Archive for February, 2007

Al Gore on Adaptation

February 23rd, 2007

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

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

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Catastrophic Visions

February 23rd, 2007

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

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:

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Where Stern is Right and Wrong

February 22nd, 2007

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

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

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

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

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

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

A Defense of Alarmism

February 22nd, 2007

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

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

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

David Adam
Environment correspondent
The Guardian

Some definitions from the Collins English dictionary

Catastrophic: a sudden, extensive disaster or misfortune

Shocking: Causing shock

Terrifying: extremely frightening

Devastating: to confound or overwhelm

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

here’s another:

news: interesting or important information not previously known.

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

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

again, to the dictionary:

worse: the comparative of bad

Mike accuses us of “appealling to fear to generate a sense of urgency”

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

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

Mike Hulme in Nature on UK Media Coverage of the IPCC

February 21st, 2007

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

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:

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Earthquake hazards policy talk tomorrow

February 21st, 2007

Posted by: admin

Anybody ready for some non-climate stuff?

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

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

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

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

February 21st, 2007

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

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

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

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

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

February 20th, 2007

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

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

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Prediction in Science and Policy

February 20th, 2007

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

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

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

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

February 18th, 2007

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

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

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

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

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