How to break the trance?
July 7th, 2005Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
On his blog the Albuquerque Journal’s John Fleck offers an interesting commentary on the reactions to yesterday’s hockey stick post:
“[Pielke says] we’re all arguing about the hockey stick as a surrogate for what we’re really arguing about. In the process, we all just talk past one another without getting anywhere. The funny thing, in terms of my premise, is the resulting comments. It’s a whole bunch of people on both sides of the issue who keep rehashing the same old arguments. It’s like they’re so entrenched in their pre-rehearsed arguments that they paid no attention to what Roger was saying.”
It is almost as if people are in a trance, where they can only see arguments about climate science and nothing else, even though they are really arguing about politics and values. I understand why this occurs and have written about it many times. But what is puzzling to me is why it is so difficult for people to see other perspectives and engage them, even if they disagree. I am not sure what to make of this; one might think that it is a function of the self-selected few with motivation to read blogs and comment. But it seems to me that it is a broader characteristic of the climate debate that infuses the media, the blogosphere and political discussion.
With all of the attention being paid to getting George Bush to accept the science of climate change, many are going to be disappointed when they succeed in this task and policies don’t change. As Margaret Beckett, the British Environment Secretary, commented on the climate debate, ” the theology is less important than action._ From where I sit it seems like most people have their priorities in the opposite order, theology trumps action. How to break the trance? I don’t know.
July 7th, 2005 at 3:51 pm
I would argue that the reason people rehash old arguments is that they don’t actually understand the arguments in the first place. Instead they trot out sound-bites that look good when they first saw them and are then impervious to correction or criticism because they don’t understand any of it.
This is more-so a problem because issues of climate and policy cross so many areas of expertise. A climate scientist is not necessarily a good policy maker or economist. Hence the example of that old canard (by now) of Castles, Henderson, the IPCC and market exchange rates (MER) versus purchasing power parity (PPP). You had (maybe still have) climate scientists staunchly defending an economic proposition that is clearly wrong. There is a nice quote in the recently released House of Lords report on this:
“While the IPCC SRES does indeed make some use of PPP conversions, the IPCC acknowledges that it has used MER conversions in its main work, and it insists on the ‘methodological soundness of the use of MER for developing long-term emissions scenarios’. We found no support for the use of MER in such exercises, other than from Dr Nakicenovic of the IPCC.”
July 7th, 2005 at 10:40 pm
And, of course, all of the previous studies which used MER as their basis, which, of course was the point made in reply by IPCC. If their charge is to do a critical review of the literature, and the literature uses in the main MER, what are they to do, repeat all the studies using MER?
Or are you saying that the claim that MER was used in most of the studies reviewed by the IPCC is false?
July 7th, 2005 at 11:30 pm
Eli,
That claim is not at all false – but the IPCC scenarios and modelling exercise were more than just a review of the literature. And bad economics is still bad economics no matter how many times people have done it in the past. You may find the paper prepared by Professor Nordhaus for a recent IPCC conference on the topic illuminating: http://www.econ.yale.edu/~nordhaus/homepage/ppp_020805.pdf
July 11th, 2005 at 10:40 am
“Hence the example of that old canard (by now) of Castles, Henderson, the IPCC and market exchange rates (MER) versus purchasing power parity (PPP). You had (maybe still have) climate scientists staunchly defending an economic proposition that is clearly wrong.”
It’s clearly wrong, but Dr. Nakicenovic claims that it doesn’t have a substantial effect on the GDP/capita projections beyond 2040 (or maybe even 2030). See Figure 1 of this document:
http://crga.atmos.uiuc.edu/publications/ipcc-sres-revisited.pdf
In any case, the errors introduced by using MER vs PPP are absolutely dwarfed by the likelihood that virtually the entire economics profession (with only occasional exceptions such as Arnold Kling and Robin Hansen) will MASSIVELY underestimate world per-capita economic growth in the 21st century:
http://www.longbets.org/194
http://markbahner.typepad.com/random_thoughts/2004/10/3rd_thoughts_on.html
The Heartland Institute provides this analysis and comment by Ian Castles:
http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=12088
“By how much did the IPCC overestimate the likely economic growth of poorer nations over the next century? For poorer nations as a whole to catch wealthier nations in economic output this century would require that average incomes on the entire continent of Asia increase over the next 100 years by a factor of 70 to 1 for the IPCC’s least-warming scenario, and 140 to 1 for its most-warming scenario.”
“Such dramatic economic growth by even a single country–let alone an entire continent–would be unprecedented, notes Castles. Examining growth rates in wealthier countries during their most dynamic periods of economic growth, Castles points out that ‘average real incomes in the United States increased by a factor of perhaps 5 to 1 in the nineteenth century, and average real incomes in Japan increased by a factor of almost 20 to 1 in the twentieth century.’”
Well, Ian Castles, I have surprising news for you: the per-capita GDP of the entire world is going to increase by a factor of ***1000*** during the 21st century.
That will make the errors introduced by MER vs PPP pale by comparison!
P.S. The ***real*** problem in the IPCC TAR analysis is not the projected rates of economic growth, but the ridiculous assumptions about how little the entire world is going to “decarbonize” in the 21st century. It is quite likely that, by the end of the century, the whole world will be operating on either a full hydrogen economy, or nearly full hydrogen economy (with some natural gas use). The idea that we will be burning substantially MORE coal in 2100 than we’re burning now…which is a nearly universal assumption throughout the IPCC TAR scenarios, is ludicrous. It’s completely unsupported by scientific analyses of technological trends, e.g. those performed by Jesse Ausubel:
http://www.techcentralstation.com/021803D.html
July 11th, 2005 at 2:49 pm
Ooh, there you go with TCS. Say, didn’t TCS “host” Glassman predict the Dow would hit 36,000 back during the tech boom? One learns not to read too much into such speculations about the sky being the limit in terms of either technology or the economy. These folks figure it’s in the interest of their personal stock portfolios to be constantly talking things up, or maybe it’s just that the free market god demands periodic sacrifices of rationality.
July 12th, 2005 at 10:52 am
Steve Bloom writes, “Ooh, there you go with TCS.”
I only linked to the TCS article, because I couldn’t quickly find Dr. Ausubel’s actual work. Here’s a piece on Dr. Ausubel’s website:
http://phe.rockefeller.edu/BrainNotChange/
In case you have trouble interpreting it, it shows we’re currently at a hydrogen-to-carbon ratio of approximately 3-to-1. The extrapolation shows us crossing into a a “methane economy” (hydrogen-to-carbon ratio of 4-to-1) circa 2025-2030. And by 2100, the projected hydrogen-to-carbon ratio is 10-to-1.
Therefore, even if energy usage were to, for example, triple from 2000 to 2100, CO2 emissions would be slightly lower in 2100 than in 2000.
“Say, didn’t TCS “host” Glassman predict the Dow would hit 36,000 back during the tech boom?”
Yes, but that’s completely irrelevant. Jesse Ausubel is not in any way connected to TCS. Jesse Ausubel is the director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University:
http://phe.rockefeller.edu/jesse/index.html