The always excellent Issues in Science and Technology (and if you don’t subscribe you should) has a great essay in its winter issue by Richard Benedick, former deputy assistant secretary of state and chief U.S. negotiator of the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Protect the Ozone Layer. The essay is titled “Avoiding Gridlock on Climate Change” and appears on pp. 37-40. Mr. Benedick knows something about international environmental agreements. His essay is not yet online, but I have excerpted some key passages below.

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David Friedman of the Union of Concerned Scientists appeared in the NY Post yesterday, giving Prez. Bush an A on energy during the SOTU Tuesday night. I only knew that because the same reporter got a hold of me, but didn’t print my response. I gave him a D+. Then again, I was looking at the combined energy/climate change picture, not just energy; perhaps Mr. Friedman was only referring to energy.

On energy and climate change it was hard to find an A in that performance, unless you take the pre-speech talking points released by the White House as saying something new. In the speech itself Bush barely mentioned energy and gave only the briefest gloss to climate.

The only thing new from past SOTU’s was his 20/10 initiative: 20% less gasoline use in 10 years. Problem is, that is 20% less than the projected increase in ten years, not a 20% decrease from 2006 consumption. The release says, “The President’s Plan Will Help Confront Climate Change By Stopping The Projected Growth Of Carbon Dioxide Emissions From Cars, Light Trucks, And SUVs Within 10 Years.” Ok, fine, a worthy goal. But transport from the gasoline-burning vehicles is obviously only one small part of the emissions portfolio. Emissions from electricity generation, diesel-burning transportation, commercial flight, etc. are not addressed. Further, if some of the new alt fuels are coming from coal-derived liquid synfuels then we’re talking about increases in GHGs, not decreases. California’s EPA is already raising this flag.

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We have commented in the past here about how the leadership of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has flouted its own guidance to be “policy neutral” by engaging in overt political advocacy on climate change. The comments by its Director Rajendra Pachauri reported today again highlight this issue:

I hope this [forthcoming IPCC] report will shock people, governments into taking more serious action as you really can’t get a more authentic and a more credible piece of scientific work.

Imagine, by contrast, if the Director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, another organization with an agenda to be “policy neutral,” were reported in the media to say of the agency’s latest assessment on Iran, “I hope that the report will shock people, governments into taking more serious action.” He would be looking for a new job in no time, I am sure. Why should climate change be treated differently?

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Full text from action by the American Meteorological Society on the recent consensus statement (PDF) by the World Meteorological Organization on Tropical Cyclones and Climate Change:

The American Meteorological Society endorses the “Statement on Tropical Cyclones and Climate Change” by the participants of the World Meteorological Organization’s 6th International Workshop on Tropical Cyclones (IWTC-VI), released on 11 December 2006.

(Adopted by AMS Council on 14 January 2007)
Bull. Amer. Met. Soc., 87

A report titled “Key Challenges Remain for Developing and Deploying Advanced Energy Technologies to Meet Future Needs”(PDF) from the Government Accountability Office, released last week, should be required reading for anything wanting to understand the challenges of transforming energy policy. Here is the bottom line (p. 53):

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Will Toor, Boulder County Commissioner (and former Mayor of Boulder and Director of the CU Environmental Center) has provided a thoughtful response to our commentary earlier this week on the new University of Colorado power plant. Here are Will’s comments:

Thanks Will!

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If you want an example of the sort of scientific exaggeration that should concern both scientists and advocates involved in the climate debate (but typically goes uncorrected), next week’s Newsweek magazine has an article on the growing tab of disaster losses, which it attributes to global warming.

Around the country, [insurance] companies have been racking up record property losses from freakish weather, such as the ice storms last week that paralyzed much of the Great Plains and froze California’s citrus crops. In recent years, wildfires in the Northwest, drought and hail in the Midwest, windstorms, lightning strikes on power grids, soil subsidence and other calamities of nature have led to cumulative property losses that exceed those caused by hurricanes. “There’s a shift going on to more frequent, extreme weather events,” says Evan Mills, an environmental scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “It’s as much an issue in the heartland as on the coast.”

Global warming is the culprit, claim many—including several insurers who are canceling policies. While scientists cannot determine whether a single weather event is caused by a natural cycle, or is evidence of more permanent, malignant climate change, the pattern of mounting losses is clear. According to Mills, weather-related catastrophe losses have increased from about $1 billion a year in the 1970s to an average of $17 billion a year over the past decade. In 2005, the year of Katrina, that figure reached $71 billion.

We have interacted with Evan Mills before, and despite having his work throughly debunked and the existence of an expert workshop report on the topic cosponsored by Munich Re, he continues to fundamentally misrepresent the state of the science to suggest that comparing disaster losses unadjusted for societal change from the 1970s to the present says something about global warming. It does not. Here are relevant conclusions from our 2006 workshop:

Analyses of long-term records of disaster losses indicate that societal change and economic development are the principal factors responsible for the documented increasing losses to date.

Because of issues related to data quality, the stochastic nature of extreme event impacts, length of time series, and various societal factors present in the disaster loss record, it is still not possible to determine the portion of the increase in damages that might be attributed to climate change due to GHG emissions.

In the near future the quantitative link (attribution) of trends in storm and flood losses to climate changes related to GHG emissions is unlikely to be answered unequivocally.

Kevin Vranes and I are quoted in a Houston Chronicle story today on the “overselling” of climate science. Kevin just posted his reactions. I have a few reactions as well.

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Roger and I are quoted in an article by Eric Berger (who has a good science/science journalism blog of his own) running today in the Houston Chronicle. It’s an outgrowth of my AGU/climate scientist tension post from late December.

It’s interesting that I learned that the article was up from dueling emails in my inbox this morning – one from a (non-skeptic) climate scientist saying that I was right on, another saying that I must be in the pocket of Exxon.

My take home message is this:

But within the broad consensus are myriad questions about the details. How much of the recent warming has been caused by humans? Is the upswing in Atlantic hurricane activity due to global warming or natural variability? Are Antarctica’s ice sheets at risk for melting in the near future?

To the public and policymakers, these details matter. It’s one thing to worry about summer temperatures becoming a few degrees warmer.

It’s quite another if ice melting from Greenland and Antarctica raises the sea level by 3 feet in the next century, enough to cover much of Galveston Island at high tide.

and then later in the article:

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[Hans von Storch posted this very thoughtful comment on the thread from last week on the recent partnership of leading climate scientists and the National Association of Evangelicals to advocate for political action on climate change. We think that Hans' comments deserve a bit more prominence so have reproduced them here. -RP]

I remember that there was a few years ago a web page in UK, which made public a statement of a religious group about climate change; a very concerned statement. It was signed by, among others Sir John Houghton (who signed in his capacity of former IPCC chair), Bob Watson and other brass of the IPCC guild [The UK statement referred to can be found here. -RP]. Thus, the disclosure of the encroachment of religion into top climate science levels is nothing new. It would have been better if this group had been open about this fact earlier.

We all are bound by certain culturally constructed values; religion is just one, and it has been particularly barbarian in times. In other times rather humanitarian. For a scientist the problem is that these values interfere with our analytical skills; not in the sense that we would execute statistical tests in a biased manner or that we would fail in our maths. But in the way we ask; in our preparedness to accept certain answers or to remain skeptical to certain answers. And finally, it may lead us to misuse our scientific authority to push for conclusions, which are beyond the realm of science.

None of us is free of this interference: this group is to be applauded for being explicit and honest. But they should also accept that claims of independence have to be given up when speaking about the social implications of anthropogenic climate change. They are, and likely have been, issue advocates. They are certainly still scientists, but they are advocates as well. In a sense they are publicly paid NGOs. NGOs play an important and welcomed role in the public discussion and decision process, like most other lobbying groups – but everybody knows what their agenda is.

Those of us who want to try to limit the influence of our values on our scientific analyses, should try to analyze these values and their potential influence on our professional performance. We should see our present activity in a historical context and reflect upon our cultural and social conditioning. We may be able to limit the degree of subjectivity of our work to some, maybe just a very minor, extent.