15 Responses to “Judy Curry in the Comments”

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1. Roger Pielke, Jr. Says:
   August 21st, 2006 at 10:02 am

   Judy-

   Thanks again for your comments. A few replies:

   1. You write, “100 years from now, if global warming proceeds as expected, there is a risk for whopper hurricanes with sea level rise making the risk even worse for our coastal cities.”

   OK, I’ll bite, how much will the risk of “whopper hurricanes” increase from today in the context of ever-increasing vulnerabilities? What effect would this increasing risk have on impacts we care about? And what effect would GHG reductions have on reducing this risk and the related impacts over 100 years?

   2. You write, “Hurricane Katrina, even tho there was no direct causal link with global warming, has served as a huge wakeup call to the American public that global warming might actually have some seriously adverse impacts if we were to see such storms more frequently in the future.”

   Are you at all concerned that this “wake up call” spurring policy action is based on a misinterpretation of the science and its significance for policy? Are you concerned that some are advocating policies to respond to hurricane impacts that won’t/can’t have their intended effects? Do ends justify means?

   This reminds me a bit of 9/11 and how it served as a “wake up call” used by advocates to push the war in Iraq. Sometimes, bad policies are just bad policies.

   3. What is my “thesis” that you are referring to? A perspective completely consistent with my views can be found in the statement you signed on to: http://wind.mit.edu/~emanuel/home.html

   Do you now disagree?

   4. The author of the nonsense WP op-ed has suggested that we not adapt to hurricanes and instead focus on energy policy as a response to hurricane impacts. This is irresponsible. Tidwell has even gone so far as to advocate that NHC director Max Mayfield, who has done an outstanding job particualrly during Katrina, be fired and replaced with someone focused on energy policy: “. . . Max Mayfield must resign immediately … [and] be replaced with appropriate leaders who resist the energy politics of the White House and insist on truth telling throughout these agencies.”
   http://www.katrinanomore.org/noaacase.php

   This is irresponsible. Our experience with FEMA and Michael Brown should tell us all we need to know about putting people in an operational position simply because of their political views. Views on energy policy should not be a litmus test for the NHC director.

   5. Finally, thanks much for your concerns about how my views are received and our traffic here on Prometheus As far as my views on hurricane policy and global warming, I am pretty sure that they are very widely understood; they are just inconvenient for those wanting to make bad arguments in supoort of good causes!

   Thanks!

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2. Mark Bahner Says:
   August 21st, 2006 at 10:34 am

   Hi,

   Roger asks, “OK, I’ll bite, how much will the risk of “whopper hurricanes” increase from today in the context of ever-increasing vulnerabilities? What effect would this increasing risk have on impacts we care about? And what effect would GHG reductions have on reducing this risk and the related impacts over 100 years?”

   I’m not sure I understand this question, and I’d like the time frame brought down (closer to!) something that is actually predictable.

   So the question(s) I have are:

   1) In the last 20 years, hurricane damages to the U.S. have averaged X dollars (don’t know the actual number, I’m sure Roger does ). For the 20 years centered around 2050 (i.e., 2040 to 2060), what would hurricane damages to the U.S. be expected to average *with* expected global warming?

   2) What would they be expected to average *without any* global warming?

   3) What would they be expected to average with a reasonable (but still vigorous) worldwide campaign to lower CO2 emissions?

   Forgive me if you think my questions merely parrot your questions, Roger. It’s just that I think that if the human race (or whatever successor exists in 2100) can’t develop systems to reduce damage from hurricanes to a small fraction of what they are today (adjusted for inflation), they’re pretty pathetic. Especially given the fact that I think we could develop a system or systems to reduce the damages from hurricanes to a small fraction of what they are now even by 2025…let alone 2050 or 2100.

   Mark

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3. Roger Pielke, Jr. Says:
   August 21st, 2006 at 10:48 am

   Mark- These are fine versions of my question. I actually have a paper submitted for publication that seeks to answer these questions across a wide range of assumptions. Judy has a pre-publication copy of the paper. I’d be interested in her views on the answers.

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4. Andrew Dessler Says:
   August 21st, 2006 at 10:53 am

   Roger-

   You asked: how much will the risk of “whopper hurricanes” increase from today in the context of ever-increasing vulnerabilities? What effect would this increasing risk have on impacts we care about? And what effect would GHG reductions have on reducing this risk and the related impacts over 100 years?

   Are you saying that if we cannot answer these questions, then this becomes an invalid reason to adopt GHG mitigation policies? If so, I would disagree with that position. We adopt policies all the time that head of uncertain risks with uncertain harms … think missile defense. We have no idea what the odds are that someone will launch a missile at us, what the harms of that missile will be, or how our defense system will decrease them. Yet we still built it. I think we can apply the same reasoning to this issue.

   Regards.

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5. Roger Pielke, Jr. Says:
   August 21st, 2006 at 11:04 am

   Andrew- Actually, quite to the contrary. We can answer these questions, or at least bound the answers based on the range of plausible scenarios. The answers to these questions illustrate why advocating GHG reductions on the back of hurricanes is poor policy.

   To make this more concrete – in my submitted paper I concluded that, under all scenarios, adaptation is many times more potentially effective than mitigation for addressing future hurricane impacts _assuming_ increased hurricane intensity caused by GHGs based on an expert elicitation of 10 prominant scientists.

   Even aligning all variables in a favorable way to GHG mitigation as a tool to modulate future impacts can get the effectiveness ratio only down to about 15 to 1 in favor of adaptation. The further into the future one looks the more the ratio favors adaptation.

   Under more realistic assumptions are about 25 to 1 and higher. The question is not whether we should respond to future risks, but how.

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6. Markk Says:
   August 21st, 2006 at 12:14 pm

   It seems to me that there is some undercurrent to this mitigation vs adaptation line I am not getting. They are of course not opposites. In fact I can’t see how people who are for “conservation” can be against “adaptation”, since the former is just an example of the latter. Pointing out that money spent on adaptation means we are not focusing enough on “mitigation” like the quote given above is a bad argument that very few people are making at least in view of the public (i.e. me) so I feel like I am missing something.

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7. Roger Pielke, Jr. Says:
   August 21st, 2006 at 12:44 pm

   Markk- On adaptation, perhaps this might help:

   http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/000844climate_change_is_a_.html

   For more on the politics of adaptation see:

   Pielke, Jr., R.A., 2005. Misdefining ‘‘climate change’’: consequences for science and action, Environmental Science & Policy, Vol. 8, pp. 548-561.
   http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-1841-2004.10.pdf

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8. kevin v Says:
   August 21st, 2006 at 12:51 pm

   Judy and all – I have a very long comment about using Katrina as a focusing event. It’s too long for this forum so I wrote a post here:

   http://scienceblogs.com/nosenada/2006/08/katrina_was_an_engineering_cat.php

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9. Sylvain Says:
   August 21st, 2006 at 8:34 pm

   Can anyone explain to me why a difference of 1°C in the next 100 years would be much worst than the 1°C seen in the last 150 years or so?

   Also why acting on future threat is more important than adapt to present threat?

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10. Indur Goklany Says:
    August 21st, 2006 at 10:32 pm

    Judith Curry’s post raises a few questions. First, there seems to be a logical inconsistency in the post. She implies that we should be limiting GHG emissions now in case “a 100 years from now… there is a risk of whopper hurricanes.” Yet, she notes such limits will do little good for the next 20-50 years. If the problem is hurricanes a 100 yrs hence, what’s the hurry? Why not wait for another 50-80 years [=100-(20 to 50)]? If Dr. Curry and her colleagues keep working on the science, over the next 20-30 years we’ll have a much better idea as to whether hurricanes are getting stronger and, if so, how rapidly. It will also give us time to better understand the climate system, its impacts on aspects other than hurricanes, and the social and economic consequences of responses. No less important, we’ll also have a wider and, if we use the time gainfully, possibly a more cost-effective set of response options to draw upon so that if and when it becomes necessary to reduce emissions it can be done more effectively (and economically) even if reductions have to be deeper. In any case, that still leaves us with 30-50 years margin of error. So it doesn’t seem that there is any need to rush to reduce GHG emissions now on account of any increase in hurricane intensities (and durations and frequencies) because of climate change.

    Second, if Hurricane Katrina served as a “wake up call” to the American public that storms might become more destructive because of global warming, then it’s waking up to the wrong alarm. Yes, we are awake, but we are headed to the wrong appointment. It’s as if we should be headed for our SAT exams, rather than for a workout in the gym. Hurricane Katrina, and the damage it wrought, had more to do with human failings – and the failure of the levees – than any intensification due to climate change (as Kenneth V aptly notes elsewhere). If 100 years ago, we had stopped any increases in CO2 emissions and all else stayed as it was in 2005, the levees would still have failed and the inhabitants of New Orleans would still have suffered the same tragedy. On the other hand, reinforcing the levees and/or more timely evacuation of the residents of the city – both adaptations rather than emission limitations – would have reduced the death and destruction.

    Third, the discussion regarding climate change and what to do about it seems to be oblivious to the fact that the world — and the US — face numerous problems in addition to climate change. [This is the climate-change-uber-alles fallacy.] Putting resources into addressing one problem, means that much fewer resources for addressing others. This normally wouldn’t be as much of a problem, if the magnitude of resources involved were trivial, but if they were indeed trivial they wouldn’t be an issue now.

    Regarding Andrew Dessler’s post, there are a few more questions that one should ask in addition to those he (and Mark) list. They include the following:
    • What will be our adaptive capacity 100 years hence, and how likely will it be that we’ll utilize it? This, in my estimate, was the major failing regarding Hurricane Katrina. We had the adaptive capacity to reduce death and destruction significantly had the levees been reinforced or evacuation been more efficient, but we failed to do so. Reducing GHG emissions would not guarantee against such human/social/institutional failures.
    • How much will adaptation cost and how much will that reduce hurricane impacts?
    • Another question, which follows from the third point noted above, is: What are the opportunity costs of trying to reduce hurricane damages by attacking GHG emissions rather than through adaptation?

    Regarding the missile defense system, I would presume similar questions were asked and answered at least qualitatively, before any one proceeded with the system. If no one did, or if we went ahead with the system despite getting unfavorable answers to those questions, then clearly we did something dumb. In any case, whether we do a dumb thing once – or for that matter, several times — shouldn’t condemn us to doing other dumb things in perpetuity. In other words, it’s never too late to try to improve our process of developing and analyzing policy options.

    Nevertheless, I note that while adaptation to hurricanes will address only the hurricane/coastal flooding issue, limiting GHG emissions would address the many other problems that climate change may contribute to or cause. In essence, it may be argued that reducing climate change is akin to killing several birds with one stone. Despite this inherent advantage, I have shown in a paper titled, “A
    Climate Policy for the Short and Medium Term: Stabilization or
    Adaptation?”, that in the short-to-medium term, reducing the vulnerability to current climate-sensitive problems (e.g., hurricanes) that might be exacerbated by climate change is likely to be more cost-effective than any mitigation or, for that matter, reducing vulnerability only to the impacts of climate change. [This analysis doesn’t take into consideration climate surprises; but that’s another story.]

    Three fundamental reasons contribute to this result (discussed below, for brevity’s sake, in the context of hurricanes). First as Dr. Curry suggests, emission reductions will have little or no impact on climate change in the short-to-medium term. However, we can reduce vulnerability substantially over this time frame. Second, reducing vulnerability to hurricanes in general is a holistic approach to the problem since it addresses the contribution of both climate change and non-climate-change-related factors (such as current climate and climate variability) to the hurricane problem. By contrast, emission reductions would, at best, only address that portion of the hurricane problem due to climate change. Thus, reducing vulnerability to hurricanes in general would be addressing a larger problem than would any reduction in climate change. Third, technologies, practices, systems and institutions that would reduce vulnerability to hurricanes today will all help reduce vulnerability to hurricanes tomorrow, whether or not they are more frequent, intense or of greater duration because of climate change.

    In summary, while in the long term mitigation may be unavoidable, in the short-to-medium term it is likely to be ineffective. For that we need adaptation. Moreover, as the numbers in Dr. Curry’s post suggest, we can wait a few decades before irrevocably committing ourselves to a course for the long term.

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11. Indur Goklany Says:
    August 21st, 2006 at 10:42 pm

    Regarding the previous post, I hadn’t realized that the system didn’t accept HTML tags — now I know what the “No HTML will be processed” means. The paper referred to in that post can be accessed at: http://members.cox.net/igoklany/EEv16_Stab_or_Adaptation.pdf

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12. Dario Says:
    August 22nd, 2006 at 10:14 am

    It seems to me that a significant weight of the debate is based on Katrina. It appears to be the foundation of where the Hurricane argument begins. However, Katrina was a Category 3 storm with winds of 127 mph at landfall. http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/12/21/katrina/index.html

    I don’t understand how this can serve as a wakeup call now when category 4 storms of the 1930s occured with more frequency.

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13. Steve Bloom Says:
    August 23rd, 2006 at 12:47 pm

    “In summary, while in the long term mitigation may be unavoidable, in the short-to-medium term it is likely to be ineffective. For that we need adaptation. Moreover, as the numbers in Dr. Curry’s post suggest, we can wait a few decades before irrevocably committing ourselves to a course for the long term.”

    It’s a good thing Dr. Curry suggests no such thing, Indur. You’re kind of like a climate version of John Yoo, aren’t you?

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14. Roger Pielke, Jr. Says:
    August 23rd, 2006 at 1:24 pm

    Steve- Please take the name calling elsewhere. We’d like people to stick to substance at our site. Thank you.

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15. Steve Hemphill Says:
    August 25th, 2006 at 4:14 pm

    It has been well established that the Katrina disaster was the result of engineering failures. As Dano points out it was only a 3.

    The fact people who should know better still equate Katrina with “Climate Change” shows how emotionally attached they are to their dogma. A few decades ago I think this was called brainwashing…