The Aisle

Conversations with "skeptics" and lessons learned

2011-07-20T21:51:00.000-07:00

Today on my flight back to Boston I had the pleasure of chatting with a layperson who is a "skeptic" about climate change. He is a computer scientist at a local company, and our conversation began by following my favorite lead-in to the topic:

"So what do you do?"
"I study atmospheric science."
"[pause] Global warming... HA! What's your take on that?"

I've made a habit of chatting with such "skeptics" over the past couple of years, including discussions with a local radio host and a local television meteorologist. And in the process, I've learned a lot and I find that there are common themes that emerge across conversations:

A strong interest in protecting the environment (air, water, natural ecosystems), especially with regards to pollution.
No aversion to switch to cleaner technologies if feasible.
Strong support for spending money to solve problems (environmental, technological, etc.) that are well understood and have immediate, tangible benefits
A general skepticism towards forceful calls for action--particular those based in fear--on issues where a lot of money is at stake and thus political agendas are perceived to play a motivating role.
Confirmation of this skepticism if either: i) scientific "bad behavior" or misinformation is exposed and scientific credibility is damaged, or ii) policies are implemented that appear to serve climate change at the expense of other important values.

As an example of this last point, the gentleman on the plane made this comment regarding the recent effort to phase out incandescent light bulbs:
"I have three young kids. Why would I want to replace my incandescent lightbulb with a lightbulb that has a warning on it that it contains toxic materials if broken, just so I can save a few cents on my electricity bill?"

People often ask if it is depressing to talk to "skeptics" about climate change, but I find it to be exactly the opposite: these conversations completely contradict the all-too-common vilification of "skeptics" as ignorant, irrational, unsympathetic, with little regard for the environment or neighbor. Instead, I typically find regular people who have regular, busy lives and thus, like most everyone else, are forced to trust experts on complex science/technical issues. However, they are simultaneously aware and concerned that these experts are liable to be exploited to serve a political agenda.

Does this understanding resolve disagreements? Not necessarily. But it does distinctly shift the framing of the climate change debate from a yelling match of scientific "good vs. evil" to a murkier--yet healthier--open discussion of policy options and shared values.

Wanted: Specific heat of water vapor at constant pressure

2011-05-26T18:17:00.000-07:00

You'd think this is a simple matter of looking the number up, but apparently not...

The specific heat capacity of water vapor at constant pressure is listed at different values in different, but similarly reputable places relevant to atmospheric thermodynamics, with no caveat (e.g. temp/pressure dependence).

Examples:

"Elsevier Constants and Conversions for Atmospheric Science" http://bit.ly/koXQgX : 1952 J/(K*kg)

"Atmospheric Convection" by Kerry Emanuel: 1870 +- 25 J/(K*kg)

"Global Physical Climatology" by Dennis Hartmann: 1952 J/(K*kg)

Wikipedia "water vapor": ~1840 J/(K*kg)

A variation of 100 J/(K*kg) seems not insignificant. Yet I don't seem to be able to find any sort of empirical or theoretical formula, e.g. as a function of temp/pressure, for this quantity anywhere. Any thermo folks out there who can help out?

Dramatic decline in global poverty

2011-02-01T12:51:00.000-08:00

From a new report out from the Brookings Institution:

"Our results indicate that the world has seen a dramatic decrease in global poverty over the past six years, and that this trend is set to continue in the four years ahead. We estimate that between 2005 and 2010, the total number of poor people around the world fell by nearly half a billion people, from over 1.3 billion in 2005 to under 900 million in 2010. Looking ahead to 2015, extreme poverty could fall to under 600 million people—less than half the number regularly cited in describing the number of poor people in the world today. Poverty reduction of this magnitude is unparalleled in history: never before have so many people been lifted out of poverty over such a brief period of time."

The Economist on adaptation to climate change

2010-11-29T20:03:00.001-08:00

The Economist this week has a cover-story article exploring the need to focus on future adaptation to climate change in the wake of the collapse of any serious international plans for large-scale emissions reductions. Time and again, the newspaper does an exquisite job of discussing the science, risks, and benefits of climate change in judicious detail; the entire article is very much worth the read. One particularly brilliant excerpt:

It is tempting to imagine that adaptation decisions might wait for models that can provide greater certainty about what might happen where. This is a forlorn hope. Faster computers and new modeling techniques might well provide more details and finer distinctions. But they will not necessarily be more accurate, or capable of being shown to be so: if different models become more precise and as a result their disagreements grow rather than shrink, which are you going to trust? Decisions about adaptation will be made in conditions of pervasive uncertainty. So the trick will be to find ways of adapting to many possible future climates, not to tailor expectations to one future in particular.

Shifting the focus away from adaptation to a deterministic prediction of the future and towards assessing and reducing vulnerability--i.e. increasing resilience--to a warming climate in general will go a long way towards helping society deal with this problem in both the short and long term. An added benefit is that this perspective is in fact valuable regardless of what one believes is causing the climate to change in the first place.

A climate change futures market?

2010-08-03T22:17:00.000-07:00

In chatting with my father last night, an idea popped into my head. It began with a brief discussion of the Hurricane Risk Landfall Options (HurLOs) financial market created by a group called Weather Risk Solutions in which I am participating as part of a test phase this year.

The idea, though sometimes controversial, is quite simple: participants--in this case, the target is individual property owners in hurricane-prone areas of the U.S.--use their money to bet on specific coastal counties in which they believe a hurricane will make landfall, with the caveat that such an event must cause over $1 mil in damage (as determined by an independent third-party assessment). If you select the correct county, then you split the entire pot of money based on the relative bets placed by each people on that county (e.g. if only two people bet on the "winning" county, one $5000 and the other $10000, then the former will receive 1/3 and the latter 2/3 of the all money bet). In theory, the market then acts as a form of insurance, where people who live on the coast will place bets on the counties in their immediate vicinity and thus when they "win", the money that they collect will go towards offsetting damages caused by the hurricane itself. In this way, then, this financial product, like any other weather derivative, acts as a risk management tool. (Moreover, trading is restricted to direct purchases of HurLOs as well as direct resales between participants; no short-selling is allowed)

Importantly, though, rather than selecting a particular county, one may also select "No Landfall" in the case that he/she believes that no hurricane with damage surpassing the threshold value will occur this season.

It was this final point emerging in the context of a broader discussion on climate change that provoked the following thought: could this financial product also be applied to climate change, specifically for the purpose of adaptation? After all, we've had a couple of instances of climate change skeptics proposing bets that the world is not facing imminent danger due to global warming. Such a market would simply be an extension of this mentality to the broader skeptic community: for those concerned about climate change it would take the form of insurance, while for skeptics it offers a chance to make a little money.

One simple, naive example: the threshold for a payout is a sea-level rise of greater than 50 cm between 2010 and 2050. Those who would be materially affected by such a rise have a strong interest to put money in, and anyone who thinks that there's little cause for concern can put their money where there mouth is. In the end, if it turns out that sea level rise is less dramatic than we had thought, the result is no different than having purchased fire insurance for your house without it ever actually catching fire.

Other options: geographic regions of sustained drought (e.g. in the western US), or of extreme temperatures; even global temperature itself?

Of course, this cannot be a panacea for addressing global warming, and there are a number of issues that immediately come to mind:
1) Public goods: if no single entity has a direct financial incentive to protect something, then this mechanism isn't helpful. Example: a city's infrastructure
2) Threshold ambiguity: this mechanism only works if a straightforward, universally-agreed upon threshold exists, yet many aspects of climate are difficult to pinpoint and are inherently long-term. Example: a climate change "skeptic" would probably not bet against a regional 10-year drought in the 2050s because that is a plausible result of natural variability alone.
3) Moral hazard: if people, in theory, can hedge against all risks related to climate change, then what's the incentive to try to prevent it from happening in the first place?
4) Bankruptcy: What if participants who bet and lose cannot pay? Or worse yet, they may purposefully bet wildly under the rational expectation that if they lose they will be able to avoid payment simply by declaring bankruptcy. Or more simply, most stakeholders don't plan that far into the future (what fraction of companies even last 40 years?).

I'm also not quite sure if there actually exists any incentive to pay into a system now whose payoff will be delayed 40 years (maybe any gains will just be offset by inflation?). Nonetheless, it's an idea. A quick google search didn't bring up much on this topic, though I'm sure it's been discussed somewhere.

Ultimately, the idea of asking people who do not think climate change is a problem to back their views up financially is intriguing, particularly as climate policy both in the US and globally continues to languish helplessly and the need for adaptation down the road becomes increasingly apparent.

Thoughts/ideas welcome. And if this idea has already been addressed elsewhere, please let me know.

Reviewing the IPCC Working Group II (Impacts)

2010-07-07T06:17:00.000-07:00

An interesting summary article from the Economist on the Dutch review of IPCC WGII:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsbook/2010/07/bias_and_ipcc_report

A new paper on the (new) future of climate policy

2010-05-11T21:12:00.000-07:00

Released yesterday "The Hartwell Paper": http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/mackinderProgramme/theHartwellPaper/

The paper itself is well worth the read, particularly Sections II(B) and II(C) on the history of the problems of climate policy.

The executive summary:
"Climate policy, as it has been understood and practised by many governments of the world under the Kyoto Protocol approach, has failed to produce any discernable real world reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases in fifteen years. The underlying reason for this is that the UNFCCC/Kyoto model was structurally flawed and doomed to fail because it systematically misunderstood the nature of climate change as a policy issue between 1985 and 2009. However, the currently dominant approach has acquired immense political momentum because of the quantities of political capital sunk into it. But in any case the UNFCCC/Kyoto model of climate policy cannot continue because it crashed in late 2009. The Hartwell Paper sets and reviews this context; but doing so is not its sole or primary purpose.

The crash of 2009 presents an immense opportunity to set climate policy free to fly at last. The principal motivation and purpose of this Paper is to explain and to advance this opportunity. To do so involves understanding and accepting a startling proposition. It is now plain that it is not possible to have a 'climate policy' that has emissions reductions as the all encompassing goal. However, there are many other reasons why the decarbonisation of the global economy is highly desirable. Therefore, the Paper advocates a radical reframing – an inverting – of approach: accepting that decarbonisation will only be achieved successfully as a benefit contingent upon other goals which are politically attractive and relentlessly pragmatic.

The Paper therefore proposes that the organising principle of our effort should be the raising up of human dignity via three overarching objectives: ensuring energy access for all; ensuring that we develop in a manner that does not undermine the essential functioning of the Earth system; ensuring that our societies are adequately equipped to withstand the risks and dangers that come from all the vagaries of climate, whatever their cause may be.

It explains radical and practical ways to reduce non-CO2 human forcing of climate. It argues that improved climate risk management is a valid policy goal, and is not simply congruent with carbon policy. It explains the political prerequisite of energy efficiency strategies as a first step and documents how this can achieve real emissions reductions. But, above all, it emphasises the primacy of accelerating decarbonisation of energy supply. This calls for very substantially increased investment in innovation in non-carbon energy sources in order to diversify energy supply technologies. The ultimate goal of doing this is to develop non-carbon energy supplies at unsubsidised costs less than those using fossil fuels. The Hartwell Paper advocates funding this work by low hypothecated (dedicated) carbon taxes. It opens discussion on how to channel such money productively.

To reframe the climate issue around matters of human dignity is not just noble or necessary. It is also likely to be more effective than the approach of framing around human sinfulness –which has failed and will continue to fail."

And a couple notable details from the paper itself:

Climate change as a 'wicked' problem:
"What makes a problem ‘wicked’ is the impossibility of giving it a definitive formulation: the information needed to understand the problem is dependent upon one’s idea for solving it. Furthermore, wicked problems lack a stopping rule: we cannot know whether we have a sufficient understanding to stop searching for more understanding. There is no end to causal chains in interacting open systems of which the climate is the world’s prime example.... [As] wicked problems demonstrate their intractability, the public soon grows weary of them."

Elaboration on the tax to fund R&D:
"An ‘inefficient’ (in strictly theoretical terms) tax: that is to say one that is not equated to the marginal damages of emissions, nor aspires to be so... [and] that is not justified on the basis of trying to alter short-term consumption behaviour as the once popular 'Cap & Trade' approach hoped to do [but rather on the basis of] credible long-term global commitments and methods to invest in energy innovation."

The power of nature in an interdependent modern society

2010-05-02T14:23:00.001-07:00

First, we had a volcano that shut down air traffic for millions of people for over a week. Next we have a disasterous oil geyser at the bottom of the sea that we are somehow incapable of shutting off. Finally, we have a water main break that requires over 2 million people in a highly developed country to boil their water for at least the next few days to make it suitable to drink.

There's a theme here of the re-emergent power of nature and its ability to disrupt modern developed society. Interestingly, it would seem that the history of technological development was one of steady progress in overcoming the power of nature in human society, yet technological change over the past decade, in the form of an increasingly diverse and interdependent set of networks for the delivery of goods and services at a global scale, may actually be counteracting that progress. I wonder if this will become a larger topic of discussion in the media over the coming weeks.

In any case, I couldn't help but think this morning what would happen if the water main break and one of these feared geomagnetic storms had occurred simultaneously: for many, no electricity would mean no boiling water, either. It's a strange thought, but one that, based on recent events, apparently isn't as extreme as one might imagine.

Climate Debate on Colbert Report

2010-04-06T21:13:00.001-07:00

For anyone who witnessed the "climate debate" on the Colbert Report, which I won't link to here since it was so inane, it's pretty clear that climate change is not a topic that can or should ever be debated in a 3-minute television segment, unless the goal is to have people shout arbitrary, context-free "facts" back and forth. The segment was funny (it's Colbert, after all), but also made my stomach cringe, as I couldn't help but think that this is what the public perception of climate science has been reduced to.

Data quality issues with the historical global temperature record

2010-02-17T18:43:00.000-08:00

In my previous post, I discussed what claims of “no warming over the past decade” really mean when placed in the context of the global temperature record of the past 100+ years. The temperature record I used is taken from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) dataset, which is predominantly derived from meteorological stations spread out (non-uniformly) around the world.

A commenter pointed out (facebook only, scroll down) existing uncertainties in this dataset due to potential issues with station location and re-location, instrument type and variation, and concerns over the urban heat island effect. Furthermore, there exists a discrepancy between the station-based temperature records (of which there are a few, and which show similar trends) and the satellite-based temperature records that extend back to 1979 and which are independent from the station-based datasets (as far as I know).

To address these concerns, I start first with graphs of the monthly global mean temperature anomaly (observed – baseline mean) over the satellite era, January 1979 – January 2010. Three different datasets are displayed, one based on surface station data (GISS) and two based on satellite data (UAH, RSS); linear trends given are over the full 1979-2010 period:

NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) dataset of surface temperature anomalies. Trend = +.168 C/decade
University of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH) dataset of satellite-derived lower tropospheric (i.e. near-surface) temperature anomalies. Trend = +.132 C/decade
Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) dataset of satellite-derived lower tropospheric (i.e. near-surface) temperature anomalies. Trend = +.156 C/decade

It appears that, while the satellite record (.132 and .156 C/decade) does show a weaker trend than the GISS station-based data (.168 C/decade) over the same period, the two datasets are in fact not that far apart. (Aside: I did notice that 1979 is particularly cold and January 2010 is particularly warm, but trends excluding those data are not much different)

Given that the satellite data are independent from the station-based datasets should give greater confidence in the recent historical record. Unfortunately we do not have satellite data prior to 1979 to verify station data prior to this period.

Regarding data integrity specifically, is it possible that the discrepancy between station-based and satellite-based datasets is due to problems with station instrumentation and location, as well as poor data management? Possibly. But it’s important to note the literature providing evidence to the contrary:

A recent study on the effect of station data quality on the United States temperature record, fueled by the demands of climate change “skeptic” Anthony Watts for closer scrutiny of data quality, found that lower-quality sites actually introduce a cold, rather than warm, bias to the temperature record. Bad station data can indeed work both ways.
Other studies have looked at the urban heat island effect specifically and also found little evidence for a warm bias.
Station data also carry with it concerns about a possible cold bias due to poor data coverage over the Arctic, where warming has been most dramatic.
Satellite data has its own associated uncertainties as well

So there are clearly concerns about data quality on both sides, but it seems that a general warming trend emerges despite these uncertainties.

Moreover, although undoubtedly we should critically evaluate the integrity of our datasets, I often find discussions over the precise reliability of the various temperature datasets to be missing the point given that there exist a large volume of other, non-temperature indicators of warming. These include:

Decline in sea ice and glacier extent
Decline in snow cover in the northern hemisphere
Changes in plant phenology: earlier leaf unfolding, flowering, fruit ripening; later leaf coloring, leaf fall of plants; poleward shift in plant distributions/abundanc; lengthening of the growing season
Changes in animal phenology: changes in bird/fish migration/egg laying, appearance/emergence of butterflies/insects, mammalian hibernation

My conclusion is that:

There is strong evidence that a warming trend exists, from both temperature records and non-temperature observations
The existence of this trend in the temperature record does not seem to depend on data errors
Temperature records should be scrutinized to ensure their integrity, but policy decisions should not depend on the precision of the various temperature records. Importantly, the observed temperature trend cannot be used as a reliable indicator for future temperature trends because the system is non-linear—it has many feedbacks, many other forcings (e.g. volcanic aerosols), and many processes that operate over a range of timescales from months to millennia. Thus, whether temperatures have increased .13 C/decade or .17 C/decade is not a scientifically relevant question to the decision-making process.

Overall, the climate is very complex, and temperature is really just one of many indicators that things are changing.

For reference: the global temperature record over the past 100+ years

2010-02-16T21:40:00.001-08:00

I think I wrote about this before. But I am going to do it one more time anyways, since this has been all over the news lately. :)

The claim that "there has been no global warming over the past decade" really ought to always be made in the presence of the graph of the recent historical global temperature record. The general public could then see for themselves why these claims don't carry any weight.

So just for reference: Global mean temperature anomalies (i.e. departure from the mean)

(source: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif)

The past 8 years are 8 of the 9 warmest years in the observational record dating back to the late 19th century. Picking out specific trends, though, depends on how you want to look at the data (in this case, the annual mean temperature anomaly (black line) and 5-year running mean temperature anomaly (red line) are shown). If you choose to look at the full annual mean temperature plot (as the "skeptics" do), then it is true that there has been no warming over the past 8-12 years.

However, if you choose the black line, then all you have to do is go back to other periods in the record--when temperatures were substantially cooler than they are today when viewed over timescales of 10 years or longer--to see that no warming over 8 years happens pretty regularly. In fact, the 1940s-70s as a whole had very little warming, yet over the timescale of the century there is clearly a long-term upward trend.

Trends in global mean temperature over a period of only several years (and arguably longer) are meaningless in the context of climate change.

This graph is not overly complicated. Is it asking too much for the media to include it in the ongoing public discussion on this topic?

The IPCC acting like a 5 year old

2010-02-04T15:36:00.000-08:00

Why can't the IPCC learn to just say "sorry, we made a mistake"?

Certainly it may be understandable for them initially to become somewhat defensive, as those in the climate science community know well that there are many out there trying they're best to invalidate the science. But, as has been pointed out many times now, people likely would be generally understanding of the revelation of a few errors in such a massive report. The fact is that the relevance of "the truth" in this case has a lot less to do with the disputed scientific facts themselves and a lot more to do with the true nature of the scientific process to which the IPCC supposedly adheres--and, in turn, the scientific credibility that has earned them the public's trust on the issue of climate change.

Yet even after weeks have passed since these errors have come out, Chairman Pachauri and other IPCC leaders continue to sound incredibly defensive. And now today the Economist published an interview with Pachauri that, for me, read like a 5 year old's alibi for something he knows he's done wrong: all of a sudden regarding any instance of alleged wrongdoing, Pachauri either was completely unaware of the matter or has no expertise and so cannot be implicated. To the Economist's credit, they do well in trying to connect the dots in the places where the story just doesn't seem to make sense (in particular in response to Pachauri's comment that "when you are talking about something which is global, such as climate change, surely it would apply to every side of the mountain," which clearly indicates that he has no idea what he's talking about in this instance).

As Mark Twain once noted: "Always tell the truth, that way you don't have to remember anything." A simple "We messed up, and we'll take the following steps to try to make it better next time..." from the IPCC would go a long way toward pulling themselves out of the public doghouse.

Bill Gates weighs in on climate change

2010-01-22T09:56:00.000-08:00

The need to get to zero emissions in key sectors almost never gets mentioned. The danger is people will think they just need to do a little bit and things will be fine.

Bill Gates gives some insightful commentary on his blog (?) regarding what climate policy needs to focus on if we want to be successful in reducing emissions as much as is required.

The Brown aftermath

2010-01-21T05:05:00.000-08:00

An interesting and convincing take on the post-Brown aftermath and its true meaning for the goals and agenda of the Democratic Party:

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/01/20/left/index.html

Copenhagen: A post-modern affair

2009-12-11T12:41:00.000-08:00

The Breakthrough Institute provides a very interesting and well-written piece on what the UN climate conference at Copenhagen truly represents. Warning: this article is not for the environmental faint of heart.

From the opening ceremony's video of a little girl running from an earthquake to the promises of emissions reductions, everything taking place in Copenhagen is contrived. The outcome of climate talks -- no treaty, no emissions reductions -- was known in advance. And yet participants pretend there is an unfolding drama. As such, Copenhagen is history's first completely postmodern global event. It's a festival of phoniness. With the ambitions of Versailles but the power of Davos, Copenhagen creates a cognitive dissonance for its creators, which results in ever-more manic displays of apocalypse anxiety and false hope. In the end, Copenhagen tells us more about ourselves -- our post-American world, our fragmented media environment, and our hyper-partisanship -- than about any attempt to slow global warming.

While the article comes off awfully callous at times, it's hard to argue the main points within. In two weeks time we'll see if anything comes out of Copenhagen to prove their arguments wrong. I am not optimistic.

Irony

2009-12-09T14:32:00.000-08:00

Thanks Fox News.

From a segment on the Daily Show last night that was absolutely hilarious and on point.

"The science is settled"

2009-12-09T09:27:00.000-08:00

A great post from Roger Pielke Jr. on the oft-used and oft-exploited statement "the science is settled" with respect to global warming, including this classic Calvin and Hobbes comic.

In it he notes:

So the next time that you hear that the "science is settled" you can understand that it is settled, but the way that it is settled doesn't provide any answers to questions of politics.

Once again, scientific consensus does not equate to policy consensus. Climate science will not solve our climate policy problems.

Climate emails part II: A very thoughtful response

2009-12-02T22:37:00.001-08:00

A very thoughtful response on "climategate" from Mike Hulme, from a former employee at the Climate Research Unit (CRU):

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107104574571613215771336.html

An interview on the CRU hacked climate science emails

2009-12-02T22:09:00.001-08:00

I hope to write up my response to the recent CRU hacked climate science emails scandal eventually, but for now I'll hold back until I have time to have a closer look at the emails. Nonetheless, from my reading of many articles on both sides on the matter, I found an interview with Judith Curry, climate scientist at Georgia Tech, to be particularly insightful: http://insiderinterviews.nationaljournal.com/2009/12/email-controversy-divides.php

In particular, with regards to the tactic of dismissing skeptics due to assumed political motivations:

Well, the motivation of the skeptic isn't really the point. The point is whether or not they have a valid argument.

I couldn't agree more.

Why 10 years of non-warming doesn't mean much

2009-11-29T10:21:00.001-08:00

There has been an outpouring of articles in the mainstream media (WSJ, BBC, NYT) on the topic of the lack of warming in the global mean surface temperature over the past 10 years, as skeptics are quick to jump on this fact as a reason to question the prevailing climate science paradigm of anthropogenic global warming. I've gotten questions from a lot of people on the issue, and so for others who are curious here is my response below.

Starting from the assumption that it indeed hasn't warmed much, if at all, (I like Figure 2 here) there are two questions to ask:

1) What does it say about greenhouse gas (GHG) induced climate change?

There are other forcings besides just GHG emissions (e.g. solar activity, which is at a record minimum right now), many of which we don't understand very well. The public is woefully uninformed about this, since the IPCC/everyone have convinced the public that the smooth curve shown in climate projections represents a precise prediction and that GHGs are the only thing that matters. Since the GHG forcing isn't the only primary forcing, deviations up or down from the projected curve do not automatically falsify the anthropogenic greenhouse theory.

2) How big of a deviation is needed to bring the GHG theory into question?

It is assumed that GHG forcing is the dominant long-term forcing; however, other shorter term forcings certainly exist (e.g. El Nino, others that we dont understand). Therefore, if our model projections represent our best guess of the long-term future of the global mean temperature, then the probability of a deviation of a given magnitude (i.e. total temperature change over time) from these projections decreases, in a general sense, with increasing magnitude. So, for example, if GHGs should induce warming of .02 deg per year (I made that up), then over a given period of time the chance that this warming is offset for one year is very likely (e.g. La Nina), offset for 5 years still likely, but offset for perhaps 20 years not so likely (since this implies .4 deg of warming that hasn't happened).

NOAA put our a statement earlier this year in response to the lack of warming. (Roger Pielke Jr. wrote a nice blog post about it: http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/07/noaa-explains-global-temperature.html) In it, they conclude "The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate." Statistically speaking, then, there is a less than 5% chance of zero warming for 15 years. So if you want to use the 95% confidence level as your indicator of "meaning", then it'll take 5 more years of zero warming in order for us to seriously question the GHG theory. However, even the 95% confidence level itself is arbitrary, although a line does need to be drawn somewhere (certainly if it didn't warm for 100 years, you would be naive not to question the prevailing theory).

In the end, then, the 10 years of observed non-warming is an interesting scientific question, but in the context of invalidating climate science, it doesn't (yet) mean a whole lot.

How facebook, gchat, and texting brings us closer together

2009-11-28T19:09:00.000-08:00

An interesting TED talk making the counterargument against the idea that all of these recent developments in communication technology--instant messanging, texting, facebook, twitter--are making people more isolated.

http://www.ted.com/talks/stefana_broadbent_how_the_internet_enables_intimacy.html

I found most interesting the discussion of how the past 150 years of social change is marked by a gradually increasing loss of intimacy: e.g. industrialization moves work away from home, both parents working requires children to be sent to school all day. Are facebook and twitter simply technologies that finally allow us to rebridge that gap?

Climate change: more than just carbon dioxide

2009-11-20T20:03:00.001-08:00

A statement on climate change authored by 19 AGU Fellows has been published in the American Geophysical Union's EOS (free draft copy or full version that requires subscription) that I fully support and that is essential to good climate policy. Here is the introduction in full:

Humans are recognized as having a major role in influencing environmental variability and change, including their influence on the climate system. To advance scientists’ understanding of the role of humans within the climate system, there remains a need to resolve which of the following three hypotheses is correct:

Hypothesis 1: Human influence on climate variability and change is of minimal importance, and natural causes dominate climate variations and changes on all time scales. In coming decades, the human influence will continue to be minimal.

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

Hypothesis 2b: Although the natural causes of climate variations and changes are undoubtedly important, the human influences are significant and are dominated by the emissions into the atmosphere of greenhouse gases, the most important of which is CO2. The adverse impact of these gases on regional and global climate constitutes the primary climate issue for the coming decades.

These hypotheses are mutually exclusive. Thus, the accumulated evidence can only provide support for one of these hypotheses. The question is which one?

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

We therefore conclude that hypothesis 2a is better supported than hypothesis 2b, which is a policy that focuses on modulating carbon emissions. Hypothesis 2b as a framework to mitigate climate change will neglect the diversity of other, important first-order human climate forcings that also can have adverse effects on the climate system. We urge that these other climate forcings should also be considered with respect to mitigation and adaptation policies.

Why do we blink?

2009-10-12T20:39:00.000-07:00

The reason's not what you might think.

http://blogs.wnyc.org/radiolab/2009/10/05/blink/

15 minutes couldn't be spent any better. What a terrific show.

Photography and civil liberties

2009-10-10T09:30:00.000-07:00

But one afternoon several years ago in the tiny Ohio River Valley town of Poca, W. Va., he found himself and his assistant surrounded by police cruisers, watching as sheriffs searched their rental car and came up with astack of Polaroids of power plants much like the coal-fired one that towered across the river. This discovery led to the summoning of an F.B.I. agent, who concluded after much deliberation that Mr. Epstein had broken no laws by taking pictures near the plant, but told him, as he later recalled, “If you were Muslim, you’dbe cuffed and taken in for questioning.”

This is an excerpt from a terrific article in yesterday's NYT titled "Capturing a Nation's Thirst for Energy", which details the efforts of Mitch Epstein, a photographer who set out over the past 6 years to photograph, in his words, “the beauty and terror of early-21st-century America, as it clings to past comforts and gropes for a more sensible future.” In the process, the objective came to mean much more than just how we produce energy, but also the nature of civil liberties and counter-terrorism in post-9/11 America, as Epstein repeatedly encountered staunch opposition by local and FBI officials and civilians to his photography, "to the point later where I would almost have an anxiety attack every time I pulled over to the side of the road to take a picture.”

Apparently personal photography is very strictly monitored by the FBI to a frightening, almost Big Brother-like degree, although the American public is arguably just as much to blame (in Epstein's case, in one town "someone called the police to report a man on Main Street carrying a missile launcher," which was, of course, his large camera apparatus). A friend of mine recounted a story a few years ago of her Professor, who is Iranian, getting phone calls from the FBI after someone reported a "suspicious" man taking photographs of the local Hospital. He was indeed taking photographs, with his family, of the Hospital--since that's where he had worked as a researcher for many years.

I also recall a big controversy last year when I lived in DC over the supposed photography ban at Union Station (the main train station near Capitol Hill), which is a historic and beautiful building that is without a doubt a major tourist attrction. While no ban was actually in the books, security officials were known to unceremoniously grab cameras and force photographers out of the building under the orders of some undisclosed higher power in the administration.

In some cases it appears it's the counter-terrorism agencies themselves keeping watch, while in others it's anonymous tips of "suspicion" that lead to such encounters. Both engender a worrisome culture of fear. Most worrisome is the apparent fact that if you are muslim in this country, you cannot photograph anything of interest without a sneaking but very real fear that you are being watched--either by the government or by your fellow citizens--and that you will be interrogated.

Perhaps these anecdotal stories skew what is in fact a friendlier reality, but somehow I doubt it. Surely there are better, less intrusive options that allow the government to defend its citizens from terrorism without simultaneously forcing its citizens to defend themselves from each other.

Someone finally complains about Ticketmaster

2009-10-08T15:09:00.000-07:00

From today's New York Times:

Britain's antitrust regulator said Thursday that it would oppose the planned merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation, warning that the consolidation of two major players in entertainment in the United States and Europe could lead to higher concert ticket prices and less competition.

I'm not clear how Ticketmaster isn't already considered a monopoly in the U.S. given that the fees they charge seem to perpetually increase despite the fact that increasing internet business efficiency presumably reduces their marginal costs ever closer to zero.

Cheap Plastic Chinese Development

2009-10-01T06:15:00.001-07:00

I had wanted to use the excessively provocative title "What's wrong with buying cheap plastic crap from China?" but changed my mind at the last moment because, well, that's not the point. Of course there are serious issues associated with massive American consumption of cheap Chinese products: environmental, labor rights, equity, etc. Instead, the point is: How does this compare with the fact that "an estimated 400 million people in China have been lifted out of poverty (defined as $1 USD / day) over the past 30 years"?

I find this to be particularly interesting because those who are most outspoken in decrying the consumption of such products Made in China are often those who believe we in the West have a responsibility to reduce poverty, hunger, etc. around the world. It seems to me that, over the past three decades, our insatiable consumption has effectively amounted to a massive wealth transfer from the West to a highly under-developed country, China. And after countless failed efforts at development programs and massive top-down investments of wealth into under-developed countries around the world that have been utterly squandered over the past half-century, one would imagine that the story of America's consumption and China's growth would be viewed as an incredible success story of how the West can fruitfully fund growth in other countries. And yet it rarely is.

Perhaps, then, it's a good thing that, despite all of the verbal assaults against all things Made in China, we just keep on buying them.

Just a thought. Comments/criticisms welcome.

The lead up to the Copenhagen climate talks

2009-09-29T05:36:00.000-07:00

A great guide to the draft agreement for the UN International Climate Change conference of parties in December in Copenhagen: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/28/copenhagen-climate-text.

A top European official told the Guardian: "We've moved on from the idea that we can negotiate on targets. That's naive and just not the way the deal will be done. The best we can get is that countries will put in what they want to commit to."

This could actually be considered progress if the international community can let go of the sacred cow of arbitrary and overly-idealistic GHG emissions targets and agree upon a more practical plan that individual nations can actually strive to achieve. Of course, what precisely this latter plan would entail is unclear.

Gross National Happiness

2009-09-28T09:15:00.000-07:00

For my policy class we read the article: "Measuring the Happiness of Large-Scale Written Expression: Songs, Blogs, and Presidents".

While one can argue about the merits of its methodology and relevance to the real world, it is nonetheless an awesome topic of exploration: using the recent history of the written word, including song lyrics, Presidential State of the Union addresses, and the vast domain of language from everyday people from societies/cultures around the world affectionately known as the modern blogosphere, to measure the "pulse" of human happiness.

Here is the abstract:

The importance of quantifying the nature and intensity of emotional states at the level of populations is evident: we would like to know how, when, and why individuals feel as they do if we wish, for example, to better construct public policy, build more successful organizations, and, from a scientific perspective, more fully understand economic and social phenomena. Here, by incorporating direct human assessment of words, we quantify happiness levels on a continuous scale for a diverse set of large-scale texts: song titles and lyrics, weblogs, and State of the Union addresses. Our method is transparent, improvable, capable of rapidly processing Web-scale texts, and moves beyond approaches based on coarse categorization. Among a number of observations, we find that the happiness of song lyrics trends downward from the 1960s to the mid 1990s while remaining stable within genres, and that the happiness of blogs has steadily increased from 2005 to 2009, exhibiting a striking rise and fall with blogger age and distance from the Earth’s equator.

The start of "Death Panels"

2009-09-04T10:56:00.001-07:00

A discussion of the importance end-of-life care in La Crosse, WI, which was the source of the ridiculous uproar about government-run "death panels", and how unfortunately far the political debate has strayed from reality: here.

The Economics of Panhandling

2009-08-30T15:04:00.000-07:00

I've always wondered about this, and I stumbled upon a fascinating article here.

Follow up: BBC audio on climate policy woes

2009-08-30T14:38:00.001-07:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00m721x

They Might Be Environmentalists

2009-08-30T10:00:00.001-07:00

I didn't realize that They Might Be Giants, known for their quirky/nerdy alt rock glory in the 90s and early 2000s (including the theme song to the Fox show Malcolm in the Middle, still exist. But it turns out they are indeed still rocking, and in fact have shifted recently to create children's educational CD/DVD music projects, one of which (Here come the 123s) won the 2009 Grammy award for "Best Musical Album for Children".

Their latest work, titled Here Comes Science, will be released on Tuesday and, as the title suggests, is filled with songs and accompanying music videos related to various cool things in science, including "I am a Paleontologist", "Why Does the Sun Shine?", and "Why Does the Sun Really Shine?". Another song is titled "Electric Car", which basically (and hilariously) just sings "Lets get in my electric car" many times over, with a couple other lines in there; the video's animation is terrific.

I don't feel like songs about electric cars (or similar topics) were very popular in the past, but maybe I'm wrong. So I suppose this is a fun aspect of the new culture of environmentalism in which the current generation of kids will be raised.

Hey, if electric cars can be as cool as that video, I definitely want one, too.

Rationalism and culture

2009-08-29T18:57:00.000-07:00

I'm stealing this from a comment posted on another website, but I think the following is fascinating.

Regarding the book "Sway: The Irresistable Pull of Irrational Behavior" (one of these pop-econ Freakonomics-type books), the commenter noted:

[The authors] report that there are distinct differences in how the audiences for the various “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” shows react to the “lifeline” audience-survey questions from the contestants, depending on which country the show is set in. They insist that the differences are the result of deliberate decisions made by the audience members, which arise from their national cultures. In the US, where there is a culture of individual striving, audiences generally try to help out, and their answers are right about 90% of the time. In Russia, where there is a long-ingrained tradition of conformism – both helping the needy and pulling down achievers, so nobody stands out too much – audiences tend to deliberately sabotage contestants, because they don’t want them to become millionaires; it is so common that Russian contestants have started to avoid asking for audience help. In France, there is a culture of intellectual achievement, which means that audiences will help contestants if they think they are worthy – they give one example of a case where a contestant actually asked for help on a question whether the Sun or the Moon revolved around the Earth, and 52% of the audience said it was the Sun, apparently because they thought he was so stupid he deserved to lose (which he did, after relying on their advice).

I have not read this book and can't find anything online attesting to the credibility of such claims. But I imagine that only basic statistics are needed to demonstrate significant differences between audience success rates across countries (although it would be great to know the audience success rate in Russia and France, as well). Should large differences exist, there are few obvious explanations that can be reasonably applied to a large sample size of large audiences like that used in Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, but prevailing cultural attitudes could certainly be a reasonable one.

If the above is really true (or even partially true), it adds further weight to those, such as anthropologists, who insist that the significance of local culture in shaping individual rationality (which renders "rationality" a relative term rather than some universal human characteristic) is too often neglected by modern western microeconomic theory.

The deeper meaning of "Change"

2009-08-28T13:04:00.000-07:00

Discontent verging on anger is almost the price of admission to our political culture these days. You're nobody if you're not furious at Congress and/or the media and/or your health care and/or the president. To believe in your country's institutions is virtually unpatriotic.
This is only as long as your discontent can remain abstract, of course. When you are asked to approve of even moderate but genuine change, the status quo starts to look pretty good.
- Michael Kinsley, The Washington Post (article here)

Great article exploring the deeper roots of the recent health care reform woes. I've seen this first hand from my own mom (not on facebook :), who supports health care reform but added the caveat that she likes her coverage and is worried about losing it. Without an infallible guarantee at the individual level that nothing will change for those who currently do have quality health care--which is arguably impossible, even if somehow codified into law, given the level of distrust of government in the U.S.--sweeping health care reform indeed appears to exist much more as an abstract ideal than a practical desire.

Book recommendation

2009-08-26T18:19:00.000-07:00

For those interested in the causes of global struggles with climate policy, I highly recommend the recently-published book "Why We Disagree About Climate Change" by Mike Hulme, a distinguished climate scientist who is well-versed in the technical details of climate change.

That said, though, this book is tacitly not about the science, but rather begins from the assumption of shared acceptance of climate change as a reality that needs to be addressed--and then explores why, despite scientific agreement, we struggle so mightily to reach a similar degree of policy agreement.

The book does not delve into excessive detail for any given subject (occasionally to its detriment), but instead examines the sources of our disagreement from a more philosophical level. Hulme breaks down his arguments into 7 key facets:

1) How we use science: as fact or as guide in the face of irreducible uncertainty
2) Value systems: neoclassical vs. ecological economics and the valuation (or not) of ecological services--a.k.a. one man's waste is another man's gold
3) Belief systems: our duty to others, to nature, and to deities
4) How we perceive risk: who defines what constitutes "dangerous" climate change?
5) The communication of risk: how the variety of ways in which climate change is framed (e.g. the precise language of expression used) to suit particular agendas ends up confusing the public
6) How we view development: does the new focus on "sustainable development" conflict with the old development view of poverty alleviation, education etc.?
7) Systems of governance: who coordinates cooperation between nations with strongly divergent governing philosophies?

I'll touch on a couple of particularly interesting points later on, but needless to say it's a great introduction to why climate change is such a difficult problem to tackle, with or without scientific consensus.

Vacation time :)

2009-08-14T16:36:00.001-07:00

It's the economy, stupid

2009-08-14T11:55:00.000-07:00

Random note after reading reader comments on one of the blogs I read: I think it's funny how polarized and outspoken people are when giving their views on the economy. My sense is that because no one actually understands how the economy works (see Keynes vs. Friedman), people are free to claim utmost certainty in their beliefs (which seems an appropriate word when it comes to economics) since it's impossible for them to be proven wrong. Quite dismal indeed.

Prevention vs. Treatment

2009-08-14T05:23:00.000-07:00

Researchers who have examined the effects of preventive care generally find that the added costs of widespread use of preventive services tend to exceed the savings from averted illness.

- Congressional Budget Office

I normally disagree with about 95% of what Charles Krauthammer says in the Washington Post, but I had heard this fact before in passing and wondered, and now he's written an opinion piece on this topic in relation to the Democrats' favorite health-care mantra that "prevention saves lives and money." Overall the article seems reasonable, particularly noting:

Prevention is a wondrous good, but in the aggregate it costs society money. Nothing wrong with that. That's the whole premise of medicine. Treating a heart attack or setting a broken leg also costs society. But we do it because it alleviates human suffering.

Counterpoints, anyone?

Follow up on previous post: per-capita emissions

2009-08-13T07:16:00.001-07:00

The comment by the Indian climate rep also underscores the fundamental importance of measuring regional and national greenhouse gas emissions on a per-capita basis. Here is the breakdown for 2006 fossil-fuel based CO2 emissions based on the US DOE Energy Information Administration's "International Energy Annual 2006":

The graph only displays selected countries, but the point is that China (81st) and especially India (138th) are nowhere near the top of the list of 207 countries based on annual per-capita GHG emissions from fossil fuels.

Moreover, the notion of assessing emissions at the country-level is a bit odd. What if China were in fact broken up such that each province was it's own nation-state? In that case, each individual country might be no different than many of the other developing nations around the world (e.g. Namibia, which has similar emissions levels as shown in the graph above), with low per-capita emissions levels and low aggregate national emissions--and no one could ethically claim that they should be required to set emissions limits. The same argument, with even greater emphasis, could be made for India.

Some would claim that this hypothetical group of "nations" (split up from either China or India) should act together, as the E.U. does. Curiously, though, in 2006 the aggregate CO2 emission from fossil fuels for Central and South America and that of India are nearly identical at approximately 1,200 million metric tons of CO2; meanwhile, India's population is 2.5 times greater than that of Central and South America (and thus India's per-capita emissions are 2.5 times lower). Why, then, aren't people calling for Central and South America to act in unison to put caps on their aggregate emissions?

Clearly, though, in some sense the economy of a given nation-state grows in unison (and in the case of India and China it is growing rapidly), and thus it is reasonable to conclude that emissions reductions are much more easily facilitated at the nation-state level. But, as shown above, approaching the issue at this level seems unfair.

Instead, we can and should vehemently encourage development of green technologies in those countries and, perhaps more importantly, in the developed world in order for new technologies that can displace fossil fuel emissions to be transfered to developing nations as quickly as possible. But leaders of the developing world, including China and especially India, are right to rail against any policies, such as emissions limits, that would dramatically increase the price of energy; this seems all the more true given that imposing and enforcing serious emissions limits has been nearly impossible to achieve even in the developed world thusfar.

Can anyone really disagree?

2009-08-12T11:59:00.001-07:00

[India] is a country where half the rural population does not have a light bulb in its home or a gas ring.

- Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, Indian Ambassador to UN climate negotiations

This type of things makes me wonder how anyone could ever actually argue in favor of emissions restrictions for the developing world.

And now, the US:

We can't solve this without them; you need them all and they all have to move immediately.

- Jonathan Pershing, US Ambassador to UN climate negotiations

This is how incredibly unlikely it will be for any international agreements to come into effect any time soon.

(Quotes from BBC article)

Fascinating video

2009-08-11T21:19:00.000-07:00

A thought-provoking TED video found here discusses four fascinating but disparate topics linked together by their transformation from bad to (arguably) good when addressed with respect to climate change: urbanization, nuclear power, genetically modified crops, and geo-engineering (of the climate).

The discussion of the beauty and importance of the informal economy that develops in the "slums" is particularly intriguing. The mini-nuclear power plants are also a curious technological development that I had never heard of before.

If nothing else, I definitely recommend checking out the incredible 30-second video clip shown at the 5:58 mark, which is simultaneous hilarious, frightening, and awe-inspiring. I'm not quite sure whether I am thankful or jealous.

Health care

2009-08-07T08:33:00.000-07:00

I don't pretend to know a ton about the current effort at serious health care reform, but a well-written article in today's Washington Post sums my accumulated sentiments as I've followed the debate off and on for the past year or so.

To me there are two basic points that can't be ignored:

First, nearly every other industrialized nation has universal health care. Even while I was in Ghana two summers ago, there were billboards fervently promoting national universal health coverage (which is, of course, extremely basic there) for a very cheap price of around $10/year--the basis of which was the simple recognition by the national government that a healthier population would lead to faster economic growth.

Second, the U.S. spends far more on health care as percentage of GDP (~16%) than any other country in the world (<12%).
So what we do is expensive and gives poor or no coverage to a sizable percentage of our population; meanwhile, we have plenty of examples around the world of how it can be done cheaper and (arguably) better, or at least more equitably.

That's not to say that any alternative plan is a good plan, but arguments claiming that any government intervention will destroy health care and destroy the economy seem a bit ridiculous.

Help run climate models on your computer!

2009-08-06T12:50:00.000-07:00

http://www.climateprediction.net/

Cool.

Blogs and journalistic integrity

2009-08-04T08:40:00.000-07:00

Should news-related personal blogs be held up to the same journalistic standards of regular news sources?

Certainly it's not really an issue for personal "fluff" blogs, e.g. fun blogs about your own daily life. But where is the line drawn for more serious blogs between small blogs (e.g. mine :-) and those that have thousands of followers?

I ask because I recently began reading the popular blog Climate Progress, written by Joe Romm on behalf of the Center for American Progress. Romm has quite a lot of credentials to his name, including Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of Rolling Stone's 100 People Who Are Changing America, and acting assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy in 1997.

In his blog, Romm regularly and incisively criticizes the views of Roger Pielke Jr., a fellow climate policy blogger, and the Breakthrough Institute of which Pielke is a member. While Romm has a lot of interesting posts on climate and energy policy (which I value for the information they contain rather than the means by which it is conveyed), his style and rhetoric in criticizing others is often wild and unprofessional.

Thus, I chose to make a polite but direct comment about this choice of style on one of his posts, including this first sentence:

I am a relatively new reader who is unclear as to why such strong, and at times unprofessional, language is regularly used with regards to the Breakthrough Institute (and Dr. Pielke Jr.) and their work given that, on the whole, you both appear to be advocating for very similar goals: massive investment into clean energy.

The first sentence of the comment then appeared in the blog like this:

I am a relatively new reader who is unclear as to why such strong, [snip], language is regularly used with regards to the Breakthrough Institute (and Dr. Pielke Jr.) and their work given that, on the whole, you both appear to be advocating for very similar goals: massive investment into clean energy.

To my total surprise, he censored my phrase "at times unprofessional". The comment is here. I followed up with another comment, written as professionally and kindly as possible, questioning this decision, providing further explanation, and stating that I am simply seeking a more constructive and less derisive debate on climate policy, and he elected not to allow this follow-up comment at all. I then emailed him kindly asking why he won't post it and have received no reply.

As shocked as I was by this progression of events, though, I'm still not actually sure he's doing anything wrong. Presumably this occurs at newspapers as well, as opinion writers routinely elect to include and exclude information as they please to support their position. But in the blogosphere, where feedback and discussion between reader and journalist now occurs instantaneously and freedom of information is especially valued, are such actions acceptable? For the Washington Post probably not, but for someone's personal blog you're free to do as you choose. So where do mega-blogs such as Romm's fall in that spectrum?

The story your mom has told you 1000 times

2009-07-29T21:51:00.000-07:00

I took a two minute bike ride tonight and had a freak accident--I somehow (I think) kicked my lock out of it's placeholder and it got caught in the front wheel--that launched me over my bike onto the road. Nothing serious, but scraped up many things and hit my jaw hard on the ground, which was, well, startling.

Wear your helmet, folks.

Energy Efficiency: an important, achievable target

2009-07-29T17:40:00.001-07:00

Today McKinsey came out with a report on the potential for energy efficiency gains in the U.S. through 2020: http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/electricpowernaturalgas/downloads/US_energy_efficiency_exc_summary.pdf.

As noted within, this is the first report that goes beyond the mere technical potential of efficiency and actually assesses net costs in order to determine which efficiency measures would be cost-effective (i.e. total lifetime savings > initial upfront costs).

The main conclusion, based solely on the 100% cost-effective efficiency measures:

If executed at scale, a holistic approach would yield gross energy savings worth more than $1.2 trillion, well above the $520 billion needed through 2020 for upfront investment in efficiency measures (not including program costs). Such a program is estimated to reduce end-use energy consumption in 2020 by... roughly 23% of projected demand, potentially abating up to 1.1 gigatons of greenhouse gases annually.

1.1 gigatons of greenhouse gases constitues 17% of 2005 U.S. CO2-equivalent emissions, which is in fact the 2020 target set by the Waxman-Markey Climate bill (a.k.a. American Clean Energy and Security Act). That is quite remarkable. The W-M bill, whose cap-and-trade system I derided previously, does in fact have quite a lot in the way of energy efficiency provisions such as strict building codes built in, which should definitely be applauded.

Energy efficiency offers a straightforward, verifiable means of making actual cuts in emissions. There exist plenty of barriers as well (see last few pages of the report), but at least it's a manageable problem with practical solutions.

Missing information

2009-07-23T18:16:00.000-07:00

Does anyone actually know exactly what happened and was said during the exchange that led to the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr.? Professor Gates Jr. has claimed racism all along, and that was indeed what the situation initally sounded like. But I've been waiting to hear the details of what happened to no avail, and now the arresting officer and his chief are openly defending the Sergeant's actions.

Annoyingly, an actual interview of Professor Gates Jr. by his daughter summarized the pre-arrest interaction between officer and professor with the oddly pithy understatement "a miscommunication ensued". What does that mean? Moreover, the Professor states that "If I had been white this incident never would have happened. He would have asked at the door, 'Excuse me, are you okay?....' " That's true, but only because the suspects were explicitly described as being black, not necessarily because he happens to be a black man. If the suspects were white and he was white, would the same thing have happened? Maybe. Maybe not.

I am inclined to give the Professor the benefit of the doubt, but it is still entirely reasonable for a police officer, reporting to the scene of a reported break-in at a home, to demand to see identification and act defensively in case the suspect is armed. But whether or not the officer was actually being racist is entirely dependent upon what was said between the two men in their encounter: who was belligerent first? Until those details are made public, everyone needs to pause a moment before jumping to any conclusions.

Follow-up: how Science fails to solve political controversies

2009-07-21T14:05:00.000-07:00

As a follow-up to the previous discussion on how certainty in science does not translate to certainty in policy, I was referred to a terrific paper on the subject by Professor Daniel Sarewitz at the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes at Arizona State University: "How science makes environmental controversies worse".

Section 2 (pp. 386-8) provides a particularly simple and interesting thought experiment that illustrates beautifully the titular claim: the 2000 US Presidential Election, in which a simple technical problem (counting votes) could not be solved by a technical solution, but instead had to be solved at the Supreme Court. In the thought experiment, it becomes clear that what begins as a problem that a 6-year old could conceivably do--i.e. counting things--is in fact laden with nuance and complexity, which becomes the basis for disagreement and thus intense political controversy.

The most interesting quote, which nicely demonstrates how this thought experiment reflects how even basic mathematics are subject to political squabbling, is on p. 388 regarding counting the Florida ballots:

...[B]ecause so many of the uncounted overvotes and undervotes were from precincts with Democratic majorities... 'a party political divide aligned the purity of numbers with the Republican right and a faith in statistics with the Liberal left.'

Who new first-grade math could be so complicated?

What if we had absolute certainty?

2009-07-16T16:20:00.001-07:00

I like playing games with the hypothetical. Contemplating about what isn't reality helps us better understand what is reality. So here's one for all those (including myself not too long ago) who believe that scientific certainty is all that's needed for meaningful climate policies to be enacted:

What would happen if we actually had absolute certainty that, with business as usual, in 100 years global temperatures would be, say, 6 degrees warmer? Would we reach an international agreement to substantially reduce emissions?

Annoying business practice

2009-07-13T13:45:00.001-07:00

I get very annoyed when businesses cheat consumers out of small amounts of money because it is easy to do "unwittingly". Today it happened again and I'm not really sure if and how I should respond. I'll summarize and skip the details:

I win a local competition that, on a webpage that is a bit hard to find but not inaccessible, states the prizes for the competition: the more people that participated, the better the prizes. In this case, I had noted before that this would be a "Level 2" prize, where Level 1 is the smallest prize. However, upon winning I receive a congratulatory email stating that I win a Level 1 prize. I email the guy who runs it to inquire and he responds with "You're right it's Level 2, I'm just too lazy to update [the automatic email]."

I thought for a second and realized: No, you aren't lazy. You are doing that on purpose, because if no one notices, you'll get away with giving out a smaller prize and save money. And if someone does notice, you can simply say "oops" and no one can get mad. I hate that.
(Also, as a note, the page stating what prize level this particular competition would be was already removed from the website by the time I won)

Who is to blame? Technically, it's the consumer's job to know the situation, but when businesses get away with such tactics, typically no one notices and everyone loses. I certainly have no intention of watching the cash register at the supermarket in order to ensure that every single item is properly scanned. But short of consumer intervention, there doesn't seem to be any simple way to prevent this type of business practice.

As someone once told me, "The greatest scams in history occur when someone steals a little bit of money from a lot of people."

The bad and the ugly: cap and trade and the Waxman-Markey climate bill

2009-07-09T22:24:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago today, the House passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, a.k.a. the Waxman-Markey (WM) climate bill named after Congressmen Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA). The primary goal of the bill is to create a cap-and-trade system that places a limit on the total number of emissions of greenhouse gases and then allows industries to access, either by purchase or free distribution, allowances that permit a set amount of emissions (the sum total of which is equal to the emissions limit).

In the context of this bill, there are two primary issues to address: 1) the international scale--global cooperation to reduce GHG emissions; and 2) the national scale--the WM bill itself.

First, at the international scale, efforts to force cooperation via an international treaty that imposes binding caps on emissions, such as the Kyoto Protocol, are very unlikely to succeed. As argued in the terrific book "Environment and Statecraft" by Scott Barrett, while at the national level a government can easily impose binding rules and regulations and enforce them as they please, at the international level it is virtually impossible to create a framework where participation and compliance in a treaty by the major emitters can be assured since there does not exist any sort of international government to enforce targets. Moreover--and very importantly--the economics of climate change mitigation make unilateral action extremely costly and with little benefit. In other words, if we're going to reduce emissions, we have to do it together.

Thus, from the game theoretical view, his claim is that without a credible enforcement mechanism, no country has any reason to believe another country's claim that they will actually meet their agreed-upon targets (achievement of targets is assessed every 5 years or so; there are no specific penalties in place to punish those who do not reach their target). And since unilateral action is very costly and will have minimal benefit in terms of climate change mitigation, there is little incentive for any single country to meet their target on their own, either. And as noted previously, even if countries like the U.S. and Europe do take the lead, it may not matter much (here and here as well).

Furthermore, in a globalized economy where industries are not confined by political boundaries, a phenomenon known as "carbon leakage" is very likely to occur. Carbon leakage is elaborated on nicely in a recent paper:

“...[T]he costs of installing clean and efficient equipment raises prices; so ‘carbon leakage’ occurs. International capital naturally prefers to invest where there are neither emissions restrictions, nor environmental standards. If production is transferred to areas, like China, with looser emission norms, then emissions increase overall. This arrangement threatens to invert the ‘polluter pays’ principle into ‘pay the polluter’. So, perversely, Kyoto has slowed the reduction of carbon intensity.” (p. 8)

Thus, unless every country is on board, one can expect that some percentage of any emissions reductions "achieved" in the future under a cap-and-trade system will in fact simply be shipped to another country that has chosen not to participate in the agreement.

Clearly, then, if a targets-oriented international approach is to have any chance at success, national-level policies must be well-designed and properly enforced (which is entirely possible to achieve in theory) across all nations. One place where it must work well is in the United States.

Unfortunately, the passage of the WM bill in the house exemplifies precisely why a targets-oriented approach is likely to fail. While many people have pointed out how bloated the bill is (~1400 pages), I will focus on two particularly important aspects: carbon "offsets" and political realities.

First, carbon offsets permit investment in alternative measures, such as planting trees, to reduce emissions in lieu of actually reducing your own emissions directly. The WM bill allows for up to 2 billion tons of such offsets annually; currently, annual US carbon emissions are at around 6 billion tons. Economic analisys demonstrates that this level of offsets far exceeds what is actually needed in order to allow the US to continue at it's business-as-usual emissions levels.

However, if offsets truly reduced emissions equivalently, then conceivably there should be nothing wrong with this approach: given that emissions are relatively well-mixed in the atmosphere and thus all emissions are effectively created equal, if planting trees is cheaper than engaging in real reductions then it only makes sense to pursue such a path.

The big flaw in all of this is that it's not simply the quantity of emissions reduced, but also when we reduce them--the sooner, the better. The fact is, though, that planting a tree does not achieve an immediate emissions reduction but rather reduces emissions over the lifetime of the tree. In other words, offsets sanction the trading of real emissions reductions today with emissions reductions in the future. Moreover, there exists no counterfactual to prove that such a tree would not have grown/been planted in the absence of the offset project (a.k.a "additionality"). Either way, though, the key conclusion is that, under the WM bill, when an elected official steps to the podium to announce that "America has achieved it's target of X percent emissions reductions over the past 5 years," this statement is not simply spin but is in fact a flat out lie.

The second key component of the WM bill involves the process of passing the bill itself, and it is intimately linked to the above discussion of offsets: How did the carbon offsets program get included in the bill in the first place? The answer is embedded in the political realities of today's society.

For the past decade, people have expressed outrage over the lack of action taken by the United States on climate change, often making the argument that "everything is in place except the political will". However, the recent economic crisis highlights the inherent poltical hypocrisy of putting a substantial price on carbon emissions: when gas prices get too high, as it did last year, it becomes the dominant political issue because it can dramatically affect much of the population, especially the poor. Moreover, big changes in energy prices affect global economic output at incredible scales.

Thus, to expect an elected official to support a program that substantially increases energy prices, unless explicitly supported by his/her constituent base, is absurd. Conventional wisdom calls for the inclusion of the cost of carbon emissions' effects on the planet in the price of emissions. While this approach adheres nicely to common microeconomic principles--i.e. make things more expensive and people will use them less--it tacitly ignores the aforementioned political realities of the situation.

People often follow this argument with stark criticism of the elected officials themselves as being "spineless" and only concerned with their own political interests. But in my view the elected official is simply listening to what his/her constituents' are demanding. Thus, the WM bill is born, whose outer shell is intended to appease environmentalists by pretending like serious action is being taken, while at the core it is intentionally watered down and ripe for corruption. Financial Times economist Willem Buiter sums it up best:

[Under the Waxman-Markey bill] emissions will not be reduced. But that is inconsistent with the supposed desire to reduce emissions to 83 percent of their 2005 level by 2020 and to 17 percent of the 2005 level by 2050. Except that is it not inconsistent if there is no intention to reduce emissions at all, but instead every intention to permit them to be raised above their 2005 levels. And that is of course what is going on.

The dilemma of environmental trade-offs

2009-07-06T21:30:00.001-07:00

An interesting post by Andrew Leonard highlights the increasingly common dilemma of environmental trade-offs in the era of GHG emissions reductions. This time the issue revolves around the exclusion of hydropower as a qualified renewable in the Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) and the negative impacts of hydroelectric dams on local salmon stocks despite the role of hydropower as a major source of carbon-free electricity.

Arguably, this trade-off falls in the middle of the spectrum of environmental dilemmas defined on one side by wind power, with its negative effects on birds, and on the other side by nuclear power, with its unintended impacts on nuclear proliferation and national security as well as the unknown future of toxic waste. In my opinion, concern over birds, while understandable, cannot take precedent over serious investment in wind power generation, which holds tremendous potential. Meanwhile, concerns over nuclear power are much more worrisome, though nuclear power has the potential to fulfill a much larger percentage of our national electricity needs in the medium and long term.

I'm not sure I agree with Mr. Leonard's statement that "If stopping global warming requires damming up all the rivers and saying goodbye to all the wild salmon, why bother?" However, I also am unsure of exactly how much damage these dams do to salmon stocks. If anyone--especially those up in the Northwest--has any further knowledge on this subject, please feel free to share.

So much for "leadership" in climate negotiations

2009-07-03T08:08:00.001-07:00

“India will not accept any emission-reduction target -- period. This is a non-negotiable stand.”- Indian Environment Minister Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, 30 June 2009. See the full article here.

People talk about the role of leadership in international negotiations such as for reducing GHG emissions (i.e. the U.S. should reduce emissions so that the rest of the world will follow). Does leadership really matter? This quote doesn't give much hope that it does. Of course, a valid counterargument is that this is a negotiation process, and since India (and presumably China as well) anticipates significant pressure to reduce their emissions despite its status as a developing nation, they have a strong incentive to reject any and all proposed emissions targets in order to reduce the final targets agreed upon in a compromise agreement. In other words, if you know you will be asked to pay $100, you will demand to pay $0 so that the compromise payment ($50) is as low as possible.

Moreover, if the stance taken in the above quote is sincere, then unilateral emissions reductions here in the US will have minimal impact; this must be a well-coordinated global effort for to achieve acceptable atmospheric GHG concentrations. Progress on clean technology in the U.S. can have a major impact, though, but capping our own emissions may not the optimal way to go about doing that. I'll write more about this and about the serious problems with the cap-and-trade legislation that recently passed in the House in a few days.

Banning the Burqa?

2009-07-02T21:43:00.001-07:00

French President Nicholas Sarkozy has proposed banning the burqa, the full-body cover with mesh over the eyes typically worn by some muslim women. NPR has an excellent debate on the issue (click "Listen now" for the complete discussion; the article itself is very short).

A few years ago, my host father in France and I had a couple very heated discussions about this topic. He stood strongly on the ideals of his country, borne out of the French Revolution, that people should be free from oppression--and that the burqa (or other similar face coverings) are blatant public symbols of oppression. He believed that one is free to do what they want in other countries, but when in France one is subject to the country's ideals, which cannot be subverted in the name of cultural sensitivity. Moreover, he finds face-coverings particularly insulting because it is as if this oppression is being openly and purposefully advertised to the rest of society in a manner that will necessarily create rifts and maintain the widespread segregation and tension that already exists between native citizens and immigrant muslims.

The problem, though, is that French ideals also would seem to simultaneously protect the burqa as well. As Voltaire famously proclaimed: "I may disagree with what you are saying, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." If one accepts as truth (as I do) that in many parts of the world head scarves symbolize a form of female subservience--even if it is the woman's choice to wear it--then both sides of the debate support a restriction of human freedom: either explicitly (in banning the burqa) or structurally (in permitting an oppressive cultural norm).

Clearly it's not a simple question, and it's one that reaches across societal, political, and religious boundaries. I wonder how the debate over such a proposed law would unfold here in the US, where government involvement is typically disdained with the exception of cases of strong moral value.

Science and media: comic relief

2009-07-02T15:25:00.000-07:00

Race and storytelling

2009-06-30T21:16:00.000-07:00

I think it's funny/interesting when someone unnecessarily includes a person's race when telling a story, such as "I was walking to the store when this asian guy cut me off on his bike." (That quote is totally arbitrary) What does the guy's asian-ness have anything to do with the story? Would it have been less notable had it been a Mexican on a bike? If the person happens to be black, though, often times I notice that non-black storytellers will consciously avoid this behavior probably because it seems ingrained in us that pointing out that a black person is black is somehow racist.

I don't think this behavior is actually racist (unless the race is invoked with the purpose of maliciously reinforcing some stereotype); perhaps the character's race is truly just an adjective that adds descriptive detail to the story. Still, I can't help but think that it in some small way reflects something curious about human nature.

Don't talk about this

2009-06-18T16:18:00.000-07:00

Here's a hypothetical question that no one wants to think about. What will the climate science community say in 10 years if global mean temperatures have not risen substantially? Or, alternatively, how many years of non-warming would it take for the climate science community to have to start answering some ugly questions?

As an important side note, in response to skeptics who have noted (screamed) that global mean temperatures haven't risen since 2001, a recent paper came out pointing out that periods of ~10 years of non-warming are common in both past data and in the IPCC models that predict dramatic warming. Thus, such periods do not in any way discredit the notion that increasing greenhouse gases are causing global warming. But this may prove to be a particularly difficult concept to convey to the public.

Scientific integrity and climate science

2009-06-17T20:44:00.000-07:00

I've long been annoyed with people--typically from either the media or from environmental group canvassers asking for money--saying something along the lines of "climate change is already causing more droughts/floods/hurricanes/deaths" to support their cause, whether a noble or selfish one (as a note, I do believe that at times some environmental groups exploit the science as blatantly as some conservatives ignore it, in both cases for their own political/financial benefit). I've also had many discussions about walking the difficult line between maintaining scientific integrity and motivating action on climate change--i.e. whether the end justifies the means. "An Inconvenient Truth" is the prime example: a movie that has done wonders to gain public support for taking action, but via several cringe-inducing scientific half-truths.

Personally, I am not at all a fan of such tactics. And recent events regarding the relationship between natural disasters and climate change--a hot topic for those who desire public action--further entrench this view: I refer to the detailed description in Roger Pielke Jr.'s blog here.

(note: all notes are posts from my blog)

Shoes and airports

2009-06-15T18:23:00.000-07:00

I've had a discussion with a few people, most recently my friend Nick to whom I promised a response (here it is!), regarding airport shoe x-rays as the oft-cited canonical example of how our civil liberties have been eroded since 9/11. While I certainly don't deny that such an erosion has taken place, I appear to be on the other side of the debate when it comes to x-raying shoes.

As a reminder of what started all of this: in December 2001 Richard Reid attempted to blow up a plane with a bomb hidden in his shoe. Since then, all passengers are now required to send their shoes through the x-ray machine at security.

My question, though, is: what would people be saying if such a policy were not enacted and some other idiot attempted/succeeded in doing the same thing? My guess is that people, most notably those who decry the current shoe policy, would have berated the FAA and the Bush Administration for their incredible incompetence in protecting Americans against something that is so simple to prevent (i.e. by x-raying shoes at security).

This is by no means advocates the position that one can cite any sort of potential attack as a means for ignoring the law (as was indeed exploited by the Bush administration). But in my view, the inside of your shoe contains nothing specifically personal, and if it happens to be an easy-access means for some idiot to do something very destructive then it would be common sense to have people throw their shoes into the x-ray machine. It may be annoying, but it also seems like the most reasonable response to an unfortunate situation.

2009-06-14T15:59:00.001-07:00

White roofs as climate change mitigation?

2009-06-14T15:26:00.000-07:00

An interesting article in the Washington Post today about Energy Secretary Steven Chu advocating for changes to white roofs as a means of temporarily mitigating climate change (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory did an official study). The idea seems simple and logical: white things absorb less and reflect more sunlight than do dark things. Thus, white roofs should act to alter the Earth's albedo (reflectivity), reducing total incoming solar radiation absorbed within the atmosphere and cooling the planet slightly.

This seems logical, especially from the perspective of lower AC costs (although higher winter heating costs). However it makes me wonder: haven't we already determined that the urban heat island effect is inconsequential? If the urban heat island effect doesn't matter, then I don't see why an urban "white" island effect would matter either. If there are HVAC savings to be had from going to white roofs, then by all means lets do it. But I'm not inclined to believe that white roofs would have "same climate benefits as taking all the world's cars off the road for 10 years" as was found in the LLNL study.

Smell and memory

2009-06-12T07:26:00.000-07:00

I personally don't have a great sense of smell, but I have noticed recently the incredible power of your nose in conjuring up old memories. Today as I walked in to work on this dreary, wet morning I had this sudden, vivid sense that I was back in France--no where specific, but in France nonetheless.

Similarly, a few weeks ago I was outside in a wooded area and a waft of, well, "natural" outhouse odor blew across and my brain immediately transported me back amongst the trees at summer camp when I was a child. I hadn't thought about summer camp in years until then.

This leads to a fascinating question that's been on my mind for a few months now: do we truly forget anything? Or are our brains simply unable to access the information without the proper cue?

Synthesizing perspectives

2009-06-11T17:47:00.000-07:00

This blog serves a purpose on two levels: first as a means for myself to jot down thoughts on science, policy, and their intersection; second as an expression of my disappointment in the ability for many people to recognize that, in most debates, neither side is 100% right nor 100% wrong.

I would have loved to title this blog "The Honest Broker", in reference to Roger Pielke Jr.'s concise book discussing the need for scientists who can fairly define policy alternatives in matters of significant scientific input, but it felt far too premature in my brief career to this point. Nonetheless, the concept of an "honest broker of policy alternatives" best represents how I view myself (in an ideal world) when discussing policy issues.

Whether from the left or the right, put the ideologies aside, step out of the echo chamber, and listen across the aisle.