounded ice sheet is already contributing to sea-level rise.

*The thinning of the ice has occurred because melting beneath the ice shelves has increased, reducing the friction holding back the grounded ice sheet and causing faster flow.

*Oceanic changes have caused the increased ice-shelf melting. The observed average warming of the global ocean has not yet notably affected the waters reaching the base of the ice shelves. However, recent changes in winds around Antarctica caused by human influence and/or natural variability may be changing ocean currents, moving warmer waters under the ice shelves.

*Our understanding of ice-sheet flow suggests the possibility that too much melting beneath ice shelves will lead to "runaway" thinning of the grounded ice sheet. Current understanding is too limited to know whether, when, or how rapidly this might happen, but discussions at the meeting included the possibility of several feet of sea-level rise over a few centuries from changes in this region.

What is the policy significance of this statement?

1. Decisions about climate change will have to be made is the face of considerable uncertainties as those related to sea level rise will not be reduced anytime soon.

2. There is the "possibility of several feet of sea-level rise over a few centuries from changes in this region." This contrasts strongly with Jim Hansen's assertion that

"Spatial and temporal fluctuations are normal, short-term expectations for Greenland glaciers are different from long-term expectations for West Antarctica. Integration via the gravity satellite measurements puts individual glacier fluctuations in proper perspective. The broader picture gives strong indication that ice sheets will, and are already beginning to, respond in a nonlinear fashion to global warming.There is enough information now, in my opinion, to make it a near certainty that IPCC BAU climate forcing scenarios would lead to disastrous multi-meter sea level rise on the century time scale" (PDF).

Who will eventually be proven correct? I have no idea. Nor do I think that it matters at all from the perspective of policy (compare Naomi Oreskes' views on this subject here) . The significance of this difference in views has more to do with issue of scientific advice than sea level rise itself -- if scientists create an expectation that our decision making should be guided by consensus views of relevant experts, then they should take care when abandoning that approach to scientific advice when less politically convenient.

3. Bottom line: Sea level rose about 20 cm over the past century. The IPCC expects that it may rise from less than that amount to about 60 cm over the next century. RealClimate says they see another 40 cm possible in the IPCC report. And there is a long thin probability tail of higher amounts with low probability and high consequences.

So, What are the Next Steps?

**Mitigation actions can have only a small effect on sea level rise in the short term (e.g., from no impact decades hences to small impacts a century out) and thus respond primarily to the longer term threats of sea level rise more than a century in the future.

**The most (and only) effective responses to sea level rise over the century timescale will be adaptive. So once again we see that mitigation and adaptation respond to fundamentally different aspects of the climate issue. Mitigation and adaptation should occur in parallel.

**Mitigation and adaptation policies to in response to sea level rise have been looked at (notably in the work of Richard Tol, e.g., here), but far more needs to be done (e.g., as argued here in PDF and here in PDF). Sea level rise has, like so many aspects of the climate issue, fallen into the trap of the "prediction game" at the expense of research on the possible consequences of alternative policies in response to that which we already know. The sea level rise issue risks becoming simply a "poster child" for mitigation rather than an issue deserving more attention itself.

So my recommendation is: Rather than arguing over which predictions of the climate future (or which scientists) are correct, we know enough about the general trend in sea level rise and the possibility of a large increase to begin thinking and talking in far more depth about a wide range of possible policy responses, especially adaptation. Such discussions have to go beyond the simplistic use of future sea level rise as a argument to mitigate. Under any scenario of mitigation the adaptation challenge remains essentially the same, and similarly under any adaptation efforts the mitigation challenge does not change. Absolutely no science on the prediction of future sea level rise will alter this basic reality.

Posted on April 1, 2007 04:58 PM View this article | Comments (10)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty

February 27, 2007

Science, Politics, Variability, Change, Learning, Uncertainty

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

Boulder's water board approved a flood plan Monday that predicts hundreds more homes and businesses will be inundated in a 100-year flood than previously believed.
But the new flood study predicts the University of Colorado's South Campus property will stay dry in a 100-year flood, worrying residents who don't want to see the former gravel mine developed.

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

Some issues raised by this circumstance:

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on February 27, 2007 07:19 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty

February 23, 2007

Catastrophic Visions

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

. . . consider two of the primary dialogs of our times that, while superficially quite different, are in fact disconcertingly similar in intent and tone. One is the current U.S. Administration’s insistence on a continuing and inescapable threat of ubiquitous and unpredictable terrorism, a campaign which appears designed to create on-going fear and insecurity in the population. (That the cultural animosity underlying increases in anti-US attitudes is to a significant degree a result of Administration choices and policy is either supreme irony or Machiavellian brilliance, depending on who one listens to.) This campaign is characterized by constant reference to worst case scenarios (e.g., nuclear attack on an American city), patterns of government intervention in common activities that reinforce a siege mentality while providing no obvious additional protection against threats (e.g., certain TSA procedures and requirements at airports), few public details regarding actual threats or specific situations, and the implicit message that the current state of affairs will persist for the indefinite future.
The second is the significant acceleration in stories and publicity regarding predictions of planetary disaster as a result of human activities, especially global warming. This challenge is characterized in remarkably similar terms as the terrorist threat: ubiquitous and uncertain with a potential for unexpected disaster, an emphasis on worst case scenarios, and suggestions that extraordinary government intervention is required and justified because all other values pale in comparison to the threat. So, for example, Vice President Gore recently stated that global warming was "infinitely" worse than the Iraq quagmire, while UK environment secretary David Miliband suggests issuing all British adults with annual carbon allowances. Indeed, the UK government has formed a study group to report back on the idea; Nature (442:340) reports that researchers favor such quotas as "a sensible way to extend emissions trading to the personal level." The connection between social engineering and environmental disaster as lever could scarcely be clearer. Similarly, a recent report in Science notes the reluctance of some climate scientists to consider geoengineering solutions to global climate change not because they don’t work, but because they don’t require social engineering (314:401-403). As one European climate scientist complains, "You’re papering over the problem [by even considering geoengineering options] so people can keep inflicting damage on the climate system without having to give up fossil fuels." Whether scientists should arrogate to themselves the responsibility for deciding for everyone that fossil fuels should be given up, as opposed to other alternatives to managing climate change, is apparently not to be subject to dialog.

Posted on February 23, 2007 01:30 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty

February 22, 2007

Where Stern is Right and Wrong

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on February 22, 2007 07:19 AM View this article | Comments (10)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty | Technology Policy

February 21, 2007

Mike Hulme in Nature on UK Media Coverage of the IPCC

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

Nature 445, 818 (22 February 2007) | doi:10.1038/445818b; Published online 21 February 2007
Newspaper scare headlines can be counter-productive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on February 21, 2007 03:02 PM View this article | Comments (5)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty

February 12, 2007

An Inconvenient Survey

Last Friday I visited Savannah, Georgia to participate in a viewing and discussion of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” This is the second time I have had a chance to participate in such an event, and it was a pleasure to participate in this event (including getting to see a thoughtful talk by Georgia Tech’s peter Webster).. This time I thought I’d collect a bit of data. So like the college professor that I am I gave a pop quiz right after the movie. After watching a documentary on climate change one should have the basic facts down, right? Unfortunately, no. Here is the pop quiz I gave with answers on the other side.

1. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its 4th Assessment Report last Friday. It projects a likely global average temperature increase for 2100 of (degrees C):

A. 1.1 to 6.4
B. 1.5 to 4.5
C. 5.0 to 11.5
D. 7.0 to 9.0

2. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its 4th Assessment Report last Friday. It projects a (mid-range) global average sea level rise for 2100 of:

A. 16 inches
B. 48 inches
C. 10 feet
D. 70 feet

3. If the Kyoto Protocol is fully implemented, including US participation, the effects on global average temperatures in 2080 would be:

A. Undetectable
B. Reduce the projected increase by 0.5 degrees
C. Reduce the projected increase by 1.0 degrees
D. Reduce the projected increase by 2.0 degrees

4. If the global greenhouse gas emissions magically stopped right now global average temperatures would:

A. Stop increasing immediately
B. Continue increasing for many decades

5. In order to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide requires that net global emissions be reduced from today’s levels:

A. to 1990 levels
B. by 20%
C. by 50%
D. by 100%

Answers:

1. A
2. A
3. A
4. B
5. D

No one in the audience of about 200 people admitted to getting all 5 correct. Judging by the show of hands very few came close to the correct answers on 1, 2, 3 or 5. Most people did get #4 correct. In fact, on 1, 2, and 3 the overwhelming answers were C and D and 5 it was A and B. And this was a very educated, engaged audience. I would venture that a scientific survey would find that Mr. Gore’s movie is more apt to mislead than bring the viewer to a clear understanding of the center of gravity of scientific opinion on climate change.

Is it alarmist? By effect on its uninformed audience, I'd hypothesize based on this nonscientific data set that it is.

What was most troubling was the comments of a few people in the audience who reacted pretty negatively to my remarks. One person commented (paraphrase):

We are here to talk about the end of the world and you want to talk about hurricanes. It is energy policy only we need to talk about, not disasters.

Of course Mr. Gore’s movie is chock full of references to disasters, most notably Katrina. The amazing thing to me is that about 6 people from Savannah that I spoke to in some depth, including taxi drivers and lawyers, mentioned to me that Savannah is fortunate to be in a hurricane shadow – it can’t be hit. The reality is that it can and will be hit, and hit hard. And to the extent that the focus on climate change distracts from hurricane preparation, when that fateful day occurs, the resulting disaster will inevitably be worse.

And if you don’t think that the focus on climate-change-as-energy-policy distracts from the need to adapt to climate change, consider this amazing admission from a state official in New Mexico, reacting to our recent paper in Nature:

The problem, Pielke said, is that advocates fear efforts to adapt to climate change will blunt calls to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
That fear has affected New Mexico's ambitious governmental climate change effort.

A report last year from the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer concluded that "adaptation" is critical to coping with climate change and population growth.

But most of the state's climate change effort has focused on cutting greenhouse gas emissions rather than on coping with the collision between a growing population and a changing climate.

Jim Norton, one of the state officials heading up the effort, agrees with Pielke that adaptation is critical. But there was a fear, Norton said, that too much emphasis "could sort of divert attention away from solving the problem of growing greenhouse gas emissions." [emphasis added]

Reducing emissions is a challenge well worth undertaking. But when it becomes such an overwhelming focus that nothing else is allowed, especially adaptation in mal-adapated communities, then a virtue becomes a vice. An Inconvenient Truth mislead because it suggests that we only need do one thing to respond to the threat of climate change. The reality is that we must do many things, among which we must evaluate tradeoffs, costs and benefits, risks and uncertainties. And that is a real inconvenient truth.

Posted on February 12, 2007 02:44 AM View this article | Comments (26)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty

February 07, 2007

Clarifying IPCC AR4 Statements on Sea Level Rise

The statements in the IPCC’s AR4 SPM released last week on sea level rise have led to some confusion and conflict over what exactly they said and how it compares to the 2001 IPCC TAR. The IPCC could have made it easier for all of us by presenting the data in a comparable manner. This post reflects my efforts to make sense of this situation. I hope that experts on the subject will weigh in on my initial thoughts.

I conclude that the IPCC has indeed lowered its top end estimates of sea level rise over the 21st century relative to 1990, in contrast to the conclusions at RealClimate which suggest that this has in fact not occurred. For details, please read on.

First, what did the IPCC 2001 TAR say about sea level? It reported:

For the complete range of AOGCMs and SRES scenarios and including uncertainties in land-ice changes, permafrost changes and sediment deposition, global average sea level is projected to rise by 0.09 to 0.88 m over 1990 to 2100, with a central value of 0.48 m

Some information was not included:

In addition, Warrick et al. included an allowance for ice-dynamical changes in the WAIS. The range we have given does not include such changes. The contribution of the WAIS is potentially important on the longer term, but it is now widely agreed that major loss of grounded ice from the WAIS and consequent accelerated sea-level rise are very unlikely during the 21st century.

and

The range we have given also does not take account of uncertainty in modelling of radiative forcing, the carbon cycle, atmospheric chemistry, or storage of water in the terrestrial environment.

This is quite similar to the just-released IPCC AR4 (PDF) which says:

Models used to date do not include uncertainties in climate-carbon cycle feedback nor do they include the full effects of changes in ice sheet flow, because a basis in published literature is lacking.

The IPCC AR4 does apparently incorporate information from Greenland and Antarctica:

The projections include a contribution due to increased ice flow from Greenland and Antarctica at the rates observed for 1993-2003, but these flow rates could increase or decrease in the future.

It suggests that on the increasing side that:

For example, if this contribution were to grow linearly with global average temperature change, the upper ranges of sea level rise for SRES scenarios shown in Table SPM-3 would increase by 0.1 m to 0.2 m. Larger values cannot be excluded, but understanding of these effects is too limited to assess their likelihood or provide a best estimate or an upper bound for sea level rise.

Over at RealClimate they seem to have added to the confusion by asserting incorrectly:

Note that some media have been comparing apples with pears here: they claimed IPCC has reduced its upper sea level limit from 88 to 59 cm, but the former number from the TAR did include this ice dynamics uncertainty, while the latter from the AR4 does not

As documented above the TAR did not include such uncertainties, writing of its Figure 11.12:

Note that this range does not allow for uncertainty relating to ice-dynamical changes in the West Antarctic ice sheet.

I asked RealClimate about this, and they responded:

The TAR range included mass-balance estimates for the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets (though did not include dynamical changes - i.e. changes due to changes in ice streams, calving, grounding line movement, etc which were then thought to be small). Recent observations point to the vital importance of such terms in assessing the net mass balance, thus since they are highly uncertain, it was thought more prudent to not include the mass-balance terms this time around. Our statement above should probably state that "the former number from the TAR did include some ice-sheet mass balance uncertainty, while the latter from the AR4 does not"

What RealClimate fails to acknowledge is that because the TAR did not consider dynamical uncertainties, then a similar uncertainty range would have to be added on top of the TAR top end estimate to make it apples-to-apples with the top end uncertainty in the AR4. So in effect they cancel out and are not relevant to this discussion.

Presumably when the IPCC AR4 says "a basis in published literature is lacking" it is indeed prudent not to speculate. I would assume that there is also no basis in the published literature to conclude that sea level rise might stop instantaneously next year, so they didn’t include that either;-)

So what then do we get when comparing the two reports? The following figure shows the TAR and AR4 estimates on the same graph, taken from the TAR with the AR4 values superimposed. The AR4 ranges are delineated using the same color scheme as the TAR, but with rounded ends. The AR4 values are for 2090-2099, which I have presented as 2095. There is, as noted above, some error term on the upper end of the range. But it should be applied to both the TAR and AR4 estimates, so for comparative purposes they basically cancel out.

Thus, I conclude that the top end estimate has indeed come down from the TAR to the AR4, and those making this observation are accurately representing the AR4. Why didn't the IPCC just say so?

Posted on February 7, 2007 03:18 PM View this article | Comments (23)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty

February 01, 2007

Does the Truth Matter?

Here are seven paragraphs from the conclusion to Alan Mazur’s excellent book True Warnings and False Alarms: Evaluating Fears about the Health Risks of Technology, 1948-1971 (Resources for the Future, 2004, pp. 107-109, buy a copy here)-- the concluding subsection is titled "Does the Truth Matter?" .

Mazur distinguishes between a "knowledge model" and a "politics model" for understanding public debates involving science. These distinctions are somewhat (but not entirely) related to the concepts of the "linear model" and "interest group pluralism" that I discuss in my forthcoming book, which is really about how to reconcile the fact that there are elements of both models in the reality of decision making. Neither of Mazur’s models accurately describes how the world works, we need both. Some of the more useful debates and discussions following my testimony his week reflected a paradigm clash between those who view the world through the lens pf the "knowledge model" and those – like me – who accept that the "politics model" also reflects some fundamental realities as well. Here is the excerpt:

In a democracy, the people or their representatives are free to spend public money as they see fit. Interest groups compete to channel funding to their favorite causes. If U.S. society chooses to allot far more money to cleaning up toxic waste sites, which harm few people, than to prevent teenagers from smoking, which creates an enormous health burden, that is our privilege as a nation.
Still, many risk analysts are disturbed when we fail to maximize the number of lives save per dollar of risk remediation. They point out that actions taken by government to avoid the consequences of an alleged hazard are often unrelated to the severity or scientific validity of the hazard (EPA 1982; Breyer 1993; Graham and Wiener 1995; Mazur 1998). The inference is that policy should be better aligned with science, and that irrational or inefficient elements of policymaking should be eliminated (but see Mazur 1995 and Driesen 2001 for limitations on this positions).

Yet public policy does not always flow directly from scientific knowledge. A value-laden subject decision is always involved, one that requires weighing pros and cons, costs and benefits, winners and losers. A wise policy choice for one party with certain interest may not be the wisest choice for a party with different interests. These considerations raise a question: does scientific evaluation of a warning matter at all?

Essentially two models show how science is applied to public policy. The first – call it the "knowledge model" – assumes that scientists can obtain approximately true answers to their research questions with methods that are fairly objective. This knowledge is used to inform public policy. For example, scientists can determine the health risks from exposure to fluoride at levels adequate to prevent cavities. Policy makers then use this finding as one factor in deciding whether to add fluoride to community drinking water. Such decisions cannot follow from facts alone, but facts ought to influence outcomes. If health risk is high, that should help shift the decision against fluoridation; if low, that should encourage fluoridation. The model makes no sense to anyone who denies that science can find correct answers.

The second model – the "politics model" – can be applied whatever one’s view concerning the objectivity of science. Here partisans use scientific findings as political capital to sway policy in the direction they prefer. If such partisans favor fluoridation, they will claim there is little health risk; if they oppose it, they claim a high health risk. I makes no difference if the findings are correct, objective, or honest as long as they are persuasive. The actors bury findings that work against their position, or attack them as invalid or inapplicable. In the politics model, scientific claims are used polemically, just like any other kind of political argumentation (Mazur 1998; Brown 1991).

The politics model has many proponents. Partisans in a particular controversy often see their goal as sufficiently important to justify any interpretation of scientific data that is favorable to their cause. During breaks from writing this final chapter, I am reading John McPhee’s (1971) laudable biography of David Brower, a major environmentalist of the postwar period. McPhee repeatedly describes Brower’s habit of making up “facts” to support his arguments against industrialists and developers. The biographer seems to regard this as an endearing tactic of the "archdruid" in his advocacy for wilderness preservation. Like McPhee, we sympathize with those who fight the good fight, accepting their argumentation when in other contexts it would be vexing.

But the politics model loses its appeal if applied to the entire array of technical controversies affecting policy. Science that is sufficiently malleable to serve any position in one controversy can serve any position in all controversies, and in that event science does not matter at all. The famous parable of “the tragedy of the commons” tells how each shepherd maximized his own herd’s grazing on the village green until no grass remained for anyone (Hardin 1968). In the same way, if each technical expert interprets data for his or her own convenience, with no attempt at objectivity, there will be no experts left with unimpeachable credibility, and we will all suffer for it. [emphasis added]

Posted on February 1, 2007 07:48 AM View this article | Comments (3)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty | Science + Politics | The Honest Broker

January 29, 2007

Science and Politics of Food

The New York Times Sunday Magazine has an excellent and provocative article on the science and politics of food by Michael Pollan. Here is an excerpt, but read the whole thing:

Most nutritional science involves studying one nutrient at a time, an approach that even nutritionists who do it will tell you is deeply flawed. “The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science,” points out Marion Nestle, the New York University nutritionist, "is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of food, the food out of the context of diet and the diet out of the context of lifestyle."
If nutritional scientists know this, why do they do it anyway? Because a nutrient bias is built into the way science is done: scientists need individual variables they can isolate. Yet even the simplest food is a hopelessly complex thing to study, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in complex and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another. So if you’re a nutritional scientist, you do the only thing you can do, given the tools at your disposal: break the thing down into its component parts and study those one by one, even if that means ignoring complex interactions and contexts, as well as the fact that the whole may be more than, or just different from, the sum of its parts. This is what we mean by reductionist science.

Scientific reductionism is an undeniably powerful tool, but it can mislead us too, especially when applied to something as complex as, on the one side, a food, and on the other, a human eater. It encourages us to take a mechanistic view of that transaction: put in this nutrient; get out that physiological result. Yet people differ in important ways. Some populations can metabolize sugars better than others; depending on your evolutionary heritage, you may or may not be able to digest the lactose in milk. The specific ecology of your intestines helps determine how efficiently you digest what you eat, so that the same input of 100 calories may yield more or less energy depending on the proportion of Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes living in your gut. There is nothing very machinelike about the human eater, and so to think of food as simply fuel is wrong.

Also, people don’t eat nutrients, they eat foods, and foods can behave very differently than the nutrients they contain. Researchers have long believed, based on epidemiological comparisons of different populations, that a diet high in fruits and vegetables confers some protection against cancer. So naturally they ask, What nutrients in those plant foods are responsible for that effect? One hypothesis is that the antioxidants in fresh produce — compounds like beta carotene, lycopene, vitamin E, etc. — are the X factor. It makes good sense: these molecules (which plants produce to protect themselves from the highly reactive oxygen atoms produced in photosynthesis) vanquish the free radicals in our bodies, which can damage DNA and initiate cancers. At least that’s how it seems to work in the test tube. Yet as soon as you remove these useful molecules from the context of the whole foods they’re found in, as we’ve done in creating antioxidant supplements, they don’t work at all. Indeed, in the case of beta carotene ingested as a supplement, scientists have discovered that it actually increases the risk of certain cancers. Big oops.

Posted on January 29, 2007 01:20 AM View this article | Comments (2)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Biotechnology | Risk & Uncertainty | Science + Politics

January 09, 2007

Robert Muir-Wood in RMS Cat Models: From the Comments

[We think that Robert Muir-Wood's comments on the Tampa Tribune article that we discussed yesterday deserve to be highlighted. Robert thanks much for participating and adding this context from RMS. -Ed.

Robert Muir-Wood
RMS

It might be useful to provide some more measured background to this story than is to be found in the Tampa Tribune.

The idea for holding an expert elicitation on hurricane activities emerged at RMS during the summer of 2005. Expert elicitations are commonplace in the earthquake community, but, this was the first time (we believe) one had been attempted among climatologists. All those invited to the Oct 2005 meeting were told in the invitation that the purpose of the meeting was 'to predict the activity rate of hurricanes, relevant to impact and loss modeling .. over the next 3-5 years'. Four scientists agreed to attend; Jim Elsner, Mark Saunders, Kerry Emanuel and Tom Knutson. Through the meeting, and in email exchanges in the days thereafter, a consensus was achieved around expected rates of Cat1-5 and Cat3-5 storms in the Atlantic Basin and at US landfall for the period 2006-2010. This consensus does not mean that everyone walks out of the meeting having agreed an identical answer but that everyone's view has been equally weighted in arriving at an expected activity rate.

RMS then took these findings and prepared to implement them in the RMS Hurricane Cat model. In the model Atlantic hurricanes are split into five separate populations according to the area of formation and track. The research to determine which track types were expected to show predominant increases was undertaken by Manuel Lonfat and based on his findings the 'increment of activity' was distributed among the track types to preserve the overall activity rate budget at landfall. There are alternative perspectives on regionalization (as emphasized by Jim Elsner), but as such a high proportion of intense hurricanes affect Florida, the Gulf and the Southeast, for the same increase in activity rates, modeled loss results in these regions are relatively insensitive to reasonable alternative regionalizations.

At the end of this process (in March 2006) a press release was issued along with a white paper describing all the work that had been undertaken - both after being checked with the four experts. Ultimately the results of the implementation of the increase in activity rates were the responsibility of RMS and we did not look to get the experts to endorse the outcome around changes in modeled losses. A scientific paper describing the whole procedure is now in process of being published in a peer reviewed journal.

In October 2006 the expert elicitation was repeated to cover the period 2007-2011. All four original experts were invited and only Jim Elsner declined, citing that he was ‘under contract’ with another modeling organisation. At the second expert elicitation there were seven climatologists, who were presented with results from twenty statistical/climatological forecast models, each being assigned 100c of probability to be assigned among the different models. The results from this exercise (in terms of expected levels of Cat1-5 and Cat 3-5 landfalling activities) were within 1-2% of the mean expected activity rates of the first expert elicitation. Again all the models, their results and the outcome of the elicitation will be published in scientific journals.

The political response to the ‘insurance crisis’ currently underway in Florida is looking for someone to blame. Cat modelers are simply the messengers relaying news concerning the significance of a period of significantly higher hurricane activity that has persisted in 9 out of the last 12 years and that climatologists, as polled at the most recent expert elicitation, expect to continue for a decade or more longer. There is a need to get journalists and politicians in Florida to focus more attention on the reasons for the increase in hurricane activity and, in particular, the role of climate change.

Posted on January 9, 2007 09:25 AM View this article | Comments (8)
Posted to Author: Others | Climate Change | Disasters | Risk & Uncertainty

January 08, 2007

An Update: Faulty Catastrophe Models?

Last April we discussed at length the profound significance to hurricane risk estimation of changes made by a leading company, Risk Management Solutions or RMS, to the implementation of catastrophe models used by insurance, reinsurance, among others in the risk management business. A news story from yesterday’s Tampa Tribune provides a perspective that underscores our original analysis.

Last April we wrote:

It does not seem to me that RMS recognizes how profoundly revolutionary this perspective is, or its potential consequences for their own business. What they are say is that the historical climatology of hurricane activity is no longer a valid basis for estimating future risks. This means that the catastrophe models that they provide are untethered from experience. Imagine if you are playing a game of poker, and the dealer tells you that the composition of the deck has been completely changed – now you don’t know whether there are 4 aces in the deck or 20. It would make gambling based on probabilities a pretty dodgy exercise. If RMS is correct, then it has planted the seed that has potential to completely transform its business and the modern insurance and reinsurance industries.

Yesterday’s Tampa Tribune has an article on the changes to the RMS model, which includes comments from scientists consulted by RMS who suggest that the changes to the model are scientifically unsupportable. Here is an excerpt from the news story:

The leading computer model used by the insurance industry to justify huge rate increases in coastal areas nationwide relies on faulty science, says an expert credited with helping develop it.
"I think it points to a problem with the way these modeling groups are operating," said Jim Elsner, a professor of geography at Florida State University.

Elsner was one of four experts on a panel assembled in late 2005 to provide input for the computer model by Risk Management Solutions of Newark, Calif.

He said the results, details of which were brought to his attention by the Tribune, contain assumptions that are "actually unscientific."

The flaws identified by Elsner and another panelist have nationwide implications. The expert input was used to justify loss estimates that have prompted major insurance companies to request homeowners rate increases of up to 40 percent.

The problem: RMS took a consensus of experts that there will be more storms across the Atlantic, then added its own projections about which U.S. regions would be most affected.

In an interview Saturday, Gov. Charlie Crist called RMS's actions "apparent misrepresentations" that are stunning and appalling, but in a way, part of a pattern.

"It almost doesn't shock me because this industry has been taking remarkable advantage of our people," Crist said. "Big insurance is about to face a new day in Florida."

The article reveals that the changes made by RMS apparently did not reflect what they were told by a panel of scientists that they convened to provide an informal expert elicitation:

In March, RMS surprised the insurance industry with a dramatic change in the benchmark catastrophe software model it sells access to. Instead of using historical models based on more than 100 years of storm data, RMS announced a "medium-term" five-year model for 2006 through 2010.

The models contain specific data on tens of millions of homes, allowing insurers to estimate risk based on computer simulations of possible storms.

Based on the new model, RMS said hurricane losses would increase by 40 percent over the Gulf Coast and 25 percent to 30 percent in the other regions.

Consumer advocates tried to raise alarms at the time, with little success.

Robert Hunter, a former Texas insurance commissioner now with the Consumer Federation of America, said the primary reason for the change to the five-year model appeared to be pressure from the insurance industry.

Thomas R. Knutson, a research meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton, N.J., and another RMS expert panelist, said the five-year timeline didn't come from the experts.

"I think that question was driven more by the needs of the insurance industry as opposed to the science," he said.

In March, RMS said the five-year model was developed in cooperation with the expert panel that included Elsner and Knutson, and that based on their perspective: "Increases in hurricane frequency should be expected along the entire U.S. coast, but will be highest in the Gulf, Florida, and the Southeast, while lower in the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast."

"I didn't make any such statement of that type," Knutson said Friday.
Elsner said he warned RMS about flaws in the model. "I said that's not a good way of doing it," he recalled, and said RMS exaggerated the basic science "well beyond what we expected."

Though RMS said in March that the expert panel "agreed unanimously that a forward-looking view of risk should reflect a higher probability of landfalling hurricanes," Elsner said there was no consensus.

It doesn’t sound like we’ve heard the end of this issue:

Other experts in the catastrophe-modeling business have questions, too.
Long-term historical data are still the most credible, given the sparse data available for projecting the next five years, Karen Clark, chief executive officer of AIR Worldwide, said in a speech in the summer. Her company is an RMS competitor. Clark encouraged insurance companies not to replace the long-term model with the short-term one. Still, AIR has launched its own version of a five-year program for customers.

The details of how RMS arrives at its projections are considered a trade secret.

"We have never been able to get what they call the information out of the black box to review their models," said Bob Lotane, a spokesman for Florida's Office of Insurance Regulation. He said a public modeling system the state is working on should provide a way to verify the RMS projections.

Crist said information from RMS might be subpoenaed.

As we concluded last April,

From the perspective of the basic functioning of the insurance and reinsurance industries, the change in approach by RMS is an admission that the future is far more uncertain than has been the norm for this community. Such uncertainty may call into question the very basis of hurricane insurance and reinsurance which lies in an ability to quantify and anticipate risks. If the industry can’t anticipate risks, or simply come to a consensus on how to calculate risks (even if inaccurate), then this removes one of the key characteristics of successful insurance. Debate on this issue has only just begun.

Posted on January 8, 2007 12:31 PM View this article | Comments (15)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters | Risk & Uncertainty

December 14, 2006

Follow Up to Flood Policy Presentation

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

First, here are the main points of my presentation:

*The "100-year flood" is not a good basis for a successful national flood policy.
*Losses provide a basis for evaluating long-term policy success.

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

*Population and development drive loss trends.

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

EMERGING ISSUES?
OR THE SAME OLD ISSUES?

Here are relevant background links:

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

Several papers of ours are relevant:

On national flood policies:

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

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 2000. Flood Impacts on Society: Damaging Floods as a Framework for Assessment. Chapter 21 in D. Parker (ed.), Floods. Routledge Press: London, 133-155. (PDF)

On climate and flood damage:

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

On the politics of flood disaster declarations:

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

On disaster losses and flood damage:

Downton, M., J. Z. B. Miller and R. A. Pielke, Jr., 2005. Reanalysis of U.S. National Weather Service Flood Loss Database, Natural Hazards Review, 6:13-22. (PDF)

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

On flood disasters related to tropical cyclones:

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

On the role of demographics in hurricane losses:

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

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

More along these lines can be found here.

Posted on December 14, 2006 01:26 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Disasters | Risk & Uncertainty

December 06, 2006

Scott Saleska on Tuning the Climate

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

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

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

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

Posted on December 6, 2006 03:47 PM View this article | Comments (38)
Posted to Author: Others | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty

November 14, 2006

Naomi Oreskes on Consensus

Naomi Oreskes, of the University of California-San Diego and a leading scholar of the history of science, wrote an excellent article on scientific consensus a few years ago as part of a special issue of Environmental Science & Policy which critiqued the debate over Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist. This is of course the same Naomi Oreskes famous for her short essay reviewing abstracts on "global climate change" in Science (a subject I do not wish to discuss in this thread, thanks!). Below I have reproduced a few lengthy excerpts from Naomi’s paper relevant to recent discussions here, though I encourage you to read the whole paper, especially the three cases that she describes. You can find the entire set of papers in the special issue here.

Oreskes, N., 2004. Science and public policy: what's proof got to do with it? Environmental Science & Policy, 7:369-383 (PDF).

In recent years it has become common for informed defenders of the status quo to argue that the scientific information pertinent to an environmental claim is uncertain, unreliable, and, fundamentally, unproven. Lack of proof is then used to deny demands for action. But the idea that science ever could provide proof upon which to base policy is a misunderstanding (or misrepresentation) of science, and therefore of the role that science ever could play in policy. In all but the most trivial cases, science does not produce logically indisputable proofs about the natural world. At best it produces a robust consensus based on a process of inquiry that allows for continued scrutiny, re-examination, and revision. . .
Most of us realize that proof—at least in an absolute sense—is a theoretical ideal, available in geometry class but not in real life. Nevertheless, many of us still cling to the idea that some set of facts—some body of knowledge—will resolve our problems and make clear how we should proceed. History suggests otherwise: earlier scientific wisdom has been overturned, earlier generations of experts have made mistakes. This is as true in physics and chemistry as in biology and geology. The criteria that are typically invoked in defense of the reliability of scientific knowledge—quantification, replicability, falsifiability—have proved no guarantee. Moreover, experts do not always agree. Even when there is no transparent political, social, or religious dimension to a debate, honest and intelligent people may come to different conclusions in the face of the "same" evidence, because they have focused their sights on different dimensions of that evidence, emphasizing different elements of the evidentiary landscape. Even when a scientific community reaches consensus on a previously contested issue—as earth scientists did in the 1960s over moving continents—there are always dimensions that remain unexplained. In the future, plate tectonics no doubt will be modified, perhaps overturned entirely. Indeed, there are a handful of scientists today who advocate Earth expansion to explain continental separation, and they are of course eager to detail the limitations of plate tectonics theory (e.g. Shieds, 2003). Nevertheless, for now plate tectonics remains the consensus of most Earth scientists: our best basis for understanding the Earth. . .

Scientific consensus is a complex process—involving a matrix of social, political, economic, historical considerations along with the epistemic—and history shows that its achievement typically requires a long time: years, decades, even centuries. But even when a stable consensus is achieved, scientific uncertainty is not eliminated. Rather, once we have deemed the remaining problems as "minor"—which is to say, insufficiently great as to warrant further concern—we simply live with them (Engelhardt and Caplan, 1987). Moreover, the grounds on which scientific communities have concluded that evidence is "good enough" to warrant living with the uncertainties have varied enormously throughout the course of history. A determined individual may choose to pursue these uncertainties, and that determination may successfully destabilize the prior consensus. In a "purely" scientific debate, that determination would, ideally, arise solely from the demands of empirical evidence, but no debate is ever "purely" scientific, given that, at minimum, credibility, reputation, and, perhaps future funding are at stake.

Posted on November 14, 2006 07:15 AM View this article | Comments (16)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty | Science + Politics

November 11, 2006

Interview with Richard Tol

The German magazine WirtschaftsWoche has posted online (auf Deutsch) an interview with economist Richard Tol discussing the economics of climate change. Benny Peiser has provided an English translation which we are happy to re-post here in full.

"WE'VE GOT ENOUGH TIME" - AN INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD TOL

WirtschaftsWoche, 11 November 2006

The eminent climate economist Richard Tol on climate alarmism and the right strategies for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions

WirtschaftsWoche (WiWo): Mr. Tol, You have called the report on the financial consequences of climate change by economics professor Sir Nicholas Stern "alarmist". How did you arrive at this judgement?

Tol: I speak of alarmism because Stern, in the summary of his report, estimated the damage [from climate change] to cost between 5 to 20 per cent of global GDP, but he is basing this on extremely pessimistic scenarios. He ignored other studies that estimate damages to be far below one per cent. This is how he arrives at the scary numbers. At the same time, the summary also gives the impression that the five per cent [of GDP damage] commences immediately and will continue for eternity if noting is done to counter it immediately. In the unabridged version, however, it is stated that the five per cent will be reached in 2075 at the earliest. This procedure is temerarious and an unacceptable way of political advice-giving.

WiWo: Now that the ice caps of the poles melt faster than even the leading sceptics have feared, isn't it essential to ring the alarm bells?

Tol: First of all, the report does not review these developments at all, and secondly any alarm does not help. It will take 50 to 100 years to lower the emission of greenhouse gases to an agreeable level. In order to achieve this goal, soberness is demanded.

WiWo: Why did Nicholas Stern sound the alarm nevertheless? He was the chief economist at the World Bank and is generally considered to be a sober person.

Tol: At the outset, the study was a purely academic exercise. Then the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, who commissioned the Stern Review, discerned that the leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, put the Labour Party increasingly under environmental pressure by portraying himself greener than the government. In order to raise its [environmental] profile, the government thus strongly influenced the tenor of the study.

WiWo: The fact that the earth is warming up due to human behaviour is scientifically beyond doubt. Isn't it then sensible to forcefully steer against it, as Nicholas Stern suggests?

Tol: We must do something and should now begin, that's where I agree with Stern. But there is no risk of damage that would force us to act injudiciously. We've got enough time to look for the economically most effective options rather than dash into 'actionism' which then becomes very expensive.

WiWo: Stern calculates that a forceful fight against global warming is today twenty times cheaper than doing nothing.

Tol: That is completely exaggerated. Stern has set the costs of damage much too high and the costs of emission reduction much too low. This employment of incorrect numbers makes it easy for opponents of climatic protection to evade accepting a consensus. They correctly assert: What the Stern Review claims is rubbish. You can only have an effective climate policy if everyone takes part. We need a long-term solution, and it has to be global one. The Stern Review perturbs this agreement process to the extent that it performs a disservice to the goals of climate protection.

WiWo: How seriously, according to your estimates, are the economic consequences of global warming?

Tol: The situation is serious, but definitely not as seriously as Stern claims. According to my computations the greenhouse effect can cause annual damage of around 0,5 per cent of global GDP. In the next century, when the impact of global warming will be felt fully, the damage could amount to two to four per cent, if nothing would be done about it.

WiWo: What do you suggest as counter measure?

Tol: The means of my choice would be to raise world-wide taxes on emissions. But that is politically not feasible. Thus, emission trading remains as the second best solution. The state allocates certificates to businesses which - at the outset - permit them free emissions of carbon dioxide, as they do today, and without setting secondary costs. However, if they want to produce more, they must either produce more [energy] efficiently or buy from other businesses (which have reduced their carbon dioxide output) certificates at a kind stock exchange. Such a free market system helps the environment.

WiWo: In Europe, such a regulatory system has been in place since last year. Nevertheless, it hasn't had much of an effect.

Tol: That is because of the fact that too many certificates were allocated. Consequently, little money can be made from the sales of certificates at the moment. Thus there are no incentives for lowering CO2-emissions. In order to have any lasting effect, the certificate trade would have to incorporate traffic, households and agriculture, additional greenhouse gases and the whole world economy. Europe alone cannot save the climate.

WiWo: Why should China and India, whose industries still produce a great deal with outdated technologies, join in the certificate trade?

Tol: It is exactly this outdated technology that makes it possible for China and India to achieve large CO2 reductions by way of relatively small investments. They could sell the emissions they reduce to Europe or the USA and could thus make a lot of money.

WiWo: The United Nations is currently trying to agree a new international climate treaty. How promising are such agreements?

Tol: They don't accomplish much as the Kyoto Treaty has already revealed. Only few countries committed themselves to concrete goals at all, only few uphold their obligations, and some, like Canada recently, simply pull out again. And why not - there is no threat of sanctions!

WiWo: Does that mean that 6000 UN delegates in Nairobi are gathering for a useless chit-chat?

Tol: They should concentrate on organising an international trade with certificates and close co-operation regarding the introduction of low-carbon technologies. Unfortunately neither issue is on the agenda. In fact, according to our calculations, world-wide greenhouse gas emissions could be halved in one fell swoop if the world would employ the best available technologies.

WiWo: Isn't it rather utopian to believe that all the countries in the world would agree on uniform technical standards?

Tol: It would often be sufficient if few market-dominating countries made advances in this direction. All the cars of this world, for example, are manufactured in just ten countries. If these countries would agree to reduce pollution output per HP by half in say ten years, that would relieve the environment enormously. The rest of the world would have no choice than to join in. Something similar applies to power stations, for which even fewer countries possess the technology. A bulk of problems would be solved if we succeeded to decouple energy consumption and emission output by means of modern technologies.

WiWo: Should the governments subsidise certain technologies financially?

Tol: We should certainly prevent civil servants to determine what is good or bad in this respect. Policy should be limited to determine certain goals, just like California, for instance, did with regards to car emissions. This would accelerate research and development most effectively.

WiWo: The German government reinforces the employment of renewable energies such as wind and sun. Wouldn't a rapid expansion of nuclear energy protect global climate substantially better?

Tol: The huge amount of money that is flowing into wind energy in Germany is an off-putting example of what happens when governments select the technology. The people who are now earning very well on account of wind turbines had most excellent relations to the formerly Green [Party run] Department of the Environment. Much money is flowing although wind energy is very unreliable and will never provide more than ten per cent of the total energy requirement. In addition, wind energy is expensive and technical progress already today seems to be exhausted to a large extent. Nuclear power can be a solution. In any case, it is more reliable and, most likely, also cheaper in the long term.

WiWo: Some experts believe that it costs less to adapt to climate change instead of stopping it. Are they right?

Tol: We should do both. In order to prevent that rising sea levels flood coastal areas, the building of dykes is an inexpensive solution. But we should not let global warming proceed unconstrained, otherwise we risk that one day the water in the oceans evaporates.

WiWo: Next year, the IPCC, the scientific committee of the UN in charge of assessing climate change, will issue its next report. Is there sufficient economic expertise readily available in the IPCC?

Tol: Unfortunately, not at all. Over the years, the IPCC has become ever greener and the few economists, who were previously involved, have been pushed out. Obviously, this casts doubt on the quality of the results.

WiWo: On a personal note, how confident are you that the climate can be still salvaged?

Tol: I do not see any reason to panic. We've got enough time to act in response. And, it would appear that the Americans and Chinese, the two biggest climate sinners, will soon invest much more in modes of climate protection. The results of the American elections will strengthen climate activists in the USA so that I envisage new concrete climate programmes in the next three years. The Chinese will follow suit in the next decade, not least because otherwise they will be threatened by catastrophic environmental damage. That will generate a huge drive.

Posted on November 11, 2006 09:29 AM View this article | Comments (8)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty

November 04, 2006

Mike Hulme on the Climate Debate

Mike Hulme, Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, and Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, has written a thoughtful, accurate, and brave op-ed for the BBC on the curent state of the climate debate. Here is how he begins:

Climate change is a reality, and science confirms that human activities are heavily implicated in this change.
But over the last few years a new environmental phenomenon has been constructed in this country - the phenomenon of "catastrophic" climate change.

It seems that mere "climate change" was not going to be bad enough, and so now it must be "catastrophic" to be worthy of attention.

The increasing use of this pejorative term - and its bedfellow qualifiers "chaotic", "irreversible", "rapid" - has altered the public discourse around climate change.

This discourse is now characterised by phrases such as "climate change is worse than we thought", that we are approaching "irreversible tipping in the Earth's climate", and that we are "at the point of no return".

I have found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied their thirst for environmental drama and exaggerated rhetoric.

It seems that it is we, the professional climate scientists, who are now the (catastrophe) sceptics. How the wheel turns.

His comments about being chastised for not going far enough in his pronouncements on climate change strike a chord very familiar to me. Comments by Mike Hulme echo those made by Steve Rayner, Hans von Storch and Nico Stehr, and others. Could it be that we are seeing the emergence of more responsible leadership on climate change among the scientific community? It sure looks that way.

Thanks Mike for speaking out.

Posted on November 4, 2006 08:30 AM View this article | Comments (25)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty

October 05, 2006

The One Percent Doctrine

This report from the BBC on the latest international climate negotiations:

One delegate told me he thought the pace of political ambition on emissions was so slow that we had a 1,000-1 chance of avoiding dangerous climate change.
He later sent me a text message to assert that he had been overly pessimistic. The odds, he said, were only 100-1.

So when is it time to re-open for negotiation FCCC Article 2? For those wanting a bit more background on this cryptic post, please see this paper in PDF.

Posted on October 5, 2006 04:17 PM View this article | Comments (5)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty

September 01, 2006

Back to Square One?

The BBC quotes AAAS president John Holdren as saying that the work has already reached the threshold of dangerous climate change. Why does this matter? If scientists actually believe that this is the case then it would mean that the overriding objective of the Framework Convention on Climate Change is obsolete and needs to be revisited. Here is what the BBC reports:

One of America's top scientists has said that the world has already entered a state of dangerous climate change.
In his first broadcast interview as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, John Holdren told the BBC that the climate was changing much faster than predicted.

"We are not talking anymore about what climate models say might happen in the future.

"We are experiencing dangerous human disruption of the global climate and we're going to experience more," Professor Holdren said.

The central objective of the FCCC is described in its Article 2 as:

stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.

But if dangerous anthropogenic interference has already occurred or is inevitably on its way, then "prevention" is not in the cards and Article 2 becomes meaningless as a guide to action. Re-opening up Article 2 for revision and updating would be extremely contentious. But view it is needed. If the science advances, so to should the policy response.

I earlier commented that the political issue of “dangerous” climate change will create incentives for scientists to claim that we are on the brink, but not there yet. Hence we often here claims of "ten years to act" and so on. I’d expect that the politically-savvy IPCC will split this baby by placing us on the brink of dangerous climate change, but not there yet. But the more scientists who speak out as Holdren have, the less tenable Article 2 is as a guide to action. In my view it is just a matter of time before Article 2 needs to be revisited. And the sooner the better.

Posted on September 1, 2006 08:48 AM View this article | Comments (7)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty

August 08, 2006

Beyond the Mug's Game

Steven Popper and his colleagues at the RAND Corporation have a thoughtful perspective on computer models and their uses in decision making, which he describes in a letter in this week's Economist:

SIR – Your excellent report on economic models raises troubling questions for both the builders and the consumers of such models ("Big questions and big numbers", July 15th). The root of many problems lies not in the models themselves but in the way in which they are used. Too often we ask "What will happen?", trapping us into the mug's game of prediction, when the real question should be: "Given that we cannot predict, what is our best move today?" This subtle shift in emphasis from forecasting to informing resolves many of the conundrums you raised.
Instead of determining the "best" model that solves optimal strategies we should instead seek the most "robust" model that achieves a given level of "goodness" across myriad models and uses assumptions consistent with known facts. My colleagues and I use such methods to address intractable policy issues fraught with arguments over which model is "right", what assumptions are valid and what is the nature of the good? This method makes the decision to be informed part of the analysis itself and the results are more readily accepted by policymakers.

Steven Popper
Senior economist
RAND Corporation
Santa Monica, California

Posted on August 8, 2006 05:51 AM View this article | Comments (0)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty

August 07, 2006

Hurricanes, Catastrophe Models, and Global Warming

Yesterday’s Boston Globe had an interesting article about catastrophe models in the insurance industry in the context of uncertainties about hurricanes and global warming. The article raises a number of unanswered questions. Here are a few excerpts and a few of my reactions:

An influential but little known segment of the insurance industry is considering whether climate change might be partly to blame for more intense hurricanes in the North Atlantic. The result of this examination, which comes as scientists debate the same question, could be skyrocketing insurance rates in coastal regions from Maine to Texas.
Already, one leading company that forecasts the risk of natural disasters for the insurance industry has revamped the computer model it uses to simulate future weather trends. The model, which looks five years out, now captures the possibility that global warming might be contributing to hurricane activity.

Risk Management Solutions released the new model in May, predicting that average annual insurance losses will increase 25 to 30 percent in the coastal Northeast because of increased hurricane activity.

Florida state officials are researching whether they should add a climate change component to an insurance hurricane risk model they have developed. And Boston-based AIR Worldwide Corp., another top risk modeler, is launching a study with Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist Kerry Emanuel to understand global warming's impact on hurricanes and whether insurance risk will rise as a result.

"It behooves us to research this in a scientific way," said Karen Clark, president and chief executive officer of AIR Worldwide. "We want to quantify the effect of global warming on hurricane activity."

The confidential risk models that private companies like AIR and Risk Management Solutions develop are key factors in the price of homeowners insurance bought by many coastal residents. The modelers calculate the risk from hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural hazards to homes and businesses in a region that takes into account everything from construction material to wind speeds. Insurance providers often use the predictions as an important piece in a complicated formula to set rates.

If global warming is driving more intense hurricanes -- and more of those hurricanes hit land -- it could drastically increase the risk of property loss along crowded coasts.

If catastrophe models are an important factor in insurance rates, and insurance rates are an important factor in insurers bottom line (not to mention a hot-button political issue in U.S. coastal states), then it seems obvious that there is potential for financial conflicts of interest in this area. With respect to pharmaceuticals generally there has been much concern, appropriate in my view, about the role of financial ties to industry among researchers and advisors. And on the climate issue industry funding from the energy sector is tantamount to a scarlet letter. How should we think about insurance industry funding of research related to global warming and insurance risk? [Disclaimer- A few years ago I had a graduate student funded by an insurance company to study uncertainties in catastrophe models.]

Howard Kunreuther, an expert on risk and insurance at the Wharton School, hits the nail on the head when he in quoted in the article:

Ultimately, the problem modelers face is figuring out a short-term prediction from a long-term trend. "The problem is that scientists talk about climate change in terms of 25, 50, or more years; they are not willing to make predictions about five years," said Howard Kunreuther, co-director of the Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. "The insurance industry is most interested in knowing what is likely to happen in the next few years as they determine what premiums to set on their coverage against hurricanes and other natural disasters."

Predictions about the long-term future are of course safe, because they cannot be evaluated in the short term. And there will always be this or that event that is "consistent with" the long term predictions, and absolutely nothing is inconsistent with them. According to the article, some scientists are apparently willing in private to make short-term predictions for the insurance industry (also discussed at length here):

In part to deal with this problem, Risk Management Solutions convened a panel of four specialists, including Emanuel, in Bermuda last October to discuss, among other things, what was causing recent hurricane activity and how many storms might hit land.
Aided by the scientists, RMS came to the conclusion that the current period of hurricane activity is so different from the long-term record it didn't make sense anymore to base its models on only the past. In May, the company announced a new model that incorporated the specialists' opinions and the more recent spate of hurricanes, among other changes.

Telling the rest of us what they told the insurance industry, in the form of peer-reviewed, scientific, short-term predictions, would be good in a number of ways. It would allow for empirical evaluation of the predictive skill of short-term (5 years or less) hurricane/climate science, based on actual events. And importantly, it would provide some transparency and accountability for the insurance industry as it ventures into the complicated, conflicted, and political world of climate science, with implications for their bottom line and their customer's insurance rates.

Posted on August 7, 2006 07:07 AM View this article | Comments (4)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters | Risk & Uncertainty

June 29, 2006

An Honorable Retirement for the Shuttle

At Space.com Leonard David has a great news story on the upcoming shuttle launch with some interesting perspectives:

The soon-to-depart shuttle mission evokes a good news/bad news comeback from Joseph Pelton, a research professor with the Institute for Applied Space Research at George Washington University.
"The good news is that the shuttle is still a relatively safe experimental space vehicle with a 1-in-60 to 1-in-100 chance of a category one failure—loss of vehicle, loss of crew. The bad news is that after $2 billion in expenditures for the reflight effort—and now many years after the Columbia failure—critical objectives set by the CAIB have not been accomplished," Pelton told SPACE.com.

Pelton was lead investigator for Space Safety Report: Vulnerabilities and Risk Reduction In U.S. Human Space Flight Programs an independent assessment prepared and released last year by the Space and Advanced Communications Research Institute (SACRI) of George Washington University.

Pelton singled out several remaining key issues: the stiffening of the shuttle outer hull; the ability perform repairs to the shuttle’s thermal protection system in space; and correction of the foam-shedding problem.

"The mantra that NASA developed after Columbia that said ‘find it, fix it and fly safely again’ rings hollow after so much time and money has been spent with such limited results," Pelton explained.

NASA credibility and space funding

"In truth, the problems that NASA continues to experience with its shuttle and the International Space Station program—really the only reason the shuttle is still flying—goes back at least to the Challenger disaster in 1986," Pelton said.

Two major national space commissions back then—one looking into the Challenger accident, the other delving into the future of the American space program—noted that the shuttle was indeed becoming “obsolescent” and that it had to be replaced by another vehicle within at least 15 years, or 2001, Pelton noted.

"Instead of developing alternative plans for the launch of International Space Station components in smaller and more modular parts at that time," Pelton said, "NASA pushed ahead without developing a new vehicle, nor developing a back-up plan.

Now, not only is NASA’s credibility and space funding at risk, Pelton continued, but also at risk are the agency’s international partners that are engaged in the $100 billion station program. “The now ‘tar baby-like tandem’ of the ISS and the space shuttle has done great harm to space programs around the world."

NASA has over-invested in both the shuttle and station initiatives, Pelton said, taking away money from programs that truly matter to the United States and indeed the world.

Never too late to start over

"The truth of the matter is that the shuttle program—an experimental program when designed in the 1970s—should have been grounded years ago. It should be replaced by better, safer, and more cost efficient programs. The development of private space vehicles that are human-rated, something that NASA is currently actively supporting, is clearly the right step forward," Pelton advised.

Ultimately, it is not NASA that is at fault here, Pelton said, pointing to national leadership that has often overruled the space agency on where and how to spend their limited resources. It is never too late to start over, he said, and develop a NASA program that makes sense, balances expenditures, and set priorities that matter to the person in the street.

"The question is not whether NASA should be grounding the space shuttle and putting them in museums,” Pelton concluded, “but what are its backup plans and how can it restore balance to its overall space programs and give new focus to its various NASA centers?"

It is worth noting that under Pelton's estimates of risk (1/60 to 1/100) this equates to a probability of a catastrophic accident at between 15% an 63%(!) over 16 remaining flights. Lets say this again -- if Pelton's risk estimates are correct there is a rather high probability of another lost shuttle.

Space historian Roger Launius asks, appropriately, about the option of allowing the Shuttle to have an "honorable retirement":

Indeed, there is a lot riding on the next shuttle liftoff, beyond technology.
"This is one of the most significant missions of the shuttle program because of the policy implications that it presents," said Roger Launius, Chair, Division of Space History at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Launius underscored the fact that Griffin has stated clearly that if NASA does not fly successfully this time it would mean the end of the program. "That, of course, begs the question [as to] what defines a successful mission?"

The last mission, for all of its challenges, was successful by most measures. It launched, flew, and returned safely; it delivered its supplies and equipment to the ISS; it undertook several safety tests and repairs.

That being the case, several questions percolate to the surface, Launius said.

"Is a level of success commensurate with the last mission sufficient to conclude that the program will continue? If that is not where the bar is set, is it higher or lower? I confess that I have no idea. I also confess that I hope and pray that this mission is a rousing success, by any standard that one might want to apply," Launius told SPACE.com.

Honorable retirement

Launius also senses there is something present with the forthcoming shuttle flight that he hasn’t necessarily experienced before.

"A sustained and underlying depression seems present among those working in the program, some of them for their entire careers," Launius explained. "There is a sense of ending—as well as an ever-present perception of loss and failure—present among many members of the space shuttle team."

Without question, Launius said, the space shuttle will be retired within something less than a decade, whether it is after this next mission or 2010 or sometime a bit later.

"As the space shuttle enters its home stretch, it should be remembered with both praises for its many accomplishments and criticisms for its shortcomings,” Launius suggested. “I am in favor of giving the shuttle an honorable retirement and to give a full measure of respect and thanks to those charged with its operations over the years for their efforts."

In the process of retiring the space shuttle, "I hope NASA will ensure that the knowledge and expertise gained in the shuttle program is preserved and used for the future," Launius concluded.

In my view NASA is acting like an aging boxer, not knowing when to say when. The end result is often not pretty.

Posted on June 29, 2006 09:43 AM View this article | Comments (1)
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty | Space Policy

May 17, 2006

A Few Reactions to the Bonn Dialogue on the FCCC

This week the International Institute for Sustainable Development continues its invaluable service of providing summaries of international meetings and negotiations by providing a summary of the “UNFCCC dialogue on long-term cooperative action.” Here are a few reactions to that summary, focused mainly on issues of adaptation. The IISD summary suggests that serious problems remain with consideration of adaptation under the FCCC and that some developing countries are not satisfied:

ADAPTATION: Tanzania and the Philippines said adaptation should have the same status as mitigation, expressing concerns that it had not yet been seriously addressed. Tuvalu underscored adaptation as a crucial issue, and called for urgent action rather than studies or pilot projects, implementation of UNFCCC Article 4.4 (developed country support for adaptation for vulnerable developing countries) and a process to ensure a rapid response to help countries suffering damage. The Philippines highlighted the need for innovative ways of financing. Egypt noted that mitigation efforts in developing countries are receiving more support than adaptation measures through the CDM.

We have discussed this subject frequently. The FCCC has a built-in bias against adaptation and characterizes it as being in opposition to mitigation. Bizarrely, under the FCCC adaptation has costs but not benefits (and the IPCC follows this cooking of the cost-benefit books), because under its view of the world adaptation would be unnecessary if climate change could be prevented. Under this way of thinking, adaptation projects reflect costs that would be avoided with mitigation, hence, preventing adaptation represents a benefit of mitigation. Think about that for a minute, and ask yourself, how can adaptation and mitigation really be complements under the FCCC if the case for the latter depends in no small part on preventing the former?

Under the FCCC adaptation to climate change means something very specific, it does not mean adaptation to climate, but only to those marginal effects of climate changes directly attributable to greenhouse gas emissions. If this strikes you as unrealistic and confusing, you’d be right. The reality is that in many, if not most, places in developed and developing countries adaptation to climate (broadly, not just the marginal effects of GHGs on climate) makes good sense as societal is extremely vulnerable to the impacts of climate, whatever the underlying causes. As we have stated here many times, it is scientifically untenable to tease out the GHG contribution to human disasters like Katrina. It is nonsensical to try to implement policies that address only those marginal impacts of GHGs, rather than the root causes of disasters themselves, which lie primarily in societal vulnerability.

We discussed this sort of nonsense following COP-10 in December, 2004 based on another IISD report which included the following telling explanation of why it is that developing countries have difficulty receiving funding for adaptation projects:

. . . adaptation projects are generally built on, or embedded in, larger national or local development projects and, therefore, the funding by the GEF would only cover a portion of the costs. In other words, if a country seeks funding for a project on flood prevention, the GEF would only be able to finance a portion proportional to the additional harm that floods have caused or will cause as a result of climate change, and the rest would have to be co-financed by some other body. The plea from LDCs, particularly the SIDS, lies precisely on this paradox, in that even if funds are available in the LDC Fund, their difficulty of finding adequate co-financing, and the costly and cumbersome calculation of the additional costs, renders the financial resources in the LDC Fund, in practice, almost inaccessible.

At this weeks meeting a comment by the UK summarized by the IISD suggests that little has changed in this regard:

The UK identified some cross-cutting themes, including financing and scientific uncertainty, which is particularly problematic for adaptation.

Why is scientific uncertainty problematic for adaptation? Because unless there is a way to attribute the impacts of GHG-caused climate change on developing countries, under the FCCC there is no vehicle for action, as the FCCC is not an all-purpose framework for reducing vulnerabilities to the effects of climate. How ironic is this? Adaptation is all about decision making under uncertainty and preparing for a future that is unknown. So in the face of uncertainties adaptation should make good sense, because its benefits are broad. Yet, under the FCCC the arbitrary rules have been set up in such a way as to mostly exclude adaptation as a policy response.

Of course, this gets back to the fact that the FCCC has been and continues to be a vehicle for changes to global energy policies and considerations of adaptation simply get in the way. Approaching climate change in this fashion makes about as much sense as telling someone that because we don’t know when they will be struck by heart disease we can provide little assistance helping them to adopt of a healthy lifestyle.

To be fair, I have many friends and colleagues who are far more sanguine about the prospects for adaptation under the FCCC, and are willing to debate this point strenuously with me when I raise comments like those above. They use words like “mainstreaming” and “sustainable development” to make their case, and cite Article 4.4 of the FCCC, among others. I respect their views and perhaps our differences in views have a bit of glass half full/half empty about them. But even so I have been convinced for some time now that the FCCC is much more of an obstacle to effective action on adaptation than a facilitator. Much of its efforts on adaptation seem to be an effort to provide a fig leaf of competence in order gloss over what increasingly appears to be a fatal flaw in the framework. The recent report from the IISD provides no reason for me to change my views.

Until the very core of the FCCC is opened up for discussion (and by core I mean Article 2 and its gerrymandered definition of climate change), the bias against adaptation is likely to persist, and adaptation policies will continue to be presented as counter to the goals of mitigation and will continue to be considered in that manner in formal negotiations (statements to the contrary notwithstanding). If this is anywhere close to the mark then people will suffer and die more than they might otherwise because of the words used to frame the climate debate as an issue of energy policy, and energy policy only.

For further reading:

A short essay:

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 2004. What is Climate Change?, Issues in Science and Technology, Summer, 1-4. (PDF)

Peer-reviewed studies with lots of detail:

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

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 1998. Rethinking the Role of Adaptation in Climate Policy. Global Environmental Change, 8(2), 159-170. (PDF)

May 02, 2006

The Next IPCC Consensus?

Yahoo Asia has a news story on the on the forthcoming IPCC report. Here is an excerpt:

A United Nations panel on climate change noted for the first time the likelihood that global warming resulting from human activities is causing heat waves and other abnormal weather phenomena as well as Arctic ice mass loss, according to a draft report seen by Kyodo News on Sunday.
"It is very likely that greenhouse gas forcing has been the dominant cause of the observed warming of globally averaged temperatures in the last 50 years," says the draft fourth assessment report of Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

I haven’t see the draft of the report so I don’t know if it is accurate or not, but assuming that it is, it raises a few interesting issues in the context of our recent discussion of the notion of consensus.

First, it is worth comparing the quoted sentence by Yahoo Asia to its companion in the IPCC TAR (here in PDF):

In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.

One key difference is the change from “likely” (meaning 64-90%) to “very likely” (meaning >90%). They did not use “virtually certain” (>99%). (For the terms, see this PDF). From where I sit, a 10% chance that a greenhouse gas forcing is not the dominant cause of warming seems to allow plenty of room for healthy skepticism to exist. I’m interested in understanding why the IPCC is confident at the 90% level and not the 99% level. Clearly many scientists who have sp[oken out publicly on climate change are 99% certain.

A second key difference is the substitution of the phase "dominant cause" for the word "most." IPCC terms are not chosen arbitrarily and my reading of this is that as far as GHGs, it represents a step back from the statement in 2001. I equate "most" with a majority (>50%) and "dominant" with a plurality. I am sure commentators will have a field day with that. Were I a betting person I'd wager that "dominant" won't last until the end.

Of course, it should be said that the news story is referring to a draft and these statements may well be substantially modified before the report’s official release. However, if accurate, the preview of what the IPCC will say seems to allow considerable room for healthy skepticism, meaning that for the foreseeable future climate policy must develop in the context of a lack of absolute certainty. Less prosaically, we can fully expect the mainstream-skeptic debate to be with us for a long time, so we’d better develop policy responses that are robust to that conflict, efforts to scour the debate of such voices notwithstanding.

Posted on May 2, 2006 02:35 PM View this article | Comments (38) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty

April 27, 2006

Cutler and Glaeser on Why do Europeans Smoke More Than Americans? Part II

This is a second post discussing a paper by two Harvard economists, David Cutler and Edward Glaeser, available at the National Bureau of Economic Research that raises some interesting questions about the role of science and advocacy on the smoking issue. In this post I'd like to ask some questions about Figure 3 in that paper, reproduced below. For me, Figure 3 raises some really interesting questions about the relationship of science, advocacy, and societal outcomes for which I really have no answers for. I am hoping that Prometheus readers can point me to serious, scholarly literature that might explain what is shown in figure 3.

Figure 3 shows an increase in smoking in the U.S. through about 1950, broken up only by the Great Depression. There is then a drop off, which Cutler and Glaeser attribute to a first "health scare" about cigarettes which appeared first in the scientific literature and then in the popular media. The upward trend then resumes until the 1960s, a few ups and downs follow, and then, remarkably, from about 1970 on, a steady, almost monotonic decrease.

The question I have is, given these trends, how can one identify the effectiveness of advocacy for and against smoking, and in particular the role of science, uncertainty, and so-called "junk science" in outcomes as measured by societal outcome, in this case the number of cigarettes smoked per adult.

I have thought a good deal about this graph and it seems to show perhaps a number of things, which I suggest below.

1. In the battle over smoking efforts to deny a link between smoking and health risks seems to have been completely a lost effort. There is precious little evidence of the effects of such campaigns in this data. Of course, one could argue that the rate of decrease would be larger without such campaigns, however, if that were the case one would probably expect to see shorter term effects as such campaigns are more or less successful over time. This is a puzzle.

2. There are likely population effects that need to be disaggregated. This is smoking per adult, and as national population grows, this perhaps reflects less people deciding to take up smoking rather than a large increase in people quitting. But such data would be worth gathering.

3. Interestingly, there seems to be no acceleration of the trend in reduction of smoking as the scientific basis for a link between smoking and health risks became much stronger over time. The rate of change in this graph seems at a glance to be about the same in 1975 as it was in 1995. If there was a tight relationship between scientific understandings and societal outcomes, I'd hypothesize an ever increasing rate of change on this issue, especially as the pro-smoking media campaigns have waned. Now it could be that a bunch of complex factors conspire to randomly keep the rate of change in balance, and more analysis would be needed to determine this.

4. To me this data suggests a similarlity with data and findings in other areas of science. Specifically, science has a huge role in getting a subject onto the "agenda" of decision making, but after that, its role is very much dimished and subsumed to other factors, such as cultural, social, and political. If this is correct, it would require some deeper understanding about the role of advocacy relatd to scientific issues and the efficacy of using science as a tool of advocacy. This begs the question -- why has anti-smoking advocacy been so successful over time? The throwaway answer that increasing scientific certainly is the key does not seem to jibe with this data.

For me this graph opens up some fundamenal questions tha arise at he intersection of science, advocacy, societal outcomes. I am motivated enough to follow this up with some actual research, so I'd welcome any comments and suggestions. The case of smoking/science is often raised in discussions of climate change and other areas as an analogy, but I am not convinced that such analogies are based on anything more that supposition, guesses, and assumptions.

Posted on April 27, 2006 08:29 AM View this article | Comments (12) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Health | Risk & Uncertainty

April 26, 2006

Cutler and Glaeser on Why do Europeans Smoke More Than Americans? Part I

The relationship of scientific research, industry advocacy, government action, and public behavior on smoking is frequently cited in discussion and debate, but I have actually seen little empirical research that backs up the various claims that are often made on this issue. Two Harvard economists, David Cutler and Edward Glaser, have a paper available at the National Bureau of Economic Research that raises some interesting questions about the role of science and advocacy on the smoking issue.

A few points it seems can be taken as fact:

1. smoking is a health hazard
2. The smoking industry for many years engaged in an active campaign to suggest that smoking is not a health hazard
3. Smoking is addictive
4. Smoking rates, and the change in those rates, are different in different parts of the work

Cutler and Glaeser seek to untangle some aspects of this last point by asking “Why do Europeans Smoke More Than Americans?” The answer that Cutler and Glaeser provide it turns out is complicated, and in my view fundamentally flawed. Here is what they claim in their abstract:

While Americans are less healthy than Europeans along some dimensions (like obesity), Americans are significantly less likely to smoke than their European counterparts. This difference emerged in the 1970s and it is biggest among the most educated. The puzzle becomes larger once we account for cigarette prices and anti-smoking regulations, which are both higher in Europe. There is a nonmonotonic relationship between smoking and income; among richer countries and people, higher incomes are associated with less smoking. This can account for about one-fifth of the U.S./Europe difference. Almost one-half of the smoking difference appears to be the result of differences in beliefs about the health effects of smoking; Europeans are generally less likely to think that cigarette smoking is harmful.

Their findings are interesting, among them:

. . . price differences cannot explain why Americans smoke less than Europeans.
While our conclusions thus need to be interpreted with some care, the U.S. does not appear to tax or regulate tobacco consumption particularly highly, making these explanations unlikely to account for the lower smoking rate in the US.

Given that our model suggests a possible non-monotonic relationship between income and cigarette consumption, the lack of a clear consensus on the income elasticity of smoking is not so surprising.

So price, regulation, and income cannot explain the differences in smoking between the U.S. and Europe. Cutler and Glaeser next turn to beliefs about smoking, for which they begin by noting:

The U.S. has one of the highest rates of believing that smoking is harmful; 91 percent of Americans report believing that smoking causes cancer. Given the high proportion of Americans that believe in UFOs and the literal truth of the bible, this must represent one of the most remarkable instances of the penetration of scientific results in the country. Beliefs about the cancer-causing role of cigarettes in some European countries, like Finland, Greece, Norway, and Portugal, are almost identical to those in the U.S., but in other places beliefs are far weaker. For example in Germany only 73 percent of respondents said that they believed that smoking causes cancer.

An interesting aside, if this recent poll is to be believed more people in Europe believe that global warming is a serious problem than believe that smoking causes cancer. By contrast, in the U.S., the opposite is the case. I’m not sure what to make of this, but the answer is surely tied up in the question Cutler and Glaeser are trying to unravel.

Cutler and Glaser then go out on what I think is thin ice when they assemble an argument based on several lines of reasoning to conclude:

On the whole, our evidence suggests that differences in beliefs are the most important factor explaining the differences in smoking between the U.S. and Europe.

One of the most important lines of evidence is presented in their Figure 11, which I reproduce below.

View image

Figure 11 purports to show a relationship between beliefs about smoking and smoking rates. However, the relationship is entirely a function of excluding Greece from the analysis. Cutler and Glaeser argue earlier in their paper why Greece is excluded from the regressions:

When we examine bivariate relationships between smoking and other factors (prices, regulations, or beliefs), it is important to have a relatively homogeneous sample of countries by income. Within Europe, the major income outlier is Greece, with a per capita income that is 60 percent below the European average ($10,607 in Greece versus $25,858 in Europe in 2000) and 25 percent below the next lowest country (Spain, at $14,138). For this reason, we omit Greece from many of our regressions, though we present raw data for Greece in the tables and show the country in the figures.

I find this justification wholly unsatisfactory. Greece, despite its lower income has the highest rate of belief that smoking causes cancer. Greece is also highly regulated, and does not have unusually cheap cigarettes. In short, its inclusion would certainly muddy the analysis. Excluding it, somewhat arbitrarily in my view, does not add any confidence that Cutler and Glaeser have an adequate explanation for what is going on.

What I get from this paper is that in fact, we don’t yet have an adequate explanation for why we see large differences in smoking between the U.S. and Europe. Consequently, if we can't explain the role of scientific information in smoking, it is safe to say that our understanding of the role of scientific information in societal outcomes on other more complex issues remains frustratingly undeveloped.

In part II I will take a look at trends in U.S. smoking presented by Cutler and Glaeser and suggest a similar lack of understanding.

Posted on April 26, 2006 07:22 AM View this article | Comments (8) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Health | Risk & Uncertainty

April 10, 2006

Politicization of Science 101: How to Use Science to Argue Politics, Manipulate the Media, and Silence your Political Opponents

A recipe for effectively using science to advance political aims:

1. Find yourself in a highly political, high-stakes debate that involves considerations of science (or more generally, intelligence).

2. Seek to turn the political debate into a debate about science or information, that is, scientize the politics.

3. Seek to associate your preferred political outcomes with a clear consensus of the relevant expert community, even if this means oversimplifying the issue. This strategy will work best if you use the term “consensus” (scare quotes!) in an undefined manner. Even if there are legitimate areas of uncertainty or debate, keep the focus on “consensus.”

4. Disparagingly characterize anyone who disagrees with your preferred political perspective as a “skeptic” or “contrarian” or “outlying perspective.” Don’t allow any distinction between the typically few consensus areas of knowledge and typically many more areas that have some greater uncertainty. If uncertainty is raised as a concern, emphasize the need for preemptive action in the face of uncertainty.

5. Do whatever you can to associate your opponents with Republicans, Democrats, industry, environmentalists, or a lack of patriotism. The latter is particularly effective.

6. Argue that the media is dealing with mistruths by allowing your political opponents voice because they are not part of the science/information “consensus” (remember, if consensus is undefined you can use it against just about anyone who disagrees with you). Ask the media to favor your political agenda under these circumstances. (If the media can be tricked into thinking that claims about information are the same as political claims, then they just might fall for it, and take sides! Yours!)

If successful, this strategy will allow you to use science to argue for your favored political outcome while denying your opponent the opportunity to do the same, and the beauty of it is that you need not admit to being political at all, simply standing behind the truth, and who could be against the truth?

Two good examples of this strategy in practice are familiar to many of us, and in many ways the political dynamics of information/science are quite similar:

A. Climate science/politics.
B. Bush Administration arguments for going to war in Iraq.

The politicization of science is a bipartisan affair. The real question is whether politicization such as described above is OK (a) in no cases, (b) in all cases, or (c) in those cases in which the ends justify the means.

The more fundamental question that I have about this dynamic, which despite the tongue-in-cheekiness displayed above, is what effect such a strategy -- which I think exists in many venues -- has on the practice of science and the long-term sustainability of science as an effective contributor to policy and politics. Do we risk something in the long-term by using science as a Trojan Horse for political gain in the short term?

Posted on April 10, 2006 04:26 PM View this article | Comments (57) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty | Science Policy: General

March 25, 2005

Tyranny of the Plebiscite

From AP Wednesday, “The National Weather Service (news - web sites) will stick with the familiar "skinny black line" on maps projecting the paths of hurricanes, despite concerns that the practice fails to convey the uncertainty in forecasting and can give the public a false sense of security. Scott Kiser, the tropical cyclone program manager with the weather service, made the announcement Wednesday before the opening of the annual National Hurricane Conference. The agency had looked at three options: keeping the skinny line, using a series of large colored dots to represent the projected path, or using large circles that would encompass the projected path and the margin for error. Kiser said the decision to stick with the line was made after the weather service sought opinions from the public, the news media and emergency service workers, receiving 971 e-mailed responses. He said 63 percent favored keeping the skinny line. He summed up the response as: "Show us your best forecast — we're smart enough to figure it out."”

From a 1999 paper of mine looking at the role of NWS forecasts in the flood disaster in the Red River of the North, “Because the NWS issued its river stage predictions in terms of a single number, local decision makers did not have the information necessary to evaluate the risk they faced under alternative courses of action. Effectively, this put the NWS in a position it should not find itself -- of implicitly deciding what level of risk a local community should face (i.e., in this case a river stage of 49 feet). This can lead to misjudged risk assessment, overconfidence in forecasts, and ultimately poor decisions about how to fight the flood. A more appropriate process would have provided local decision makers and the public with probabilities of different levels of inundation, and coupled with other relevant information, the community and particular individuals could have decided how they ought to respond. Some local decision makers in the region want this responsibility, but others do not. Many of the decision makers interviewed expressed the following sentiment: “We don’t want changes, just give us an accurate forecast that the NWS will stand behind.” The local resistance to change is understandable: the effect of providing probabilistic information would result in a shift in responsibility (and accountability) for decision making on the question of “what river height do we prepare for?” from the NWS to the local decision makers. For many local decision makers this added responsibility is not desired. But more generally, few would argue that such decisions belong at the local level and should not be made by the NWS.”

Sometimes, science and technology decisions ought not to be made simply through surveys of the public or decision makers. The NWS has learned this lesson but apparently has not taken it to heart.

Posted on March 25, 2005 07:45 AM View this article | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty

March 01, 2005

Swiss Re on Disasters

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

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

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

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

Rising insured assets and population densities....

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

Posted on March 1, 2005 04:49 PM View this article | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty

February 24, 2005

More on Cat Models

Last year a student of mine, Edouard von Herberstein, wrote a fantastic master's thesis on the use of catastrophe models in insurance and reinsurance decision making. It is hard to find on our WWW site, so it is worth highlighting. Here is the abstract:

Hurricane risk pricing, catastrophe models, and data quality: Why it matters and what should be done about it?

Over the past 20 years, the colossal increase in computing power has allowed computers to simulate very complex systems that require millions of calculations and operations per second. Simulation software is frequently used to forecast weather, exchange rates fluctuations, stock price movement, or global climate. In most cases, computer simulation is the only available tool generating forecasts from complex models. Assuming that the use of more information in more complex simulators reduces uncertainty, decision makers often incorporate these forecasts in their decision processes. In some cases, decision makers give simulation tool results a very large weight in their final decision.

Catastrophe models are a good illustration of very complex computer simulations that largely drive business decisions in the insurance and reinsurance industries. But just as in global climate models, the sensitivity and uncertainty in catastrophe models should not be overlooked when using model output in decision-making. In this project ENVS graduate student Edouard von Herberstein proposes a method to assess the sensitivity of insurance pricing methods to data quality and questions whether these pricing techniques efficiently use the information in hurricane loss models.

See Edouard's complete report here.

Posted on February 24, 2005 12:42 PM View this article | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty

Catastrophe Models: Boon or Bane?

I just returned from a meeting where I had a chance to discuss the role of "catastrophe models" in insurance and reinsurance. Upon returning I thought that it might be worth revisiting an essay I wrote six years ago for a newsletter that we used to publish called the WeatherZine. Here is the essay in full:

WeatherZine, February, 1999

The 1990s have seen the rise of the catastrophe modeling industry in response to demand, primarily from the insurance industry, for quantification of risk. Decision makers seek from catastrophe models some estimate of the risk that they face due to extreme events like hurricanes or earthquakes. A typical model will incorporate information on weather (e.g., hurricane landfall and wind speed probabilities), insurance (e.g., the value of exposed property), and damage potential (e.g., engineering, building materials, construction, codes). The model uses these data to calculate things like probable maximum loss, annual expected loss, and losses due to a specific event. Insured losses are typically much smaller than total economic losses in a catastrophe. Catastrophe models have become fundamental to the existence of financial products such as catastrophe bonds and futures. Even the United States government has begun to develop its own catastrophe models to aid its Federal Emergency Management Agency response to disasters. Clearly, with so many decision makers wanting to understand risk, the rise of the catastrophe model industry should be applauded. But there is reason for hesitation: No one knows how well the models actually perform.

Evaluation of predictions of any sort can be tricky. It involves more than just comparing the prediction with what actually unfolds. For example, in the late 1800s a scientist predicted days on which tornadoes would or would not occur with 96% accuracy. This seemed like a truly remarkable feat until someone noticed that predicting "no tornadoes" every day would have given a 98.5% accuracy rate! For a prediction to show "skill" it must outperform a simple prediction based on persistence. In weather forecasting the simple prediction is climatology; in economics it is called the nave forecast; mutual fund managers use the performance of the S&P 500 as a benchmark. While some in the insurance industry have sought to evaluate models against actual events and historical losses, there exists no community-wide benchmark for evaluation, leaving most users in the dark as to how well the models actually predict catastrophe losses. The State of Florida and particular companies have invested significant effort to evaluate the models, but for the most part these evaluations are based on qualitative criteria such as the credentials of the modelers and whether or not the results "look realistic."

Historically, catastrophe losses have not been particularly amenable to the development of such a benchmark because there is such dramatic change over time in the context in which losses occur. This means that one cannot generate a simple estimate of expected losses based on what has occurred in the past, as actuaries typically do for the insurance industry. Consider that the great Miami hurricane of 1926 caused an inflation-adjusted $100 million in losses. But Miami had only about 100,000 residents at the time. Comparing the losses of 1926 with potential losses of today is like comparing apples and oranges. Even comparing Andrew's losses in 1992 with today's potential losses can mislead. Indeed, underestimates of risk based on improperly aggregating losses over time is one factor that stimulated the rise of the catastrophe model industry.

But even with the difficulties associated with placing catastrophe losses on an actuarial basis, it has been done. Traveler's Insurance Company for many years adjusted catastrophe losses for changing societal conditions as part of an in-house research capability. More recently, work by Changnon et al. (1996) and Pielke and Landsea (1998) have sought to respectively adjust crop/property insurance losses and hurricane losses for changes in society. Such adjustments, properly done for the insurance industry, could form the basis of a community (i.e., public) benchmark against which to evaluate catastrophe models. A catastrophe model would have skill if it were shown to outperform the benchmark. The degree to which the model outperforms the benchmark would determine its relative skill as compared to other models.

On the one hand, it seems logical that evaluation of catastrophe models would be in the interests of the users of the models, but it would also benefit the developers of the models. Public information on relative skill of the models would aid in marketing and pricing of their services. On the other hand, it is also important to recognize that for a subset of users of catastrophe models, the performance of the models is less important than their mere existence. Because the models exist, they allow for the quantification of risk. Because risk can be quantified, financial instruments like bonds and futures can be created and traded in the financial markets. Significant financial returns result to those companies that create and manage these financial instruments made possible by the existence of catastrophe models. And for the most part, these are not the same companies that bear the risk of a catastrophic loss. In the war against catastrophe losses, they are making the bullets, so to speak. This is perhaps one reason why there has not been a greater push to evaluate catastrophe models in a public forum.

Given experience with multi-tens-of-billions of dollars in losses in Hurricane Andrew in Miami and the Great Hanshin Earthquake in Kobi, it is only prudent to ask about the consequences of once again failing to properly calculate the risks of catastrophic losses. Catastrophe models have provided decision makers with a means to better estimate risk, but at the same time in catastrophe bonds and other instruments decision makers have created products that depend upon greater accuracy in awareness of risk. Catastrophe models are here to stay and will likely be used to develop ever more precise predictions of risk (e.g., at the zip code or even household level). Because most everyone pays taxes or has insurance, it would seem to be in the common interest to know how well the models predict by developing a public approach to the evaluation of catastrophe models - before events show us that we waited too long.

For further reading see the publications of Rade Muslin at: http://www.ffbic.com/actuary/papers/index.html; and particularly his paper on "Issues in the Regulatory Acceptance of Computer Modeling for Property Insurance Ratemaking", Journal of Insurance Regulation, Spring, 1997, pp. 342-359. (You need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open.)

Posted on February 24, 2005 12:03 AM View this article | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty

February 01, 2005

flooddamagedata.org

I have collaborated with colleagues Mary Downtown and Zoe Miller on a project sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to reanalyze the historical record of flood damages in the United States. The results of our project can be found here: http://www.flooddamagedata.org. Last week a journal article describing the project came out in Natural Hazards Review:

Downton, M., J. Z. B. Miller and R. A. Pielke, Jr., 2005. Reanalysis of U.S. National Weather Service Flood Loss Database, Natural Hazards Review, 6:13-22. (PDF)

As far as historical data on flood damages in the United States, I believe that this dataset represents the best information available. The data can be used for research purposes, but caution is advised (read the paper). We have a companion article in press describing limitations in disaster loss estimates:

Downton, M. and R. A. Pielke, Jr., 2005 (in press). How Accurate are Disaster Loss Data? The Case of U.S. Flood Damage, Natural Hazards Review. (pre-publication PDF)

Have a look at the project site: (http://www.flooddamagedata.org/ ) And have a look at the paper: (PDF) Here is the abstract:

“Abstract: To understand the nature of increasing flood damage in the United States, accurate data are needed on costs and vulnerability associated with flooding. The National Weather Service (NWS) is the only organization that has maintained a long-term historical record of flood damage throughout the country. The NWS estimates are obtained from diverse sources, compiled soon after each flood event, and not verified by comparison with actual expenditures. This paper presents results of a comprehensive reanalysis of the scope, accuracy, and consistency of NWS damage estimates from 1926 to 2000 and recommends appropriate methods for data use and interpretation. Estimates for individual flood events are often quite inaccurate, but when estimates from many events are aggregated the errors become proportionately smaller. With the precautions described in this paper, the reanalyzed NWS damage estimates can be a valuable tool to aid researchers and decision makers in understanding the changing character of damaging floods in the United States. The reanalyzed data are available at http://www.flooddamagedata.org/.”

Posted on February 1, 2005 07:33 AM View this article | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty | Science Policy: General

January 14, 2005

The Uncertainty Trap

Scientists are being played expertly in the ongoing political debate about climate change. Here is how the game works. Those opposed to acting on the options currently on the table, like Kyoto or McCain/Lieberman, invoke "scientific uncertainty" about climate change as the basis for their opposition. Of course, the basis for opposition for most of these folks has nothing to do with scientific uncertainty and everything to do with their valuation of the costs and benefits of taking action. As George W. Bush said in 2001, "For America, complying with those [Kyoto] mandates would have a negative economic impact, with layoffs of workers and price increases for consumers." The projected economic impacts of Kyoto are of course uncertain because they are the product of complex computer models based on numerous assumptions and parameterizations. But this uncertainty is not an obstacle to the Bush Administration taking decisive action.

Even though the basis for President Bush's opposition is grounded in how he values expected outcomes, he nonetheless raises scientific uncertainty about climate itself as a basis for his decision, "we do not know how much effect natural fluctuations in climate may have had on warming. We do not know how much our climate could, or will change in the future. We do not know how fast change will occur, or even how some of our actions could impact it. For example, our useful efforts to reduce sulfur emissions may have actually increased warming, because sulfate particles reflect sunlight, bouncing it back into space. And, finally, no one can say with any certainty what constitutes a dangerous level of warming, and therefore what level must be avoided." But his invocation of such uncertainties is just a distraction. Consider that Senator John Kerry who also opposed the Kyoto Protocol, but never invoked scientific uncertainty as the basis for his opposition (he claimed that the fact that developing countries did not participate was the basis for his opposition). Because Bush and Kerry shared opposition to Kyoto but had different views on the science of climate change, this suggests that ones views on climate science are not deterministic of one's political perspectives.

While there is ample evidence that scientific uncertainty is not the main reason behind opposition to action on climate change, advocates of Kyoto and emissions reduction policies more generally have seized upon claims of scientific uncertainty as the linchpin of their advocacy efforts (Why? Read this). In this way, the political debate over climate change takes place in the language of science, with some invoking "scientific uncertainty" as the basis for their preexisting ideological and political views, and others invoking "scientific certainty" (often in response to those invoking "scientific uncertainty"). Whether one likes it or not, claims of uncertainty map onto one political agenda and claims of certainty onto another political agenda. In climate politics there is no such thing as objective or unbiased science, it is all viewed through the lens of the political conflict.

The great irony here is that the debate of certainty and uncertainty is largely disconnected from the real reasons for political debate over climate change, which is based on a conflict over values. There may of course be those few folks whose political perspectives undergo "data-induced transformations" based on science but as Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay have observed "people generally come to their beliefs about how the world works long before they encounter facts."

If this assertion is close to being right, it means that opponents to action on climate change have already taken a big step toward winning the political debate when advocates of action take the bait on uncertainty. By raising uncertainty as a red herring advocates for action spend considerable time and effort trying to disprove allegations of uncertainty as the centerpiece of their efforts, but no matter how this sideshow winds up, it will do little to change the underlying political outcome, as the opponents can just switch their justification to something else while maintaining their political commitment to opposition. This is an exceedingly difficult line of argument for environmentalists and scientists to accept because the former have hitched their agenda to science and the latter's claims to authority lie in science.

The experiences of a new weblog run by a group of climate scientists, realclimate.org, provide a great example of this dynamic. The site claims to be "restricted to scientific topics and will not get involved in any political or economic implications of the science." This is a noble but futile ambition. The site's focus has been exclusively on attacking those who invoke science as the basis for their opposition to action on climate change, folks such as George Will, Senator James Inhofe, Michael Crichton, McIntyre and McKitrick, Fox News, and Myron Ebell. Whether intended or not, the site has clearly aligned itself squarely with one political position on climate change. And by trumpeting certainty and consensus, and attacking claims to the contrary, it has fallen squarely into the uncertainty trap.

So if opponents to action on climate change want to distract the attention of some prominent climate scientists, they need simply write the occasional opinion article or give a speech in which they invoke uncertainty about climate change. Meantime, business as usual pretty much gets a free pass.

It would be wonderful if opponents to action on climate change would stop hiding behind science. But the efforts of those scientists who take them on the basis of science are what allow then to hide in plain sight. The way out of this situation is not to engage in endless debate about climate science, but to question whether science is in fact the right battleground for this political conflict.

Posted on January 14, 2005 10:53 AM View this article | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty

December 16, 2004

Uncertainty and Decision Making

In many areas of decision making a claim is often made that “reducing uncertainties” are a prerequisite for decision making to occur. Hence, on an issue like climate change we see tens of billions of dollars invested into research justified primarily by a goal of reducing uncertainties to foster decision making. We also see a very public debate, enjoined by scientists, to try to scrub the world clean of any of the last vestiges of lingering uncertainty among the populace (for example, see here). And even the IPCC chairman sees its mission as being “reducing uncertainties.”

All of the focus and allocation of resources to reducing uncertainties raises what I would think ought to be several basic questions:

Is there evidence that reduction of uncertainty actually compels policy action?

Does funding of research actually lead to reduced uncertainty?

Is action impossible is the face of uncertainty?

I’d suggest that the answer to each of these questions is clearly “No”, and there is ample research, theory and experience to back this up (see the end of this post for some links to this literature). But let me illustrate this with an example focused on the 2004 election.

Who won the 2004 election? Well George Bush did, we can be sure of that just by looking to see who is inaugurated next month. But who received more votes? Well, that question, it turns out is a bit more complicated. A paper prepared by Campaignaudit.org, showing research done by students in a fall 2004 class of Communication Technology and Politics at the University of Washington in Seattle, compares error rates in various polling methods with actual margins of victory. They find that in several instances in the 2004 election, the margin of error in polling methods exceeds the margin of victory. This suggests some lingering uncertainty about who actually received the most votes in several states, including Iowa, in the 2004 presidential election. For example, the paper argues that Bush’s margin of victory in Iowa was 0.7% and two different methods suggest that the margin of error in the final tally is 1.0% and 1.3%, meaning that we can estimate the probability that President Bush won, but we cannot not have complete certainty. Here is an excerpt from their paper:

“In this data memo, we explore some of the different ways of estimating the error rate in the 2004 election. There are no pure measures of error in elections, but here we explore three ways of analyzing data about the outcomes of error — technology error, residual votes, and reports of incidents on Election Day. Inherently, this research has political implications, but we first begin by saying something about what this report is not describing. We are not arguing for recalls, recounts, or different political outcomes. We are not recommending one balloting procedure over another. We are not working with statistical models about social inequality, electoral administration and political outcomes. Instead, this is intended to be a focused exploration of margins of error and margins of victory in 2004.”

And if you don’t like this particular analysis of elections and error rates, consider Florida in 2000 or Washington state in 2004 where it is abundantly clear that the margin of victory fell far inside polling margin of error. Who thinks that Washington state will reducing its margin of polling error before installing a governor? Just like in Florida in 2000, a decision will be reached without resolving the fundamental uncertainty. Or to put things another way, it is politics, not information, which is most important for reducing political uncertainty. This is the lesson of policy adoption in just about every major issue of science and policy in recent decades, including the ozone issue (see, e.g., this paper).

If decisions about such apparently simple decision processes as elections are clouded by but not held up by inherent uncertainty, wouldn’t the same be true about more complicated decision processes involving the global environment? Of course. Yet many persist in asserting that reducing uncertainty is a prerequisite for action in a wide range of issues involving science. Why these assertions persist is a topic for another day.

To read more on this, see these two papers by Dan Sarewitz:

(as HTML) Sarewitz, D. 2000. Science and Environmental Policy: An Excess of Objectivity, Chapter
8, pp. 79-98 in R. Frodeman (ed.), Earth Matters: The Earth Sciences, Philosophy,
and the Claims of Community (Upper Saddle River, NJ, Prentice Hall).

(as PDF) Sarewitz, D. 2004. How Science makes Environmental Controversies Worse,
Environmental Science and Policy, 7:385-403.

Posted on December 16, 2004 10:32 AM View this article | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty

August 31, 2004

Jay Kay on the Wisdom of Experts and other Things

A while back I wrote about The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations, by James Surowiecki (Doubleday, 296 pp., $24.95).

In today’s Financial Times a regular columnist, John Kay, a British economist, discusses the wisdom of crowds, and of experts (subscription required but the essay is available free here). An excerpt:

“So the crowd is more likely to be right about things that do not matter, like guessing the weight of an ox or the number of jelly beans in a jar, and the expert is more likely to be right about things that do matter, like flying an aircraft or brain surgery. Where good judgments are important to us, we select people who are likely to be good at making these judgments and train them until they are very good at making these judgments. There are flight academies and medical schools, but no university offers a course on how to guess the weight of an ox or count the number of jelly beans in a jar… it is a mistake to place too much confidence in either great men or the market… Be sceptical: ask why you should buy what others want to sell. Discount the conventional wisdom. Be wise to conflicts of interest. There is wisdom in crowds, but more often wisdom in the wise. And you can beat the market, but not as often as the crowd would have you believe.”

Kay has a range of interesting articles on the site, including a very well-written one about uncertainty, uck, and gure.

Posted on August 31, 2004 10:15 PM View this article | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty | Science Policy: General

August 17, 2004

Charley’s Damage in Context

In 1998 Chris Landsea and I published a paper that asked how much damage past hurricanes would cause under contemporary societal conditions (i.e., adjusting for changes in population and wealth.) The table below shows these data updated to 2003. The damage estimates for Charley are not yet in, but the storm will have to result in greater than $11.2 billion in damages to break into the top 15 all time and more than $22.9 billion to break into the top 5.

Top 30 Damaging Tropical Storms and Hurricanes in the continental U.S.

Normalized to 2003 dollars by inflation, personal property increases, and coastal county population changes (1900-2003).

RANK	HURRICANE	YEAR	CATEGORY	DAMAGE (U.S))
1.	SE Florida/Alabama	1926	4	$98,051,000,000
2.	ANDREW (SE FL/LA)	1992	5	44,878,000,000
3.	N Texas (Galveston)	1900	4	36,096,000,000
4.	N Texas (Galveston)	1915	4	30,585,000,000
5.	SW Florida	1944	3	22,870,000,000
6.	New England	1938	3	22,549,000,000
7.	SE Florida/Lake Okeechobee	1928	4	18,708,000,000
8.	BETSY (SE FL/LA)	1965	3	16,863,000,000
9.	DONNA (FL/Eastern U.S.)	1960	4	16,339,000,000
10.	CAMILLE (MS/LA/VA)	1969	5	14,870,000,000
11.	AGNES (NW FL, NE U.S.)	1972	1	14,515,000,000
12.	DIANE (NE U.S.)	1955	1	13,875,000,000
13.	HUGO (SC)	1989	4	12,718,000,000
14.	CAROL (NE U.S.)	1954	3	12,291,000,000
15.	SE Florida/Louisiana/Alabama	1947	4	11,266,000,000
16.	CARLA (N & Central TX)	1961	4	9,587,000,000
17.	HAZEL (SC/NC)	1954	4	9,545,000,000
18.	NE U.S.	1944	3	8,763,000,000
19.	SE Florida	1945	3	8,561,000,000
20.	FREDERIC (AL/MS)	1979	3	8,534,000,000
21.	SE Florida	1949	3	7,918,000,000
22.	S Texas	1919	4	7,253,000,000
23.	ALICIA (N TX)	1983	3	5,501,000,000
24.	ALLISON (N TX)	2001	TS	5,408,000,000
25.	FLOYD (NC)	1999	2	5,264,000,000
26.	CELIA (S TX)	1970	3	4,526,000,000
27.	DORA (NE FL)	1964	2	4,215,000,000
28.	FRAN (NC)	1996	3	4,201,000,000
29.	OPAL (NW FL/AL)	1995	3	4,068,000,000
30.	ISABEL (NC)	2003	2	3,370,000,000

Posted on August 17, 2004 10:36 AM View this article | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty

July 19, 2004

More on TRMM Reentry

A follow up …

In 2001 NASA asked me to organize a workshop to evaluate the decision alternatives it faced on TRMM. Our workshop report concluded:

“[W]e recommend that NASA should not base its decision to extend the TRMM mission primarily on quantitative comparisons between "lives potentially saved" through operational exploitation of TRMM data and "potential hazard" associated with uncontrolled reentry.”

We made this recommendation because estimates of reentry risk are simply arithmetic exercises with little connection to reality. As it turns out, so too are estimates of the benefits of the TRMM satellite to hurricane warnings. Comparing two meaningless estimates didn’t make much sense to us.

It turns out that NASA (probably inadvertently) followed our advice, according to this excerpt in the Washington Post article Shep cited earlier:

“In 2002, Asrar asked Bryan O'Connor, NASA associate administrator for safety and mission assurance, to conduct a "disposal risk review." Did the benefits of using all the fuel to keep TRMM in orbit an additional five years outweigh the hazards of allowing the spacecraft to fall back to Earth without guidance?

In his reply on Sept. 4, 2002, O'Connor said the probability of a TRMM debris casualty would be one in every 5,000 reentries, twice as dangerous as NASA's standard of one in 10,000. NASA allows about six uncontrolled reentries a year. Despite the heightened danger, O'Connor concluded that "these risks appear to be reasonable when subjectively weighed against the potential public safety benefits of improved storm analysis and forecasting capabilities that appear to be realized by extending the TRMM mission."

But uncontrolled reentry was never seriously considered, Asrar said, and the O'Connor analysis was used to reaffirm what Asrar described as NASA's original view: "What if the one in 5,000 becomes a reality?" Asrar said. "Can anybody stand up and say it was worthwhile?" He said he asked for the O'Connor report simply to show that "we had done due diligence" in evaluating TRMM's potential hazard.”

Our workshop concluded:

“[D]ecision makers lack knowledge necessary to prioritize observational program decision alternatives on the basis of quantitative risk assessment according to the actual and potential contributions to science and society. Absent such information, it is likely that decisions on issues such as TRMM deorbiting will continue to be made on an ad hoc basis. It would be relatively simple to construct a “back-of-the-envelope” calculation of potential lives saved related to TRMM data availability based on a set of simplifying assumptions. However, participants agreed that because of the unverified nature of the cascade of assumptions on which such a calculation would be based, it would have little connection with reality. One reason for the lack of unanimity in the Workshop participants' estimation of relative risk is the lack of analysis and data on the direct and indirect roles of TRMM data in weather forecast operations. Anecdotes, back-of-the-envelope calculations, and incomple!
te case studies are not a substitute for reasoned conclusions based on rigorous, scientific analyses.”

Finally, while I do agree with Shep that the money saved on TRMM has nothing to do with the President’s Mars mission, it all but certainly has something to do with paying for the next generation of remote sensing satellites.

Posted on July 19, 2004 12:36 PM View this article | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty | Space Policy

July 15, 2004

Confusion about Science and Policy

A story on Yucca Mountain in today’s New York Times by Matthew Wald contains this interesting, and I think very misplaced, observation:

“Congress has made other decisions that substitute policy for science.”

What decisions are being referred to?

“In 1982, [Congress] decided that waste should be buried, and in 1987, it said waste should be buried at Yucca, one of three sites the Energy Department was then considering. There was no presumption that Yucca was best, only that it was a site on which everybody outside Nevada could agree, and was better than leaving the waste at reactor sites around the country.”

... and ...

“[Congress] alone decides what high-level waste is. It is considering a bill that would redefine some waste as not being high level, so the waste could stay where it is, in old steel tanks in South Carolina, rather than being solidified for burial at Yucca.”

"Science” alone cannot answer questions about whether or not to bury nuclear waste, where to bury that waste, what waste is risky, and how to bury or store that waste. The fact is that there is not a single technical answer to such questions because the answers involve considerations of different individuals’ and groups’ values and preferences, which differ widely. “Risk” is a subjective term. Politics is the process that we use to reconcile differences in values in preferences when we need to act together.

To suggest in this instance that Congress has made “decisions that substitute policy for science” is to fundamentally mischaracterize the role of science in decision making, and the differences between policy and politics.

On such confusion see:

Pielke, Jr., R. A. 2004. Abortion, Tornadoes, and Forests: Thinking about Science, Politics and Policy, Chapter 9, pp. 153-142 in J. Bowersox and K. Arabas (eds.) Forest Futures: Science, Policy and Politics for the Next Century (Rowman and Littlefield).

Posted on July 15, 2004 09:46 AM View this article | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Energy Policy | Risk & Uncertainty

July 13, 2004

Risk Communication: SNL Scoops GAO

The General Accounting Office released a report today titled, “Homeland Security: Communication Protocols and Risk Communication Principles Can Assist in Refining the Advisory System.”

“In this report, we make specific recommendations to the Secretary of Homeland Security regarding documentation of communication protocols to assist DHS in better managing federal agencies’ and states’ expectations regarding the methods, timing, and content of threat information and guidance provided to these entities and to ensure that DHS follows clear and consistent policies and procedures when interacting with these entities through the Homeland Security Advisory System.”

In this instance Saturday Night Live scooped the GAO:

“Good evening. I'm Tom Ridge. Nearly six months ago, President Bush asked me to organize and lead a new federal agency, the Office of Homeland Security. Since that time, many of you have probably wondered just what this agency has been up to and what, if anything, we are doing to prevent terrorist attacks within our borders.

Tonight, I'm proud to unveil my agency's new weapon in the War on Terror: the Homeland Security advisory system. It's a simple five level system, which uses color codes to indicate varying levels of terrorist threat. The lowest level of threat is condition OFF-WHITE, followed by CREAM, PUTTY, BONE and finally NATURAL. It is essential that every American learns to recognize and distinguish these colors. Failure to do so could cost you your life. For those who may have questions, an excellent guide will be found on page 74 of the spring J. Crew catalogue.

Now, what precisely do these threat levels indicate? Condition OFF-WHITE, the lowest level, indicates a huge risk of terrorist attack. Next highest, condition CREAM: an immense risk of terrorist attack. Condition PUTTY: an enormous risk of terrorist attack. Condition BONE: a gigantic risk of terrorist attack. And finally, the most serious, condition NATURAL: an enormous risk of terrorist attack.

Many of you probably noticed that in the preceding chart, we used the term "Enormous risk of terrorist attack" twice. This was a mistake we didn't catch in time and we're trying to fix it... Live, from New York, it's Saturday Night!”

Posted on July 13, 2004 02:13 PM View this article | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty

July 06, 2004

Sunstein, Surwiecki, and Scientific Consensus

An addition thought related to the wisdom of crowds …

The notion of consensus as reflecting the “wisdom of a crowd” of experts is important connection to science and decision making. The notion of “scientific consensus” (or putative lack thereof) is often bandied about simplistically as a justification for this or that action or inaction – global warming is a great example. But people who invoke the notion of consensus often do so in a overly simplistic black or white manner, i.e., consensus or no consensus.

But what this does is strip out any notion of uncertainty and thus ignores the inevitable distribution of views held by individual members of the community. Any consensus (however defined) has dimensions, and those dimensions are often important for action. As both Sunstein and Surwiecki remind us, NASA’s “consensus view” before Challenger and Columbia was that the space shuttle was safe. In reality, the shuttle has risks which are difficult to calculate precisely – it is never simply “safe” or “unsafe.” NASA’s error was driving toward a “consensus” on safety rather than developing policies reflective of and robust to the true diversity of its experts' opinions.

The real wisdom of crowds is not in providing us with deterministic answers, but in helping us to understand how uncertain or certain we really are.

Posted on July 6, 2004 09:41 AM View this article | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty | Science Policy: General

July 02, 2004

Risk and Space Flight

Of the many news accounts of Cassini's arrival at Saturn, few have mentioned the controversy that surrounded its launch. The mission, launched in 1997, engendered protests and concern from some. The crux of the problem was Cassini's plutonium containing radio thermal generator, and fears that an accident at launch or flyby could release the plutonium. NASA went to great lengths to communicate their commitment to safely launching and flying the mission, overcoming a lawsuit in the process.

The same battle of space nuclear power looms on the horizon with Project Prometheus and the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter. The project hopes to design and use a new generation of RTGs and nuclear reactors. Moving this project forward will depend on communicating and debating risk and uncertainty.

A similar debate is also ongoing for the future of the space shuttle, a manned flight to Mars, the Hubble servicing mission, and commercial space flight. Indeed, much of NASA's work contains small but significant factors of risk and uncertainty, factors that greatly complicate the agency's ability to gather support for and maintain initiatives.

Successfully describing and supporting thier risk assessments will be a critical challenge to the agency, and will require sensitivity to the subjective nature of risk tolerance and the value judgements that underlie arguments for and against particular missions. Technical and scientific data will play an important role, but cannot alone overcome value based objections.

Posted on July 2, 2004 11:11 AM View this article | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Ryen, T.S. | Risk & Uncertainty | Space Policy

June 22, 2004

Per Capita Greenhouse Gas Emissions

A very interesting paper crossed my desk from The Australia Institute titled, “Greenhouse gas emissions in industrialised countries: Where does Australia stand?” by Hal Turton, a researcher in Environmentally Compatible Energy Strategies at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Austria.

The paper focuses on the following:

“The international climate change community is increasingly turning its attention to proposals to base future greenhouse gas emission reduction obligations at least in part on a per capita principle… This paper reports calculations showing per capita greenhouse gas emissions on a comprehensive basis for all industrialised (Annex I) countries. The data are drawn from national communications and greenhouse gas inventory submissions to the UNFCCC secretariat. The paper presents the most recent and consistent estimates of per capita emissions, covering the years up to and including the year 2001. It also presents historical data on the per capita emissions of all Annex I countries for the years 1990-2001 inclusive.”

The paper concludes that Australia has the highest per capita emissions, Canada has the fastest growth in emissions (since 1990), and the U.S. is relatively high in both categories. Geopolitical events show dramatically in the trend data with large decreases in per capita emissions among counties that comprised the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc.

The paper has one glaring weakness – it does not discuss uncertainties in the data, which undoubtedly are quite large in comparison to the estimates. For example, scientists who study the carbon cycle disagree about sources and sinks of CO2, sometimes quite dramatically. Even so, the paper provides an interesting compilation of FCCC data, some of which challenges conventional wisdom.

Posted on June 22, 2004 11:07 AM View this article | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty

June 02, 2004

O'Keefe Sticks to His Guns: No Shuttle Mission to Hubble

In a speech yesterday, NASA Administrator O'Keefe stood by his much criticized decision to cancel Hubble Servicing Mission 4, saying, "it would not be responsible to prepare for a servicing mission, only to find that the required actions identified by the [Columbia Accident Investigation] Board could not be implemented."

While news accounts (and his audience) have struck on his partial support for a robotic servicing mission, as O'Keefe announced a forthcoming Request for Proposals following up on a February request, O'Keefe also gave one of his most rigorous defenses yet of his decision to cancel SM4, saying in part,

"A mission to the Hubble would require the development of a unique set of procedures, technologies and tools different from any other mission we'll fly before the Shuttle fleet retires. Many of these capabilities which provide safety redundancy for ISS missions are primary or singular for a Hubble mission. Moreover, these Hubble unique methods must be developed and tested promptly before Hubble's batteries and other critical systems give out.

We are making steady progress in our efforts to meet the safety requirements for the Shuttle return to flight next year. But based on where we are today, prospects are even more challenging than six months ago for our being able to develop in time all required safety and return-to-flight elements for a servicing mission before Hubble ceases to be operational."

The whole of O'Keefe's speech is here.

In addition to this speech, O'Keefe has made a case for his decision here, here, and here, all based on the CAIB recommendations and his concern for human life. Meanwhile, critics of his decision have continually suggested that Hubble is too important to science to lose, thus setting up an age-old conflict of the relative importance of manned flight and science at NASA. Is this another example of the Excess of Objectivity that Prometheus has commented on elsewhere? Both sides continue to argue over the "facts" of mission risk and ignore the fundamental value conflict between the "Hubble Huggers" and Administrator O'Keefe.

Posted on June 2, 2004 10:56 AM View this article | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Ryen, T.S. | Risk & Uncertainty | Space Policy

May 31, 2004

Reducing Uncertainty: Good Luck

For a while now there has been a debate going on about how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change out to project forward into time economic growth. Such projections are important for developing scenarios of carbon emissions that are used as input to climate models. The debate involves differences between market exchange rates (e.g., $1 = 1.26 Euro) and what is called Purchasing Power Parity, e.g., a Big Mac = $2.90 in the U.S. but only $1.26 in China. (On these differences see this article.)

This week The Economist reminds us why this debate matters for the issue of climate change.

“The IPCC's forecasts of global output are based on national GDP converted to dollars using market exchange rates. They also bravely assume that most of the gap in average income between rich and poor countries will be closed by the end of this century, even while the rich continue to get richer. Because using market exchange rates overstates the initial gap in average income between rich and poor countries, this results in improbably high projections of GDP growth in developing countries, much faster than has ever been achieved before. As a result, the IPCC's projections of future carbon emissions, on this basis alone, are probably overstated.

The IPCC claims that measuring at PPP or market exchange rates does not affect the economy any more than a switch from degrees Celsius to Fahrenheit alters the temperature. But the analogy is wrong. PPP and market exchange rates, unlike Celsius and Fahrenheit, are measuring different things. That should not be too hard an idea for scientists to grasp.”

(Those with deep interests in this topic can learn much more here, here, here, and here.)

A group of researchers in Norway explored what the implications would be if IPCC were to switch to PPP from MER. They found that, “the use of PPP instead of MER has significant effects on the emission development paths. In fact, the emissions in 2100 are reduced by 38 to 50 percent, depending on choice of scenario. However, due to the accumulative effect of emissions, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is not to the same extent influenced. The CO2-concentration in 2100 is reduced by 16 to 24 percent in 2100. The projected temperature increases are lowered by 0.5-1 °C relative to the original SRES scenarios.”

While it is unlikely that the IPCC would switch growth metrics, it is not unreasonable to expect that it might in the future include scenarios based on PPP. If so, all else being equal, the inclusion of such scenarios would mean that the IPCC’s projected temperature range for 2100 would expand. And while the “global warming: yes or no” crowds would have plenty of fun with this, the real lesson would be that climate science, rather than moving towards deterministic predictions of the future climate, i.e., reducing uncertainty, is instead providing us with considerable knowledge about how uncertain the future actually is. Decisions about climate will have to be made in the face of profound, irreducible uncertainty.

Today, we know enough to act. But of course, the question that we face is: how to act? Fortunately, we know what to do, it just seems that doing it is the hard part.

Posted on May 31, 2004 11:25 PM View this article | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty

April 30, 2004

Policy Relevant Science in the Media

Last week Nature published a letter titled “Dangers of crying wolf over risk of extinctions” by scholars at Oxford University. The letter warns, “simplifications of research findings may expose conservationists to accusations of crying wolf, and play directly into the hands of anti-environmentalists… many of the errors could be traced back to the press releases and agency newswires… [Then] Politicians and conservationists repeated these statements.”

For a range of participants in this process there are a number of reinforcing incentives for either emphasizing the dramatic or cherry picking convenient findings. For the university press office sensational and simple cause-effect press releases may increase the odds of news organizations covering the story. For reporters selective reporting may help to advance whatever personal agenda they may wish to advance. For scientists, accentuation of the extreme may provide access to or influence in political debates. For politicians, the “facts” suggest an authoritative basis for arguing their preferred outcomes. Of course, these reenforcing incentives exist across the political spectrum.

This is another form of the consequences of the “excess of objectivity” that I have written about on this blog.

Ann Henderson-Sellers has an excellent article about this process:

Henderson-Seller, A., 1998. Climate whispers: Media communication about climate change. Climatic Change 40:421-456.

What to do? Here is an article with a suggestion that the scientific community take some responsibility for going beyond presenting “just the facts” and assessing the significance of science:

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 2003: The Significance of Science, chapter in P. Dongi (ed.) The Governance of Science, Laterza, Rome, Italy, pp. 85-105. (Also available in Italian.)

Posted on April 30, 2004 11:17 AM View this article | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty

April 22, 2004

A Perspective on Science and Policy in India

Sunita Narain, editor of the Indian magazine Down to Earth, writes a provocative editorial on challenges of science in politics and policy in India.

“In the West, scientific issues are at least publicly debated and even George Bush and his ‘sound science’ caucus will get a run for their money as more and more citizens (including) scientists engage with and put public pressure on policy systems to deliver. But not in India, where scientists have taken silence to be their best insurance. And worse, arrogance, as their best cover….

But in all this we must also realise that science is not the ultimate truth. Scientific uncertainty can never really be eliminated, even in the best of sound science. All conclusions involve some uncertainty and are creatures of the nuances of interpretation. Therefore, science must guide policy, but ultimately, societal values and ethics must underwrite that policy code. That is what we could call ‘sound science’.”

It’s titled “Sounds of Self-Interested Science” and worth a read.

Posted on April 22, 2004 09:30 AM View this article | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Risk & Uncertainty | Science Policy: General

April 14, 2004

Climate Change Prediction and Uncertainty

An interesting article about the limitations to regional climate predictions and corresponding irreducible uncertainty:

Nature 428, 593 (08 April 2004); doi:10.1038/428593a
Modellers deplore 'short-termism' on climate
By QUIRIN SCHIERMEIER

"Projections of climate change in, say, Florida or the Alps carry more political weight than vague warnings about global warming. And for almost two decades, specialists in regional climate assessment have sought to make such projections.

But their success has been limited, a meeting of regional-climate modellers in Lund, Sweden, acknowledged last week. Our understanding of regional climate change will remain uncertain, the modellers said. And, some speakers suggested, policy-makers' expectations of precise local projections need to be dampened down."

Full story:
http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/Dynapage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v428/n6983/full/428593a_fs.html

Posted on April 14, 2004 04:59 PM View this article | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Risk & Uncertainty

Category:

« Risk & Uncertainty »

April 11, 2008

Kudos to Kerry Emanuel

April 08, 2008

Green Car Congress on PWG

April 02, 2008

Commentary in Nature

March 26, 2008

LA Times on Adaptation

March 15, 2008

Update on Falsifiability of Climate Predictions

February 20, 2008

Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Spy Satellite Shootdown Attempt

January 07, 2008

Deja Vu All Over Again

December 21, 2007

On the Political Relevance of Scientific Consensus

December 10, 2007

AGU Powerpoint with Steve McIntyre

December 06, 2007

Revisiting The 2006-2010 RMS Hurricane Damage Prediction

November 20, 2007

So-kalled WiFi research

May 11, 2007

State of Florida Rejects RMS Cat Model Approach

April 01, 2007

Sea Level Rise Consensus Statement and Next Steps

February 27, 2007

Science, Politics, Variability, Change, Learning, Uncertainty

February 23, 2007

Catastrophic Visions

February 22, 2007

Where Stern is Right and Wrong

February 21, 2007

Mike Hulme in Nature on UK Media Coverage of the IPCC

February 12, 2007

An Inconvenient Survey

February 07, 2007

Clarifying IPCC AR4 Statements on Sea Level Rise

February 01, 2007

Does the Truth Matter?

January 29, 2007

Science and Politics of Food

January 09, 2007

Robert Muir-Wood in RMS Cat Models: From the Comments

January 08, 2007

An Update: Faulty Catastrophe Models?

December 14, 2006

Follow Up to Flood Policy Presentation

December 06, 2006

Scott Saleska on Tuning the Climate

November 14, 2006

Naomi Oreskes on Consensus

November 11, 2006

Interview with Richard Tol

November 04, 2006

Mike Hulme on the Climate Debate

October 05, 2006

The One Percent Doctrine

September 01, 2006

Back to Square One?

August 08, 2006

Beyond the Mug's Game

August 07, 2006

Hurricanes, Catastrophe Models, and Global Warming

June 29, 2006

An Honorable Retirement for the Shuttle

May 17, 2006

A Few Reactions to the Bonn Dialogue on the FCCC

May 02, 2006

The Next IPCC Consensus?

April 27, 2006

Cutler and Glaeser on Why do Europeans Smoke More Than Americans? Part II

April 26, 2006

Cutler and Glaeser on Why do Europeans Smoke More Than Americans? Part I

April 10, 2006

Politicization of Science 101: How to Use Science to Argue Politics, Manipulate the Media, and Silence your Political Opponents

March 25, 2005

Tyranny of the Plebiscite