The final version of the following paper is now online:

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 2005. Misdefining Climate Change: Consequences for Science and Action, Environmental Science and Policy, 8:548-561. PDF)

Late in the development of the program for the Amreican Geophysical Union’s (AGU) fall meeting, the AGU asked Kerry Emanuel and I to organize a special union session on hurricane Katrina. The session will be held Wednesday 7 December at 13:40. It has just been added to the AGU website here. If you are attending, please drop by, should be very interesting. Here are the speakers and talk titles:

1340 U33C Marriott Salon 7 Scientific Perspectives on Hurricane Katrina: >From Planning to Recovery I

Presiding: K A Emanuel, MIT; R A Pielke, Jr., University of Colorado
1340 Hurricane Katrina, the Response, and the Recovery: Discerning the Real Disaster
*M Davidson
1340 U33C Marriott Salon 7 Scientific Perspectives on Hurricane Katrina: >From Planning to Recovery I

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In a press release issued today the United Nations tries to put a positive spin on data that tells a far different story. The release states:

“Developed countries, taken as a group, have achieved sizable reductions of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but further efforts are needed to sustain these reductions in gases blamed for global warming and cut them further, a United Nations climate body warned today. The acting head of the secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Richard Kinley, emphasized that a large part of the reductions was achieved in the early 1990s in countries of Eastern and Central Europe undergoing transition to a market economy. ”

The release should have said that all of the so-called “reductions” are the result of the collapse of the Soviet Union which led to a one-time accounting quirk based only on the date used as the baseline for measuring reductions (1990). The press release spins off into fantasy land when it states,

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We have coming up a comment on the “hockey stick so what?” exercise. Until then, enjoy the debate, which had a slow start but has become quite substantive. Here also are a few items worth briefly noting.

1. Dan Sarewitz is profiled in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education. Dan is a close friend and colleague. He is also one of the smartest people you’ll ever meet. Read the Chronicle article here here. And you can find his various writings here.

2. For our readers in Italy, I have a new book out in Italian (thanks to a set of excellent translators!). Here are the details:

Pielke, Jr., R. A. 2005. Scienza e politica: La lotta per il consenso. (trad. di B. Giovagnoli), Laterza, Lezioni Italiane, Rome.

A considerably longer version in English should be available in 2006, stay tuned.

3. The American Journal of Bioethics blog has a very thoughtful post on the ethical scandal that appears to be engulfing South Korea’s stem cell research program. They are promising more substance on this next week in the AJOB, we’ll watch closely.

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Post by Ross McKitrick

Roger Pielke Jr. has posed a challenge to Michael Mann and us to briefly explain why each of us thinks the ongoing hockey stick debate matters. The technical content of the debate is summarized elsewhere (here and here; Our papers are linked under the heading “articles” (right hand column), and an overview paper by Ross McKitrick is here) and I won’t re-cap it here. That it matters is demonstrated by the enormous traffic on blog sites, the volume of comments to science journals, the opening of a Congressional investigation, etc. Obviously a lot of people find that it matters.

So: why does it matter?

1. It matters because it concerns the validity of an influential scientific paper. Mann’s 1998 and 1999 papers (which I’ll call “MBH”) have been heavily cited and highly influential. The paleoclimate field seems to have organized itself around them: other papers since then have gained prominence in proportion as they appear to back up MBH, whereas papers that contradict it have little prospect of being published or are relegated to lower-profile outlets. A popular icon in paleoclimate circles these days is what can be called a “spaghetti graph,” showing a pastiche of climate reconstructions from a small group of authors who call themselves the “Hockey Team”. They agree on few details, other than that the Medieval Warm Period is not as warm as the 20th Century.

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Post by Steve McIntryre

Stefan Rahmsdorf and others (including Roger Pielke, the proprietor of this site) have taken the position that the Hockey Stick is irrelevant to the great issue of the impact of 2xCO2 on global climate. Even the originator of the Hockey Stick, Michael Mann, who received many awards and honors for its construction, ironically has taken the position that it doesn’t “matter”. (I do not believe that he has not returned any of the honors.) I’m inclined to agree that, for the most part, the Hockey Stick does not matter to the great issue of the impact of 2xCO2. However, I believe that it matters (or should matter) to IPCC, to governments that relied on IPCC and to climate scientists who contributed to and supported IPCC and to people who may wish to rely on IPCC in the future.

The Hockey Stick was not, as sometimes portrayed, an incidental graphic, buried in IPCC TAR. Nor was it an icon resurrected by sceptics purely to torment poor Michael Mann. It could almost characterized as the logo for IPCC TAR. Figure 1 below shows Sir John Houghton, at the press conference releasing IPCC TAR, standing in front of the Hockey Stick. The graphic was used repeatedly in IPCC TAR and was one of the most prominent graphics in the Summary for Policymakers. Some governments (and, the Canadian government in particular) relied upon it in their promotion of Kyoto policy even more than IPCC. In the lead-up to adopting Kyoto policy, Canadians were told by their Minister of the Environment that “1998 was the warmest year of the millennium and 1990s the warmest decade”. So even if the Hockey Stick did not “matter” to the scientific case, it mattered to the promotion of the scientific case. Scientists may want to “move on”, but institutions cannot, if they want to maintain any credibility. If the Hockey Stick was wrong, it would be as embarrassing as the failure to find WMD in Iraq. In both cases, the policy might well be justified on alternative grounds, but the existence of the alternative grounds does not mean that responsible agencies should not try to isolate the causes of intelligence failure and try to avoid similar failures in the future.

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Yesterday the House Science Committee held a hearing on the role of social science research in disaster preparedness and response. Here are some excerpts from the prepared testimony:

Susan Cutter (PDF): “The Hurricane Katrina crisis was precipitated by a physical event, but it was the failure of social and political systems that turned the natural disaster into a human catastrophe. As a nation, we need to understand the human decisions and organizational failures that contributed to this disaster so it won’t happen again. We need an independent review of the local, state, and federal responses to Hurricane Katrina so we can learn the lessons of what went right and what went wrong in the response and use these to improve our preparedness and responses to future disasters. The social science disaster research community is ready and willing to step up to this challenge and participate in such an independent review. Are you willing to authorize one?”

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Over at RealClimate Gavin Schmidt has written a post defending the IPCC against a critique by Nigel Lawson, a member of the British House of Lords and former chancellor of the exchequer. An exchange I had with Gavin in the comments aptly illustrates why some people agree with Lawson when he claims, “the IPCC’s apparent determination to suppress or ignore dissenting views, which has become little short of a scandal, is part of a wider problem.”

Lawson has some strong things to say, “The IPCC process is so flawed, and the institution so closed to reason, that it would be far better to thank it for the work it has done, close it down, and transfer all future international collaboration on the issue of climate change to the established Bretton Woods institutions.” For his part Schmidt, gives no ground in his defense, “The IPCC makes its assessments in a very thorough writing and review process involving hundreds of scientists, open to critics, with transparent and predefined procedures. That it makes no proclamations in between the full assessments is not a ’scandal’, it simply is sticking to its sound and transparent procedures.” An open discussion on the IPCC is worth having. But here I’d like to focus in on how an exchange I had with Gavin reinforces one of Lawson’s main complaints about the IPCC and the climate science community, an inability to admit error.

Lawson points to those making connections of global warming and hurricanes Katrina and Rita as an indication of scientific excess. Schmidt responds as follows:

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Last summer we took issue with Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX) when he sought to gain political advantage by taking on some climate scientists. I’d bet that the loud reaction to his “investigation” was one factor in Rep. Barton’s apparent decision not to follow up as yet. Such external oversight of science and politics can play a positive role in limiting the politicization of science and its negative effects on policy making. Now we have a case of Democrats playing politics through climate science, and a similarly loud reaction would seem to be appropriate from informed observers. Will we see a similar reaction?

Providing ample evidence that the politicization of science by politicians is a bipartisan pastime, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and 150 fellow Democrats have introduced a rarely used “resolution of inquiry” to explore whether the Bush Administration has been hiding evidence that the current hurricane season has been caused by global warming. Kucinich said in press release last week:

“”The American public deserve to know what the President knew about the effects climate change would have, and will continue to have, on our coasts. This Administration, and Congress, can no longer afford to overlook the overwhelming evidence of the devastating effect of global climate change. It is essential for our preparedness that we understand global climate change and take serious and immediate actions to slow its effects.”

According to an InsideEPA.com news story, which Rep. Kucinich introduced to the Congressional Record (PDF), the “Resolution of Inquiry” is part of a strategy to try to divide moderate Congressional Republicans from the party. According to InsideEPA.com,

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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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