Over at the Breakthrough blog, Michael Shellenberger offers some straight talk on the outcome of the Bali meeting.

From Alan Zarembo writing in the LA Times today, this dose of reality:

Here’s a recipe to head off the worst effects of global warming:

1. Start with 30 new nuclear power plants around the world.

2. Add 17,0000 wind turbines, 400 biomass power plants, two hydroelectric dams the size of China’s Three Gorges Dam, and 42 coal or natural gas power plants equipped with still-experimental systems to sequester their carbon dioxide emissions underground.

3. Build everything in 2013. Repeat every year until 2030.

It’s an intentionally implausible plan presented this week by the International Energy Agency to make a point: For all the talk about emissions reductions, the actual work is way beyond what the world can achieve.

As delegates from 190 countries gather here on the Indonesian island of Bali to negotiate a “road map” for the successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming, some experts are wondering whether the meeting has lost touch with the reality of tackling climate change.

So far, the thousands of delegates have been consumed by a debate over caps on emissions of greenhouse gases that are the primary cause of global warming.

The United States and China — the two biggest carbon polluters, each accounting for about 20% of worldwide emissions — have opposed any hard caps.

But while the debate continues, the most fundamental question of what it will take to achieve meaningful reductions has gone largely forgotten.

When in the comments on Tom’s post about the recent scientists petition for action on climate change I complained that 200 scientists calling for action on climate change had ignored adaptation, Todd Neff, a local reporter from here in Boulder, helpfully explained to me why climate change is only about energy policy and not human development, and how a focus on the latter implies “pooh-poohing” the former:

Lots of things kill human beings and make them miserable. Poverty and income inequality is real, and 50-1 ratios and 7.3s versus 0.15s should be addressed with real vigor. But that’s not what’s being talked about in Bali. Pooh-poohing efforts to transform the energy system because poverty remains a problem despite Lyndon Johnson’s best efforts strikes me as diverting from the point. These climate scientists are completely ignoring Tay-Sachs disease, too, not to mention tooth decay and this nefarious hiphop prisoner jeans-at-the-knees look that clearly risks widespread tripping among America’s male teens.

The view that adaptation is not a part of climate change does seem to be widely shared among environmentalists who would like the climate issue to be narrowly looked at as only an energy issue. Not everyone agrees, particularly folks who work in developing countries. OXFAM for example (PDF) has a different perspective, reflected in this call for action in Bali:

To enable poor countries to adapt successfully, change needs to occur at many levels. Communities must be at the heart of efforts to build resilience, whether through improving economic choices, diversifying livelihoods, protecting eco-systems, or strengthening food and water security. Ministries must be able to integrate climate risk management into their overall planning and budgeting, and must also integrate adaptation into development-planning processes, restructure and strengthen institutions, and provide early-warning systems. In addition, they must ensure that climate risks are integrated into national and local disaster-risk reduction plans, so that they can tackle the underlying vulnerabilities that put communities at risk in the face of the increasing number of climate-related disasters.

Given rich countries’ historic role in causing climate change, they now have two clear obligations: to stop harming, by cutting their greenhouse gas emissions hardest and fastest; and to start helping, by providing compensatory finance so that poor countries can adapt before they suffer the full impacts of climate change. . .

In 2005, the G8 countries promised to increase annual aid levels by $50bn by the year 2010. This finance would be a crucial step towards achieving the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets, which aim to halve poverty by 2015. But it is still only 0.36 per cent of rich countries’ incomes – just half of the 0.7 per cent target they signed up to in 1970. Importantly, it is also a target that does not account for the costs of climate change. Two years on, aid to poor countries is falling, not rising and, if current trends continue, Oxfam calculates that the G8 will miss their promised increase by a staggering $30bn. This funding deficit would be a major concern even without climate change.

On top of this deficit, climate change will make it harder to realise the MDGs because it threatens the prospects of reaching every one of them. As the Stern Review states, the scale of additional funding needed for adaptation ‘makes it still more important for developed countries to honour both their existing commitments to increase aid sharply and help the world’s poorest countries adapt to climate change.’

Mitigation and adaptation as complements, what an idea! The continued opposition to adaptation among advocates for action on climate change — whether scientists or members of the media — remains as baffling as ever to me.

At SciDev.net, David Dickson has a thoughtful editorial on how the scientific community and others advocating increased investments in S&T in the developing world should temper expectations on what these investments in alone can achieve. Here is an excerpt:

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The always excellent Issues in Science and Technology (and if you don’t subscribe you should) has a great essay in its winter issue by Richard Benedick, former deputy assistant secretary of state and chief U.S. negotiator of the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Protect the Ozone Layer. The essay is titled “Avoiding Gridlock on Climate Change” and appears on pp. 37-40. Mr. Benedick knows something about international environmental agreements. His essay is not yet online, but I have excerpted some key passages below.

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This Post Will Stay at the Top through 24 Nov, New Posts Will Still Appear Below

This semester in my graduate seminar Policy, Science, and the Environment we have spent a good share of the semester replicating and critiquing the Copenhagen Consensus exercise. With this post we’d like to solicit some feedback on the class term projects reporting and justifying their results

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I find this just amazing:

Beginning next month, Florida researchers won’t be able to travel to Cuba to carry out any studies. Although the United States allows such interactions, the state has banned faculty members at Florida’s public universities from having any contact with the island nation under a law enacted last week. “This law shuts down the entire Cuban research agenda,” says Damián Fernández, director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami.

Cuba is one of six countries that the U.S. State Department has designated as a “sponsor of terrorism,” although U.S. scholars can travel to Cuba for research if they first obtain a government license. The Florida measure, which passed the state legislature unanimously, essentially closes that loophole by disallowing state-funded institutions from using public or private funds to facilitate travel to such countries. (The list includes North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Sudan.)

“Florida’s taxpayers don’t want to see their resources being used to support or subsidize terrorist regimes at a time when America is fighting a war on terror,” says David Rivera, a Republican Cuban-American state legislator who introduced the bill. Florida researchers won’t miss out on anything by not going to Cuba, he adds: “I don’t think there’s anything there that cannot be studied in the Dominican Republic or other Caribbean islands.”

Except Cuba. Duh.

In today’s New York Times David Leonhardt has a column which debunks the supposed exodus of radiology work to India, finding such claims to be vastly overstated:

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Yesterday’s New York Times had an interesting article on uranium enrichment research in Iran. It begins as follows:

There are times when even a little bit of research can be a bad thing, especially if it centers on Iran and the bomb. On Tuesday, a wide range of nuclear scientists and analysts faulted as dangerous Moscow’s tentative proposal to let Tehran do small amounts of research on uranium enrichment, with some comparing it to being a little bit pregnant. “After a while, you tend to wind up having a baby,” said Peter D. Zimmerman, a professor of science and security in the war studies department of King’s College, London. “I do not believe the Iranians should have any access to enrichment technology until they prove to be a more responsible partner than they’ve been so far.” The Iranians have strenuously objected to such characterizations, saying the West wants to deprive them of atomic knowledge and expertise that they have a right to acquire for a peaceful program of nuclear power. They see it as nothing less than a devious plot by outside powers to keep their country from modernizing. In an interview with Al Arabiya television last month, for example, Ali Larijani, Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, said, “The problem is that they look at the Islamic nations as being inferior, that we should not have modern technology, and it is enough for us to produce tomato paste and mineral water.”

The international issue of nuclear research in Iran is in my mind exactly analogous to the debate at the federal level over stem cell research in the United States in the follow ways:

1. A group in society – the researchers — wants to conduct research that has potential positive benefits to outcomes that they value.
2. Another group in society – the restricters — wants to restrict that research because of its potential negative impacts with respect to outcomes that they value.
3. Both groups seek to impose their values on the other, but both cannot succeed at the same time as their goals are in direct conflict.
4. In both cases the restricters have the upper hand from a political perspective.
5. In both cases the researchers are seeking ways around the research restrictions.
6. The researchers assert that this is about the right to conduct research.
7. The researchers accuse their opponents as being morally challenged.
8. In both cases the decision to conduct the research or not is 100% political.

These debates are about what research gets to be conducted, by whom, and how paid for. Did I miss anything? I’m interested in reactions.

Last month the National Research Council released a report titled “Rising Above The Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future.” The report argues, “The unmatched vitality of the United States’ economy and science and technology enterprise has made this country a world leader for decades, allowing Americans to benefit from a high standard of living and national security. But in a world where advanced knowledge is widespread and low-cost labor is readily available, U.S. advantages in the marketplace and in science and technology have begun to erode. A comprehensive and coordinated federal effort is urgently needed to bolster U.S. competitiveness and pre-eminence in these areas so that the nation will consistently gain from the opportunities offered by rapid globalization.”

Writing at SciDev.net Caroline S. Wagner and Calestous Juma take issue with the report’s focus on science as a area of competition among nations. They write, “The National Academy of Sciences report encourages an ‘us and them’ mentality within knowledge systems that can only exacerbate political instabilities and resentment.”

Instead, Wagner and Juma argue for a collaborative approach to realizing the benefits of global knowledge,

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