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.

Just to give you a few examples. It’s a problem of substance, for example, when Roger Pielke Jr. conducts studies on normalizing natural disaster losses over time by correcting for increase in wealth, while neglecting increasing resilience against flood events by, say, building dams, introducing flood control measures, or build our houses safer (with the relationship between wealth and mitigation measures not so easy to assess). Following from this, it’s poor style to repeatedly claim:

Note that work that I have been involved in on floods assumes that damage increases proportionally to increases in population and wealth (…).

While one of the studies dealing with this issue (even discussed by Pielke Jr. here) clearly states:

One of the problems with normalizing damage from natural disasters, independently of the method chosen, is our inability to take into account defensive mitigating measures (…).

And (emphasis mine):

What the results tell us is that, based on historical data, there is no evidence so far that climate change has increased the normalized economic loss from natural disasters. More cannot be inferred from the data. In particular, one cannot infer from our analysis that there have not been more frequent and/or more intensive weather-related natural disasters.

Of course I know that Pielke throws this stuff in to make people look bad who claim global warming has already led to an increase in weather-related disaster losses. Yet it’s not looking good either if you only tell half the story.

Likewise, it’s poor substance to organise a meeting in Lisbon aiming at a reconciliation between the climate “sides” while painstakingly avoiding the real controversy, i.e. politics, and horrible style to invite Gavin Schmidt to that very meeting, but when he decides not to come inventing things he didn’t say in order to make him look bad.

In addition to that, it’s a problem of substance not knowing what’s in ones own paper, and terrible style to claim (h/t Stoat):

When I make a public statement about what a scientist does or does not know, I make a point of actually reading what that scientist has to say on the subject, rather than what other people say about that scientist on blogs.

But you know what’s the worst of it all? That implicitly or explicitly, these guys claim to have found the philosopher’s stone by aiming for what they call “robust” climate science (Curry) or climate policy (Pielke), yet they fail miserably at even running a robust climate discussion with their peers.

I mean, honestly? Somebody who manages to get such a disastrous media and blogosphere response like the Lisbon meeting did should have any deeper knowledge about what sort of science and would be “robust”? Don’t be ridiculous.

Leaving the annoyed tone aside, I do think that Pielke’s “iron law” of climate policy has a lot of merit (which is why I read him regularly, and when I want to do some intellectual workout, I go tease him). Yet the real trick is not to nail it in everyones head, but to build on it and actually develop measures that achieve the ultimate goal of climate policy (reducing greenhouse gas emissions) while not pissing everyone off. And also to be creative. A $5 carbon tax won’t get us anywhere, a 0.1% financial transaction tax actually might. Given, of course, it’s used to boost low carbon energy sources, not throwing it at banks too stupid to bank but “too big to fail”.

And now for something completely different.

Writes Roger Pielke, Jr.:

But anyone who thinks that action on greenhouse gases provides a meaningful lever to influence food prices (…) has lost all perspective.

Oh, good, so those darn biofuels don’t do so much harm after all. I’m glad this mystery is solved once and for all.

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.

I can follow this thinking up to a point, even though there’s a plethora of details you can discuss even after you’ve narrowed the discussion down like that. But here’s what I don’t get: All the papers that come to my mind, even the ones most vividly argue for escaping the narrow climate change box, do inexplicably remain inside this very narrative when it comes down to sources for funding change. Just two examples I can grab from the shelf without walking around too much: Oliver Tickell’s “Kyoto2″ from 2008, and Roger Pielke Jr.’s “The Climate Fix” from 2010. Both call for a price on carbon that’s supposed to bring in enough revenues for financing change. Now, I’m all for putting a price on carbon, since it’s one of the most sensible things you can do (and with adding that Pielke’s suggested 5$ per ton is closer to nothing than to anything). But I don’t understand why we should stop there.

After all, when has a government ever aligned its revenue sources with its spending practice? Governments don’t do that, and they don’t need to. They can build roads and get the money from, say, taxing income. They can have a military and fund it with, say, VAT. And so on and so on. Only in climate change debates, the potential source of revenues for financing a low-carbon and highly efficient energy infrastructure is magically restricted to taxing the main culprit: Carbon dioxide.

Why is that? We have numerous other sources for funding the clean and green stuff we need. Introducing a worldwide financial transaction tax, channelling only 0.01% of every transactions’ value into the hands of governments, could provide us with up to $250 billion per year. Enough to get some serious clean-the-energy-sector going, and just for fun calculate what a not-so-gigantic 0.1% would get us. Next example: The global military sector is eating up more than $1 trillion each year. You’re telling me this crazy amount of self-defending humanity from itself can’t be diverted into something that will keep us much safer than those battleships, like limiting climate change? The last example: Companies spend €30 billion on advertising in Germany alone each year – but we can’t afford to invest more than €1 billion of public funds annually into retrofitting the housing stock of the biggest European economy? That’s absurd.

Even more absurd is the unwillingness of climate change discussants to embrace funding sources outside the narrow climate box. Is it our fear of appearing political, after all? Is it cowardice towards potential partisanship that prevents us from taking a stand how clean energy should be paid for? Why do we point towards to sheer magnitude of the climate challenge, yet restrict ourselves to remain fixed within carbonated thinking when it comes down to identify adequate funding mechanisms?

Originally from NASA, via Micael Tobis via Dennis Dimick

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.

Now don’t get me wrong: Scientifically, this is perfectly fine. It is stated in the papers that mitigation measures are not evalued, and that the results should therefore be taken with caution. However, since we have seen a lot of criticism against some climate scientists allegedly not communicating clearly enough about, say, uncertainties and inconclusive research results, one has to wonder how these papers are being discussed in the blogosphere. Rabett Run has had some interesting questions about this back in February 2010 following my own observations, so it’s worth looking again.

These damage-figure-normalization-papers assume a house built in the 1980s, or the 1950s, or the 1920 (depending on how far back in time they look) has the same construction standard and therefore resilience against (let’s stick with the hurricane example for a while) stormy winds than a house built in the 2000s. Also, they assume that all the flood management programs introduced throughout the 20th century have virtually no effect whatsoever, and that all the hurricane observation technology in place and the hurricane watch/warning schemes set up have zero effect.

One might even be able to argue that this actually is the case, and that NOAAs National Hurricane Center along with everything else done to prevent material losses has a net economic benefit of zero. However, none of the papers does. So all the results from these normalizing losses exercises take into account anything that would lead to an artificial increase in loss figures (i.e. more people building more expensive houses near vulnerable areas), for which the gross figures are then corrected, yet they leave out anything that would virtually lead to a reduction of these figures over time.

Other papers concerned with normalizing disaster-related damages suffer from the same problem. For example, Pielke et al. 2008 state in “Normalized Hurricane Damage in the United States: 1900–2005″ (emphasis added):

This paper normalizes mainland U.S. hurricane damage from 1900–2005 to 2005 values using two methodologies. A normalization provides an estimate of the damage that would occur if storms from the past made landfall under another year’s societal conditions. Our methods use changes in inflation and wealth at the national level and changes in population and housing units at the coastal county level. Across both normalization methods, there is no remaining trend of increasing absolute damage in the data set, which follows the lack of trends in landfall frequency or intensity observed over the twentieth century.

However, further down the pages we find:

Another important factor is mitigation and the implementation of stronger building codes. There is considerable evidence that strong building codes can significantly reduce losses; for example, data presented to the Florida Legislature during a debate over building codes in 2001 indicated that strong codes could reduce losses by over 40% (IntraRisk 2002). As strong codes have only been implemented in recent years (and in some cases vary significantly on a county-by-county basis), their effect on overall losses is unlikely to be large, but in future years efforts to improve building practices and encourage retrofit of existing structures could have a large impact on losses.

Of course, next to building codes there’s also building practice, there’s flood management, there’s hurricane preparedness and a lot of other things that changed over time. However, they do not even find mentioning in Pielke et al. 2008, let alone are they being incorporated into the analysis. Likewise, there is Schmidt et al. 2009. In “The impact of socio-economics and climate change on tropical cyclone losses in the USA” it is stated:

The findings show the increase in losses due to socio-economic changes to have been approximately three times greater than that due to climate-induced changes.

And again, no analysis of any protective measures against disaster damages. I remember having a brief e-mail conversation with Roger Pielke Jr. a while ago about this (and now I remember that it was my turn to continue the dialogue). His latest post on this has brought the issue back to my mind. Roger comments on NM2010 and writes:

The paper finds no evidence of upward trends in the normalized data.

Which is only half the truth, since the abstract of NM2010 contains (emphasis added):

Due to our inability to control for defensive mitigation measures, one cannot infer from our analysis that there have definitely not been more frequent and/or more intensive weather-related natural hazards over the study period already. Moreover, it may still be far too early to detect a trend if human-induced climate change has only just started and will gain momentum over time.

So if you’re a true honest broker, what should you do with all these papers? If one does not look into defensive/mitigation measures, one simply shouldn’t state (like Roger does) that there`s no evidence for an upward trend in disaster losses and leave it like that. In fact, if a normalization method finds no significant upward trend, one could easily interpret this as quite disturbing. Because it either means that all our adaptive measures against disasters have had zero effect so far (quite a startling conclusion for the folks who fancy adaptation against climate change), or it means that the hypothetical reduction in disaster losses one would expect over time has been eaten up by actually increasing storm damages.

Update: A meta study by Bouwens (2010) is also interesting in this regard. In “Have disaster losses increased due to anthropogenic climate change?”, Bouwens summarizes the findings of 22 recent quantitative studies and comes to the conclusion (emphasis added):

Analyses show that although economic losses from weather related hazards have increased, anthropogenic climate change so far did not have a significant impact on losses from natural disasters. The observed loss increase is caused primarily by increasing exposure and value of capital at risk.

It’s as clear as that. With regards to protection against disasters, however, he notes:

When society becomes wealthier and more exposed, investments are more likely to be made, in order to prevent and protect against natural hazards. Normalization studies often fail to correct for measures that reduce vulnerability as they are harder to quantify than changes in exposure. Properly set-up studies would need to include aspects of the hazard (geophysical data), exposure (population and wealth), as well as changes in vulnerability. Some studies do take into account changing vulnerabilities. For instance the normalization study by Crompton and McAneney (2008) corrected over time for increasing resilience of buildings to high wind speeds. A rigorous check on the potential introduction of bias from a failure to consider vulnerability reduction in normalization methods is to compare trends in geophysical variables with those in the normalized data. Normalized hurricane losses for instance match with variability in hurricane landfalls (Pielke et al. 2008). If vulnerability reduction would have resulted in a bias, it would show itself as a divergence between the geophysical and normalized loss data. In this case, the effects of vulnerability reduction apparently are not so large as to introduce a bias.

The latter point has also been made by Roger Pielke Jr. in our brief email exchange. It certainly is a valid one, though I still have my doubts. Try turning it around: Would the match between landfalling hurricanes and normalized losses be proof enough for discrediting NOAAs National Hurricane Center als useless for preventing material damages? I don’t think so. What’s surprising to me is that instead of publishing the 23rd normalization study, apparently no one (at least not that I’m aware of, but I’m not really familiar with this field) tries to actually factor in resilience changes.

Also, it is rather strange to see that the number of fatalities goes down with the introduction of hurricane surveillance (and for that matter, according to a 2000 study, it’s the same with tornadoes). However, while saving lives, the whole effort is supposed to not have significantly prevented material damages.

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.

Some instruments may be confined to only one of the phases described above, like direct R&D expenditure (invention phase) or direct subsidisation of entry-into-market measures (innovation/market-launch phase). Others may spread over the entire innovation-cycle. Jänicke and Lindemann came up with “market-based trend steering” as one of a few examples. I would add feed-in-tariffs, since they are primarily aiming at the diffusion of existing technologies, but have a strong innovation aspect due to the degression of revenues built in the law.

One fascinating instrument that has at times come to play is called technology forcing. If a government wants a certain, say, emission standard to be met, yet this cannot be done with existing technologies (or only at unacceptable costs), the solution may be as brute as pragmatic: Simply set the standard anyway and see what industry can come up with. Thereby, the regulator forces companies to innovate, since otherwise they can’t sell their products anymore. Gerard and Lave, in a study published in 2007, assessed the two examples are quite famous for successful and failed technology forcing: The 1970 Clean Air Act that forced industries to invent low-cost catalytic converters (success), and the 1969 airbag mandate that would need 20 years to come up with something fairly useful (failure).

A set of instruments aiming at the diffusion phase does not need to go beyond existing technologies, but rather sets the best available technology (BAT) as a standard and requires other market players to quickly adopt it. This is done, for example, by the EU in its Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control Directive (IPPC). A more fascinating example is the top runner program employed by Japan. It has been introduced by the Japanese government in 1998 and has been very successful since. The top runner scheme works by first assessing the market for certain appliances, then identifiying the most energy-efficient product available, and finally setting its efficiency level as the standard to be met by the whole industry in a number of years. Today, it covers 21 product categories from air conditioning devices to computers, TVs and water heaters, and is considered a major pillar of Japan’s climate policy mix. It gives companies an additional incentive to innovate, because they know in advance that if they come up with an even more efficient fridge, 5 years from now all other companies have to do just as good.

Eduardo’s example of the internet as a technology that nobody foresaw in its potential to change the world is a good starting point for mentioning how important it can be to spend money on things you don’t know what they may be good for in the future. It reminds me of the story that throughout the 1950s, the US military would buy off nearly the whole production of newly developed transistors in order to work on missiles and such stuff. This gave the new microelectronics industry the necessary profits to grow, and ultimately it would lead to all of us using a PC to reading this. Of course nobody could foresee this in 1950 – that’s why transistors are a good example to not dismiss a seemingly strange new technology on the grounds of its present value. Feel free to enhance on this idea with regards to, uh, renewable energies.

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.

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.

The following graph from Malte Meinshausen nicely shows the relationship between GHG levels and probability of staying below or exceeding two degrees (taken from Meinshausen 2005, PDF):

It might therefore be sensible to encase the two degrees target with other measures that ultimately serve the same purpose of limiting the amount of warming we’ll likely have to bear. And indeed, climate negotiators have introduced such an encasing in the negotiation text.

In the 70 pages long negotiation text (PDF) of the UNFCCC Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA) delegates are currently discussing in Tianjin, the temperature target is being followed by two other targets: A peak year for emissions, and a global greenhouse gas reduction target. The draft text reads as follows, with [xyz] marking passages that are so far contested among parties:

Temperature, Para.2: “… reducing global emissions so as to [maintain] [hold] [stay well below a 1.5 degree Celsius increase in global average temperature above preindustrial levels] the increase in global temperature below [1][1.5][/350ppm][2] degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels]…”

Peak year, Para.3: “…peaking of [global][their] greenhouse gas emissions [[in 2015 and no later than 2020] [no later than 2015] [by 2020 at the latest,] [in order to hold the increase in global temperature below [1.5] [2] degree Celsius] and the peaking of national emissions] [in 2015]…”

Reductions, Para.4: “[Developed country][Annex I] Parties as a group should [aim to] reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by [at least [40][45] per cent from 1990 levels by 2020 and] [80 per cent by 2035 and] [[75-85][around 80][80][at least 80-95][more than 95] per cent from 1990 levels by 2050] [more than 100 per cent from 1990 levels by 2040] [underpinned by a mid-term target of at least 40 per cent reductions from 1990 levels by 2020.”

As you can see, delegates seem well aware that the two degrees target should not be the only game in town. If two or more of these targets will make it through to a final text to be adopted by the COP in Cancún later this year, they would have to correspond with each other. It is technically unfeasible to agree upon, say, a 1.5 degree target, yet at the same time calling only for a 75% reduction of developed country emissions by 2050 while leving out any commitments for developing countries.

Likewise, if negotiators would agree upon a more than 95% reduction for developed country emissions by 2050 while also limiting developing country emissions, and finding consensus on 2015 as a peak year of global emissions, the two degrees target would not be central  at all to such a fictitious (and fantastic, by the way) document anymore.

So, do we already witness the downgrading of the two degrees target in terms of centrality and prominence, just a few months after which it had finally made it into a (“taken note of”-)COP document? Is this encasing a first stept to get rid of the target at some future negotiation round, since it is ultimately unmanageable? Or do a peak year and a global emissions reduction target solidify the position of the two degrees target?

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.

Something related to these efforts is what Ron Bronberg is doing over at The Whiteboard. After RealClimate reported about this project, a lot of new people became aware of his attempts to link the GHCN network of weather stations with the GSOD network, thereby creating a much more robust dataset. Ron’s motto is what many participants in the climate debate would like to see more often from contrarians: “Trust but verify”. With this in mind, they’d become real skeptics and finally helping to advance our understanding of the climate system, not undermining what we already know.

All these efforts show what many people were already aware of: That surface temperature records are indeed reliable. However, they advance upon earlier work since they form an independent, online-based reconfirmation, done by indivudals without any visible affiliation to classical climate science. This increases trust in temperature records and is therefore highly welcomed.

The UK MetOffice has understood the challenge related to surface temp records, and announced a conference on this issue to be held next week. Via surfacetemperatures.org, they discuss the necessity to come up with more robust, more spatially and temporarily advanced meteorological datasets to be used for climate science. If you’re interested why they’re doing this, you might want to read Peter Stott’s and Peter Thorne’s Nature article.

In 16 white papers, the MetOffice laid out its plans for this task. In White Paper #14, seeking input from the community, i.e. you, they have a nice graph showing how this might work, and how they may use social media platforms to facilitate the flow of information.

Image: Possible integration of social and collaborative tools in a new temperature dataset project. Source: UK MetOffice 2010

One of the best things about this initiative is that it actually reverses the process of dealing with contrarians. This is not a mere reaction, has the IPCC was forced to exert after that darn glacier error, but a proactive approach, and it puts climatologists in a much better role than many of them found themselves in since the UEA email theft.

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.

Concepts of social constructivism may hold a key to acknowledging the work of civic skeptics – at least that’s what did the trick for me, so don’t say social theory is all dry and has little relevance for one’s everyday life People have an interest in actively coproduce meaning, or, to say it differently, participate in the social construction of climate change. Put simply, people are eager to be heard. And blogs offer a great opportunity to take part in the climate change debates, to influence the discourse, and of course to get in touch with other people, including professional scientists who would otherwise be out of reach.

There’s no reason why the science of climate change should be confined to official experts, especially not when we basically need our whole society to move forward with strong climate policies. We need the support of everyone we can get, and for some people this means to understand what’s behind all the fuss. When they come across data glitches or strange statistical methods, they’re eager to find out more. Only through blocking such attempts has the climate community fed elements of an online movement it now wishes to disappear.

There’s basically not much of a difference when environmentalists doubt the alleged harmlessness of genetically modified organisms or question the safety of a proposed nuclear waste repository, or when climate skeptics doubt the seriousness of climate change due to uncertainties in various impact studies. While I have much more sympathy for the former, I got to admit that critically questioning what scientists present as fact to laypeople is a virtue, not a sin.

Some people have therefore tried to reframe activities of civic skeptics as “citizen science” (discussed here and here). To the degree that blog posts are actually intended to advance science, or to learn what’s behind some papers, or to discuss climate policy, that’s a valid attempt. It would offer mainstream scientists a way to get actively and productively engaged in online discussions. Yet instead, one often has to stumble upon insults, personal attacks, and gross misunderstandings of the nature of science. That’s no fun at all.

While it is relatively easy to identify professional denialists and separate them from civic skeptics, there are a lot of fine differences within skepticism itself that are not so easy to separate. In fact, a lot of denialists and skeptics alike have done so much damage to the idea of civic skepticism that too many well-minded people have shut their eyes and ears to their contributions. It’s difficult to figure out what skeptic actually has something important to say, or in which one of her dozens of blog posts lies something hidden that deserves attention. As Bart Verheggen put it:

The existence and flourishing of technical climate blogs that take a critical stance towards the mainstream scientific view shows that the dualistic view of professional scientists on the one hand and the amateur public on the other hand is too simplistic (especially if the public is deemed ‘ignorant’ of the science). It is clear that there is a continuum of interest, knowledge, skepticism, sincerity, etc amongst the public.

I agree that it’s not constructive to dismiss the expertise and energy of the more scientifically minded critics (“citizen scientists”). But then I would suggest that those sincerely interested clearly distance themselves from the contempt and suspicions raising crowd, since that are the public face of the critics, and it’s severely hampering communication with mainstream scientists and their supporters.

That would be very helpful indeed, so that finally “genuine” and “pseudo skeptics” could be distinguished. Anyway, things might be even more complicated than that. In this sense it is very good that Deep Climate has produced a series of high quality investigations into the work of Steve McIntyre from ClimateAudit (see how to be a climate auditor part I, part II, and here) Auditing the auditors was long overdue.

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.

The UNFCCC process has not delivered on a globally binding treaty that would serve to seriously limit greenhouse gas emissions. Yet it has provided two quite scarce resources in international politics: Attention and money.

There are not many issues in the international arena which repeatedly get the attention of dozens of government leaders at the same time, let alone the honor of their physical appearance. Heads of state are short on time, and therefore one could expect them to abate the UNFCCC process as long as there’s no real chance to get what they want (be that a weak, a tough or no climate treaty at all). Yet the stage is already set for the following scenario:

COP16 in Cancun (including the preparatory process already under way) will result in some of the still open technical questions to be resolved, while the really tricky issues will be postponed to COP17 in South Africa. Public expectations and hence pressure will rise again, even more so since governments don’t appear to strongly follow policies which would result in GHG reductions as co-benefits. And then government leaders will again make their way to a world climate conference, showing their commitment to whatever global concern and domestic agenda drives them there. So with regards to political attention, it’s hard to see how and why it should diminish over the next few years.

With $100bn developed countries promised to pay annually for climate change mitigation and adaptation by 2020 in the Copenhagen Accord, starting with $30bn fast track finance from 2010-2012, it is also clear that the UNFCCC process will remain a major political battleground for the upcoming years. It is not even necessary to believe that the money will actually flow in the end (and there’s already serious doubt about it). It suffices that developing nations expect that money, or parts of it, are going to be paid.

Furthermore, many issues are increasingly linked with climate change. While a lot of people have rightly criticised this “climate mainstreaming”, this has not persuaded the water or agricultural or biodiversity community to seek less rather than more links between their respective fields with global warming. And with $100bn promised to flow into developing countries by 2020, they would be stupid to do otherwise. Ideas like a polycentric approach towards climate change, as outlined by Elinor Ostrom in late 2009, or the German Advisory Council on Global Change’s 2010 vision for a three level strategy will inevitably take place within a climate-centred framework, which is in turn centred on the UNFCCC. The reason for this is that attention and money are inextricably linked to the mainstream climate political approach.

Given that, I think it would be sensible from this point onwards to start talking about various protocols to emanate from the UNFCCC process. Precisely because this process is so overblown, it could be useful to seek singular agreement on issues like forestry, finance, technology transfer, and the like. This would not only be good in terms of getting on-the-ground projects working to help mitigating GHG emissions and adapting to the effects of global climate disruptions. Also, binding commitments on GHG reduction targets are literally the last thing we need. It is much more important to start reducing emissions than agreeing to do so. If interested states (building a “pioneer group”) could manage to agree upon something like a Sustainable Use of Forests Protocol under the UNFCCC, this could shift perceptions of climate talks from utter failure to mediocre success. Why under the UNFCCC? Well, firstly all the other processes in which states have tried to agree upon a multilateral forest framework have failed, from the Rio Forest Principles via the Intergovernmental Panel on Forests (IPF) and the Intergovernmental Forum on Forests (IFF) to the current process, the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF). Only since talks about Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest-Degradation (REDD) have begun with relation to the UNFCCC, we have seen significant progress. The same is about to happen for other policy fields.

Such a process would pose significant challenges to the UNFCCC as it exists today. We not only need a real estate refurbishment for the secretariat as pictured above. We also need an institutional refurbishment, consisting of governance innovations that would allow the UNFCCC to follow such a multiple-track-approach. The Framework Convention could then become what it originally was intended to be, an umbrella for various sorts of agreements. As of today, these agreements have largely been designed in order to feed into one all-encompassing treaty. Yet one size fits nobody. So we should try getting more diversity in the process, less confusing and utopian than today, and more results-oriented and pragmatic. We will be stuck with the UNFCCC process for at least another decade anyway, so we might as well make some good use of it.