For you local folks (from Bobbie Klein):

“Coping with Climate Change: A Symposium Highlighting Activities at the University of Colorado to Help Decision Makers Prepare for the Future” will identify and highlight research and other activities at the University of Colorado designed to assist decision makers in responding to and coping with the coming impacts of climate change. The symposium will feature several half-hour presentations from faculty and students in various CU departments and programs about in progress or planned activities. It will provide an opportunity to learn about climate change-related ?decision support? activities at CU, identify gaps and constraints in current activities, and discover possibilities for future research and collaboration.

The symposium will be held Tuesday, April 4, from 8:30 am – 3:00 pm in the CIRES Auditorium. It is free and open to the public – registration is not required. Stay for as many sessions as you like. Lunch provided.

For more information, a schedule, and directions visit the symposium website, or contact Bobbie Klein, bklein@colorado.edu. Sponsored by the Western Water Assessment, a NOAA-CU project to provide usable climate information for decision making.

Ed.- Richard Tol, a professor at Hamburg, Vrije and Carnegie Mellon Universities. has written an interesting paper forthcoming in the journal Energy Policy critiquing the scientific basis for Europe’s temperature target for responding to global warming. Frequent readers of this blog will be familiar with discussions of the FCCC and “dangerous anthropogenic interference.” Prof. Tol adds to the diversity of perspectives here at Prometheus and offers a challenging, rigorous critique. Richard was kind enough to summarize his recent paper for us, so please read on. RP

The European Union have set a goal for international climate policy: The world should not warm more than 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures. This is an ambitious target. As the warming response to the enhanced greenhouse effect is so uncertain, it may imply that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide could not rise much above 400 ppm, only some 20 ppm above today. If recent trends continue, the 400 ppm level would be reached by 2020. A 400 ppm target may require zero carbon emissions, worldwide, by 2050.

One may of course dismiss the European target. Who are they to decide on a global target? Perhaps the target is just political posturing and wishful thinking, or maybe it is just the opening bid in international negotiations. Perhaps European policy makers have been led to believe that deep emission reduction is easy and cheap. However, the European Union is a major player in international climate policy, and its 2°C target deserves serious discussion.

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Guest Post by Andrew Dessler

Ed.- Professor Andrew Dessler, of Texas A&M University’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences, has been a frequent and substantive contributor to discussions here at Prometheus for a while now. On the occasion of the publication of his new book (The Science and Politics of Climate Change, co-authored with Edward Parson, Cambridge University Press, 2006), we thought it might be valuable to ask Andrew to present his views of science and policy in the climate issue to stimulate discussion and debate among our readers, and to give Prometheus readers a little diversity in the perspectives presented here. Andrew introduced his book here. This is part two, on uncertainty. RP

Anyone familiar with the climate change debate is familiar with the “scientific uncertainty” argument, which usually goes something like this:

The response to climate change must be based on sound science, not on speculation or theory. There is too much uncertainty and too much that we do not know about climate change. It would be irresponsible to undertake measures to reduce emissions, which could carry high economic costs, until we know that these are warranted.

Political analyst Frank Luntz suggests that this argument can aid in convincing people to oppose action on climate change, especially when used as part of a broader set of arguments that include economic and standard rhetorical components. The foundation of the argument – that there is uncertainty in present scientific knowledge of climate change – is uncontroversial. But is there so much uncertainty that we should delay action on addressing climate change until we know more? According to this argument, the answer is yes.

To dissect this argument, let’s consider three different arenas of decision making under uncertainty:

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Ed.- This comment from Gavin Schmidt of NASA appeared in the comments and I thought important enough to bring to the top. Thanks Gavin very much, RP

A couple of points for clarification. Around 20 of the scientific staff at GISS work directly for NASA as civil servants (including me). The rest work for Columbia University or the contractor.

GISS’s mission is to research long term climate change, rather broadly defined, it is not to implement government policy. Thus there is no contradiction in Hansen continuing to work on climate science while disagreeing on policy.

The problem with NASA public affairs was not limited to Hansen, but also impacted the rest of us even on issues and media requests that had absolutely nothing to do with any policy questions. Simple requests to explain ‘global warming’ or discuss the difference between weather and climate were turned down by Deutsch and company, presumably because they felt the mere mention of the science was political.

Guest Post by Andrew Dessler

Ed.- Professor Andrew Dessler, of Texas A&M University’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences, has been a frequent and substantive contributor to discussions here at Prometheus for a while now. On the occasion of the publication of his new book (The Science and Politics of Climate Change, co-authored with Edward Parson, Cambridge University Press, 2006), we thought it might be valuable to ask Andrew to present his views of science and policy in the climate issue to stimulate discussion and debate among our readers, and to give Prometheus readers a little diversity in the perspectives presented here. So I’ll now turn it over to Andrew. RP

During 2000, I was a senior policy analyst at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. I was OSTP’s staff atmospheric scientist, and one of my jobs was to explain to White House policymakers the scientific importance of newly published research as well as the truth or falsity of scientific arguments made in mainstream media outlets. Several times per week, I would run across the most ridiculous, obviously erroneous arguments about climate change in the media. I began to wonder why such outlandish arguments were being made and, more importantly, why these arguments got traction in the public debate.

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For you local folks:

George Keyworth II, White House science adviser to former President Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1986, will speak at the University of Colorado at Boulder on Tuesday, Jan. 31, at 7 p.m. in room 270 of the Hale Science Building.

The free, public event is part of a yearlong lecture series titled “Policy, Politics and Science in the White House: Conversations with Presidential Science Advisers,” sponsored by CU-Boulder’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research.

Keyworth, who played a key role in Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative known as “Star Wars,” will speak on science and the presidential decision-making process. Following his remarks, CSTPR Director Roger Pielke Jr. will interview Keyworth about topics like the role of scientific information in the Star Wars initiative. The event will conclude with a question-and-answer session with the audience.

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Post by Ross McKitrick

Roger Pielke Jr. has posed a challenge to Michael Mann and us to briefly explain why each of us thinks the ongoing hockey stick debate matters. The technical content of the debate is summarized elsewhere (here and here; Our papers are linked under the heading “articles” (right hand column), and an overview paper by Ross McKitrick is here) and I won’t re-cap it here. That it matters is demonstrated by the enormous traffic on blog sites, the volume of comments to science journals, the opening of a Congressional investigation, etc. Obviously a lot of people find that it matters.

So: why does it matter?

1. It matters because it concerns the validity of an influential scientific paper. Mann’s 1998 and 1999 papers (which I’ll call “MBH”) have been heavily cited and highly influential. The paleoclimate field seems to have organized itself around them: other papers since then have gained prominence in proportion as they appear to back up MBH, whereas papers that contradict it have little prospect of being published or are relegated to lower-profile outlets. A popular icon in paleoclimate circles these days is what can be called a “spaghetti graph,” showing a pastiche of climate reconstructions from a small group of authors who call themselves the “Hockey Team”. They agree on few details, other than that the Medieval Warm Period is not as warm as the 20th Century.

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Post by Steve McIntryre

Stefan Rahmsdorf and others (including Roger Pielke, the proprietor of this site) have taken the position that the Hockey Stick is irrelevant to the great issue of the impact of 2xCO2 on global climate. Even the originator of the Hockey Stick, Michael Mann, who received many awards and honors for its construction, ironically has taken the position that it doesn’t “matter”. (I do not believe that he has not returned any of the honors.) I’m inclined to agree that, for the most part, the Hockey Stick does not matter to the great issue of the impact of 2xCO2. However, I believe that it matters (or should matter) to IPCC, to governments that relied on IPCC and to climate scientists who contributed to and supported IPCC and to people who may wish to rely on IPCC in the future.

The Hockey Stick was not, as sometimes portrayed, an incidental graphic, buried in IPCC TAR. Nor was it an icon resurrected by sceptics purely to torment poor Michael Mann. It could almost characterized as the logo for IPCC TAR. Figure 1 below shows Sir John Houghton, at the press conference releasing IPCC TAR, standing in front of the Hockey Stick. The graphic was used repeatedly in IPCC TAR and was one of the most prominent graphics in the Summary for Policymakers. Some governments (and, the Canadian government in particular) relied upon it in their promotion of Kyoto policy even more than IPCC. In the lead-up to adopting Kyoto policy, Canadians were told by their Minister of the Environment that “1998 was the warmest year of the millennium and 1990s the warmest decade”. So even if the Hockey Stick did not “matter” to the scientific case, it mattered to the promotion of the scientific case. Scientists may want to “move on”, but institutions cannot, if they want to maintain any credibility. If the Hockey Stick was wrong, it would be as embarrassing as the failure to find WMD in Iraq. In both cases, the policy might well be justified on alternative grounds, but the existence of the alternative grounds does not mean that responsible agencies should not try to isolate the causes of intelligence failure and try to avoid similar failures in the future.

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**Post by Andrew Dessler

It has been argued on this web site that it is impossible to receive advice on science independent of political considerations. I disagree and suggest in this post a process for how it might be achieved. The process relies on scientific assessments: summaries of the scientific literature that are produced by expert scientists. Assessments connect the domains of science and democratic politics, but are distinct from both. They differ from science because rather than advancing the active, contested margin of knowledge on questions that are important for their intrinsic intellectual interest, they seek to make consensus statements of present knowledge and uncertainty on questions that are important because of their implications for decisions. They differ from democratic policy debate because they reflect deliberation over questions among scientific experts based on their specialized knowledge, not among all citizens or their representatives over what is to be done.

Here’s how the process would optimally work. Policymakers would determine the positive (scientific) questions of importance to them on some issue. This would likely be an iterative process, where scientists and policymakers together identify which scientific issues are most important for a particular issue. For the climate debate, the important questions might be: 1) is the Earth warming? 2) are human activities to blame? 3) what kind of warming do we expect over the next century? These questions would then be passed to the assessment body, which would use the existing peer-reviewed literature to determine the scientific consensus on those issues, and produce from that a report that is itself peer reviewed by outside experts. A good example of this process in action is the National Academy review of the IPCC Working Group I report initiated by the Bush Administration in 2001. The White House provided a list of questions, and the NAS panel responded to them.

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For you local folks:

Donald Hornig, Science Adviser To Lyndon Johnson, To Speak At CU-Boulder Oct. 24

Donald Hornig, White House science adviser to former President Lyndon Johnson from 1964 to 1969, will speak at the University of Colorado at Boulder on Monday, Oct. 24, at 7 p.m. in the Old Main Chapel.

The free, public event is part of a year-long lecture series titled “Policy, Politics and Science in the White House: Conversations with Presidential Science Advisers,” sponsored by CU-Boulder’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research… Read more.

For more information visit the series website.

**Posted by Bobbie Klein