Happy Thanksgiving

All my best for a Happy Thanksgiving to the readers and commenters on this blog! Posting will be light at best during the holiday week (until November 30), but please feel free to comment away (and please forgive any lags in clearing comments).

CRU-Gate: Climate Conspiracy or Much Ado About Nothing?

UPDATE: Real Climate explains that it is in fact much ado about nothing.

So by now everyone is aware of the emails leaked/hacked/TBD from CRU. While the significnace of these emails has yet to be determined, it seems that they are indeed real, based on these comments from Phil Jones of UEA, who is involved in many of the emails. Here is an interview just published by TGIF (PDF):

The internet is on fire this morning with confirmation computers at one of the world’s leading climate research centres were hacked, and the information released on the internet. A 62 megabyte zip file, containing around 160 megabytes of emails, pdfs and other documents, has been confirmed as genuine by the head of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, Dr Phil Jones.

In an exclusive interview with Investigate magazine’s TGIF Edition, Jones confirms his organization has been hacked, and the data flying all over the internet appears to have come from his organisation. “It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails.”

“Have you alerted police?”

“Not yet. We were not aware of what had been taken.”

Jones says he was first tipped off to the security breach by colleagues at the website RealClimate.
“Real Climate were given information, but took it down off their site and told me they would send it across to me. They didn’t do that. I only found out it had been released five minutes ago.” The files were first released from a Russian fileserver site by an anonymous tipster calling him or herself “FOIA”, in an apparent reference to the US Freedom of Information Act. The zip file contains more than a thousand documents sitting in a “FOIA” directory, and it prompted speculation that the information may have been in the process of being compiled for consideration of an information act request.

Jones, however, says the files were not contained in a “FOIA” directory at the Climate Research Unit. “No. Whoever is responsible has done that themselves.” “I’m not sure what we’re going to do. I’ll have to talk to other people here. In fact, we were changing all our passwords overnight and I can’t get to my email, as I’ve just changed my password. I’ve gone into the Climate Audit website because I can’t get into my own email. “It’s completely illegal for somebody to hack into our system.”

While the significance of the emails has yet to be determined, there are some questions already being asked:

In one email dating back to 1999, Jones appears to talk of fudging scientific data on climate change to “hide the decline”:

From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@[snipped], mhughes@[snipped]
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@[snipped],t.osborn@[snipped]

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,

Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow. I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers, Phil
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit

TGIF asked Jones about the controversial email discussing hiding “the decline”, and Jones explained he was not trying to mislead. “No, that’s completely wrong. In the sense that they’re talking about two different things here. They’re talking about the instrumental data which is unaltered – but they’re talking about proxy data going further back in time, a thousand years, and it’s just about how you add on the last few years, because when you get proxy data you sample things like tree rings and ice cores, and they don’t always have the last few years. So one way is to add on the instrumental data for the last few years.”

Jones told TGIF he had no idea what me meant by using the words “hide the decline”. “That was an email from ten years ago. Can you remember the exact context of what you wrote ten years ago?”

The other emails are described by skeptic commentators as “explosive”, one talks of stacking the peer-review process to prevent qualified skeptical scientists from getting their research papers considered.

Surely lots more to come on this.

Meantime, In the Real World

As people wonder if the Copenhagen conference will lead to any significant outcomes, the dramatic expansion of carbon-intensive infrastructure continues with little apparent worry about the effects of climate policies. From a quick tour of news from Asia over the past day or so:

From India:

JSW Steel Ltd., India’s third- biggest producer, may spend $500 million buying coal mines overseas to secure supplies for its local expansion.

The company is seeking mines in nations including Australia and South Africa, Managing Director Sajjan Jindal said in an interview in Mumbai. JSW Steel plans to source half of its coal overseas, he said.

Indian steelmakers are expanding as local demand is expected to grow by about 10 percent in the second half of this financial year. JSW Steel is looking at new locations after failing to find coking coal at its exploration project in Mozambique.

The company plans to raise capacity by more than 33 percent to 10 million metric tons at its Vijayanagar plant in South India by 2011 as demand from customers including Larsen & Toubro Ltd. and GMR Group increases, Jindal said in the interview yesterday. Later, JSW aims to build a mill in West Bengal state with an initial 3 million ton capacity, he said.

And also from India:

Top Indian power-equipment maker Bharat Heavy Electricals (BHEL.BO) said on Wednesday it has signed a joint-venture pact to build a 1,600 megawatt (MW) thermal power plant in the central state of Madhya Pradesh.

The power plant at Khandwa will be equipped with supercritical technology, which helps lower coal consumption and leads to lower emissions.

State utility Madhya Pradesh Power Generation Co Ltd and BHEL will initially have an equal share in the joint venture. Their stakes will later be diluted to 26 percent each, with the rest held by financial institutions and other partners, BHEL said.

BHEL has been promoting joint ventures with state utilities to set up and operate supercritical thermal power plants. It has set up joint ventures with the southern states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.

Earlier this month, leading Indian power producer NTPC (NTPC.BO) said it would set up a 2,640 megawatt (MW) thermal power plant under a pact with the Madhya Pradesh state government and the MP Power Trading Co.

And from Bangladesh:

Bangladesh plans to set up a fund that will invest as much as $10 billion in energy and power projects within the next decade to resolve an electricity shortage, a senior official said.

The 11-month-old government also is seeking to attract about $4 billion of investments in power plants and a liquefied- natural-gas import terminal, and will meet potential investors in London, New York and Singapore in December, said Tawfiq-e-Elahi Chowdhury, 64, energy adviser to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed who also holds the post of energy minister.

“The potential demand for electricity is maybe twice as much as we are producing now,” Chowdhury said in an interview in Dhaka yesterday. “It’s not just trying to meet today’s gap; it’s trying to stay ahead of the curve, which is going to be very difficult.” . .

The fund will invest in the equity and debt of coal, oil and gas companies as well as power projects along with companies, he said. The government is still working on the structure of the fund, including how it will be securitized and whether it will be traded, he said.

From Australia:

The Federal Government has put Waratah Coal’s proposed $7.5 billion ‘China First’ coal project in the fast-lane, yesterday granting it Major Project Facilitation (MPF) status.

According to the company’s chief executive Peter Lynch, MPF status will the give the central Queensland development access to a more a timely and efficient approvals process.

Waratah, owned by billionaire mining magnate Clive Palmer, is planning to build a thermal coal mine near Alpha, in the Galilee Basin.

The lesson from these vignettes? The world needs more energy. Much more. Reducing emissions is the wrong focus, the expansion of carbon free energy is more appropriate. But until the costs of alternatives are lower than fossil fuels then news stories like the above will continue to appear around the clock and around the world.

How Climate Scientists Talk to Each Other on Email

A very prominent climate scientist, who writes from a .gov address, sends this to my father after my father simply responded to a scientific query from another climate scientist who put the .gov guy (his colleague) on the distro list (along with a bunch of others, including me):

Roger,

Please remove me from your email distribution list. I have no desire to communicate with you. Ever.

XXXXXXXXX

That message comes across a bit like sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming "I'M NOT LISTENING I'M NOT LISTENING". Climate science has a few remarkable human beings in it, that is for sure.

Of course, this would be just a bit of silliness, but the unnamed scientist above has a major role in international and national climate science assessments, and is undoubtedly an active peer reviewer. Do you think based on that email he is going to give my father's scientific work a fair shake? And to the extent he is representative of a broader set of individuals, climate science is a deeply troubled institution of science. Makes me glad to be a social scientist.

Condoms for Climate

The climate debate has plenty of signs of complete inanity, but these signs are increasingly coming from groups that should probably know better. Take the case of the UN Population Fund, which is arguing that free condoms can help to slow greenhouse gas emissions:

The battle against global warming could be helped if the world slowed population growth by making free condoms and family planning advice more widely available, the U.N. Population Fund said Wednesday.

The agency did not recommend countries set limits on how many children people should have, but said: "Women with access to reproductive health services ... have lower fertility rates that contribute to slower growth in greenhouse gas emissions."

"As the growth of population, economies and consumption outpaces the Earth's capacity to adjust, climate change could become much more extreme and conceivably catastrophic," the report said.

What effect will free condoms have on emissions and, ultimately, on climate change?

The U.N. Population Fund acknowledged it had no proof of the effect that population control would have on climate change. "The linkages between population and climate change are in most cases complex and indirect," the report said.

It also said that while there is no doubt that "people cause climate change," the developing world has been responsible for a much smaller share of world's greenhouse gas emissions than developed countries.

Still, Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, the U.N. Population Fund's executive director, told a news conference in London on Wednesday that global warming could be catastrophic for people in poor countries, particularly women.

"We have now reached a point where humanity is approaching the brink of disaster," she said.

In three weeks, a global conference will be held in Copenhagen aimed at reaching a deal to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which required 37 industrial countries to cut heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions.

The idea that family planning should be justified in terms of reducing emissions is, in my view, utter nonsense. Family planning policies are important in their own right, and to justify them in terms of climate change cheapens both the climate change agenda and the family planning agenda. Fortunately, this perspective is widely shared:

"It requires a major leap of imagination to believe that free condoms will cool down the climate," said Caroline Boin, a policy analyst at International Policy Network, a London-based think tank.

She also questioned earlier efforts by the agency to control the world's population.

In its 1987 report, the U.N. Population Fund warned that once the global population hit 5 billion, the world "could degenerate into disaster." At the time, the agency said "more vigorous attempts to slow undue population growth" were needed in many countries.

According to Boin, "Numerous environmental indicators show that with development and economic growth we are able to preserve more natural habitats. There is no causal relationship between population density and poverty."

In this month's Bulletin, the World Health Organization's journal, two experts also warned about the dangers of linking fertility to climate change.

"Using the need to reduce climate change as a justification for curbing the fertility of individual women at best provokes controversy and at worst provides a mandate to suppress individual freedoms," wrote WHO's Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum and Manjula Lusti-Narasimhan.

The dynamics going here have been well-chronicled by Mike Hulme, who has suggested that much of the debate about climate change is not really about what we can do about climate change, but what climate change can do for us. Helping to sell family planning is probably not among those things.

UPDATE: A reader writes in noting this from The Economist a few weeks ago:

Lastly, a special case: China’s one-child policy, which began nationwide in the early 1970s. China’s population is probably 300m-400m lower now than it would have been without it. The policy (which is one of population control, not birth control) has had dreadful costs, including widespread female infanticide, a lopsided sex ratio and horrors such as mass sterilisation and forced abortions. But in its own terms, it has worked—20m people enter the workforce each year, instead of 40m—and, to the extent that China is polluting less than it would have done, it has benefited the rest of the world.

People can legitimately disagree on whether the benefits of such policies exceed the costs. However,you can put me down on the side of believing (quite strongly) that they do not.

Good Intentions, Horrible Optics

In today's Boulder Daily Camera:

On their first day together as a new board of nine elected officials, the Boulder City Council started with light stuff: curing the planet's climate crisis and advocating global nuclear disarmament.

The council on Tuesday night unanimously voted to support a two-person delegation heading to Copenhagen, Denmark, next month to attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference of Parties.

How is the city going to pay the costs of sending its delegation to Copenhagen? By using proceeds from the Boulder's carbon tax.

Boulder is paying an estimated $2,500 for the trip, including airfare and meals. The money will come from the city's carbon-tax fund. To cut down on costs to taxpayers, the city employees will be staying at a private residence and riding bicycles to and from the conference, city spokesman Patrick von Keyserling said.

"It's a very reasonable amount," von Keyserling said of the costs to attend. "It's an international stage for Boulder to share best practices for municipalities."

Whatever you think about Boulder's ambitions to reduce emissions, the real lesson from this episode is that policy makers easily fall prey to engaging in all sorts of activities under so-called "emissions reductions policies" that have absolutely nothing to do with reducing emissions. And whatever the merits of going to Copenhagen are, the trip will do nothing to help Boulder meet its Kyoto goals, which is why the carbon tax exists in the first place. If the city values demonstrating its global leadership and vision (and why not?), it should probably earmark some funds for exactly that purpose. A more politically savvy Council would have taken the funds from elsewhere in the City budget, or better yet, secured external sponsorship of some sort.

On a more positive note, a letter-writer in the Camera today notes that since its passage in 1985, Boulder's non-nuclear policy has thus far prevented a nuclear attack on the city, so perhaps Boulder's delegation to Copenhagen can return with similar success.

Top 10 Hurricane Losses: AIR and Pielke et al. 2008

AIR-Worldwide has released an interesting top-10 list of the largest U.S. insured hurricane losses if each historical hurricane had occurred with 2009 exposures. Here are those values:

And here is a similar list of top-10 total damaging storms in the Pielke et al. 2008 (PDF) database as updated to 2009 values in the ICAT Damage Estimator:

There are 8 storms that overlap in the two lists, which we should expect to be different for several reasons. First the AIR-Worldwide list is insured damage and ours is total damage. Second, their list includes business interruption and demand surge and ours does not. This being the case, the AIR-Worldwide list has prompted us to take a second look at the 1947 Fort Lauderdale storm, which has losses that may be underestimated in the NHC database. It appears as 22nd in our 2009 list with an adjusted $16.4B in total losses.

Soon I'll take a look at the AIR-Worldwide earthquake list and see how that compares to our normalized earthquake losses (here in PDF).

Told Ya So

In 2005 I wrote that it was just a matter of time before air capture -- the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere -- was going to move to the center of climate policy debates. Since that time I have been following the issue closely and even doing a bit of research on it (PDF). Today, Nature reports on the final results of a major European research project called Ensembles:

Carbon dioxide emissions will have to be all but eliminated by the end of this century if the world is to avoid a temperature rise of more than 2 ºC, scientists warned yesterday. And it might even be necessary to start sucking greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.

The findings are the culmination of five years work by Ensembles, a major European research consortium led by the UK Met Office Hadley Centre and involving 65 other research institutes worldwide. In the first study of its kind, scientists in the project used a variety of the latest global climate models to determine the reductions needed to stabilize levels of greenhouse gases, termed CO₂ equivalents, at 450 parts per million. That level, which offers a reasonable chance of keeping the temperature rise under 2ºC, is the goal of European climate policy.

The results suggest that to achieve that target, emissions would have to drop to near zero by 2100. One of Ensemble's models predicted that by 2050, it might also be necessary to introduce new techniques that can actually pull CO₂ out of the atmosphere.

Here is what Ken Caldeira says:

The results suggest that simply switching to renewable sources of energy may not be enough to stabilize emissions. "It's clear that if we continue our current emissions trajectory and we want to stay at 450 parts per million, we'll need to pull CO₂ out of the atmosphere," says atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira, who works at the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Global Ecology in Stanford, California. That could mean deploying new techniques for capturing carbon, such as biochar, reforestation or air filtering, on a massive scale.

Caldeira adds that action now could be a better option. If people stop building new CO₂-emitting devices within the next decade, they could achieve the same result at a lower cost.

Any bets on whether or not people will "stop building new CO₂-emitting devices within the next decade"? As I have often said, no one really knows the possibilities of air capture (chemical, biological, geological) and sequestration at scale, and we won't until a greater effort is devoted to it. But whether you like it or not, the slow pace of mitigation policies to meaningfully deflect trajectories from business-as-usual means that air capture is gaining traction as a policy option, and will continue to do so. It is not at the center of debates over climate -- yet -- but it is moving closer.

G20 Humanitarian Priorities

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies asked the governments of the G20 about their top humanitarian priorities (PDF), results shown in the figure above.

As an initial question, the governments were asked: “What does your government consider to be the three greatest ‘humanitarian’ challenges facing the international community?"

The leading priority was "climate change." Poverty and food security did not even make the top 3 on the list. As these are "humanitarian challenges," I wonder how responding to climate change differs from responding to the other issues on the list.

Short Essay on Experts in Policy and Politics

I have a short essay on scientists in policy and politics up at www.publicsector.co.uk titled, Improving the contribution of experts in policy and politics. Here is an excerpt:

In recent weeks we have seen a range of conflicts between scientific experts and governments. In the United Kingdom the dismissal of David Nutt, chair of the UK Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), for making statements perceived to undercut government drug policies has received considerable criticism from the scientific community. In Australia, the government's primary research organization intervened in the peer review process to attempt to stop the publication of an economic analysis critical of emissions trading programs, which the Rudd Government is currently championing. And in the United States the Environmental Protection Agency has sought to limit what two of its experts can say as private citizens about their professional experience when being critical of U.S. climate policies.

What is going on here?

Find the rest here and The Honest Broker here (in the UK) and here (in the US).

Better Recheck That List

My attention has just be called to a list of "450 Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism of "Man-Made" Global Warming." A quick count shows that they have 21 papers on the list by me and/or my father. Assuming that these are Hypothesis 1 type bloggers they'd better change that to 429 papers, as their list doesn't represent what they think it does.

Does this Math Add Up?

Fatih Birol, chief economist for the IEA, was asked about the twin challenges of providing electricity for those without access around the world and the need to reduce emissions.

Climate change and Energy and Poverty are indeed two key challenges the energy world is facing today, and I do believe that a major international concerted effort can deliver a solution with co-benefits for both the issues. Bringing electricity to everyone by 2030 would require electricity generation in 2030 to be only 3% higher than generation in our Reference Scenario. An annual additional investment of $35 billion would be sufficient to meet this challenge. Also impact on energy-related CO2 emissions is disproportionately modest compared with the number of people affected. If the generation fuel mix to supply the additional demand were that of the 450 Scenario, the increase in energy-related global CO2 emissions would be a mere 0.9% by 2030. Alleviating poverty can and must be part of an international effort for fighting Climate Change.

Does this math add up? No. Here are some details:

According to the IEA,

Based on a detailed country-by-country database updated for this Outlook, we estimate that in 2008 the number of people without access to electricity was 1.5 billion or 22% of the world’s population.

The IEA suggests that this number will be cut to 1.3 billion by 2030. The IEA 2030 450 scenario has 26.4 GtCO2 in 2030 (2.4 GtCO2 less than 2007). So 0.9% of this is 0.24 GtCO2. So the IEA is arguing that electricity can be provided to 1.3 billion people by 2030 and it will add only 0.24 GtCO2. Somehow I don't find that to be credible.

By contrast, if each of those 1.3 billion people had average emissions at the 2007 world average of 4.4 tCo2 they would add about 5.72 GtCO2 to the 2030 total, or an increase of 14% over the Reference Scenario.

What this exercise shows is that you can have a lot of fun with Reference Scenarios and Stabilization Scenarios, none of which is too closely connected to the real world. To suggest that access to electricity for 1.3 billion people can be provided at a marginal emission increase of 0.24 GtCO2 is misleading at best, and yet another example of how international assessments serve to dramatically understate the magnitude of the decarbonization challenge.

The Paradox of Apocalypse Fatigue

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger have an interesting article up at Yale360 on public opinion and climate change. Here is an excerpt:

Perhaps we should give the American public a little more credit. They may not know climate science very well, but they are not going to be muscled into accepting apocalyptic visions about our planetary future — or embracing calls to radically transform “our way of life” — just because environmentalists or climate scientists tell them they must. They typically give less credit to expert opinion than do educated elites, and those of us who tend to pay more attention to these questions would do well to remember that expert opinion and indeed, expert consensus, has tended to have a less sterling track record than most of us might like to admit.

At the same time, significant majorities of Americans are still prepared to support reasonable efforts to reduce carbon emissions even if they have their doubts about the science. They may be disinclined to tell pollsters that the science is settled, just as they are not inclined to tell them that evolution is more than a theory. But that doesn’t stop them from supporting the teaching of evolution in their schools. And it will not stop them from supporting policies to reduce carbon emissions — so long as the costs are reasonable and the benefits, both economic and environmental, are well-defined.

And for those wanting to use science as a tool to turn up the alarm, N&S argue that there exists a central paradox:

In fact, the louder and more alarmed climate advocates become in these efforts, the more they polarize the issue, driving away a conservative or moderate for every liberal they recruit to the cause.

These same efforts to increase salience through offering increasingly dire prognosis about the fate of the planet (and humanity) have also probably undermined public confidence in climate science. Rather than galvanizing public demand for difficult and far-reaching action, apocalyptic visions of global warming disaster have led many Americans to question the science. Having been told that climate science demands that we fundamentally change our way of life, many Americans have, not surprisingly, concluded that the problem is not with their lifestyles but with what they’ve been told about the science. And in this they are not entirely wrong, insofar as some prominent climate advocates, in their zeal to promote action, have made representations about the state of climate science that go well beyond any established scientific consensus on the subject, hyping the most dire scenarios and most extreme recent studies, which are often at odds with the consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

I wouldn't be surprised to see reactions to the N&S piece along the lines that the science is alarming and demands that we act now. Given the arguments about the effect of this strategy on public opinion made by N&S, that would be an ironic response indeed. Instead, it is important to recognize what public opinion allows, rather than continually emphasize that which it does not:

What is arguably most remarkable about U.S. public opinion on global warming has been both its stability and its inelasticity in response to new developments, greater scientific understanding of the problem, and greater attention from both the media and politicians. Public opinion about global warming has remained largely unchanged through periods of intensive media attention and periods of neglect, good economic times and bad, the relatively activist Clinton years and the skeptical Bush years. And majorities of Americans have, at least in principle, consistently supported government action to do something about global warming even if they were not entirely sold that the science was settled, suggesting that public understanding and acceptance of climate science may not be a precondition for supporting action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Until this last point is appreciated by advocates, including the most outspoken activist scientists, even efforts made in the best faith to motivate action by arguing politics through science are not just unlikely to work, but have the opposite effect to that intended. That is the paradox of apocalypse fatigue.

Jobs and "Climate Light"

The comments in this Politico story on the climate bill may hint at whats to come, jobs, jobs, jobs and an inevitable focus on "climate light":

An aggressive White House push on jobs and deficit reduction in 2010 may be yet another sign that climate-change legislation will stay on the back burner next year.

“There is a growing chorus in the party that thinks we should be doing more to spur job creation and not necessarily tackle cap and trade right now,” said a moderate Democratic Senate aide.

White House officials told POLITICO on Friday that President Barack Obama plans curb new domestic spending beyond jobs programs and focus on cutting the federal deficit next year.

In the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid has hinted that Democrats plan to take up a job-creation bill, in the wake of the announcement of a 10.2 percent unemployment rate. In the House, some lawmakers are beginning to push a major highway bill for next year to focus on job creation.

None of this is promising for a major climate change bill. . .

Other moderate Democrats have pushed Reid to take up a “climate light” bill that focuses only on energy provisions included in the legislation — leaving the cap-and-trade provisions to be dealt with after the economy recovers.

The Energy and Natural Resources committee passed an energy bill with bipartisan backing in June. Dorgan and other say the vote signaled that a package including renewable fuels mandates, energy-efficiency measures, and increased domestic exploration could attract significant Republican support.

“Good policy is going to be left behind by the insistence that the climate change bill has to be done first or together,” warned Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.).

Obama and Democratic supporters of the bill have repeatedly said that legislation would create millions of new green jobs by providing incentives for businesses to invest in green technologies.

They also note that the Senate bill sponsored by Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) is deficit neutral, largely due to a Senate rule that prohibits major bills from adding $5 billion to the federal deficit in any of the five decades following its enactment.

“There’s just no credible way to turn these deficit-neutral bills into definitively-negative decisions for our country, especially since energy remains a top priority for the Obama administration and for the American people,” said a House Democratic aide close to the bill.

Aides say that legislation currently being drafted by Kerry and Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) will also be deficit neutral and focus on economic growth.

“If environmental policy is not good business policy, you'll never get 60 votes,” said Graham. “So my goal is to try to make sure that we fashion environmental policy that will create millions of new jobs for Americans who are desiring to have new jobs.”

McKitrick on Amplification Ratios

Ross McKitrick has added his two cents on the criticisms raised by Gavin Schmidt at Real Climate, and they show what a tempest in a teapot this all is (bold added):

AMPLIFICATION RATIOS: I was drawn into the dispute between Gavin Schmidt and Klotzbach et al. (see Pielke Sr.) over the latter paper's conclusion that the surface temperature record over land has a warm bias for the purpose of measuring global warming. I was cited in Klotzbach et al. as the source of a claim that the GISS model exhibits amplification over land of about 1.2. I should not have been cited, since all I did was report in an email to John Christy the average trop/surf trend in Gavin Schmidt's own GISS data pertaining to my 2007 surface temperature analysis. The information source, in other words, was Schmidt himself, not me; and in any case I did not provide it as a personal communication for the purpose of a journal article (which I did not know was being written). Phil Klotzbach and his coauthors have issued a correction on this point. In subsequent correspondence with Gavin Schmidt he reported to me that he had corrected an error his original IJOC archive and also that the GISS model classifies land differently than CRU so some of the 440 grid cells are actually over ocean in his model. He supplied me with the GISS landmask. I have recomputed the original results using the corrected data and the GISS landmask. The cosine-weighted amplification ratio over land is about 1.106 and over ocean is 1.602, where 'land' and 'ocean' are according to the GISS landmask applied to the 440 grid cells used in my 2007 paper.

So in the paper we used an amplification of 1.2 based on calculations done earlier this year as described above. Subsequently, Gavin computed a value that was apples to our oranges and arrived at 0.95. Ross McKitrick just now re-computes a value that is more apples-to-apples and arrives at 1.1. We have shown that our conclusions are insensitive to the choice of 1.2 and 0.95 and you can easily conclude that using 1.1 instead won't matter either to the conclusions.

It is virtually certain that Gavin will contest the new number from McKitrick. Does it matter to me which one is judged to be most appropriate? From the standpoint of the analysis of Klotzbach et al., no. This sort of dispute won't be resolved on blogs, but in the peer reviewed literature where it belongs.

In other news, we've been informed by Ben Santer that our paper contains a referencing error (i.e., Santer et al. 2005 is used in the introduction where it should instead be Santer et al. 2000) and a typo (i.e., it reports a "p-test" rather than a "t-test"). We regret these errors, but certainly appreciate the close reading. We hope that the substance of the paper receives similar close attention. Once again, I hope that Gavin submits his critique of our paper's analysis and conclusions to the scientific literature, and if his work improves upon our work leading to better understandings, then good for science.

IMechE Report on UK Climate Policy

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) in the UK has released a hard-hitting report on the state of the UK Climate Change Act. IMechE says:

To decarbonise the nation and achieve the 80% reduction in GHG output by 2050, the UK will need to undertake a monumental task at a scale it has never seen before, reducing carbon output per unit of GDP by over 5% annually until 2050. Between 2001 and 2006, we achieved an average of 1.3% annual reduction, but in more recent years, progress has been far more limited. Globally, while the UK, is one of the better performing nations. France has the most decarbonised economy among the large developed nations – through its move towards nuclear power as the predominant source of electricity generation.

For the UK to be on track to achieve the emission reductions required by the Climate Change Act, it would have to become as carbon efficient as France by about 2015; which magnitudinous challenge would require the equivalent of the UK constructing and putting into service about 30 new nuclear power stations in the next five years, while retiring an equal amount of coal-fired generation!

The report has been picked up by the UK media, which reports the following response from the Government:

"The Institute of Mechanical Engineer's can't do, won't do attitude is sending out a defeatist message ahead of the crucial climate change talks in Copenhagen. The truth is that if we act now we can not only beat climate change but gain from the green benefits that will flow in terms of jobs and investment from going low carbon."

If some of the numbers in the report sound familiar, it is because it relies a good deal on my analysis of UK climate policy:

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 2009. The British Climate Change Act: A Critical Evaluation and Proposed Alternative Approach, Environmental Research Letters, Vol. 4, No. 2.

AIR Responds to My Critique of the ABI Report

Peter Dailey of AIR Worldwide, who led the analysis in the ABI report that I critiqued earlier today, has been kind enough to provide a response to my comments. Here they are in full, and I'll offer some reactions in the comment. But first, here is Peter, who I'd like to thank very much for providing a quick and thoughtful response:

Thanks for your recent blog comments on the ABI study. To avoid confusion, let me clarify a few things for you and your readers.

GDP growth was used as a proxy for increases in the number and value of properties insured, and the period of 10 years was selected to illustrate in a simple way how a relatively small annual growth rates (say from 2.5 to 6%) compound over time. We did not project 35 or 65 years of GDP because over that long of a period, uncertainties attributed to changing exposure concentrations in hazardous areas, changes in building codes and vulnerability, new or updated man-made defenses, and other factors including GDP itself will be significant and cannot be predicted over such an extended period. Also, public adaptation could also change, such as reversing migration patterns which currently trend toward areas of risk. All of these factors, and the interactions amongst them, are largely uncertain.

The report clearly points out that the time element of predicting climate change was removed by instead associating changes in risk to changes in global temperatures. Of course, the natural question arises, “When will these temperature changes occur?” There is an appendix specifically devoted to answering this and other related questions. The time frames associated with a 2°C (4°C) rise are quite wide, and by no means does the report conclude that 35-years (65-years) is the consensus. If we had computed a 35-year or 65-year growth rate based on current changes in GDP, some would have argued that the resulting changes are misleading for many reasons, not the least of which is the reality of the current economic crisis where many GDP rates are negative.

Perhaps it would have been more precise to say:

• Over a 10 year period of 2.5% growth (as an estimate of GDP in the UK), the compounded increase is 28%. The sensitivity of the catastrophe model results to this level of change in insured values for the 4°C scenario is as follows:

– Insured 100-year (1.0% annual probability) Great Britain flood losses would rise by 38%, compared to 30% without GDP growth considered

• Over a 10 year period of 6.0% growth (as an estimate of GDP in China), the compounded increase is 80%. The sensitivity of the catastrophe model results to this level of change in insured values for the 4°C scenario is as follows:

– Insured 100-year (1.0% annual probability) China typhoon losses would rise by 16%, compared to 9% without GDP growth considered

Even here, with all the percentages and probabilities involved, it can be confusing and the main point can be lost in the translation. To be clear, there was no intention to mislead. In fact, I hope you will find that the climate model and catastrophe model results are quite sensible. As you well know, bringing economic conditions into the analysis leads to a great deal of uncertainty. For example, regional growth changes will certainly not follow the UK average. While this study does address several socio-economic factors related to climate change, it will naturally lead to more questions, and to more research, both of which fuel a healthy debate.

One of the key goals of this study was to dig into these complex interactions between climate science and risk management more deeply than in the 2005 study, but trying to predict how all of the moving parts will change over many decades, and moreover how individuals will respond to these changes is beyond its scope. Certainly, I hope you agree that exposure trends which exist today cannot be extrapolated very far into the future just as exposure trends of the early to mid-1900s do not apply today.

We greatly appreciate your comments, and are always looking for ways to better communicate these highly complex but extremely important issues for industry and society.

Hyper-Partisanship, Cartharsis and Non-Skeptical Heretics

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger continue their sequence of excellent analyses of what has gone wrong in the climate debate with a post focused on the hyper-partisan nature of the climate debate. The piece is worth reading in full, but the ending is especially on target:

Democratic partisans, liberals and greens have spent much of the last eight years tearing out our hair about all the ways the hyper-partisan it's-all-a-hoax! Republicans have blocked action on climate. These complaints may have been cathartic, but they have not been productive. We have not had and cannot have any impact on Republicans, and our partisan apocalypse talk and our sacrifice-now agenda are obviously alienating the vast, moderate middle.

The work of holding Republican obstructionists, anti-government extremists, and right-wing conspiracy mongers to task is work for principled conservatives, not liberals. The work of greens and liberals is to challenge the Democratic demagogues, the left-wing bullies, and the Climate McCarthyites who narrow and polarize the debate in ways that make effective policy action all but impossible. If we can hold our own hyper-partisans to account then fair-minded conservatives might do the same. For until the establishment and the grassroots on both left and right learn to say no to Joe Romm and to Glenn Beck, hyper-partisanship is here to stay.

What "left-wing bullies" (like Joe Romm) have done is turn the tactics that they have used on the "hyper-partisan it's-all-a-hoax! Republicans" onto anyone and everyone that they see any disagreement with. This has the metaphorical effect of painting themselves into a very small political corner. Nordhaus and Shellenberger do a nice job of explaining how Romm and his fellow travelers work to establish "the partisan identity of any given thing, whether it be a new technology, policy, or analysis." And guess what? If you try really hard to distinguish yourself from reasonable folks who share most of your views and might appeal to the "vast, moderate middle," you just might succeed!

The strong reaction by hyper-partisans to a New York Times article by Andty Revkin a few years ago exemplifies this behavior. Revkin wrote:

A third stance is now emerging, espoused by many experts who challenge both poles of the debate.

They agree that accumulating carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases probably pose a momentous environmental challenge, but say the appropriate response is more akin to buying fire insurance and installing sprinklers and new wiring in an old, irreplaceable house (the home planet) than to fighting a fire already raging.

“Climate change presents a very real risk,” said Carl Wunsch, a climate and oceans expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It seems worth a very large premium to insure ourselves against the most catastrophic scenarios. Denying the risk seems utterly stupid. Claiming we can calculate the probabilities with any degree of skill seems equally stupid.”

Many in this camp seek a policy of reducing vulnerability to all climate extremes while building public support for a sustained shift to nonpolluting energy sources.

They have made their voices heard in Web logs, news media interviews and at least one statement from a large scientific group, the World Meteorological Organization. In early December, that group posted a statement written by a committee consisting of most of the climatologists assessing whether warming seas have affected hurricanes.

While each degree of warming of tropical oceans is likely to intensify such storms a percentage point or two in the future, they said, there is no firm evidence of a heat-triggered strengthening in storms in recent years. The experts added that the recent increase in the impact of storms was because of more people getting in harm’s way, not stronger storms.

There are enough experts holding such views that Roger A. Pielke Jr., a political scientist and blogger at the University of Colorado, Boulder, came up with a name for them (and himself): “nonskeptical heretics.”

“A lot of people have independently come to the same sort of conclusion,” Dr. Pielke said. “We do have a problem, we do need to act, but what actions are practical and pragmatic?”

This approach was most publicly laid out in an opinion article on the BBC Web site in November by Mike Hulme, the director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research in Britain.

Dr. Hulme said that shrill voices crying doom could paralyze instead of inspire.

“I have found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied their thirst for environmental drama,” he wrote. “I believe climate change is real, must be faced and action taken. But the discourse of catastrophe is in danger of tipping society onto a negative, depressive and reactionary trajectory.”

I have often explained that I am not a big fan of using the term left-middle-right to describe the views of experts as expertise has many more dimensions and nuances than this simple framework. I do not claim that my views are in the "middle" of the extreme right or left, because they are not a matter of splitting the difference or triangulation. I have different views (as I think Ted and Michael would claim as well). They are not in the middle of the left and right, but they are better than those views from the standpoint of political action and policy outcomes. Thus, I do like the language of a "third perspective."

But in terms of describing the views of the public, it is entirely reasonable to say that the U.S. public is comprised mainly by people who are not on the fringe right or extreme left, so "vast, moderate middle" is an entirely fair characterization. The "vast, moderate middle" does not respond so well to hyper-partisan appeals (unless it is to reject them).

Yet, to win the hearts and minds of the American public and most decision makers depends up appealing to this vast, moderate middle. While there is plenty of cartharis involved in serving up red meat for the most ideological, this is almost certainly a strategy doomed to fail if the goal is to appeal to the vast, moderate middle. Efforts to demonize those seeking to appeal to this middle are only going to reinforce the pathologies of the hyper-partisan climate debate, and push that middle further away.

Apples and Oranges in the Latest ABI Report

A few years ago I published a paper that contained an analysis critical of an analysis of the Association of British Insurers (ABI) because the ABI projected future impacts from extreme events under various scenarios of climate change, but it assumed that society would not change. This had the effect of making the effects of climate change look larger, as a proportion of GDP, than they would have if societal factors were considered alongside climate changes.

The ABI had performed a sensitivity test rather than a projection, and this difference was confused by none other than the Stern Review Report. At the time I wrote of Stern's reliance on ABI:

The Stern Review’s methodological error is based on treatment of a sensitivity analysis focused only on the effects of climate change in the context of total GDP as a projection. Thus, rather than telling the reader what losses might be expected in the future, the Stern Review’s results instead indicate the effect that future climate change would have on today’s world GDP. This is misleading because both GDP and societal vulnerability are increasing at a rate that will increase catastrophe losses much faster than the independent effects of climate change.

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 2007. Mistreatment of the economic impacts of extreme events in the Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change, Global Environmental Change, Vol. 17, pp. 302-310.

ABI has released a new report and while it takes a small step in the right direction, it continues to confuse the issue. The report notes that it is conducting a sensitivity analysis, but then does something odd with GDP (p. 39):

The loss estimates presented in Section 3 isolate the effects of climate change by holding all other parameters constant. In examining the potential impact on insurers’ operations in this section, projected 10 year GDP growth is considered alongside an assumption of no growth. The GDP projections are meant to serve as a proxy for combined increases in the number of insured properties resulting from population growth and increases in the total sums insured resulting from increased wealth.

The report's examination of climate change effects are for the 2040s and 2070s. So it is comparing the effects of ~35 and ~65 years of climate change with 10 years worth of change in GDP. If one wants to look at 35 or 65 years worth of climate change, it would make obvious sense to look at 35 or 65 years worth of GDP change. The ABI is thus looking at apples and oranges.

The ABI report states that GDP growth over 10 years leads to a cumulative increase in expected losses of 28% for 2.5% and growth over 10 years and 79% for 6.0% annual growth over ten years. It then uses these 10-year growth figures to compare with 35 and 65 years of climate change:

As an example, a conservative long-run estimate of annual GDP growth for the UK and China (based on annual real growth of 2.5% and 6% respectively) could be adopted as a proxy for increases in the number of insured properties resulting from population growth and increases in the total sums insured resulting from increased wealth.

Assuming a 4°C increase in temperature and ten years of GDP growth at 2.5%, insured 100-year Great Britain flood losses could rise by 38% compared with a possible rise of 30% if GDP growth were not taken into account. Assuming a 4°C increase in temperature and ten years of GDP growth at 6%, insured 100-year China typhoon losses could rise by 16% compared with a possible rise of 9% if GDP growth were not taken into account.

What would happen if they did an actual apples-to-apples comparison of losses based on 35 and 65 years of GDP growth?

The independent effect of societal change on increasing losses from their 2010 values would be as follows:

2045 -- 240% (@ 2.5% annual growth) -- 770% (@ 6.0% annual growth)
2075 -- 500% (@ 2.5% annual growth) -- 4,415% (@6.0% annual growth)

In other words, for 2075 the ratio of the independent effect of societal change on losses to the independent effect of climate change, under the assumptions of the ABI exercise, would be about 17 times larger in the case of the UK and almost 500 times larger in the case of China. This means that the societal influences on future losses overwhelmingly dominates the projected effect on losses due to climate change.

The ABI report is extremely misleading because it compares 10 years worth of societal change to 35 and 65 years worth of climate change.

Is the Senate Climate Bill Hibernating or Dead?

The Wall Street Journal reports some troubling news for supporters of a US cap and trade bill:

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D., Mich.), who is leading an effort by moderate, heartland Democrats to protect manufacturing and agriculture industries, said committees were no longer under any timetables to produce legislation.

Ms. Stabenow said the Agriculture Committee—which has jurisdiction over climate provisions fundamental to containing costs and cutting emissions in the farming and forestry sectors--might not even debate or vote on any provisions for the bill.

"The question is whether or not Agriculture actually marks up something or it gets done on the floor," she said.

Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D., Ark.), who chairs the Agriculture Committee, is facing a tough re-election campaign next year, and handling a highly controversial climate-change bill in her panel may risk alienating voters.

In the face of the hard-fought debate on health-care legislation--not to mention appropriations bills and finance-reform proposals—Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) has dropped his earlier schedules for committees. A Reid aide said he hadn't drafted any new timetable for panel action on climate change.

Even Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.), a climate-bill champion who last week said committees should have climate legislation processed by the end of the year, Tuesday backed off such expectations. "I don't want to create artificial deadlines which get in the way of our being methodical about this," he said.

Instead, Mr. Kerry said he is focused on getting the 60 votes necessary to pass controversial climate legislation -- a higher margin than a simple majority and no mean feat. "The main thing to do here is to build the adequate base of support and consensus," he said.

Response to Gavin Schmidt on Klotzbach et al. 2009

UPDATE 2: For an example of how Gavin uses of his comment threads (and why I see little use commenting there) see my submission and Gavin's edits/response. Gavin's reaction helps to explain why such disputes must take place in the peer reviewed literature rather than on blogs, and I hope that Gavin chooses to follow up with a submission.

UPDATE: A predicted below, Gavin uses the comment thread at Real Climate to raise (red herring) issues that he did not feel the need to address in his main post. My father deals with Gavin's supplementary concerns.

Over at Real Climate, Gavin Schmidt is upset that we did not properly reference the GISS model as a source for a citation in Klotzbach et al. (2009, PDF). He is right to be upset as we failed to make that addition during page proofs. We have submitted a corrigendum as follows:

"A reference in Klotzbach et al. (2009) to McKitrick (pers. corres.) depended upon an analysis of GISS model output placed online by Gavin Schmidt of NASA in early 2009. We regret the oversight."

But Gavin goes too far in his critical comments when he states that we have made an "error" because we did not change aspects of our paper based on informal comments that he provided us in August based on a quick and dirty recalculation he did. For Gavin, not doing what he demands means that we have made an "error" and in typical overheated fashion -- "muddied the peer reviewed literature." His comments are surely going to provoke another round of mud slinging and misinformation about our work, and I rather suspect that this is the point, as in the Real Climate post Gavin encourages his commenters to have a go at us on issues unrelated to his post in the comment thread. Uncool, but not unexpected. Make no mistake, climate science is a contact sport.

We have repeatedly pointed out to Gavin that our results are insensitive to the points that he raises, and we showed this to him based on a recalculation of our analysis using his numbers when he first raised the issue. So were we to have changed our paper it would have said something like:

Informally, Gavin Schmidt raised some interesting points that are worthy of further investigation, however they make no difference to our conclusions. They do however hint at broader problems in reconciling surface and tropospheric tempertures that go well beyond the scope of our paper.

It looks like he completely understands the full insignificance of his comments as he writes at Real Climate that this situation is about "when problems (of whatever seriousness) are pointed out." You can be sure that he put in "of whatever seriousness" because in this instance his complaint is "not very serious." In any case, if Gavin thinks that the issue is important enough, we encourage him to submit something to the peer reviewed literature and explain why this matters. Given that his complaint does not materially affect our results and opens up a Pandora's Box of trouble for the models, I really doubt that he will do so. We also invited him on several occasions to join us in preparing a follow-on paper looking more broadly at the amplification issue, and he declined that invitation. Of course, had he taken us up on our offer (which still stands), he would have not been able to write a misleading post at Real Climate about (ironically, enough) muddying the waters.

Gavin kindly shared an early version blog post in advance of publishing. Below is how the authors of Klotzbach et al. 2009 responded. (Note: In the past Gavin has requested that we do not post his emailed comments, so we have not. He is free to add these emails in the comments if he'd like.) We look forward to further discussing this issue with Gavin in the peer reviewed literature.

Meantime, the bottom line is that regardless of the invective that might be found over in the Real Climate comment thread and among those who are inevitably going to (mis)citing that post, Gavin's comments do absolutely noting to impeach the conclusions of Klotzbach et al. (2009).

Here is the reply we sent earlier today:

Dear Gavin-

Thanks for sending the draft blog post. Below we identify several errors and omissions in it, and we ask you to correct these before publishing to avoid misrepresenting our paper and its conclusions.

But first, let us apologize for failing to add the reference to the supplementary information from Schmidt (2009) as the source of Ross McKitrick's calculations. This referencing oversight was simply overlooked at the proof stage, so thanks for calling it to our attention. We will submit a Corrigendum to JGR-A to rectify this. We also note that you replaced the data McKitrick relied on in our pers. corres. citation with a new dataset on 16 August 2009, which means that the data relied on by McKitrick were replaced on the very same day that you were raising these comments with us. Now that the original data has been removed, that certainly muddies the waters a bit as far as correctly citing the information.

There are also some factual issues with your blog post.

First, you strongly suggest that our paper has "fundamental flaws" but never say what these are. It is misleading at best to intimate that there are "fundamental flaws" when the issues you raise are irrelevant to the analysis in the paper. We'd ask that you specifically identify what you see as "fundamental flaws" if you choose to use such language. Otherwise your post is highly misleading.

Second, we published an exchange with you online in which we showed that our results were insensitive to the amplification provided by McKitrick versus those that you provided. Given that there was no implication to our conclusions, the issue that you raise, while certainly worth further investigation across models, is not central to our paper. At a minimum your blog post should clearly state that we have shown that our statistical results and conclusions are not influenced by this issue, and to be fair you should link to and present our demonstration of this, which you allude to but do not share in the post.

When you write, "a key assumption for this study rest solely on a personal communication from an economics professor" you are simply incorrect. The assumption, as we have shown to you, is not "key." Again, the issue that you raise is tangential to the paper and does not affect its conclusions.

As we understand the information provided to us by McKitrick, he calculated the model ratio based on model grids for which there were also observed data (so he could do an apples to apples comparison with observations and models). We suspect that you are using all land grids from the model. Thus, when we used observations for the surface temperature, we were being more consistent by using the subset of grids Ross developed as compared to those that you presented. At the same time, clearly our paper was not meant to be the final word on model amplification (nor of course was your note to us), since we show only a single illustrative result, and given the wide range of amplifications across the various models this is certainly a subject worth further study. But again, it is not directly relevant to our analysis.

Third, you are incorrect when you write that the choice of amplification factor "leaves one of the key hypotheses of the Klotzbach paper somewhat devoid of empirical support." Again, as we have shown, the conclusions of the paper are robust to choice of amplification factor. We would agree that a closer look at amplification factors over land and ocean as compared with the observational record is worthy of attention, which is why we invited you to co-author a follow-up piece to more fully explore this topic, and to which you declined to participate. The information that you provide suggests that there are even deeper problems in reconciling models with observations, but that subject goes well beyond the scope of our paper. But let’s be very clear, our results are not affected by the issues that you raise.

In sum, we are sorry to have overlooked the reference to the NASA GISS model as the primary source of a personal correspondence reference in the paper, and understand why you might feel aggrieved by this. We will submit a corrigendum JGR-A to present the acknowledgment more fully. We apologize. At the same time we do find it odd that you removed the data that McKitrick relied on from the GISS website and replaced it on the same day that you provided comments to us in August.

Finally, even though we understand why you may be upset about the reference, we see this unfortunate oversight on our part as providing no justification for you to mislead people about our paper or its findings, and we'd respectfully ask that you present information correctly and fully. If you feel that you have substantial scientific disagreements with our paper, we would encourage you to either take up our offer of collaboration on a subsequent piece, or to pursue this through the peer-reviewed literature on your own. As you have correctly emphasized in the past, blog commentary is not a substitute for the peer reviewed literature.

Sincerely,

Phil, John, Dick, Roger and Roger

Alternative Hypotheses About Climate Change, Part 2

In Part 1 I laid out the three hypotheses as presented by 19 distinguished Fellows of the AGU an article in EOS (PDF, AGU membership required). In this post I present their selection, and some of their justification and discussion of implications. First they chose Hypothesis 2a:

Hypothesis 2a: Although the natural causes of climate variations and changes are undoubtedly important, the human influences are significant and involve a diverse range of first- order climate forcings, including, but not limited to, the human input of carbon dioxide (CO2). Most, if not all, of these human influences on regional and global climate will continue to be of concern during the coming decades.

Why did they pick this one over the others?

Hypotheses 2a and 2b are two different oppositional views to hypothesis 1. Hypotheses 2a and 2b both agree that human impacts on climate variations and changes are significant. They differ, however, with respect to which human climate forcings are important. Because hypothesis 1 is not well supported, our scientific view is that human impacts do play a significant role within the climate system. Further, we suggest that the evidence in the peer- reviewed literature (e.g., as summarized by National Research Council (NRC) [2005]) is predominantly in support of hypothesis 2a, in that a diverse range of first- order human climate forcings have been identified.

What are these other climate forcings?

In addition to greenhouse gas emissions, other first- order human climate forcings are important to understanding the future behavior of Earth’s climate. These forcings are spatially heterogeneous and include the effect of aerosols on clouds and associated precipitation [e.g., Rosenfeld et al., 2008], the influence of aerosol deposition (e.g., black carbon (soot) [Flanner et al. 2007] and reactive nitrogen [Galloway et al., 2004]), and the role of changes in land use/land cover [e.g., Takata et al., 2009]. Among their effects is their role in altering atmospheric and ocean circulation features away from what they would be in the natural climate system [NRC, 2005]. As with CO2, the lengths of time that they affect the climate are estimated to be on multidecadal time scales and longer.

Why does it matter?

Because hypothesis 2a is the one best supported by the evidence, policies focused on controlling the emissions of greenhouse gases must necessarily be supported by complementary policies focused on other first- order climate forcings. The issues that society faces related to these other forcings include the increasing demands of the human population, urbanization, changes in the natural landscape and land management, long- term weather variability and change, animal and insect dynamics, industrial and vehicular emissions, and so forth. All of these issues interact with and feed back upon each other. The impact on water quality and water quantity, for example, is a critically important societal concern. The water cycle is among the most significant components of the climate system and involves, for example, cloud radiation, ice albedo, and land use feedbacks [NRC, 2003]. Regional and local variations in water availability, water quality, and hydrologic extremes (floods and droughts) affect humans most directly.

If communities are to become more resilient to the entire spectrum of possible environmental and social variability and change [Vörösmarty et al., 2000], scientists must properly assess the vulnerabilities and risks associated with the choices made by modern society and anticipate the demands for resources several decades into the future. Moreover, since the climate, as a complex nonlinear system, is subject to abrupt changes and driven by competing positive and negative feedbacks with largely unknown thresholds [Rial et al., 2004], scientists’ ability to make skillful multidecadal climate predictions becomes much more complicated, if not impractical.

Surely the IPCC is on top of this? The authors suggest not:

The evidence predominantly suggests that humans are significantly altering the global environment, and thus climate, in a variety of diverse ways beyond the effects of human emissions of greenhouse gases, including CO2. Unfortunately, the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment did not sufficiently acknowledge the importance of these other human climate forcings in altering regional and global climate and their effects on predictability at the regional scale. It also placed too much emphasis on average global forcing from a limited set of human climate forcings. Further, it devised a mitigation strategy based on global model predictions. For example, although aerosols were considered as a global average forcing, their local effects were neglected (e.g., biomass burning, dust from land use/land cover management and change, soot from inefficient combustion).

Because global climate models do not accurately simulate (or even include) several of these other first- order human climate forcings, policy makers must be made aware of the inability of the current generation of models to accurately forecast regional climate risks to resources on multidecadal time scales. For example, how the water cycle responds to the diversity of climate forcings at the regional level will be important information to policy makers seeking to mitigate risks to water resources.

We recommend that the next assessment phase of the IPCC (and other such assessments) broaden its perspective to include all of the human climate forcings. It should also adopt a complementary and precautionary resource- based assessment of the vulnerability of critical resources (those affecting water, food, energy, and human and ecosystem health) to environmental variability and change of all types. This should include, but not be limited to, the effects due to all of the natural and human causedclimate variations and changes.

Correspondence in Nature

I have a short Correspondence in Nature out today on China's and India's claimed business-as-usual rates of decarbonization. For non-subscribers here is the text:

Decarbonization figures for India and China unconvincing

SIR — In their Opinion articles, Rajendra Pachauri (Nature 461, 1054; 2009) and Jiahua Pan (Nature 461, 1055; 2009) include figures that show business-as-usual perspectives on India’s and China’s emissions growth in coming decades. Both figures indicate that the two countries’economies have already made the transition to high rates of decarbonization. This would put them in a very strong position in international climate negotiations, but I find the figures unconvincing.

India’s five business-as-usual projections include different assumptions of annual rates of decarbonization, from 1.0% up to 3.3%. Four of these greatly exceed the 1987–2006 average of 1.1%. The single business-as-usual projection for China suggests an annual rate of decarbonization of 6.5% per year to 2030, which is almost three times the 1987–2006 average. China’s emissions grew by 12.2% per year from 2000 to 2007, and under business-as-usual are now expected to grow by only 2.5% per year to 2030.

If India and China have indeed already implemented policies that will decarbonize their economies by 3% per year and more, then it would be very good news indeed, as global rates of about 5% (or more) per year would be necessary to achieve an 80% emissions reduction below 1990 levels by 2050, assuming modest economic growth. But if India and China are overoptimistic about future rates of business-as-usual decarbonization, then the challenge of stabilizing concentrations of carbon dioxide will be much greater.

Either way, projections of business-as-usual decarbonization from any country that are at rates three times higher than recent historical averages should be greeted with appropriate scepticism.

Roger A. Pielke Jr.
Center for Science and Technology Policy Research
UCB 488 University of Colorado
Boulder, Colorado 80309-0488, USA
e-mail: pielke@colorado.edu

Wolfgang Knorr on Uncomfortable Research

At the University of Bristol, Wolfgang Knorr has a new paper out in GRL that finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has increased lockstep not changed with increasing emissions, suggesting that the Earth system may have a greater capacity to take up carbon than previously thought. However, this post is not about the details of the study or its significance, which are important, but rather Professor Knorr's admirable response when pressed about whether his research gives support to the "deniers."

On radio 106.5 in Bristol Knoor was interviewed by Marin Jones who repeatedly asked about whether Knorr was concerned that his research would help the cause of the "deniers." Here is Jones' second effort to elicit a response, which I transcribed from the audio stream:

Is there any sense of trepidation at putting out research like this? People who do want to deny the reality of climate change and the reality that it is caused by human beings can jump on this as an excuse and use it to suggest doing nothing or very little.

Knorr's response is responsible and measured:

We have had a lot of research that could be interpreted that way. I believe science has to be open and fair and we should not hide any of the results. Climate critics will always find something, no matter what the results are. It's not an indication not to do anything and you can always misinterpret results. But I think that kind of misinformation dies out quickly, I don't see a problem.

Kudos to Professor Knorr.