Roger A. Pielke Jr.’s Review of Kicking the Carbon Habit: A Rebuttal by William Sweet
December 4th, 2006Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
[It is our pleasure to provide a rebuttal by William Sweet, author of Kicking the Carbon Habit, to a review on Mr. Sweet's recent book by Roger Pielke, Jr. which recently appeared in Nature. Mr. Sweet's book can be found online here and purchased through at a discount through Amazon and other online retailers. Pielke's review can be found here in PDF. We thanks Mr. Sweet for his contribution and welcome your comments. -Ed.]
What Just Ain’t So…Also Just Wasn’t Said in the First Place
In a review that appeared in the Oct. 19, 2006 issue of Nature, Roger A. Pielke Jr. praised my Kicking the Carbon Habit for recognizing that there are uncertainties in climate science and yet arguing convincingly that a reasonable person can “still believe that human influence on climate is a problem worth our attention and action.” But then he proceeds to claim that the book’s discussion of policy is “regrettably grounded in a fundamental error that surprisingly was not caught in the review process” — an error having supposedly to do with the way the Pacala-Socolow carbon mitigation wedges is presented.
I am not aware that any such error exists, and in a personal communication, Robert Socolow has declared my capsule summary of the wedges model “exemplary.” But that is really beside the point. The important thing is that my policy argument, which Pielke radically misconstrues, is not in fact grounded in the Pacala-Socolow model. Rather, it is grounded in story I tell at the critical juncture in Chapter 8 of the Book, the chapter called not coincidentally “Breaking the Carbon Habit.” The story has do with Enrico Fermi and the issue of whether Hitler might be able to build an atomic bomb, as seen by Fermi and others at the beginning of World War II.
In a nutshell: Fermi had told the graduate student Isodor Rabi that the idea of an atomic bomb was “nuts.” Rabi conveyed that opinion to Leo Szilard, who was sounding the alarm about the possibility of a Nazi nuclear weapon. Szilard suggested Rabi ask Fermi just why he thought the idea was nuts. Rabi did so, and Fermi told him he considered the possibility of a bomb being made successfully was ”remote.” So Rabi asked Fermi what he meant by that. Fermi said that the possibility of a bomb being built successfully was perhaps only about 10 percent. To which Rabi said: “Wait a minute. If I go to the doctor and the doctor tells me that there’s a remote possibility I might die, and that it’s 10 percent, I get excited.”
Instantly—and this is mark of intellectual greatness and greatness in leadership as well—Fermi completely changed his mind about the issue. He started to work around the clock on graphite moderation, leading a couple of years later to the famous Chicago pile in which a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was first demonstrated.
The argument in my book is that even if the probability of a climate cataclysm in this century is very small, perhaps (say) only 1 percent, the magnitude of that cataclysm could be so dire, concerted action is warranted right now.* To say, by the way, that I characterize human-induced climate change something worthy of our attention and action is rather an understatement. I consider it the most urgent problem facing humanity today. But my argument about the case for strong immediate action is of a statistical character and is essentially identical to the one laid out by Richard Posner in his book Catastrophe (Oxford, 2004).
This brings me to a second drastic misunderstanding on Pielke’s part — and here I take some responsibility for not having made myself clearer. Kicking the Carbon Habit makes no claims about what is needed to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the long run. In fact it makes no claims about the long run whatsoever, except that the possibility of cataclysmic climate change cannot be ruled out. What the book does is make a case for the United States’ immediately joining in the Kyoto regime and, to that end, for its adopting a program to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by about 25 percent right away.
That means using the low-carbon and zero-carbon technology we can deploy right now, which happens to be the subtitle to the third section of the book. Contrary to what Pielke says in the review, I do not “dismiss the prospects for renewables and carbon sequestration.” What I do is show that sequestration, solar energy, and hydrogen-economy technologies are not market-ready at this time and therefore not relevant to what the United States can do to cut its emissions by 25 percent today.
The zero-carbon and low-carbon technologies that are market-ready are conservation (of course in the widest sense), wind energy, natural gas, and nuclear energy. My position is that the United States should adopt a very stiff carbon tax that would result promptly in economy-wide conservation (including in the auto sector), and rapid replacement of dirty coal by some combination of wind, gas, and nuclear.
I do appreciate the positive things Mr. Pielke said in his review. But I would have been a lot happier if it had begun it more like this:
“In a book addressed squarely at American readers, William Sweet argues for prompt ratification of the Kyoto Protocol by the United States, which implies — and this is the really important point — adopting a program to immediately cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 25 percent. Sweet proposes adoption of a stiff carbon tax, to induce rapid conversion of the coal industry to some combination of nuclear, natural gas and wind, and to prevent any further growth in U.S. energy demand.
“In building his case for that intrinsically controversial position, Sweet presents some important science in a way that’s often interesting and even entertaining. However, he fails to address the question of how his aggressive program of U.S. carbon cuts would lead to long-term global stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations. In my view that is a serious shortcoming, because without that link being made, it’s hard to see why the United States should do anything at all.”
Having not explicitly addressed that important last point in my book, let me do so now. My view is that when we project future energy demand and greenhouse gas production out to the end of the century, relying on reasonable extrapolations from the situation we’re in today, the prognosis is utterly hopeless. I see any attempt to develop a comprehensive, global, long-term solution as not merely futile but as a recipe for inaction.
Therefore, frankly borrowing a principle from 12-step philosophy, my view is that when confronting a problem that is impossibly big and impossibly tangled, we should simply look at our part of it and address that. Accordingly, the United States, as the world’s main source of greenhouse gas emissions (about 25 percent), the world’s richest country, and the advanced industrial world’s most extravagant user of energy, should step up to the plate and do what it can as fast as it can.
The United States is in a position right now to do much more than any other country to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But instead of doing the most, it is doing the least. That is my message.
—Bill Sweet
December 4, 2006
* By a cataclysm I mean a spontaneous reorganization of the world’s climate system, of a scale and magnitude similar to the ice ages, such that life could become unsustainable for a large fraction of the people living on earth. The change in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide associated with the onset and termination of ice ages has been about 100 ppmv; since the industrial revolution began, the concentration has increased by about that same amount, and in the next 50-100 years it could increase by as much as twice that amount again, unless we take radical actions to curtail its growth.
December 4th, 2006 at 10:33 am
Mr Sweet
I would appreciate it if you could clarify how you arrive at your risk assessment of a 1% probability that warming in the next 100 years will cause a global “cataclysm of a scale and magnitude similar to the ice ages.” Perhaps you could point interested readers to hard evidence published in the scientific literature.
December 4th, 2006 at 10:50 am
Mr. Sweet:
I’m also curious about your catastrophe scenario. I’m curious about:
1) How you came up with the 1% probability value, and
2) How is it that a 5 degree Celsius average temperature rise over 100 years could cause the result that “life could become unsustainable for a large fraction of the people living on earth.”
3) Particularly, have you considered that people in 2100 will likely be far wealthier and more technologically sophisticated in 2100 than in 2006?
December 4th, 2006 at 10:54 am
Mr. Sweet:
Another question.
You write, “My view is that when we project future energy demand and greenhouse gas production out to the end of the century, relying on reasonable extrapolations from the situation we’re in today, the prognosis is utterly hopeless.”
“Utterly hopeless?” What does that mean? Will climate change cause extinction of the human race?
December 4th, 2006 at 12:06 pm
(1) By “hopeless” I mean that there would seem to be no hope of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at any reasonable level.
(2) The 1 in 1000 estimate is entirely hypothetical, nothing but a wild guess. But consider the Fermi situation: in hindsight, we can say that the chance of Hitler’s developing an atomic bomb and using it to win the war was perhaps more like 1 in a 100, not 1 in 10 as Fermi guessed. Would the Manhattan Project still have been worthwhile? I think so. The Rabi rejoinder still holds.
So even if the odds of our inducing a systemic climate change as cataclysmic as an ice age are, say, only 1 in 10,000, would concerted action still be warranted now? I think so.
December 4th, 2006 at 2:42 pm
Nazi research into uranium went further than thought up till now. According Red Army spies the Germans “detonated two large explosions in Thuringia.” The bombs, the Soviet spies wrote, presumably contained uranium 235, a material used in nuclear weapons, and produced a “highly radioactive effect.” In other words; a “dirty bomb”.
The Red Army’s spies noted with concern that the Germany army could “slow down our offensive” with its new weapon. The fact that dictator Josef Stalin received one of the four copies of the report shows just how seriously the Kremlin took the news.
December 4th, 2006 at 3:35 pm
Hi,
You write, “1) By “hopeless” I mean that there would seem to be no hope of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at any reasonable level.”
I think there is approximately a 50/50 chance that CO2 concentrations will be stabilized at less than 560 ppm (i.e., double the pre-industrial level of 280 ppm), and that there is approximately a 50/50 chance that the methane atmospheric concentration will be less than the current value (1770 ppb).
http://markbahner.typepad.com/random_thoughts/2006/04/complete_set_of.html
Do you think that there is no hope (as opposed to a 50/50 chance) of these levels being attained? Or do you think those levels are not “reasonable?”
“So even if the odds of our inducing a systemic climate change as cataclysmic as an ice age are, say, only 1 in 10,000, would concerted action still be warranted now? I think so.”
I guess I’m having a hard time imagining a warming that could be as cataclysmic as an ice age. A 10 degree Fahrenheit temperature increase is approximately equal to the temperature difference between Raleigh NC and Providence, RI. Or Raleigh NC and Daytona Beach, FL. Or Louisville, KY and Minneapolis, MN. Or Louisville, KY and Montgomery, AL. None of those places seem especially climatologically problematic.
Look at the United States and Canada…two countries that are wealthy, with citizens free to move wherever they want. The southern part of Canada is FAR more populated than the north. In fact, virtually all the major Canadian cities are right on the border with the U.S. (Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Vancouver).
And people in the U.S., when their working lives are over, all seem to retire to Florida, Arizona, and other southern places (e.g. Costa Rica). So I don’t see the “catastrophe” in even a 10 degree Fahrenheit temperature increase (which in any case has virtually no chance of occurring).
“The Rabi rejoinder still holds.”
Yes, but the Rabi rejoinder was regarding a totalitarian regime with which we were at war possessing nuclear weapons. I can’t right now think of any similar danger for global warming. If you could more thoroughly describe the particulars of the catastrophe, maybe I’d agree that the Rabi rejoinder applies to global warming.
December 4th, 2006 at 4:22 pm
Bill- Thanks again for this thoughtful comment. I have only a little to add to what is in my review.
It was comments like the following in your book that led me to believe that you were thinking about stabilization over the long term:
“If the reader accepts only half what [Pacala and Socolow] propose, the problem of greenhouse gas stabilization can in principle be solved.”
This sort of statement is repeated in numerous places in the book, and even occurs more subtlety on p. 150 in the figure that you use to illustrate the P&S wedges. Your arrow which extends emissions beyond 2054 is flat, while in Pacala and Socolow’s original figure the post-2054 emissions curve points downward.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/305/5686/968/FIG1
But let me again emphasize that the aside from this issue, I found the book enjoyable, and in particular its treatment of climate science is sophisticated and entertaining.
I’m happy for readers to have a look at your book, my review, your rebuttal, and come to their own judgments.
Thanks again for participating!
December 4th, 2006 at 7:24 pm
Mark Bahner makes an interesting point about finding it hard to visualize a much warmer world being as problematic as a much cooler world. It’s certainly the mainstream view that the warmer world will probably not be as bad, and that’s why I rate the chances of there being a climate cataclysm as being no higher than 1 in a hundred or perhaps even 1 in a thousand.
What’s distrubing, however, is that modelers so far have not been able to fully explain the dynamics of ice age onsets-particuarly, why such large-scale climate transformations are associated with relatively modest decreases in greenhouse gas levels. Given that uncertainty, it seems possible that comparable and even greater changes in greenhouse gas concentrations, albeit in the opposite direction, also could produce unexpectedly far-reaching effects.
Thanks again to Roger Pielke for generously providing this forum. I admit that some of the wording he quotes was slightly careless, and that the second version of the wedges diagram on p. 150 could have been done better.
December 4th, 2006 at 10:03 pm
Bill -
You are putting the cart before the horse. There is no evidence that CO2 causes either warming or cooling in the paleo record. The temperature change preceeds the CO2 level change. It’s the “warm coke effect.”
But, yes, the litmus test is the answer to the question of how many people live on the 10% of land closest to the equator vs. the 10% of land closest to the poles… Obviously the optimal temperature is warmer than existing.
December 5th, 2006 at 1:10 am
Steve:
“There is no evidence that CO2 causes either warming or cooling in the paleo record. The temperature change preceeds the CO2 level change.”
Yes, but.
We know CO2 is a GHG; the lag in the past tells us simply that other factors triggered warmings – warmings that were then further enhanced by rising CO2 levels. Clearly higher CO2 levels do cause more warming, so we have clear cause for concern. Mankind’s GHG emissions have replaced Malinkovich cycles and other influences as the trigger.
December 5th, 2006 at 1:33 am
Steve,
This is such a tired and shallow argument about CO2 lagging behind temperature in the glacial cycles.
http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/02/co2-lags-not-leads.html
You need a sensitivity to CO2 forcing of around 3oC/doubling to explain the magnitude of the temperature swings observed oer the last million years. But that is not the entirety of the geological record, there are examples of CO2/CH4 driven climate changes farther back, eg the PETM and the eruption of the Deccan Traps.
You must also dismiss very basic physics to pretend that CO2 doen’t cause warming.
I don’t get your point about population distro and warming being better. And what about sea level, we mostly live near the coasts?
As to the general notion that a warmer climate might be better in the end, please see this post:
http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/02/whats-wrong-with-warm-weather.html
December 5th, 2006 at 6:01 am
I am with those questioning the catastrophic claims. As far as I can tell, the talk of “tipping points” and “ten years to act” is all totally without basis — at least I have never seen a basis for it. To my knowledge, none of the computer models predicts anything catastrophic. Bill Sweet’s probability numbers (whether one in a hundred or one in ten thousand) are just made-up numbers unless there is a basis for them. If anyone can tell us what the basis is for expectations of a catastrophe, I for one would be much obliged.
December 5th, 2006 at 8:07 am
toKYOTOm,
Your statement “We know CO2 is a GHG; the lag in the past tells us simply that other factors triggered warmings – warmings that were then further enhanced by rising CO2 levels” is incorrect. We do not, in fact, know that. Again, there is no evidence of any “enhancement” in the paleo record.
Coby – it may be tired to you, but it’s still true – your dogma notwishstanding.
December 6th, 2006 at 10:26 pm
Steve:
It is unclear to me what point you are trying to make. You suggest that we will all be better off with a warmer world, but seem to argue that pumping GHGs like CO2 into the atmosphere hasn’t been pushing the atmosphere in the right direction – that the warming is strictly natural and anthropogenically caused or induced GHG emissions have no effect. Sounds to me that you are in effect denying that the so-called GHGs actually have warming effects.
What am I missing in summarizing your understanding of climate physics?
December 6th, 2006 at 10:46 pm
Tom -
Your dogma is clouding your thinking. I am not suggesting that we *will* be better off with a warmer world. I am suggesting that, once the reality of feedbacks is discovered, we *might* be better off. We *might* be slightly worse off. We *might* be a lot worse off, although based on what we actually know about the effects of (strictly) CO2, the deck is stacked against that in that the only thing we really know is CO2 is the base of the food chain and it enhances convection.
My argument is that once one gets out of the lab we, realistically, have no clue about what CO2’s overall effects will be.
This is not to say that the 6+ billion of us, closely related to the lemming as we are, are not totally screwing up the environment.
However, the bottom line is that knowing what we know, or rather not knowing what we don’t know, some extra plant food may very well, in the big picture, be a good thing. The answer is another Manhattan project – not a hobbling of society.
December 6th, 2006 at 10:56 pm
A point of clarification: We know that ghg’s intercept various lw radiation emitted from Earth’s surface. What that does, in effect, is tend to warm the lower troposphere. What *that* does, in effect, is increase the temperature lapse rate of the troposphere. Then, what *that* does, is increase convection since warm air rises. Since we don’t really know how much convection is increasing, we don’t really know what’s happening with the lapse rate. That’s why I said all we really know about CO2 is that it’s the base of the food chain and it increases convection.
December 7th, 2006 at 6:01 am
Steve, thanks for your response.
When you say “Obviously the optimal temperature is warmer than existing”, it sure seems like you’re suggesting that we will all be better off with a warmer world, but maybe that’s just my dogma.
I think it’s clear that we are forcing the climate on one direction, and rather quickly from a geological perspective. If this was taking place over milllenia, I think we’d all be less concerned. As it is, as we discussed on another thread, it seems to be stressing a number of ecosytems and species.
We should be looking for the most cost-effective solutions (including doing a better job of protecting biodiversity and habitat), but taking into account that doing nothing is also costly.
I’ll leave to others the fight over CO2’s role in climate, but suffice it to say that I think your view is unjustifiedly sanguinary.
December 7th, 2006 at 4:08 pm
Steve Hemphill wrote: “We know that ghg’s intercept various lw radiation emitted from Earth’s surface. What that does, in effect, is tend to warm the lower troposphere. What *that* does, in effect, is increase the temperature lapse rate of the troposphere.”
If the troposphere is warming, how does this increase the lapse rate, unless the surface is warming more than the troposphere?
The lapse rate is the rate at which air temperature decreases with height. Increasing the lower troposphere temperature will decrease the lapse rate, the opposite of what you state.
For example, this illustrates the result of the scenario you describe:
http://www.rap.ucar.edu/weather/upper/grb.gif
[Green Bay, WI, USA sounding 12/7/2006 1200Z, LI 18.5]
Certainly no increasing convection in this profile.
Now a profile with better convection possibilities (it is winter, after all) is Tampa Bay, FL, USA:
http://www.rap.ucar.edu/weather/upper/tbw.gif
[12/7/2006 1200Z, LI 5.5]
Note the relatively steep lapse rate here.
December 7th, 2006 at 6:15 pm
Tom – you answered your own apparent conundrum. Yes, I feel that the optimum temperature on Earth for biomass (including Homo sapiens) is warmer than now. However, we do not know if there will be a rate of increase that is too great to maintain sufficient balance. We should find that out, eh? (I agree that the last 8 years are nothing to base a trend on, but we can at least say that the rate of global warming is not *accelerating*.)