Archive for June, 2006

Lloyd’s on Climate Adaptation

June 6th, 2006

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

Lloyd’s of London has an interesting new report out on the need for the insurance industry to improve their adaptive capacity in the face of climate change (here in PDF). The report is titled “Climate Change: Adapt or Bust.” Here is the executive summary:

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Climate Change is a Moral Issue

June 5th, 2006

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

Quite unintentionally, Dave Roberts of Grist Magazine provides an incredibly clear statement of the insanity of the climate debate:

Advocating that adaptation play a larger role in U.S. policy, in the current political context, does not increase the odds of sensible, balanced climate policy. It simply, if inadvertently, helps the corporatist right cloud the debate and avoid the difficult steps required to cut GHG emissions.

And whatever else we do, that task is paramount.

In an ideal, abstract policy debate, sure, I’d say we should boost our attention to adaptation. But in the current political situation, I don’t want to provide any ammunition for the moral cretins who are squirming frantically to avoid policies that might impact their corporate donors. Until they’re gone from the scene — until we have an administration serious about addressing this problem — I’m going to focus on cutting emissions.

Dave’s honesty is to be applauded, as his view on this subject is widely shared among those in the climate debate but rarely explained so clearly. However, his focus on sticking it to the “moral cretins” he so despises has the side effect of preventing greater help to people like those pictured below waiting for help in the aftermath of hurricane Mitch. There are hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, who sure could use a little help in improving their adaptive capacity irrespective of emissions reductions.

refug1.jpg

Climate change is indeed a moral issue. But hey, why advocate policies that can directly help suffering people around the world when you can instead stick to your ideological opponents?

Comment from Judy Curry

June 2nd, 2006

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

[Ed.- I want to make sure that Judy's response to my post earlier today is not missed. I will respond in the comments. RP]

Roger,

I make it a practice not to blog, but i want to clarify your misreading of our meeting with Governor Bush. We went to extreme pains NOT to talk about policies or politics. We talked about the science and the risks to Florida. Governor Bush made the important point in our discussion that this whole issue has become very politicized, and said that we needed to take the politics out of this and get to the bottom of the scientific issue of hurricanes and global warming. I wholeheartedly agree.

The most important issue from Florida’s point of view is to understand whether the hurricane situation is likely to get worse. We said that there is a considerably risk that it will.
Florida and other coastal cities need to urgently reassess their risk to hurricanes to allow for the risk of increased hurricane activity. No matter what we decide to do about the greenhouse warming issue, the most vulnerable coastal cities need to reconsider their coastal engineering, land use practices, emergency procedures, etc. in view of the risk of increasing hurricane activity and the longer range prospect of sea level rise.

The prospect of increasing hurricane activity has overall raised people’s awareness of the global warming issue, but I don’t think that many people believe that anything we do re greenhouse gases in the short term will influence the problems that our coastal cities are facing particularly in the next few decades.

The media has often misrepresented my remarks, that is unfortunate but not unexpected I guess. The particular article you refer to was an accurate portrayal of our meeting with Governor Bush. Yes, there are a variety of advocacy groups in Florida that are trying to influence Governor Bush and others to adopt a variety of policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Yes those groups believe that hurricanes can help raise awareness of the global warming issue. But no one that I know of is pushing greenhouse gas reductions as a policy to deal with increasing hurricane activity.

Judy

Petropolitics, MoveOn.org, and The Politics of Decarbonization

June 2nd, 2006

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

Thomas Friedman is brilliant at capturing large-scale dynamics of the international scene. In the current issue of Foreign Policy he has an excellent article on the relationship of oil prices and the “pace of freedom” which he argues always move in opposite directions. His article provides a compelling justification for reducing reliance on fossil fuels:

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Like a Broken Record

June 2nd, 2006

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

We have made the case many times here that reducing greenhouse gases makes good sense for a wide range of reasons, not just climate change, but that it is a poor policy argument to suggest that greenhouse gas reduction can have any effect on hurricane losses in the near term, and only a small effect in the long term due to the inexorable pace societal development along the coast. Just yesterday I was asked in the comments why it is I that on hurricanes and global warming I always “change the subject” from climate science to hurricane policy. Below are some good reasons why we should always ask “so what?” in the context of scientific debates.

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NOAA Protest

June 1st, 2006

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

Kevin Vranes has the scoop on the protest by some environmental groups calling for the NOAA administrator and NHC director to resign because they haven’t said the politically correct things about hurricanes and global warming. I don’t have much to add to Kevin’s post which is right on target. However, it is worth adding that NHC Director Max Mayfield has co-authored (with me and 3 others) two peer-reviewed papers on the hurricane-global warming issue over the past year. Here is the conclusion from the first paper, which clearly shows the rantings of madmen unfit for public service (PDF):

. . . looking to the future, until scientists conclude a) that there will be changes to storms that are significantly larger than observed in the past, b) that such changes are correlated to measures of societal impact, and c) that the effects of such changes are significant in the context of inexorable growth in population and property at risk, then it is reasonable to conclude that the significance of any connection of human-caused climate change to hurricane impacts necessarily has been and will continue to be exceedingly small.