Op-Ed in Financial Post
June 18th, 2008Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
UPDATE: At Dot Earth Andy Revkin labels an excerpt from this op-ed the “quote of the day.”
I have an invited op-ed in today’s Financial Post (a Canadian newspaper with a skeptical editorial perspective on climate change). I argue that even though many scientists oversell the predictive capabilities of climate models, action on climate change still makes sense. Here is an excerpt:
So in the debate on what to do about climate change, what are we to make of the overstated claims of predictive accuracy offered by many scientists?
Not surprisingly, the reason for overstated claims lies in the bitter and contested politics of climate change. Myanna Lahsen, an anthropologist who has studied climate modelers, finds that many of these scientists are acutely aware of the fact that any expressed “caveats, qualifications and other acknowledgements of model limitations can become fodder for the anti-environmental movement.” She documents how, more than a decade ago, a prominent climate scientist warned a group of his colleagues at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, home of one of the main U.S. climate modeling efforts that informs the IPCC, to “Choose carefully your adjectives to describe the models. Confidence or lack of confidence in the models is the deciding factor in whether or not there will be policy response on behalf of climate change.”I witnessed this dynamic in practice while I was waiting to testify on climate policy before the U.S. Congress in 2006. A prominent climate scientist testifying on the panel appearing before mine was asked by a member of Congress about uncertainties in predictions from climate models. The scientist replied, enthusiastically and accurately, that there are a range of important uncertainties coming from scenario inputs and choices in parameterization schemes, instantly overwhelming his congressional audience with technical detail. Much later, and after a long break, the scientist requested an opportunity to clarify his earlier comments, and this time he said, “I would like to give you a little more direct answer to the question on reliability of climate models. I think they are reliable enough to be a very useful guide into the future.”
Lost in the Manichean debate over climate change is the real significance of what climate models really are telling us: We should act on climate mitigation and adaptation not because we are able to predict the future, but because we cannot.
See it all here. Comments and reactions welcomed.
June 18th, 2008 at 1:40 am
I saw many times u can’t exactly predict of climate that what will happen in few days specially earthquakes..sometimes u can’t predict of storms too coz they change their direction according to winds.
June 18th, 2008 at 1:41 am
I saw many times u can’t exactly predict of climate that what will happen in few days specially earthquakes..sometimes u can’t predict of storms too coz they change their direction according to winds.
June 18th, 2008 at 9:04 am
Your analogy to Iraq is backwards. It was argued in pre-war counsels that (a) what we think we know about Saddam is bad but (b) what we don’t know is almost certainly worse. Uncertainty coupled with defiance to inspections was probably a greater incentive to attack than the revisionist notions of claims certainty which are now antiwar dogma.
It does appear to me that modern climate change science has much of any existence apart from the policy and ideological agenda it is paid to serve. The work is funded at increased levels precisely because of an expectation that certain policy preferences will be well served. It is a unique ideological climate (metaphor, not pun) that other sciences generally do not experience.
I have seen this before in another context. In my youth I worked at medical research facilities and wondered why we spent so much time and money on silly “Cyclamate paradigm” projects, i.e., massive doses of common commercial chemicals given to rodents to try to induce cancer to then declare these compounds carcinogenic and thus generate a publishable result. Many people speculated at the time that the approach was wrong, we should instead be wondering why there are times when body fails to prevent, combat and control cancer and look to understand and strengthen those processes.
With respect to climate science, there seems to be less focus on the nature of the equilibrium processes in climate that need to be understood and protected. Instead there is an obsessive “cyclamate” focus on alleged discrete harms by greenhouse gases as if those larger processes did not exist. Like bad cancer research, most money is probably going to the dominant bad paradigm while richer lines of inquiry are left comparatively unattended.
I think there is another dynamic with respect to the “certainty” issue that you did not discuss. If the IPCC models continue to depart from actuality, climate scientists will feel called upon to fashion more disastrous change scenarios because a decreasing liklihood of being right about AGW risk times an increasing scope of predicted harm would provide the same programmatic cost justification as would a known risk times a more modest set of harms. The best defense against a charge of uncertainty and model failure is to up the ante on the scope of possible harm.
June 18th, 2008 at 9:22 am
Joe Romm on recent US tornadoes and floods:
“. . . the natural disasters underway today are consistent with the predicted consequences of global warming . . .”
http://climateprogress.org/2008/06/17/lessons-from-an-angry-planet
June 18th, 2008 at 9:45 am
Roger, you write: “I have been asked by some of my colleagues why I raise these points, since action on climate change is a good thing and those questioning climate models typically are opposed to action. So what, I am told, if action on climate change is based on some exaggerations and false claims to certainty, isn’t the end goal important enough to justify bending the truth just a bit?”
Could you please provide the names and quotations that verify this claim? Thanks in advance.
June 18th, 2008 at 10:33 am
Jon-
Welcome back.
This subject has come up many times in the comments and I’ve discussed it explicitly with example, e.g., in these posts:
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/disasters/000741reactions_to_searchi.html
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/zine/archives/1-29/28/editorial.html
Oxford’s Steve Rayner wrote a commentary on this exact issue of using “bad arguments for good causes” referencing my work:
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/science_policy_general/000737bad_arguments_for_g.html
Did you have any substantive comments on the piece?
Thanks.
June 18th, 2008 at 10:42 am
Jon- I just saw the more insulting version of you comment over at Dot Earth. Please feel free to share my response over there.
When you can’t argue against the argument, argue against the man, eh?
June 18th, 2008 at 11:13 am
“This subject has come up many times in the comments and I’ve discussed it explicitly with example, e.g., in these posts”
I read the entirety of these three links, and I confess that I did not see a single direct quotation in which a “colleague” of yours claims that “the end goal [is] important enough to justify bending the truth” or the equivalent. Perhaps I am mistaken- rather than linking to past posts, you can simply state which of your colleagues have made such statements and quote them directly here.
June 18th, 2008 at 11:35 am
Jon-
Indeed you are mistaken. Did you really read those links?
It included comments such as:
“Perhaps most troubling, the editor of a leading scientific journal asked me to “dampen” the message of a peer-reviewed publication for fear that it would be “seized upon” by those seeking to defend their interests in business-as-usual energy policies. I found this incredible – was I really being asked to change scientifically well-supported arguments based on some editorial concerns about politics?!”
and
“As I prepared for the Senate Forum a number of colleagues expressed concern that my work might be used (or misused) in the political process to support particular positions. . . Several of these colleagues suggested that I should downplay the policy implications of my work showing that for a range of phenomena and places, future climate impacts depend much more on growing human vulnerability to climate than on projected changes in climate itself (under the assumptions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).”
There is no ambiguity here — “dampen” and “downplay”
Others who have made similar comments to me in person and by email about my work, including our recent blog discussions are readers of this blog. If they wish to put their names out into public associated with these comments, they are welcome to do so.
And should you wish to believe that no scientists have ever expressed these views to me, you are of course welcome to do so.
June 18th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
“Did you really read those links?”
Yes. I of course noted your “blind item”-style anecdotes that neither identify the supposed speakers nor provide their actual statements.
“There is no ambiguity here — ‘dampen’ and ‘downplay’”
I accept the fact that people have given their opinions on what emphasis on policy implications they prefer. My inquiry was regarding the claim that your colleagues have said the following or similar: “So what… if action on climate change is based on some exaggerations and false claims to certainty” and “the end goal [is] important enough to justify bending the truth”.
“And should you wish to believe that no scientists have ever expressed these views to me, you are of course welcome to do so.”
I have no trouble believing that scientists have made their displeasure at some of your conclusions known. I simply prefer to review the relevant statements myself and discuss them with those that made them, especially in regards to the context in which you are referencing them.
If you are willing to state that these conversations happened, why not provide actual statements and names?
June 18th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Jon-
Believe me, if these folks were willing to go on the record, I’d be happy to provide their names and statements. Meantime, you’ll have to take me at my word, or not. Your choice.
I can’t help but see the irony in receiving demands for names coming from an anonymous blog poster!
June 18th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Mitigation via CO2 emissions reduction is already bust due to the fact that the only way for emissions is up, due mainly to developing countries, and no one knows whether the actual climate sensitivity to CO2 is large or small. We seem to have entered a period of non-warming or cooling, of unknown duration or severity, despite rising CO2 emissions.
Adaptation to inevitable climate change, which could involve warming or cooling, is money well spent – it would also be more affordably spread over, say, 100 years.
CO2 emissions will take care of themselves if new technologies provide viable alternatives to fossil fuels, or even cleaner ways of burning them. Until viable alternatives exist, the only sensible choice is to continue to use fossil fuels.
‘Climate’ Policy that interferes with the free market will result in restricting the use of fossil fuels for more expensive and inadequate alternatives to the detriment of our economies/well-being. This is already happening.
I’d have thought that both climate realists and alarmists could unite behind a policy of upping R & D into genuinely viable alternative fuels, and adaptation to inevitable climate change.
Forget about unachievable CO2 targets and separate climate policy from energy policy. Get rid of the hopelessly biased literature reviews known as the UN IPCC reports.
I also think the excessive spending on climate research should be drastically cut back – punishment for inadequate ‘global average’ surface temperature data sets, seriously flawed paleoclimate reconstructions that hide the true extent of the natural variability of the earth’s climate, and computer models that are consistent with anything and predict nothing.
June 18th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
I agree with you that some action is advisable even though it appears to me that for a variety of reasons, we aren’t able to predict the rate of warming very accurately. But lack of predictive ability doesn’t mean warming isn’t happening or likely to occur: It is.
Some sort of action to reduce CO2, methane and other GHG emissions is advisable.
The questions is of course: Which actions, and how to implement them.
It seems to me that recently, I am reading more activist blogs dare to state the “N” word: Nuclear. Yes, we need wind, solar, conservation etc. But, the perpetual reluctance to embrace nuclear energy has been a stumbling block pitting those who want to ensure the level of economic growth made possible by large power plants, against those who seem to imagine some nirvana where we all live comfortably and somehow happily hand digging pits in which to install the heat exchanger for the solar powered heat pump we use to replace our furnaces.
So, yes, we need to take action. But we also need to keep option like nuclear energy open.
June 19th, 2008 at 8:16 am
Roger–
Your op-ed smear of climate scientists and climate science is beyond the pale.
First off, though, you falsely attribute a quote to me that is in fact from Bill Becker. “. . . the natural disasters underway today are consistent with the predicted consequences of global warming . . .” Next time, check your facts before trying to call me out on your blog.
Your op-ed sub-head is: “Scientists advocating for action are overselling the predictive capabilities of climate models.”
The entire IPCC is advocating action. So you are accusing the entire climate science community of a lack of integrity. Unbelievable.
And for some reason you don’t want scientists to tell people that the statistically anomalous extreme weather we are now experiencing is precisely what is expected under climate change theory. So that means precisely what? You are saying climate scientists can’t talk about changes in the climate predicted by climate change theory? Unbelievable.
You seem to be trying to enforce some bizarre form of scientific political correctness that isn’t even correct. Incredible.
Sea levels are rising FASTER than the IPCC predicted, as numerous peer-reviewed studies have showed. Arctic sea ice loss is faster, Greenland and Antarctic mass loss is faster, the subtropics are expanding faster, etc.
“So what, I am told, if action on climate change is based on some exaggerations and false claims to certainty, isn’t the end goal important enough to justify bending the truth just a bit? After all, those opposed to action often show no hesitation toward exaggeration and hyperbole.”
This is McCarthyesque smearing. Claiming an equivalence between global warming deniers and the legitimate climate scientists including the IPCC and the National Academies and the scientists who sign the Bali declaration.
Either post on your blog a dozen specific names of serious scientists who are making such exaggerations and false claims — with specific examples from the IPCC and the National Academies and the Bali Declaration
http://www.ccrc.unsw.edu.au/news/2007/Bali.html/
or withdraw this slander.
You keep saying we need to take action, but more and more that appears to be cover for essay after essay calling into question the integrity of climate scientists and the climate science. You provide aid and comfort to the delayers, but still refuse to explain what specific policies you would implement now to stabilize at 450 ppm (or even to avoid 1000 ppm).
If you walk like a delayer and talk like a delayer, you may, just in fact, be one.
June 19th, 2008 at 9:52 am
Thanks Joe for your comments. A few replies.
1. Apologies for attributing the quote to you. You might consider a more clear byline in your guest posts, as it was unclear that someone other than you wrote that post.
You write, “the statistically anomalous extreme weather we are now experiencing is precisely what is expected under climate change theory” — fair enough?
2. For plenty of examples of scientists overselling climate predictions, just search Prometheus for “consistent with” — here is a link to get you started:
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/001416the_consistentwith_.html
Another example might be your association of the recent Midwest floods with greenhouse gas emissions, or perhaps that Minnesota bridge collapse or any other things that you have speculated as being consistent with expected impacts of greenhouse gas emissions.
Should scientists be held to the same standards as “global warming deniers”? Sure. Why not?
June 20th, 2008 at 12:59 am
Roger, I think your op-ed is in many ways perceptive, but misdiagnoses the underlying dynamics and as a result wrong-headedly attacks scientists.
The not-so-hidden dynamics of climate change policy in the US is that any change from the current status quo (GHG emissions are free, and voluntary changes are encouraged) is essentially a political decision that would disadvantage a large class of powerful and well-connected economic interests, while those who would benefit from changes are spread throughout the economy and are not as concentrated or as well connected. In such classic struggles over spoils, “truth” is inevitably a football to be fought over in order to influence raw political calculation.
Blaming scientists for the distortions of science that results from the struggle over the political allocation of resources is thus rather perverse – as it completely ignores the real interests who are engaged in the contest. It’s like blaming the football for being kicked (or when Lucy yanks it away from Charlie Brown).
The answer, of course, lies in clarifying whose interests are at stake and exploring possible accommodations.
In this regard, you might consider the irony of your own op-ed: though you argue FOR climate action because of serious warning bells provided by scientists, the headline bills you as warning of “overheated” claims (as opposed to the “overstated claims of predictive accuracy”) and as implying that climate scientists who “advocate for action” generally cannot be trusted, as they “are overselling the predictive capabilities of climate models”. Of course even if NO scientists waved any warning flags (“advocated action”) at all, or oversold the predictibility of models, they would still be accused, one way or another, of a lack of evenhandedness, accuracy etc.
Thus, even while some of your criticisms are accurate, they may easily end up coopted by one of the parties at interest. If you’d like to see progress on climate policy, you might consider thinking and commenting more on the public choice aspects of the problem, as Jim Hansen recently has.
Regards,
Tom
June 20th, 2008 at 7:08 am
Roger
So what do you think is the correct strategy to encourage our scientists to be honest?
Perhaps they don’t realize yet that we’ve all heard the over-hyped message until we are sick of it. Some believe it, some have heard it all before with the last false apocalypse. Many say they believe it just to sound PC but they never do anything anyway (sometimes they buy a Prius). Some think that if it’s the end of the world let’s live a little, and others think that if scientists are so clever then they must be clever enough to save us. Whatever their stance few people will ever do anything unless the alternative will save them money. So scientists shouldn’t feel so much angst about it. Be honest, you people – it really doesn’t matter, but you might feel better about yourself!
At the end of the day the politicians have to deal with the reality that to change our society’s energy structure is not easy. Yes it is possible but it has to be done right. In any event it would be nice if they could actually trust what the scientists say and at the moment they can’t. Kevin Rudd’s election and immediate about-turn tells us he knew all along that the case was over-stated and that drastic and sudden cuts in CO2 mean real pain. When you are landed with the task of creating change but faced with tight monetary restraints and serious loss of income if you do change, then you can’t avoid reality.
Obama would act just the same as Rudd except that he has even less money to work with because Bush has borrowed so much. Clinton faced this problem too after the overspending Reagan-Bush era. I don’t envy the guy that takes over this mess.
June 20th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
>>Thus, even while some of your criticisms are >>accurate, they may easily end up coopted by one >>of the parties at interest. If you’d like to see >>progress on climate policy, you might consider >>thinking and commenting more on the public choice >>aspects of the problem, as Jim Hansen recently has.
Does this translate to:
Roger, what you say is accurate. But please imitate Jim Hansen: don’t say these true things, but talk about something else instead.
June 20th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
A central point from Roger’s piece in the Financial Post (but not repeated in the extract above) is his declaration, “saying that any recent weather events are “consistent with” model predictions is an empty statement”. I would rather say that it is a disingenuous or intellectually misleading statement rather than an empty one and I think a closer examination of the “consistent with” argument is worthwhile as a window into one of the principal devices used to convince the public at large of the truth of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
Taking a probabilist’s standpoint, what “consistent with” is saying is that if the climate model represents reality then there is a high probability that such and such a weather event will be observed. Expanding out to the AGW issue, the same argument would go, “if the CO2-climate link is correct then global surface temperature and sea level will rise, glaciers will melt, etc etc. And as a bald statement, this is probably unarguable. Why it is misleading (to put it mildly) is that this high probability is then switched to support the reverse logic, i.e. if the globe warms, sea level rises and glaciers melt then AGW is true with the same high level of certainty. This of course is the conventional way round for scientific advancement – what is the probability that the theory is true given the observations.
Those with some probability background will recognise this as sleight of hand. To calculate the Probability of (A given B) from the Probability of (B given A) is the job of Bayes formula and introduces other terms that can degrade the resultant probability to near zero. To spell it out, we want the probability that AGW is true given the globe is warming etc, but what we are starting from is a “consistent with” type statement amounting to one about the high probability that the globe is warming given the AGW theory is true. The other terms in this case are the missing probabilities deriving from other mechanisms that are also consistent with the observations (chaos, the sun) and other observations that are not consistent with the mechanism (warming and glacier melting preceding CO2). These will vastly erode the initial high probability.
This is a well known problem and goes under the name of “The Prosecutor’s Fallacy” in legal circles – the probability of the defendant being seen near the scene of the crime if he was guilty being conflated with the probability that the defendant was guilty if he was seen near the scene of the crime. It also rears its head in medical screening for diseases that are rare in the population at large where even quite a modest rate of false positives can render useless a test that seems excellent in the lab (exhibiting few false negatives).
So labelling the “consistent with” approach as merely “empty of meaning” doesn’t do justice to it’s pernicious consequences in actual usage.
June 20th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
A central point from Roger’s piece in the Financial Post (but not repeated in the extract above) is his declaration, “saying that any recent weather events are “consistent with” model predictions is an empty statement”. I would rather say that it is a disingenuous or intellectually misleading statement rather than an empty one and I think a closer examination of the “consistent with” argument is worthwhile as a window into one of the principal devices used to convince the public at large of the truth of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
Taking a probabilist’s standpoint, what “consistent with” is saying is that if the climate model represents reality then there is a high probability that such and such a weather event will be observed. Expanding out to the AGW issue, the same argument would go, “if the CO2-climate link is correct then global surface temperature and sea level will rise, glaciers will melt, etc etc. And as a bald statement, this is probably unarguable. Why it is misleading (to put it mildly) is that this high probability is then switched to support the reverse logic, i.e. if the globe warms, sea level rises and glaciers melt then AGW is true with the same high level of certainty. This of course is the conventional way round for scientific advancement – what is the probability that the theory is true given the observations.
Those with some probability background will recognise this as sleight of hand. To calculate the Probability of (A given B) from the Probability of (B given A) is the job of Bayes formula and introduces other terms that can degrade the resultant probability to near zero. To spell it out, we want the probability that AGW is true given the globe is warming etc, but what we are starting from is a “consistent with” type statement amounting to one about the high probability that the globe is warming given the AGW theory is true. The other terms in this case are the missing probabilities deriving from other mechanisms that are also consistent with the observations (chaos, the sun) and other observations that are not consistent with the mechanism (warming and glacier melting preceding CO2). These will vastly erode the initial high probability.
This is a well known problem and goes under the name of “The Prosecutor’s Fallacy” in legal circles – the probability of the defendant being seen near the scene of the crime if he was guilty being conflated with the probability that the defendant was guilty if he was seen near the scene of the crime. It also rears its head in medical screening for diseases that are rare in the population at large where even quite a modest rate of false positives can render useless a test that seems excellent in the lab (exhibiting few false negatives).
So labelling the “consistent with” approach as merely “empty of meaning” doesn’t do justice to it’s pernicious consequences in actual usage.
June 22nd, 2008 at 6:30 am
Lucia, no, that`s not what I meant.
My suggestions were that (1) Roger`s admonishment to the bearers of political footballs (scientists) not to get kicked has little chance of being practically useful to scientists, but is a message very easily coopted by those who would like to the current volunteer-only climate policy continue and (2) if he`s interested in seeing meaningful climate change policy adopted (other than solely the default of ad hoc adaptation to ongoing changes), he might recognize that an effective policy will not be a deck of cards but may very well find popular support if it is a per capita tax refund along the lines proposed by Jim Hansen (based on Jim Barnes, Boyce and Biddle, etc.).
June 26th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
TokyoTom:
Is Roger admonishing “he bearers of political footballs (scientists) not to get kicked”? (And what, does that phrase mean anyway?)
I thought Roger was discussing tendency of climate modelers to oversell the accuracy of their own product. At least that’s how I interpret statements like this:
“what are we to make of the overstated claims of predictive accuracy offered by many scientists?”
Thanks for clarifying that you really meant to suggest that Hansen’s tax plan is not a “deck of cards”. But can I make a suggestion? In future, if your intention is to suggest Roger should help Hansen advocate his preferred tax plan, and you want third parties reading comments to understand what you mean, it might be best to include words like “tax plan” in your comment.
Otherwise, few readers are likely to understand what you intend when you write things like this:
“you might consider thinking and commenting more on the public choice aspects of the problem, as Jim Hansen recently has.”
This sort of oblique statement is utterly puzzling because
a) Roger often comments on public choice aspect of the problem, and has written books on the subject and
b) No one would infer that you are suggesting Roger should jump on Hansen’s band wagon and advocate Hansen’s preferred policies for him.
well need help.