. . . as soccer has grabbed the spotlight, it has also attracted the scorn of nativists on the right, who see the growing attention being paid to it as a byproduct of someconspiratorial leftist plotor the result of insidious foreign influences. Fox News host Glenn Beck ranted, "I hate it so much, probably because the rest of the world likes it so much." Whether one is a fan of the world's game or not, the notion that soccer's growth is part of some plot is reflective of a conspiratorial nativism all too prevalent among the right wing.
Who cares what Glenn Beck thinks about soccer (or anything, really)? I am sure he would feel right at home with some Hansa Rostock supporters;-) In the US there is no "right wing war on soccer" -- it is as wrongheaded an idea as the "war on science." Politicizing science for partisan gain is one thing, but soccer? Heresy!
The graph above shows the proportion of global fossil fuel consumption that comes from coal, gas and oil. The data comes from the 2010 Statistical Review of World Energy from BP. Contrary to some claims, we are not nearly at the twilight of the coal industry. In fact, coal accounts for a greater share of global fossil fuel consumption than it has since 1969!
There is no "war on science." There was not a Republican war on science under the Bush Administration and there is not a Democratic war on science under the Obama Administration. What every administration has are efforts to cherrypick and massage evidence in support of their political preferences and sometimes these efforts are judged to go too far. The Bush Administration was particularly ham-handed in its handling of expertise, to be sure. The Obama Administration seems to be having its own problems as well.
Consider how the Obama Administration handled scientific advice that it solicited from the National Academy of Engineering (part of the NAS), as reported by the WSJ.
In the wake of the oil spill, President Obama asked Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to produce a report on new drilling safety recommendations. Then on May 27 Mr. Obama announced a six-month deep water drilling ban, justifying it on the basis of Mr. Salazar's report, a top recommendation of which was the moratorium. To lend an air of technical authority, the report noted: "The recommendations contained in this report have been peer-reviewed by seven experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering."
That would be false, sir. In a scathing statement this week, the seven experts explained that the report draft they had reviewed did not include a six-month drilling moratorium. That was added only after they signed off.
Seven authors of the NAE report wrote the following in a letter complaining that their advice had been altered after it had been provided (pdf, emphasis in original):
A group of those named in the Secretary of Interior’s Report, “INCREASED SAFETY MEASURES FOR ENERGY DEVELOPMENT ON THE OUTER CONTINENTAL SHELF” dated May 27, 2010 are concerned that our names are connected with the moratorium as proposed in the executive summary of that report. There is an implication that we have somehow agreed to or “peer reviewed” the main recommendation of that report. This is not the case.
As outlined in the attached document [pdf], we believe the report itself is very well done and includes some important recommendations which we support. However, the scope of the moratorium on drilling which is in the executive summary differs in important ways from the recommendation in the draft which we reviewed. We believe the report does not justify the moratorium as written and that the moratorium as changed will not contribute measurably to increased safety and will have immediate and long term economic effects. Indeed an argument can be made that the changes made in the wording are counterproductive to long term safety.
The Secretary should be free to recommend whatever he thinks is correct, but he should not be free to use our names to justify his political decisions.
Of course politicians should be responsible for decision making and advisors for advice, but politicians should not change advice to fit more comfortably with their preferred course of action. Such behavior would represent a highly pathological politicization of science.
If you are opposed to the political agenda of the administration then you probably will be less forgiving about such transgressions than someone who supports that political agenda. Because of these political dynamics it can be hard to maintain a focus on issues of scientific integrity.
That the Obama Administration has been caught out politicizing science is not a surprise. As I have often said, such behavior is in the DNA of political behavior. However, the only references to the episode that I can find in the media and the blogosphere (and I have not made a comprehensive search, so please add references in the comments) are from the WSJ and Fox News and also on some conservative blogs.
If the politicization of science is only something that your political opponents engage in, then it is easy to see how issues of scientific integrity easily get lost. But scientific integrity should be a nonpartisan issue, shouldn't it?
Christiana Figueres startled delegates when she addressed the United Nations climate conference in Bonn last week: “I do not believe we will ever have a final agreement on climate change, certainly not in my lifetime,” the Costa Rican diplomat told them.
“If we ever have a final, conclusive, all-answering agreement, then we will have solved this problem. I don’t think that’s on the cards.” Addressing the issue successfully would “require the sustained effort of those who will be here for the next 20, 30, 40 years”.
Her words count, and not only because of her 15-year involvement in tackling global warming. Next month, Ms Figueres takes over from the Netherlands’ Yvo de Boer as executive secretary of the UN’s climate change secretariat, based in the former west German capital.
As Bonn’s low, heavy skies pelted delegates with rain, much of the rest of the talk during the long sessions was of technical matters such as the measurement of greenhouse gases. But in quiet conversations in the corridors, in cafes over hurried coffees or while scurrying between thunderstorms, the deeper question some officials were asking was whether there was indeed any point in continuing with this type of negotiation, which had failed for 20 years. Could the UN climate talks be reformed – or were they just too broken to fix?
Images of gushing oil and dying pelicans in the Gulf of Mexico have stirred anger and agony in Washington. But are they enough to prod the Senate to act on long-delayed clean energy and climate change legislation?
Energy, maybe. Climate, probably not. There is growing sentiment for a measure that penalizes BP, imposes higher costs and tougher regulations on offshore drillers and takes some steps toward reducing overall energy and petroleum consumption.
But despite the outrage over the spill, there appears to be limited appetite in the Senate for a broad-based effort to cap greenhouse gas emissions across the board.
At various talks I have given recently I am often asked what the fastest and cheapest way to get The Climate Fix is. I am told that pre-ordering it online from your favorite retailer is the answer. I have some links here. In the late summer I'll coordinate an online "book club" for those academic courses that have adopted the book, which will be open to general discussion.
Last week, following my comments on public opinion on climate change, a prominent climate scientist (who does not wish to participate in blog discussions) wrote to me to object to my claims, writing that:
"Science debates can change science ... which can change public opinion ... which can change policy direction. "
This is of course an invocation of what has been called the "linear model" of science in decision making. The views expressed by this scientist are widely shared and are in fact a point of agreement among competing factions in the climate debate, particularly as found in blog discussions.
The linear model is named as such because it posits that: science ----> public opinion ----> policy direction
If the linear model were an accurate description of the world then it would be the case that when we are debating science we are actually debating issues that influence policy directions. Science would thus serve as a real proxy for political debate.
The problem with the linear model is that it does not accurately describe the real world relationship of science and policy in general, and certainly not with respect to climate change. As I have documented, US public opinion on climate change has been relatively stable (with ups and downs) over three different presidencies, four IPCC reports, various weather extremes like Katrina, and a vigorous effort by skeptics to cast doubt on the science and advocates for action to cast the science as settled. At this point the continued efforts to debate the politics via science simply serve to reinforce the extant nature of public opinion.
What efforts to wage climate politics through science actually do, rather than influencing political outcomes, is to increase the politicization of science. One result of this is a trend in public opinion across partisan lines indicating increasing numbers who believe that climate science has been exaggerated in political debate.
I discuss the linear model and its pathologies in some depth in The Honest Broker and public opinion on and the politicization of climate change in The Climate Fix.
There was a lot of interesting discussion following my post on public opinion and climate change. In the short term I won't have a chance to respond to every comment and email arising from that thread, but let me offer the following as a capsule summary of my views (and the list below is a set of assertions that I back up in TCF). I believe that the evidence amply supports the following conclusions:
1. A large majority of the public, in the US and more generally in most places worldwide, believes that humans are influencing the climate through the release of greenhouse gases.
2. A similar large majority of the public finds the prospect of such an influence to be troubling.
3. Public views on #1 and #2 have been up and down, but remarkably, have been fairly consistent for a period of several decades. There is a noted partisan split (especially in the US, but also elsewhere) in public opinion.
4. The public consistently ranks climate change as a relatively low concern when asked to prioritize. Issues such as the economy, jobs, education, crime, war and others are regularly deemed more important.
5. The public supports action to reduce emissions, to diversify energy supply, to increase energy security and to do so comprehensively and internationally. This support is bipartisan.
6. Such support has been consistent for decades and exceeds the level of support observed for other issues for which action was taken.
7. The public overwhelming is willing to pay some price for the attainment of energy and climate goals, but that willingness is severely limited. The price must not be high.
8. Increasing numbers of the public believe that climate science has been exaggerated in public debate. This trend occurs across the political spectrum.
9. Public support for emissions reductions is, at best, only loosely tied to public opinion on climate science. Even as the public believes in increasing numbers that the science has been exaggerated in public debate, support for action remains strong.
10. The public, as on most every complex scientific or technical issue, is not particularly literate about climate science.
The bottom line?
The contours of public opinion on the science and the economics of climate change have been set now for many years, even decades. The public believes that humans affect the climate, that they want action, that that action should not cost too much, that there a range of reasons for action and that climate science is often exaggerated.
These views have been stable for a long time and absent something really dramatic, are unlikely to change appreciably. Thus, they provide a set of ground rules or boundary conditions for effective climate policy.
The public's opinions are clear and consistent, however the experts do not seem to have yet heard them.
Much has been said about the procedures of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But at the end of the day, everything comes down to people. The average IPCC author is smart enough to violate the spirit of any rule while complying with its every letter. The right group of people would produce a sound and honest report even if there were no rules at all.
That is why my submission to the review panel of the Inter Academy Council focuses on the selection of lead authors. The panel will announce its findings at the end of summer – and the IPCC will announce the authors for the Fifth Assessment Report next week.
This is very unfortunate. I think that the IPCC should suspend the AR5 process, fix the procedures for nominating and selecting authors, and postpone the report to 2015. I’d rather bet on New Zealand winning the world cup.
That said, the leaders of Working Group 2 are making an effort. I have been critical of the IPCC. I think that climate change is real, really caused by humans, and a problem that should be solved – but I also think that there are bigger, more urgent environmental problems (let alone other problems) and that the policies put forward by our dear leaders are ineffective, misdirected and needlessly expensive. Nonetheless, WG2 has put me forward as a convening lead author of one of the chapters in AR5.
I tentatively accepted, knowing that this would be a lot of difficult work under immense scrutiny.
Guess what? Although the Irish government nominated me, it will not financially support my participation – not even travel costs – because of … substantive differences over environmental policy.
RogersBlogGroup now has 44 entries, and I have not yet even entered my own (coming Thursday morning!).
I should have thought of this before, but the winner of the competition who must also exceed the two naive metrics of skill that I have introduced, wins a signed copy of . . . . The Climate Fix (to be delivered when published). You can enter as many times as you'd like, I don't mind. I will sign the book with full recognition of your accomplishment as the first quadrennial winner of my Blog World Cup competition ;-) If I win, which I handicap at no better than 1/45 at present, then I will demand some sort of appropriate recognition.
In our survey, which was financed by a grant to Stanford from the National Science Foundation, 1,000 randomly selected American adults were interviewed by phone between June 1 and Monday. When respondents were asked if they thought that the earth’s temperature probably had been heating up over the last 100 years, 74 percent answered affirmatively. And 75 percent of respondents said that human behavior was substantially responsible for any warming that has occurred.
For many issues, any such consensus about the existence of a problem quickly falls apart when the conversation turns to carrying out specific solutions that will be costly. But not so here.
Fully 86 percent of our respondents said they wanted the federal government to limit the amount of air pollution that businesses emit, and 76 percent favored government limiting business’s emissions of greenhouse gases in particular. Not a majority of 55 or 60 percent — but 76 percent.
Large majorities opposed taxes on electricity (78 percent) and gasoline (72 percent) to reduce consumption. But 84 percent favored the federal government offering tax breaks to encourage utilities to make more electricity from water, wind and solar power.
And huge majorities favored government requiring, or offering tax breaks to encourage, each of the following: manufacturing cars that use less gasoline (81 percent); manufacturing appliances that use less electricity (80 percent); and building homes and office buildings that require less energy to heat and cool (80 percent).
Thus, there is plenty of agreement about what people do and do not want government to do.
As I have said for many years, and documented in The Climate Fix, the battle for public opinion on climate change has been won by those who argue that there is a profound human influence on climate and action is warranted. This has been the message of opinion polls for as long as 20 years.
The effort to cleanse the world of climate skeptics that occupies the attention of so many climate bloggers is simply a waste of effort, if the goal is to advance climate policies. The public support is there -- and has been for many years. The battle over climate science is so over that those wanting to continue this fight have to try to label people with whom they disagree with "climate skeptics" or "climate deniers" just to pick a fight (trust me, I've seen this happen;-).
I fully expect that the blogospheric wars over climate change science to continue ad nausem, because people enjoy it and it allows people (on various sides) to assert the authority of science in a political debate. But by now it should be clear, such debates are just entertainment or sport, they are not related to public opinion or political action.
Sorry for those who wish things were otherwise, but the science debate is over. Time to raise the white flag.
Yesterday's FT reports that Germany's Bundesliga is the most profitable football league, and which is also in the most healthy financial state (the graph above comes from the FT. Note that Spain somehow got left off). The English Premier League spends 67% of revenues on players whereas the Bundesliga spends only 51%. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the FT reports that:
The survey also found little correlation between pay and league position achieved outside the very top and bottom of England’s top division.
Total revenues across England’s top 92 clubs rose by £100m to more than £2.5bn, though debt levels also increased to £3.2bn.
“We accept that it’s right that revenue finds its way to talent, but we have tried to argue that there needs to be a healthy dose of restraint on the business side,” said Mr Jones.
Following the World Cup, I'll discuss in more depth the relationship of pay and team performance.
After spending much of the past year working intensively on The Climate Fix, I am overdue for some escapist reading. I am thus enjoying Steig Larsson's thrillers, but then come across this:
Matilda is a hurricane that formed off Brazil a few weeks ago and tore straight through Paramaribo . . . [hurricane season] is usually September and October. But these days you can never tell, because there's so much trouble with the climate and the greenhouse effect and all that.
It's fiction, I know, I know. Fortunately, Larsson gets back to the escapist stuff right away and Salander is again fighting bad guys, not freaky tornadocanes.
Predictive "skill" refers to the ability to make forecasts that outperform some naive baseline. A seasonal climate forecast has skill if it improves upon expectations derived from long-term climatology, a managed mutual fund has skill if it outperforms an index fund, a World Cup prediction has skill if it improves upon a simple way of generating forecasts.
In this competition I am going to employ two naive methodologies. The first is simply to take the FIFA ranking as the basis for deciding the winner of each game. This results in Brazil as the champion, with Spain as runner up. In the ESPN bracket, the rankings are conveniently provided next to the team names. Were you to come from another planet and have no knowledge of soccer, you should do no worse than a forecast generated naively by looking at the rankings. After all, the rankings are supposed to say something meaningful about relative team strengths. This entry is called Naive.2-FIFAWorldRanking in RogersBlogGroup.
The forecast based on team worth is named Naive.1-TeamWorth, and it has Spain over Brazil in the finals. It is a bit more sophisticated than the FIFA World Ranking to be sure, but it is still a fairly naive metric for forecasting.
I have also entered into the mix forecasts generated by three big financial firms: Goldman Sachs (Brazil), JP Morgan (England) and UBS (Spain). (That previous sentence may provide you with all you need to know to remove all your investments handled by JP Morgan;-) These forecasts can be found from links here. As you can see, they spent considerable effort in making these forecasts, using fairly sophisticated methods akin to ones used to guide their investment decisions. These sophisticated methods should outperform the naive methods, if they are to any value.
Do you think you have skill? Can you beat the big investment banks? Sign up here!
Chris Huhne, isn't it? Congratulations on your appointment to the Department of Energy and Climate Change with its dramatically daunting agenda, starting with the overriding electoral imperative to keep the lights on in a country with an incoherent energy strategy. The figures which stick in my mind are that during January 4-7, with high pressure stable over the country and the highest peak electricity demand in the coldest winter for 30 years, wind power contributed 0.6 per cent to the Grid. The Grid issued only its second-ever Gas Balancing Alert to divert gas to power stations and the coal stations were ramped up to 43 per cent. I witnessed at first hand the South African electricity supply crisis escalate between 2006-08 and you will know soon, if your officials haven't already briefed you, how swiftly and decisively Pretoria batted aside its anti-nuclear and green opponents, advanced its nuclear construction with Chinese help and increased its coal stockpiles.
I don't suppose that on the morning of May 11 you expected to be where you are sitting as you read this? Frankly, my 13 co-authors around the world and I were also taken by surprise. We had not intended either to launch our collective analysis of what to do about the other side of your portfolio on what, thanks to the creation of the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition, became for other stories (like ours) the worst news day in Britain in decades.
[UPDATE: Please do note that the image above is not from the FT account below, and is really just eye candy for this post. Sorry for any confusion, and thanks to several commentors!]
The IEA estimates that in 2008 – the latest year for which data are available – 37 large developing countries spent about $557bn in energy subsidies, according to a draft seen by the Financial Times. Previous estimates put it at about $300bn. Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India and China top the ranking, according to the report.
Some of the biggest spenders, including Saudi Arabia and China, recently warned of the need to cut subsidies over the medium term. . .
The IEA estimates that energy consumption could be reduced by 850m tonnes equivalent of oil – or the combined current consumption of Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand – if the subsidies are phased out between now and 2020. The consumption cut would save the equivalent of the current carbon dioxide emissions of Germany, France, the UK, Italy and Spain.
Critics of energy subsidies say they encourage wasteful consumption, reduce global energy security, impede investment in clean energy sources and undermine efforts to deal with the threat of climate change.
They also claim that subsidies are a burden to national budgets, with spending on financial support to oil, natural gas and coal sometimes larger than education or health spending. The IEA says the 37 countries surveyed spent, on average, about 2.1 per cent of their GDP on energy subsidies.
Following up an earlier discussion of the provisional squads, I've posted up tables below showing the country where each of the 23 players on each final World Cup national team plays professionally (interesting trivia: New Zealand has 2 players who apparently do not play professionally, Australia has one). More than half of the players in the World Cup play in the top six European leagues, and the English, German and Italian squads are each populated entirely by domestically-based players. Source for team data: FIFA (pdf).
Two remarkable reports were released late last week on conflicts of interest among scientists advising the World Health Organization on response to influenza (the news story above discuss them). The reports criticize the WHO for its failure to adequately disclose and manage potential conflicts of interest among its expert advisors, calling into question the legitimacy and credibility of its policy guidance on influenza.
Key scientists advising the World Health Organization on planningfor an influenza pandemic had done paid work for pharmaceuticalfirms that stood to gain from the guidance they were preparing.These conflicts of interest have never been publicly disclosedby WHO, and WHO has dismissed inquiries into its handling ofthe A/H1N1 pandemic as "conspiracy theories."
The BMJ website also has a 12 minute video on the investigation.
A second report was issued by a committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (here in PDF), and is scathing in its conclusions:
The Parliamentary Assembly is alarmed about the way in which the H1N1 influenza pandemic has been handled, not only by the World Health Organization (WHO), but also by the competent health authorities at the level of the European Union and at national level. It is particularly troubled by some of the consequences of decisions taken and advice given leading to distortion of priorities of public health services across Europe, waste of large sums of public money, and also unjustified scares and fears about health risks faced by the European public at large.
Be open. Be transparent. That seems to be the key learning point for the WHO from this joint investigation.
It is common practice for academic experts to work closely with the pharmaceutical industry, such as getting funding for drug trials, or to be paid for attending meetings.
On all clinical papers authors must publicly declare any competing interests.
So it is surely advisable that the WHO follows the same policy with its advisors.
And there is surely no logic in refusing to name the members of the emergency committee which advised the WHO about the pandemic.
To fail to do so presents an own goal to critics and conspiracy theorists.
I hope that the InterAcademy Council Review of the IPCC is paying close attention, as the IPCC has similar problems with a lack of disclosure and potential conflicts of interest.
The Financial Times very gently upbraids the National Center for Atmospheric Research for issuing a highly misleading press release (which includes the video above), which states in alarming fashion:
A detailed computer modeling study released today indicates that oil from the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico might soon extend along thousands of miles of the Atlantic coast and open ocean as early as this summer. . .
“I’ve had a lot of people ask me, ‘Will the oil reach Florida?’” says NCAR scientist Synte Peacock, who worked on the study. “Actually, our best knowledge says the scope of this environmental disaster is likely to reach far beyond Florida, with impacts that have yet to be understood.”
The computer simulations indicate that, once the oil in the uppermost ocean has become entrained in the Gulf of Mexico’s fast-moving Loop Current, it is likely to reach Florida's Atlantic coast within weeks.
NCAR tries to explain that the press release is not making a forecast, nor is it actually talking about oil, but a virtual dye in a computer model. NCAR sure had me fooled.
Models of ocean circulation seem like a potentially useful tool for informing various parts of the response. But I don’t see how feeding the media frenzy with misleading YouTube animations and overconfident quotations is related to that role. Apparently, for UCAR being part of the solution is not enough; they need to be in the spotlight too.
For a community under fire for sexing up its climate research, using a computer model to generate an over-hyped prediction (while simultaneously disclaiming that they are predictions, of course, wink wink) is probably not going to help restore trust.
The Center for American Progress shows that there is no subject beyond politicization. Seriously.
