Posted by Roger A. Pielke, Jr. (RP) and Kerry Emanuel (KE)

In a column in the Richmond Times-Dispatch Pat Michaels mischaracterizes the role of KE in a paper RP is lead author on forthcoming in BAMS (PDF). Michaels writes,

“A heavily cited paper, published recently in Nature by Kerry Emanuel, claims that hurricanes have doubled in power in the past half-century. It has been the basis for much of the association of Katrina with planetary warming. However, there are three manuscripts in review at Nature disputing this, as well as a recently published paper by Roger Pielke, Jr., in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, downplaying the notion. (As a measure of the acrimony among leading scientists on this subject, Emanuel removed his name as a co-author of this paper shortly before publication.)”

This is incorrect on two counts.

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Earlier this week NASA released its plans for the future of the U.S. human spaceflight program. The New York Times has a good series of articles on the plans and reactions to it (here and here). Were I a discerning budget examiner or congressional staffer with a knowledge of the history of the space program, I’d ask NASA why we should believe any of the following statements (borrowed from the Times reporting):

* “Michael D. Griffin, the agency’s new administrator, detailed a $104 billion plan that he said would get astronauts to the Moon by 2018.”

Does NASA have any credibility on budget or schedule projections? History suggests that cost estimates are overly optimistic and shortfalls are used as a justification to secure budget increases. As one former congressional staffer has commented, “NASA cost overruns represent full employment in some congressional districts.”

* “Dr. Griffin said that after adjusting for inflation, the program would cost just 55 percent of what it cost to put a dozen men on the lunar surface from 1969 to 1972.”

The spin begins. An actual accounting of Apollo costs (see Table 14.4 here in PDF) indicates that the program actually costs (in 2004 dollars) between $105 to $125 billion. NASA is already either playing fast and loose with the budget numbers or is ignorant of its own budget history. Neither option is particularly encouraging.

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Andy Revkin is one of the nation’s most influential and widely respected journalists covering climate (and other environmental) issues. In a news release, the AAAS provides a rare look at the views of someone who plays a significant role in shaping public and policy debate over climate. Here are some interesting excerpts from the AAAS news story:

“”We have to understand, and society has to become comfortable with, making decisions in uncertainty,” Revkin said in the Robert C. Barnard Environmental Lecture at AAAS headquarters in Washington, D.C. He spoke to an audience of AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellows and others …

In his lecture, Revkin said that after covering global warming for almost 20 years, he is convinced that there will never be a time when he can write a story that states clearly that global warming “happened today.” “It is never going to be the kind of story that will give you the level of certainty that everyone seems to crave,” he said. “We are assaulted with complexity and uncertainty. Somehow, we need to convey that in all that information, with those question marks, there is a trajectory to knowledge.” American society is uneasy with the equivocal answers that often are the best environmental scientists can provide, said Revkin. Newspapers are uncomfortable with “murk,” and politicians and Congress “hate it,” he said. Yet, despite the lack of crystal clarity, “you can still make decisions. Uncertainties don’t let you off the hook,” he said, even though some people in politics have used the uncertainties for that purpose…

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The Webster/Holland/Curry/Chang work in Science this week received a load of press coverage. Little of it was intelligent. (Roger slammed one piece last Friday here.)

In my experience, often one of the most important sections of any Science or Nature paper is the last two paragraphs. Here’s what the last two paragraphs say in Webster et al.:

“We deliberately limited this study to the satellite era because of the known biases before this period (28), which means that a comprehensive analysis of longer-period oscillations and trends has not been attempted. There is evidence of a minimum of intense cyclones occurring in the 1970s (11), which could indicate that our observed trend toward more intense cyclones is a reflection of a long-period oscillation. However, the sustained increase over a period of 30 years in the proportion of category 4 and 5 hurricanes indicates that the related oscillation would have to be on a period substantially longer than that observed in previous studies.

“We conclude that global data indicate a 30-year trend toward more frequent and intense hurricanes, corroborated by the results of the recent regional assessment (29). This trend is not inconsistent with recent climate model simulations that a doubling of CO2 may increase the frequency of the most intense cyclones (18, 30), although attribution of the 30-year trends to global warming would require a longer global data record and, especially, a deeper understanding of the role of hurricanes in the general circulation of the atmosphere and ocean, even in the present climate state.”

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Amir Attaran asks in PLoS Medicine of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, “Could it be, despite an appearance of firm targets, deadlines, and focused urgency, that the MDGs are actually imprecise and possibly ineffective agents for development progress?” He answers this question with,

“I argue that many of the most important MDGs, including those to reduce malaria, maternal mortality, or tuberculosis (TB), suffer from a worrying lack of scientifically valid data. While progress on each of these goals is portrayed in time-limited and measurable terms, often the subject matter is so immeasurable, or the measurements are so inadequate, that one cannot know the baseline condition before the MDGs, or know if the desired trend of improvement is actually occurring. Although UN scientists know about these troubles, the necessary corrective steps are being held up by political interference, including by the organisation’s senior leadership, who have ordered delays to amendments that could repair the MDGs. In short, five years into the MDG project, in too many cases, one cannot know if true progress towards these very important goals is occurring. Often, one has to guess.”

Jeffrey Sachs and colleagues disagree, responding:

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I am overdue to comment on an excellent 2004 book by Andrew Rich, Think Tanks, Public Policy and the Politics of Expertise (Cambridge University Press). Anyone who wants to understand the evolution and role of think tanks should read this book (A sample chapter, here in PDF, whets your appetite for the whole thing. Here are some short, thought-provoking excerpts from the book:

pp. 26-27, “The greater substantive potential for policy research early on as opposed to during final deliberation and enactment is recognized by scholars. But this insight does not seem to have guided the behavior of many think tanks, at least not in the past quarter century. In the chapters that follow, I examine what account for these particular developments. I consider the paradox why, at precisely the moment when experts and those who support them are realizing their own power in policy making, those among the that are most conscious of their own potential devote effort where it can achieve the least substantive effect. This development in combination with the harm to collective reputation done by some ideological think tanks results in little evidence that, amid the proliferation of think tanks in American policy making, these think tanks and experts generally are especially – or proportionally – influential. Quite the opposite in fact: Their actual standing may be eroding just as their numbers and scholarly recognition increase.”

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It is good to see my generic news story on global warming from May, 2004 being put to good use by the Washington Post in a story today on the new Webster et al. paper in Science. (For those wanting to see an excellent news story on Webster et al. see Richard Kerr in Science.)

Here is the generic news story in full from Prometheus in May, 2004:

Generic News Story on Climate Change

Instructions to editor: Please repeat the below every 3-4 weeks ad infinitum.

This week the journal [Science/Nature] published a study by a team of scientists led by a [university/government lab/international group] [challenging/confirming] that the earth is warming. The new study looks at [temperature/sea level/the arctic] and finds evidence of trends that [support/challenge] the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Scientist [A, B, C], a [participant in, reviewer of] the study observed that the study, ["should bring to a close debate over global warming," "provides irrefutable evidence that global warming is [real/overstated] today,” “demonstrates the value of climate science”]. Scientist [D, E, F], who has long been [critical/supportive] of the theory of global warming rebutted that the study, ["underscores that changes in [temperature/sea level/the arctic] will likely be [modest/significant],” “ignores considerable literature inconvenient to their central hypothesis,” “commits a basic mistake”]. Scientist [A, B, C or D, E, F] has been criticized by [advocacy groups, reporters, scientific colleagues] for receiving funding from [industry groups, conservative think tanks]. It is unclear what the study means for U.S. participation the Kyoto Protocol, which the Bush Administration has refused to participate in. All agreed that more research is necessary.

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In Science this week, Richard Kerr has the best summary I’ve seen of recent scientific studies of hurricanes and climate. The occasion for Kerr’s article is a study by Webster et al. on trends in strom frequencies and intensities. Here is the summary of Kerr’s article, “Mounting evidence suggests that tropical cyclones around the world are intensifying, perhaps driven by greenhouse warming, but humans still have themselves to blame for rising damage.” These articles are freely available here.

In today’s New York Times, economist Alan B. Kruger discusses our work on politics and presidential disaster declarations. Here is an excerpt:

“While no one would doubt that a disaster of the magnitude of Hurricane Katrina deserves the full commitment of the federal government, the language in the FEMA law is vague enough to count two feet of snow in Ohio as a major disaster, as was the case last December. Indeed, the law specifically prohibits the use of an “arithmetic formula or sliding scale” to deny assistance. So, disaster requests are not evaluated based on standard quantitative evidence; instead, declarations involve subjective judgment. Not surprisingly, in this vacuum presidents have displayed a tendency to declare more disasters in years when they face re-election. Mary W. Downton of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Roger A. Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado, Boulder, for example, looked at the flood-related disasters that were declared from 1965 to 1997 in an article published in “Natural Hazards Review” in 2001. Even after accounting for the amount of precipitation and flood damage each year, they found that the average number of flood-related disasters declared by the president was 46 percent higher in election years than in other years. The tendency to declare more disasters during election years is not limited to floods. President Bill Clinton set a record by declaring 73 major disasters in 35 states and the District of Columbia in 1996, the year he was up for re-election. When George W. Bush faced re-election in 2004, he declared 61 major disasters in 36 states – 10 more than in 2003 and tied for the second highest number of major disaster declarations ever, according to data provided by FEMA. The increase from 2003 to 2004 was particularly sharp in the 12 battleground states in which the election was decided by 5 percent or less; these states had 17 major disasters declared in 2004 but only 8 in 2003, and, therefore, accounted for 90 percent of the increase.”

The paper that Professor Krueger references is this one:

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In Part I and Part II of his series we discussed some of the methodological challenges in quantifying economic impacts and sought to place Katrina into the context of historical hurricanes. Katrina holds the distinction of not only being one of the most costly hurricanes on record, but also one of the most costly floods.

In its tabulation of losses from extreme weather events, the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) has historically distinguished hurricane damages from flood damages. In a research report to NOAA on flood damage that we completed several years ago we characterized the distinction as follows:

“[Flooding includes] river and coastal flooding, rainwater flooding on level surfaces and low-gradient slopes, flooding in shallow depressions which is caused by water-table rise, and flooding caused by the backing-up or overflow of artificial drainage systems. The NWS includes damage from most types of flooding listed above, but excludes ocean floods caused by severe wind (storm surge) or tectonic activity (tsunami).” The NWS also excludes mudslides from its flood damage totals.

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