Republican climate cladistics

Might be useful to have some categories for Republican leaders:

Genus: Science Believers

Species: As good as typical Democrats

examples: Arnold the Governator, the eight Republicans who voted for cap and trade in Congress in 2009, Bush promises during the 2000 campaign (more or less)

notes: functionally extinct, unless McCain starts getting mad at fellow Republicans again.

Species: Proactive, but not as proactive as Democrats

example: Chris Christie. Others??

notes: they'll do something, maybe even without having to be forced to do something. But not as much as Democrats, which in turn isn't enough.

Species: Embracing science, rejecting acting on the science

examples: Mitt Romney, John Huntsman. Maybe Bush post-2005.

notes: this is the leftist side of the Republican Party mainstream. Might actually do something, very limited, if elected to office.

Genus: Wafflers

Species: Incoherent action rejecters.

example: Tim Pawlenty. Plenty of others I'm too lazy to track down. McCain on some days.

notes: results will likely vary if elected to office - they won't do much anything to be helpful, but the resistance they have to sane efforts by others could differ from case to case. Might have something to do with what they "really" believe, although considering that issue is a road to madness.

Other waffler species?

Genus: Denialists

Species: Conspiracy True Believers

examples: James Inhofe, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry (Morano-approved)

notes: I suppose you could try to distinguish between the ignorant and the express conspiracy supporters, but it doesn't work too well. These folks will only do what they're legally bound to do, after they've been sued for failing to do what they're legally bound to do.

So the Republican nomination is a battle between action rejecters and conspiracy true believers. Wonderful.

RP Jr. says strength of climate denialism in the US "not a limiting factor" in US politics

Roger Pielke Jr. on To the Point, which previously had done a good job in picking speakers (speaking around minute 24):

I would say the evidence suggests pretty strongly that public opinion is not a limiting factor in taking effective action on climate change.

All right then. If public opinion is not a limiting factor then you hypothetically could increase public opinion from what it is so that it matches the opinion of climatologists publishing on climate change, 97% of whom accept human effects on climate, and we still wouldn't have passed a climate bill in Congress in '09 or '10. Sounds a little loony to me.

This isn't Roger "The Battle for US Public Opinion on Climate Change is Over" Jr's first attempt to dismiss denialism while demanding people not talk about it. He also concluded that the claim that 57 US Senators accepted climate reality in 2007 was not a problematically low figure. My math places 57 as less than 60, not even taking account the climate realists who bow to lobbyist pressure and the lost potential votes among the 43 who are unlikely to vote to address a problem they doubt exists.

This isn't to say that the forces of denial are going to win in the long run, just that RPJr's dismissal of their influence doesn't sound like sound political science.

Now hidden in his drive to be contrarian is an interesting nugget - back to To the Point:

Public has at least for 20 years been strongly behind climate science and the idea that action needs to be taken. What we have seen is a big partisan divide....It's become part of the culture wars of the United States....as assumption that many scientists and experts carry with them that if only the public understood the science as they understand the science, the public would come to share their values....As a political scientist I look at issues like the debt ceiling or the war in Iraq or the TARP program and when you look at what public opinion was when action was taken on these controversial topics you find out that the strength of public opinion on climate change is at or exceeding the levels for which action was taken for the other issues. So I would say the evidence suggests pretty strongly that public opinion is not a limiting factor in taking effective action on climate change.

The stuff that's not bolded is either wrong or obvious. The bolded stuff, that legislative solutions with equal public support don't get passed at an equal rate suggest there's more to look at. RPJr goes on to say its the voters choosing the economy over their potential long term interest in climate, an Iron Law that's not so irony in practice. I'd suggest that the Iron Law doesn't exist, but that powerful economic interest tied into ideological backwardness can really screw things up in our democracy, especially when the 60 vote requirement in the Senate isn't very democratic.

Lomborg misunderstands city subsidence and sea level rise

Maybe I should ignore this Bjorn Lomborg Op-Ed like everyone else has, but one part got a rise out of me. He compares subsidence that's happened in certain cities due to groundwater depletion to the long-term, multi-century sea level rise of 15 feet (actually it could be more than that), and says that we've handled "large relative sea-level rises without much difficulty." In other words, adaptation is no big deal.

I don't know the cities he's talking about, but I do know about subsidence in San Jose along San Francisco Bay. Contrary to Lomborg's statement, it's a big deal and a serious problem, especially when combined with other potential flooding problems that usually exist because cities are normally located near rivers.

The other point Lomborg misses is that city subsidence is geographically limited. The only area that needs to be protected from relative sea level rise is a small stretch of shoreline. And cities are the most economically valuable land on the planet, so the cost of protecting them relative to their value constitutes the best possible scenario.

Sea level rise, even minor sea level rise, is a much bigger deal. Here in Santa Clara County, we're going to have to deal with it, and it's already costing taxpayers money. Flood projects for near-sea-level creeks are right now being designed to handle sea level rise, which is the only intelligent way to construct these long-term structures. Adaptation is already here, it's a significant problem, and the question is who should pay for the costs. Seems like greenhouse gas emissions would be a good place to look for a tax to pay for greenhouse gas costs.

And, Roger's back to his old tricks

RP Jr.'s got his third post up now in his attack-dog series against attaching a number to death and destruction from climate change. I can't keep up, but here's a note or two.

Roger sez:

I focused my critique on the disaster impacts because it seems common wisdom that the attribution of malaria, diarrhea and malnutrition deaths to greenhouse gas emissions needs no further critique. I was wrong about the common wisdom.

Roger finally admits he was only talking about less than 5% of the deaths. As to his claim that he omitted critiquing the 95% of the study because he was being nice, decide for yourself if you think he's telling the truth.


Moving along:

The attribution of health impacts to greenhouse gas emissions relies on work done by the WHO. Here is how the WHO describes its own analyses:

In 2002 the WHO explained (at p. 26 in this PDF):

Climate exhibits natural variability, and its effects on health are mediated by many other determinants. There are currently insufficient high-quality, long-term data on climate-sensitive diseases to provide a direct measurement of the health impact of anthropogenic climate change, particularly in the most vulnerable populations. Quantitative modelling is therefore the only practical route for estimating the health impacts of climate change.

And by quantitative modeling, they mean a model with assumptions included for the effects of GHG-driven climate change. To be clear, these assumptions are not based on observations or measurements.

So we're back, yet again, to Roger's shibboleth, his saying you can't start with an estimate of known climate impacts and use that to attribute a percentage of deaths and economic costs. Why? He says it's hard to do it accurately, that a slight change in the assumptions will give large changes in the numbers.

What he calls nonempirical is what normal humans would call an estimate. If you can't estimate perfectly, then you try to do it conservatively, and make clear that you're being conservative.

Roger thinks that if you can't get a perfect number, then don't do it at all, and give polluters a free ride instead.

UPDATE: Roger says in his post that tweaking the assumptions could result in an analysis where climate change actually reduces deaths instead of increasing them. That sounds to me like a great way for Roger to falsify this method - show that different but equally-reasonable assumptions lead to radically different conclusions. Incidentally, that's also how the fossil fuel companies could have backed up their assertion that climate models are useless - they could build their own with defensible parameters and assumptions and get different outputs. The fact that they never did it (publicly, anyway) suggests to me that any defensible model leads to a similar conclusion.

UPDATE 2: See William's post - he thinks the study's flawed, and makes the good point that my attack on Roger's critique sounds like a defense of the study. It's not meant to be.

Robert Samuelson retreads, repeats past mistakes on climate

Robert Samuelson got far more credit from me than he deserved until I realized he wasn't respected economist Paul Samuelson. Brad DeLong accurately describes Roger as "one of those who knows enough about economic analysis to use it as a tool but who instead uses it as a club."

Anyway, Robert has once again announced that it's too hard to do much about climate change, citing an Energy Information Administration study forecasting increased US emissions in 2030 compared to 2007.

I'll outsource much of this to Paul Krugman who notes that skeptics believe capitalism can manage any resource constraint except ones on GHG emissions, but also add these notes:

• RS fails to link directly to the study, but rather to the EIA main website. The study is here and reading the first paragraph may indicate why he omitted the link: the forecast increase is based on doing nothing additional to control emissions beyond what's already planned, either legislatively or under Clean Air Act authority. Even so, just the relatively minor changes in policies in 2007 and 2008 decreased the rate of increase from 0.8% annually in 1980-2007 to 0.3% annually for 2007-2030. Of course Samuelson doesn't note this.

• Two years ago, Samuelson wrote a very similar article saying future conservation won't work. At that time, he picked a study assuming only a 30% gain in vehicle fuel economy by 2030, and came up with 31% increase in carbon emissions. Now his current article says 50% gain in fuel efficiency, and 7% increase in emissions.* What he thought difficult to do just two years ago is already way behind what's anticipated. I think the same will hold true with his do-little position he now forecasts.

*Not totally clear from his articles whether in 2007 he's talking about global or US emissions, but the change in anticipated fuel efficiency is unambiguous.

UPDATE: per the comments, I corrected my screwup on the name from "Roger" to "Robert".