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Roger Pielke, Jr.

On the BBC Today program this morning the head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Yvo de Boer
is quoted as saying the following, as subsequently reported online by the BBC:

The UN's binding global climate agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, currently requires industrialised nations to reduce the majority of emissions themselves.

But Mr de Boer said this was illogical, adding that the scale of the problem facing the world meant that countries should be allowed to invest in emission cuts wherever in the world it was cheapest.

"We have been reducing emissions and making energy use more efficient in industrialised countries for a long time," he told BBC News.

"So it is quite expensive in these nations to reduce emissions any more.

"But in developing nations, less has been done to reduce emissions and less has been done to address energy efficiency," Mr de Boer observed.

"So it actually becomes economically quite attractive for a company, for example in the UK, that has a target to achieve this goal by reducing emissions in China."

He said rich nations should be able to buy their way out of 100% of their responsibilities - though he doubted that any country would want to do so.

This statement is simply factually incorrect on many levels. For instance:

1. Industrialized countries have not seen their emissions decrease, quite the opposite.

2. On a per capita basis people in developing countries emit far, far less than people in developed countries, whether in North America or Europe.

3. Given the long residence time of atmospheric carbon dioxide, concentrations cannot be stabilized if developed countries do not reduce emissions by a great deal.

Expect a retraction soon.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on August 22, 2007
Categories: Climate Policy, In the News, Mitigation, Roger Pielke, Jr | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

Alex Witze

Everybody’s been reviewing the new book on hurricanes and global warming, and Nature is no exception. We’ve got not one, but two reviews of Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics and the Battle Over Global Warming.

In Nature proper, James Elsner of Florida State provides the academic’s reading. He pulled off a nice metaphor for the lead of the review (calling the book ‘a reconnaissance flight into the turbulent debate over a link between hurricane activity and global warming’), which made me a tad envious. I thought I was being clever with my own lead for a review of the book, which appears online on Nature Reports Climate Change. Unlike Elsner, I chose to riff off the reputation of the book’s author, Chris Mooney, and his recent work on how scientists can best ‘frame’ their results for the public.

Both reviews, though, will tell you the main point of the book: the battle over hurricanes and climate change, with MIT’s Kerry Emanuel and Colorado State’s Bill Gray taking starring roles as antagonists. Storm World is a colorful glimpse into this highly publicized corner of tropical meteorology, with scientists trading barbs at conferences and via media appearances. It’s also a good book to read as hurricane season in several ocean basins nears its peak: at the time of this writing, Hurricane Flossie was bearing down on the Big Island of Hawaii with its category-3 strength winds.

Alex Witze
Nature's chief of correspondents for America

Posted by Olive Heffernan on August 14, 2007
Categories: Alex Witze, Communicating Climate Change | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Just when everyone was getting sick of explaining that climate models are producing projections not predictions per se, it seems that some of them are indeed producing predictions. There's a paper (pdf) in Science from a team at the Hadley Center that shows how using real initial conditions improves the accuracy of ten year climate forecasts. They do a bit for hindcasting first, looking at historical data and comparing model runs with real initial conditions with run-of-the-mill runs. Then they do some prediction. This prediction is being treated as saying that we're at the end of a little plateau, and that at the end of this decade things will warm up further, giving a run of years in the early 2010s where the chances for new global records are good. Quirin Schiermeier wrote a story on this for news@nature, reporting that the modelling community seems pretty impressed. Here's a bunch more coverage (88 pieces at the time of googling), and for those with a subscription to Science here's the estimable Dick Kerr, who had longer to write the story than the rest of us...

Posted by Oliver Morton on August 10, 2007
Categories: Climate Science, Climate variability, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

Over at News@nature, Mike Hopkin reports from the Ecological Society of America's meeting in San Jose on research into tropical forest growth rates. Looking at plots in Panama and Malaysia, the researchers found that increases in mean daily minimum temperature over a couple of decades correlated with decreases in growth rates. They associate this with lower net photosynthetic activity.

The team, led by Harvard's Ken Feeley, suggests that if this sort of effect were repeated in bigger rainforests (most of which have only experienced marginal warming to date, as I understand it) then what are now stable stores of carbon would become net sources as theworld heats up. This is obviously a considerably less optimistic scenario than the possibility that carbon-dioxide fertilisation would make them sinks. It would presumably make the net effect of the increase in soil respiration that Peter Cox and others always stress (Nature paper from 2000) an even worse problem.

It's not a dead cert that the change is due to temperature -- the paper (published in Ecology Letters) seems to suggest that increased cloudiness could be playing a role. And there could be internal botanical changes too -- maybe the lianas are doing more damage? But all in all it doesn't sound good.

Mike is blogging the conference on the newsblog.

Posted by Oliver Morton on August 10, 2007
Categories: Biosphere feedbacks, Climate Science, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hans von Storch and Dennis Bray

In 1996 and 2003 we surveyed the opinions on climate change held by climate scientists. The results of these surveys have been subject to many misuses and erroneous claims. Some have selected individual statements out of context (scroll down to number 5) to bolster their claims, while others have argued that the 2003 part of the survey would be strongly biased by skeptics misusing the online-sampling for multiple submissions.

With respect to the latter – the survey was conducted first in 1996 with a mail-out format, which nobody claimed could be biased and the results were published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. The second survey from 2003 was conducted on the internet, a procedure that in principle could have been misused by multiple submissions by those skeptical or alarmist on climate change who shared the password. However, the 2003 results are internally consistent with the 1996 results. In 2003 scientists expressed increased satisfaction and agreement with the IPCC and increased confidence in the tools of the science. In comparison to 1996, no anomalies were found in the response to questions.

On the skeptical side, the survey has often been used to create the impression that most scientists were not in support of anthropogenic causes of ongoing climate change: Specifically, it was noted that “For example more climate scientists ‘strongly disagree’ than ‘strongly agree’ that climate change is mostly the result of anthropogenic causes.” This interpretation is certainly biased.

We had requested responses on a scale from 1-7 to the question “Climate change is mostly the result of anthropogenic causes.” – with 1 representing “strong agreement” and 7 “strong disagreement”. Thus, scales 1-3 signal agreement, 4 an ambivalent position, and 5-7 disagreement. The frequency distribution for the two surveys in 1996 and 2003 are:

Thus, the statement, that more respondents strongly disagree than strongly agree is technically correct (10% vs. 9%), but highly misleading. If we pool the 1-3 positive responses to “agreement”, and 5-7 to disagreement, then the ratio in 1996 was 41:45 in favor of disagreement; in 2003, however, this ratio has become 56:30 in favor of agreement; all scales 1-3 have seen strong increases in frequency, while 5-6, with the notable exception of scale 7, have seen marked reductions.

Continue reading "Climate scientists' views on climate change: a survey" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on August 08, 2007
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, Hans von Storch, In the News, Opinion | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (2)