A temporary end to bliss

With a rare exception or two, I've been blissfully ignoring Roger Pielke Jr's recent stuff for the last year or so as he slid into irrelevance. As long as I didn't read his stuff, I could keep open the possibility that he was doing something useful.

Or not, regarding the Marcott paper. The Oglaf comic is great though, but highly inappropriate.

Others have handled it, (Eli shows up in the comments at the link), but I'll just add the parallel I see between this and how James Annan spotted the Pielkean confusion between detection and estimation of climate change effect on disasters, way back when in 2006.* Back then, people were trying to estimate what aspect of disasters were climate change-related, which Pielke denounced as failing to scientifically detect climate change in disasters. They weren't doing detection until more recently, as the science improved and disaster dice started rolling 13s.

IOW:

RPJr: You say X (percent of disaster damages) proves Y (climate change)
Rest of humanity:  No, I said assuming Y, here's our estimate of X.
RPJr.: You're wrong to say X proves Y!

(paraphrasing, not actual quotes)

It's the same issue or even less valid with RPJr and the post-1850 hockey stick/wheelchair component in Marcott. The paper is very clear in that they're not attempting to prove the current rise in temps via proxies. They even warn you not to consider their estimate robust, and they indicate the modern record they add is not theirs.

I agree that the press release could be clearer, but also agree with Stoat that it doesn't matter. It's like a paper examining Mars' orbit around the sun, where a press release might confuse a reader to think it also was about the fact that earth orbits the sun. There's no controversy about whether the earth orbits the sun. And the paper's clear.

So, just more of the same from RPJr.


*I think I spotted it too but could never find where I wrote it, thus reducing my own claim to a bitter, bitter footnote.

"Let's return to this February, 2013 and see if 'victory' still smells as sweet". Why wait?

The above is the political prediction of a political scientist that delaying the Keystone XL decision was Obama's brilliant way of playing his supporters for fools until the next election.

Or maybe not (although who knows for sure, but it's no help to the project).  Now the fight may also switch to Canada deciding whether to build their own pipeline to export the oil overseas, instead of piping it to Louisiana to be sent overseas.  It's a long game.

(Edited for a tad more context.)

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.

Open-air carbon capture economically unfeasible for decades

See the report from the American Physical Society. They spotted the not-hard-to-spot issue that it's a lot easier to capture CO2 at concentrated power sources than in dilute amounts in the atmosphere, and that transport doesn't overcome that issue (UPDATE: on second look, doesn't seem to deal with transport - the one advantage of open air capture is that you can position it where your sequestration sites are instead of where your power plants are. Good luck with having that overcome sequestration as a cost savings, though).

Hansen's idea of carbon sequestration from biomass power isn't affected by this, since he still relied on point source capture and can still achieve carbon negative results. Roger Pielke Jr. doesn't do so well however in his dream of an unnamed technological solution that will make all the problems go away for a low low cost. The report's dated April 28th, and we'll see when he gets around to discussing it.

Global coolers not fessing up, and a SECOND not-wrong (?) Roger Pielke Jr. post

Green Grok catches a few denialists saying in 2008 that we're about to cool off, and asks them to fess up (Watts Up, of course is one of them). Good luck with the fessing up, though.

Deltoid had something similar with Andrew Bolt, who's equally unlikely to fess up.

I seem to see Don Easterbrook showing up more often in various places for who knows why. He predicts cooling, but won't bet on it.

In other news, 2011 is off to a good start. The year's barely begun and yet there's a post by Roger Pielke Jr. that's not obviously wrong, claiming the media does a decent job of portraying scientific understanding of sea level rise. While I didn't exactly RTFR as Eli Rabett demands, I did skim TFR that the post is based on and it still looks okay, and both the post and FR are free of hippie-punching. Progress! RP Jr also had a not-wrong post in 2010, and quite likely more that I've simply missed.

BTW, I swear I was going to skip the snarking, but on my way to recover Roger's post, I found this regarding climate change and tropical storms:

It is simply logical that a signal that cannot be seen for decades is not immediately relevant to judgments of near-term risk.

No, it's not logical to say that when we can derive damage from climate change, even if we can't distinguish it from the huge amounts of noise.

Iron Law versus BOSO

Thought I'd just spell out the timeline I reference in the previous post.

• 2006 (a gubernatorial election year): Democrats in the California Assembly pass AB 32, mandating greenhouse gas reductions. The Democratic candidate for governor immediately supports the bill. After some equivocating, Republican incumbent Arnold Schwarzenegger signs the legislation instead of vetoing it.

• 2006-2010: Cap-and-trade consistently discussed as an important part of implementing AB 32.

• October 28, 2010: California Air Resources Board announces cap-and-trade will be part of implementing AB 32.

• November 2, 2010: Voters reject Proposition 23, which would have suspended AB 32, on a 60-40 vote.

• November 5, 2010: Roger Pielke Jr. announces on National Public Radio that "the iron law of climate policy simply says that while people are willing to bear some cost for environmental objectives, that willingness has its limits. And cap and trade ran up against those limits time and again, and it's not surprising that it failed."

I think RPJ's Iron Law has some hindcasting problems. He could say it's just a reference to national politics, but his Iron Law doesn't seem phrased that way.

In lieu of the RPJ Iron Law, I'd like to propose BOSO, or Brian's Obvious Statement of the Obvious, which is that getting 60 votes in the Senate is hard. While BOSO may not sound quite as profound, I think it has better explanatory power and does better with hindcasting.

UPDATE: A nice write-up on California's proposed cap-and-trade by Michael Wara is here.

UPDATE 2: Matt Yglesias had a near-identical point here that I just stumbled upon. I like the term BOSO more than YOSO, though.

UPDATE 3: I was happy to find a RPJ post I agreed with on the value of testing carbon sequestration for a coal plant operation. Maybe it's not too surprising as a post, in that it gives him a chance to go hippie-punching against the Sierra Club, but in this case I think he's right and Sierra Club is wrong.

How to be a climate hawk and a polite elected official

One of an important number of problems I saw with the elected leadership where I ran for office was insufficient politeness to members of the public, to the staff, and to each other. So now I'm an elected official wondering how to deal with things here on my personal blog, where I don't feel very politely inclined toward some people on climate issues.

I'll try to handle it mainly by the fact that this isn't where I intend to discuss Water District issues primarily, something I'll do at my campaign blog. There, I'll be Mr. Polite. No climate denialists being labelled there, just misguided skeptics. And it's helpful to remember that the position is with a special district without even the police power of local government.

As for here, I'll continue to point out problems, like the ones with (non-denialist) Roger Pielke Jr.'s alleged Iron Law that economic policies will always outweigh climate policies. Roger claims that his book is much more subtle and one shouldn't criticize his Iron Law without first reading (buying) his book. I'm going to have to pass on that suggestion - buying the book is probably creating a bad incentive given his past work on these issues.

The point I tried to make is that I'm certain that had Prop. 23 won in California, then Roger would've claimed it as vindication of his Iron Law. Instead it got roundly thumped and California moves ahead on its cap-and-trade provisions, right before Roger explains on national radio that moving ahead on cap-and-trade will be stopped at the ballot box. Roger could try to make the argument made against me, that it was unfair to focus on ancillary benefits from fighting climate change, and that defenseless Texas oil companies and coal billionaires had no ability to respond, but the question is whether you can get climate change policies passed. We can, and Roger's Iron Law seems pretty squishy.

But he is polite though, so I'll give him credit for that. Thanks!

Republican Party denialism and Roger Pielke Jr.'s analysis

The National Journal finds that no major party in any democracy is as thoroughly in denial about climate science as the Republican Party. Roger Pielke Jr. writes "it didn't have to be this way....I have no idea as to how that circumstance may have evolved differently." That seems incoherent to me, especially as he acknowledges a strong and widespread anti-environment shift among Republican political candidates. He does his best to blame climatologists for provoking this shift instead of reacting to the shift.

What I really had been looking for in Roger's work is this piece from 2007 saying that climate science was so widely accepted that the "issue of science is no longer relevant to debate in Congress." Even in 2007, the massive level of Republican denialism meant only 57 Senators accepted the consensus position. Not enough to overcome a filibuster, and Roger felt that denialism didn't matter.

I think the level of denialism at the highest level of the Republican Party has an obvious connection to the inaction we've had in the US, and it should be a pretty obvious connection.

Unfortunately, it took me a while to find that 2007 post of Roger's. While looking for it, I also came across this one from 2009 saying cap-and-trade is likely to get Congressional support sufficient to pass in the next few years; another one making the (incomprehensible to me) argument that improved mitigation of potential weather-related damages doesn't affect the damage signal from climate change; and another from 2007 saying the public has accepted climate change science (with the implication being there's no point in battling denialists).

I'm not finding any of these five blog posts particularly persuasive.

Roger Pielke Jr. incorrectly ties flawed Inhofe list to a good study of climate researchers

(UPDATE:  Roger Pielke Jr. asserts I've got it all wrong - see his post starting around comment 89.  He did help clarify one minor point about the Inhofe list that I'm inserting below, but other than that I stand by everything I said here, as well as my posts about misinformation he's given on open-air capture and ocean sequestration.)

(Background on the good PNAS study here - it found that only a tiny number of active climate researchers are unconvinced about human caused climate change, and that the unconvinced ones don't produce as much work nor are cited by others as much as the mainstream scientists).

I'll cut RP Jr. more slack than I otherwise would, because it's his father being categorized as on the losing side of scientific history, and I'd have trouble maintaining perspective myself in that situation.  However, he still needs to be factually accurate, and he isn't when says this:

 "What qualifies one to be on the [PNAS study] APHS10 list of skeptics, which I'll just call the "black list"? ....In fact, it turns out that you don't even have to sign an open letter or argue against immediate cuts for emissions. You can simply appear unwillingly on Senator James Inhofe's list."

Actually, no.  Inhofe and Marc Morano compiled a list of climate denialists that's as flawed as everything else that the denialists put out, and it included climate believers with the skeptics.  RP Jr uses the inclusion of the Inhofe list to discredit the PNAS study, but the PNAS study didn't use the Inhofe list.


Three of us tried to get this clarified/corrected in the comments to Roger's post, with little effect.  He says that the study links to one of the co-author's website who relies on the Inhofe list, which provides legitimacy to a flawed (apparently broader) list.  He won't fix his post, so far.


Incidentally, he hasn't shown where the PNAS author Jim Prall relies on the Inhofe list, so the entire critique could be wrong.  (UPDATE:  Roger's additional comments did help with this at least - Prall uses Inhofe's list here, but never used it as the sole source of information on a skeptic, and again it wasn't used in the PNAS study as Roger says it was.)


Moving on from the Inhofe thing, the whole claim that it's "blacklisting" to point out a viewpoint is held by a tiny and mostly undistinguished group means that Pielke Jr. and the other critics object to an attempt to determine the state of scientific opinion.  I could imagine this type of analysis could apply very usefully to wholly unrelated scientific questions, but apparently Pielke Jr wouldn't want that to happen.


Finally, an interesting choice of tactics here - during the whole stolen climate emails thing, some people wanted to focus on the privacy invasion and illegal theft, which I thought would be viewed as an attempt to distract people from the content when the content wasn't that bad.  Here, denialists and unhelpful types like Pielke Jr. are ignoring the PNAS study content and screaming about blacklists.  Maybe it's like the lawyer's saying that if you can't pound any arguments in your favor, pound the table instead.

Even skeptics see the VA Atty General as another McCarthy

(I was going to write about rock-climbing in Yosemite, but I guess that'll have to wait.)

Today a few people who might otherwise get the term denialists have earned the skeptic moniker for a day, for opposing the Virginia Attorney General fishing expedition that seeks virtually all records held by the University of Virginia regarding a former researcher Michael Mann who believes in climate change, while AG Cuccinelli doesn't.

More info at Deltoid, including a list of some skeptics who've done the right thing. I'd add, with reservations, the climate action diversionist Roger Pielke Jr. Reservations stem from the fact that Roger can't resist stabbing Mann in the face a few times during the blog post condemning Cuccinelli and offering his "support" for Mann.

The fishing expedition request is here. Timpanogos has a good link roundup. Regarding his thought that the statute of limitations has been exceeded, I don't think so - the section he quotes only applies to actions by private parties, not the AG. There's this section of the law, though:

§ 8.01-216.12. Civil investigative demands; protected material or information.

A civil investigative demand issued under this article shall not require the production of any documentary material, the submission of any answers to written interrogatories, or the giving of any oral testimony if such material, answers, or testimony would be protected from disclosure under (i) the standards applicable to subpoenas or subpoenas duces tecum issued by a court of this Commonwealth to aid in a grand jury investigation or (ii) the standards applicable to discovery requests under the Rules of the Supreme Court of Virginia, to the extent that the application of such standards to any such demand is appropriate and consistent with the provisions and purposes of this article.

I'm thinking this could provide a reason for UVa to stand up to the AG, if they wanted to, just like they could fight any unreasonable subpoena. The AG isn't going after anyone else though, not Mann directly (Roger missed this part) so only the university has a choice. I think.

Would be useful to have lawyers who practice in these fields to weigh in on this stuff.

UPDATE: Ed Darrell of Timpanogos found a better link showing the statute of lims section does apply to the Attorney General. OTOH, my not-super-informed opinion is that the reference for those "responsible to act" means the Attorney General, not the officials supervising Mann, so either that provision applies, or the end of Mann's work in 2004-2005 comes under the six-year limit.

Actually, a criminal inquiry by a powerful Senator is kind of a big deal

Ages ago by blog reckoning, but I thought I'd pull up some stuff by good ol' Roger Pielke Jr., wherein he blames Rick Piltz for indiscreetly saying that climate denialist Senator Inhofe is investigating climatologists for alleged legal violations, including one criminal law violation.

Well, I share Roger's outrage at Piltz for saying Inhofe is claiming one potential criminal law violation. Inhofe is claiming three potential criminal law violations, at least (see pp. 29-31: False Statements Act, False Claims Act, and obstruction of justice, with some weird statement about an "OSTP Policy Directive" that is poorly written but probably doesn't assert criminal violations). A Roger Reader wouldn't know that Inhofe had said boo about crimes, where Roger only quotes Piltz and not Inhofe talking about such things, and Roger cheerily dismisses Inhofe's legal threats of any kind as inconsequential.

Not so fast, though. I'm not worried too much about the False Claims Act, which would only apply if climatologists got paid for work and didn't do it. False Statements and obstruction of justice, however, could come down to whether the climatologists misleadingly answered or deliberately failed to meet legal mandates to answer certain questions or information requests. Denialists are probably ready to call anything misleading and any omission deliberate. In a normal world this is almost never applied to responding to Congressional inquiries (when the tobacco execs said cigarettes aren't addictive, nothing happened to them), but the denialists are trying to shape a different world.

One would think that a political scientist like Roger would know that Inhofe will regain subpoena power as the EPW Committee Chairman if the Republicans get the Senate back, allowing him to cause endless trouble and to assert new legal violations if subpoena responses are deemed inadequate. If Roger knows this, he fails to mention it.

As for actual prosecution, it's highly unlikely so long as Democrats run the Department of Justice. Again though, I'd think that a political scientist would remember that the Bushies placed quite a few arch-conservatives at DOJ in the civil service, and those folks are still there and capable of making trouble. They'd most likely get shut down long before doing anything too serious, but those people could also make life difficult for scientists. And a still more serious issue, IMHO, is Inhofe's repeated mention of "debarment," which could make the climatologists and possibly their institutions ineligible for federal funding. No scientific institution wants even a whiff of that idea near them. The 2012 election isn't far off, and while President Sarah Palin is unlikely, she's not impossible. It's not over the top to worry some about this.

As Eli pointed out, there is a new McCarthyism, and it's from the denialists. Roger sees nothing to worry about though, so YMMV.

Friends of Earth UK's questionable support for chemical open air carbon capture

Maybe I'm biased because of Roger Pielke Jr.'s misrepresentations in favor of chemical air capture, but I was a little surprised at the partial thumb's up given by FOE UK to chemical capture.  Because they're sane they give priority to reducing emissions over geoengineering fantasies ("Mitigation has to be the priority for action, action far in excess of currently being considered by politicians is needed.").  Still, they give chemical capture some props, including favoring it over biomass power plus sequestration:

The use of large-scale afforestation, bio-char production and biomass carbon capture and storage have some limited carbon reduction potential but there are very significant land use issues associated with these. These geoengineering techniques could seriously compete with land needed to produce food (the quantity of land required varies hugely dependent on diet) and land for the protection of ecosystems. Until these land-use issues are better understood Friends of the Earth cannot support the use of large-scale afforestation, bio-char production and biomass carbon capture and storage.

Chemical air capture of carbon is the most promising carbon reduction option, although some research is still needed into safe storage sites. This is a very expensive option which is far more costly than mitigation. However rich countries have already far exceeded their fair share of “environmental space” through releasing far more than their fair share of carbon emissions over the last 200 years. If safe storage sites can be identified rich countries should carry out significant air capture of carbon, in additional to very significant cuts in emissions.

The problem with this analysis is the apples and oranges comparisons of costs.  Chemical capture can only be done at great cost per unit of carbon reduction, so FOE assumes that large costs are allowable for chemical capture but not for the biological techniques.  OTOH, if you assume you're allowed to spend the same amount on biomass or biochar, you can solve at least some of the problems that FOE identified with them.  At least you could provide incentives to use non-agricultural land for biomass production.  This might still produce pressure on natural habitat, but if we're assuming lots of money, there's ways to deal with that too, like paying for increased productivity on farmland instead.

Of course I'm just waving my hands at cost figures instead of crunching them, but that still puts me one step ahead of FOE.  Somebody needs to do the numbers.  Roger claimed to have done the numbers, but 1. his work generally raises doubts in my mind and I'm not going to spend time checking every citation to determine whether it says what he claims it says; 2. he only examines capture costs, not sequestration costs, transport, monitoring, technology development etc ("In this paper I explore some of the economic considerations associated with air capture of carbon dioxide, and do not address issues of storage, which are explored in depth elsewhere"); and 3. he does his own apples to oranges thing of comparing the partial costs of capture to full costs of mitigation in the Stern Report and IPCC (in part 4.1:  "If air capture technology could be implemented at [lowest rate cited by Roger], then the cost to stabilize emissions over the 21st century would be less than the Stern median estimate....The IPCC median value of 1.3% [of global GDP] is less than the costs air capture [sic] at $360 cost per ton of carbon, but almost three times the cost at $100 per ton.")

I hope FOE reconsiders its analysis sometime on an apples to apples basis.  I wouldn't rule out chemical capture, but it needs to considered realistically.

Fun and games with Roger Pielke Jr. at the NY Times

(UPDATE:  as I mentioned in a previous post, I'll be mostly offline for the next few weeks, and will have to see if anything interesting develops.)

Here's my original post about Roger's disturbing vagueness in describing Hansen's support for sequestration from biomass power, used in order to validate Roger's support for open air chemical capture.

Roger accuses me of lying about his definition of open air capture, which he claims to have clearly mentioned as including biological means.  His proof is something written ten months after my critique.

It's there in the comments to that post, and may get played out in a Dot Earth post and comments.  Here's what I wrote to Dot Earth:

Roger Pielke Jr. (#32) is disturbed when I mention (#29) how he misinformed people about Hansen's position on open air carbon capture (supporting sequestration from biomass plants), in relation to Roger's support for chemical versions of open air carbon capture. I think I gave a pretty decent summary in the comment, and at the quotes of Roger's own work at the link. 

As for his defense that he has expressly defined open air capture to include biological means, he defends by linking to something he wrote in December 2009. My critique was written in February 2009 about a paper Roger published in the same month, where Roger describes air capture as that "which refers to the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the ambient air. Air capture has received remarkably little attention in debates on policy responses to climate change, but this seems to be changing (e.g., Jones, 2008). By contrast, the capture and storage of carbon dioxide from power plants has received considerable attention (e.g., IPCC,2005)".

http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu...

He does indeed once mention Hansen's specific idea that Roger somewhat disjointedly ties to his own definition (although Roger fails to understand Hansen's proposal for sequestration), and I disclosed that in my February 2009 documentation. Two other uses of Hansen by Roger in that paper and a linked FAQ kept Hansen's support as a vague generalization not linked to biomass power plants, and even this one more specific mention fails to indicate that it is all that the reference supports, not the chemical capture idea that is Roger's interest.

So is Roger misinforming his readers in the actual paper that I critiqued? The question is whether someone who failed to go and read the Hansen reference would have the idea that the reference is supportive of chemical capture. That's how Roger's work appears to me to be read. If Hansen is supportive, it's not shown by the reference Roger provided in the paper I critiqued, and Roger's time travel to a definition that he wrote ten months later (or to any other external source) does not rescue that paper from misinforming people.

Similarly, someone who read Roger's comment #32 above and didn't carefully compare references would likely think that Roger had pointed to something that I had concealed in Roger's paper that I was critiquing, rather than Roger quoting a totally different paper written long after my critique. These nested levels of misinformation indicate the challenge involved in dealing with his work. I confess that I can rarely keep up with him.

Maybe I'm the one who's losing perspective.  I welcome that advice in a comment or an email if so.


UPDATE:  The comment above hasn't been posted yet to Dot Earth, but I hope it will be (UPDATED UPDATE:  it's up, as is Eli's comment).  And I shouldn't throw out the baby with the Pielkeian bathwater - sequestration may prove too expensive to use even concentrated sources like power plants, but maybe not.  Hansen's idea is intriguing.  Roger's idea is much less so but like geoengineering, something we may have to consider.  The main problem I have with Roger's paper is the misleading way it describes Hansen's position.

More snows of San Francisco Bay

We're going on five days now of snow in the high-elevation hills above San Francisco Bay. We've got the possibility of more snow on the way, so some of this snow could last for two weeks.

Thought I'd take advantage of this to recycle two posts: first, on how the Bay Area and anywhere else with intermittent snowfall will see some significant effects of climate change as we go from a few snowfalls per year to a few snowfalls per decade. In addition to what I wrote before, I'll just add the aesthetic impact: hills turn into mountains when their top halves are snow-covered. It'll be sad to have that happen less often.

And second, a post on how we'll see increased flooding because winter storms that would've stored some of their precipitation as snowfall at higher elevations will be more likely to drop it all as rain, all at the same time. I think it should be possible to model this effect quantitatively.

UPDATE: bonus blogging - GingkoGate is now breaking in the comments at Jules' and James' blog. They won't get away with it.

Detection, Attribution and Estimation

The above is the title for an old 2006 James Annan post that I tried to find earlier, about Roger Pielke Jr.'s approach criticizing those who attempt to estimate the current level of damage from AGW. An excerpt:

A recent comment of [Pielke's] provides a nice opening:

As you well know much of science works through hypothesis - falsification. Across climate science the null hypothesis used to guide research has been that a human signal is NOT present, and research is then done to falsify this hypothesis. In some cases such research has been done allowing attribution of climate effects to an anthropogenic forcing. This null hypothesis is chosen because of Occam's razor, it is a simpler explanation for what is observed.

He is essentially posing the question as initially one of detection - can we show that the AGW has had an effect, and that the observations are not just the result of climate variability? - before moving on to attribution - how much of a change can we describe as being due to this particular cause?

There is, however, an entirely different but equally valid approach that could also be used from the outset, which is: what is our estimate of the magnitude of the effect? The critical distinction is that the null hypothesis has no particularly priviledged position in this approach.

James goes on to point out one of the two reasons why this is a bad approach:

It is amusing to see Roger, very much at the sharp end of policy-relevant work, promoting the scientifically "pure" but practically less useful detection/frequentist approach rather than the more appropriate estimation/Bayesian angle.

The business interests who will be hurt by action to address emissions know who they are, but the people who will be hurt by inaction don't know who they are. Damage estimates will help people know they are being affected and be more likely to balance the polluters in policy development.

The other reason why estimates are valuable is for climate change litigation. If we can estimate how much damage polluters are causing, we're much closer to figuring out what they owe to society. I'm certain this is something that fossil fuel lawyers and lobbyists are thinking about, and at some point they're going to want a deal: in return for immunity from litigation, they'll give a concession on climate change legislation. The more scared they are of litigation means the bigger the concession that they'll offer.

Back to James' post - in the comments, Roger shows up to say he mostly agreed with James on policy, but was not advocating but just "noting" the IPCC approach. Fast forward to more recently:

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.

Roger calls this "non-empirical" and says estimates can be altered to say anything. Only "empirical" data can be used. I assume he means a disproof of the null hypothesis, which he had said before isn't a good way to do policy. Maybe I've misunderstood....

Worth noting that this WHO stuff is the same that Stoat says is badly done. And I'll concede that taking the additional step of estimating the human impact after estimating the AGW climate damage adds more squishiness to the calculation. But Roger says it shouldn't even be attempted, a different approach from saying the attempt was flawed.

(And I'll just put in a marker that I'm not convinced that William's right about the WHO, but I'm going to have to look at that more closely to see if I have anything intelligent to say....)

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.

Dog bites man, and Roger Pielke Jr. goes about things wrong

(META-UPDATE: As I said in the update to the post following this one, go read William's critique of the GHF study. What I'm trying to do here is not to defend the study but to argue that Roger did a lousy job of critiquing it, especially in his originally critique that he sent to the NY Times.)


Unfortunately, Roger Pielke Jr. seems to be the NY Times' go-to guy to say something contrary about climate stuff (OTOH, finding anyone who's semi-consistently contrary, but non-denialist, and not as credibility-wrecked as Lomborg, has got to be tough).

Latest is reporting on a study estimating over 300,000 deaths are now caused annually climate change, where RP Jr. says categorically the report is "deeply flawed" and a "methodological embarassment". His critique in full is here, and it really comes down to claiming that past attempts to pull a climate signal out of disaster noise have failed, and that this new attempt - comparing earthquake disasters and weather disasters over the same 25 year time period to determine whether increased disaster stats are from socioeconomic growth or climate - doesn't control for confounding factors.

First and most important, he condemns the entire report while offering reasons on just one small part. Disasters account for a little over 10% of the 300k death estimate (UPDATE: I was sloppy - it's actually less than 5%, and that figure also includes droughts, another thing I don't think Roger has critiqued). Most of the non-disaster-related deaths come from environmental degradation (methodology here) of which Roger has nothing to say.

Second, we don't know if earthquake regions have experienced less growth than other areas. Maybe they've had more growth, and the report is an underestimate. All we really know - and what would have been a valid criticism - is that this method is necessarily crude and has wide error bars for disaster attribution.

Third, Roger should have welcomed the approach to begin with, because it's the only one he acknowledges as legitimate. For years he's attacked as illegitimate the analyses that take what are generally-accepted levels of current climate change and tried to estimate what level of current disaster losses can be attributed to them. It took me forever to figure out his real critique was claiming these studies were attempting to prove a climate signal in the disaster noise, which is a complete misinterpretation (James Annan figured this out too, but I can't find where he wrote about it on his blog). This new report, by contrast, tries to do what Pielke Jr. wants, and instead he's just mad.

Fourth, if he wants to stand by previous analyses, he should have tried to figure out how to improve the study by making a prediction: that narrowing the geographic focus to areas with earthquake disasters would show no difference in trends between earthquake disasters and weather disasters (or at least, decreased diffence than what the present study found). That would remove much of the socioeconomic factors that Roger thinks are the problem. It would be interesting to see the answer to this narrower focus.

UPDATE: per Eli's comment, Roger's played a role in staking "ownership" of a policy area. And I thought I remembered this earthquake thing before.

Climate change is changing rain/snow mix in winter floods

Thought I'd try a local reference as part of the whole Roger Pielke Jr. kerfluffle, wherein Roger expresses outrage at the idea that present climate disasters are partially traced to climate change. He apparently doesn't dispute that climate change will make future disasters worse, so I fail to detect the bigness of the deal.

Something I put up at my work blog is relevant to climate disasters and flooding. Our local area winter storms and resulting flooding are a mix of rain at low elevations and snow at high elevations. California has definitely warmed, so this has likely increased the rain:snow ratio and made flooding worse, and will do so even more in the future.

And it's probably not just us that have this problem - plenty of other temperate areas could face fall and spring storms that would have been partially or completely snow instead of rain under natural conditions but will get rain-caused flooding instead because of warming. Not the most important climate impact by far, but directly relevant to Roger's field.

I expect his response would be to say you can't point to existing data on economic damages and separate out a climate signal from the noise of every other factor. So what? That doesn't mean the damage hasn't happened. It's a logical implication, and what's lacking is only the detailed information that lets us tease out the various factors.

Tierney and Pielke Jr.'s wild exaggerations about Holdren and Hansen

Mostly outsourcing this one to Joe Romm. Several additions:

Pielke Jr. says "[scientists] pose as impartial experts pointing politicians to the only option that makes scientific sense." He's apparently referring to John Holdren and likely to Jim Hansen. The article doesn't give any examples of those two pretending to be above the political fray. My guess is they'd admit they're taking political sides, so Pielke doesn't make sense. His arguments about exaggeration or "stealth science" is an underhanded way to pretend to support a prior statement that's wrong.

Second, Tierney repeats Pielke's pollyannish views on open-air carbon capture. To support this, Pielke announces:

Who else thinks air capture is important?
Lots of people. Jim Hansen is a notable example. In my paper I quote him as follows:

‘‘a feasible strategy for planetary rescue almost surely requires a means of extracting [greenhouse gases] from the air”

Pielke repeats it (page 5):

Of course, there is no guarantee that the installation of air capture facilities would be any les controversial than new nuclear plants or coal facilities with CCS. Even so, Hansen et al. (2007) suggest that the fate of the planet depends upon successfully deploying air capture technologies, ‘‘a feasible....(repeats quote)"

Pielke also lists Hansen as among those paying attention to open-air capture (page 1). Only once does Pielke drop the veil, slightly (page 2):

The most straightforward means of air capture is simply through photosynthesis. Hansen et al. (2007) propose that carbon dioxide emissions from power plants fuelled with biomass might be captured at the source and then sequestered in the deep sea.

Pielke's being sloppy - Hansen actually says "well beneath the ocean floor" (page 1950), a different process with less environmental risk than deep-sea injection.

Pielke also omits Hansen's central point in Hansen's paper - that we are in so much trouble already with current concentrations of greenhouse gases that we HAVE to pull the gases out of the atmosphere. Unsurprising that he'd omit this, since Pielke spends every possible moment fighting efforts to slow emissions (he'll claim differently though), and because of the fantasy that open-air capture would allow emissions to proceed mostly unchecked.

The most misleading aspect is that Pielke allows the impression that Hansen supports open-air capture in much the same way as Pielke. For all I know that may be true, but Pielke's never shown it while implying otherwise. Biomass generation with sequestration is a very limited concept that has little to do with Pielke's ideas, and the buried citation in one spot, with no clarification that this is all that Hansen talks about, does not eliminate Pielke's misleading.

My not-worth-much opinion is that we're in so much trouble over climate change that we need to be open to and spend some money on crazy ideas like geoengineering and open-air capture. The primary effort should be controlling emissions though. Pielke is no help.

UPDATE: edited to tone down a bit. Must find the right tone....

UPDATE 2 (Feb. 2010):  well, this is ironic.  I approved Roger's counter-attack comment below from the moderation queue, and now can't seem to be able to post my reply in a followup comment.  So here it is instead:

Roger, your cites to Hansen had the effect of avoiding a direct lie, but gave the impression that he was a supporter of chemical capture.  I didn't say that you expressly claimed he supports chemical capture, but that you misinformed people to use him as validation.

The definition you use isn't from the paper I critiqued - it postdates that paper and my critique.

To accuse me of semantic twisting in this context is quite a stretch.

And you still haven't addressed your mistake on sequestration "in the deep sea". 

Mucking my way through Pielke Jr. (and the Volokhs)

I haven't paid too much attention to Roger Pielke Jr. lately, as it's just too much work to sort through his stuff. I don't even know how to categorize him - not a denialist, exactly. Maybe just contrarian for the sake of it, a climate change nihilist.

But let's go through the exercise. Jonathan Adler at the Volokhs does his usual uncritical citing of RP Jr. to take potshots at Joe Romm who pushes for rapid action. This is how it works, by the way. Even if RP Jr. doesn't directly oppose attempts to mitigate climate change, he's used extensively by people like Adler who does.

RP says a new climate study doesn't support the idea of emphasizing how climate change makes weather more extreme. A casual reader might think RP is saying that weather won't get more extreme, so RP gets to send that message without actually saying it. To support his argument, he says the study finds in the US that

3. Despite increases in some measures of precipitation , there have not been corresponding increases in peak streamflows (high flows above 90th percentile).

Again a casual reader might think this means that things aren't getting worse. What RP leaves out is this compares high flows within a single period, not against the past. If total precipitation increases, the 90th percentile can also increase compared to what would have been a 90th percentile flood, fifty years ago. In other words, things are getting worse and it supports the opposite of what RP implies (this could be wrong, see updates below).

Another example - RP says the study (available here) emphasizes flooding when in fact "there has been no increase in streamflow" and is therefore ignorant or misleading (RP also says damage has decreased as a percentage of GDP, but he's ignoring the effect of flood control measures). TokyoTom valiantly tries to figure out in the comments what he's talking about regarding "no increase" in streamflow. RP says, "The report is not discussing flooding when it says it is discussing flooding. It is discussing precipitation. They are not at all the same thing, and implying that precip = floods is in error, and misleading." RP is accusing the study of doing what he just did - implying (not saying directly though) that streamflow is a proxy for extreme weather and it's not getting worse. Eventually RP cites to yet something else he wrote, but I'd had enough by this point.

UPDATE: Good grief, that was quick - Roger has a response in the comments. I'm not satisfied. And in somewhat related news, "Scientists studying variations in tropical heat and rainfall since the mid-1980s have found a strong link between warm periods and a rise in the frequency of the most extreme downpours."

UPDATE 2: Thinking some more about the comments, I did the same wrong leap from more extreme precip = more extreme flooding. It does ceteris parabis, but not over time with heavily managed and altered watersheds. Going back to the study itself, it's pretty measured on streamflow issues (p. 53), so I don't see the problem. More broadly, extreme events and their possibilities do motivate people, and is an important part of the economic analysis. They shouldn't be overplayed or downplayed.