Well, it’s not the job of people to dispute it. It’s the job of those claiming it to back it up in terms of reality. Don’t you think there would be some correlation somewhere in the recent past if it were real? Right now, they have no backup in the real world to be crying wolf.

There will be losers and there will be winners with climate change – all we know is that there are usually more losers with cooling. If only 10% of western water is for urban purposes, then dropping rural uses by 10% will allow a doubling of the population. The same orders of magnitude goes for a decrease in water supply.

Then, you completely dismiss the fact that if in fact we end up with warming from CO2, the increase in convection which has never happened with warming before anyway is a wild card that needs to be addressed by realistic models, the computing power for which is within reach but is not being adequately focused on.

Who will win and who will lose, and how many of each will there be compared with who will win and who will lose with the status quo is what needs to be addressed – it’s all relative. ZPG may be addressing the real, and only, problem here.

Without this knowledge you are effectively just tilting at windmills.

But hey, those who would profit from carbon trading schemes are in your corner…

http://www.cspo.org/documents/workshopfinalreport.pdf

and

http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-2479-sparc_2006.01.pdf

Jonathan- I am sensitive your your concerns, but the fact is that any policy can be warped and twisted. In my view this is not a reason for avoiding particular areas of policy or policy research, but rather a reminder of the challenges of real-world policymaking.

Thanks!

- water shortages are a function of both supply and demand, and conflicts are guaranteed where allocation is made politically rather than through private market transactions;

- water shortages are a function of both supply and demand, if prices to users are kept low then demand will be relatively high and incentives to conserve relatively low;

- politicians and various special interests may naturally favor “technology” solutions that do not improve markets (which may increase water prices), but require continuing government involvement. This way the politicians have a continuing role to play in doling out constructions projects, which benefit both construction firms and users that are able to shift costs to general taxpayers.

Harry — just because a long-term independent CO2 change in the past hasn’t led temperature (from what can be read in the paleo record, at least) doesn’t mean that a change in CO2 now will not force a temperature change. The science is solid enough to surmise a very high certainty that CO2 can lead temperature and I have yet to see any serious, credible dispute to that. The real question is about feedbacks and amplification. Changes in the lapse rate are one small piece of the larger puzzle — feedbacks and processes abound. You don’t need to lecture us about the science around here….that’s what RC and CA are for.

P.S. Ag water will convert to urban water when the price is right.

In much the same way engineering is used in flood control to avoid talking about the unpleasant political realities of flood plain management, engineering is being used here to avoid a discussion of the unpleasant reality of agricultural water usage. As the story notes, 90 percent of the Colorado River’s water is used in agriculture. You’ll find similar ag-nonag splits around the west. You have two *very* different pricing structures – cheap ag water and very expensive urban water. But while there are individual cases of ag-urban transfers, there is very little high-level discussion of this larger issue.

When Pielke, Sarewitz, and others call for enormous investments in adaptation to climate change, they clearly don’t intend simplistic engineering fixes. But I’d like to see them grapple more directly with the political reality that in the United States, calls for adaptation will be interpreted by state and federal government as calls to build more levees and desalination plants, not to making more more judicious use of land, water, and other natural resources.

A great challenge in discussing adaptation will be to present it accurately as an essential part of responding to climatic threats without making it seem a panacea (see Pielke’s response to Henry Miller’s mistake along those lines: http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/001149unpublished_letter_t.html) and in a way that makes clear that adaptation means behavior change, not technological magic beans.

Indeed, in their Nature paper, Pielke et al. identify this problem: “defining adaptation in terms of sustainable development does not fit comfortably into the current political framework of the climate-change problem,” but don’t address how we’re to introduce sustainable environmental practices into a political system that can’t keep deficits below the rate of GDP growth and which can’t even bring itself to maintain our current physical infrastructure (see Bob Herbert’s column in Thursday’s Times: http://select.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/opinion/05herbert.html).

Although sustainable adaptation is necessary, I fear that the concept will be so distorted in practice that putting a lot of political emphasis on adaptation would cause more harm than good. On the other hand, the enthusiasm we see for ethanol and hydrogen demonstrates that mitigation runs similar risks.