Yesterday Nature published a paper by Thompson et al. which argues that a change in the observational techniques for taking the temperatures of the oceans led to a cold bias in temperatures beginning in the 1940s. The need for the adjustment raises an interesting, and certainly sensitive, question related to the sociology and politics of science: Does the IPCC’s main conclusion need to be revisited?

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A reader writes in with positive things to say, but notes that as interesting as it is to see our focus on technical issues like the short-term predictive capability of models and the fidelity of IPCC pre/post/SRES scenarios we may also balance that out with some bigger picture stuff.

To that I say: guilty as charged, fair enough. I’ll be returning to the short-term prediction stuff before long, but for today’s big picture perspective, consider the following points on the scale of the mitigation challenge.

The Center for Global Development estimates that there are 25,339 power plants around the world that emit carbon dioxide. If the world starts replacing or converting these plants to carbon free energy production at the rate of one plant per day, then it will take 69 years to make all of these power plants carbon neutral, and an 80% conversion would take 56 years. If you’d like assume that most emissions come from the largest plants, you can cut those numbers in half or even by 2/3 and the point remains. At a conversion rate of one plant per week — using only the top 1/3 emitters — it would take 145 years to convert 80% of these 1/3 (162 years to convert the entire 1/3).

But energy production from fossil fuel power plants is of course increasing, so these are conservative numbers. The rate of conversion from carbon dioixde emitting power plants currently is negative (they are growing in number, at a rate of, what, several per week? Good data sources appreciated in the comments), so the conversion clock is running in reverse. And, oh yeah, power plant emissions according to CGD are 29% of the global total.

The point of this post is not that mitigation is impossible, but that it arguably is much, much harder a challenge than typically advertised. Any guesses on when the power plant conversion rate will become positive, and a what rate it will occur? Will it occur at all?

Joe Romm has helpfully posted up his full reply to Nature on PWG (PDF), and we are happy to link to it as promised. And after reading Joe’s original letter and his comments, the source of his complaint — and confusion — is now clear. This post explains that Joe has confused the differences between different IPCC SRES scenarios with spontaneous decarbonization within each individual scenario.

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This post provides a good example how some climate bloggers try to shut down debate over policy options by personalizing policy debates.

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Check out the candidates’ science and technology related policies here.

I conclude this series of analyses of candidates’ science and technology policies with Senator Obama. If I can take anything from this exercise is that it defies easy surface analysis. Going on what is typically considered science and technology policy will miss things that are relevant and important for science and technology. Education, for instance, underlies a fair amount of science and technology policy, and the two areas are not well connected in federal policies, or candidates’ campaigns.

Senator Obama’s science and technology policies are not terribly different from those of Senators Clinton and McCain, at least for the big picture. For me, the differences emerge through how Senator Obama presents these issues, and in how he makes a more explicit appeal for using science and technology to achieve policy goals.

For instance, while Senator Obama hits many of the same points as Senator Clinton does in her Innovation Agenda it’s placed in his website’sTechnology section among discussion of his proposals on broadband deployment, internet predators, privacy and network neutrality. It’s the collection of seemingly disparate issues linked, at least in part, through technology, that strikes me as different and encouraging.

The Senator’s science policies are also described in a separate section. They reflect the same basic priorities found in Senator Clinton’s Innovation Agenda, but the doubling Senator Obama wants doesn’t have the timeframe or specifics that Senator Clintons’ plan does. Again, the difference is in presentation. The goals of both Democratic candidates in conventional science and technology policies (such as research funding, more underrepresented groups, visas for scientists and engineers) are essentially the same, though the smaller details differ. While those differences matter in terms of policy and governance, I am not so confident that those small differences will matter politically.

One notable point about Senator Obama’s policies is his willingness to use technology in order to achieve other policy goals. To paraphrase the categorization of Harvey Brooks, Senator Obama is interested in technology for policy at least as much as policy for science and technology. Again, the other candidates do this too, primarily in energy, health care, and environmental policy. To offer policies about using technology to open government and improve infrastructure should serve as a reminder that science and technology have many roles to play in public policy and in political campaigns. I think that advocacy groups would be better served in their efforts to increase federal support for science and technology to better engage with the many different roles science and technology can play in these areas.

The graph above shows three trend lines.

BLUE: Temperature Trend prediction from the 1990 IPCC report
RED: Temperature Trend prediction from the 2007 IPCC report
GREEN: Observed Trend for 2001-2007 (from average of four obs datasets)

All data is as described in this correspodence (PDF).

Your assignment:

Which IPCC prediction is the trend observed 2001-2007 more consistent with and why? Show your work!

You are free to bring in whatever information and use whatever analysis that you want.

Check out the candidates’ science and technology related policies here.

In this post I want to assess Senator McCain’s science and technology related policies.

Arguably Senator McCain has placed the least emphasis of the three candidates on science and technology policies. To be fair, I don’t think any of the candidates have placed a great deal of emphasis on science and technology policies – at least in the same way that the constituent advocacy groups would like. For instance, all three senators have advanced cap-and-trade plans for carbon emissions (McCain’s plan is the only one that would issue the carbon credits for free). This is likely considered by most as an environmental policy rather than a science and technology policy (I think the notion that the two policy areas are often considered independent of each other is a problem for those interested in seeing science and technology policies gain more political cachet).

While I don’t think Senator McCain would ignore science and technology policy (or has – he did serve as Chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over most of the science portfolio), hewing to the traditional Republican line would imply embracing policies that would either leave action to the private sector, or provide incentives for the private sector to invest or take other desired action. Whether or not this is an area of policy where McCain will be a traditional Republican or not is not clear given the lack of statements from the McCain campaign on the traditional areas of science policy. You can infer from the absence of those statements that he would, but the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. For instance, he is of a kind with the Democratic candidates in opposing the stem cell research ban. So it’s possible that he might be the least hands-off of the Republicans who ran for President this year, but more hands-off than the two Democratic contenders.

There have been recent events that suggest McCain could disappoint those concerned with science and technology policy.

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The 8 May 2008 issue of Nature published 4 letters in response to the Pielke, Wigley, and Green commentary on IPCC scenarios (PDF). This provides a few excerpts from and reactions to these letters.

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The World Bank and UK government issued a report today titled, “Strategies For Sustained Growth And Inclusive Development.” Here is what the report says about the implications for climate change of development in the developing world (p. 86), something that the report calls absolutely necessary:

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The May 1, 2008 issue of New Scientist magazine has an interesting article that parallels some of the discussions that we’ve had on this site lately. Here is an interesting excerpt:

“Politicians seems to think that the science is a done deal,” says Tim Palmer, “I don’t want to undermine the IPCC, but the forecasts, especially for regional climate change, are immensely uncertain”.

Palmer is a leading climate modeller at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK, and he does not doubt that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has done a good job alerting the world to the problem of global climate change. But he and his fellow climate scientists are acutely aware that the IPCC’s predictions of how the global change will affect local climates are little more than guesswork. They fear that if the IPCC’s predictions turn out to be wrong, it will provoke a crisis in confidence that undermines the whole climate change debate.

The IPCC’s forecasts could be wrong in many different ways, over different time periods and spatial scales, including underestimating future changes. And it is not even clear that scientists involved with the IPCC have a collective view on what it would even mean for the IPCC to be “wrong”. As we’ve argued here often, action on climate change makes sense even if the predictions of the IPCC are not yet perfect. But this is a hard case to make when defenders of those predictions allow no room for imperfections to be seen, or questions to be asked.