Discounting the Future: Economics 1 – AGW 0

How can we evaluate future costs against present ones? Could it be right to apply a discount factor, so that $1 of today is equivalent to, say, $37 in the year 2100 (rate=4%), and to base on that, for example, climate change policy ?

The answer (“yes it may well be right!“) is buried deep among the dozens of comments to RealClimate’s quick rebuttal of Freeman Dyson’s ideas on global warming. And it is written in clear and concise explanations by a “card-carrying economist” signing as “Bob Murphy” (and no, I don’t think he considers himself as an “AGW skeptic”).

I report Murphy’s comments below (for my own convenience, mostly). Nothing against RealClimate here: there are plenty of blogs with hundreds and hundreds of replies by readers, and who knows how much truly insightful stuff is simply lost in the crowd.

One thing to note is that the reactions to Murphy’s perfectly reasonable remarks clearly show what the political and ethical slants of the RealClimate scientists are. Gavin’s conclusion is that “ethics are not discountable [so] there is no reason to think that [we should use] the same discounting rate that applies to today’s monetary investment decisions“. I am sure those are not the last words on this subject.

Bob Murphy Says:
25 May 2008 at 3:04 PM

Like Lou above, I also am a card-carrying economist, so you may want to discount what I say (ha ha)…

For the people who think economists have nothing to contribute to this issue, I guess all I can do is remind them that the various solutions being proposed to tackle climate change involve things economic. E.g., a tax on carbon or a cap-and-trade program. The hard sciences alone don’t tell us how many dollars per ton a carbon tax should be, just as it would be ridiculous for an economist to try to calculate that figure without asking help from the climatologists.

As far as discounting for future generations: You need to use a discount rate to make sure you’re helping them as much as possible. It seems that some posters here are objecting not to the discounting per se, but to the conversion of everything to dollars and cents. I have no problem with that objection.

However, if we’re going to quantify future damages from climate change into dollar terms, then we need to discount those numbers to sensibly determine how much it’s worth spending today to try to mitigate those damages. The reason is simple: We could take the money and invest it, giving a larger inheritance to future generations. Discounting makes sense even if the recipient isn’t alive yet. Presumably our grandkids would rather get something worth more than something worth less. And so that’s why it would be silly, say, to spend $900 today to avert $1000 in damages in the year 2100. It would make more sense to take that $900 and buy T-bills, and keep rolling them over for our descendants.

Again, if that talk sounds crazy to you, because “you can’t put a number on climate damage!” OK fair enough. But your problem isn’t with the discounting per se.

[Response: My problem is with discounting over long time frames, longer than a human lifetime. What if the ancient Greeks two thousand years ago had come up fossil energy, allowing them to thrive for a couple of hundred years? Would we thank them for leaving us a degraded world? Or do you think there would be some bank account somewhere where we could get all the invested money back, with interest, in compensation? David]

Bob Murphy Says:
25 May 2008 at 8:47 PM
David wrote:

My problem is with discounting over long time frames, longer than a human lifetime. What if the ancient Greeks two thousand years ago had come up fossil energy, allowing them to thrive for a couple of hundred years? Would we thank them for leaving us a degraded world? Or do you think there would be some bank account somewhere where we could get all the invested money back, with interest, in compensation?

If the ancient Greeks had attained our current level of technology, then right now I think we would all be thousands of times wealthier than we currently are. If the Earth were a bit warmer than it is right now, that would definitely be worth the extra wealth; everyone would turn up the AC in his or her hovercraft on the way to his or her 10-hour-per-week job.

Yes this is a fanciful scenario, but only because you gave me a fanciful assumption and asked about its implications.

There are billions of people who right now lack basic utilities like clean drinking water and dependable electricity. If they are encouraged (forced?) to try to leapfrog over fossil fuels and go right to solar or whatever, their development will be hindered. And hence their grandchildren will be much poorer than under the business-as-usual case.

I used the T-bill example just to make the point, but it doesn’t rely on direct lineage. E.g. you and I benefit right now from the capital accumulation of earlier generations. When people work with tools and equipment, their labor is much more productive than if we all had to start from scratch with just nature and our bare hands.

Obviously, if you think that business-as-usual will lead to catastrophic damages, then a rational response would be to limit GHG emissions in the present, notwithstanding the high cost. But I’m just saying, the way to handle this in economic terms is to realize that the future damages are so high (measured in $$) that, even with discounting, they are still higher than the present costs of mitigation.

One other point: I want to second the statement of a previous poster, that yes Stern actually does discount future climate damages. This is because of the small probability that those generations won’t exist to enjoy the fruits of our current, costly mitigation efforts. E.g. there could be nuclear war, an asteroid could blow up the world in 2025, etc.

But Stern does not allow a “pure” discount rate, where the utility of future generations is discounted simply because of its futurity. So that’s why his overall discount rate is lower than Nordhaus’, who bases his on the market’s observed discount rate.

Bob Murphy Says:
25 May 2008 at 8:53 PM
David Benson wrote:

Lamont (48 ) wrote “Why can’t mitigating climate change and GHGs produce economic stimulus, rather than be a drag on the economy?” It can. I opine that it largely will be, due to ingenuity and innovation.

I agree that human ingenuity will always find ways to make a given situation better. But the point is, requiring a reduction in CO2 emissions takes away our range of options. Other things equal, it necessarily makes us poorer.

Now of course, most posters here would say other things aren’t equal. They would say the costs of mitigation are outweighed by the avoided damages of further global warming.

I’m not arguing that point right now. I’m merely saying that it’s not correct to, say, count up the “green jobs” as a benefit of a carbon tax or cap-and-trade program. This is because you would have to then include all the jobs that were destroyed (in SUV manufacturing, coal-fired power plants, etc.) by those measures.

If the government passed a law forbidding the production of anything that was yellow, that could only make us poorer. By the same token, if the government says industry has to reduce its carbon emissions by x% next year, in and of itself that makes us poorer.

Bob Murphy Says:
26 May 2008 at 9:26 AM

The real problem with doing nothing now will be the cost in lives not air conditioning later. That means you, your kids and the rest.

But this is also the “real problem” with severe restrictions on the use of fossil fuels. As I said earlier, there are billions of people who don’t have what we consider to be necessities of life. They really are dying every day in ways directly traceable to this lack.

So if your criterion is, “Minimize the number of premature deaths over the next 200 years” or something like that, it doesn’t automatically follow that a massive carbon tax now is the answer. It could be the answer, but it is an empirical question. Many posters here are acting as if altruism for others necessarily implies support for radical curbs on carbon emissions, when it doesn’t. You would have to (a) care about future generations, and (b) agree with some of the more catastrophic predictions, in order to support radical measures today.

On the issue of discounting, I agree that on the face of it, it sounds crazy to even ask, “How many future people are worth one person today?” But as I tried to get across (obviously not very persuasively) in earlier posts, the fact is that the price of current purchasing power is higher than (right now) the price of purchasing power in the year 2100. So there needs to be some discount rate (and people can argue about how high it should be) to make sure present mitigation efforts are as effective as they can be.

One final note: I am not saying that the psychological motivation of most “deniers” is concern for people dying of dysentery in Africa today. Of course not. But even so, it is a fact that there are people we know are dying today from poverty. Their efforts to climb out of poverty will be hampered by mitigation proposals. So it’s not simply a matter of, “Do you value human lives?” It’s an empirical an ethical issue of, “Is allowing x more people to die for sure over the next 20 years, counterbalanced by models that lead us to believe we will thus save x+y people over the next 200 years?”

Incidentally I am not being sarcastic in writing the above. The answer may very well be “yes, it is worth it.” I’m only trying to show that it is a question of balance, to quote Nordhaus. It’s not simply, “Do I value my SUV more than 80 kids 100 years from now?”

Bob Murphy Says:
26 May 2008 at 1:25 PM
In response to post #70, raypierre wrote:

The two points you make have been quite thoroughly addressed, but you weren’t paying attention….Besides [Nordhaus’ dubious model], there’s the highly questionable issue of the discount rate assumed by Nordhaus and many other economists. David addressed that specifically in his post.

Hang on a second. The following is David’s addressing of the issue of discount rates:

I personally can get my head around the concept of discounting if the time span is short enough that it’s the same person on either end of the transaction, but when the time scales start to reach hundreds and thousands of years, the people who pay in the future are not the same as the ones who benefit now.

There’s no polite way I can say this, but the above is honestly analogous to me (an economist) criticizing the IPCC at a website like WeHateGore.org and saying, “Personally, I don’t see why we should put any faith in these models. They can’t even tell me if it’s going to rain next week, so when the time scale goes to hundreds or thousands of years…!”

So whatever your thoughts on discounting, David’s expression of personal confusion over the practice of economists hardly counts as a thorough disposal of the practice.

And yes, some people pointed to Weitzman’s work, and the RFF paper. Again, this is analogous to me pointing to Lindzen and saying, “Look, even an MIT expert on this stuff agrees with me! These models are bunk!”

It’s hard to keep the different objections separate on this thread. As I keep pointing out, a lot of people here don’t like the idea of using dollar measurements in the first place, in which case the discussion of discounting is superfluous.

But if you are prepared to accept that a cost/benefit test of proposed mitigation measures isn’t absurd, then the next step is to ask whether future costs and benefits should be given equal weight to present ones.

And I’m saying the answer is no, because whether we agree with it or not, the market right now undervalues future dollars. So we can achieve our aims more cheaply by recognizing this basic fact, rather than declaring it immoral.

I’ll try one more analogy to get the point across. Suppose there is a homeowner trying to decide whether to spend $1000 renovating the insulation in his house, in order to save $100 on utility bills per year. Should he do it or not?

If David is right, then before we can answer that question, we need to know how old the homeowner is. After all, if he’s going to die in two years, then clearly the expenditure isn’t worth it, right?

(The standard answer of course is no, the age of the homeowner is irrelevant, assuming he wants to pass on as much wealth as possible to his heirs. They will reap the benefits of the efficient purchase of insulation. They would rather get the insulated home, and $800 less in cash, than the non-insulated home, and $800 more in cash. [The $200 comes from the two years of life left in the homeowner, in which he lowers his utility bills from the new insulation.])

[Response: There is a real difference between assessing a discount rate for dollar investments for which clear alternatives are available (i.e. why bother to invest in something special if the bank interest rate is higher than the expected return), and assessing the worth of non-economic goods (’the social discount rate’). Confusing the two concepts is at the heart of most of the noise surrounding this issue. To give an extreme example for clarity, if someone uses a bomb to blow up someone today, that is surely just as heinous as if they bury the bomb and set it to blow up tomorrow (or next week or next year). It is equally unethical to set the timer for a day in the future as for a hundred years, yet any substantial social discounting would downgrade the crime to a misdemeanor given a long enough lead time. There is a difference and pretending that only the economically illiterate think so, is not constructive. It is however an ethical decision, and can’t be proven one way or another using economics alone. – gavin]

Bob Murphy Says:
26 May 2008 at 1:28 PM
One final comment, and then I think I should quit while I’m ahead (or not too far behind): Nordhaus is actually on “your” side in this. He has been one of the most vocal economists on the importance of climate change.

If you think he is unduly activist, it might be because, as a professional economist, he sees costs of your personally favored policies that you aren’t considering.

Bob Murphy Says:
26 May 2008 at 1:52 PM
Whoops–typo: I meant above to say that if you think Nordhaus’ isn’t activist enough, then it might be because he is worrying about drawbacks to mitigation policies that you aren’t taking seriously. I.e. there seems to be a sense here that because he’s skeptical of some approaches, he must not care about the environment as much as Gore (or Stern) does. And I don’t think that’s it at all. Believe me, I have been a critic of Nordhaus on this very issue, so it’s odd that I’m defending him here.

Bob Murphy Says:
26 May 2008 at 2:54 PM
Well shoot, I said I was done pestering you guys, but then Gavin goes and makes a great analogy that I hope will really clarify our different positions on this. So if you’ll forgive me for one more attempt:

There is a real difference between assessing a discount rate for dollar investments for which clear alternatives are available (i.e. why bother to invest in something special if the bank interest rate is higher than the expected return), and assessing the worth of non-economic goods (’the social discount rate’). Confusing the two concepts is at the heart of most of the noise surrounding this issue. To give an extreme example for clarity, if someone uses a bomb to blow up someone today, that is surely just as heinous as if they bury the bomb and set it to blow up tomorrow (or next week or next year). It is equally unethical to set the timer for a day in the future as for a hundred years, yet any substantial social discounting would downgrade the crime to a misdemeanor given a long enough lead time.

OK thanks, as I said this really crystallized our differences on this. Note that we’re actually closer to agreement than you seem to think; all along I have said, “If you don’t want to put a dollar value on lives or the environment, that’s fine. But if you do then you need to discount.” I think we’re both agreed, then, that the basic problem with Nordhaus is his attempt to monetize everything, rather than his application of a discount rate to those monetary values.

But anyway, back to your example: First of all, under the law you will get a lighter sentence (today) for planting a bomb set to go off in one year, than if you planted one that went off two minutes ago. And the difference of course is that you haven’t actually killed anybody with the first bomb. This is relevant to the climate discussion, because those future harms might not actually occur. And I don’t even mean, maybe carbon-munching trees will be developed. As I said, Stern discounts the future because of the possibility that those people won’t exist (asteroid, nuclear war, etc.).

(Now in fairness, you could say, “OK, if the bomb is set to go off in one week, versus one year.” I don’t know what the legal treatment of these cases would be, but in either case you would not be charged with murder, because no one is yet dead.)

But now let’s make your bomb scenario a little closer to the climate change one, and hopefully you’ll see why I keep insisting that discounting is important. Suppose that instead of just an outright government crackdown on bomb-planting, the government capitulates to the bomb lobbyists and only imposes a $35 tax on every bomb planted. (Maybe most citizens view bomb planting as essential to their way of life.)

Now in that case, it really would be crazy to not discount the fine based on the timer setting, because otherwise the same crime would be penalized at different levels. E.g. someone today plants a bomb set to go off in one year, and he gets fined $35. Then next year, someone plants a bomb to go off in 24 hours, and he also gets fined $35.

Both bombers killed one person in the year 2009. But the first bomber paid a higher fine, because he had to pay $35 in 2008, while the second guy had to pay it in 2009. During his trial, the first guy in 2008 could have said, “Hang on a second! Don’t make me pay it now, make me pay the $35 when it actually kills someone.” And naturally he would prefer that outcome, because he could set aside less than $35 today (in 2008 when he’s convicted), and let it roll over to $35 in 2009 when his bomb actually causes damage.

So that’s one way of seeing why, if you’re going to bring monetary incentives into it, which plenty of environmentalists want to do, then it matters that “current money” is more expensive than “future money.”

To insist that monetary fees (carbon taxes, prices for cap-and-trade permits, etc.) reflect the prevailing exchange rate between present and future dollars, is no crazier than saying a carbon tax expressed in Japanese yen has to be higher per ton than a carbon tax expressed in US dollars.

To push the bomb analogy even further, yes it certainly would be better if the bomb planters could be persuaded to set their timers farther into the future, even if we’re solely concerned about minimizing the damages from their actions. This is because we have more time to adapt to the bombs. People in the vicinity can move away, they can buy armor for their cars, etc.

Obviously I’ve carried the analogy a bit far, but I’m just trying to show that the closer you make it to the actual situation of carbon emissions causing future damages, and especially where the government’s response is to inflict monetary fines on the parties doing the damaging, then you need to use discounting. Otherwise you end up with an outcome that is inferior from everyone’s viewpoint, to what would be achievable if discounting were used.

[Response: My point was only that ethics are not discountable. It is equally unethical to plant the bomb with a one day setting as with a century setting. Your extension to my analogy is really a stretch to make an ethical point into an economic point – I don’t see that any of your additional assumptions are necessarily valid. But nonetheless, there are clear uncertainties with future actions that mean that something that is almost certain to happen if I plan it for a day ahead, is less certain if I plan for a century ahead. Fine – some kind of allowance needs to be made for that (as Stern does). But there is no reason to think that it should be the same discounting rate that applies to today’s monetary investment decisions. – gavin]

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Positive Feedback…or Oscillation?

A very interesting remark by Roy Spencer in a guest blog at Roger Pielke Sr’s:

[…] Oscillation, or any other mode of internal variability will ALWAYS look like positive feedback – even if there is no feedback present.  The question of how the neglect of this effect has contaminated observational estimates of feedback has never even been addressed, let alone answered.

I repeat: to the extent that any non-feedback radiative fluctuations occur, their signature in climate data LOOKS LIKE positive feedback.  And when modelers use those relationships to help formulate cloud parameterizations, it can lead to models that are too sensitive. […]

Obviously the above does not mean there is _no_ positive feedback. It “just” means that this “fake feedback” effect has to be removed from the data BEFORE announcing to the world how sensitive climate is eg to CO2 concentrations.

Science a Side Issue in International Scientific Congress on Climate Change

Early birds at the University of Copenhagen, talking already about the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change scheduled for March 2009 (only 9 months to go…).

The Preliminary Programme is available and I cannot see anything to be optimistic about. First of all, the one all-science Parallel Session (#1: Exploring the Risks: Understanding Climate Change) shows little chance of understanding much apart from all that may go bad with climate change itself. Not a single topic on anything good that may come out of a warmer world, heaven forbid!!

Even more worrying, overall proper “Science” does not appear to be central to the conference. There are many topics that more properly fall under “Policy”, “Politics” and “Management”.

What are those doing in a meeting aiming “to provide a synthesis of existing and emerging scientific knowledge necessary“, is anybody’s guess: or a sign that too many AGW scientists really cannot extricate themselves from climate activism.

And that’s a way of debasing their own science.

 

AGW Environmentalism Just a Moral and Fashion Statement

The Washington Post wakes up to the vacuity of so many anti-climate-change initiatives: “On Climate, Symbols Can Overshadow Substance – Lights-Out Event More Showy Than Practical” – by Shankar Vedantam

[…] the modern environmental movement […] has become a crusade that is partly moral statement and partly fashion statement. Earth Hour, Earth Day and the Miss Earth beauty pageant — “saving the planet, one pageant at a time” — generate lots of publicity, but they also tend to prompt people and companies to choose what looks good over what works.

[…] “Solar panels are popular because you can see you are doing something — and your neighbors can see it, too.”

[…] The behavior of individuals, companies and nations is largely determined by structural factors, not personal choices.

[…] When it comes to turning off lights, for example, Earth Hour would have produced far more energy savings — although no cool photos of darkened cities — if it had asked people to save energy during the late afternoon, rather than at 8 p.m.

 

Gambling People’s Lives to Fight Anthropogenic Global Warming

An insightful comment by Alex Cull to my blog “Is It Ethical To Hold a Biased, Negative View on Climate Change?” deserves to be replicated verbatim as its own blog:

As far as I am concerned, what it boils down to is this: there are people in the world who are suffering and dying, due to a number of causes. For instance, one known cause is contaminated drinking water. Governments and charities can spend money on things that can help this situation, e.g., better infrastructure, better hospitals, education for women, etc. Or they can spend this money on “tackling climate change”.

So: they have a choice, either to devote this money to improving the situation directly (let’s say, connecting an actual village somewhere in Asia to a sewer system) or spending it on attempting to reduce carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, in the hope that this will address the problem sometime in the future.

In my opinion, the second option would be far less effective than the first. For argument’s sake, let’s assume that an NGO has 6,000 USD allocated to reducing suffering and death caused by contaminated water. These 6,000 Dollars can pay for water storage tanks in Uttar Pradesh, or they can go towards “tackling climate change”, perhaps to plant a grove of trees in Indonesia.

I think that ultimately, the second option is no different to gambling. It is like someone walking into a casino with 6,000 Dollars and placing it all on one spin of the roulette wheel. This person would have decided: “I can enjoy the benefits of this money now, or I can gamble, on the chance that my winnings (if I win) will create far more benefits than I would have gained, had I not gambled.” I think my hypothetical NGO might be making a similar choice, basing their decision on several criteria, which if true would correspond to the win at roulette. If one or more of these are untrue, however (as I suspect is the case!), this would correspond to losing the gamble. They would win the gamble only:

1- If we are still in a period of global warming and there is a continuing upward trend in average global temperatures AND
2- If this warming is mainly the result of increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere AND
3- If this warming trend will be responsible for more suffering and death caused by contaminated drinking water than is occurring now AND
4- If man-made carbon dioxide is a significant factor in the total level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere AND
5- If it is possible to reduce levels of man-made carbon dioxide without damaging the economy to a level where we have even more suffering and death caused by contaminated drinking water (which would be defeating the object) AND
6- If reducing man-made carbon dioxide will reduce atmospheric levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide generally AND
7- If reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide will halt or reverse the warming trend AND
8- If money spent on planting that grove of trees in Indonesia will have an appreciable effect on atmospheric levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Well, I’m not a scientist, economist or mathematician, and it’s possible that my reasoning is at fault, or too simplistic. But if I was in a position to make this kind of choice, I wouldn’t want to gamble. I’d probably want to spend the money addressing a measurable problem affecting actual people now, i.e. I would want to install those water storage tanks in Uttar Pradesh.

Is It Ethical To Hold a Biased, Negative View on Climate Change?

There are at least two key omissions in John Broome’s “The Ethics of Climate Change” (Scientific American, June 2006). One is about the uncertainties of predicting the future. The other concerns the unethical stance of considering Climate Change as purely a collection of negatives.

(1) There are many things we do not know about future climate. The IPCC itself is not in the business of predicting anything, rather of working on projections of where the global climate may be heading to, for those variable that we can compute. There are other variables involved, that are not captured by climate models (for example, of course volcanoes cannot be foretold). In other words, there is no way to know what the climate of 2058 or 2108 will actually be.

There is no trace of such uncertainty in Broome’s discourse. I would go as far as to say, Prof. Broome completely disregards the concept of risk management.

And so we are told at some point that we should take a “temporally impartial” stance, that is the death of a child today is as important as the death of a child in 100 years’ time (Broome rather unethically recommends to read his books to find out why).

But a child dying today is a certainty, whilst little can be said about children decades in the future: their very lives, and their deaths are a matter of probabilities. And surely the longer we try to see in the future, the fewer the chances of getting those probabilities right.

A Victorian scientist would have had no idea of how many children would survive today into adulthood. To claim that we are better today at seeing the XXII century is truly preposterous.

(2) As many sad articles about Climate Change, Broome’s is a collection of negatives.

Now, does one have to be a philosopher to understand that, as in almost everything else, in climate matters too there are positives and negatives whatever happens? Because the alternative would be, to consider a cooling world as a collection of positives…

We are told for example of how many deaths and disasters will Climate Change bring. Is Prof Broome aware of the fact that heat waves kill the already-dying, whilst cold waves simply kill? Death rates get below average at the end of a heat wave: they only get back to normal at the end of a cold wave.

Where are the people whose lives will be saved by an increase in global temperature? Certainly nowhere to be seen or taken care of in Broome’s article. And why not? Are some deaths more equal than others?

WIll people matter if they die because of heat, and matter less or not at all if they die because of cold?

=========

Until such huge reasoning and moral gaps are not filled up properly, I will say thank you, but no thank you, I don’t need your ethical lessons, Prof. Broome.

GLOBAL WARMING: IT’S ALL MY FAULT!!!

TierneyLab mentions a Lancet study according to which “obesity promotes global warming”.

Oops!! I should have done that diet last year!!!

Hopefully though, the paunch police won’t throw me in jail any time soon (you know, we Large People are usually easy to catch…)

AGW: Straight Answers

(thanks to GH for providing the questions)

(1) Is there a consensus among climatologists that AGW is real?

Yes, mainstream climatologists of today believe in AGW

(2) If real, AGW poses a serious threat – drought, rising sea level, severe weather and more. Yes or No.

Yes. If.

(3) Beyond broad incremental change there is a risk of significant, catastropic and irreversible change. Yes, or No, and if No, who are you to be so sure?

There is a risk of everything. An asteroid may come our way lost in the glare of the Sun, bringing a catastrophic change orders of magnitude worse than the direst AGW prediction. The issue is about evaluating those risks. And that is a political decision at the end of the day, because such evaluation includes non-quantifiable factors

(4) Remedial action is easier the sooner it is undertaken. Yes or what the bleep are you thinking?

Yes, remedial action is better taken asap. On the other hand, the wrong remedial action more often than not cause makes the situation worse. If you have pain at the level of the heart, a painkiller will be “remedial action” but…

(5) There has been a systematic campaign to discredit AFW by commercial interests, Yes or No.

Yes, but nothing in comparison to the far bigger systematic campaign to shove AGW down everybody’s throat, by commercial and political interests. We are talking a few million dollars against hundreds and hundreds million dollars.

(6) US political support for action has been a much lower percentage of lawmakers than of qualified climatologists, Yes or read the newspapers.

US political support for action has been a much lower percentage of lawmakers (and professional weathermen) than of qualified climatologists

(7) The discrepancy between political support for action and scientific concerns is due largely to BAU interests, Yes or No.

No. The discrepancy between political support for action and scientific concerns is due largely to the inability to bring the AGW credo to the masses

(8 ) Politicians seeking to do harmful things for profit of special interests, will seek shelter under any contrary opinion they can find, no matter how well or poorly founded it is, Yes or No.

No. Politicians seeking to do harmful things for profit of special interests, will masquerade their actions as perfectly aligned with current scientific consensus (corn-based ethanol where are thou)

Warming World Affecting the Minds of Nature Editors

Much fanfare on Nature and elsewhere about a paper by Rosenzweig et al that appears to be a re-hash of chapter 1 of the IPCC AR4-WG2 report.

Now, there is one thing that is very evident: the vast majority of reported changes are about Europe.

Nature reporter Emma Marris admits “the bulk of the observations come from Europe”. That statement is somewhat incomplete. In the IPCC report, for example, there are, from Europe, 28,115 observed biological changes out of a worldwide total of 28,671.

That’s 98%. Just from Europe. And most of it, just from a single meta-analysis.

Perhaps Marris should have substituted “bulk” with “pretty much the absolute totality”.

========

So the years are passing by, but the question remains: what if Global warming is just European?

ps I am worried about Californian birds (the ones with plumage, that is). There’s a researcher studying them, Cagan Sekercioglu of Stanford University, but he doesn’t show much interest in the real world:

““We shouldn’t even need to publish such papers at this point,” he says. “This paper is an argument that climate change is causing the observed changes. This should be a given. Thirty years later we are still trying to convince people of this.”

Well, Mr Sekercioglu, with an attitude like this, I bet you’re going to make lots of unexpected discoveries, aren’t you?

Dealing with Climate Change…in Ancient Rome

(thanks to LM for pointing this out)

Lucius Iunius Moderatus Columella (AD 4-70) writes in De Re Rustica (“Agriculture”, or perhaps “Affairs of the Land”) (Book III, Chapter 20):

For there is never a year so mild and temperate as not to inflict some injury upon some variety of the vine: if it is dry, that kind which thrives on moisture is damaged; if rainy, that which delights in dry weather; if cold and frosty, that which cannot endure blighting cold; or if hot, that which cannot bear heat. 2 And, not to run through, at this time, a thousand rigours of the weather, there is always something to work harm to vineyards.

A Real Climate of Misunderstanding

What Climate Science?
Are AGW climate scientists and science-prone skeptics talking about the same subject? I thought so, but am not sure of that any longer.

Having read Real Climate (RC)’s “Butterfly” blog and engaged in some commentary about it at that site, and having followed the AGW debate for the last five years, my impression is that:

• the AGW climate scientists are just doing what they can, after heavily restricting their area of research
• I and some other fellow science-minded skeptics are simply pointing out to the vast, unexplored regions outside of your average climate modeller’s understanding and computational ability.

Imagine if paleontologists had decided to concentrate on the skulls of Rift Valley hominids, treating with disdain (aka as “noise”) all of a find’s context, including other human bones, remains of other animals, local geography (and climate). And deliberatingly ignoring every other hominid find, anywhere else in the world.

That’d still be science, but within such a very focused line of research quite unlikely to add much knowledge or understanding, apart than about itself.

There Must Be Some…
If such a colossal misunderstanding is indeed in place, that would go a long way in explaining the extraordinary ill feelings surrounding the whole of climate science at the moment (and I am deliberately keeping politics outside of this), with one side treating skepticism itself as a dishonest scandal that should be stamped out of existence once and for all, and the other side dismissing years and years of research as pretty much irrelevant gibberish written by incompetent liars.

No wonder they (we) can’t see each other eye-to-eye…how could two judges agree at a canine show contest, if one of them were only interested in (and had built a whole theory of canine beauty about) the shape of the tails?

Climatology: An Abridged History
The story of how contemporary climatology has ended up like this is illuminating.

At first, basic laboratory experiments gave some indications on how atmospheric constituents could interact with one another, and with the incoming solar radiation. Notable among them, the study of CO2’s “greenhouse effect” by Arrhenius in 1896. But the real world of meteorology (including climate) is somewhat more complex than a lab’s setting.

For example, vast energy exchanges manifest in atmospheric cell circulation, oceanic heat exchanges, and whole climate-affecting cycles currently known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, el Nino/la Nina, etc etc.

With no way of replicating that in controlled laboratory conditions, climatologists opted at one point to computational models of the atmosphere. This was of course possible only and after a minimum of computational power became available.

Computers of course understand only numbers and formulas/commands. In order to get to that, a momentous assumption was made: in an approach curiously reminiscent of the science of aeronautics, climate was taken as the response of the atmosphere to “forcings”, i.e. discernible components pushing and pulling the atmosphere in one or the other direction.

“Climate” is then the resulting overall effect of the action of each forcing, averaged over a certain lentgh of time.

In that context, “forcings” were purely operational, “digitizational” tools, providing some basis for computing the climate. By definition, in fact, forcings cannot be measured: all observations of the actual atmosphere will (obviously!) include the effect of them all. If “forcings” exist or not is therefore irrelevant. For all they were worth, forcings could have been substituted by Fourier analysis, or Principal Component Analysis, or whatever other technical tool that can transform a set of signals (and formulas) of any sort into computer-friendly figures (and procedures).

However, alongside a steady increase in available computational power, there came the a shift in focus, from real (observable) climate to forcings: in a first dichotomy with the real world, models became ways of investigating the (possible) effect of each forcing, instead of forcings being ways of investigating the (possible) evolution of the planet’s climate.

This change is less subtle than it appears. It entails throwing one’s hands up in the air about trying to understand the actual atmosphere, choosing instead to concentrate on known (pre-set) effects of known causes. Models in fact are far from independent from assumptions about forcings: they are made out of them. The effect of each forcing is already written in the code of each model, and model runs will show that effect at work. Even if results could vary for example modifying a model’s representation of geography, there is no way that model will be able to run contrary to its pre-assumed behaviour, for example in the case of increased CO2 concentration.

If I write a computer program that just adds one every time a white objects traverses a camera’s field of view, there is no way my program will ever count down, say to minus 20. And the fact that the counter always increases says nothing about how many white objects there are in the real world. It just shows how the counter works.

Nothing But Parameters
What can you do when all you have are models only useful to investigate what a particular forcing’s effect might be? You are left with playing with the parameters, modifying them to “fit” observations and “plausibility”. This is manifest for example in Hansen et al’s 2007 article, “Climate simulations for 1880–2003 with GISS modelE“, literally saddled with innumerable “estimations”, six of them explicitly “subjective” (little more than guesses, that is) but still able somehow to get published in a peer-reviewed scientific article.

Note that comparison to the real world is but a side issue in that paper. “Observations” (25+ years of averages) are useful to evaluate what the parameters are likely to be, i.e. the relative importance of each forcing. There is nothing important outside of them. In a second dichotomy with the real world, in such a vision of the world everything that is not included in the modelling is “noise”, in other words “irrelevant”.

There is no “going back to the lab” in contemporary mainstream forcings-based climate science, eg to learn anything new after finding unexpected observations, because those are “noise” (sometimes called, “weather”) and thus have to be ignored. And there is no meaningful effort to measure what if anything is going wrong: for example, comparisons between model results and observations are simply visual.

The good thing about this is that there are enormous avenues of research left open to future generations. The downside is that the reality of climate models is, at present, literally set in stone, whatever the real climate is out there.

Can climate models predict anything?
Skeptics and non-skeptics alike seem to agree that models cannot predict (i.e. make predictions that can be falsified, or confirmed, by observations) for timeframes shorter than around 25 years from the time of computation.

In fact, RealClimate seems to be willing to take a quarter of a century, more or less, as the minimum amount of time needed to get “averages” that can be called “climate” rather than mere “weather”. That is a second example of AGW climate scientists pigeonholing themselves: just as anything that cannot be modelled by forcings is “noise”, so anything that doesn’t cancel itself over 25 years is “noise” too.

So we started with “climate science” only to get stuck into “multi-decadal averaging to evaluate parameters to use in estimating the effect of forcings”.

Can anything ever disprove a forcings-based model?
No. Nothing at all ever will. Some AGWers are answering that with improbable claims about Popper being long dead, an eery reply one would expect only from inventors of perpetual-motion machines.

Actually, the prove/disprove question may simply be the wrong question. Models are only tools to investigate the possible effect of each forcing. Hansen et al talk about “using the model for simulations of future climate change”.

The key word there is of course “simulations”.

Models are not a weather-predicting tool (remember, they are about “climate”, not “weather”). And they are not a climate-predicting tool either, even if they are often abused as if they were. In its 2001 report the IPCC itself stated as much, in no uncertain terms: “In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible” (from the IPCC TAR-WG1, 2001).

What models can do is simulate the effect of individual forcings in isolation, something that can never be observed anyway. They also simulate the cumulative effect of forcings, with added uncertainty as interactions must be modelled too. Such a cumulative effect is not necessarily expected to be observable either.

It must be stated that as far as I can remember RC has never claimed anything more. Good for them. Perhaps they could have been clearer before more clear and more often, but things are starting to move in the right direction, of late. As already quoted in a previous blog: “[…] The ensemble mean is monotonically increasing in the absence of large volcanoes, but this is the forced component of climate change, not a single realisation or anything that could happen in the real world. […]”

And Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the IPCC-TAR report, recently wrote: “In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been. The IPCC instead proffers ‘what if’ projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios.”

Compounded Weaknesses
Don’t get me wrong: on its own, doing an estimation is part-and-parcel of conducting scientific research; computer modelling is a great tool for very complex situation; forcings are a good way to translate a system into a manageable model; and scenarios are the standard way to evaluate risk.

But with regards to forcings-based climate science, all of those combine together compounding their weaknesses rather than their strenghts: estimations are often subjective, computer models are used to study forcings rather than climate, forcings are taken as “real” even if they cannot be measured, and scenarios are interrogated not for current sensitivities but as forecasts.

They have become the basis for a large Intergovernmental organization, tens of international meetings, the collective action of thousands of people, one Oscar and one Nobel Peace Prize, all in the name of what every knowledgeable person knows it is impossible to predict.

What Kind of Science is Climate Science?
Restricted to “the computation of scenarios (the ‘what-ifs’ projections)”, climate modelling is a science (the “science of climate forcings”, in fact). And RealClimate is as good as it gets. The same applies to much of contemporary AGW scientific journalism and publications, including Scientific American, American Scientist, New Scientist, Nature, Science. And the BBC.

Just try, next time you read their reports, to imagine a world view (a “climate narrative“) where climatology, the most uncertain of exact sciences, is applied science, a policy-making tool where only forcings count and, among the forcings, only those of anthropogenic origin are relevant (as there is little to make policies about, for non-anthropogenic forcings).

That is too narrow a view to be useful for risk management, let alone to bring science forward. It may lead to worries wasting time worrying about possible future stronger hurricanes, rather than about certain concentrating on preventi present-day catastrophical levee failure for present-day storms.

Time to Expand the “Climate Narrative”
Models have been the cradle of climatology, Tsiolkovsky would have said, but we cannot live in the cradle forever. It is time to expand the “climate narrative”, by getting climate science of the models-forcings-scenarios hole.

Because “real” climate is much, much more than RealClimate.

Kudos to RealClimate’s Honesty and Sincerity

And no, I am not being sarcastic.

It’s just that (finally!) there is a RC claim that can be compared to the real world; next to it, a good dose of outright sincerity (surely it must have been there before,  perhaps buried in the polemic…)

From What the IPCC models really say (May 12, 2008):

• Claims that GCMs project monotonic rises in temperature with increasing greenhouse gases are not valid. Natural variability does not disappear because there is a long term trend. The ensemble mean is monotonically increasing in the absence of large volcanoes, but this is the forced component of climate change, not a single realisation or anything that could happen in the real world.
• […]
• Over a twenty year period, you would be on stronger ground in arguing that a negative trend would be outside the 95% confidence limits of the expected trend (the one model run in the above ensemble suggests that would only happen ~2% of the time).

Note that even the fabled 20-year negative trend may still be interpreted as consistent with at least one model run.

But it’s a good step in the right direction: bringing back climate science from its forcings cage to the actual world…

Climate Models Are Irrelevant, and Latest IPCC Models a Regression

(many thanks to LM for pointing this out)

• “[GCM] model outputs at annual and climatic (30‐year) scales are irrelevant with reality“
• “model predictions are much poorer that an elementary prediction based on the time average“
• “The GCM outputs of AR4, as compared to those of TAR, are a regression in terms of the elements of falsifiability they provide, because most of the AR4 scenarios refer only to the future, whereas TAR scenarios also included historical periods“

Those are not the insane ramblings of yours truly, but the conclusions of D. Koutsoyiannis et al’s “Assessment of the reliability of climate predictions based on comparisons with historical time series“, a poster presentation at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2008 in Vienna, Austria, 13‐18 April 2008.

Of course, it’s only a poster presentation…and of course, there was really no space at all to talk about it in the news, eg on the BBC.

Well, there is one good thing that has come out of this though: some explicit references in RealClimate about the need to have “a very civilized and friendly chat“, “to be respectful, sincere, and show courtesy in our criticism, even when we argue why we think that a paper has flaws“, and that “we some day may be mistaken, so it’s important to be humble and check our drafts amongst ourselves“.

This will mean no more verbal attacks about “negationism”, and few if any displays of condescension. Sure it will… 

Great News About Great Tits

Shameless traffic-enhancing post (just guess how) to mention Richard Black’s reporting of some great news about great tits (yes it’s birds, but alas, dear drooling visitors, of the avian variety).

A Place Where Climate Forecasts Should Be A Piece of Cake

Lloró, Colombia

It’s the place with the highest average annual precipitation: 523.6 inches / 13,300 millimeters of rain per year (estimated average, 29 years of records)

(note how the Google Maps photo in the link above does show Lloro shrouded by clouds)

That translates to 1.43in / 36.4mm of rain per day, every day of the year. And it looks like that’s what actually happens, as the forecast is of constant rain and thunderstorms.

There are 7,000 people living in Lloró and one can only imagine the strength of the local umbrella market.

=========

One wonders if any climatologist will step forward with a 1-year, 5-year, 10-year climate forecast of rain for Lloró? 😎

(many thanks to RS at the Italian weather forum “Meteoweb” for writing about Lloró in the first place)

Webcast: “Consumer Perception of Climate Change”, May 12, 2pm GMT

I received this among the Comments yesterday

Consumer perception of climate change and its potential impact on business

A global survey from Havas Media

Havas Media the umbrella group which draws together the full global media expertise of Havas invites you to the weblaunch of their global survey on consumer response to climate change.

Webcast Details

Date: Monday 12 May 2008

Time: 3.00pm British Summer Time

To register for the webcast go to http://events.ctn.co.uk/ec/havas/513/

The webcast will begin with an interview on the results and then be followed by a Q & A session.

Details of how to obtain an advance copy of the research findings will be sent to all who register.

Key Facts:

With more than 11,000 respondents, this is one of the largest pieces of research of its kind.

Qualitative and quantitative research across nine key markets – UK, US, Spain, France, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, India and China.

Vast majority of consumers highly engaged with the issue and keen to further demonstrate their green awareness in how they shop.

Considerable expectation from consumers that brands should lead the way in tackling climate change.

 

Evidence for Warming – And Yes, It’s Good News!

The “Sahara dried out slowly, not abruptly“, according to a Reuters report of a new article by Kropelin et al., published in Science. That would be good news on its own, first as it means abrupt climatic changes happen not as often as once feared; and second, because it indicates climate was changing in an area the size of the United States, between 6,000 and 2,700 years ago (the latter date, coinciding with the legendary foundation of Rome).

Obviously, with no SUVs polluting at the time of Romulus, the end result is…more evidence that if anything is happening right now, is not necessarily the fault of us environmental sinners.

But the really good news is buried at the end of the piece:

[Kropelin] said there were already greener signs in a huge area with almost no reliable weather records. “I see a clear trend to a new greening of the Sahara, a very slow one,” he said, based on visits to some of the remotest and uninhabited parts of the desert over the past two decades. “You go to unoccupied areas over a long time and you know there was pure sand there without a single snake or scorpion. Now you see tens of kilometers covered by grass,” he said.

Finally! Some actual albeit initial evidence that warming is occurring indeed, and not just in continuously-corrected temperature measurements: because a warmer world is a wetter world, for the same reason why a colder world is a drier world, with all that water locked up in ice.

And what is a warmer and wetter world, if not a greener world?

Skeptics Society Confirms: AGW Skepticism Is Perfectly Legitimate

Volume 14, number 1 of “Skeptic”, the magazine of renowned American “Skeptics Society”, is partially dedicated to the topic of Global Warming.

Interestingly, the cover says “SPECIAL ISSUE: Global Warming and the Problem with Predictions […]”, with three topical articles, the first two available online in full:

• “A Climate of Belief – The claim that anthropogenic CO2 is responsible for the current warming of Earth climate is scientifically insupportable because climate models are unreliable“, by Patrick Frank
• “How We Know Global Warming is Real – The Science Behind Human-induced Climate Change“, by Tapio Schneider
• “Turning Around by 2020 – How to solve the global warming problem“, by William Calvin

Keeping in mind that, according to the Skeptic Society, “the key to skepticism is to continuously and vigorously apply the methods of science to navigate the treacherous straits between “know nothing” skepticism and “anything goes” credulity“, it is pretty much self-evident that, whilst still leaning towards Al Gore, the Skeptic Society itself recognizes that AGW skepticism is _not_ an untenable stance.

In other words, if it is true that belief in AGW is not comparable to belief in UFOs, it is also true that disbelief in UFOs is not comparable to disbelief in the Apollo lunar landings. 

Something to remind people when they scream that “the science is settled”…

Climate Models: How Much Difference is Too Much Difference?

Does anyboy know the answer?

I re-post here a comment I just left at RealClimate (one never knows what gets published over there, and what doesn’t…)

Re: #101 As a matter of fact if you search on PubMed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ there are four articles with my name. In two of them I appear as first author. And no, they are not first-rated earth-shattering Science or Nature articles about climate science.

But as we all agree now, that’s beside the point.

Let’s me start again from a simple question. Hansen et al did compare model results to observations.

“Climate simulations for 1880–2003 with GISS modelE”, Clim Dyn (2007) 29:661–696 – DOI 10.1007/s00382-007-0255-8

For example, consider fig. 9 (the PDF of the article is on the internet, apologies but I do not have time to search for it right now):

“Fig. 9 Global maps of temperature change in observations (top row) and in the model runs of Fig. 8, for 1880–2003 and several subperiods. […]”

Observations there are shown in periods respectively of 124 years (1880-2003), 54 years, 61 years, 40 years and finally 25 years (1979-2003).

Presumably, this provides a first approximation of what time spans are needed to talk about climate (around 25 years). The actual shortest period may be 40 years or longer, as 1979-2003 has been chosen primarily as “the era of extensive satellite observations”. Please correct me if am wrong.

Let’s take now a clear-cut example. The authors write “All forcings together yield a global mean warming ~0.1C less than observed for the full period 1880–2003.”. And that’s a remarkable result.

But…may I ask this rather elementary question: say, if the global mean warming yielded by all forcings together had been much less, or much more than observed, what would have been the (absolute) threshold above which the climate simulations would have been declared a failure?

Or has this question no meaning either? If not, why not?

Once again, I am consciously simplifying things here but this is a blog…more a brainstorming session than a week-long workshop.

Italian Examples of AGWers’ Totalitarianism

A period of cooling may or may not lie ahead, but there are signs that the average AGWer’s inability to handle dissent is starting to show in Italy too. Here two examples

(1) A comment by somebody signing up as “ina” in (my) Italian version of Numberwatch’s Warmlist, stating that people that do not believe in AGW are to be blamed for the world going to the dogs

(2) A comment by Marco Ferrari: having found no way to reply to my arguments, Ferrari asks on RealClimate’s Butterflies, tornadoes and climate modelling for help in silencing me, of course after calling me a “negationist”, in true goebbelite fashion

It’s just two examples, but having been mobbed not once but twice in an Italian mailing list when I dared to speak out again the AGW credo, the fact that they happened almost at the same time is not an encouraging sign.