Politics – Page 133 – a sibilant intake of breath

The 2035 glacier claim and the IPCC

Previously, I described an asymmetry between the approach of climate change deniers and climate scientists, with the latter unwilling to retract any claims no matter how poorly justified or effectively rebutted. I think the instance with the IPCC and ‘poorly substantiated’ Himalayan glacier data is illustrative.

A failure to properly vet some information has come to light, and the IPCC has responded in an open and honest way:

In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly…

The Chair, Vice-Chair, and Co-Chairs of the IPCC regret the poor application of well-established IPCC procedures in this instance. This episode demonstrates that the quality of the assessment depends on absolute adherence to the IPCC standards, including thorough review of ‘the quality and validity of each source before incorporating results from the source in an IPCC report.

Climate deniers have jumped on all this to argue that it undermines the overall conclusions reached by the IPCC. Far from calling into question the overall scientific consensus, this willingness to concede errors demonstrates one of the reasons for which it is robust, namely a willingness to accept and respond to valid criticism. By contrast, deniers of various stripes tend to rub along well with one another, even when they have wildly different positions: that climate change isn’t happening, that it is actually beneficial, that it is caused by something other than greenhouse gases, etc.

The MSC and BCs sockeye salmon

I have written before about how the certification of a fishery by the Marine Stewardship Council is not sufficient cause to think it is genuinely sustainable (even before factors other than fish numbers, such as fossil fuel use by ships, are taken into account). More evidence for this has been forthcoming recently. Now, they have decided to certify the British Columbia sockeye salmon fishery, despite how the fish numbers are dwindling and subject to an ongoing inquiry. Last year’s run on the Fraser river was less than 10% of what had been expected. The recent history of salmon in BC is a catalog of failure. The decision to certify regardless certainly doesn’t leave the MSC looking very credible. Their decision doesn’t become official until a 15-day complaint period has concluded, and people will hopefully be able to persuade them to think differently during that span.

For those who really care about environmental issues and are willing to make personal choices to reflect that, I recommend avoiding fish (and other sorts of meat) entirely. Keeping fishing activity at a sustainable level just seems to require more political integrity and long-term thinking than any of the world’s governments can muster. It’s so much easier to grab a haul now, earn a bundle, and leave the mess for those who will come later.

Surviving climate change

The failure of Copenhagen and other climate change setbacks raise the real possibility that the world will continue to obsess over trivialities, missing the big picture until it is too late to prevent radical change. As such, we need to at least contemplate the possibility of seeing more than 4˚C of mean global temperature rise within our lifetimes, with all the radical effects that might accompany that.

As individuals, what kind of strategies could permit that? Warming is likely to be far more pronounced in the higher latitudes than in more temperate ones. Sea levels are likely to rise significantly, while summer snowpack and glaciers are likely to vanish. Crops that have been well suited to regions for all of human history may no longer grow where they used to. How can someone with no intention of having children maximize their odds of living decently in a world we are so actively undermining? What should those who have reproduced (or are considering doing so) take into consideration, above and beyond that?

For the sake of this planning exercise, it is worth considering outcomes that are plausible and serious, even if they are more unlikely than likely. After all, there are a lot of powerful feedback mechanisms that haven’t yet been incorporated into climate models. It is also worth remembering that even business-as-usual projections, based on emissions continuing to grow at the present rate, involve projected warming of over 5˚C by the end of the century, making the planet far hotter than at any time in human history.

Note that this has been partly discussed here before.

Waiting on Massachusetts

It seems as though there are an absurd series of magnifying glasses over top of the Massachusetts senate race. If Scott Brown, the Republican candidate, takes over the senate seat of the late Ted Kennedy there is a good chance health care reform will die. If that happens, it seems certain that climate change will become even less of a priority in the United States. Also, it would probably increase the chances of a big swing towards the Republicans in the upcoming mid-term elections. If they lose their supermajority in the senate, the chances of either a domestic cap-and-trade strategy or the ratification of an international climate change treaty with binding targets will become very remote indeed.

All this at a time when global emissions need to peak in the next 1-10 years, if we are going to have a decent chance of avoiding more than 2°C of temperature increase. Note that that is a global peak; to accommodate continuing growth in poorer countries, places like Canada and the US will need to cut faster and deeper than average.

Of course, just because there is a plausible connection between a Republican win in this senate race and eventual failure to address climate change, the logic of failure cannot be flipped around to produce a template for success. To get the kind of action we need on climate change, a lot more things will need to go right.

Emissions drop from Canada’s biggest GHG polluters

One curious thing about those who are determined to avoid the emergence of effective climate change policies is how they argue that climate science is far too uncertain to serve as the basis for decision-making, while simultaneously claiming that their economic models prove that going low-carbon will produce certain economic ruin. That claim is especially poorly defended over the long-term, given that economic models cannot effectively incorporate the consequences of technology and capital changes across a span of decades. Also, the idea that fossil fuel based prosperity will be everlasting faces a fundamental challenge from the scarcity of those fuels, and the political volatility of many of the regions in which they are found.

Near-term data also suggests that Canadian companies can cut emissions without suffering economic ruin. According to Tyler Hamilton’s blog:

[Canada’s] Top 10 industrial CO2 emitters reduced their greenhouse gas emissions by 9 per cent in 2008 compared to 2007. At the same time, the Canadian economy grew by 0.5 per cent. Given that the impacts of the economic downturn were felt mostly in 2009, an even greater drop is expected this year. Canada’s Top 350 emitters reduced greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 6 per cent during the same period.

Of course, that does not prove, in and of itself, that effective climate change policies would be painless in terms of costs or jobs. Still, just as the onus must be on climate scientists to both refine their models and acknowledge their limitations, those who assert that good climate policies will be economically ruinous must address both evidence and arguments that suggest that this may not be so.

Rapier’s insights into blogging

Over on his energy blog, Robert Rapier has written a summary of what he has learned, blogging about energy issues. The points seem pretty broadly applicable to those writing about technical and politically contentious topics. For those thinking of giving serious blogging a whirl, a couple of his points seem especially pertinent and well matched to my own experience. In particular, you won’t be able to predict which posts are popular and produce discussion, and which will not. Also, you shouldn’t expect to make any significant amount of money, and you should expect to be plagued by spambots trying to do so.

At its worst, blogging on substantive issues just produces a discordant echo chamber of people yelling at one another, continuing to use discredited arguments, and generally not advancing the state of discourse. That being said, I do think blogs have a lot of societal and pedagogic value. By forcing the author and commenters to defend their views in the face of criticism, they provide a valuable mechanism for sharpening thinking. Here’s hoping that helps to address the world’s grave problems, over the long term.

Haiti, crises, and the international community

Haiti’s terrible earthquake has given the international community an opportunity to demonstrate where it is capable of effective response. International organizations, national militaries, the media, and non-governmental organizations are all familiar with the business of short-term post-crisis response. The issues at stake are immediate, acute, and highly visible. The cost of making a commitment is fairly clear from the outset: whether you are evacuating people, digging through rubble, providing emergency shelter, or what have you. The response is also essentially apolitical: there is no blame to be assigned after such a natural disaster, and there are no clear partisan divisions in terms of what our response ought to be. Certainly, the international assistance is laudable and valuable. Predictions that a second wave of death would follow the Asian tsunami (on account of hunger, disease, etc) were partly defied as a consequence of energetic international aid efforts.

Of course, while a crisis illustrates what the international community is reasonably good at, it indirectly highlights areas in which responses are far more hesitant and ineffective. While the movement of tectonic plates is not a political phenomenon, the question of why Port-au-Prince was so vulnerable has political implications. The 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan was similarly powerful, but killed fewer people: about 6,500 compared with 40,000 plus in Haiti. Surely, construction standards and overall levels of societal wealth are part of the explanation for that. Comparisons can also be drawn to disasters that lack the features that make this one so politically simple: those that exist for an extended period, require uncertain and potentially large commitments of resources and political capital, and which lack the ability to create an immediate emotional response in the voting and tax-paying public.

While Haiti will provide incremental experience in acute crisis management, it is worth asking whether it can show the international community anything about longer-term risk management. In an increasingly interdependent world, the capabilities of the international community arguably need to expand beyond just sweeping up the broken glass, though doing so calls into question issues like sovereignty and the ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine that seems to have become an unexpected casualty of the second Iraq war. Certainly, the U.N. cannot create seismic standards and hope they will be enforced in poor countries; at best, the U.N. and other such international organizations might be able to get a better handle on transboundary issues, which can only become more acute as the world is ever more densely populated, and the total material withdrawals and waste deposits from humanity into the biosphere continue to grow.

If there were a climate change conspiracy…

A flawed but interesting blog post about climate change and conspiracy theories does a good job of summing up what climate change deniers are actually alleging:

They argue that the governments of Europe, of the US, of Canada, of China and India, and indeed of much of the rest of the world–governments that rarely agree on anything, I might point out–are acting in concert to promote a bogus claim that the earth is heating up because of man-made release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. They claim that this conspiracy is being supported by the almost universal connivance of the world’s scientists, who are collectively falsifying data and hiding countervailing data. And all this is happening, they assert, despite the almost universal opposition of the world’s corporations, most of which, we know, are resisting having governments take any serious action to combat climate change, and in many cases (look at the US Chamber of Commerce), are actively challenging the whole notion of climate change.

When put that way, it really doesn’t sound terribly plausible. Of course, there will be new developments in science as we refine our models and collect more data about what is actually happening in the world. That is simply a consequence of the nature of the climate system and of scientific inquiry. To argue, however, that the world’s scientific and political community are cooperating to actively mislead people into thinking there is a problem where none actually exists is quite preposterous.

Note that I called the post ‘flawed but interesting’ because it contains a number of dubious claims not related to climate change – for instance, that only a fire hot enough to melt steel could explain the catastrophic failure of the World Trade Center towers on September 11th. As the BBC explains, the 800°C fires were hot enough to weaken the steel to the point where the weight of the towers could not be borne. While I wouldn’t endorse the entirety of the post, I do think the point about the alleged climate change conspiracy is well made.

Carbon taxes v. cap-and-trade

Among advocates of carbon pricing, there is a long-running disagreement about whether a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system is preferable. Among economists and environmentalists, there is generally a preference for a carbon tax. Politicians terrified of the electoral implications of creating a new ‘tax’ tend to favour cap-and-trade schemes (partly, because it is easy to give away permits to influential industries under such a scheme).

Economists frequently argue that the trade-off is between price and emissions certainty. With a tax, you know exactly how much more any particular carbon-intensive activity will cost, making planning easier. With a hard cap, you know exactly what your emissions will be. With a tax, you can try to tweak the level to get the emissions volume you want, but you can never be entirely sure. Conversely, a cap assures the emissions outcome selected, but does so at a cost that cannot be known in advance.

A recent letter to The Economist does a good job of laying out some of the advantages of a cap-and-trade approach, arguing that economists and environmentalists have been too eager in throwing their support behind a tax:

First, a “one size fits all” tax requires an impossible calculation of the average cost of reducing emissions over a given period of time. Compare this with an emissions-trading system that works on the free-floating marginal cost of abating emissions. Second, carbon taxes would be levied locally and so impossible to properly administer on a global scale. A global carbon-market price is perfectly pervasive. And third, taxation cannot guarantee a reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions; emitters could opt to pay the tax and continue emitting at will. Conversely, a cap-and-trade solution introduces a carbon ceiling and the price acts as no more than a useful barometer of how close we are to achieving that goal; prices will tend to zero as the requisite level of emission reductions is achieved.

Personally, I think the choice of instrument is less important than the level of genuine political will, reflected in the care taken in regulatory design. Either approach can be set up in a dodgy way, intended to produce the impression of action without actually constraining carbon emissions effectively. A well-designed tax is better than a cap-and-trade system full of giveaways and dodgy offsets. A well-designed cap-and-trade scheme is better than a tax that is too low to be effective, or one where exemptions and rebates undermine the incentive effect. Those concerned about climate change should be willing to support either policy approach, while being energetic in ensuring that the system that is ultimately designed is a fair and effective one where polluters pay for the cost of their damaging activities and the long path to carbon neutrality is started upon.

Technology silver bullets for climate change

Talking about climate change mitigation, people often make reference to the Manhattan Project: arguing that we need a massive, technology-focused governmental effort to sort out the problem. This historical example can, however, be thought about in another way. During the final stages of WWII, the United States was preparing to invade Japan. Given the fierce resistance they encountered during the island hopping campaigns in the Pacific, they expected a very difficult battle to capture the Japanese home islands. Ultimately, those preparations were rendered unnecessary when the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped to produce a Japanese surrender.

In the climate context, the equivalent of the atomic bomb might be some miraculous new set of technologies that allows us to deal with climate change at a low cost and with few real sacrifices: algae-based biofuels, next generation fission or fusion nuclear reactors, carbon capture and storage, etc. Counting on the emergence of such technologies is akin to betting on the atomic bombs ending the war, long before it was certain that they would work or would be developed in a timely matter. While we may be lucky and see some breakthrough technologies emerge in the decades ahead, we need to do what the Americans did and plan to deal with the problem through the difficult practice of old-fashioned slogging. We need to have a plan to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at a safe level, and do so with the technologies and technical resources that exist today, not those that may exist in the future.

The future of our planet and of all future generations of humans depends on avoiding catastrophic climate change. Presented with that burden, we cannot just invest in researching a few technological long shots and then rest easy. We need to get ready to address the problem, no matter how costly, painful, and difficult doing so may ultimately prove to be.