Well-seasoned perspective

I can’t deny that currently I’m pretty bored by those “middle ground” guys who purportedly want to reconcile the two “sides” of the climate debate, yet who really have little more in mind than seizing a new ground to stand on for themselves.

In my opinion, Chris Colose summarizes the state of play quite nicely (h/t Tamino). The middle ground buddies have two interrelated problems: One of substance, and one of style. The superficial result of these problems is boredom, so I tend to avoid their blogs. Yet the deeper problem appears to be one of hubris: The claim to have found a solution to a global problem through designing “robust” approaches, while at the same time suffering from an incapacity to even run a robust online discussion.

Funding solutions outside the climate box

Over the past years, some thoughtful pieces have been written on managing the climate crisis that call for thinking outside the climate box. We should leave too narrow climate-as-an-environmental-problem-thinking behind and accept that climate change is as much an environmental issue as it is, for example, a development challenge, or a problem of ecological modernization. Therefore, we shouldn’t focus too much on climate change science, and think more about the socioeconomic challenges we need to address in order to manage climate change.

One of these strands of thinking focuses – naturally, I might add – on the necessary transformation of our energy infrastructure from the outdated fossil-fuel and nuclear based system towards a shiny new, low-carbon-clean-energy-thing. This is about the reasoning guys like Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger from the Breakthrough Institute advance. As they put it recently: “Climate Science Divides Us But Energy Technology Unites Us.” Yeah. Roger Pielke Jr., himself a Breakthrough Fellow, explains in his book The Climate Fix, we have basically two options to do something about climate change: Increase energy efficiency, and come up with competitive low-carbon energy sources.

Spot the difference

It ain’t that difficult, I’ll admit.

Originally from NASA, via Micael Tobis via Dennis Dimick

It’s a Disaster

A new paper titled “Normalizing economic loss from natural disasters: A global analysis” by Neumayer and Barthel (NM2010) in the top journal Global Environmental Change introduces a new method to normalize disaster-related economic losses over time. In the past there have been a few papers dealing with the issue that we see rising disaster losses, yet also increasing wealth, so the question is whether more disasters or more fancy beach houses are ultimately behind the upward damage figures. NM2010 state in their abstract (emphasis added):

In this article, we argue that the conventional methodology for normalizing economic loss is problematic since it normalizes for changes in wealth over time, but fails to normalize for differences in wealth across space at any given point of time. We introduce an alternative methodology that overcomes this problem in theory, but faces many more problems in its empirical application. Applying, therefore, both methods to the most comprehensive existing global dataset of natural disaster loss, in general we find no significant upward trends in normalized disaster damage over the period 1980–2009 globally, regionally, for specific disasters or for specific disasters in specific regions.

I have myself thought about this issue in German at Die Klimakrise here and here, and I can’t help to notice that this paper, just as several others before, fail on one crucial account: They do not look into mitigation, i.e. defensive measures against disasters (I don’t really know why this isn’t called adaptation, maybe it’s meant as mitigating e.g. storm damages?). In a word, these papers treat present-day disaster preparedness as if it was the same a few decades or even a century ago. And that’s simply not the case.

Governing innovation

In an article posted at Die Klimazwiebel, Eduardo Zorita asks where environmental and energy innovation ought to come from. One question he has in mind is whether governments may successfully induce innovation. He is doubtful, though:

In my personal experience, I do not have the feeling that forced innovation, i.e. a deliberate search for new inventions, has been very successful in the past.

He can only think of the Apollo Project, but there’s definitely more. Jänicke and Lindemann recently published a helpful overview paper about the various instruments regulators can use to encourage environmental innovations.They have come up with a matrix where market-based, regulatory, and supporting instruments can cover the invention, the innovation (market launch), and the diffusion phase of a new technology. Overall, this leads to a quite complex picture of how governments may cover the various phases of innovation, and employ different types of instruments in order to achieve the goal of having new environmentally-sound technologies developed and distributed.

In short: There’s no silver bullet in innovation and environmental politics, but rather necessary to establish a well-targeted and integrated approach. Otherwise you’re going nowhere.

Open IPCC

Today at a PhD summer school here in Berlin, I held a presentation on a potential paper I already spent some time thinking about. The working title is “Public participation in environmental assessments: The case for an open IPCC”. I don’t know yet whether I will actually write a paper about it, since I’ve got a lot of other stuff to do. Anyway, the presentation can be downloaded here (ppt), and the abstract reads as follows.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) serves as a science-policy interface, providing policy makers with valuable information on which they can decide how to react towards climate change. Even though the processes employed in the IPCC assessments – and the assessments themselves – have been proven widely reliable, public perception of the IPCC has suffered markedly due to “Climategate”, the publication of about 1,000 emails from a server of the Climatic Research Unit in November 2009, and to the realisation that there is a small number of errors in the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).

Attacks against climate science do not only arise from paid professionals, to whom disinforming the public with regards to climate change is a PR job. It has its roots also in a number of civic sceptics, to whom the IPCC processes appear intransparent, biased, and unreliable. These individuals should not merely be discarded as troublemakers, but sought to be integrated in a public participation process leading to an open IPCC, extending its original role towards a science-policy-society-interface.

In the first part, I will present the case for why the IPCC assessment process should be opened. This will be done with a focus on normative and functional aspects. I will then give an overview of the state of public participation in environmental assessments. The third part will be used to develop scenarios for how an open assessment process could be managed in practice. This includes technical means, e.g. software solutions and web platforms on which the assessment could be co-produced, acceptability, and practicability, especially in light of the small budget of the IPCC and the extremely limited time of the reports’ authors.

Encasing a temperature target

The two degrees temperature target, favoured by the European Union and the G8, and mentioned in the Copenhagen Accord, has quite an interesting history. It can be understood in rather different ways (PDF), ranging from a threshold beyond which catastrophe looms, as a level at which costs and benefits of mitigation policies are optimised, or as a simplifying measure in a highly complex management process.

Not so long ago, my colleague Oliver Geden at SWP published two papers suggesting that sooner or later, politicians might have to reconsider the two degrees target because global greenhouse gas levels will have made it unlikely to stay below that threshold (see also the discussion at Die Klimazwiebel or at Roger Pielke Jr.’s). This was not welcomed by everyone, since some people thought Oliver had argued against the target as such. Far from it, he merely questioned its future viability as a political strategy once the risk of overshooting two degrees will have become obviously high.

In fact, the numerical risk of exceeding the target is a key variable, with possible GHG levels corresponding with a two degrees temperature increase ranging from 330 to 700 ppm, according to Boykoff et al. 2010. This huge range is due to the uncertainties regarding climate sensitivity, which the IPCC AR4 put at 2-4.5°C for a doubling of CO2.

Climate codes

Since its inception, I’ve been a fan of Clear Climate Code, a project that tries to rewrite the rather messy NASA GISS temperature code into clear python (not that I would understand a lot about programming, but I admire the effort). So far, they’ve been quite successful and able to perfectly reproduce the steps done to create the GISTEMP global average surface temperature curve.

Among the most fascinating aspects is the amount of constructive skepticism the CCC people show. When they found a bug in GISTEMP, they sent the information to NASA who fixed it. Ultimately, GISS may take over the new code when it’s finished, and that would be a marvellous success story for citizen science. What CCC does is simply the opposite of what many contrarians do: Improving science, not seeding doubt about its validity.

And they’ve got more plans. Just a few days ago, Nick Barnes, the head behind CCC, announced the creation of the Climate Code Foundation (h/t Stoat). It’s supposed to act as an umbrella for projects related to temperature code, so far CCC and open climate code (though I can’t tell how much work, if any, has been done through the latter initiative). One project Barnes had already thought about loudly was the creation of clear code for paleo temperature reconstructions. Whether that’s going to be the next thing remains to be seen.

Distinguishing deniers from skeptics

A lot of people have found it useful to distinguish between different kinds of climate skepticism. In the current edition of Skeptic Magazine, David Brin makes this point and distinguishes climate denialists from climate skeptics. Keith Kloor adds some useful comments. Bart Verheggen likewise discovered various shades of grey in climate skepticism, and it is very worthwile thinking about those shades in more depth.

Not everyone who doubts scientific details about global warming is a climate denier. There’s an actually not so subtle difference between laypeople who put a lot of time and effort into vindicating or vitiating climate science, and paid professionals who seed doubt ordered by corporate players whose profits are endangered by climate policy or connected with personal ideologies opposed to anything green.

The latter group truly deserves the title “professional denialists”. They do not care about advancing science at all, they are not interested in honest debate, and they do everything to disturb the work of scientists working in the field. This sort of people is mostly absent from Europe, they appear to be largely constrained to the US and other anglosaxon countries. Their impact there, however, may be significant, according to the accounts of James Hoggan, and Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway. Admittedly, the field of denialists can’t be reduced only to PR people, but let’s keep it like this for a minute.

Civic skeptics, however, have been met with a lot of hostility on the web, while their contributions to the climate debate can – and should – be seen in a more positive light. Yet it’s also up to them to present their case in a more digestible way.

Refurbishing the UNFCCC

Currently, the UNFCCC gets a new building in Bonn. The secretariat is going to move from the Langer Eugen (the tall building to the right) to the Altes Abgeordnetenhaus. Work is pretty well under way, as you can see, and it should be finished by the end of 2011.

Also in 2011, we expect another large climate conference to be held in South Africa, after this years’ COP16 will take place in Cancun, Mexico. Many observers have noted that the sheer size of UNFCCC conferences has gotten out of control, and some suggested to shrink their scale in order to improve matters. While this proposition certainly makes for a good discussion, here’s why I think it’s not going to happen.