Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog

Blog Break

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Pielke, Jr.) — Fri, 03 May 2013 15:48:00 +0000

This blog is going to go silent for the summer, as I turn my attention to completing the 2nd edition of The Honest Broker.

I'll keep up my blogging at The Least Thing and my periodic column at The Breakthrough Institute. You can also find me on Twitter @RogerPielkeJr.

Have a nice summer and tune back in here in the fall!

UPDATES

15 May: I have a review of Michael Levi's The Power Surge up at The Breakthrough Institute
15 May: My latest Bridges column is out: Overcoming the Tyranny of the Stylized Fact

Recent Buzz

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Pielke, Jr.) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 21:51:00 +0000

Is it only Tuesday? It seems like a full week already. Here is a quick round-up of a few items of my week thus far:

At the Guardian's Political Science blog James Wilsdon (@JamesWilsdon) and I have a piece up responding to George Monbiot's over-the-top attack on newly appointed UK Chief Scientific Adviser Mark Walport. The conversation continues in the comments and on Twitter.
At the Lowy Interpreter I provide a rejoinder to the last few defenders of the EU ETS. I suspect that its defenders will long outlast the program itself. My post is a response to a response to an earlier post of mine (got that?).
Today I gave a talk on science advice to government at the UK ESRC Genomics Network Conference. The talk is summarized here and you can see a picture below.
Over at The Least Thing, the best sports governance blog you'll find linked from here, I have a discussion of the newly released FIFA ISL report. If you think governance of science and technology has problems, then visit sports to feel much better!
Later this week, or perhaps early next, look for my latest column in Bridges which focuses on some lessons of the Reinhart and Rogoff austerity debacle.
Boulder has a winter storm warning up and a forecast of possibly the coldest temperatures ever recorded for May (!). And yet, despite record snowfall since April 1 approaching 5 feet (!), to the anger of BVSD students throughout the district, not a snow day yet in 2013;-)

The Importance of Carbon Capture to the Climate Debate

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Pielke, Jr.) — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 16:06:00 +0000

UPDATE: The journal Climatic Change has a special issue on this subject just out, it is open access and can be found here.

Dan Sarewitz and I have a piece just out in The Atlantic on the importance of carbon capture to the debate over climate change. Here is how the short piece starts out:

Today, more than 85 percent of the world’s energy still comes from fossil fuels. Despite centuries of growing use, these fuels remain abundant. Powerful economic and political interests are organized around the fossil-energy system, as are complex social arrangements (consider, for example, the dependence of rapidly expanding cities on conventional electrical grids).

These realities have made a mockery of the 20-plus years of international efforts to wean the world off oil, coal, and natural gas. That doesn’t mean we should stop trying; when it comes to climate-change mitigation, a shift to carbon-free energy remains the Platonic ideal. Yet it is past time to acknowledge that on any given day, “Drill, baby, drill!” is in fact a highly effective strategy for continuing to deliver the many benefits of cheap energy.

As a result, it’s also past time to explore more seriously a parallel path to reducing greenhouse gases—one focused not on moving off fossil fuels, but on capturing the carbon that these fuels emit.

Head over to The Atlantic to read the whole thing.

Dan and I last conspired on a piece in The Atlantic on climate change back in 2000 (Al Gore was on the cover, with fangs;-). Here is that oldie-but-goodie as well.

We'd welcome your comments. Thanks!

Presentation on Weather Risk & Climate Change

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Pielke, Jr.) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 16:08:00 +0000

Here in PDF is a handout of a presentation I gave earlier this week to the Intermediaries and Reinsurance Underwriters Association 2013 Spring Conference.

Here are the questions and answers that I presented in the talk:

Anyone with questions or comments please send them along (again, the link to the handout is here in PDF). If you'd like to reuse any of the figures in the talk, just drop me an email, I am happy to share.

Thanks to the IRUA for an excellent conference and stimulating discussions.

State of the EU ETS

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Pielke, Jr.) — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 01:06:00 +0000

Over at the Lowy Interpreter I have a guest post up on the current state of the European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme in the aftermath of the EU parliament's decision not to prop up the program last week. I discuss the ETS and offer a few thoughts on the state of Australia's climate policy debates, where it looks like Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott are working together (what?!).

Here is how it starts:

Last week, in a surprise to many, the European parliament defeated a proposal to postpone the auctioning of emissions permits, a move that would have propped up prices in the bloc's carbon market, known as the EU Emissions Trading Scheme or ETS. The market reaction was quick and brutal, with the price of carbon allowances falling by more than 30%. The political reaction was similar — the Wall Street Journal wrote that the vote was the 'equivalent of the pope renouncing celibacy'.

Head over to Lowy for the rest, and feel free to come back here and tell me what you think.

Thanks!

A New Book on Science Advice

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Pielke, Jr.) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 13:57:00 +0000

Good news: A new book is out today on science advice for government.
Even better news: The book is rich with content.
It gets even more better: It is free!

The book has been put together by Robert Doubleday of Cambridge University and James Wilsdon of the University of Sussex on the occasion of Mark Walport taking over as the UK government's chief scientific adviser. The book has a UK focus but covers issues of much broader relevance.

Here is the table of contents:

The science and art of effective advice - John Beddington
Experts and experimental government - Geoff Mulgan
A better formula: will Civil Service reform improve Whitehall’s use of expert advice? - Jill Rutter
Making the most of scientists and engineers in government - Miles Parker
Civil Service identity, evidence and policy - Dave O’Brien
The science of science advice - Sheila Jasanoff
The case for a Chief Social Scientist - Cary Cooper and Stephen Anderson
Engineering policy: evidence, advice and execution - Brian Collins
The benefits of hindsight: how history can contribute to science policy - Rebekah Higgitt and James Wilsdon Networks, nodes and nonlinearity: how scientific advice gets into policy - David Cleevely
Windows or doors? Experts, publics and open policy - Jack Stilgoe and Simon Burall
The power of ‘you’: expertise below the line - Alice Bell
The politics of posterity: expertise and long-range decision making - Natalie Day
Scientific advice in Parliament - Chris Tyler
Letter from America: a memo to Sir Mark Walport - Roger Pielke Jr.
The crowded chasm: science in the Australian government - Paul Harris
Lessons from the IPCC: do scientific assessments need to be consensual to be authoritative? - Mike Hulme
Science advice at the global scale - Bob Watson

Here are several blog posts distilled from the chapters and which have appeared on the Guardian's Political Science blog over the past few weeks:

The science and art of effective advice by Sir John Beddington
Experts and experimental government by Geoff Mulgan
Watching the watchers: lessons from the science of science advice by Sheila Jasanoff
Will civil service reform improve Whitehall's use of expert advice? by Jill Rutter
The benefits of hindsight: how history can contribute to science policy by Rebekah Higgitt and James Wilsdon
The politics of posterity: expert advice and long-term decision making by Natalie Day
Letter from America: a memo to chief scientific adviser Sir Mark Walport by Roger Pielke Jr
The crowded chasm: the place of science in the Australian government by Paul Harris
The power of 'you'? Science policy below the line by Alice Bell

Enjoy!!

Letter From America on Science Advice

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Pielke, Jr.) — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 11:42:00 +0000

At The Guardian's Political Science blog you can find an excerpt from my forthcoming chapter on science advice, to appear later this week in The Future of Scientific Advice in Whitehall (edited by Wilsdon and Doubleday), which will available to download here. My piece is written as a "letter from America" to Sir Mark Walport, the newly installed UK chief scientist, offering some advice from the history of science advice in the US.

Here is the opening from the excerpt of the chapter:

Congratulations Dr Walport on your appointment as the UK government's chief scientific adviser. You join a select group. Since the position of chief science adviser was established in the US in 1957 and in the UK in 1964, fewer than 30 men (yes, all men) have occupied the position. Today across Europe, only Ireland, the Czech Republic and the European Commission have formal equivalents, which also exist in Australia, New Zealand, and soon perhaps in Japan and at the United Nations.

In the United States, the science adviser is an assistant to the president with the formal title of Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. All US science advisers (except notably the first, James Killian, who had a background in public administration) have been trained in some area of physics, reflecting the cold war origins of the position.

Since 2005, the Centre for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado has brought to our campus presidential science advisers, spanning the administrations of John F Kennedy to Barack Obama. Let me distil what I consider to be a few of the most relevant insights from their experiences.

Do head here for the full post and stay tuned later this week for more details on the entire collection.

Wealth and Well-Being

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Pielke, Jr.) — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 14:02:00 +0000

Yesterday saw the release of the Social Progress Index, a new metric of national well-being that seeks to use non-economic criteria to produce its rankings. Michael Green, executive director of the Social Progress Imperative, a Washington, DC group which with academics from Harvard and MIT helped to produce the ranking, explained:

It is becoming increasingly apparent – particularly in light of the world’s global economic downturn – that GDP is simply too one-dimensional to provide a complete measure of a nation’s progress. The ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011 and the last decade in Mexico show that robust economic growth does not automatically translate into wellbeing among the population.

Countries need a new measure – as a complement to, not a replacement for economic growth – that assesses and quantifies factors that really matter to real people: Do I have enough to eat? Do I have shelter? Can I get an education? Do I have a fair chance to get on in life without facing discrimination? Economic measures, whether it is GDP or income inequality, are mere proxies for wellbeing. We need to measure wellbeing directly.

Efforts to replace GDP as a metric of overall well-being have seen many champions. However, almost all of these efforts have added complexity but little, if any, additional value. So it seems to also be the case with the Social Progress Index.

The graph at the top of this post shows the relationship of the new SPI index with national per capita GDP (2011 PPP $US from The World Bank graphed on log scale). As you can see, there is an exceptionally strong relationship between the two metrics. More than 85% of the variance in the SPI can be explained by per capita GDP, suggesting little practical basis for preferring the SPI to a straightforward metric of wealth as a proxy for well-being.

The lesson? You can try to develop an index of well-being that hides wealth. But it is there nonetheless.

Fool Me Once: Munich Re's Thunderstorm Claims

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Pielke, Jr.) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 23:22:00 +0000

Last October Munich Re, one of the world's largest reinsurance companies, issued a press release in which they made a remarkable claim about a new study of normalized economic losses related to thunderstorms in the United States:

In all likelihood, we have to regard this finding as an initial climate-change footprint in our US loss data from the last four decades.

To date no studies of economic losses associated with weather events have successfully identified a signal of human-caused climate change in loss data. This conclusion was underscored by the IPCC which surveyed the literature and concluded in its 2012 Special Report on Extreme Events that "Long-term trends in economic disaster losses adjusted for wealth and population increases have not been attributed to climate change, but a role for climate change has not been excluded."

The claimed discovery was thus of tremendous significance. But fantastic claims before peer review deserve, as Andy Revkin has warned, caution.

Munich Re did prepare a report (which was not made readily available) in conjunction with its press release, but no peer reviewed paper. They later promised that peer reviewed support for the claim would soon be forthcoming:

[Ernst] Rauch [head of Munich Re's Climate Center] said Munich Re researchers have submitted a paper for peer review that shows how climate change is resulting in intensifying storms in the United States. The forthcoming study, he says, points for one of the first times "toward an attribution of climate change to losses."

This week, the promised study -- Sander et al. 2013, hereafter SEFS13 -- was published in the journal Weather, Climate and Society of the American Meteorological Society. Munich Re subsequently issued the press release that you see at the top of this post titled, "Climate change effects increasingly influencing US thunderstorms."

If you like stories with happy endings, then this would be the time where you should stop reading this post, to take a nod from Peter Falk in The Princess Bride.

As one looks a little bit closer at the public representations made by Munich Re about the paper and the paper itself, one quickly finds -- as is all too common in climate science -- that the strong public claims simply cannot be supported by the actual research, and the paper suffers from an obvious fatal error. Let's have a look.

The further one reads into the press release the further it deviates from the claim expressed in its title. The paper says the following about attribution of loss trends:

[A] high probability is assigned to climatic variations primarily driving the changes in normalized losses since 1970. Due to the chosen methodology, the current study has not been able to conclusively attribute the variability in severe thunderstorm forcing situations and losses to either natural climate variability or anthropogenic climate change.

Got that? The paper says nothing conclusive about attribution. It is not an "initial climate change footprint." It does not support the claim that "climate change effects increasingly influencing US thunderstorm losses."

In fact, the paper says much the opposite: attribution of losses to climate change was not achieved in the paper. Perhaps the media is getting wise to these games, because there has been almost no media coverage of the sensational claim trumpeted in the headline of the press release put out a few days ago -- a claim, which if it were correct, would deserve broad coverage.

But it gets worse.

The paper argues that the causal mechanism leading to greater thunderstorm variability is the frequent claim that it is the consequence of an atmosphere holding more water vapor:

Trapp et al. (2007, 2009) have found that climate-model-based projections display indications of a regime in which increasing specific humidity (as the main contributor to increasing CAPEml over time) increases the annual frequency of severe thunderstorm environments (defined by the product of CAPEml and DLS) in a transient climate model experiment since 1950.

The paper further explains:

As a precondition of rising CAPEml, monthly observations of near surface specific humidity during the period 1973–1999 (HadCRUH, Peterson et al. 2011) show a clear increase in the Northern Hemisphere. In eastern North America this increase equals 3.6 (±2.7) %. This was shown to be in coarse statistical agreement with the results from (anthropogenically forced) GCM runs over this period (Willett et al. 2010).

It is here where the reader of the paper might find themself being taken for a fool.

Willett et al. 2010, the source cited by SEFS13, provides estimates for changes in "near surface specific humidity" for a large number of regions around the world, as shown in the figure below.

Eastern North America, which is cited explicitly in SEFS13, is found where you would expect it and is labelled ENA. You might wonder why SEFS13 did not say anything about CNA- Central North America, which is otherwise known as "tornado alley." I sure did.

Immediately below is a zoomed-in image of North America taken from the image above. Immediately below that I show Figure 1 from SEFS13 -- which shows the location of the normalized loss events included in its study -- with my overlay of the Willetts et al. 2010 CNA region (which stretches from the Florida panhandle to the Texas panhandle, and then goes north to the Canadian border through eastern Colorado) highlighted as the transparent blue box.

You can clearly see that the vast majority of normalized US thunderstorm losses actually occurs in Central North America -- CNA. This conclusion is insensitive to small errors in the mapping of the CNA region onto SEFS13 Figure 1.

So, what do Willetts et al. 2010 actually say about changes in "near surface specific humidity" in the CNA region 1973-1999?

It is not hard to find as it appears in the same table as the ENA data which was reported by SEFS13. In fact, it appears in the row just above. It says that there has been no change in "near surface specific humidity" in Central North America 1973 to 1999. The numbers are 1.9 (±4.1) %. Surprised?

So let's recap:

Munich Re claimed to have discovered the first "climate change footprint" in economic loss data.

That was incorrect.

Munich Re claimed in the headline of the press released announcing SEFS13 that "climate change effects increasingly influencing US thunderstorms."

That turns out not to be supported by the paper, which actually concludes the opposite.

SEFS13 argues a causal mechanism between increasing humidity, thunderstorm variability and by extension, to normalized losses.

The paper fails to report that in the region where most US thunderstorm activity and damage has occurred, the data shows no change in humidity 1973 to 1999 -- undercutting its core argument. The paper reports data for an accompanying region where there has been an increase in humidity, but very few losses.

Misleading public claims. An over-hyped press release. A paper which neglects to include materially relevant and contradictory information central to its core argument. All in all, just a normal day in climate science!

Planetary Boundaries as Millenarian Prophesies: A Guest Post by Steve Rayner

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Pielke, Jr.) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 21:17:00 +0000

This is a guest post by Steve Rayner, Oxford University, and is distilled from a forthcoming book chapter that Steve has co-authored with Clare Heyward, also of Oxford University. The full citation is (and please see the original for the broader argument and references):

S. Rayner and C. Heyward, 2013 (in press). The Inevitability of Nature as a Rhetorical Resource, Chapter 14 in Kerstin Hastrup (editor), Anthropology and Nature (Routledge, London).

This post follows up an earlier discussion of the politics of planetary boundaries on this blog here and a critique and follow on discussion here.

Planetary Boundaries as Millenarian Prophesies

by Steve Rayner

The idea that we are collectively on the brink of overstepping “planetary boundaries” that will render civilization unsustainable has been prominently propounded by a group of scholars around Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre. In common with other scientific catastrophists, Rockström et al make much of the claim by Nobel prizewinning chemist, Paul Crutzen (2002) that the earth has entered a new geological period, the Anthropocene “in which human actions have become the main driver of global change” that “could see human activities push the Earth system outside the stable environment state of the Holocene with consequences that are detrimental or even catastrophic for large parts of the world” (Rockström et al 2009:472). A few sentences further on they assert that:

Many subsystems of Earth react in a non-linear, often abrupt, way and are particularly sensitive around the threshold levels of certain key variables. If these variables are crossed then important subsystems, such as a monsoon system, could shift into a new state, often with deleterious or potentially even disastrous consequences of humans…. Most of these thresholds can be defined by a critical value for one or more control variables, such as carbon dioxide concentrations.

The authors go on to identify nine such planetary boundaries, two of which, the nitrogen cycle and biodiversity loss, they claim have already been transgressed with climate change rapidly approaching the point of no return.

Subsequently, 18 past winners of the Blue Planet Prize published a report warning that civilization faces a “perfect storm” of ecological problems driven by overpopulation, overconsumption, and environmentally damaging technologies (Bruntland et al 2012). These ideas echo the Malthusian arguments of the Limits-to- Growth, Small-is-Beautiful movements of the 1960s and 70s. The notion of impending cataclysmic events with dystopian outcomes is frequently invoked not only by environmental NGOs but also by policymakers in highly public forums. Examples include the UNFCCC, the World Economic Forum in Davos, the European Parliament, and recently at Planet Under Pressure, a major conference in London designed to feed into the 2012 Rio Plus 20 summit, which opened with one of the Blue Planet prize winners setting the catastrophist tone. “Reality” and “nature” were frequently invoked as the impetus for radical action. In the words of Anne Glover, the Chief Science Advisor to the European Commission, “The facts just are.” All the while, “society” was blamed for failing to respond to the urgent messages of scientists and campaigners, and social scientists chided for failing to market the natural scientists’ warnings effectively.

The rhetoric employed in the plenary sessions was especially striking in its efforts to establish the present as a uniquely defining moment for the future of humanity requiring urgent action on a global scale which seems slow in coming. Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom declared that, “We have never faced a challenge this big.” Johan Rockström drove home the point claiming that “We are the first generation to know we are truly putting the future of civilization at risk.” Apparently, those who lived through the Second World War or the prospect of mutual nuclear annihilation in the 1960s were deluded in their estimation of the challenge they faced or the consequences for civilization, to say nothing of Old Testament prophets who only had the authority of God that destruction was imminent if people did not mend their wicked ways. Lest there be any doubt that behavioural change was the goal, Dutch political scientist Frank Biermann spelled out the imperative that “The Anthropocene requires new thinking” and “The Anthropocene requires new lifestyles.”

Indeed, the rhetorics of the Anthropocene, tipping points, and planetary limits have all three characteristic features of traditional millenarianism that I identified in an early study of the credibility of millenarian prophesies among small Marxist splinter groups, long before I turned my attention to environmental issues (Rayner 1982). These are the foreshortening of time (the claim that catastrophe is imminent), the compression of space (the assertion that the earth is a closed system), and an egalitarian concern for the plight of the weak and vulnerable.

In keeping with egalitarian advocacy, a radical redistribution of certain key resources is needed: the dramatic cut in the use of fossil fuels upon which industrialised economies are based. Moreover the advocates’ preferred strategy is presented as the only course of action that will let humanity avoid its fate.

At first sight, the contemporary resurgence in catastrophist thinking might be understood as a response to improvements in our understanding of critical earth systems resulting from research-led improvements in scientific understanding. However, I have not been able to identify any new empirical studies to justify the claim that, “Although Earth’s complex systems sometimes respond smoothly to changing pressures, it seems that this will prove to be the exception rather than the rule.” (Rockström et al 2009:472). Leading ecologists have long suggested that the general assertions of systems theorists that “everything is connected to everything else” and “you can’t change just one thing” are actually less robust than is often claimed. It seems that most species in many ecosystems are actually quite redundant and can be removed without any loss of overall ecosystems character or function (e.g., Lawton 1991, but for a contrasting view, see Gitay et al 1996). While it is doubtless the case that there are many non-linear relationships in natural systems, it is another matter as to whether non-linearity dominates and whether we should, as a matter of course, expect to find tipping points everywhere. Indeed, a recent review challenges Rockström et al.’s claims, arguing that out of the planetary boundaries posited, only three genuinely represent truly global biophysical thresholds, the passing of which could be expected to result in non-linear changes (Blomqvist et al, 2012).

The same report also challenges the idea that the planetary boundaries constitute “non-negotiable thresholds”. The identification of the planetary boundaries is dependent on the normative assumptions made, for example, concerning the value of biodiversity and the desirability of the Holocene. Rather than non-negotiables, humanity faces a system of trade-offs - not only economic, but moral and aesthetic as well. Deciding how to balance these trade-offs is a matter of political contestation (Blomqvist et al, 2012:37). What counts as “unacceptable environmental change” is not a matter of scientific fact, but involves judgments concerning the value of the things to be affected by the potential changes. The framing of planetary boundaries as being scientifically derived non-negotiable limits, obscures the inherent normativity of deciding how to react to environmental change. Presenting human values as facts of nature is an effective political strategy to shut down debate.

Global Insured Catastrophe Losses from Aon Benfield

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Pielke, Jr.) — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 20:50:00 +0000

In a recent report on reinsurance Aon Benfield (here in PDF) includes the graph shown above which shows insured catastrophe losses worldwide as a proportion of GDP. Such a graph is not equivalent to a loss normalization of the sort that I often show. However, it does show that the re/insurance industries have managed (by design or by outcome) insured catastrophe losses such that there has not been a statistically significant trend in losses/GDP 1960 - 2011.

For those interested in weather-related losses (total, not just insured) at the global scale here is that data.

Climate Predictions as Double-Edged Sword

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Pielke, Jr.) — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 14:10:00 +0000

Recently The Economist caused a stir by featuring the recent slowdown in global temperatures, illustrated above and described as follows (see also The Telegraph):

Temperatures fluctuate over short periods, but this lack of new warming is a surprise. Ed Hawkins, of the University of Reading, in Britain, points out that surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range of projections derived from 20 climate models (see chart 1). If they remain flat, they will fall outside the models’ range within a few years.

The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now. It does not mean global warming is a delusion. Flat though they are, temperatures in the first decade of the 21st century remain almost 1°C above their level in the first decade of the 20th. But the puzzle does need explaining.

The mismatch might mean that—for some unexplained reason—there has been a temporary lag between more carbon dioxide and higher temperatures in 2000-10. Or it might be that the 1990s, when temperatures were rising fast, was the anomalous period. Or, as an increasing body of research is suggesting, it may be that the climate is responding to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in ways that had not been properly understood before. This possibility, if true, could have profound significance both for climate science and for environmental and social policy.

The fact that the atmosphere is not warming in line with climate model predictions let The Economist to state rather provocatively:

If climate scientists were credit-rating agencies, climate sensitivity would be on negative watch. But it would not yet be downgraded.

The responses have been predictably tribal. Below I reproduce a blog post that my father and I wrote back in 2006 warning advocates of action not to put too many bets on the short-term evolution of the climate system based on climate model predictions. Like experience with credit-rating agencies, surprises could have been avoided.

Big Time Gambling With Multi-Decadal Global Climate Model Predictions
Roger A. Pielke Sr. and Roger A. Pielke Jr.
8 August 2006

Many advocates for action on climate change, including the IPCC assessments and recent documentaries have promoted a view that global warming will continue through the 21st century, with global warming defined as a steady increase in global average temperatures. This prediction of warming is based on the output of multi-decadal general circulation models and is primarily due to the radiative forcing effect of anthropogenic emissions of CO2. In such models only relatively minor year-to-year variations in global average temperatures are forecast in the upward trend, except when major volcanic eruptions cause short-term (up to a few years) of global cooling. For example, see these projections of the most recent IPCC — none of the models has an obvious multi-year (i.e., >2) decrease in global average temperatures over the next century.

Such predictions represent a huge gamble with public and policymaker opinion. If more-or-less steady global warming does not occur as forecast by these models, not only will professional reputations be at risk, but the need to reduce threats to the wide spectrum of serious and legitimate environmental concerns (including the human release of greenhouse gases) will be questioned by some as having been oversold. For better or worse, a failure to accurately predict the changes in the global average surface temperature, global average tropospheric temperature, ocean average heat content change, or Arctic sea ice coverage would raise questions on the reliance of global climate models for accurate prediction on multi-decadal time scales. Surprises or experience that evolve outside the bounds of model output would likely raise questions even among some of those who have so far accepted the IPCC reports as a balanced presentation of climate science. (for a perspective different than the IPCC on applications of climate models see this).

The National Research Council published a report in 2002 entitled “Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises” (of which RP2 was a committee member). The report raised the issues of surprises in the climate system. One of the surprises (to many) may be that the global climate models are simply unable to accurately predict the variability and trends in the climate metrics that have been adopted to communicate human-caused climate change to policymakers. Among the climate metrics with the most public visibility are the long term trends in global average surface temperature, global average tropospheric temperature, summer arctic sea ice areal coverage, and ocean heat content.

There is some emerging empirical evidence to suggest, however, that the concerns expressed here are worth consideration. The recent dramatic cooling of the average heat content of the upper oceans, and thus a significant negative radiative imbalance of the climate system for at least a two year period, that was mentioned in the Climate Science weblog posting of July 27, 2006, should be a wake-up call to the climate community that the focus on predictive modeling as the framework to communicate to policymakers on climate policy has serious issues as to its ability to accurately predict the behavior of the climate system. No climate model that we are aware of has anticipated such a significant cooling, nor is able to reproduce such a significant negative radiative imbalance. Meaningless distinctions between “projections” and “predictions” will be unlikely to convince consumers of climate models to overlook experience that does not jibe with modeled output.

There is no greater danger to support for action on important issues of human impacts on the environment than an overselling of what climate science can provide. If the climate behaves in ways that are unexpected or surprising it will be more than just credibility that is lost. Advocates for action should think carefully when gambling with the unknown predictive abilities of climate models. The human influence on the climate system is real, but the climate may not always cooperate.

Planetary Boundaries as Power Grab

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Pielke, Jr.) — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 15:05:00 +0000

UPDATE2: 8 April, Victor Galaz, of the Stockholm Resilience Center, says that this post is focused on a straw man. Read his response here and we start a discussion in the comments here.

UPDATE: 5 April, in the comments Melissa Leach weighs in with further thoughts.

Writing at the Huffington Post UK, Melissa Leach, Director of the STEPS Centre at Sussex University, asks a provocative question:

When the cover of the Economist famously announced 'Welcome to the anthropocene' a couple of years ago, was it welcoming us to a new geological epoch, or a dangerous new world of undisputed scientific authority and anti-democratic politics?

The occasion for raising this question was Prof. Leach's participation last month in a United Nations meeting of experts on the development of new sustainable development goals. Leach describes a meeting in which scientific authority was invoked as the basis for closing down debates over policy and asserting the preeminent roles of experts in charting a course for future global development.

This meeting - and many others like it in the run up to September - raise a significant question: Is there a contradiction between the world of the anthropocene, and democracy? The anthropocene, with its associated concepts of planetary boundaries and 'hard' environmental threats and limits, encourage a focus on clear single goals and solutions. It is co-constructed with ideas of scientific authority and incontrovertible evidence; with the closing down of uncertainty or at least its reduction into clear, manageable risks and consensual messages.

This is a far cry - as a South African participant pointed out - from some other worlds: on the ground in the global south and north, where people and social movements debate and contest their interests, values and desired futures; and the world according to democratic theory, in which such politics are worth acknowledging and respecting. In this world, there is a need to open up, make uncertainty and ambiguity and dissensus explicit, and foster diversity to cope with it.

The basis for the power grab by the experts -- really old wine in new bottles -- is the fashionable idea of "planetary boundaries" which holds that there are hard and fast ecological limits within which human activity must be constrained. The concept is much contested scientifically -- such as in this excellent review by my colleagues at The Breakthrough Institute.

However, as an instrument of scientific authority in political debates the concept of planetary boundaries could not be more perfect. Frank Biermann of VU University Amsterdam, explains (here in PDF):

Since the assessment of planetary boundaries is inherently political, scientists involved in this process become inadvertently also political actors. This raises fundamental questions about the legitimacy and accountability of scientific assessment processes . . .

For the proponents of planetary boundaries as political authority, issues of legitimacy and accountability are easily dealt with through the incontestable authority of science. Consequently, they argue that the tradition conception of sustainable development as a challenge of trading off competing values -- environmental, social, economic -- needs instead to be rethought in hierarchical terms. They explain and illustrate the need as follows (from this recent paper in Nature in PDF).:

[W]e need to reframe the UN paradigm of three pillars of sustainable development — economic, social and environmental — and instead view it as a nested concept.

In the hierarchical axiology, the trump values are defined by the planetary boundaries.

Who, you may ask, is responsible for identifying and enforcing those values? Why, the experts, of course. The power implications of planetary boundaries were spelled out explicitly by several of its leading advocates as follows:

Ultimately, there will need to be an institution (or institutions) operating, with authority, above the level of individual countries to ensure that the planetary boundaries are respected. In effect, such an institution, acting on behalf of humanity as a whole, would be the ultimate arbiter of the myriad trade-offs that need to be managed as nations and groups of people jockey for economic and social advantage. It would, in essence, become the global referee on the planetary playing field.

The political model that underlies the power grab of scientists is one of "trusteeship" a form of which was described by PIK's John Schellnhuber, an early advocate of the planetary boundaries model of global politics, in Der Spiegel:

Ultimately only democratic societies will be able to master this challenge, notwithstanding their torturous decision-marking processes. But to get there perhaps we'll need innovative refinement of our democratic institutions. I could imagine assigning 10 percent of all seats in parliament to ombudsmen who represent only the interests of future generations.

An expert body of the German government memorialized the political philosophy in a comic book (illustrated below, here in PDF), complete with the scientist (Schellnhuber himself in this case) symbolically above the policy maker, describing a planetary boundary condition and as a consequence, President Obama in the panel below expressing concern that action is needed.

A real-world example of the implications of the planetary boundaries political philosophy is vividly seen through the issue of global energy access. Future global development, at least in the short term, necessarily will involve trade offs between expanded use of carbon-emitting fossil fuels and the expansion of energy access to the world's poorest. The planetary boundaries advocates, consistent with their hierarchical values framework, call for "universal clean energy" and recommend development targets focused not on measuring expanded energy access, but rather carbon dioxide emissions (here in PDF).

In other words, expanded energy access to the world's poorest is deemed acceptable only if it first satisfies the demands of planetary boundaries -- in other words, the political demands of the scientists couched in the inviolable authority of science. As Shellenhuber explains:

I have nothing against economic growth, as long as it does not break through the planetary guardrails.

In a recent essay, Nico Stehr, of Zeppelin University, characterizes dissatisfaction about democracy among climate experts, and explains the general underlying perspective:

Consensus on facts, it is argued, should motivate a consensus on politics. The constitutive social, political and economic uncertainties are treated as minor obstacles that need to be delimited as soon as possible - of course by a top-down approach. . . the discourse of the impatient scientists privileges hegemonic players such as world powers, states, transnational organizations, and multinational corporations. Participatory strategies are only rarely in evidence. Likewise, global mitigation has precedence over local adaptation. “Global” knowledge triumphs over “local” knowledge. . . the sum of these considerations is the conclusion that democracy itself is inappropriate, that the slow procedures for implementation and management of specific, policy-relevant scientific knowledge leads to massive, unknown dangers. The democratic system designed to balance divergent interests has failed in the face of these threats.

Stehr's explanation aptly summarizes the play book used by the experts at the United Nations meeting described by Leach in their efforts to assert authority over high level decisions on the future course of global development. Leach ends her essay with an ominous warning:

[T]he human rights and well-being that are under threat in the anthropocene may prove not just to be material rights to food, water and energy, but also rights to voice, priorities, perspectives and culturally-embedded ways of life.

James Hansen: Responsible Scientist and Advocate

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Pielke, Jr.) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Via the New York Times, James Hansen, long time NASA scientist and advocate for action on climate change, announced that he was retiring from the government:

His departure, after a 46-year career at the space agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, will deprive federally sponsored climate research of its best-known public figure.

At the same time, retirement will allow Dr. Hansen to press his cause in court. He plans to take a more active role in lawsuits challenging the federal and state governments over their failure to limit emissions, for instance, as well as in fighting the development in Canada of a particularly dirty form of oil extracted from tar sands.

“As a government employee, you can’t testify against the government,” he said in an interview.

Hansen's scientific contributions while at NASA are notable and will no doubt be reflected upon elsewhere. Here I focus on Hansen's evolution from staid government bureaucrat -- clean shaven in a blue suit to a stylish icon, complete with signature hat and Amish beard -- to passionate advocate who no longer wants to work for government but seeks to change it.

Over the years Hansen has experimented with many approaches to advocacy, including at times some heavy flirtation with varieties of stealth advocacy that ultimately saps the authority of science. But in the end, Hansen seems to have gotten it right. He is first and foremost a democrat, and has decided to participate in the most noble of democratic traditions through public advocacy for what he values.

As I chronicle in The Climate Fix, Hansen first burst upon the public scene in a 1988 Congressional hearing on climate change organized by Senators Al Gore and Tim Wirth. I recount this important episode in the elevation of climate as a political issue:

The hearing that day was carefully stage-managed to present a bit of political theater, as was later explained by Senator Tim Wirth (D-CO), who served alongside Gore in the Senate and, like Gore, was also interested in the topic of global warming. “We called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer. Well, it was June 6th or June 9th or whatever it was. So we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it. What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn't working inside the room.”

The star witness that day was Dr. James Hansen, a NASA scientist who had been studying climate since the 1960s. Hansen had decided that “it was time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here and is affecting our climate.” Hansen emphasized three points in his testimony: First, that “the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements;” second, “global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship” to the emission of greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide; and third, the consequences are “already large enough to begin to affect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves.” The hearing’s public impact surely must have exceeded even its organizers expectations, as the of the temperature in the room and the scorching weather outside resulted in Hansen’s testimony receiving wide coverage in the national and international media.

It was less than a year later in 1989 when Hansen appeared on the front page of the New York Times after going public with complaints that the Office of Management and Budget (under George H. W. Bush) had altered his testimony before Congress. At the time the NYT reported:

Dr. Hansen's testimony, before it was changed, would have given strong support to the position that while there are still many uncertainities, enough is known now about the general and even regional effects of the global warming trend to start acting now to mitigate and prepare for those effects. . .

''I should be allowed to say what is my scientific position; there is no rationale by which O.M.B. should be censoring scientific opinion,'' Dr. Hansen insisted. ''I can understand changing policy, but not science.''

The episode would foreshadow decades of skirmishes at the intersection of climate science and policy, and the efforts by advocates on both sides of the debate -- those calling for aggressive action and those opposed -- to wage their political battles through climate science. In such debates what counts as a matter of science versus a matter of policy was often blurred, strategically so, which helped contribute to the deep politicization of climate science.

Along the way, Hansen has progressively become more and more overt in his political advocacy reflecting at least a change in tactics if not a change in outlook. Thus, his resignation from NASA was probably inevitable, if belated.

In 2004, following an extended set of skirmishes with the administration of George W. Bush over access to media and responsibilities of government officials ability to comment on government policy, Hansen gave a public lecture in Iowa in advance of the presidential election between Bush and John Kerry.

Hansen explained in his book, Storms of My Grandchildren, how he had hoped that the talk might be a first domino that helped to influence the election outcome (p. 95):

I did not expect my talk to alter votes in the upcoming election. Yet, in the back of my mind I wondered: What if this public lecture leads to publicity and debate, and Professor [James] Van Allen indicates agreement with my position? Given his reputation, it might influence fence-sitters in Iowa . . .

Iowa is a "purple" state, sometimes voting Republican, sometimes Democratic. It was conceivable that Iowa might be pivotal in the presidential election. I had decided to mention my preference for John Kerry over George W. Bush, based on their positions over climate and energy.

Hansen explains how he sent an advance copy of the speech to the New York Times Andy Revkin who subsequently reported on the speech, highlighting Hansen's conflicts with the Bush Administration and endorsement of Kerry. Despite the national visibility and conveyance of his endorsement, Iowa and the election both went to George W. Bush.

In his book Hansen characterizes himself (and fellow traveler Steve Schneider) in religious movement terms and expresses repeated frustration that his political efforts -- which included the sending of strongly worded letters to world leaders -- had not paid off in the sorts of action that he would have liked to see. Yet, Hansen had become a movement icon and enjoyed remarkable access to leading policy makers, of the sort that is virtually unprecedented among the scientific community.

For instance, in 2007 Hansen wrote letters to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and German Chancellor Angela Merkel calling for those countries to take specific actions on climate change. Hansen reflected after the fact that he hoped that his arguments would be found convincing to Merkel on the weight of their merits and against the wishes of her government (p. 179):

Merkel was trained as a physicist, and I hoped that rather than relying on advisers, she would be willing to think about the problem herself. I figured she would be able to appreciate the geophysical boundary conditions, the conclusion that most of the coal must be left in the ground.

Hansen was advised by German scientists close to government that the best route to influence policy was to speak to the environment minister. Remarkably, Hansen was subsequently granted a 90 minute session with the German environment minister, Sigmar Gabriel, arranged by John Schellnhuber (who also served as a Merkel advisor) and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

With Gabriel, Hansen found a receptive audience to his summary of climate science and the need to stabilize carbon dioxide at 350 parts per million. There were no debates over the science. "The sticking point," Hansen recounted, "was the implication: the need to halt coal emissions." Hansen was quickly learning about the realities of democratic systems and the fact that scientific authority does not compel action. Gabriel, of course, is famous for explaining that “You can build 100 coal-fired power plants and don’t have to have higher CO2 emissions,” due to the magic of emissions trading. Germany's coal use has expanded since Hansen's audience with the minister.

Hansen's initial reactions to the failure of world leaders to follow his guidance was, ironically enough, to blame their intransigence on a failure of democracy. Hansen explained to The Guardian in 2009:

"The democratic process doesn't quite seem to be working. The first action that people should take is to use the democratic process. What is frustrating people, me included, is that democratic action affects elections but what we get then from political leaders is greenwash.

The democratic process is supposed to be one person one vote, but it turns out that money is talking louder than the votes. So, I'm not surprised that people are getting frustrated. I think that peaceful demonstration is not out of order, because we're running out of time."

The irony in Hansen's view is of course that the governments that he was deriding over their supposed democratic failures were expressing the preferences of democractically-elected officials rather than one man's pleas (a foreigner, no less) for action grounded in his claims to the authority of science. Hansen even went so far as to call for his political opponents to be put on trial, as the NY Times reports, "He has repeatedly called for trying the most vociferous climate-change deniers for “crimes against humanity."

Perhaps it was the realization that calls for action originating in authority were not going to trump the realities of democratic governance. Perhaps it was something else. But at some point Hansen changed tack.

Since 2009 Hansen has been arrested a half-dozen times for civil disobedience at protests against individual fossil fuel projects, marking a sharp departure from his earlier efforts to sway world leaders based on his authority as a scientist. The NY Times explains:

In the absence of such a broad [climate] policy, Dr. Hansen has been lending his support to fights against individual fossil fuel projects. Students lured him to a coal protest in 2009, and he was arrested for the first time. That fall he was cited again after sleeping overnight in a tent on the Boston Common with students trying to pressure Massachusetts into passing climate legislation.

Such overt advocacy for government action, grounded in shared values is the lifeblood of democracy.

Hansen will of course face criticism for his actions and for the specific policies that he advocates, some of it well deserved. However, one thing that Hansen can no longer be accused of is using science as a cover for seeking political ends. Hansen's lifelong journey to passionate advocate has arrived at a place where he shows respect for both democratic practices and for the role of science in democracy.

Best wishes to Jim Hansen as he takes on new challenges!

Raise your Integrity

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Pielke, Jr.) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 13:18:00 +0000

At the Financial Post (Canada) Ross McKitrick has a very good op-ed on the Marcott mess and its larger consequences:

In recent years there have been a number of cases in which high-profile papers from climate scientists turned out, on close inspection, to rely on unseemly tricks, fudges and/or misleading analyses. After they get uncovered in the blogosphere, the academic community rushes to circle the wagons an denounce any criticism as "denialism." There's denialism going on all right -- on the part of scientists who don't see that their continuing defence of these kind of practices exacts a toll on the public credibility of their field.

The problems lie of course not the academic community as a whole but a vocal and aggressive subset, egged on by an uncritical media and a chorus of fellow travelers. Most of the community are solid scientists, who strive to do good work. But the public face of climate science is represented by the most vocal and politicized elements. As readers here know, I could write a book about the unseemly shenanigans that have gone on in the area of disasters and climate change.

The climate community won't fix this situation until practicing scientists start publicly saying enough is enough. Perhaps the upcoming generation of academics will be the ones to do so. Meantime, deviations from long-held norms of scientific integrity deserve to be called out loudly for what they are.

Fixing the Marcott Mess in Climate Science

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Pielke, Jr.) — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 03:24:00 +0000

In 1991 the National Research Council proposed what has come to be a widely accepted definition of misconduct in science:

Misconduct in science is defined as fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism, in proposing, performing, or reporting research. Misconduct in science does not include errors of judgment; errors in the recording, selection, or analysis of data; differences in opinions involving the interpretation of data; or misconduct unrelated to the research process.

Arguments over data and methods are the lifeblood of science, and are not instances of misconduct.

However, here I document the gross misrepresentation of the findings of a recent scientific paper via press release which appears to skirt awfully close to crossing the line into research misconduct, as defined by the NRC. I recommend steps to fix this mess, saving face for all involved, and a chance for this small part of the climate community to take a step back toward unambiguous scientific integrity.

The paper I refer to is by Marcott et al. 2013, published recently in Science. A press release issued by the National Science Foundation, which funded the research, explains the core methodology and key conclusion of the paper as follows (emphasis added):

Peter Clark, an OSU paleoclimatologist and co-author of the Science paper, says that many previous temperature reconstructions were regional and not placed in a global context.

"When you just look at one part of the world, temperature history can be affected by regional climate processes like El Niño or monsoon variations," says Clark.

"But when you combine data from sites around the world, you can average out those regional anomalies and get a clear sense of the Earth's global temperature history."

What that history shows, the researchers say, is that during the last 5,000 years, the Earth on average cooled about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit--until the last 100 years, when it warmed about 1.3 degrees F.

The press release clearly explains that the paper (a) combines data from many sites around the world to create a "temperature reconstruction" which gives a "sense of the Earth's temperature history," and (b) "that history shows" a cooling over the past 5000 years, until the last 100 years when all of that cooling was reversed.

The conclusions of the press release were faithfully reported by a wide range of media outlets, and below I survey several of them to illustrate that the content of the press release was accurately reflected in media coverage and, at times, amplified by scientists both involved and not involved with the study.

Examples of Media Coverage

Here is Justin Gillis at the New York Times, with emphasis added to this excerpt and also those further below:

The modern rise that has recreated the temperatures of 5,000 years ago is occurring at an exceedingly rapid clip on a geological time scale, appearing in graphs in the new paper as a sharp vertical spike.

Similarly, at the NY Times Andy Revkin reported much the same in a post titled, "Scientists Find an Abrupt Warm Jog After a Very Long Cooling." Revkin included the following graph from the paper along with a caption explaining what the graph shows:

Revkin's caption: A new Science paper includes this graph of data providing clues to past global temperature. It shows the warming as the last ice age ended (left), a period when temperatures were warmer than today, a cooling starting 5,000 years ago and an abrupt warming in the last 100 years.

Revkin concluded: "the work reveals a fresh, and very long, climate “hockey stick.”" For those unfamiliar, a hockey stick has a shaft and a blade.

Any association with the so-called "hockey stick" is sure to capture interest in the highly politicized context of the climate debate, in which the iconic figure is like catnip to partisans on both sides. Here is Michael Lemonick at Climate Central:

The study... confirms the now famous “hockey stick” graph that Michael Mann published more than a decade ago. That study showed a sharp upward temperature trend over the past century after more than a thousand years of relatively flat temperatures. . .

“What’s striking,” said lead author Shaun Marcott of Oregon State University in an interview, “is that the records we use are completely independent, and produce the same result.”

Here is Grist.org, which refers in the passage below to the same figure shown above:

A study published in Science reconstructs global temperatures further back than ever before — a full 11,300 years. The new analysis finds that the only problem with Mann’s hockey stick was that its handle was about 9,000 years too short. The rate of warming over the last 100 years hasn’t been seen for as far back as the advent of agriculture.

To be clear, the study finds that temperatures in about a fifth of this historical period were higher than they are today. But the key, said lead author Shaun Marcott of Oregon State University, is that temperatures are shooting through the roof faster than we’ve ever seen.

“What we found is that temperatures increased in the last 100 years as much as they had cooled in the last 6,000 or 7,000,” he said. “In other words, the rate of change is much greater than anything we’ve seen in the whole Holocene,” referring to the current geologic time period, which began around 11,500 years ago.

Back to more mainstream outlets, here is how Nature characterized the study, offering a substantially similar but somewhat more technical description of the curve shown in the figure above:

Marcott and his colleagues set about reconstructing global climate trends all the way back to 11,300 years ago, when the Northern Hemisphere was emerging from the most recent ice age. To do so, they collected and analysed data gathered by other teams. The 73 overlapping climate records that they considered included sediment cores drilled from lake bottoms and sea floors around the world, along with a handful of ice cores collected in Antarctica and Greenland.

Each of these chronicles spanned at least 6,500 years, and each included a millennium-long baseline period beginning in the middle of the post-ice-age period at 3550 bc.

For some records, the researchers inferred past temperatures from the ratio of magnesium and calcium ions in the shells of microscopic creatures that had died and dropped to the ocean floor; for others, they measured the lengths of long-chain organic molecules called alkenones that were trapped in the sediments.

After the ice age, they found, global average temperatures rose until they reached a plateau between 7550 and 3550 bc. Then a long-term cooling trend set in, reaching its lowest temperature extreme between ad 1450 and 1850. Since then, temperatures have been increasing at a dramatic clip: from the first decade of the twentieth century to now, global average temperatures rose from near their coldest point since the ice age to nearly their warmest, Marcott and his team report today in Science.

And here is New Scientist, making reference to the exact same graph:

Shaun Marcott of Oregon State University in Corvallis and colleagues have compiled 73 such proxies from around the world, all of which reach back to the end of the last glacial period, 11,300 years ago. During this period, known as the Holocene, the climate has been relatively warm – and civilisation has flourished.

"Most global temperature reconstructions have only spanned the past 2000 years," says Marcott.

Marcott's graph shows temperatures rising slowly after the ice age, until they peaked 9500 years ago. The total rise over that period was about 0.6 °C. They then held steady until around 5500 years ago, when they began slowly falling again until around 1850. The drop was 0.7 °C, roughly reversing the previous rise.

Then, in the late 19th century, the graph shows temperatures shooting up, driven by humanity's greenhouse gas emissions.

The rate of warming in the last 150 years is unlike anything that happened in at least 11,000 years, says Michael Mann of the Pennsylvania State University in University Park, who was not involved in Marcott's study. It was Mann who created the original hockey stick graph (see upper graph here), which showed the change in global temperatures over the last 1000 years.

Over the Holocene, temperatures rose and fell less than 1 °C, and they did so over thousands of years, says Marcott. "It took 8000 years to go from warm to cold." Agriculture, communal life and forms of government all arose during this relatively stable period, he adds. Then in 100 years, global temperatures suddenly shot up again to very close to the previous maximum.

It seems clear that even as various media took different angles on the story and covered it in varying degrees of technical detail, the articles listed above accurately reflected the conclusions reflected in the NSF press release, and specifically the "hockey stick"-like character of the new temperature reconstruction. Unfortunately, all of this is just wrong, as I explain below. (If you'd like to explore media coverage further here is a link to more stories. My colleague Tom Yulsman got punked too.)

The Problem with the NSF Press Release and the Subsequent Reporting

There is a big problem with the media reporting of the new paper. It contains a fundamental error which (apparently) originates in the NSF press release and which was furthered by public comments by scientists.

In a belatedly-posted FAQ to the paper, which appeared on Real Climate earlier today, Marcott et al. make this startling admission:

Q: What do paleotemperature reconstructions show about the temperature of the last 100 years?

A: Our global paleotemperature reconstruction includes a so-called “uptick” in temperatures during the 20^th-century. However, in the paper we make the point that this particular feature is of shorter duration than the inherent smoothing in our statistical averaging procedure, and that it is based on only a few available paleo-reconstructions of the type we used. Thus, the 20^th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.

Got that?

In case you missed it, I repeat:

. . . the 20^th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes . . .

What that means is that this paper actually has nothing to do with a "hockey stick" as it does not have the ability to reproduce 20th century temperatures in a manner that is "statistically robust." The new "hockey stick" is no such thing as Marcott et al. has no blade. (To be absolutely clear, I am not making a point about temperatures of the 20th century, but what can be concluded from the paper about temperatures of the 20th century.)

Yet, you might recall that the NSF press release said something quite different:

What that [temperature reconstruction] history shows, the researchers say, is that during the last 5,000 years, the Earth on average cooled about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit--until the last 100 years, when it warmed about 1.3 degrees F.

So what the paper actually shows is the following, after I have removed from the graph the 20th century period that is "not statistically robust" (this is also the figure that appears at the top of this post):

Surely there is great value in such an analysis of pre-20th century temperatures. And there can be no doubt there will be continuing debates and discussions about the paper's methods and conclusions. But one point that any observer should be able to clearly conclude is that the public representation of the paper was grossly in error. The temperature reconstruction does not allow any conclusions to be made about the period after 1900.

Does the public misrepresentation amount to scientific misconduct? I'm not sure, but it is far too close to that line for comfort. Saying so typically leads to a torrent of angry ad hominem and defensive attacks, and evokes little in the way of actual concern for the integrity of this highly politicized area of science. Looking past the predictable responses, this mess can be fixed in a relatively straightforward manner with everyone's reputation intact.

How to Fix This

Here are the steps that I recommend should be taken:

1) Science should issue a correction to the paper, and specially do the following:

(a) retract and replot all figures in the paper and SI eliminating from the graphs all data/results that fail to meet the paper's criteria for "statistical robustness."
(b) include in the correction the explicit and unambiguous statement offered in the FAQ released today that the analysis is not "statistically robust" post-1900.

2) NSF should issue a correction to its press release, clarifying and correcting the statements of Peter Clark (a co-author, found above) and Candace Major, NSF program manager, who says in the release:

"The last century stands out as the anomaly in this record of global temperature since the end of the last ice age," says Candace Major, program director in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Ocean Sciences.

3) The New York Times (Gillis and Revkin, in particular), Nature and New Scientist as outlets that pride themselves in accurate reporting of science should update their stories with corrections. Grist and Climate Central should consider the same.

[UPDATE: Andy Revkin at DotEarth has updated his posts here and here to reference the "lost blade" from the hockey stick and link to this post. That was quick and easy. Others take note.]

Let me be perfectly clear -- I am accusing no one of scientific misconduct. The errors documented here could have been the product of group dynamics, institutional dysfunction, miscommunication, sloppiness or laziness (do note that misconduct can result absent explicit intent). However, what matters most now is how the relevant parties respond to the identification of a clear misrepresentation of a scientific paper by those who should not make such errors.

That response will say a lot about how this small but visible part of the climate community views the importance of scientific integrity.

Spring Break

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Pielke, Jr.) — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 15:11:00 +0000

Spring break! I'll be back in April . . .

Climate Attribution Alchemy

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Pielke, Jr.) — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 01:56:00 +0000

NOTE: This post has been updated, based on suggestions made by HowardW in the comments, and to correct an error on my part.

In a paper just out in the journal Climate Dynamics Holland and Bruyère (HB13) claim to have found a signal of greenhouse gas emissions on global tropical cyclone behavior. They use data from Weinkle et al. 2012 -- our recent paper on global landfalls -- as part of this argument. They write:

Weinkle et al. (2012) examined the global number of hurricanes that actually make landfall in each of the Saffir–Simpson categories. The proportion of Cat 4–5 at landfall to all landfall hurricanes in their data set has increased with ACCI [Anthropogenic Climate Change Index -- a measure of global temperature increase] at a rate of ~21 % per C (p < 0.01).

Wow! 21% per degree sounds like a lot.

Setting aside issues of data uncertainty for classification of storms, I was skeptical about their finding off of our data because -- as you can see in the graph above from our dataset -- there is not an obvious signal in proportion of global Category 4 and 5 landfalls 1970 to 2010. The presence of any multi-decadal trend in this metric (significant or not) is very sensitive to start and end date. Urged on by a persistent but ultimately helpful commenter on this blog, I can report that I am able to replicate this finding and it is . . . interesting. (Note that the following discussion focuses only on the claims of HB13 related to Weinkle et al. 2012, but that is plenty enough for me.)

HB13 explain of their methodology:

For the global hurricane analysis we choose to focus on the slightly shorter period from 1975 to 2010, as this is a reasonably homogeneous period of global satellite data . . .

[P]revious studies have reported a marked upward trend in intense hurricanes (Webster et al. 2005; Emanuel 2005, 2007; Elsner et al. 2008), one that is closely related to increasing SST (Hoyos et al. 2010). This trend in intense hurricanes is the focus of the remainder of our analysis.

We bin all hurricanes into the five Saffir–Simpson categories and take annual proportions of each relative to the total number of hurricanes. These are smoothed with a 5-year running mean to remove short-term variability. . .

So I followed this procedure and produced the following graph of the smoothed data for the period 1975 to 2010 with trend taken, as described in the paper, and shown in red along with the linear regression equation.

Applying the linear regression shown in the graph above over the 35 years of data, the proportion of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes increases at a rate of 0.33% per year (from the regression equation).

The metric that HB13 report is percentage increase in proportion per degree Celsius global temperature change. Global temperatures have increased by approximately 0.5-0.6 degrees C from the late 1970s to the late 2010s (I do not have the precise values of their ACCI, but this value is consistent with HB13 Figure 2a, 6a and also this dataset).

So the increase (the slope of the regression line) in of Category 4 and 5 tropical cyclones in the Weinkle et al. 2012 dataset (using the trend off of the smoothed data) is 0.0033/(.55/35) or an increase of ~21% per degree Celsius -- exactly what they report. QED.

I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to offer a critique of methods or interpretation of the results. For my part, I do not find the analysis compelling. But it is interesting!

If I Taught a Statistics Course

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Pielke, Jr.) — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 17:20:00 +0000

Today I am guest lecturing in a graduate seminar here on Quantitative Methods of Policy Analysis, being taught by Jason Vogel. The subject of today's class is statistics. In preparing for the class I rounded up a set of books that I have found to be particularly useful and I thought I'd share them here, just in case I ever teach a stats class down the road.

These four books would be at the top of my required reading list:

S. Sigler, 2002. Statistics on the Table: A History of Statistical Concepts and Methods, Harvard University Press.

S. Senn, 2003. Dicing with Death: Chance, Risk and Health, Cambridge University Press.

W. Briggs, 2008. Breaking the Law of Averages: Real Life Probability and Statistics in Plain English, LuLu Marketplace (and here, free!).

M. Mauboussin, 2012. The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing, Harvard University Press.

A few of the cases that we will discuss today will include the NCAA tournament (and Nate Silver's skill), hurricane trends (of course), and a few puzzlers from the books above. It'll be fun. The cases for exploration of statistical questions and methods are infinite of course, and run up against important questions of research design, epistemology and philosophy of science among other topics.

What other books, readings would you recommend?

I Remain "Roughly" 18 Feet Tall

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Pielke, Jr.) — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 06:07:00 +0000

UPDATE: Grinsted engages in the comments, do have a look!

UPDATE2: I see that Grinsted is changing his "rebuttal" in real time and without acknowledgment of the changes (not good blog etiquette;-). So please do note that the post below is a response to the rebuttal as it stood March 19th, which now has evolved. In the latest version, Grinsted grants my major points (great!), so I think this debate has come to a close. Readers are invited to judge for themselves whether the Grinsted et al. surge index should be preferred in any way to existing datasets on US hurricane landfall frequencies and intensities, as a measure of past hurricane incidence.

Aslak Grinsted, the lead author of a new paper in PNAS this week which predicts a hurricane Katrina every other year in the decades to come, has just responded to my earlier critique of their methods. The new paper depends on that earlier work, and I am afraid suffers the same faults. My earlier critique can be found here and Grinsted's response is here. I welcome the exchange. Here I explain why Grinsted's response is off base and repeats the problematic analysis found in the original paper.

In his response to my critique, Grinsted claims to see a marked increase in the number of damaging storms from our normalized loss dataset. This "surprising" discovery apparently supports the conclusion of ever worsening hurricanes, and it has been missed all this time. Grinsted shows the following graph.

Grinsted explains the graph as follows (emphasis added):

I find it interesting to plot the frequency of extreme normalized damage events. I have a chosen to define extreme damage so that so that it corresponds to roughly the same number of events as UScat1-5. Surprisingly there is a strong trend. The same clear trend is not in total normalized damage per year. It clearly shows that the distribution is not stationary.

Once again we see how the notion of "roughly" introduces some problems for the analysis. Let me explain -- precisely.

On the graph (at the top) Grinsted says that he has included the top 205 most damaging events from our dataset for 1900 to 2005 (our paper and dataset can be found here). Our dataset has 217 total events, which includes landfalling storms of tropical storm strength (those which are named storms but at less than hurricane strength) as well as landfalling Category 1 to 5 hurricanes. Grinsted's black curve shows Category 1-5 landfalling hurricanes and the red curve shows what he claims to be "roughly the same number of events as UScat1-5." This claim is wrong.

By using the top 205 damaging events, that means that Grinsted dropped off the bottom 12 least-damaging events. The bottom 12 events include 8 Tropical Storms: Fay (2002), Beryl (1988), Chris (1982), Isidore (1984), Allison (1995), Chris (1988), Dean (1995) and Gustav (2005) plus 4 Category 1 hurricanes: Bonnie (1986), Alex (2004), Florence (1988) and Floyd (1987).

Grinsted missed 50 other storms of less-than-hurricane strength. Put another way, there are only 155 damaging events of Category 1-5 strength from 1900 to 2005, yet Grinsted graphed 205 events. So 205 is "roughly" 155, and I once again am "roughly" 18 feet tall.

Why does this matter?

From 1945 to present there were 57 tropical storms which caused damage. Before 1945 there was just 1. The graph above shows how these storms show up in our dataset over time. Is global warming causing more damaging storms with winds less than 74 mph?

I am sorry to disappoint. The actual reason for the increasing number of damaging tropical storms has to do with the reporting of damages. Typically, such storms have very low damages and simply were included less frequently in the official records of the National Hurricane Center. Today, every storm comes with a damage estimate -- small or large.

The neglect of past tropical storms in the NHC dataset does introduce a very small bias in our results -- from 1900 to 2005 the normalized losses (in 2005 dollars) from all landfalling storms of tropical storm (i.e., less than Category 1) strength are about 2% of the total losses. Of note there were also 8 storms of hurricane strength which made landfall prior to 1940 which had no loss estimates (and thus these also do not appear in our dataset or in Grinsted's graph). Adding in past storms with missing loss estimates would have the effect of making the damage estimates of the distant past as much as several percent higher annually from 1900-1940. That wouldn't change our results in any meaningful way (and works against those laboring to find a trend in our so-far trend-free dataset).

What the small bias will do instead is perhaps confuse someone who looks at our dataset without understanding it, much less someone who treats it "roughly." Obviously this error also confounds Grinsted's efforts to create correlations bewteen our dataset and others.

When you correctly compare the historical record of US hurricane landfalls to our damage record you will find a perfect match (assuming that the 8 hurricanes prior to 1940 with zero damage would cause damage today), as every landfalling Category 1-5 storm since 1940 has a damage estimate. Tellingly, in his rebuttal, Grinsted has committed the exact same type of error that was committed in his original paper -- he has looked at data and seen in it something which it does not hold.

The bottom line here is clear. If you want to look at trends in hurricanes, there is absolutely no need to construct abstract indices as there is actually good data on hurricanes themselves. Look for yourself:

The Advocate's Dilemma

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Pielke, Jr.) — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 15:26:00 +0000

In today's FT John McDermott has lunch with Noam Chomsky. If you don't know who Chomsky is McDermott explains:

Chomsky is arguably the world’s most prominent political activist. To his opponents, he is a crank who sees evil as made in America. To his supporters, he is a brave truth-teller and unrelenting humanist; a latter-day Bertrand Russell. . . Some of Chomsky’s critics have accused him of going easy on the faults of autocrats so long as they are enemies of the US.

Chomsky pushes back on this characterization and in the process points to a fundamental dilemma faced by the advocate - a role distinguished by its focus on reducing the scope of choice available to a decision making, typically to a single preferred outcome.

Chomsky explains the dilemma as follows:

“Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don’t agree with, like bombing.” He argues that any criticisms about, say, Chávez, will invariably get into the mainstream media, whereas those he makes about the US will go unreported. This unfair treatment is the dissident’s lot, according to Chomsky.

What we have here is the old "ends-justify-the-means" challenge. For scientists and other experts this dilemma is particularly acute, because the authority of the expert lies in their claim to integrity and credibility. It is one thing for a political commentator to cherry pick or otherwise make arguments selectively, as their authority does not necessarily rest on the fidelity of their claims. It is quite another thing for an expert to engage in the same sort of sly tactics, because they risk the very basis for the experts' claim to political authority. It may not seem fair, but that is how it is.

Chomsky explains that experts often serve political power rather obediently:

Intellectuals like to think of themselves as iconoclasts, he says. “But you take a look through history and it’s the exact opposite. The respected intellectuals are those who conform and serve power interests."

If you think that political battles are mostly about competing power interests, then you will probably have little concern about experts who decide to enlist their authority in service of advancing those interests. In power politics, the ends, of course, justify the means. However, if you think that the substance of alternative courses of action matter as much or even more than power interests, then you will view politicized expertise as not just of concern, but deeply pathological.

Back in 2005, when I was working on the first edition of The Honest Broker I explained on Prometheus how this dynamic was playing out in the climate debate:

[I]f the climate science community were to simply ignore such misuse of their authority for purposes of advocacy, it raises legitimate questions about the role that climate scientists wish to play in the political debate. Context matters here as many climate scientists have shown little reluctance to speak out in response to certain commentators (compare, e.g., reaction to Michael Crichton). . . Under this scenario, letting misstatements stand while selectively correcting others contributes to the conflation of climate science and climate politics.

These dynamics help to illustrate how an observer of the political debate on climate might come to (or even seek) the conclusion that climate science and politics are one and the same. From this vantage point, climate scientists become issue advocates whether they like it or not. For some climate scientists this outcome may be perfectly acceptable (see earlier reference to Madisonian democracy), but if climate policy needs consideration of new and innovative options (see earlier reference to Schattschneiderian democracy) then the climate community's collective actions may limit its future contributions to the climate debate to simply a tool of marketing for agendas now on the table. For issue advocates this may be a desirable outcome, but the question that I have for scientists is - is this the direction that you really want science to go?

The risk of advocacy within the expert community is not so much the consequences for the individual -- after all experts are people too, and each of us has to decide what role we wish to play. In a democracy advocacy is not just fundamental, but a noble calling. There are of course consequences for the individual expert of deciding to become an overt advocate, but taking such a course of action is not problematic. This is one reason that I have long supported Jim Hansen's overt advocacy on climate change -- more power to him. Same goes for Noam Chomsky - his advocacy is welcomed in policy debates, whether I agree with his politics or not. No one would likely confuse Hansen or Chomsky with an honest broker institution or a reliable arbiter of technical questions.

A risk of advocacy to expertise is when it becomes systemic to the degree that alternative perspectives beyond advocacy are not welcomed or even denigrated -- if you are not with us then you must be with the enemy. When an expert community becomes dominated by advocacy you may find yourself playing power politics in the absence of policy substance. At that point the battles may be intense and symbolic, but they won't mean much in terms of achieving the advocate's policy goals. (Ring any bells?) In other words, it wouldn't be desirable if all of our experts followed the path chosen by Noam Chomsky.

The advocate's dilemma is thus not simply about whether to be an advocate or not -- the dilemma is whether to respect and include independent expertise, or to denigrate or even try to silence it when you find it politically inconvenient. Such a situation becomes problematic when policy debate needs a constant influx of new and creative options for action, which can serve both political and policy objectives, or alternatively, when the credibility of expertise actually matters.

The Bush administration found out that sacrificing credibility and options may help achieve short term political successes, but ultimately saw that strategy fail in the longer run (both in terms of policy success and political credibility see my discussion in The Honest Broker). For advocates (experts or other) who disapprove of independent, uncompliant experts, it is a lesson worth learning.

Thou Shall Not Critique the Australian Climate Commission

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Pielke, Jr.) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:39:00 +0000

UPDATE: John McAneney responds to the Climate Commission press release here.

Today brings another case study in the self-destructive intolerance of the climate movement, and the challenges of expertise in highly politicized debates. Writing at The Conversation, a widely-read commentary site in Australia, Ryan Crompton and John McAneney of Macquarie University provide an update on their database of normalized insured disaster losses for Australia. (Note: I am affiliated with the group headed by McAneney and have collaborated with both.)

The occasion for their update is a recent report by the Australian Climate Commission, a government body put established to advocate for action on climate change. The report -- The Angry Summer -- provides a tabulation of various weather records broken Down Under during the remarkable summer that has just ended. The report makes a number of very strong claims, including this one:

Australia’s Angry Summer shows that climate change is already adversely affecting Australians. The significant impacts of extreme weather on people, property, communities and the environment highlight the serious consequences of failing to adequately address climate change.

As experts on damage to property caused by extreme events Crompton and McAneney subsequently wrote their piece at The Conversation to put one metric of impacts experienced in Australia this past summer into a bit of historical perspective. They explain by explicitly referring to the claim made by the Climate Commission, noting that it was just one of several claims that were made:

The report refers to, amongst other things, how the significant impacts of extreme weather on property highlights the serious consequences of failing to adequately address climate change.

So has property damage during 2012-2013 been higher than normal?

The answer, in terms of insured losses from weather-related disasters, is no.

You can see the losses for 2012/2013 in the figure at the top of this post (note: the data is June-May, so the data for the current year will still need several months for a full year). The data comes from peer-reviewed research that I have discussed occasionally. Crompton and McAneney conclude:

The long-term average annual normalised insured loss from weather-related disasters is around $1.1 billion. To date, insured losses during the 2012-13 financial year from bushfires in Tasmania and Coonabarabran and flooding in Queensland and New South Wales currently total almost $1 billion. This loss is certainly not “angry”.

Lest they be misinterpreted, the authors conclude their piece by emphasizing the importance of responding to climate change and maintaining scientific credibility in that effort:

Climate change is an important concern, and deserves policy attention. However, making supportable scientific claims is important as well. Those who point to increasing disaster losses as a signal of human-caused climate change are doing no favours for those working to address growing losses and accumulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

So far, so normal -- at least as far as the climate debate goes. The urge to associate climate change with property damage is tempting and common, of course, and when such claims are made responsible researchers place them into context by pointing to what the peer-reviewed research actually says. In the annals of the discussions of climate change and property damage, where debates can get intense, Crompton and McAneney are respectful and stick to the science (unlike this jerk).

So it is bizarre that at this point this story goes off the rails.

Upon publication of the piece at The Conversation, the Australian Climate Commission issued a rambling and vicious press release attacking Crompton and McAneney. Apparently, the sin they committed was not in being wrong in their scientific claims, but in daring to offer a critique of the Commission in the first place.

The Commission press release states:

Today in the Conversation Ryan Crompton and John McAneney badly misrepresent the Climate Commission’s recent report, The Angry Summer.

Commissioner Professor Will Steffen has released the following statement responding to the article. He commented that the article is “opportunistic and unbecoming of a research institution”.

Crompton and McAneney assert that, from an insurance loss perspective, this summer was not the worst. They compare the costs of extreme weather events this summer to other extreme weather events and assert that the Commission wrongly used insurance losses in the Angry Summer report.

Badly misrepresent? At no point do Crompton and McAneney ever "assert that the Commission wrongly used insurance losses in the Angry Summer report." Sorry, but this is a bald-faced lie from the Commission. Crompton and McAneney accurately state that the report refers to the "significant impacts of extreme weather on property" during the "angry summer." You can see a tweet below from the Commission which refers uncritically to another recent piece at The Conversation, one that is chock full of scientific inaccuracies. Apparently being completely wrong did not merit a press release, but I digress.

Insurance costs of extreme weather events theconversation.edu.au/climate-change…
— Climate Commission (@ClimateComm) January 21, 2013

The statement by Will Steffen, a scientist speaking for the government in his official capacity on the climate commission, beggars belief -- "opportunistic and unbecoming of a research institution." The comment, which explicitly makes reference to the university as a whole, brings to mind the time that Richard Nixon demanded that all funding for MIT be cut of because he didn't like its politics.

The Commission press release rambles on about how much the Commission actually agrees with Crompton and McAneney, and explains that in the "Angry Summer" report when they said impacts to property they were actually referring to unspecified and unquantified impacts to property other than those related to economic costs. Please. (And really, so what? Regardless of what the Commission really meant, Crompton/McAneney's piece adds valuable context not given by the Commission and should be welcomed.)

The press release says:

Crompton and McAneney correctly note that “making supportable scientific claims is important”. They would be well advised to take their own advice.

The Climate Commission offers not a single criticism of any claim made by Crompton and McAneney.

There is actually nothing more becoming of a research institution than researchers willing to engage the public with the results of their scientific research. In democracies, it is OK to crtiique government -- in fact, governance is improved through such critique. There is nothing more offensive than a government that attacks researchers for the temerity to offer legitimate critique. In the US, we saw how the Bush Administration learned that lesson the hard way. It looks like the Climate Commission hasn't taken note.

Learning from China: Coal and its Nukes

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Pielke, Jr.) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 22:43:00 +0000

Over the past few years I've given the NYT's Justin Gillis a (deserved) hard time for some of his reporting. Today I'm happy to given him some well-earned praise on the occasion of his first monthly column at the NYT Times on climate change. Gillis wisely chose to write his first column on energy innovation, with a focus on nuclear power and China:

We have to supply power and transportation to an eventual population of 10 billion people who deserve decent lives, and we have to do it while limiting the emissions that threaten our collective future.

Yet we have already poured so much carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere that huge, threatening changes to the world’s climate appear to be inevitable. And instead of slowing down, emissions are speeding up as billions of once-destitute people claw their way out of poverty, powered by fossil fuels.

Many environmentalists believe that wind and solar power can be scaled to meet the rising demand, especially if coupled with aggressive efforts to cut waste. But a lot of energy analysts have crunched the numbers and concluded that today’s renewables, important as they are, cannot get us even halfway there.

“We need energy miracles,” Mr. Gates said in a speech three years ago introducing his approach, embodied in a company called TerraPower.

A variety of new technologies might help. Bright young folks in American universities are working on better ways to store electricity, which could solve many of the problems associated with renewable power. Work has even begun on futuristic technologies that might cheaply pull carbon dioxide out of the air.

But because of the pressing need for thousands of large generating stations that emit no carbon dioxide while providing electricity day and night, many technologists keep returning to potential improvements in nuclear power.

The conclusion reached by Gillis is a logical consequence of doing the math on energy and carbon dioxide. Gillis concludes, quite rightly:

In effect, our national policy now is to sit on our hands hoping for energy miracles, without doing much to call them forth.

While we dawdle, maybe the Chinese will develop a nice business selling us thorium reactors based on our old designs.

Of course, "we" are doing a lot more than just siting on our hands -- we are fighting over a largely symbolic piece of pipe going across the Canadian border, we are waging battles over arcana of climate science, we are blaming every disaster on carbon dioxide and we use the climate issue to demonize our opponents (whatever their views). So Gillis is right the that we could be spending our efforts much more productively.

The Chinese are certainly not sitting on their hands. At the Washington Post, Brad Plumer has an excellent post on a new Deutsche Bank report (here in PDF) on China's growing pollution problem. Plumer writes:

Earlier this year, when Beijing was choking on record levels of smog, observers wondered whether China would ever get its pollution problem under control. It’s an insanely difficult question, with huge implications for everything from climate change to the global economy.

So here’s one stab at an answer, in the form of a big recent analysis (pdf) from three Deutsche Bank economists. The bad news: Most of China’s current attempts to curb pollution are failing badly — the country is on pace for ever-higher levels of smog that could throttle the nation’s economy and trigger out-of-control protests.

But there are reasons for optimism here, too: It’s still technically possible for China to get a handle on its smog problem without abandoning economic growth. The country will just have to revamp its energy and transportation policies entirely. Starting… now.

Plumer's analysis is worth reading in full, as is that of Kate Mackenzie at FT Alphaville.I agree with Mackenzie's skepticism about the pace at which China's energy intensity of GDP can be reduced. Nonetheless, the comparison by Deutsche Bank with the experience of the UK over the past 60 years is illustrative. The figure above, from the report, shows the evolution of the UK energy mix from 1948 to 2008, moving from almost total dependence on coal to an energy mix with gas as the leading source of energy.

There are reasons why China is not a good analogue to the UK. For instance, Deutsche Bank projects that China will increase its installed nuclear capacity by 10 times by 2030. That would mean something like 170 new nuclear power plants (China currently has 17). For its part, the Chinese government projects 255 new plants. Either way (I'll take the over, thank you), the rate of build works out to about 1 new plant per month from now until 2030. Sounds fantastic? I thought so too until I learned that China built 11 new nuclear plants in 2011. Apparently not content with its domestic build-out, China is planning to export its nuclear technologies in the near-term. (Perhaps the US Congress will take note as realted to US competitiveness, but I digress.)

China can be thought of as a microcosm of the global economy. As China becomes richer and further sees its energy intensive activities shift offshore, its pollution problems will migrate to the next generation of developing economies, perhaps elsewhere in Asia and eventually in Africa. As I have argued, the energy demands of the future are likely to be massive, and to meet this demand coal (and other dirty energy technologies) are just not going to work -- as the image at the top of this post shows -- despite its dominance in the energy mixes of China and India today.

The bottom line from these excellent reports and analyses should be abundantly clear: Looking to the energy future, one is necessarily either pro-nuclear and pro-gas (fracking) OR one is pro-carbon dioxide and pro-pollution. Which are you?

No Superpowers for the EU Science Adviser

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Pielke, Jr.) — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 15:05:00 +0000

Writing in Science today, Kai Kupferschmidt has an excellent profile of Anne Glover, Europe's chief scientific advisor. The profile follows the typical arc of such discussions -- a longing for power, success in institutionalization, followed by disappointment in the realpolitik of the position. At the top of this post you can see Glover giving a keynote talk last month at the STEPS science policy conference in Sussex, UK.

An anecdote related by Kupferschmidt tells the tale:

[In] a magazine interview in July, Glover argued that eating genetically modified food was no riskier than eating conventionally farmed food—a stance at odds with the beliefs of many Europeans.

She says she wanted to give evidence a voice. “By all means, people can say, for ethical reasons, for philosophical reasons, for economical reasons, for political reasons, I am not keen on that,” she says. “But you cannot 1say it is dangerous, when it isn’t.”

The interview sparked a debate in the European Parliament and an official request by one of its members asking whether the commission agreed with Glover’s stance. The reply was telling. The chief science adviser, the commission wrote in its answer, “has a purely advisory function and no role in defining Commission policies. Therefore, her views do not necessarily represent the views of the Commission.”

Here is what José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission and to whom Glover reports, had to say in full (here as a DOC) about the controversy, from which Kupferschmidt quotes from:

The Commission wishes to use the opportunity to clarify to the Honourable Member the role of the Chief Scientific Adviser (CSA). The CSA reports directly to the President of the Commission and has the task to provide independent expert advice to the President on any aspect of science, technology and innovation and the potential opportunities and threats to the EU stemming from new scientific and technological developments. Likewise, the CSA has a role in enhancing public confidence in science and technology and to promote the European culture of science. In this context, the CSA has a role in stimulating societal debate on new technologies and to communicate the existing scientific evidence about such technologies. The CSA has a purely advisory function and no role in defining Commission policies. Therefore, her views do not necessarily represent the views of the Commission.

The science adviser has a role much like one would expect in the real world of politics. However, the image of the science adviser held by many, including some scientists, remains tied to the mythology of the position based on unrealistic expectations of truth speaking to power.

That mythology shows up in Kupferschmidt's profile as well.

Contrast Glover’s access with that of John Holdren, the latest in a long list of éminence grises tapped to advise U.S. presidents. At the annual meeting of AAAS (Science’s publisher) in Boston last month, Glover says that Holdren told her that he was in and out of Barack Obama’s office up to four times a day in the run-up to important decisions.

Four times a day!? Based on John Holdren's recent talk in Boulder in which he described his role in the Obama Administration, and the history of the position (here in PDF), this claim would seem to be best viewed as a bit of science-adviser-to-science-adviser braggadocio. The science adviser in the US system sits outside the circle of close presidential advisers, not least because the position is congressionally mandated and thus not subject to executive privilege. When important decisions are being made the science adviser is asked to leave the room. No science adviser that we interviewed (going back to JFK) met with the president up to 4 times per day - once a month might be more realistic.

Rather than taking from this a sense of access-envy, Glover should take some confort in knowing that her role as science adviser is actually not so different from that experienced by advisers in the US:

European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, the driving force behind the creation of her position, hasn’t bestowed superpowers on Glover, however. On the contrary, after years of discussions in Brussels, the science adviser’s office became a “casualty” of austerity measures, Glover says. She has no budget of her own and just five staff members—one-half of the size of her team in Scotland.

While there is a big difference between having superpowers and serving as a mid-tier bureaucrat, the key to the success of the science adviser role is to recognize the realities of the position and take full advantage of what is nonetheless a unique role in government.

Graph of the Day: Global Weather Disasters and GDP

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Pielke, Jr.) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 22:01:00 +0000

Data from Munich Re and United Nations. The graph shows a ratio of global weather-related disaster losses to global GDP expressed in 2011 dollars and calculated at market exchange rates. For a peer reviewed analysis which goes into some depth on this subject, see this Munich Re-funded study:

E. Neumayer and F. Barthel. 2011. Normalizing Economic Loss from Natural Disasters: A Global Analysis, Global Environmental Change, 21:13-24 (here in PDF).

They conclude: "there is no evidence so far that climate change has increased the normalized economic loss from natural disasters."