Remember the "War on Science"?

During the Bush Administration, a lot was made about how Republicans were waging a "war on science." The Bush Administration was particularly ham-handed and certainly tried to use (and abuse) science in support of its political agenda. There is no dispute about this. For many years I have disputed the notion that such actions were simply characteristic of Republican leadership which might be addressed at the ballot box, returning science to its proper place, rather than via more systemic policy reform. With the election of Barack Obama and a significant Democratic majority in Congress we can test this hypothesis.

Today's Los Angeles Times provides some evidence that the Obama Administration is itself ham-handed and trying to use (and abuse) science in support of its political agenda:

When he ran for president, Barack Obama attacked the George W. Bush administration for putting political concerns ahead of science on such issues as climate change and public health. And during his first weeks in the White House, President Obama ordered his advisors to develop rules to "guarantee scientific integrity throughout the executive branch."

Many government scientists hailed the president's pronouncement. But a year and a half later, no such rules have been issued. Now scientists charge that the Obama administration is not doing enough to reverse a culture that they contend allowed officials to interfere with their work and limit their ability to speak out.

"We are getting complaints from government scientists now at the same rate we were during the Bush administration," said Jeffrey Ruch, an activist lawyer who heads an organization representing scientific whistle-blowers.

What are some of the complaints being levied against the Administration?

[I]nterviews with several scientists — most of whom requested anonymity because they feared retaliation in their jobs — as well as reviews of e-mails provided by Ruch and others show a wide range of complaints during the Obama presidency:

In Florida, water-quality experts reported government interference with efforts to assess damage to the Everglades stemming from development projects.

In the Pacific Northwest, federal scientists said they were pressured to minimize the effects they had documented of dams on struggling salmon populations.

In several Western states, biologists reported being pushed to ignore the effects of overgrazing on federal land.

In Alaska, some oil and gas exploration decisions given preliminary approval under Bush moved forward under Obama, critics said, despite previously presented evidence of environmental harm.

The most immediate case of politics allegedly trumping science, some government and outside environmental experts said, was the decision to fight the gulf oil spill with huge quantities of potentially toxic chemical dispersants despite advice to examine the dangers more thoroughly.

And the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Washington-based organization, said it had received complaints from scientists in key agencies about the difficulty of speaking out publicly.

"Many of the frustrations scientists had with the last administration continue currently," said Francesca Grifo, the organization's director of scientific integrity.

For example, Grifo said, one biologist with a federal agency in Maryland complained that his study of public health data was purposefully disregarded by a manager who is not a scientist. The biologist, Grifo said, feared expressing his concerns inside and outside the agency.

Most of the examples provided by Ruch, Grifo and others come from scientists who insist on anonymity, making it difficult for agencies to respond specifically to the complaints. Officials at those agencies maintain that scientists are allowed and encouraged to speak out if they believe a policy is at odds with their findings.

Of course, during the previous presidency if you supported the policies of the Bush Administration, you might have found it easy to look away from issues of scientific integrity. Similarly, if you support the policies of the Obama Administration you might choose to remain silent about the continuing issues of scientific integrity. This sort of selective concern exacerbates the pathological politicization of science. Distinguishing partisan politics from issues of scientific integrity is important, but unfortunately, difficult to do.

The Emerging Climate Technology Consensus

[NOTE: The Q&A below is cross-posted from The Breakthrough Blog and is by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, of The Breakthrough Institute, where I am a Senior Fellow, and proudly so - RP.]

The Emerging Climate Technology Consensus
by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger

The twenty-year effort to create a single global pollution framework to reduce carbon emissions is in a state of collapse. Europe's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) has not reduced emissions and is quickly fading as the central effort to decarbonize European economies. The UN process is becoming a forum for nations to compare and coordinate national policies and measures, not create or enforce a binding global treaty. And it is now clear that, if energy legislation passes the U.S. Senate, it will not create an economy-wide cap-and-trade system, nor will it increase the deployment of clean energy.

Meanwhile, a new climate policy consensus is emerging, one which prioritizes direct investment in technology innovation. This consensus begins with the recognition that the root cause of the failure of the pollution paradigm was the technology and price gap between fossil fuels and their alternatives. No nation -- not even the wealthiest in Europe -- is willing to price carbon enough to cover the difference. Until the technology gap is closed, little will be done to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy.

Think tanks on the left, center, and right -- from Brookings to Third Way to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) to the Breakthrough Institute -- have put out a growing number of policy proposals and analyses reinforcing the need for direct investments to overcome the technology gap and make low-carbon power (renewables and nuclear, alike) much cheaper. In Britain, this technology-centered approach to climate has been championed by leading thinkers from Oxford's Steve Rayner, LSE's Gwyn Prins, East Anglia's Mike Hulme, (independently and in the recent Hartwell Paper, which we co-authored), as well as by think tanks such as the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) on the left and Policy Exchange on the right. And recently, Bill Gates and executives from Xerox, General Electric, and other high-tech firms have begun to publicly and privately lobby President Obama and Congress for a tripling or more of U.S. energy R&D funding.

Even so, many continue to misunderstand the reasons for a technology-centered climate policy framework, and how it would work. Some, such as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, continue to imagine that carbon pricing will result in radical technological innovation, badly garbling the history of the digital revolution, which depended on direct government investment in things like R&D and military procurement -- not an analogue tax, or a cap on typewriters.

Others, led by America's leading environmental groups, staffed by pollution regulation attorneys experienced in dealing with technologically simpler problems like the ozone hole and acid rain, claim such an approach lacks the certainty of prominent cap and trade proposals which, ironically, would allow emissions to rise at business-as-usual rates as long as offsets are purchased. And a mix of environmentalists and libertarians, typified by Alex Evans of the UK Global Dashboard on the left and Robert Michaels of the Master Resource blog on the right, imagine this technology framework to be simply more subsidies for existing clean energy technologies. In fact, the goal of a climate energy technology framework must be to make clean energy cheaper in unsubsidized terms -- a radically different strategy than today's energy-subsidy or carbon-pricing frameworks.

Over the past three years we have written long and short articles laying out our views on these questions in Foreign Policy, the Harvard Law and Policy Review, the Democracy Journal, The New Republic, Slate, the American Prospect, and in a series of white papers on our web site. Others have made excellent contributions to creating the framework, and we would point to reports and analyses by Brookings, Third Way, ITIF, and IPPR.

Recognizing that this is a lot of material, and that some important new questions are being raised about a technology-centered program to reduce emissions, we offer here a set of questions -- including, we hope, hard ones -- about our proposal. We do so in the spirit of mutual understanding so that we can achieve genuine disagreement and agreement where it exists. Comments, criticisms, and further questions are welcome.

Why propose a new climate policy framework when we are starting to make progress with the Kyoto process of national emissions reductions targets and timetables?

Simply put, because we are not making progress. Promises to reduce emissions are not the same as actually reducing emissions. Buying carbon offsets, most of which do not represent real reductions in emissions, simply avoids the hard work of technological innovation and transformation.

Two decades of commitments, legally binding and otherwise, from nations around the world have had no discernable impact upon the trajectory of emissions or the pace of innovation. Among nations that ratified the Kyoto Protocol and made binding commitments to reduce emissions, there has been little evidence that such commitments have impacted national emissions levels. Emissions have gone up in some nations and down in others, but in almost every case, those trends have been predominately, if not wholly, driven by factors that have been almost entirely exogenous to the Kyoto commitments that those nations made.

But haven't emissions gone down in Europe?

There is little evidence that either the EU's Kyoto commitments or policies put in place to comply with those commitments, have had any impact upon emissions. Virtually all of the emissions reductions touted by EU leaders are the result of having negotiated emissions targets based upon a 1990 benchmark. As a result of the collapse of Eastern bloc economies in the early 1990's, virtually all of the EU's new members are substantially below their Kyoto emissions targets (including those of reunified Germany).

For different reasons, UK emissions declined substantially in the early 1990's, before Kyoto was negotiated but after the 1990 emissions baseline that became the basis for the Accord. Excepting Britain and Germany, the remaining western European members of the EU saw their emissions rise 12 percent between 1990 and 2005. In the years since, EU emissions have risen and fallen with the region's economic fortunes, recording precipitous declines since the onset of the financial crisis in 2008. But those trends are consistent with similar declines in the United States and other developed economies that have not implemented (supposedly binding) caps. (See: "Scrap Kyoto")

But without legally binding emissions caps, how can we be certain that we will achieve the reductions in emissions that climate scientists say we must achieve to stabilize the climate?

In fact, supposed emissions caps offer no such certainty. Every nation that has enacted carbon caps has also enacted a variety of mechanisms, overt and covert, to control the costs of complying with emissions reduction mandates. These have included over-allocating emissions allowances, "borrowing" allowances from future compliance periods, exempting critical industries from emissions reduction requirements, allowing for the purchase of "hot air" from former Eastern bloc nations whose emissions declined sharply after the collapse of the former Soviet Union, and the purchase of carbon offsets from developing economies in lieu of actual emissions reductions.

Given this reality, cost containment measures such as those in wide use throughout Europe and proposed in current U.S. climate legislation functionally abrogate carbon caps. To date, carbon caps have had little impact on emissions because no nation that has implemented them has been willing to allow compliance costs to rise to levels that might compel the achievement of the reductions mandated by the caps.

Doesn't this just mean that we need to push harder for stricter caps and work to close loopholes in the future?

The loopholes and cost-containment mechanisms that have rendered carbon caps ineffective are not accidental nor are they the result of poor policy design. They reflect the underlying dynamics of every political economy in the world. Governments introduce loopholes to their carbon regulatory policies to keep the cost of compliance low. Most policymakers around the world are happy to promote carbon caps and climate policy so long as the costs are minimal or delayed to someone else's watch. But the unwillingness of policymakers to impose real costs in the present is reason to be skeptical that the present loopholes that have rendered carbon caps completely ineffectual are likely to be closed anytime soon nor that long term emissions reduction targets or commitments offered by policymakers today are likely to be meaningfully binding upon future policymakers. Until clean energy becomes much cheaper, such commitments will continue to be pyrrhic.

Why is it so expensive to transition to clean energy if we have, as Al Gore and many others have said, all the technology we need to reduce our emissions?

The issue is not so much that we don't have low carbon technologies that could replace fossil fuels, it is that we don't have low carbon technologies that can do so cost effectively. Solar panels still suffer from low conversions of sunlight to electricity and high installation costs. Wind and solar thermal require enormous amounts of land to generate large amounts of electricity, often require transmission across vast distances, and require additional storage costs if they are to reliably provide power for more than a few hours a day. Next generation biofuels, still in the demonstration phase, are roughly twice as expensive as gasoline. Nuclear power is energy dense and dispatchable all day-long, but remains unpopular and very capital intensive, making the cost of new plant construction high.

The result is that low carbon energy, when all is said and done, costs two to five times more than coal, the dominant source of power generation in the global economy. While mature low carbon energy technologies such as wind and nuclear can be cost competitive in certain very limited contexts, where fossil fuels are scarce and expensive and conditions are optimal for the alternative, such circumstances represent the exception, not the rule. They cannot be applied broadly to the global climate challenge.

Isn't there vast potential to reduce emissions cheaply through energy efficiency?

The emissions reduction potential of energy efficiency programs has been vastly overhyped. Emissions reduction scenarios that rely heavily upon low cost efficiency improvements to accomplish substantial emissions reductions in the next several decades, including those of the IPCC and IEA, double-count reductions resulting from improved energy efficiency, assuming robust rates of energy intensity declines in baseline emissions scenarios and then further assuming deep reductions from a wide range of energy efficiency measures in policy scenarios without specifying what specific measures are responsible for the assumed energy intensity declines in the baseline scenarios. As such, much, if not all energy intensity decline resulting from energy efficiency measures in the policy scenarios are almost certainly already assumed in the baseline scenarios upon which the policy scenarios are built. The result is that such estimates significantly understate the scale of the emissions reduction challenge and overstate the potential of energy efficiency measures to meet it. (See Pielke, et al., "Dangerous Assumptions")

But didn't programs like the CFC phase out and the sulphur dioxide cap result in companies finding a range of ways to cheaply comply with those mandates?

On the contrary, it was the availability of low-cost alternatives that made those policies successful. Efforts to negotiate a global agreement to phase out CFC's failed repeatedly until DuPont developed a low cost chemical substitute that did not deplete the ozone. Agreement on a global accord was quickly concluded once a cheap, widely available alternative became available. Similarly, the completion of rail lines that could transport large quantities of low sulfur coal from the western United States to coal plants in the East paved the way for the acid rain amendments to the Clean Air Act in 1990. Low sulfur coal, along with cheap scrubbing technologies developed in the 1970's and 80's, not the federal emissions trading program as is commonly claimed, are what allowed American firms to cost-effectively comply with the SO2 restrictions imposed in 1990.

The lessons from these experiences are not that regulatory measures will not ultimately be necessary to deal with climate change. It is rather that the success of such measures depends upon the availability of cheap and widely available technologies to either mitigate emissions associated with carbon based fuels or replace those energy sources entirely. Efforts to establish regulatory policies as the first, primary, and central step in the effort to address global warming put the pollution regulatory "cart" before the energy technology "horse." The result has been serial political and policy failure for 20 years.

Once we set a price for carbon, won't private firms have an incentive to invest in technology innovation to make clean energy technologies cheap?

There is little evidence that pricing carbon will drive the kind of energy technology revolution that will be necessary to achieve substantial reductions of global carbon emissions. Carbon pricing proponents often note that economies, such as Denmark and Japan, that have high energy prices and high gas or carbon taxes have lower carbon intensity than the United States. But those economies, in virtually every case, had lower carbon intensity prior to the imposition of high carbon and gas taxes. There is no evidence that the imposition of carbon taxes or gas taxes resulted in substantial shifts in economic behavior or technology innovation.

But hasn't Europe's carbon price had an impact?

Carbon prices in the European Union have at times reached as high as $40/ton but have had little discernible impact upon both the trajectory of European emissions and the dispatch of capital for new energy technologies. Indeed, at the same time that European carbon prices were soaring towards $40/ton, European regulators were approving the construction of 50 new coal fired power plants across the continent. (See New York Times)

Are you denying that Europeans drive smaller cars because of higher fuel prices?

There is some evidence that higher energy prices drive modest conservation through both behavior changes and more efficient use of energy. But the situations in which this has been the case have typically involved dramatic spikes in energy prices -- such as those that occurred after the Arab oil embargo -- that dwarf the magnitude of proposed carbon pricing.

The run up in gasoline prices in the United States between 2005 and 2008 was equivalent to the imposition of a $400 per ton carbon price -- twenty times higher than the maximum allowable price in climate legislation currently proposed in the U.S. Senate and ten times higher than the maximum price achieved by the EU ETS since its inception. Yet the impact of a $400 per ton carbon price equivalent increase in gasoline prices in the United States was minimal, resulting in a very modest decline in vehicle miles traveled and a similarly modest shift in consumer preferences towards smaller, higher gas mileage cars.

But isn't that just because the higher prices were not long-term?

No. Denmark has had a carbon tax in place since the early 1990's. Danes drive small, fuel efficient cars today -- just as they did prior to the imposition of the carbon tax. They are not, however, driving electric cars. At the same time, Denmark has significantly shifted its power sector to renewables, primarily wind. But the primary driver of that shift has been direct government subsidies for wind powered energy that dwarf the carbon tax in the magnitude of the incentive to deploy wind energy.

But don't the economic models show carbon pricing resulting in technology innovation?

Combined climate and economic models don't actually demonstrate that carbon pricing will lead to dramatic energy innovation. Rather they simply assume both robust technological innovation and the existence of a generic "backstop technology" - which will become available at a predetermined carbon price in unlimited quantities - and then purport to demonstrate that emissions are reduced dramatically in response to the carbon price signal. In fact, virtually all economic modeling of the costs associated with reduced carbon emissions conclude that the pace of technological innovation will be the most important factor determining the cost of reducing carbon emissions.

So then are you against carbon pricing?

We favor pricing carbon if done right. It's critical to have a realistic expectation of what pricing carbon can and cannot accomplish. Pricing carbon cannot drive substantial energy technology innovation or substantial decarbonization of global and national economies. Carbon pricing will continue to fail to pull new technologies into the market at scale because doing so requires carbon prices to be prohibitively high.

However, pricing carbon (through either selling pollution permits or a carbon tax) may be a good way to raise revenue for more direct and substantial public investments in the development of low cost, low carbon technologies, and a rising carbon price may send a forward price signal to some private sector actors, pulling low carbon technologies into the market when they are reasonably cost-competitive with fossil fuels.

What would a technology-based alternative for dealing with climate look like?

Our proposal is to focus climate and energy policy centrally around making clean energy technology cheap, in real, unsubsidized terms. Policy must focus on driving down the cost and improving the performance of low carbon technologies. Doing so involves making substantial and direct public investments in the development, demonstration, and deployment of a broad suite of clean energy technologies.

This approach is consistent with the history of both energy technology innovation and virtually all technology innovation over the last century or more. Nearly every low carbon technology we have today - wind, solar, nuclear, even high efficiency gas turbines - was developed and deployed with substantial and sustained support from governments. Private firms played an important role -- initially as contractors and later in response to various subsidies and incentives -- but in almost every case, governments have led the way with targeted public investments.

But if we choose to do this technology-based alternative, what obligation will developing countries have to act?

Developing countries, like China, made it amply clear at UN talks in Copenhagen that they are not going to agree to emissions caps as part of some global warming treaty. To the extent they deploy more low-carbon power sources above their business-as-usual projections, they will do so only if the price comes down significantly.

What are the historical precedents for this proposal?

The two developed economies with the greatest success decarbonizing their energy systems, France and Sweden, did so through the direct state development and deployment of nuclear (and in the case of Sweden, hydro) power. Germany, Japan, and Denmark, three leaders in developing and deploying clean energy technologies similarly did so largely through direct public investments in solar, wind, and battery technologies. Successful attempts to decarbonize economies will, in the future as in the past, be supply-focused rather than demand-focused, will directly invest in desired low carbon technologies, and will be led by public sector investment.

Aren't you just proposing to subsidize clean energy rather than penalize dirty energy?

No. Large, new, open-ended subsidies are no more workable than the carbon pricing model. Whether proposed policies raise the price of dirty energy through carbon pricing or other regulatory measures or lower the cost of clean energy through subsidies and whether the public pays the price for those policies through higher energy prices or higher taxes, the political constraints upon such policies are the same. Heavy subsidies and high carbon prices or energy taxes will fail for the same reason.

Rather than offering open ended subsidies, public technology investments would be better served to adopt a procurement model, where governments or public/private collaboratives serve as a demanding consumer for new clean energy technologies, constantly procuring at the leading edge of a range of new technologies through a competitive bidding process that incentivizes firms to improve the performance and drive down the costs of their technologies. The primary objective of this approach is to rapidly reduce the real, unsubsidized cost of clean energy technology, not simply deploy as much above cost clean energy power as possible.

How do we know that investments in better energy technologies will result in reduced emissions?

We don't. No policy -- regulation, tax or investment-focused -- can guarantee emissions reductions. What we can safely predict is that as long as clean energy technologies cost substantially more than conventional energy technologies, efforts to cap, price, or otherwise regulate carbon emissions will fail. Public investments in clean energy technology are a necessary precondition, not a guarantee, of reduced global carbon emissions.

Even if we have better and cheaper clean energy technologies won't there still be major costs associated with replacing our existing carbon based infrastructure?

Absolutely, the cost of replacing existing energy technologies early will be significant even if the replacement technologies are much cheaper. That's all the more reason to drive down the cost of the replacement technologies. It will be hard enough to replace fossil fuel technologies with alternatives that are reasonably cost competitive. It will be impossible if those alternatives cost two, three, or even five times as much. Moreover, much of the challenge associated with stabilizing atmospheric carbon levels involves meeting future demand with low carbon alternatives, not replacing existing capital stock. Cheap alternatives vastly increase the likelihood that we will build a low carbon energy infrastructure for a growing global population that will need dramatically more energy over the next half-century and beyond.

Even if you are right about the need to invest in technology, governments around the world are already running huge deficits. Where will all the money come from to finance major investments in developing and deploying clean energy technology?

The cost of a major public program to invest in clean energy technology is substantially less than the costs associated with current cap and trade and carbon pricing proposals. Current proposals pending in the U.S. Congress will transfer hundreds of billions of dollars from consumers and businesses to incumbent energy interests over the next decade in exchange for what will be, in the very best case, very modest emissions reductions. These costs don't show up in budget deficit calculations but they represent a vastly larger cost to the U.S. economy than would a serious public investment and deployment program.

By contrast, $30 to $50 billion annually in public investments to develop and deploy cheap clean energy technology constitutes one quarter or less of the cost of proposed cap and trade legislation over the next decade. In contrast to current congressional proposals, and in contrast to the EU ETS, a direct public investment program will actually deploy new clean energy technology while accelerating the pace of innovation.

Won't the losers in the transition to a clean energy economy fight your approach just as hard as they've fought efforts to regulate or price carbon?

No effort to build a clean energy economy will be uncontested. Incumbent energy interests will always represent an obstacle to that transition and policies designed to drive that transition will almost inevitably end up compensating those interests in one way or another. But an investment-centered strategy has the advantage of explicitly and directly tying compensation to investments in clean energy. Oil companies are among the best candidates for public investments in bio-fuel technologies, utilities for investments in carbon capture, and automobile manufacturers for investments in hybrid, battery, and fuel cell technologies.

But in the end, such efforts, like those at present, will almost certainly be contested. However, if we are going to have that fight, we are better off having it over making investments in a public good - clean energy technology that is affordable and abundant for all - than taxing or otherwise increasing the regulatory price of a commodity that almost every global citizen depends upon. And indeed, virtually every public in the world is substantially more supportive of investing in clean energy than taxing or otherwise increasing the regulatory costs of dirty energy. Such preferences cannot simply be written off as a preference for painless remedies rather than painful ones. Even when asked about support for gas or other energy taxes, voters consistently prefer taxes that are dedicated to investing in clean energy over those that are intended to shift behavior through penalizing consumption of dirty energy sources.

Aren't you just proposing to take the easy way out by counting on new technologies to save us rather than coming to terms with the fact that we are all going to have to sacrifice and live with less in order to deal with climate change?

All serious strategies to dramatically reduce carbon emissions count on new technologies, they just differ in where they imagine those technologies will come from. Carbon pricing strategies assume, against virtually the entire modern history of technology innovation, that higher energy prices will result in private firms investing in innovation to develop the technologies we need to decarbonize our economy. They just assume that private firms will do the innovating and that pricing will motivate it. In contrast, we actually specify the process through which that innovation will occur and design policy explicitly for that objective.

But isn't that why we, in the developed world, need to lead the way by reducing our consumption?

Even radical redistribution of global wealth will not raise global living standards to even marginally acceptable levels without substantial economic growth and hence, much greater energy use. Consider that even if we were to lower living standards for the developed world to $15,000 per capita, the so-called happiness threshold, and redistribute the remaining wealth of the developed world to the rest of the world, per capita living standards today among the 5 billion people who do not live in the developed world would rise to only about $6,000 per capita. Raising all projected 9 billion global citizens to the happiness threshold by 2050 would require a tripling of world GDP and with it a substantial increase in global energy use at the same time that we must reduce global emissions by fifty percent.

No scenario for stabilizing, much less reducing, global carbon emissions is possible without the virtually complete decarbonization of the global energy supply and this will, in fact, require technology to "save" us.

But do we have time to wait for better technologies?

What we don't have is time to waste. That is why it is critical that we take much more pro-active steps to accelerate clean energy technology innovation. Without better technologies we are unlikely to take effective action to reduce carbon emissions. We have already wasted over twenty years arguing about climate science, carbon caps, and the internalization of environmental impacts through a price on carbon. In the meantime, global carbon emissions have continued their inexorable rise and the world has made scant progress developing better and cheaper low carbon technologies, much less deploying them.

It is indeed ironic that many of those who insist that we don't have time to "wait" for technological innovation themselves suggest that serious action to address carbon emissions will have to wait until some set of, as yet, unspecified climate catastrophes motivate global publics and policymakers around the world to embrace costly action to address the issue.

Our choice is not, as proponents of staying the current course would suggest, between acting to cap (or price) carbon emissions, and delay. It is between continuing to demand impossible actions or investing intelligently to overcome the primary obstacle to progress -- the inadequacy of today's low carbon energy technologies. It is our hope that the world will soon make the rational choice.

And the Winner is . . .

A Michener wins RogersBlogGroup World Cup prediction competition. C Burrows had an equal number of points, but missed out on the tiebreaker. Congrats! A Michener, to claim your prize (a signed copy of The Climate Fix) just send me an email.

I'll soon post up a discussion with a look back at the predictions and some lessons from them that go far beyond soccer. Thanks to all who participated, we'll do it again for Brazil 2014.

Deep into Amazonian Mud

With respect to the kerfuffle over a statement by the IPCC on the Amazon, I have been somewhat aware of the various claims, counterclaims, accusations, apologies, threatened lawsuits, demands for even more apologies, demands for retracted apologies and overall stridency that is endemic to blog debates over climate change. I haven't discussed the topic on this blog, because I didn't really know enough to say anything about it. But I spent a bit of time over the weekend looking into the issue, and here in capsule form is what I learned.

First, the IPCC made a statement in its Fourth Assessment Report:

Up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state, not necessarily producing gradual changes between the current and the future situation (Rowell and Moore, 2000).

The citation for this statement is as follows:

Rowell, A. and P.F. Moore, 2000: Global Review of Forest Fires. WWF/IUCN, Gland, Switzerland, 66 pp. http://www.iucn.org/themes/fcp/publications /files/global_review_forest_fires.pdf.

The link is dead, but you can find it here in PDF, and it says:

Up to 40% of the Brazilian forest is extremely sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall.

The paragraph in which that sentence appears is cited to the following paper:

D. C. Nepstad, A. Veríssimo, A. Alencar, C. Nobre, E. Lima, P. Lefebvre, P. Schlesinger, C. Potter, P. Mountinho, E. Mendoza, M. Cochrane, V. Brooks, Large-scale Impoverishment of Amazonian Forests by Logging and Fire, Nature, 1999, Vol 398, 8 April, pp 505

The problem, as is now widely known, is that Nepstad et al. provide no scientific support for the claim "Up to 40% . . .".

Fortunately, Nepstad issued a statement (PDF) on this issue soon after it broke, and confirmed the misciting in Rowell and Moore:

The authors of this report [Rowell and Moore] interviewed several researchers, including the author of this note, and had originally cited the IPAM website where the statement was made that 30 to 40% of the forests of the Amazon were susceptible to small changes in rainfall.

Are you following this so far?

Nepstad suggests that the IPCC statement as written was correct but that (a) Rowell and Moore missed some relevant citations, and (b) in any case, a more recent publication of his could have been used to support the claim being made by the IPCC. Let's address these in turn.

(a) The claim made in Rowell and Moore appears to have absolutely no scientific basis at all. In The Telegraph, Christopher Booker summarizes a range of blog-reader/commenter-contributions to identifying the provenance of the statement on the IPAM website alluded to by Nepstad. The original source is simply a website, no longer live but found in the internet archives, and shown to the right. This is where the trail ends for Rowell and Moore.

We can conclude unambiguously that the citation of Rowell and Moore by the IPCC was improper as it was not only "grey literature," but also devoid of scientific support for the claims that it advanced that were repeated in the IPCC.

(b) So what about Nepstad's implication that his 2004 article could have simply been inserted into the IPCC sentence in question, and all would have been fine?

I find this suggestion to be false. I have read Nepstad et al. 2004, and you can too at this PDF. There is nothing in that paper that can be used to support the "Up to 40% . . ." statement in the IPCC. Let me be clear -- that paper could have been used to support other statements, but not the statement which actually appeared in the IPCC. To put this another way, had the IPCC simply exchanged the citation of Rowell and Moore (2000) for Nepstad et al. (2004) the IPCC would have been equally as guilty of making a claim without support in the scientific literature. This is not to say that the specific claim made by the IPCC cannot be supported by the scientific literature, only that Nepstad et al. (2004) does not provide such support. That said, I cannot find any scientific support for the specific claim advanced by the IPCC (and apparently, neither can anyone else! Ironically enough, there is a trail leading from that very IPCC section to evidence counter to the contested statement).

Here it is worth adding that Simon Lewis, of the University of Leeds, who filed a complaint against the UK Sunday Times (here in PDF), muddies the waters a bit. While Lewis presents a range of issues, with respect to the contested claim made by the IPCC, Lewis argues that the IPCC is qualitatively correct:

there is a wealth of scientific evidence suggesting that the Amazon is vulnerable to reductions in rainfall. The IPCC statement itself is poorly written, and bizarrely referenced, but basically correct.

By "basically correct" Lewis explains that the Amazon is sensitive to rainfall and that reductions below a 1.5 m per year threshold can lead to massive tree die offs. Let me simply accept these statements as true, while noting at the same time what should be abundantly obvious -- these claims are not at all what the IPCC claimed. They are very different claims. They both invoke the Amazon and precipitation, but they are substantively different claims. Again, substituting the two papers mentioned by Lewis for Rowell and Moore (2000) as sources for the contested statement would not make the IPCC claim any better cited or accurate. The IPCC would have to have written a different set of claims.

The bottom line here? The IPCC did indeed make a claim in its report that is unsubstantiated in the literature that it cited in support of the claim. Further, the specific claim being made also appears to be unsubstantiable -- that is, there is nothing in the literature to support the specific claims being made. The IPCC could have said something else -- perhaps something even more alarming about the Amazon -- but it did not. For the IPCC this degree of sloppiness and lack of attention to accuracy is troubling.

Those claiming that there is nothing to see here are simply wrong -- the IPCC botched this one. The various defenses of this issue are an embarrassment. The IPCC simply made a mistake. Pretending that it did not cannot help either the IPCC or the cause for action, and will likely have the opposite effect, as anyone who takes a moment to look at the issue, as I did, will see the same evidence that I did. At the same time, it should also be said that the breakdown here has to do with the fidelity of the IPCC assessment process and not the substance of climate science. That the IPCC botched this particular claim does not make its opposite claim true.

The Amazon error in the IPCC occurred in almost the exact same manner as the 2035 Glacier error. It reflects a lack of attention to detail and accuracy, two criteria that one might think are the lifeblood of a process of assessment. In the end it may simply be an innocent mistake, but a mistake nonetheless. In this respect, both the Amazon and Glacier errors are far less troubling than the issue of how the IPCC has handled disasters and climate change, which goes beyond sloppiness.

In my self-education on this subject I came across some other problems in that section related to the Amazon, including the laundering of grey literature in an apparent effort to escape the IPCC publication deadline. But that will have to await another day, enough mudding for me for now.

Congratulations Spain

Has the Future been Foretold?

Has the outcome of this week's World Cup championship game been foretold in lyric for almost 500 years? Here is a stanza from the Dutch national anthem:

Nothing so moves my pity
As seeing through these lands,
Field, village, town and city
Pillaged by roving hands.
O that the Spaniards rape thee,
My Netherlands so sweet,
The thought of that does grip me
Causing my heart to bleed.

I am sticking with my pre-tournament pick of the Netherlands, but most of the smart money appears to be on Spain. I expect that the team that scores first will win, and I do think that the Dutch have a good chance to open up the Spanish defense in a way that Germany could not. If it goes to penalties, take the team that wins the coin toss and shoots/scores first. It could be a classic game. I'll go with 3-2 Holland, rather than 1-0 Spain!

Hup Holland!!

Australia's Climate Policy: Where Now?

Check out this excellent news report on Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard's options on climate policy. As I've argued, Australia does not have many very good options. We have not seen the end of political fallout on emissions trading in Australia by a long shot.

The Road Ahead

Much of the discussion about the recent investigative reports of the implication of the emails released from the University of East Anglia last fall have been hyperbolic in the extreme. Some have cried whitewash! Others seem to recommend elevating the relevant climate scientists for sainthood. As is typically the case as related to climate debates, reality is not to be found colored in stark black and white, but rather in the more complex shades of gray.

It is thus encouraging to see the Financial Times strike exactly the right note on this episode, which, along with the thoughtful perspectives of Fred Pearce and Roger Harrabin, brings a much needed sense of proportion to the issue. Here is an excerpt from the FT editorial today:

The e-mails revealed intellectual arrogance and reluctance to engage critics: climate change sceptics were denied access to CRU data. Some e-mails seemed to imply professional deceit. The controversy rattled climate science. The CRU is small, but important. Some of its members have taken leading roles at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

A report into the affair, published this week, criticised the CRU employees. They failed to display the “proper degree of openness” required of scientists and were “unhelpful and defensive” in response to reasonable requests for information.

But the report found no evidence that the CRU employees’ biases polluted their output. Accusations that they cherry-picked statistical results have been knocked down. Furthermore, persistent sceptics would have been able to access most of the data by other means. But the episode has proved damaging for climate science.

There is dispute among climatologists about projections. Economists and scientists disagree honestly about mitigation strategies. But researchers in the field often see themselves as campaigners, and so try to stamp out dissent. This leads them to breach the rules of scientific discourse.

The East Anglia emails do not show that climate scientists are criminals or frauds, but they do show the implicated scientists failing to uphold fairly basic norms of science. Given the hyperbolic reactions, it would not be a surprise to see the activist climate scientists once again start trying to overplay their hand , as hubris seems to be endemic to the field. At the same time, the most vocal critics of the climate science community are unlikely to back down, and will no doubt find in the recent investigations fresh fuel for their fury.

But the context has changed -- a key difference is that many informed observers are now a bit wiser, and a bit more cynical, about the politicization of climate science. Ironically, to justify their own sense of outrage, the activist scientists and their most ardent critics need each other more today than ever before. And to be honest, they deserve each other. Meantime, discussion of climate policies can continue its movement away from the pathological good guys/bad guys debates and toward a more constructive and open discussion of the politics of climate. Over the long run this movement represents a much needed change for the sake of both climate science and climate policy.

Catastrophes Wanted: Climate Change and the Soft Market in Reinsurance

At the moment the property and casualty insurance industry is awash in capital -- so much so that it is making it difficult to make strong profits because the excess capital exerts a downward pressure on the pricing of coverage. This situation is what is known as a "soft market."

Last month, National Underwriter described the situation as follows:

With $100 billion in excess capital, the property and casualty insurance market is not turning, a Wall Street analyst said Thursday, and a carrier executive attributed existing conditions to the absence of AIG’s historical price leadership.

The analyst, Jay Gelb, managing director of Barclays Capital, speaking Thursday at the S&P Insurance Conference held here, said the commercial lines and reinsurance markets will be soft “for at least several years barring major catastrophe losses,” or some other type of shock to industry capital.

“That’s because the p&c insurers are overcapitalized. It’s as simple as that,” Mr. Gelb said.

It make strike some people outside the industry as odd, but what the reinsurance market needs is a big catastrophe, maybe even two:

Thomas Motamed, chairman and chief executive officer of Chicago-based CNA, gauged the impact of catastrophes on a market turn.

He said brokers often tell him that a catastrophe is needed to end the soft market.

“They believe that will drive the market turn, [but] I don’t believe that for a second,” he said.

“The big companies with strong balance sheets can afford to take some hits,” he explained, adding that the best companies are well-capitalized—much larger than they were a decade ago, when a single catastrophe may have changed the market.

“How about two catastrophes?” he asked rhetorically.

“These are companies that make $1 billion or $2 billion a year…. What you would need is multiple events,” he said, postulating a natural catastrophe, an accompanying financial crisis and perhaps a terrorist event.”

He suggested that a more important factor relevant to insurance pricing changes is what happens with the economy.

“Until the economy gets better, people are not going to pay us more for the product,” Mr. Motamed said.

In the context of the soft market, some in the reinsurance industry are looking for a justification to try to firm up the market, to justify increasing premiums. If the economics don't justify increasing rates, maybe there is some other justification? Here is an Australian Broadcasting Corporation interview with a representative from Munich Reinsurance:

"Climate change, we believe, is a fact."

Why?

His pockets are already hurting.

"Based on our own loss experience, climate change we believe is a fact. It triggers natural disasters, atmospheric natural disasters, and the number of these natural disasters worldwide has more than doubled since the 1980s, driven by atmospheric perils, not by earthquakes or volcanic eruptions," Mr Rauch said.

"If we look at the sheer number of losses from natural catastrophes worldwide since the 1980s, more than $US1,600 billion in losses have occured. Most of them were actually weather-related, not earthquakes, not geophysical events."

And he says the economic cost of these disasters, once you take out things like inflation and currency fluctuations, is increasing by 11 per cent a year.

So faced with these increasing losses, what are large insurers and reinsurers doing?

Well, they're putting up premiums of course.

Well, they are at least trying to put up premiums. But in the marketplace, it is difficult to use science to argue against the economics of the market. And the market says that reinsurers have plenty of excess capacity and losses have not been at all unreasonable in recent years, so the market is soft. Of course, it is especially difficult to use science to argue against economics when that science is just wrong.

Climate change is indeed real -- with a significant human component -- but to date, there has been no signal of human caused climate change in the disaster record. Don't just take my word for it, you can see that result in the peer reviewed research conducted by . . . Munich Re.

And Then There Were Two

The ESPN Bracket Challenge Group that I set up -- RogersBlogGroup --received 84 entries. We are now down to 2 potential victors, one of whom will receive a signed copy of The Climate Fix. Currently leading is G. Williams, who ranks in the top 1,100 of more than a million entries in the overall ESPN Bracket Challenge (or in the 99.9th percentile!). G. Williams will win with a Dutch victory on Sunday. The other potential winner is A. Michener who wins with a Spanish victory.

My selections are presently in a very respectable tie for 7th place and in the 96.2 percentile overall, and I correctly picked both finalists (as did 8 others in the group). I am happy to report that the readers of this blog are very informed about football (no surprise), with the median ranking above the 60th percentile.

I'll provide a summary of the results on Sunday or Monday, and announce a support group for those like me expecting to suffer Cup withdrawal ;-) I'll also evaluate group performance against the naive baseline predictions that I set up as well as a recap of the performance of UBS, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. I'll just say this about that -- let's just hope that their football prognostications are not an indication of their financial acumen. More after the final.

The Muir Russell Review

The Muir Russell Review is out (here in PDF), and it has plenty in it for everyone on all sides of the debate over the East Anglia emails to crow about and to complain about. It has some strong rebukes of the scientists involved in the emails and dismisses many, but accepts some, of the criticisms raised by their strongest critics.

In this post I want to highlight a very puzzling statement in the report. The Muir Russell report characterizes the IPCC as follows (p. 41):

The IPCC produces assessments of the current state of understanding of climate change, its causes and implications. Its approach is to produce the most probable account of these issues; together with their uncertainties, and to identify where there is insufficient evidence to discriminate between different interpretations of a phenomenon. Its purpose is to produce a "best estimate" of what is currently understood, through the work of a group of scientists chosen for their expertise and experience to make reasoned assessments on the balance of evidence. It is not to produce a review of the scientific literature.

The idea that the IPCC presents a "best estimate" understanding based on the views of a selected group of scientists is completely contrary to how the IPCC characterizes its own work. To suggest that the IPCC is "not to produce a review of the scientific literature" is just plain wrong.

Here is how the IPCC WG I (the relevant working group for the MR inquiry) characterizes the scope of its own assessment process (emphasis added):

All chapters undergo a rigorous writing and open review process to ensure consideration of all relevant scientific information from established journals with robust peer review processes or from other sources which have undergone robust and independent peer review.

Note that it says "all relevant scientific information" -- it says nothing about a "best estimate." The IPCC states very clearly in its principles for report preparation (PDF) that its reports are supposed to,

present a comprehensive, objective, and balanced view of the areas they cover

And it explains that authors of IPCC reports,

should clearly identify disparate views for which there is significant scientific or technical support, together with the relevant arguments

IPCC reports are further supposed to

represent the latest scientific, technical and socio-economic findings and are as comprehensive as possible . . . [and] provide a balanced and complete assessment of current information

The notion that IPCC reports are supposed to present a selective view of climate science, representing the judgments of a select group of experts is in fact contrary to the mission of the IPCC.

The Muir Russell mischaracterization of the IPCC becomes relevant in the report when it uses the characterization as a criterion for evaluating the efforts revealed in the emails to minimize or exclude certain perspectives. For instance, the Muir Russell report explains with respect to one alleged instance of exclusion of peer reviewed literature from IPCC drafts that (p. 76):

Those within the [IPCC] writing team took one view, and a group outside it took another. It is not in our remit to comment on the rights and wrongs of this debate, but those within the team had been entrusted with the responsibility of forming a view, and that is what they did.

This speaks directly to problems of the IPCC, revealed to some degree by the emails, but of much broader concern. The IPCC is supposed to "identify disparate views" not hide them from view or take the side held by the author team. Had the Muir Russell review actually taken an accurate view of the IPCC, it is likely that its judgment about the appropriateness of the behaviors revealed by the emails would be considerably different.

It is not the job of the IPCC authors to serve as selective arbiters of the peer reviewed literature and judge which peer reviewed science they agree with and disagree with. This only invites extra-scientific considerations into the assessment process and a cherrypicking of the literature, rather than a considered assessment. The job of the IPCC should be exactly as it says it is -- to produce a comprehensive, balanced and complete review of the relevant literature. If the IPCC finds itself in a situation where its author team reflects a perspective represented by only a subset of the literature, then the IPCC has a problem.

The released East Anglia emails -- for better or worse -- revealed some problems associated with in-group control of parts of the IPCC. Muir Russell's sanctioning of in group behavior in the preparation of IPCC reports is a notable shortfall in what otherwise appears to be a nuanced and comprehensive assessment of the implications of the East Anglia emails.

Examination Copies of The Climate Fix for Course Adoption

The Climate Fix will be published in about 10 weeks, just in time for fall courses on environmental and climate policies. The book is aimed at a broad audience well beyond the campus, but it is also appropriate for courses ranging from the freshman level through advanced graduate courses.

Basic Books has set up a web page for The Climate Fix. From that page you can access instructions for how to order an examination or desk copy of the book for course adoption.

If you are interested in using the book in your class, I would be happy to participate in an online discussion with your students -- just send me an email. On this blog I'll be sharing a number of quantitative and analytical assignments that can be used to accompany the book, which I'll be using in my own fall graduate seminar. Soon I'll share the full list of books that will be on my fall syllabus.

Also, this fall I'll be visiting a number of campuses to lecture on the book, including Purdue University, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, Arizona State University, Oxford University, University of Exeter and several others to be confirmed (and as part of my book tour I'll be making East and West Coast visits). If you'd like me to visit your class to discuss the book with your students, please do be in touch to see if we can work something out.

Goal of the World Cup

And then check this out:

How Might Indians React to a $30/tonne Carbon Tax?

The Indian government's decision to partially rescind subsidies for petroleum, diesel and kerosene, and the associated public reaction provides us with a natural policy experiment to see how the Indian public might respond to a high price on carbon (see the news report above for how that experiment turns out).

To understand this more precisely we need to convert the governments action on subsidies into an equivalent carbon price. Here is what the BBC reports on the impact of the partial removal of subsidies on fuel prices:

The fuel price rise followed the government's decision last month to scrap its subsidy of petrol prices in an effort to cut the budget deficit, which is forecast to hit 5.5% of GDP by 2010-11.
Allowing the price of petrol to be decided by the market has added about 3.5 rupees (£0.05; $0.08) to the price of a litre of petrol, a rise of 6.7%.
Diesel prices will be increased by 5% or 2 rupees a litre, although not immediately.
And kerosene, which is used for cooking by tens of millions of poor Indians, went up by 33% (3 rupees per litre) in the first such increase since 2002.

There are 0.002322 tonnes of carbon dioxide per liter of gasoline, kerosene or petroleum (there are small differences, but irrelevant for present purposes, sources: EIA, Galiana and Green, 2009).

From the BBC article we can calculate the prices of petrol, kerosene and diesel at 52, 9 and 40 rupees per liter respectively. The current rupee to dollar conversion is about 47 per dollar.

Thus, the carbon-dioxide-tax-equivalent of the India government's decision to partially remove fuel subsidies is abouyt $18 per tonne for diesel, $27 for kerosene and $32 for petroleum. (That is, a 3.5 rupee increase is equivalent to ~1,500 rupee per tonne carbon dioxide tax, or about $32).

Who thinks that a high price on carbon (such as above $20 per tonne) -- implemented via whatever mechanism -- is in the cards in India (or anywhere really)? Climate policy must begin by recognizing that a fundamental boundary condition of policy design is that energy prices cannot be made much higher. In fact, public support is far more likely with policies that reduce energy costs.

I am of course fully aware of and sympathetic to academic arguments about the importance of externalities, subsidies and incentives. I am also aware of political realities. When academic arguments confront political realities, guess what wins? If we are to accelerate decarbonization, then making clean energy cheaper has to be a top priority.

This of course is why India has quietly placed a carbon tax on coal. Yes, you read that right.

“This will give 25 billion rupees ($535 million) this year alone,” Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said in Mumbai, calling it “a carbon tax that will be used for clean energy.”

Why aren't there protests in India about this carbon tax? Simple, the tax is 50 rupees (about $1) per tonne of coal, which is about equivalent to about a $0.35 per tonne carbon dioxide tax. Such a tax is not politically contentious, and that is of course the point. To sum up:

• High carbon price = public protest and opposition
• Low carbon price = money to invest in clean energy + public acceptance

There is a lesson here.

The Economist on Dutch IPCC Report

The Economist has a brilliant online article on the Dutch IPCC report, that is well worth reading in full. Here is how it concludes:

Perhaps the most worrying thing about the PBL report, though, is a rather obvious one about which its authors say little. In all ten of the issues that the PBL categorised as major (the original errors on glaciers and Dutch sea level, and the eight others identified in the report), the impression that the reader gets from the IPCC is more strikingly negative than the impression which would have been received if the underlying evidence base had been reflected as the PBL would have wished, with more precise referencing, more narrow interpretation and less authorial judgment. A large rise in heat related deaths in Australia is mentioned without noting that most of the effect is due to population rather than climate change. A claim about forest fires in northern Asia seems to go further than the evidence referred to—in this case a speech by a politician—would warrant.

The Netherlands look more floodable, Asian glaciers more fragile. A suspicion thus gains ground that the way in which the IPCC sythesises, generalises snd checks its findings may systematically favour adverse outcomes in a way that goes beyond just serving the needs of policy makers. Anecdotally, authors bemoan fights to keep caveats in place as chapters are edited, refined and summarised. The PBL report does not prove or indeed suggest systematic bias, and it stresses that it has found nothing that should lead the parliament of the Netherlands, or anyone else, to reject the IPCC’s findings. But the panel set up to look at the IPCC’s workings by Dr Pachauri and Mr Ban should ask some hard questions about systematic tendencies to accentuate the negative.

Read the whole thing.

China's Not-So-Spontaneous Decarbonization

It is old news for regular readers of this blog, but today's NYT has a thoughtful article on how China's emissions are surging and efforts to increase efficiency gains are foundering.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

Already, in the last three years, China has shut down more than a thousand older coal-fired power plants that used technology of the sort still common in the United States. China has also surpassed the rest of the world as the biggest investor in wind turbines and other clean energy technology. And it has dictated tough new energy standards for lighting and gas mileage for cars.

But even as Beijing imposes the world’s most rigorous national energy campaign, the effort is being overwhelmed by the billionfold demands of Chinese consumers.

Chinese and Western energy experts worry that China’s energy challenge could become the world’s problem — possibly dooming any international efforts to place meaningful limits on global warming.

If China cannot meet its own energy-efficiency targets, the chances of avoiding widespread environmental damage from rising temperatures “are very close to zero,” said Fatih Birol, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency in Paris.

Aspiring to a more Western standard of living, in many cases with the government’s encouragement, China’s population, 1.3 billion strong, is clamoring for more and bigger cars, for electricity-dependent home appliances and for more creature comforts like air-conditioned shopping malls.

As a result, China is actually becoming even less energy efficient. And because most of its energy is still produced by burning fossil fuels, China’s emission of carbon dioxide — a so-called greenhouse gas — is growing worse. This past winter and spring showed the largest six-month increase in tonnage ever by a single country.

The article also explains that earlier assumptions of "spontaneous decarbonization" implicit in major energy and emissions assessments were likely overly optimistic:

Until recently, projections by both the International Energy Agency and the Energy Information Administration in Washington had assumed that, even without an international energy agreement to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, China would achieve rapid improvements in energy efficiency through 2020.

But now China is struggling to limit emissions even to the “business as usual” levels that climate models assume if the world does little to address global warming.

This of course echos an argument that I made along with Tom Wigley and Chris Green in a 2008 paper in Nature (PDF) focused on the assumptions of spontaneous decarbonization in the IPCC, in which we conclude:

There is no question about whether technological innovation is necessary — it is. The question is, to what degree should policy focus directly on motivating such innovation? The IPCC plays a risky game in assuming that spontaneous advances in technological innovation will carry most of the burden of achieving future emissions reductions, rather than focusing on creating the conditions for such innovations to occur.

At some point climate policies will have to evolve to reflect the realities of economic growth and energy demand, and move beyond magical solutions. We are not there yet, but we are getting closer.

Dutch IPCC Report Generally Useful, But Botches US Hurricanes

The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency has issued a report (PDF) that assesses the regional chapters of the 2007 IPCC Working Group II. It finds that there are indeed errors, referencing problems and unsupported claims, but overall judges these issues to be minor. The press release that the NEAA issued is titled, "Key findings of IPCC on regional climate-change impacts overall considered well founded." My reading of the report is that it is considerably more hard-hitting than the press release, with recommendations for significant changes in the IPCC.

Last March, I was contacted by the NEAA during their investigations about the IPCC's presentation of hurricane loses in North America (note that this is a different issue than the global loss issue that I have discussed here before, which appears in Chapter 1 of the WGII report, not a regional chapter). Since I have discussed the (mis)treatment of US hurricane losses in the relevant IPCC regional chapter in depth on this blog (which I shared with and explained to the NEAA) I was surprised to see the NEAA completely botch its treatment of US hurricanes.

At p. 78, the NEAA report discusses the hurricane issue as follows:

Figures TS.15 and 14.1 on the economic damages from hurricanes. (minor)

Figures TS.15 (Technical Summary, page 55) and 14.1 (Chapter 14, page 621) in the Working Group II Report illustrate the statement in the Technical Summary that reads ‘Over the past several decades, economic damage from hurricanes in North America has increased over fourfold, due largely to an increase in the value of infrastructure at risk’. We have a minor comment to make on the figures. Because of a shorter averaging period at the end of the time series (6 years instead of 10), the most recent increase was higher, compared with the increase that would have resulted from applying a uniform averaging period at the end of the series. However, a different choice of statistical method would not have affected the statement. Furthermore, we have found this statement to be fully supported by the underlying material. This minor comment has no consequences for the IPCC conclusions in the various Summaries for Policymakers.

The NEAA is correct that the IPCC presented a misleading graph (the NEAA did not choose to report that the IPCC had invented data for the endpoint of Figure TS.15). But the NEAA is incorrect to claim that the following statement is "fully supported by the underlying material':

‘Over the past several decades, economic damage from hurricanes in North America has increased over fourfold, due largely to an increase in the value of infrastructure at risk’

Either the graph or the statement necessarily must be in error. IPCC Figure TS.15 can be seen at the top of this post. It shows data taken a paper that I was lead author on (Pielke and Landsea 1998) and appends data that did not come from our paper (where it came from is unknown, but it is in error). The data shown in the grpah shows hurricane losses after adjusting for societal change. That is to say, there is no signal of "an increase in the value of infrastructure risk" in the data because our methodology is designed specifically to take out that signal!

Thus, any increase in losses over a period of "several decades" shown in the graph must be due to climatic factors (such as decadal variability), most obviously, the fact that the 1970s saw the least losses over the period covered by our dataset and 2005 had hurricane Katrina. The increase in losses shown in Figure TS.15 from the 1970s to 2005 cannot be due to "infrastructure at risk." Had the graph instead shown non-normalized data, the statement would have been more accurate.

If the IPCC had accurately represented the data, rather than the misleading graph, it would have been clear that over the period of record there has been no increase in normalized losses due to hurricanes in the United States. Here is what the data actually showed (Source: PDF) about US hurricane losses at the time that the IPCC produced Figure TS.15 and wrote the incorrect statement:

Overall, the NEAA report looks to be a valuable effort in assessing the IPCC WGII regional chapters. However, on the topic of hurricane losses in the United States, the NEAA is in obvious error, which is unfortunate because the issue is so straightforward. I cannot judge the other parts of the report. However, it does include some hard hitting advice for the IPCC, including:

• Create a public website for the submission of possible errors found in the published reports;
• Provide stronger underpinning of generalisations of case studies to entire regions or sectors, also making use of regional modelling studies;
• Ensure that statements that attribute impacts to climate change are well founded in scientific research, including systematic observations, modelling and statistics. The climate change component of impacts should be carefully characterised.
• Be careful with phrasing of statements that could be perceived by readers as heightening the projected impacts of climate change;
• IPCC governments should provide financial support for hiring chapter assistants to assist with quality control;
• Assure that the reviews of all draft texts are fully covered by several expert reviewers;
• Strengthen the expert and government reviews of the foundation for and provenance of statements in the summaries;
• IPCC governments should increase their investments in climate-change observations and modelling in developing countries.

The IPCC would do well to listen, but the tone of the press release might be misinterpreted as suggesting that business-as-usual is OK. If so, that would be a shame.

What Fußball Says About the Globalization of Germany

SoccerQuantified has an interesting post about the make-up of this year's phenomenal German World Cup team. Here is an excerpt:

While Manuel Neuer, Arne Friedrich, Holger Badstuber, Philipp Lahm, Per Mertesacker, Bastian Schweinsteiger, and Thomas Müller are all Germans of German descent and were born in Germany, Sami Khedira, Mesut Özil, Mario Gomez, Lukas Podolski, Marko Marin, Miroslav Klose, and Jeronimo Baretto Cacau are different. And it’s not just the starters: the bench was loaded with non-traditional Germans of Nigerian (Aogo), Ghanaian (Boateng), Turkish (Tasci), and Polish descent (Trochowski), alongside goalies Butt and Wiese, and field players Jansen, Kroos, and Kießling.

All of the seven non-standard Germans who played last night [against Australia] have at least one parent who is not German (only two have one German parent: Khedira's and Gomez's mothers are German). And the most common foreign origin of players on the German team is Poland (Podolski and Klose; along with Trochowski who sat on the bench). Khedira’s father is Tunisian, Gomez’s is Spanish, Özil’s parents are Turkish, Podolski’s and Klose’s parents are immigrants from Poland, while Marin’s parents immigrated from Bosnia-Herzegovina). Cacau’s story is a little more complicated; he came to Germany as a young man of 18 to live with an uncle and try his luck in German soccer. But wouldn’t you know it, 3 of the 7 were born in Germany.

So how did the Germans end up with such an international team? Before you accuse the German soccer association of scouring the world to buy some new citizens who know how to play soccer, think again. It all makes sense, at least to a political scientist, historian, or economist, and there’s nothing fishy about it. In a curious way, the make-up of the German team reflects different trends in recent German history.

Take Özil (or Tasci). During the 1950s and 1960s, Germany rebuilt its economy from the ashes of World War II. In fact, the German economy became so successful that commentators refer to this period as “the German economic miracle”. The economy grew, and labor markets grew tight. Enter the Turks. Originally attracted to work in Germany’s booming economy, which faced severe labor shortages in the last 1960s, many came and stayed. Today, slightly less than 2 million Turks live in Germany. Turks are the single largest group of immigrants in Germany, and have been for a long time. Today. Unsurprisingly, many of today’s young Turks (no pun intended) in Germany are actually German-born and raised. If anything, it’s surprising that not more Turks have made it to the national team.

And Klose’s, Podolski’s, and Marin’s stories are stories of vicinity and opportunity, but also of geo-politics. Their parents left Poland and Bosnia (Marin) to find better lives and better jobs in the West – they fled communist Poland before the end of the Cold War. Klose’s parents originally went to France – his dad was a professional soccer player, too – and eventually to Germany; Podolski’s parents immigrated to Germany in 1987. Marin’s parents left Bosnia in 1991 and settled in Germany. If I had to guess, and if you ask historians of the Bosnian wars of the early 1990s, they'll tell you that Bosnia wasn’t a great place to be in 1991, especially if you were young and had a young child.

So looking at the map, it’s clear that there’s a neighborhood effect. But beyond this, you can think of the players’ origins as testament to the Cold War (and its end), as well as a reflection of the histories of post-WWII war Germany and Europe.

Congrats to Germany on a convincing victory today!

Orange

Decelerating Decarbonization of the Global Economy

Today, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency released new data on estimated 2009 carbon dioxide emissions. Here is how the NEAA characterizes the findings in a press release:

Despite the continued economic crisis, global emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, have remained constant in 2009, as strong increases in CO2 emissions from fast-growing developing countries, such as China and India, have completely nullified CO2 emission reductions in the industrialised world.

As readers here know (and as readers of The Climate Fix will learn), a focus on emissions is only part of what matters, as economic growth is an important driver of emissions growth. The variable that matters most for efforts to achieve targets for the stabilization of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of economic activity. A reduction in this ratio means that the economy has become more energy efficient and/or is transitioning toward carbon neutral energy generation. In other words, decarbonization is a measure of technological progress in energy use and supply.

So with the 2009 data in hand, how are we doing? Not good.

The graph at the top of this post shows the decarbonization of the global economy 1990 to 2009, with 1990 set to 1.0, using emission data from the NEAA and economic data from Angus Maddison (Note: 2009 GDP is estimated based on growth rate found in the IMF data). I also did the same analysis with economic data from the IMF, reaching the same conclusions. I prefer the Maddison data because it allows cross-country comparisons, and it is also the basis of the analyses in The Climate Fix. The data shows a pronounced slowdown in the rate of decarbonization of the global economy, exactly the opposite effect that climate policies are supposed to be having. This can be seen even more dramatically in the following chart, which shows the annual rate of decarbonization, with a trend line super-imposed in green.

This graph shows that the pace of decarbonization has slowed dramatically in recent decades, with important consequences for climate policies. Tom Wigley, Chris Green and I discussed this emerging trend in Nature in 2008 (PDF). To get a sense of what is needed to achieve low stabilization targets (the exact number does not matter, but say 450 ppm), the world would need to achieve annual rates of decarbonization of more than 5-6% for many decades.

The fact that emissions did not increase from 2008 to 2009 is not good news, nor is it a reflection of the positive effects of climate policies. The one-year stabilization occurred because of the dismal state of the economy in North America and Europe, a condition that policy makers are quickly trying to remedy. When economic growth resumes, so too will growth in emissions in these regions. Meanwhile, the world as a whole took a step backwards in terms of decarbonizing the global economy. The world is falling short in terms of energy technology innovation, with consequences that will reach much further than climate policies alone.