Slouching from Gomorrah

Bali, as Kyoto before it was about establishing a position from which the world could negotiate about meeting the climate change challenge. The necessity of emerging with an agreement meant that the principles each had a blocking power. In such a situation you only get a major step forward if each wants something that the others can accept. This was not the case, because as Al Gore presciently said in his speech preceding the final negotiations by days

I am not an official of the United States and I am not bound by the diplomatic niceties. So I am going to speak an inconvenient truth. My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali. We all know that, but my country is not the only one that can take steps to ensure that we move forward from Bali with progress and with hope.

Those of you who applauded when I spoke openly about the diplomatic truth here have a choice to make. You can do one of two things here. You can feel anger and frustration and direct it at the United States of America, or you can make a second choice. You can decide to move forward and do all of the difficult work that needs to be done and save an open, large, blank space in your document, and put a footnote by it, and when you look at the footnote, write the description of the footnote: This document is incomplete, but we are going to move forward anyway, on the hope, and I'm going to describe for you why I think you can also have the realistic expectation, that that blank will be filled in.

This is the beginning of a process that is designed to culminate in Copenhagen two years from now. Over the next two years the United States is going to be somewhere it is not now. You must anticipate that.

Eli is not happy that his country is behaving badly. The opprobrium the US government representative received was well deserved, and we, especially those who live in the US, must work towards the goals that Gore set forth.

At Bali, with the exception of the US, the world came together. The current US administration was isolated and forced to accept an outcome which can allow progress. Much to do in the next year. John McCain and all of the Democratic candidates clearly would allow the Bali process to go forward.

Read or listen to Gore's speech. Andrew Light's comments at Grist are worthwhile

Bali Rants

In support of our Science Rant Contest, Eli brings you Bali Rants:

First up from Washington Monthly, Yvonne, come on down Yvonne

"And then we come to the Bali conference. When, years from now, you have to look into the eyes of your impoverished grandchild, standing there in soiled, tattered clothes, and try to explain to him why he must be consigned to utter destitution, mention to him the name of "Bali" second only to Kyoto in the annals of hackneyed, globalist socialistic scams. Tell him that Mr. Ban Ki Moon and Al Snore sold your country down the river, ripped up our capitalist traditions and replaced them with gutter hippie sham morality. It's high time we stopped letting these environmentalists push us around!"

To be continued. . .

There'll be a hot time in Greenland this time

Plenty of news on the ice cube front today, with a roundup at the AP. Stoat and Co might want to start hedging

This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: "At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions."

All this is emerging at the Fall AGU meeting, as part of which, NASA has put together a panel and a set of web presentations on tipping points and where the Earth stands.

The bottom line is that if you thought things were going to hell in a handbasket you were an optimist. (From the AP)

2007 shattered records for Arctic melt in the following ways:

• 552 billion tons of ice melted this summer from the Greenland ice sheet, according to preliminary satellite data to be released by NASA Wednesday. That's 15 percent more than the annual average summer melt, beating 2005's record.

• A record amount of surface ice was lost over Greenland this year, 12 percent more than the previous worst year, 2005, according to data the University of Colorado released Monday. That's nearly quadruple the amount that melted just 15 years ago. It's an amount of water that could cover Washington, D.C., a half-mile deep, researchers calculated.

• The surface area of summer sea ice floating in the Arctic Ocean this summer was nearly 23 percent below the previous record. The dwindling sea ice already has affected wildlife, with 6,000 walruses coming ashore in northwest Alaska in October for the first time in recorded history. Another first: the Northwest Passage was open to navigation.

• Still to be released is NASA data showing the remaining Arctic sea ice to be unusually thin, another record. That makes it more likely to melt in future summers. Combining the shrinking area covered by sea ice with the new thinness of the remaining ice, scientists calculate that the overall volume of ice is half of 2004's total.

• Alaska's frozen permafrost is warming, not quite thawing yet. But temperature measurements 66 feet deep in the frozen soil rose nearly four-tenths of a degree from 2006 to 2007, according to measurements from the University of Alaska. While that may not sound like much, "it's very significant," said University of Alaska professor Vladimir Romanovsky.

- Surface temperatures in the Arctic Ocean this summer were the highest in 77 years of record-keeping, with some places 8 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, according to research to be released Wednesday by University of Washington's Michael Steele.

Greenland, in particular, is a significant bellwether. Most of its surface is covered by ice. If it completely melted — something key scientists think would likely take centuries, not decades — it could add more than 22 feet to the world's sea level.

However, for nearly the past 30 years, the data pattern of its ice sheet melt has zigzagged. A bad year, like 2005, would be followed by a couple of lesser years.

According to that pattern, 2007 shouldn't have been a major melt year, but it was, said Konrad Steffen, of the University of Colorado, which gathered the latest data.

"I'm quite concerned," he said. "Now I look at 2008. Will it be even warmer than the past year?"

Other new data, from a NASA satellite, measures ice volume. NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke, reviewing it and other Greenland numbers, concluded: "We are quite likely entering a new regime."

But remember, being realistic puts people off according to to the do nothing crowd.

Picture from NCAR AGU preview by Steve Roberts

Best Science Rant

Eli, being a gentle bunny, has never mastered the art of science ranting. In support of the call for a Science Debate (go there and sign up in support), and Dano's pitiful effort, he offers all (including John S in the pro division) a chance to win the best science rant award. You can enter on the behalf of others. Later in the day we will be posting links from Rabett Run. (UPDATE: Weekend?, Beats shopping for gifts)

The OED defines a rant as a "high-flown, extravagant, or bombastic speech or utterance; a piece of turgid declamation; a tirade," and you can find links to some wonderful examples at Slate in an article on the rant by Daniel Seidel. The NY Subway is famed for its rant inducing properties, but surely in the mix of usual suspects we can find at least one is so discombobulated by the IPCC that he or she could compete?

UPDATE: Remember, this is but the preliminary event. With the coming of the new year, we will have the second annual S. Fred Competition, and Eli is happy to announce that the great man himself will have an entry. God, on the other hand, has not published in 2007 and is not eligible.

Calling for a science debate

Since about 1900 science and its significant other, technology have become the dominant influence on the life and death of those living on this sphere, and often to the joy of their families on the births and especially survival of newborns. Dad Rabett's father, Eli's grandfather, was born in 1884 before flush toilets, about 20 years after Maxwell first stated his unification of electricity and magnetism, but in the same year that Heaviside and Gibbs reformulated it into modern vectorial form and three years before Hertz demonstrated the reality of electromagnetic waves (radio). Atoms were postulated, but their structure unknown. All four of Eli's grandparents were born before just about any technology used today, and their lives were significantly extended by the creation of modern medicine, but even more so by such technological commonplaces as water treatment. His mom has made it into the Internet age. Awareness and some understanding of science and engineering is necessary for policy makers although many behave as if this were not the case.

Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum at Intersection have organized a petition asking the candidates for the US Presidency to debate about science issues (and Eli would explicitly add technology). Please get behind this. Please get involved by registering at the petition site. The casual acceptance of scientific ignorance by policy makers is a serious danger to the survival of you and the ones you love.

Documenting the Atrocities

A just issued report from the US House of Representatives Oversight Committee confirms what we all knew

The evidence before the Committee leads to one inescapable conclusion: the Bush Administration has engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warming.

In 1998, the American Petroleum Institute developed an internal “Communications Action Plan” that stated: “Victory will be achieved when … average citizens ‘understand’ uncertainties in climate science … [and] recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom.’” The Bush Administration has acted as if the oil industry’s communications plan were its mission statement. White House officials and political appointees in the agencies censored congressional testimony on the causes and impacts of global warming, controlled media access to government climate scientists, and edited federal scientific reports to inject unwarranted uncertainty into discussions of climate change and to minimize the threat to the environment and the economy.

Without going into the chapter and verse, there is an indicative paragraph towards the end of the document dealing with how the EPA denied a petition that they regulate CO2 emissions

CEQ (Council on Environmental Quality, a White House Office) and others inserted a comment after the conclusions of the National Academy of Sciences on global warming were included in the draft of the petition denial. In response to National Academy quotes like “the changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities,” the comment read: “the above quotes are unnecessary and extremely harmful to the legal case being made in this document. This is not a survey of the science, but a legal argument.”220 (endnote)

Ken Peel of the CEQ further instructed EPA to “revise all science text in collaboration with DOJ.”214 Science and facts being inconvenient things further instructions noted

The following sentence was in the original text of the draft: “At present, the best scientific information indicates that if atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations continue to increase, changes are likely to occur.”218 A comment was inserted after this sentence: “this strong statement does not support EPA’s position.”219

An undated CEQ document amplifies this point. The first line of the document listing CEQ edits to the draft denial of the petition to regulate CO2 states simply: “Vulnerability: science.”221 Later in the document, CEQ notes: “Lead sentence is trouble, as it leans too much on science.”222 Far from being the touchstone for CEQ edits, CEQ apparently saw the science of global warming as an obstacle standing in the way of its desired result: the refusal to regulate motor vehicle emissions that contribute to global warming.

Names changed to protect the innocent (and guilty)

While googling about, Eli found these gems, which describes his daily travail to a T. What follows has been anonymized to avoid embarrassing the fellow sufferer who wrote them, but be assured that this is the typical way in which universities work (or don't). We start with the arrival of the young and newly recruited on campus, soon after which he discovers:

The scale of the management problems at the University has begun to become clear, but I gradually discover more ways around the more incompetent parts of the university’s bureaucracy. I am still surprised, though, about how many people dislike the system and how little they do to change it.

The only way to work around a dysfunctional system is to find a few key sensible people, and get them on your side. Newcomers tend to think that the oldtimers have not tried (and failed) to break through. Our passivity is a recognition that the administration likes the system it has and will not change it. The VP for fiscal affairs once told me why we have such a complicated and poorly functioning purchasing system: "If it worked you could spend money".

Parts of the financial administration are structurally underfunded (e.g., they cannot afford computers), not because there is not enough money but because money is misallocated. Decisions that require little interdepartmental coordination and a lot of speed and service (e.g., software, hardware purchases) are centralised while decision that require substantial coordination and occasional intervention (e.g., space allocation, curriculum) are decentralised.

Everyone at Non-Research Habituated Universities and a mess of the R1s is now nodding their heads, and wanting to drink a beer and trade war stories with this guy. The only worse thing than an understaffed administration is one that is in the process of computerization. That too happens . . . .

After a relatively smooth period, the administrative problems reached new and unprecedented levels. The retirement of the departmental administrative assistant coincided with the switch from hand-written, single-entry bookkeeping to computerized, double-entry bookkeeping. The resulting chaos was quite large, with bills going unpaid for 4 months or longer, suppliers refusing to deliver, and underpaid PhD students not getting their travel costs reimbursed.

Ours don't get their travel, their stipends AND their tuition paid, which is why I have a fairly large loan fund.

The situation was compounded by the fact that the central administration lost (!) the Director's contract, taking away the legal and financial basis of the research unit. Fortunately, the department had a copy as well. The human resources office maintained its general level of incompetence with error rates around 90%. It’s all a bit tiresome.

90% wrong is something we celebrate at my place, the problem is you never know which 5-10% they will get right. Keeps you on your toes it does. But don't think you can settle in

The move landed us in Outer Mongolia. Not only are the facilities (library access, photocopying, amenities) worse than at the main building, the distance to both colleagues and students, and the bad connection by public transport hamper productivity and cooperation. The sad thing is that the move to Outer Mongolia was perfectly avoidable if the University administration had been more active and the Department more cooperative.

Our funding agencies have inquired with me about the implementation of the contract. I cannot answer that question as the University to date has not shared this information with me, despite repeated requests. However, there seem to be notable deviations. The University has also chosen to reinterpret its contract with me. Uncertainties about his contract, invoked by sluggish behaviour in the human resources offices, have led the best person we recruited to accept a position at a foreign university.

Eli just got two contracts signed 1.5 years after the money came in. Of course the key to this is to never be allowed to know who is working on what. Administrators like to keep their faculty in dark rooms and shovel manure over them. From this tasty mushrooms grow. Still, you should always be careful about what you wish for

Another source of unrest was the reforms initiated at breakneck speed. Our department was merged with five others. Institutes will cease to exist, and schools and centers formed. Furthermore, research and education are at to be coordinated with other states. Reform is hard, needed, and strong leadership is necessary too, but the current pace is frantic and the direction not always clear.

A nice way to say that the people at the top are clueless as to the knife work going on below and the bodies that the jackals haul out each night. Watch your back.

On the whole been there. Done that. Am looking forward to retirement.

More nonsense from Eli Rabett

Tales of Ethon and Eli are now featured on the report of all good things about the Forschungsstelle Nachhaltige Umweltentwicklung der Universitaet Hamburg. Still, it is good to know that a Professor has a sense of humor. We are helping him with the sense tho.

Eli's doings are part of the first two items, but the fourth is an interesting article in the Handelsblatt, which the bunnies taking have translated

The Economic Consequences of Climate Change

By Oliver Voss

In spite of many studies, the economic consequences of climate change are subject to debate. Even small changes in the complex models shift the results. Worse, how do you calculate the effects of irreversible damage, illness, deaths or the extinction of families of animal and plants

Many proposals to rescue the World sound dangerously adventurous: the Chemistry Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen would pump tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. This would reflect a portion of the sunlight slowing global warming. NASA is examining the development of a sun shade for the globe, consisting of tens of thousands of plastic pieces in space. The costs of such rescue operations are 25 to 140 billion dollars a year. A lot of money, but peanuts compared to potential damages that could be caused by global warming.

The British economist Nicholas Stern stirred up the world a year ago in the Stern Review prepared for the British Government. He estimated that annual losses of 5.5 trillion (US) euros or 20 percent of global economic output would be the worst economic consequences if nothing were done about climate change. Stern message: Climate protection is worthwhile financially, because in order to prevent the worst, the world community would have to devote only one percent of its yearly economic output to the fight against global warming.

Since then new studies have continued to appear on possible damage from climate change and the cost of counter-strategies. The fluctuation range of calculations is enormous. Claudia Kemfert, Environmental Economist of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), estimates that unlimited climate change would cost Germany not 20, but "only" 0.5 percent of its gross domestic product. And the Uno-Climate Agency estimates the cost for curbing climate change as not 1, but only 0.12 percent of the World Social product.

The studies are based on different assumptions and methodologies, so theybcan only be compared in limited ways. But even within individual investigations the range of estimates is immense.

"Half of the uncertainty comes from the climate models, and the other half from the economic calculations," says Richard Tol, environmental economist at the Economic and Social Research Institute Dublin. According to DIW-researcher Kemfert the economic calculations especially are on thin ice. "There are many, many unknowns and uncertainties are exponential."

One difficulty is that the costs of climate protection are incurred in the near future, but the benefits are felt only much later. To take generational equity into account, economists build the so-called discount rate {n.B.probably means social discount rate} into their climate models. It is "perhaps the most important parameter," says economist Tol. The higher the discount rate, the lower the value of future benefits. As a result early costs have a higher value. The lower the discount rate, the greater - over a long period - the costs. A discount rate of zero means that future generations will be treated just like today. Stern used in his calculations, a relatively low discount rate of 0.1 percent. This is one of the main reasons his model leads to particularly high costs - and it has earned him much criticism from other economists.

In addition to the discount rate, there are other difficulties for estimating the economic consequences of climate change, how do you calculate irreversible damage, disease, deaths or the extinction of entire species of animals and plants? Such questions are not treated in many models. The same goes for the cost of nuclear energy, both because of millennia long storage costs for radiating nuclear waste, as well as the scarcely predictable risks of a meltdown. The damage estimates of the "most likely accident" in a German nuclear power plant of ranges between 500 billion {500E9} up to five Bill. Euro {5E12}. Such a wide range is typical for other issues.

Some of our other friends feature at FNU

For Magnus

A short, but appropriate excerpt from Viking Kittens. Click the link to blow your mind and for a lot better video




UPDATE: In 6.5 ns after posting, Munin points out that the source of goodness is Joel Veitch at rathergood.com (the URL was wiped out by the Blogger fuzzies) and points to his favorite

The uncertainty principle

Over Thanksgiving, Eli was out in Colorado visiting Ethon, [for those who don't know, a rather large bird specializing in liver pecking] who offered a ride in the mountains. Coming down the hill at lickety split units of distance per second, Eli wondered if Ethon knew where the cliff was, and if he had a clue where to start stopping to avoid going over the edge. Ethon pointed out that he could fly and wondered what Eli's problem was. Eli silently wrapped his ears around his eyes, you don't mess with a big liver pecker but you can prey.

This is the situation that Nicholas Stern identified, and that Marty Weitzman tip-toed up to but did not quite go over the edge on in his review of the Stern Review which Eli reviewed yesterday. Weitzman concludes that

In my opinion, public policy on greenhouse warming needs desperately to steer a middle course, which is not yet there, for dealing with possible climate-change disasters. This middle course combines the gradualist climate-policy ramp of ever-tighter GHG reductions that comes from mainstream mid- probability -distribution analysis (under reasonable parameter values) with the option value of waiting for better information about the thick-tailed disasters. It takes seriously whether or not possibilities exist for finding out beforehand that we are on a runaway-climate trajectory and –without “leaving it all up to geoengineering”– confronts honestly the possible options of undertaking currently politically incorrect emergency measures if a worst-case nightmare trajectory happens to materialize.

This might have been a good policy ten or fifteen years ago, when some, including Eli were arguing for it, but today we are a lot closer to the cliff, wherever it may be, and probably closing rapidly on the beyond this point we are going over point (see for example the IPCC WGII take on where the cliffs might be) . Weitzman and other to be named later assume that there is lots of time to organize a response. Hansen and now Pachauri think not. The Roadrunner never tells.

Sternly he said

UPDATED MATERIAL: An exchange between Wm Nordhaus and Nicholas Stern in Science 7/13/07

Testimony by Henry Jacoby to the US Congress 2/13/07

A Note on the Ethical Implications of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change Charles Kenny in the Journal of Environment & Development, Vol. 16, No. 4, 432-440 (2007)

The 'Stern Review' and its Critics: Implications for the Theory and Practice of Benefit-Cost Analysis Daniel H. Cole Social Science Research Network

The Stern Review a Deconstruction, Richard Tol and Gary Yohe

The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, William Nordhaus 5/3/2007

A missed opportunity: The Stern Review on climate change fails to tackle the issue of non-substitutable loss of natural capital, Eric Neumayer Global Environmental Change Volume 17, Issues 3-4, August-October 2007,Pages 297-301

The Journal of Economic Literature has two long reviews of the Stern Review. One by William (Ted) [as pointed out by Richard Tol] Nordhaus and one by Marty Weitzman (link correctred thanks to gz). Eli has read the Weitzman review, and will look at the Nordhaus one later this week. Weitzman finds the choices that Stern made for discount rates arbitrarily chosen to reach a predetermined conclusion.

We know that the choice of discount rate drives both the Stern Report and most other economic analyses of how to deal with climate change. This is related to the long period over which climate change happens.

Global climate change unfolds over a time scale of centuries and, through the power of compound interest, what to do now is hugely sensitive to the discount rate that is postulated. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that the biggest uncertainty of all in the economics of climate change is the uncertainty about which interest rate to use for discounting. In one form or another this little secret is known to insiders in the economics of climate change, but it needs to be more widely appreciated by economists at large. The insight that the strong conclusions of the Review are driven mainly by the low assumed discount rate has been picked up and commented upon already by several insider critics.[1]

and further

The present discounted value of a given global-warming loss from a century hence at the non-Stern annual interest rate of r = 6% is one hundreth of the present discounted value of the same loss at Stern’s annual interest rate of r = 1.4%. The disagreement over what interest rate to use for discounting is equivalent here in its impact to a disagreement about the estimated damage costs of global warming a hundred years hence of two orders of magnitude. Bingo!

Weitzman recognizes the fat tail risks, e.g. risks with extreme costs at the high end of the predicted global temperature change and the need for insuring against them.

This paper makes five basic points about the economics of climate change.
1: The discount rate we choose is all important and Stern’s results come from choosing a very low discount rate.
2: We are a lot less sure about core elements of discounting for climate change than we commonly acknowledge because critical puzzles, projections, and ambiguities are yet unresolved.
3: Standard approaches to climate change (even those that purport to treat uncertainty) fail to account fully for the implications of large consequences with small probabilities.
4: Structural parameter uncertainty that manifests itself in the thick tails of reduced-form probability distributions –not risk –is what likely matters most.
5: Gathering information about thick-tailed uncertainties representing rare climate disasters (and developing a realistic emergency plan were they to materialize) should be a priority of research.

To anticipate my main finding, spending money now to slow global warming should not be conceptualized primarily as being about optimal consumption smoothing so much as an issue about how much insurance to buy to offset the small chance of a ruinous catastrophe that is difficult to compensate by ordinary savings. While I am (along with most other economist /critics) skeptical of Stern’s formal analysis, I believe that the Review’s informal emphasis on climate-change uncertainty can be recast into sound analytical arguments that might justify some of its conclusions.

Still he does not accept how Stern valued them

Instead, the Review dances around the significance of the aggregative analysis of Chapter 6 by arguing that conclusions from IAMs [a type of economic model] are suggestively useful but not crucial to the basic story line that anything above ultimate stabilization at ~500 ppm CO2e and ~3 C is self evidently just too risky for the planet to bear.

but really never comes to detailed grips with what it is that has scared Stern about going beyond these limits, and which as Eli pointed out agrees with what has freaked out the WGII working group. Weitzman is not of the be happy go lucky crowd, but recognizes that Sern

. . .consistent with what an uncharitable critic might see as a philosophy of focusing on the gloomier outcomes in a heuristic-intuitive attempt to include extreme damages, because in Stern’s language “when we try to take due account of the upside risks and uncertainties, the probability-weighted costs look very large.” Actually, the Review goes well beyond 5% in its “multi-dimensional” approach by making numerous literary and numerical allusions to the dark possibilities lurking in the tails of the distribution of possible outcomes (and then, as it were, rubbing salt in the wound of numerical calibration by noting how centrist it is actually being by not choosing much higher probability-weighted distant-future damages, which could be as big as 20%-35% when one considers catastrophes that might materialize after 2105). Stern also estimates the annual costs of its ambitious abatement strategy as being equivalent to about 1% of GDP (which seems rather on the low side by maybe a factor of two or more, but that is not so relevant here).

The question for the Stern Review analysis then effectively becomes: is it worthwhile to sacrifice costs~1% of GDP now to remove damages ~5% of GDP a century from now?

and how this plays out in the uncertainty of economic modeling

If the conclusion from the last section –that what to do about global warming depends over whelmingly on the imposed interest rate –is seen as disappointing, then a second conclusion is likely to seem downright unnerving. As noted, the choice of appropriate discount rate is itself extraordinarily sensitive to seemingly-arcane modeling details like the value of the climate-change investment beta and how the asset-return puzzles are resolved. One interpretation of the asset-return puzzles, which could also have some relevance for the economics of climate change, is the idea that investors are disproportionately afraid of rare disasters. These rare disasters are not fully re‡flected in the available data samples that, being limited, are naturally deficient in coverage. Besides, even if we had an infinite time series of past observations, they are of restricted relevance in an evolving world whose features are always changing and whose past never fully repeats itself.

and most clearly in

The IPCC does not extend its projections beyond 2105 on the basis that predictions into the 22nd century are too uncertain, but it seems unavoidable that the reduced-form probability of Delta T > 6 C increases substantially above 3% after the next century just from the enormous inertial lags for what by then will be in the climate-change pipeline. Societies and ecosystems whose average temperature has changed in the course of a century or so by
Delta T > 6 C located in the terra incognita of what any honest economic modeler would have to admit is a planet Earth reconfigured as science fiction, since such high temperatures have not existed for some tens of millions of years.

It is important to note that 6C is a red herring, because seriously bad things happen even at 3 C. 6C would be a total disaster. Weitzman concludes that

it is much better to go directly through the front door with the legitimate concern that there is a chance, whose subjective probability is small but diffuse (thereby resulting in a dangerously-thickened left tail of comprehensive-consumption growth rates), that global warming may eventually cause disastrous temperatures and environmental catastrophes. If one accepts that global climate change is as likely an arena as any for a valid application of the general principle that thickened tails from uncertain structural parameters must dominate expected-discounted- utility calculations, then many hard questions need to be asked.

And of course we meet at the end in the middle.

In my opinion, public policy on greenhouse warming needs desperately to steer a middle course, which is not yet there, for dealing with possible climate-change disasters. This middle course combines the gradualist climate-policy ramp of ever-tighter GHG reductions that comes from mainstream mid- probability -distribution analysis (under reasonable parameter values) with the option value of waiting for better information about the thick-tailed disasters. It takes seriously whether or not possibilities exist for finding out beforehand that we are on a runaway-climate trajectory and –without “leaving it all up to geoengineering”– confronts honestly the possible options of undertaking currently politically incorrect emergency measures if a worst-case nightmare trajectory happens to materialize. The overarching concern of such a middle course is to be constructive by having some semblance of a game plan for dealing realistically with what might conceivably be coming down the road. The point is to supplement mainstream economic analysis of climate change (and mainstream ramped-up mitigation policies for dealing with it) by putting serious research dollars into early detection of rare disasters and by beginning a major public dialogue about contingency planning for worst-case scenarios perhaps akin to the way Americans (at their best) might debate the pros and cons of an anti-ICBM early warning system. It may well turn out that the option value of waiting for better information about catastrophic tail events is negligible because early detection is impossible, or it is too expensive, or it comes too late (this is Stern'’s line, and it might, or might not, happen to be true), or because nothing practical can be done about reversing greenhouse warming anyway –so we should stop stalling and start making serious down payments on catastrophe insurance by cutting CO2e emissions drastically. But these are conclusions we need to reach empirically, rather than prejudging them initially.

Hopefully many will read the Review.

That Strange Weather

A new and interesting climate blog from Julien Emile-Geay, a post-doc in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech. His area of research is how tropical climate affects the global system, with an emphasis on the ENSO. Emile-Geay does not post often (yet), but his posts are worth reading. The first was his take on An Inconvenient Truth, and his recent two (one, two) posts on Loehle's provocation (open link to paper) in Energy and Environment is worth looking at. Lest you think that provocation is, well, not civil, here is what Loehle said:

My purpose in doing the study was to get my foot in the door that other proxies produce a different result than tree rings, which everyone is hooked on. I have achieved my purpose and if you think I did a crappy job, please repeat the study in a proper manner. I don't have my lifework tied up in this. Maybe we could collaborate on the remake?

Emile-Geay also hates Blogger, which speaks well for him.

Return of Fat Bird

Eli and Ms. Rabett have been quite worried about Ethon. The poor creature absorbed three hard blows in a short time, banishment from the Wikipedia (we remain suspicious about a certain carnaevor's role), Roger Pielke Jr., going on sabbatical and Roger Sr. transferring to the de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est category on the Rabett Run blogroll. Last we saw Ethon in the Fall, he was quite bedraggled and lacking in appetite. We were thus quite happy to greet a sleek and well livered bird who came by after Thanksgiving.

Turns out Roger Jr. is back and pecking away, Roger Sr.'s blog has risen but he doesn't want to hear about anything he doesn't want to hear about so the humor is gone, and Ethon, well the Wikipedia has added an A to his name, but admits that the bird's mission in life, may have been his mission in myth.

Ethon reported that had spent turkey week at the Best of All Possible Worlds Resort attending the Happy Face Conference hosted by Ted Nordhaus, which featured invited talks by the Walmart Deep Discounting Professor of Economics, Richard Tol, and Bjorn Lomborg who lectured the audience on things he agreed he knew nothing about, and, of course, to be very civil, the audience agreed with him. Newt Gingrich gave the keynote. Still, as it must at these things, the disruptive name of Nicholas Stern came up and Eli thought, like 1066, it would be a good thing to contrast the every so pessimistic predictions of Stern

with the sunny information contained in the IPCC WGII report. Fortunately this can be done in pictures.

Or as Nordhaus would sing

A closing salvo in the 2007 hurricane wars

As pointed out by an anonymouse troublemaker (ain't we all) Mann and Co have fired a late salvo at the end of the 2008 hurricane season in GRL

We obtain new insights into the reliability of long-term historical Atlantic tropical cyclone (‘TC’) counts through the use of a statistical model that relates variations in annual Atlantic TC counts to climate state variables. We find that the existence of a substantial undercount bias in late 19th through mid 20th century TC counts is inconsistent with the statistical relationship between TC counts and climate.

Mann, Sabetelli and Neu find that the undercount is one (1.2 to be precise) by comparing the observed number of Atlantic tropical cyclones to that predicted using three proxys: sea surface temperature, El Nino and NAO indicies. The undercount bias is adjusted to give the best fit.

UPDATE: In the comments Henry Anonymouse asked for the full Fig. 1. (see below). By eyeball, it is pretty clear that the sea surface temperature is the driver, with El Nino and the NAO serving as modulating factors.

Hitting ourselves with a rake

Eli was reading Andrew Dessler's blog over at Gristmill. Andrew, conscientious and fair minded lad that he is, has been looking for a denialist that would come to his class and debate climate change. He thought that Steve Milloy might have a stable of such available for guest appearances, but alas, when he wrote Steve at demanddebate.com Milloy wrote back that there was no one available.

Andrew points out that what we are seeing is a few of the usual quacking heads recycled endlessly. Now this bears on issues that Eli has been thinking about but has not been able to quite verbalize, hence the recent ennui over here.

First, scientists are as bad as journalists about understanding the public and providing needed and useful information for others. The seeds of this are different, but the results the same. As we know journalists would much rather write about the controversy than the issue. Thus someone like Andrew Revkin will take a complex issue like climate change, project the multidimensional problem onto a line, seek the extremes, say Greenpeace and our beloved S. Fred's SEPP, and then find ignorant posers like Newt Gingrich and Bjorn Lomborg in the middle. Michael Tobis nails this, follow the links.

UPDATE: Michael prefers you start at the bottom, Reply to Revkin, not at the top, but Eli did provide instructions to follow the links, he can't help it if no one listens.

Scientists, on the other hand, are pretty much fixed not on what they know, which since they know it for more than ten minutes, is already boring, but what they don't and are excellent in telling people that they don't know everything. The average person hears that everything is up in the air, something that pro denialists are quite happy to chant in chorus. Stoat often provides excellent illustrations of this.

Consider what Andrew has discovered. The Overton window has moved. Pat Michaels, Richard Lindzen and the rest of the emeriti might as well move into the old scientists home with Frederick, S. Fred and Co.

Now is NOT the time to bring them back for a nostalgia tour. What Andrew needs to do is find people like, for example, James Annan, Gerald North and others (Eli is prepared to be corrected on the choice of protagonists) who form the more conservative wing of the IPCC consensus, to debate the radical wing, the Hansenites as it were.

Andrew's job is to offer his class real choices based on real science, rather than the delusional drivel offered by the loony .

Eli is a bit burnt out

Things have been frantic the last few weeks at Rabett Labs, and Eli is a bit frazzled. Don't look for anything until Monday. A happy Thanksgiving to everyone in the US.

How decisions are made elsewhere

Without comment, but part of Eli's series on extraterrestrials, from Science this week:

Robotics offer new possibilities for studying and modulating animal behavior. Halloy et al. (p. 1155; see the news story by Pennisi) observed collective decision-making by mixed groups of cockroaches and autonomous minirobots. The robots, similar in size (though not in shape) to the cockroaches, were coated in a blend of cuticular hydrocarbons that mimic the natural cockroach cuticle. The robots and the insects made shared decisions regarding choice of shelter, and the robots could modulate the collective decision-making process and produce a behavior pattern--choice of an inappropriate shelter--not observed in groups of cockroaches alone. Thus, a small number of robots can change the global pattern by altering feedbacks between individuals in the system.

Think globally, act locally, save moneyOne of the simplest ways to save energy and money is to have a light colored roof. It the summer a black or dark roof absorbs the suns rays and heats up, a lighter colored roof reflects much of the light. In the winter the darker roof is a much more efficient radiator of solar energy than a lighter one. A few days ago, Eli was up pretty high in a building that overlooked a bunch of row houses in a seedy to improving neighborhood, and he saw that most of the roofs were light, even on the houses that had not been tarted up. So he decided to use Google maps to take a look at the area he lives in. There are very few dark roofs left. Eli suspects that progress has falsified what the EPA says

Over 90% of the roofs in the United States are dark-colored.

Take a look at your neighborhood. The web page continues about dark roofs

These low-reflectance surfaces reach temperatures of 150 to 190°F (66 to 88°C) and contribute to:

• Increased cooling energy use and higher utility bills;
• Higher peak electricity demand, raised electricity production costs, and a potentially overburdened power grid;
• Reduced indoor comfort;
• Increased air pollution due to the intensification of the "heat island effect"; and
• Accelerated deterioration of roofing materials, increased roof maintenance costs, and high levels of roofing waste sent to landfills.

In contrast, cool roof systems with high reflectance and emittance stay up to 70°F (39°C) cooler than traditional materials during peak summer weather. Benefits of cool roofs include reduced building heat-gain and saving on summertime air conditioning expenditures. By minimizing energy use, cool roofs do more than save money – they reduce the demand for electric power and resulting air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

Why it was the European Warm Period
and the Very Little Ice Age

Recently, Eli got tangled in a toodo at Tamino's (where are the bouncers when you need them) with one Leif Svalgaard, who looks at solar insolation for a living. Eli played but a small role in the proceeding. To make the story very short (and indeed it went on more and more and more and almost lead the mild mannered T to close up the comments)

Svalgaard propounds (go read Tamino) that there is no difference in solar insolation between solar cycle minima extending back to the year dot, and the year dot includes our beloved Maunder minima. Eli went and RTF AR4 on this, and indeed the solar gang has changed its tune, not as far as Svalgaard, but certainly a major change from the TAR.

The magnitude of the long-term trend in solar irradiance remains uncertain. A reassessment of the stellar data (Hall and Lockwood, 2004) has been unable to confirm or refute the analysis by Baliunas and Jastrow (1990) that implied significant long-term solar irradiance changes, and also underpinned some of the earlier reconstructions (see Section 2.7). Several new studies (Lean et al., 2002; Foster, 2004; Foukal et al., 2004; Y.M. Wang et al., 2005) suggest that long-term irradiance changes were notably less than in earlier reconstructions (Hoyt and Schatten, 1993; Lean et al., 1995; Lockwood and Stamper, 1999; Bard et al., 2000; Fligge and Solanki, 2000; Lean, 2000) that were employed in a number of TAR climate change simulations and in many of the simulations shown in Figure 6.13d.

In the previous reconstructions, the 17th-century ‘Maunder Minimum’ total irradiance was 0.15 to 0.65% (irradiance change about 2.0 to 8.7 W/m^2; radiative forcing about 0.36 to 1.55 W/m^2) below the present-day mean (Figure 6.13b). Most of the recent studies (with the exception of Solanki and Krivova, 2003) calculate a reduction of only around 0.1% (irradiance change of the order of –1 W/m^2, radiative forcing of –0.2 W/m^2; section 2.7). Following these results, the magnitude of the radiative forcing used in Chapter 9 for the Maunder Minimum period is relatively small (–0.2 W/m^2 relative to today).

Which if true (and this is going to be very short) leads one to the conclusion that the little ice age was very little and very local and may have had a lot more to do with volcanic activity then much else. Leaving us with the European Warm Period. There they won't even go out on a large tree trunk (Section 2.7 of WGI)

Prior to direct telescopic measurements of sunspots, which commenced around 1610, knowledge of solar activity is inferred indirectly from the 14C and 10Be cosmogenic isotope record in tree rings and ice cores, respectively, which exhibit solar related cycles near 90, 200 and 2,300 years. Some studies of cosmogenic isotopes (Jirikowic and Damon, 1994) and spectral analysis of the sunspot record (Rigozo et al., 2001) suggest that solar activity during the 12th-century Medieval Solar Maximum was comparable to the present Modern Solar Maximum. Recent work attempts to account for the chain of physical processes in which solar magnetic fi elds modulate the heliosphere, in turn altering the penetration of the galactic cosmic rays, the flux of which produces the cosmogenic isotopes that are subsequently deposited in the terrestrial system following additional transport and chemical processes. An initial effort reported exceptionally high levels of solar activity in the past 70 years, relative to the preceding 8,000 years (Solanki et al., 2004). In contrast, when differences among isotopes records are taken into account and the 14C record corrected for fossil fuel burning, current levels of solar activity are found to be historically high, but not exceptionally so (Muscheler et al., 2007).

Which leaves us precisely here

Who framed Roger? Rabett

Let Roger Revelle Speak for Himself
Blame the Lab Lemming for the title change (see comments)

Stoat has stumbled back across the S. Fred Singer malloying of Roger Revelle and the associated SLAPP suit against Justin Lancaster by Singer. What we have to add to the tale is a link to the letter that Revelle's collaborator Walter Munk and the director of Scripps sent to the Oceanographic Society, Edward Frieman commented on Singer's Cosmos club article and the attaching of Revelle's name to it. After Revelle's death, Munk and Frieman write

"One year later, in a discussion of Senator Gore's book Earth In Balance, Gregg Easterbrook notes that Senator Gore failed to mention that "'before his death last year, Revelle published a paper that concludes, 'The scientific basis for greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic' action at this time.' "

from which Easterbrook concluded that CO2 emissions were "far less hazardous than originally feared". As usual, you can RTFR, but for the link shy, they point out

The key is the use of the word drastic. Roger's last written statement on the subject was "What Can We Do About Climate." presented at the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) session, Climate Change: Scientific Uncertainties and Policy Responses in New Orleans on 16 February 1990. It outlines a possible set of actions designed to mitigate or delay climatic warming. It includes attempts to modify society's use and mix of fuels. While these may not be viewed as drastic, there is also no evidence that he believed that "emissions... are far less hazardous than initially feared."

We have already blogged on Revelle's non drastic recommendations in Roger and Jim, pointing out that they were not so far from what Jim Hansen is recommending today. Thus it is revealing that Singer, in a letter to Lancaster wrote:

P.S. The editor of Cosmos has kindly sent me a copy of a short note received from Walter Munk and Ed Frieman. Apparently, they are concerned that an article written by Newsweek journalist Gregg Easterbrook, distors some of Roger's views, and I believe they wish to put their concerns on the record. We do not defend Easterbrook's interpretations or extrapolations, and frankly we feel that theirs [Munk and Frieman] would be a much more positive step than the one you [Easterbrook] suggest.

Which, if Singer is to be believed (don't bet on this), means that he accepted Revelle's 6 points.