It seems that the international biodiversity community is leery of empaneling an equivalent body to the IPCC, due to the political implications of such a panel in policy making. From the AFP today (emphasis added):

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Japan’s emissions hit a record high:

Japan’s carbon dioxide emissions hit a record high of 1.37 billion tons in the year to March 2008, well above the target set by the Kyoto Protocol, the environment ministry said Wednesday.

The figure, which marked a 2.3 percent rise from the previous fiscal year, was mainly the result of more polluting energy production following the closure of the world’s biggest nuclear power plant after it was damaged in an earthquake that struck northern Japan.

“The greater use of thermal power plants due to reduced nuclear power operations significantly contributed to the increase,” an environment ministry official said.

The data shows that Japan’s CO2 emission rose 8.7 percent from the 1990 level.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, Japan is committed to reducing its emissions by six percent from the benchmark year in the period between 2008 and 2012. Japan relies on nuclear plants for nearly one-third of its power needs.

Rather than reduce emissions by 6 percent, Japan has seen their grow by about 9 percent. With outcomes like this, why wouldn’t the U.S. sign on to Kyoto plus?

The New York Times is reporting today on the efforts by Google.org – the internet company’s philanthropic arm – to harness the vast data available to the company in order to track the spread of flu viruses.  Tests indicate that the web tool – Google Flu Trends – could detect outbreaks earlier than reports by the Centers for Disease Control.  The key to this apparent success?  Many Americans tend to enter phrases connected to flu and flu symptoms before seeking medical attention.   A more detailed explanation of the project and its potential will be in an upcoming issue of Nature, but for now you can hear it straight from the web giant’s mouth.

As we are moving to a new administration that has embraced online tools to acheive desired goals, it’s possible that policies encouraging new applications for online data could encourage more items like Flu Trends.  Hopefully these projects will take appropriate steps to maintain the privacy and security of this information.

Now that the election is over there’s one House race left to watch: Dingell v. Waxman.

John Dingell is the Ann Arbor/Detroit Representative who chairs the Energy and Commerce Committee.  E&C is the key House committee of jurisdiction for climate policy and Dingell has been unabashed in his reluctance to move climate policy forward.   Considering the aggressive moves by other Congressional Dems – particularly Bingaman, Boxer and Markey — on trying to move the policy conversation forward within the Democratic caucus in advance of January 2009, Dingell has been the bottleneck to movement.

Now, the always-aggressive Henry Waxman, #2 on the E&C committee, has started a push to wrest the gavel from Dingell.  The differences in philosophy and approach between the two men are quite clear, especially on climate.  Dingell has been upfront about protecting the auto industry at all costs and being reluctant on carbon regulations (see for example), while Waxman is clearly itching to move forward on carbon caps.

The politics behind this will be fascinating as it is no secret that many Dems, including Ms. Pelosi, would like to see Dingell relinquish control of the committee (and the attendant control it will have over climate policy in the coming term, although that’s not the only reason).  Pelosi tried to go around Dingell in 2006 by creating an ad hoc committee on climate change (chaired by Markey), only to see Dingell win a fight that ensured the ad hoc commitee would have no legislation-writing authority.  Apparently Dingell is taking the current challenge so seriously that he’s formed a “whip team” to help him fight off Waxman.  But Waxman has apparently been planning this coup for a while, contributing heavily to incoming freshmen Dems.

You can bet that savvy watchers of climate policy are watching this “race” more closely than anything else in D.C. right now.  Ultimately, the ramifications of this fight will have serious and long-lasting implications for the direction and scope of the country’s first real foray into carbon regulations (whether they happen sooner or later).

Today the IEA released its World Energy Outlook 2008. Here are some interesting excerpts from the Executive Summary here in PDF:

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A common refrain from science advocates during the election campaign was to restore the head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to the Assistant to the President status it held prior to the current administration.  I criticised the over-emphasis on this goal in a post last month, but a recent letter circulating in Washington has prompted me to revisit the topic.

The American Institute of Physics, in its FYI bulletin #105 dated November 7, noted letters sent to the presidential candidates signed by several science advocacy groups.  The letters requested the Office of Science and Technology Policy director be designated an Assistant to the President and that it be elevated to Cabinet-level status.  This last request, as best as I can tell, is a relatively recent addition to the traditional list of demands.  For instance, of the four reports (1992, 2000, 2004 and 2008) the National Academies has issued on science and technology policy presidential appointments, only the 2008 report specifically mentions Cabinet-level status for the OSTP director/presidential science adviser.  So, why this new request?  Why would it make a difference?  It’s not at all clear from any of the documents I’ve seen calling for such a change.

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From Greenwire today (subscription):

On the campaign trail, Obama pledged to reduce U.S. emissions down to 1990 levels by 2020, with a midcentury 80 percent cut. Yet Obama has not stated a timetable for actually moving global warming legislation to implement those goals, and congressional leaders are likely to hold off in pushing the issue until all of the complex details have been worked out.

“It’s not a first 100 days priority,” Drew Hammill, a spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), said today of cap-and-trade legislation. “It’ll take longer to come together.”

President-elect Obama also received support for delaying U.S. action until after the 2009 Copenhagen meeting from Yvo de Boer of the UN FCCC:

In 1997, de Boer said negotiators did not have their own laws in place as they crafted the emission limits spelled out during talks in Kyoto, Japan.

“I can’t think of a single country that signed up in Kyoto that also had its implementation plan done,” de Boer said. “All the industrialized countries that signed up to targets in Kyoto then went and developed their national policy package and submitted the package for approval in conjunction with a ratification proposal. I don’t see why we should have a much more difficult standard for the United States.”

The United States stands out as the only major industrialized country not to have ratified the Kyoto Protocol. But U.S. leaders have avoided Kyoto for good reason.

In 1997, the Senate voted 95-0 on a critical resolution that essentially blocked President Clinton from getting ratification of an agreement that did not include binding commitments from developing economies. Bush also held the Kyoto Protocol back from the Senate, though his move prompted a much louder international outcry because he also opposed setting mandatory limits on U.S. emissions.

De Boer said some diplomats know what to expect out of the United States based on the struggles over Kyoto.

“It’s possible to sign an agreement in Copenhagen, then develop the domestic policy package and then put both to the Senate for approval,” de Boer said. “The Senate will say, ‘If you guys signed up for this, you need to show us how you’re going to get there.’”

He added, “The lesson to learn from Kyoto is not to sign something in Copenhagen that you know the U.S. Senate is not going to ratify.”

These comments signal that what would likely be a vicious, perhaps politically damaging, fight over cap and trade will be avoided until after the 2009 Copenhagen meeting. Delaying U.S. action makes good political sense for both the Obama Administration and the international negotiations over climate change. However, those wanting dramatic domestic action are bound to be disappointed.

Observing the public behavior of some prominent climate scientists reminds me a bit of the Apple commercials — “I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC” as described by Slate a few years ago:

As the Mac character, Justin Long (who was in the forgettable movie Dodgeball and the forgettabler TV show Ed) is just the sort of unshaven, hoodie-wearing, hands-in-pockets hipster we’ve always imagined when picturing a Mac enthusiast. He’s perfect. Too perfect. It’s like Apple is parodying its own image while also cementing it. . .

Meanwhile, the PC is played by John Hodgman—contributor to The Daily Show and This American Life, host of an amusing lecture series, and all-around dry-wit extraordinaire. Even as he plays the chump in these Apple spots, his humor and likability are evident. . . The ads pose a seemingly obvious question—would you rather be the laid-back young dude or the portly old dweeb?—but I found myself consistently giving the “wrong” answer: I’d much sooner associate myself with Hodgman than with Long.

The writing may have something to do with this, too. Hodgman gets all the laugh lines! And Mr. Mac comes off as a smug little twit . . .

I was reminded of this when reading Steve McIntyre’s (of Climate Audit) recounting of a recent interaction with Ben Santer, a climate scientist who is employed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a U.S. government lab. Santer thus works for the public.

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The most recent issue of Isis has a Focus section on counterfactuals in the history of science (articles in the Focus section are free, but other articles require a subscription).  The full citation is “Focus: Counterfactuals and the Historian of Science,” Isis 99:3 (September 2008) 547-584.

I’m drawn to the topic for the same reason I’m drawn to speculative fiction - the asking and answering of ‘what if?’ questions.  The Focus section explains the usefulness of counterfactuals, which includes their ability to address considerations of determinism (or inevitability) in history as well as analyzing the influence of contingent factors.  I recommend all of the essays in that section, but think that Steve Fuller’s (“The Normative Turn: Counterfactuals and a Philosophical Historiography of Science,” 576-584) is perhaps the best one to help make a connection to policy and policy analysis.  His discussion of the overlapping of past and present comes off a bit dense (he’s not writing for policy readers), but his discussions of overdeterminism and underdeterminism in counterfactuals.  Reduced to propositions (581) they are:

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James Hansen and colleagues have a new paper out. I notice that the press release that accompanies the paper includes the following claim:

[Hansen et al.] also dismiss the notion of “geo-engineering” solutions, noting that the price of artificially removing 50 ppm of CO2 from the air would be about $20 trillion.

Well, how does 50 ppm of CO2 for $20 trillion compare to other ways of reducing CO2?

One ppm of CO2 contains about 2.1 billion tonnes of carbon (a gigatonne, abbreviated GtC). So 50 ppm is about 105 GtC. At $20 trillion this equates to about $190 per ton of carbon, or about $52 per ton of carbon dioxide (you need about 3.7 tonnes of carbon dioxide to get one tonne of carbon). To 2030, $20 trillion represents about 1.5% of cumulative global GDP. How do these values compare to, say Stern, IEA, or IPCC estimates?

Stern suggests that we should be ready to pay between 1% and 5% of GDP to 2050. The IPCC presents a range of costs up to $200 per tonne of CO2 to 2030 (Figure TS.9 here in PDF). The IEA suggests the costs of stabilizing emissions at current levels at $50 per tonne of CO2, and the costs of cutting them by half have marginal costs of $200 to $500 per tonne (see this report).

So the costs of air capture that Hansen et al. so readily dismiss as too costly are about the same as, or even less than, those costs for other forms of mitigation proposed by Stern, IEA and IPCC. If one accepts the costs presented by Hansen et al. (drawn from the work of David Keith), then one must come to one of the following conclusions:

1. We should be pursuing direct capture of carbon dioxide from the air with great vigor because the costs are in the same ballpark as approaches proposed by Stern, IEA and IPCC, or,

2. If air capture can be dismissed as too expensive, then so too are the approaches proposed by the Stern, IEA and IPCC.

What you should not conclude is that air capture can be summarily dismissed as too expensive. There may be other reasons not to like air capture beyond costs (and which Hansen et al. do not raise). But $20 trillion for 50 ppm seems like a bargain, particularly for those, like Hansen et al., who think that carbon dioxide levels above 350 ppm represent the end of planet Earth as we know it. I am amazed that these guys can argue that the end of the world looms, and we must spend a small fraction of our global GDP over the next half century to reduce the risks, yet so readily dismiss a solution that they accept costs a small fraction of GDP. What gives?