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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)

Posted by Olive Heffernan on behalf of Roger Pielke Jnr.

Writing last week in The American Prospect, Peter Teague and Jeff Navin explain the complexities of U.S. public opinion on climate change and its implication for climate politics and policy:

Americans' anxiety over rising energy costs is a serious challenge to anyone seeking a solution to global warming. The anxiety is real, and the vast majority of Americans perceive these costs as causing financial hardship for their families. Proposals that raise energy prices risk triggering populist anger; Americans uniformly reject government efforts to increase the cost of gasoline or electricity as a way of encouraging certain kinds of behaviors.

Nobody disagrees that regulatory strategies alone will raise energy costs. And raising the price of carbon high enough to have a real effect on global warming -- by cutting emissions and by providing sufficient motivation for industry to invest in new technologies -- will raise energy costs significantly. . .

With a regulatory-only approach, we will end with a debate between environmentalists arguing about the cost of global warming, and industry economists telling Americans how much more they'll pay for everything from electricity to gasoline to consumer products. And they'll argue that these higher prices will result in job losses.

Policy makers are aware of this challenge and have added provisions to their regulatory bills that are aimed at easing voters' fears. There are proposals for tax rebates and offsets and even the creation of a "Climate Change Credit Corporation" to help voters with the anticipated increase in consumer energy costs. The trouble is that the bills either provide tiny amounts to authorize studies of the problem, or they remain silent about how much help voters can expect. It's important to remember that the proponents of [the failed California] Prop. 87 made a well-supported case that the initiative wouldn't raise energy costs at all. Its defeat demonstrates that it's going to take more than good intentions about global warming and vaguely-worded proposals to convince voters

Continue reading "Understanding the Politics of Climate Change in the United States" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on July 03, 2007
Categories: Climate Policy, In the News, Roger Pielke, Jr | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Olive Heffernan on behalf of Roger Pielke Jr.

Today I am testifying before the House Committee on Science and Technology of the U.S. Congress. In my testimony I argue that we should pay attention to development paths in addition to the mitigation of greenhouse
gases. You can see my testimony in full here.

Continue reading "The Importance of the Development Pathway in the Climate Debate" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on May 16, 2007
Categories: Climate Science, Roger Pielke, Jr | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

(Posted by Oliver on behalf of Roger)

Our research suggests that the answer to this question is a clear "No!"

With the IPCC reporting that greenhouse gas concentrations can be stabilized at an extremely small cost relative to global GDP, why should advocacy press right up to the scientific frontier where claims are most vigorously contested and knowledge most uncertain? The case for mitigation is already strong without invoking hurricane damages.

And consider this: even if we simply assume that greenhouse gases have a large and immediate impact on hurricane intensities, there is little that mitigation efforts can do anyway to stem the ever-growing economic toll associated with hurricanes.

Continue reading "Should Hurricanes be Part of the Mitigation Debate?" »

Posted by Oliver Morton on May 07, 2007
Categories: Mitigation, Roger Pielke, Jr | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (0)

(Posted by Olive on behalf of Roger)

Even the venerable New York Times is prone to completely botching a discussion of the science of climate change. In a front page article today, the NYT reports on how the National Arbor Day Foundation has updated plant hardiness maps to reflect recent changes in climate. (A plant hardiness map presents the lowest annual temperature as a guideline to what plants will thrive in what climate zones.) The NYT misrepresents understandings of variability and trend and in the process confuse more than clarify.

The new map updates a 1990 USDA map based on 1974-1986 data, and replaces it with data from 1990-2006. In most places the range of increased average minimum temperature has moved north as can be seen from a difference map between the two time periods. The difference map, shown here, has the horizontal lines because the zones used are so broad -- 10 degrees -- that the differences are only noticeable at the margins of the zones.

The New York Times reports that these differences can all be attributed to human-caused climate change, using the case of Atlanta as an illustration:

Using data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Arbor Day map indicates that many bands of the country are a full zone warmer, and a few spots are two zones warmer, than they were in 1990, when the map was last updated.

Atlanta, which was in Zone 7 in 1990, is now in Zone 8, along with the rest of northern Georgia. That means that areas in the northern half of the state where the average low temperature was zero to 10 degrees Fahrenheit are now in a zone where the average low is 10 to 20 degrees. A scientific consensus has concluded that this warming trend has largely been caused by the human production of heat-trapping gases.

Because the zones span 10 degrees (or 5 degrees in the case of the 1990 USDA map) and the largest change shown on the difference map is 2 zones (i.e., >10 degrees!, now corrected), then clearly no location has jumped 2
zones! This is just an error.

More important than this simple mistake is the claim in the NYT that the changes in temperature observed in Atlanta can be attributed to human-caused greenhouse gases. In fact, the IPCC argues that it needs 30 years of records to detect trends, much less make attribution. In fact, the IPCC report just out has reported that the U.S. southeast has actually cooled over the period of record as shown below.

The underlying issue has to do with understanding the role of human-caused climate change in the context of climate variability on long time scales.

Continue reading "Confusion on Climate Variability and Trends" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on May 03, 2007
Categories: Climate Science, Communicating Climate Change, In the News, Roger Pielke, Jr | Permalink | Comments (35) | TrackBacks (2)

Roger A. Pielke, Jr. is a Professor in the Environmental Studies Program and Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado. He has degrees in Math, Public Policy, and Political Science, and spent 8 years at the U.S. National Centre for Atmospheric Research, 1993-2001. In 2006, he received the Eduard Brueckner Prize in Munich, Germany for outstanding achievement in interdisciplinary climate research. His most recent book is The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics (Cambridge University Press).

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 26, 2007
Categories: Recent contributors, Roger Pielke, Jr | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)