Here are a few useful FAQs on recent increasing prices of food around the world:

International Monetary Fund (FAQ link)

UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAQ link)

World Bank (Link)

Gary Becker and Richard Posner (Link)

Please feel free to add useful resources in the comments.

I’ll end this heavy week of blogging with an award for the bonehead move of the week. There is in fact a tie for the award between NASA’s James Hansen and UK environmental activist Jo Abbess.

James Hansen has undertaken a pressure campaign, apparently orchestrated with Friends of the Earth, on a publisher for some statements on climate change that he disagreed with within a high school textbook. Hansen had the bright idea of engaging this pressure campaign using his official NASA letterhead and thus presumably while being paid by taxpayers. Smart move.

Not to be outdone, Jo Abbess was able to successfully lobby BBC reporter Roger Harrabin to modify a story on climate change to be more to her liking. Abbess had the bright idea to announce her success to the world, including republishing her full email exchange with Mr. Harrabin. Smart move.

Well, if nothing else both of these episodes will surely keep the blogosphere agitated and engaged!

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.

Lucia Liljegren has a considered post up on Real Climate’s odd post on my recent letter to Nature Geoscience. I apologize for our comment problems on that thread, but perhaps this one will work better, and you can always comment at Lucia’s site, or try to get through the screeners at Real Climate. Is it just me or has the Real Climate discussion board become completely empty of anything resembling scientific discussion?

Anyone who wants to see how the misplaced opposition to adaptation actually hurts poor people need look further than thie report out today from ClimateWire:

Environmental and humanitarian activist groups plan to formally ask the World Bank to back away from plans to create a $500 million trust fund aimed at helping poor nations cope with climate change.

The letter, which representatives of several organizations confirmed Thursday is being drafted and will be signed by more than 100 organizations, comes as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund launch their 2008 spring meeting, attended by finance ministers from across the world.

Among the reasons cited for opposing adaptation funds is that the World Bank is supporting the development of a giant coal plant in India:

Groups said their overarching concern, though, is the World Bank’s fossil fuel-rich energy portfolio. The bank’s approval this week of $450 million for a major coal-fired power plant in India, many said, undermines its attempts to go green.

“There’s a lot of concern about the World Bank taking over of the [adaptation program] because of their ongoing funding of fossil fuel projects,” said Steve Kretzmann, executive director of Oil Change International, a nonprofit group based in Washington that advocates for clean energy and against foreign aid to the international oil industry.

“It is not a credible institution for managing these funds, especially given its poor environmental track record,” added Karen Orenstein, extractive industries campaign coordinator with the environmental nonprofit Friends of the Earth.

“If the World Bank is truly interested in being a leader in fighting climate change, they shouldn’t start out by financing a huge mega-coal project,” she said.

So you read that right, lets take away money that could have positive benefits improving the lives of people in the developing world because of concerns about a fossil fuel project. This is a real-world example of how continuing efforts to place adaptation in opposition to mitigation have a material effect on people’s lives.

Does anyone really think that opposing energy development and adaptation will make the climate agenda more appealing to people in India? Why can’t these groups support adaptation and clean energy at the same time, rather than placing them in opposition?

The folks at the Real Climate blog have offered up some comments on my letter to Nature Geosciences (PDF) which appeared last week. In the condescending tone that we have come to expect from Real Climate, they helpfully frame their comments in terms of teaching me some lessons. I encourage you to read the whole post, but here is my response (submitted for their posting approval) to their three main points, which I’ve highlighted in bold:

Thanks for this discussion. Full text of the letter can be found here:

http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-2592-2008.07.pdf

1. IPCC already showed a very similar comparison as Pielke does, but including uncertainty ranges.

RESPONSE: Indeed, and including the uncertainty ranges would not change my conclusion that:

“Temperature observations fall at
the low end of the 1990 IPCC forecast range
and the high end of the 2001 range. Similarly,
the 1990 best estimate sea level rise projection
overstated the resulting increase, whereas the
2001 projection understated that rise.”

2. If a model-data comparison is done, it has to account for the uncertainty ranges – both in the data (that was Lesson 1 re noisy data) and in the model (that’s Lesson 2).

RESPONSE: I did not do a “model-data comparison”. One should be done, though, I agree.

3. One should not mix up a scenario with a forecast – I cannot easily compare a scenario for the effects of greenhouse gases alone with observed data, because I cannot easily isolate the effect of the greenhouse gases in these data, given that other forcings are also at play in the real world.

RESPONSE: Indeed. However, I made no claims about attribution, so this is not really relevant to my letter.

Thanks again, and I’ll be happy to follow the discussion.

As I have commented here before, one of the pleasures of writing a book is receiving reactions and comments, especially those from people who you have learned from and respected. Sheila Jasanoff, of Harvard University, is one of the giants of the “science and technology studies” community, and in the current issue of the American Scientist, she writes a review of The Honest Broker. But unlike Eugene Skolnikoff, another giant in the field who recently reviewed the book, Professor Jasanoff is far more critical of the book. However, after carefully reading her review, I remain unclear as to what her objections actually are to the book, and this post explains why.

Professor Jasanoff’s summary of the book, which comprises most of the review is excellent and clearly written. It is clear that she read the book closely. Jasanoff offers two critiques of the book.

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A Guest Post by Greg Nemet, University of Wisconsin.

The Economist has an article this week with the title “bureaucratic meddling has harmed solar power.”

The article points out correctly that the cost of solar power has stopped falling in the past couple of years as a result of scarcity of purified silicon, the main material used to make solar panels. It’s an informative article…as long as you ignore the headline and the conclusion that governments should not interfere with the development of new technologies.

Any subsidy program will put upward pressure on prices in the near term, as people are generally willing to pay more for something when someone else pays part of the cost. The important question is what happens in the longer term. And despite the recent rise in prices, the subsidy program in Germany and the market for solar it has created over the past eight years, have set in motion promising trends: new purified silicon plants are coming on line that will make the input material for solar panels much cheaper, the rise in silicon cost has led to rapid reductions in the amount of material used, and the scale of demand has made it worthwhile for German machine tool companies to develop PV-specific manufacturing machinery that they now export to low-cost PV factories in China. These developments are highly promising for cheaper PV; and they are very closely tied to important policy innovations, also known as “bureaucratic meddling.”

The bigger problem, that the article misses, is that the solar technology being used today is unlikely ever to get cheap enough for truly massive deployment, even if the factors above engender substantial cost reductions in the next several years. In a recent study (PDF), we compared the effects of subsidies and R&D on the cost of solar power and found that you can’t get to really cheap solar with subsidies alone. Subsidies can help enable economies of scale and learning-by-doing, but they are not enough. Technology breakthroughs are also needed if PV is going to get cheap enough to compete with coal or gas or, eventually, nuclear power—even with high carbon prices. Some of the technical improvements that will enable commercialization of cheap PV are certainly best left to the private sector. But the history of technology policy suggests that the fundamental breakthroughs required will need to come from more bureaucratic meddling in the form of publicly sponsored R&D funding.

Center faculty affiliate Frank Laird is interviewed over at the Breakthrough Institute on energy policy and climate change.

Ted Nordhaus eloquently characterizes a disturbing pattern in debate among those calling for action climate change — avoid debating the merits of policies, and instead smear the character of those making arguments that you disagree with.

Here is an excerpt:

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