Deniers grow desperate

A few days ago someone sent me a link to an article in The Register in which Dr John Theon, ex-NASA scientist, declared that climate change is not man-made. He made a number of curious claims:

• “The [climate] models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit.”
• “Some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results” without explaining why.”
• Jim “Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA's official agency position on climate forecasting."

It didn’t take long to throw serious doubt on all this. For instance, a posting on ScienceBlogs.com pointed to criticism of many of the supposed facts. In particular the claim that the Bush White House did not attempt to muzzle Jim Hansen is absurd given all the coverage on this. (See, in particular: http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20071210101633.pdf. )

Now it turns out that Theon has been a climate change denier for a few years – which makes me wonder why this has come up now. His views are being promoted by Senator James Inhofe, Republican Senator for Oklahoma. The person most criticized in Theon’s statement is Jim Hansen and Jim Hansen is a leading supporter of energetic action against climate change. Maybe this is an attempt to discredit Hansen and thus to encourage Obama not to take the action needed.

If so it shows how desperate the denial lobby has become. What we have here is opinions from one man that relate largely to a period years after he ceased to work on climate issues. Not exactly compelling.

The body of evidence for man-made global warming, by contrast, is huge. It wouldn't be disturbed by the opinions of a former NASA climate scientist even if he were Mandela, Einstein and Pauling rolled into one!

Pricing carbon emissions

We all know that the long-term survival of our civilisation, if not of our species, depends on sharply reducing our use of fossil fuels. The UK government has committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050. The single most important tool must be to charge companies and individuals for their emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) and this may be done by imposing a tax or by requiring permits (which have to be paid for). But what should the price be? And how should it be set?

Last summer Friends of the Earth ran a seminar to discuss the options. The 26 participants were drawn from a mixture of academic, consulting and campaigning backgrounds. Perhaps surprisingly, for an FoE event, the seminar did not come to a simple conclusion but did look at four approaches:

1. Social cost, ie the cost to society.
2. Marginal cost of abatement, ie the cost of reducing emissions.
3. Market cost
4. “Precaution and pragmatism”

None of these approaches produces a clearly correct result (estimates of the costs vary wildly) and each is open to several criticisms. In particular, in each case the number you get depends on the assumptions you make about both the physics of climate change and the policies that governments will follow over several decades. For instance, the more effective we suppose future policies to be:

• the lower the calculated social cost per ton and likely market price but,
• the greater, probably, will be the marginal cost of abatement.

In addition:

• The social cost depends on the values we assign to human life and convenience, ecosystem services and various kinds of damage to life and the environment.
• The current market price, e24/ton, is based on a badly flawed trading scheme and is absurdly low.

The meeting was unable to decide which approach would be best. I, however, am less cautious.

The reason for setting a price is to enable market mechanisms and organisations’ own decision-making processes to make the decisions that will reduce GHG emissions. We ought to accept the logic of this and set the price so that it produces, in the short-term, the change we need. If, for instance, we need to reduce emissions by 3% pa then we set a price that we expect to do this. If, after a year, we are wrong we adjust the price. We should also, obviously, not make or permit investments that encourage additional emissions.

This, in fact, is the “Precaution and pragmatism” approach. It has five important advantages:

1. If pursued seriously, it’s almost certain to produce the required reduction
2. It defines the issue as political and does not seek to hide political choices behind a technocratic smokescreen.
3. The accountability for setting the price is explicit
4. The accountable body, the government, is subject to democratic recall.
5. The link between goal and price is simple and explicit.

On this approach the key decision is just how fast to reduce GHG emissions. My own preference is for 4% pa – which would reduce emission levels by 35% by 2020 and by 80% by 2050. This isn’t very different from the budgets set by the UK Climate Change Committee.

There are, obviously, several disadvantages. First the carbon price may fluctuate wildly in the early years since we don’t really know how business and consumers will respond to price signals. Second, government has to review, and possibly revise, the price every year. This provides many opportunities for bad decisions, especially in difficult economic times.

Despite this “Precaution and pragmatism” is the best choice precisely because it is so straightforward.

Avoiding the shock of geo-engineering

If current policies and behaviour continue increases in greenhouse gases will drive temperature to two degrees above the pre-industrial level. From there it's likely that feedback effects will drive the increase to at least four degrees - quite possibly more.

We need to stop any net increase in emissions within five to ten years and then to bring emissions down.

At present there seems little chance of us meeting this demanding target. But there will come a point (perhaps after 2018) at which the key players - the governments of the US and China - recognise the need for action. At that point they will combine to insist on a world response. If it's too late to handle the growth in emissions then geo-engineering may be the only option. (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_keith_s_surprising_ideas_on_climate_change.html)

Several geo-engineering schemes have been proposed. Some obstruct incoming sunlight or reflect it back whilst others collect CO2 from the atmosphere and store it underground. All will be very expensive and will be required in addition to, not in place of, energy efficiency, reductions in aviation, renewable power generation, etc.

Most geo-engineering schemes will have significant side effects, eg they may warm some areas whilst cooling others. Inevitably there will be winners and losers. So what's needed is:

• First, honesty about the possibility that our current efforts will fail.
• Second, real R&D on geo-engineering schemes and their likely costs and effects.
• Third, study of the forms of governance that such schemes will need.
  

The third is particularly significant. It's obvious that expensive schemes with world-scale impacts need effective governance. I, like most people of goodwill, would favour international governance aimed to solving the problem with the least damage to people and their environments.

But that is not what we are likely to get. In her book The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein has shown how the US government and major international organisations, especially the IMF, have used a series of crises, eg Iraq, the asian tsunami, New Orleans, to advance a neoconservative political agenda. Indeed, in some cases, and not just in Iraq, they have deliberately created the crises.

The effects of these political interventions have been to increase enrich certain major corporations whilst increasing violence, corruption, sectarianism and the gaps between rich and poor. More to my point - the proportion of the money spent that has produced real benefits on the ground has been astonishingly small.

These interventions - driven by an unholy alliance of China and the US - would constitute a big step towards the Police World scenario.

The neocons have been able to achieve these perverse effects because of their strong position - control of the US government is a big advantage - and because they have been always ready to propose - indeed impose - their preferred solutions. The challenge for people of goodwill is therefore to think through what's really needed before panic induces governments to adopt simplistic and counter-productive solutions.

Measuring international collaboration

My scenarios for climate change – really for the social and political consequences of climate change – vary according to the degree to which nations will co-operate, long-term, to avoid and ameliorate the change.

I had given no thought to how we might measure that co-operation until I saw research by Michèle Bättig and others at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Battig’s group has created a co-operation index which combines five factors:

• Speed of ratification of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
• Speed of ratification of the Kyoto protocol,
• Frequency of payments to the UNFCCC
• Timeliness in submitting emissions reports
• Reductions in CO2 emissions relative to per capita GDP.

Inevitably, being a first attempt at something quite difficult, this index is imperfect. For instance, it is largely blind to actions, even relevant collaborative actions, taken below the level of the national government. That’s unfortunate since such actions may be precursors to a change in national policy – as appears to be happening in the USA.

More worryingly it does not seem to have been validated, ie shown to predict behaviour not used to calculate it. Therefore the authors’ findings about the causes of co-operative behaviour (though weak) are suspect.

Changes over time

An online summary of the work says “…co-operative behavior of countries within the climate change regime … is only little influenced by the results from climate change research,...”. However, since the study looked at variations between countries rather than changes over time it would not reveal changes due to climate change research that affects all or most countries. It seems almost certain that the increasing confidence that the IPCC has attached to its warnings has affected some governments – and has prompted some electorates, eg Australia, to change their governments.

A study of variations over time could look at whether changes in the severity and confidence level of IPCC warnings, both local and global, have influenced national and international policies. If they have, and if other drivers can be found, we would have a useful contribution to forecasting changes in willingness to co-operate in the future.

Pale green policies won’t keep the global lifeboat afloat

Yesterday Irwin Stelzer of the Hudson Institute had an article in the Guardian (Brown’s pale green policies are more honest than most, 24 June 08) in which he praised Gordon Brown with faint damns. The article made some good points. ‘Cleaning up the environment’, ie changing our ways to use Earth’s resources sustainably, will be expensive. And, yes, politicians are hypocritical and short-sighted in wanting to take the credit for action without dealing with the electoral unpopularity that effective action will produce.

But what does Stelzer recommend? ‘Pale green policies’. That is, policies that do too little to achieve sustainability. Policies that will continue to drive global warming.

Stelzer’s real concern, as his website makes clear, is to promote ‘market solutions’ even if they do not actually solve the problems. He does not address the need to treat climate change as a global emergency that will make the Earth unable to support even its current population if left unchecked. In an emergency we put aside our normal preoccupations and focus on solving the problem. In WW2, for instance, we formed a government of national unity which took control of the economy.

Climate change is not one issue amongst many – just another environmental issue. It is the central survival issue of our time. It poses as great a threat as world war – just a less immediate one.

Today the whole human race is in one lifeboat. Because it’s a planet-sized lifeboat many people do not recognise this. But because we are in a lifeboat we need to put our effort into bailing – not selling our emergency supplies to each other!

Open letter to Piers Corbyn

Piers Corbyn is a physicist who has published research on superconductivity, cosmology, solar physics, Sun-Earth relations and the weather. He runs a commercial weather forecasting business (www.weatheraction.com) and disagrees with the IPCC consensus on global warming.

Piers has challenged the IPCC '...to admit that there is no observational evidence … that CO2 levels (whether from man or nature) have driven or are driving world temperatures or climate change'. He’s issued a general challenge: 'If you believe there is evidence of the CO2 driver theory in the available data please present a graph of it'.

Here is my reply to the challenge.

Dear Piers,

Let me respond to your request for evidence by explaining why I won’t be providing any.

Since I’m not a climate scientist I must, even though I have a science degree, approach the issue as an informed layman. How is the informed layman to proceed in such a case?

a) He can ask whether the claimed effect is plausible based on what he does know. For instance I know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, that there’s more in the atmosphere than there was before the industrial revolution and that temperatures and sea levels are rising globally. Now that doesn’t prove causation but it is consistent with it.

I also know that most of the reports I see on advances in climate science (in New Scientist for instance) suggest that change is now happening faster than was expected in the last IPCC report.

b) He can ask whether MOST of those who are competent to form a genuinely independent scientific judgement are agreed. In this case there’s a very broad agreement that increases in atmospheric CO2 are driving global warming. He’s entitled to note that there are always dissidents in science. Their existence is not evidence that the consensus is wrong.

c) He can ask whether the issue has thoroughly studied. Given the IPCC process climate change has perhaps been studied more thoroughly than any other comparable question.

d) He can ask whether the consensus is getting stronger or weaker. Plainly it’s getting stronger.

e) He can ask whether vested interests have been operating so as to undermine the science. In this case some of the world’s strongest vested interests have lobbied against accepting that increases in atmospheric CO2 are driving global warming:

• The White House has censored US government scientists.
• It has also pressed for the weakest form of words in IPCC drafting work.
• Major multinationals have paid supposed climate scientists to contest the consensus in just the way that Big Tobacco sought to resist the evidence on smoking. (NB I don’t, of course, suggest you have been suborned in this way.)

f) He can ask whether people he knows personally have well-founded views on the science. In this case I know you. But I also knew David King at UEA’s School of Chemical Sciences in the 70s. So let’s call that a tie.

g) He can ask whether prominent non-scientists who are well advised on the science have accepted the consensus. Here I see that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, the UK Prime Minister, the US President and an overwhelming majority of senior business executives polled by McKinsey last year have either accepted or moved towards acceptance of the consensus. Insofar as any of these have a vested interest it lies for the majority in denying, not affirming, the evidence for man-driven climate change. Evidence against interest always weighs more heavily than the contrary.

So out of the seven tests that I, as an informed layman, can make six encourage me to believe that increases in atmospheric CO2 are driving global warming. One is inconclusive. Actually, that’s about as good as it gets.

Now none of this creates certainty but neither, in practice, does science. Science is always somewhat provisional.

The real question now is that of public policy and here a version of Pascal’s Wager applies. If the consensus is right it would be dangerous to the lives of many people to wait the years that may be needed to approach certainty more closely. If the consensus is wrong and we act as if it were true we will waste money on insulation, wind farms and carbon offsets and some of us will take fewer foreign trips.

Morally, I don’t find that a difficult decision.

Is climate change politics working for the poor?

Sometimes politics is knockabout comedy. Sometimes it’s tragic farce. And, just sometimes, it looks as if it might do some good. At last Tuesday’s meeting on the climate change bill I felt several times that here was politics that could do good. But was I right?

Climate Change Bill Public Meeting, 22 April 2008 Speakers: Hilary Benn Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Peter Ainsworth Conservative Shadow Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Secretary Steve Webb Liberal Democrat Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Energy, Food and Rural Affairs Tony Juniper Director of Friends of the Earth and representative of the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition Chair : Anne McElvoy, Executive Editor of the Evening Standard.

The speakers were Hilary Benn and his Tory and LibDem shadows, plus Tony Juniper of FoE – which had organised the meeting. The speakers told a packed and often enthusiastic, house – the main meeting hall at London’s Friends’ House – that climate change was a vital, urgent problem and that they were committed to serious action. They agreed that a target of 60% reduction by 2050 would not be enough.

They congratulated each other on their shared commitment and on making the UK the first country in the world to set itself legally-binding targets for greenhouse gas emissions. And they congratulated the NGOs, like PA, and the audience on their roles in putting climate change on the political agenda. Continued public pressure will be needed, they agreed, to keep up the momentum. Though disagreements emerged they seemed minor.

It seems churlish to object when people are talking sense. And yet – with the exception of one man who called Hilary Benn a murderer – there didn’t seem to be the sense of moral outrage the situation requires. Benn spoke of targets for 2050 and five year budgeting. The opposition claimed credit for demanding a tougher target and annual reports. There was more than a touch of complacency that we were doing the right thing.

Yet LibDem spokesman Steve Webb argued that if we count aviation and shipping emissions the UK has made NO cut since 1990. Yet we need to cut emissions by three per cent EACH year to reach even the 60% target.

In my view Sarah Mukherjee of the BBC asked the key question: “Shouldn’t we just use less stuff?”. No politician was prepared to agree. Even Steve Webb described it as “a possible second term strategy for the LibDems”.

Afterwards a group of Practical Action supporters shared experiences at a local pub. We also met Tory spokesman Peter Ainsworth, who was rather franker than he’d been in public. Politicians and public are moving. But are they moving fast enough?