Laitner is indeed Skip. Their AMIGA model is a wonderful example. They use a baseline scenario with lots of technological progress, and then in their policy analysis they use the difference between frozen technology and baseline again to find that 550 ppm can be reached at the stroke of a pen!

The bottom-up studies in the IPCC and elsewhere tend to make the same double-counting error.

Richard

I am extremely well aware who you are (and if I didn’t, I know how to use Google, so please drop the patronizing tone).

That’s why I was stunned you defended Smil, who, as Pielke noted, wrote in his Nature letter: “Consequently, the rise of atmospheric CO2 above 450 parts per million can be prevented only by an unprecedented (in both severity and duration) depression of the global economy, or by voluntarily adopted and strictly observed limits on absolute energy use. The first is highly probable; the second would be a sapient action, but apparently not for this species.”

This is NOT what the IPCC report that you helped author concludes in the least bit, nor is it what most major economic models that I have seen concluded, and it is certainly not what bottom-up studies show.

You defended Smil. Do you agree with him?

Second, do you mean “George W” Bush is confused? And you are blaming the IPCC for that? You cannot be serious. I doubt he could spell IPCC.

Third, you need to do more than just drop names of people who “believe in costless action” or “confused baselines with policies” (whatever that means) — you need to provide links.

I know Laitner very well, if you mean Skip Laitner, a resource economist, not an engineer. He certainly does NOT believe in costless action. He does believe there is a very large energy efficiency resource, as does the National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. national laboratories (in a report I oversaw, which you know doubt know since you’ve studied me), and the IPCC itself!

As you well know, the 2007 Synthesis report says, “Bottom-up studies suggest that mitigation opportunities with net negative costs have the potential to reduce emissions by around 6 GtCO2-eq/yr in 2030.”

Wow! A 20% reduction in global emissions might be possible in a quarter century with net economic benefits!

Is that costless action? I suppose so. Is it true? Again the U.S. DOE and the NAS and McKinsey thinks so, among others. Guess they are all wrong.

But in any case, they don’t have their positions BECAUSE of the IPCC, they have them because that is what the literature says, because they did the analysis themselves, and/or because many of them, many of us, have direct experience which makes clear that the energy efficiency potential exists.

Just because the mainstream economic community does not accept the existence of a large efficiency potential 1) does not mean you are right and 2) does not mean everybody who does is wrong and wrong because of the IPCC.

In any case, one of the IPCC’s job is to reflect the scientific literature — not just the view of part of one academic discipline. So again, I am still waiting to see what the dangerous assumptions in the scenarios are.

PGW have not uncovered some hidden assumption in SRES. Rather, they point at an assumption that is either misunderstood or ignored by large number of SRES users.

Engineers who believe in costless action: Blok, Krause, Laitner.
Politicians who confuse baselines with policy: Bush, Dimas.

IPCC WG3 in its AR4, by the way, strengthens this misinterpretation of the baseline. If you look at the cost curve implied by the tables in the technical summary, then you’ll find that it bends the wrong way. If you wonder why, you’ll eventually find a footnote that will tell you that the deeper targets can only be reached from lower baselines. The material in the summary suffers from severe sample bias, significantly underestimating the costs of emission reduction.

And yes, this was no mistake: At least one author and one referee pointed to sample bias and the potential for incorrect interpretation.

Richard

I suppose after reading the piece a dozen times and writing maybe 10,000 words about it, I could have “entirely missed the main point of PGW.” Had you read the two links I provided, though, you’d see that I haven’t. Since you didn’t, let me repeat the point here:

As I explain, the key word in PGW, which you omit from your comment is “spontaneous.” In paragraph three they write,

“… the scenarios assume a certain amount of spontaneous technological change and related decarbonization. Thus, the IPCC implicitly assumes that the bulk of the challenge of reducing future emissions will occur in the absence of climate policies.”

PGW repeats the word “spontaneous” several times, implying that the technological improvement happens on its own. And in Paragraph II, they write the IPCC reference scenarios “assume no policy interventions directed toward reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.”

But those statements are so misleading as to be completely inaccurate.

As I wrote, In fact, in its scenarios, the IPCC assumes energy and environmental policies, but just isn’t allowed to call them “climate policies.” I kid you not.

Here is what the Special Report on Emission Scenarios (SRES), which the Nature article cites, says about the scenarios:

“As required by the Terms of Reference, however, none of the scenarios in the set includes any future policies that explicitly address additional climate change initiatives, although GHG emissions are directly affected by non-climate change policies designed for a wide range of other purpose.”

Let me give a very specific example. Most of the IPCC scenarios are of little interest because they result in global warming of much more than 2°C — and thus they make catastrophic climate impacts likely. The B1 scenario, however, is worth examining because it keeps warming close to 2°C through energy efficiency and decarbonization. Does this happen spontaneously? Quite the reverse:

“The central elements of the B1 future are a high level of environmental and social consciousness combined with a globally coherent approach to a more sustainable development. Heightened environmental consciousness might be brought about by clear evidence that impacts of natural resource use, such as deforestation, soil depletion, over-fishing, and global and regional pollution, pose a serious threat to the continuation of human life on Earth. In the B1 storyline, governments, businesses, the media, and the public pay increased attention to the environmental and social aspects of development.”

In other words, in B1, humanity aggressively pursues sustainable development.

“… Technological change plays an important role. At the same time, however, the storyline does not include any climate policies, to reflect the SRES terms of reference. Nevertheless, such a possible future cannot be ruled out.”

Semantically, the scenario writers are not allowed to include climate policies — but they are allowed to include policies that would lead to a great deal of decarbonization and energy efficiency, which is the same thing.

“Particular effort is devoted to increases in resource efficiency to achieve the goals stated above. Incentive systems, combined with advances in international institutions, permit the rapid diffusion of cleaner technology. To this end, R&D is also enhanced, together with education and the capacity building for clean and equitable development. Organizational measures are adopted to reduce material wastage by maximizing reuse and recycling. The combination of technical and organizational change yields high levels of material and energy saving, as well as reductions in pollution.”

That does not sound like “spontaneous technological change and related decarbonization.” In fact, it sounds like an aggressive and coherent climate policy to me.

“The B1 storyline sees a relatively smooth transition to alternative energy systems as conventional oil and gas resources decline. There is extensive use of conventional and unconventional gas as the cleanest fossil resource during the transition, but the major push is toward post-fossil technologies, driven in large part by environmental concerns.”

And it also sounds like B1 is imagining a future where conventional oil and gas production peaks and declines, which, as we’ve seen, appears to be our likely future.

“Given the high environmental consciousness and institutional effectiveness in the B1 storyline, environmental quality is high, as most potentially negative environmental aspects of rapid development are anticipated and effectively dealt with locally, nationally, and internationally. For example, transboundary air pollution (acid rain) is basically eliminated in the long term. Land use is managed carefully to counteract the impacts of activities potentially damaging to the environment. Cities are compact and designed for public and non-motorized transport, with suburban developments tightly controlled. Strong incentives for low-input, low-impact agriculture, along with maintenance of large areas of wilderness, contribute to high food prices with much lower levels of meat consumption than those in A1. These proactive local and regional environmental measures and policies also lead to relatively low GHG emissions, even in the absence of explicit interventions to mitigate climate change.”

Pretty amazing, no? A primary conclusion of the PGW article, embodied in its title, “Dangerous Assumptions,” is simply wrong.

You, and PGW, claim “This has led people to believe that climate policy is effortless and costless.”

I have never met anyone who believes the IPCC says that. Let’s see, what did IPCC head, Rajendra Pachauri, tell the NYT when the Synthesis report was released:

“If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

Does that sound like the head of a group that has underestimated the scale of the climate challenge?

The IPCC report says,
“There is high agreement and much evidence that all stabilisation levels assessed can be achieved by deployment of a portfolio of technologies that are either currently available or expected to be commercialised in coming decades, assuming appropriate and effective incentives are in place for their development, acquisition, deployment and diffusion and addressing related barriers.”

Again, 1) doesn’t sound to me like they are assuming spontaneous technological change. They are assuming technological change driven by strong policies. And yet PGW ends by saying:

“IPCC plays a risky game in assuming that spontaneous advances in technological innovation will carry most of the burden of achieving future emissions reductions, rather than focusing on creating the conditions for such innovations to occur.”

What “risky game” are they playing? The IPCC scientists are begging the world to stabilize below 450 ppm starting NOW. We’ve seen the IPCC does not assume “spontaneous” advances — it assumes humanity will take strong action.

“… rather than focusing on creating the conditions for such innovations to occur.” This is similar to the earlier phrase “diverting attention from policies that could directly stimulate technological innovation.” It is similarly nonsense.

Have you read Working Group III report? I’m looking it over right now. It lays out in great detail all of the technology strategies needed to stimulate innovation, including a carbon price of $50 a ton of CO2, which is hardly a low price.

It talks about the GDP cost If we adopt the least-cost trajectories. The numbers they use are certainly in the range of the numbers I’ve seen in the studies I believe. They talk about “changes in lifestyle and behavior patterns can contribute to climate change mitigation across all sectors” the need for “new energy infrastructure investments in developing countries, upgrades of energy infrastructure in industrialized countries.” They write “initial estimates show that returning global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions to 2000 levels by 2030 would require a large shift in the pattern of investment.”

And on and on an on. Therefore, 2) it doesn’t sound to me like they are saying this would be effortless and costless. Every climate scientist and energy expert I know is increasingly desperate in begging the world to take strong action immediately. I wrote a big piece on that in Salon.

I just think PGW created a strawman and then destroyed it.

Richard — please point me in the direction of links to politicians and other opinion leaders who
“believe that climate policy is effortless and costless” or to articles written about the IPCC report that draw such an inference. I have seen neither.

You seem to have entirely missed the main point of PGW: The SRES scenarios assume very substantial technological change. A number of people in the field, particularly engineers and politicians, do not know that — and they present the difference between “frozen technology” and “business as usual” as “climate policy”. This has led people to believe that climate policy is effortless and costless.

As a minor point, the SRES scenarios are very peculiar in their assumptions about population (too little migration, fertility falling too fast, aging too little), economy (too fast in Africa, too slow in Asia), and energy efficiency (too fast) — their energy supply looks in line with history, but they may have overlooked the current dash for coal.

Richard

That is the post where I explain why this statement from Pielke et al is somewhere between “very misleading” and “completely untrue”:

… the scenarios assume a certain amount of spontaneous technological change and related decarbonization. Thus, the IPCC implicitly assumes that the bulk of the challenge of reducing future emissions will occur in the absence of climate policies. We believe that these assumptions are optimistic at best and unachievable at worst, potentially seriously underestimating the scale of the technological challenge associated with stabilizing greenhouse-gas concentrations.

The technical objections to Pielke can be found here — I can see why it was hard to find since I left Pielke and Nature out of the title:
http://climateprogress.org/2008/04/14/the-decarbonization-story-and-why-a-carbon-price-beats-tech-breakthroughs/

Interestingly, while I have problems with Pielke’s analysis — my far bigger concerns are with his primary conclusions.

The IPCC SRES scenarios are very peculiar. I’d even say they are not terribly useful and a largely counterproductive. But, as I explain in the above post:

The historical decarbonization data strongly suggests that the two major conclusions of the Nature article are wrong:

1. The IPCC scenarios are not filled with “Dangerous Assumptions,” as the title of the Nature article asserts.
2. The recent carbonization data does not support the central conclusion of the article “Enormous advances in energy technology will be needed to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations at acceptable levels.” In fact, if anything, it supports the reverse conclusion.

Your technical objections to Pielke would be welcome indeed. I searched your blog, but found little material than can be described as an academic argument.

A number of us have done the sums, and found results that are very similar to those of Roger, Chris and Tom: The IPCC SRES scenarios are peculiar in many ways.

Richard

BTW, I’ll probably post the original letter — and the full e-mail exchange with Nature — on my blog.

1000 words? Let me think if that does the critique justice.

The question is whether humans are sapient enough to take matters into their own hand and speed things up. He thinks it would be sapient if we “voluntarily adopted and strictly observed limits on absolute energy use.”

I think it would be sapient if we “adopted an aggressive strategy to deploy energy efficient and low carbon technologies, some version of the 14 or so wedges” here:
http://climateprogress.org/2008/04/22/is-450-ppm-or-less-politically-possible-part-2-the-solution/

I think that would be more sapient — and more plausible — than his plan. But I am fully aware it is unlikely to happen. But as long as it is not too late — and it pretty clearly isn’t — I remain an optimist, I prefer to see the glass as 5% full.