John Holdren's Epic Fail

Last week in a Congressional hearing, John Holdren, the president's science advisor, characterized me as being outside the "scientific mainstream" with respect to my views on extreme events and climate change. Specifically, Holdren was responding directly to views that I provided in Senate testimony that I gave last July (and here in PDF).

To accuse an academic of holding views that lie outside the scientific mainstream is the sort of delegitimizing talk that is of course common on blogs in the climate wars. But it is rare for political appointee in any capacity -- the president's science advisor no less -- to accuse an individual academic of holding views are are not simply wrong, but in fact scientifically illegitimate. Very strong stuff.

Given the seriousness of Holdren's charges and the possibility of negative professional repercussions, via email I asked him to substantiate or correct his characterization, to which he replied quite quickly that he would do so in the form of a promised follow-up to the Senate subcommittee.

Here is what I sent him:

Dear John-

I hope this note finds you well. I am writing in response to your characterization of me before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight yesterday, in which you said that my views lie "outside the scientific mainstream."

This is a very serious charge to make in Congressional testimony about a colleague's work, even more so when it comes from the science advisor to the president.

The context of your comments about me was an exchange that you had with Senator Sessions over my recent testimony to the full EPW Committee on the subject of extreme events. You no doubt have seen my testimony (having characterized it yesterday) and which is available here:
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/2013.20.pdf

Your characterization of my views as lying "outside the scientific mainstream" is odd because the views that I expressed in my testimony are entirely consonant with those of the IPCC (2012, 2013) and those of the US government's USGCRP.  Indeed, much of my testimony involved reviewing the recent findings of IPCC SREX and AR5 WG1. My scientific views are also supported by dozens of peer reviewed papers which I have authored and which have been cited thousands of times, including by all three working groups of the IPCC. My views are thus nothing if not at the center of the "scientific mainstream."

I am writing to request from you the professional courtesy of clarifying your statement. If you do indeed believe that my views are "outside the scientific mainstream" could you substantiate that claim with evidence related specifically to my testimony which you characterized pejoratively? Alternatively, if you misspoke, I'd request that you set the record straight to the committee.

I welcome your response at your earliest opportunity.

Today he has shared with me a 6-page single space response which he provided to the Senate subcommittee titled "Critique of Pielke Jr. Statements on Drought." Here I take a look at Holdren's response.

In a nutshell, Holdren's response is sloppy and reflects extremely poorly on him. Far from showing that I am outside the scientific mainstream, Holdren's follow-up casts doubt on whether he has even read my Senate testimony. Holdren's justification for seeking to use his position as a political appointee to delegitimize me personally reflects poorly on his position and office, and his response simply reinforces that view.

His response, (which you can see here in full in PDF) focuses entirely on drought -- whereas my testimony focused on hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and drought. But before he gets to drought, Holdren gets off to a bad start in his response when he shifts the focus away from my testimony and to some article in a website called "The Daily Caller" (which is apparently some minor conservative or Tea Party website, and the article appears to be this one).

Holdren writes:

Dr. Pielke also commented directly, in a number of tweets on February 14 and thereafter, on my February 13 statements to reporters about the California drought, and he elaborated on the tweets for a blog post on The Daily Caller site (also on February 14). In what follows, I will address the relevant statements in those venues, as well. He argued there, specifically, that my statements on drought “directly contradicted scientific reports”, and in support of that assertion, he offered the same statements from his July testimony that were quoted by Senator Sessions.

Let me be quite clear -- I did not write anything for "The Daily Caller" nor did I speak or otherwise communicate to anyone there. The quote that Holdren attributes to me - “directly contradicted scientific reports” -- is actually written by "The Daily Caller." Why that blog has any relevance to my standing in the "scientific mainstream" eludes me, but whatever. This sort of sloppiness is inexcusable.

Leaving the silly misdirection aside -- common on blogs but unbecoming of the science advisor to the most powerful man on the planet -- let's next take a look at Holdren's substantive complaints about my recent Senate testimony.

As a starting point, let me reproduce in its entirety the section of my Senate testimony (here in PDF) which discussed drought.

Drought 

What the IPCC SREX (2012) says:

• “There is medium confidence that since the 1950s some regions of the world have  experienced a trend to more intense and longer droughts, in particular in southern Europe and West Africa, but in some regions droughts have become less frequent, less intense, or shorter, for example, in central North America and northwestern Australia.” 

• For the US the CCSP (2008)20 says: “droughts have, for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U. S. over the last century.”21

What the data says:

8. Drought has “for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U. S. over the last century.”22

Figure 8. Figure 2.6 from CCSP (2008) has this caption: “The area (in percent) of area in severe to extreme drought as measured by the Palmer Drought Severity Index for the United States (red) from 1900 to present and for North America (blue) from 1950 to present.”

Note: Writing in Nature Senevirnate (2012) argues with respect to global trends that, “there is no necessary correlation between temperature changes and long-term drought variations, which should warn us against using any simplifications regarding their relationship.”23

Footnotes:

20 CCSP, 2008: Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate. Regions of Focus: North America, Hawaii, Caribbean, and U.S. Pacific Islands. A Report by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program and the Subcommittee on Global Change Research. [Thomas R. Karl, Gerald A. Meehl, Christopher D. Miller, Susan J. Hassol, Anne M. Waple, and William L. Murray (eds.)]. Department of Commerce, NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, Washington, D.C., USA, 164 pp.

21 CCSP (2008) notes that “the main exception is the Southwest and parts of the interior of the West, where increased temperature has led to rising drought trends.”

22 This quote comes from the US Climate Change Science Program’s 2008 report on extremes in North America.

23 http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v491/n7424/full/491338a.htm

Let's now look at Holdren's critique which he claims places me "outside the scientific mainstream."

Holdren Complaint #1:  "I will show, first, that the indicated quote [RP: This one: "“droughts have, for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U. S. over the last century.”21"] from the US Climate  Change Science Program (CCSP) about U.S. droughts is missing a crucial adjacent sentence in  the CCSP report, which supports my position about drought in the American West. . . That being so, any reference to the CCSP 2008 report in this context should include not just the sentence highlighted in Dr. Pielke’s testimony but also the sentence that follows immediately in the relevant passage from that document and which relates specifically to the American West."

What is that sentence in question from the CCSP 2008 report that Holdren thinks I should have included in my testimony? He says it is this one:

"The main exception is the Southwest and parts of the interior of the West, where increased temperature has led to rising drought trends."

Readers (not even careful readers) can easily see Footnote 21 from my testimony, which states:

CCSP (2008) notes that “the main exception is the Southwest and parts of the interior of the West, where increased temperature has led to rising drought trends.”

Um, hello? Is this really coming from the president's science advisor?

Holdren is flat-out wrong to accuse me of omitting a key statement from my testimony. Again, remarkable, inexcusable sloppiness.

Holdren's reply next includes a section on drought and climate change which offers no critique of my testimony, and which needs no response from me.

Holdren Complaint #2: Holdren implies that I neglected to note the IPCC's reference to the fact that drought is a regional phenomena: "Any careful reading of the 2013 IPCC report and other recent scientific literature about on the subject reveals that droughts have been worsening in some regions in recent decades while lessening in other regions."

Again, even a cursory reading of what I quoted from the IPCC shows that Holdren's complaint does not stand up. Here is the full quote that I included in my testimony from the IPCC on drought:

“There is medium confidence that since the 1950s some regions of the world have experienced a trend to more intense and longer droughts, in particular in southern Europe and West Africa, but in some regions droughts have become less frequent, less intense, or shorter, for example, in central North America and northwestern Australia.”

Again, hello? Seriously?

Holdren Complaint #3: Near as I can tell Holdren is upset that I cited a paper from Nature that he does not like, writing, "Dr. Pielke’s citation of a 2012 paper from Nature by Sheffield et al., entitled “Little change in global drought over the past 60 years”, is likewise misleading."

He points to a January 2014 paper in Nature Climate Change as offering a rebuttal to Sheffield et al. (2012).

The first point to note in response is that my citing of a paper which appears in Nature does not provide evidence of my being "outside the scientific mainstream" no matter how much Holdren disagrees with the paper. Academics in the "scientific mainstream" cite peer-reviewed papers, sometimes even those in Nature. Second, my testimony was delivered in July, 2013 and the paper he cites as a rebuttal was submitted in August, 2013 and only published in early 2014. I can hardly be faulted for not citing a paper which had not yet appeared.  Third, the 2014 paper that Holdren likes better actually supports the IPCC conclusions on drought and my characterization of them in my Senate testimony.The authors write (PDF):

How is drought changing as the climate changes? Several recent papers in the scientific literature have focused on this question but the answer remains blurred.

 The bottom line here is that this is an extremely poor showing by the president's science advisor. It is fine for experts to openly disagree. But when a political appointee uses his position not just to disagree on science or policy but to seek to delegitimize a colleague, he has gone too far.

1974 Ehrlich and Holdren Senate Testimony

Motivated by my recent reading of The Bet, by Yale University's Paul Sabin, I tracked down the complete 1974 Senate testimony of Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren in hearings on the "Domestic Supply Information Act" held by the Committee on Commerce and Committee on Government Operations (Serial No. 93-107).

The testimony provides an eye-opening look into the depths of Malthusian froth of the time and also provides a great case study for thinking about the role of experts in policy making. I plan on using the testimony in future courses, so I am making it available here as a PDF.

Below are some excerpts and a starter-set of discussion questions.The whole testimony which is worth reading in full. First Ehrlich:

Ehrlich: I suspect you're aware, that the increased price of petroleum which is certainly related to the near depletion of petroleum resources-they're going to be gone by the end of the century . . .

I think that what is not realized, and it's going to be one of the hardest things to be accepted by the Americans in general, is that the onset of the age of scarcity essentially demolishes current models of economists. We are going to move to a no-growth [economy]. Now, whether we do it intelligently through the Government by planning as rapidly as possible, or whether we move there automatically-by the way, when I look at some of the figures these days, I think we're moving there much more rapidly than people realize--we're going to get there, obviously. And I think we'd do a lot better if we had some planning for the dislocations that will inevitably occur. . .

If bad weather continues in the Midwest this year, and if the monsoon should fail this year in India, as it might, then I think you're going to see the age of scarcity and many of the changes I'm talking about coming on next winter.'I mean that's when we're really going to start getting into it.  If we are "fortunate" for a few years, and have nothing but good weather, then it'll come on, you know, 5 or 10 years down the pike. But of course during that time populations will have increased. . . .

I think that the thing you can say with absolute assurance is, considering the magnitude of the changes, if we have 20 years-which I wouldn't put a nickel on-but if we have 20 years, we're already 10 years too late in starting to do something about it. We're not going to change the political and economic structure of the United States overnight. And for that reason, I think that any feeling of urgency that you can generate--one of the big problems is how do you generate a feeling of urgency . . .

Class discussion questions:

• How did Ehrlich's warnings pan out?
• Should policy makers have acted on his advice? Why? Why not? (and what would it have meant to "act"?)
• What makes experts today more believable by policy makers than Ehrlich was then (both contemporaneously and with the advantage of hindsight)?
• Should experts at the time have helped campaign to increase a sense of "urgency"?

Now some excerpts from Holdren's testimony:

Holdren: The. main point here is that, although there may be defects in any specific detailed model, the general conclusion is far more robust than any specific model. At the same time, one has to make a certain disclaimer, and that is that neither analysis nor computer models are adequate to the task of predicting exactly what disaster will follow from a continuation of present trends and exactly when such a disaster will take place.

Now, this problem puts those of us who tend to view with alarm in a somewhat curious position. We're calling upon society to make major changes, but we cannot prove exactly what will happen and exactly when, in the absence of those kinds of changes. This particular point is often used against us by people who are optimistic and believe that one way or another, technology will let us muddle through. I think a useful way to think about this particular dilemma is in terms of the burden of proof; that is, we should ask: Are we worse off if we believe the pessimists and they are wrong, or are we worse off if we believe the optimists and they are wrong?

I think the conclusion is clear. . .

In addition to the reliance on technological panaceas, per se. there is an enormious reliance on the part of optimists of various kinds of the price mechanism, on economic forces, to somehow bail us out of the kinds of difficulties that we're in for. This too has been one of the major criticisms of "Limits to Growth," tlat somehow they didn't adequately incorporate what the price mechanism would do for us in extricating us from this morass of problems.

In this context I think its very important to understand what economics is. Economics is the study of how to allocate resources that are fundamentally scarce in the most efficient way. It doesn't always even do that. But ideally, the idea behind economics is to allocate scarce resources. It does not make scarce resources less scarce. . .

This tendency is perhaps the most dangerous one we face, that somehow people want to wait until the evidence is absolutely overwhelming, that we're in for a catastrophe, before they take action. What worries me is that by the time the evidence is absolutely overwhelming, a good deal of the damage may in fact be irreversible. It's the same tendency toward oversimplification which leads people to think that one set of technological solutions will bail us out. As much as we need technology, we need a good many other things. And as you've already suggested this morning, one of them is social and institutional changes . . .

Class discussion questions:

• How do you evaluate Holdren's view of technology?
• How do you view Holdren's view of economics?
• How much evidence should policy makers have before committing to a particular course of action?
• In what ways are experts who call for social and institutional changes in society different than Holdren/Ehrlich in 1974? 

Over all, what advice should experts take from these cases for thinking about how their testimony in 2013 might be viewed from the perspective of 2053?

Practical Advice for Experts Who Testify Before Congress

Last week’s House Science Committee hearing on climate change was political theater as usual (image above from the witness table looking up at the Chairman). But one small part of that hearing helps to illustrate the challenges that face experts when they agree to testify before Congress, and the choices that they face between advocacy and arbitration, to use the terminology found in my book, The Honest Broker.

In the middle of the hearing there was an exchange on sea level rise between Ralph Hall (R-TX), the committee chair, and Kerry Emanuel, a scientist at MIT who I have known for quite a while and for whom I have a lot of respect.

Hall prompted the exchange with these comments (quotes below are from this webcast):

HALL: Do you recollect when Dr. Holdren was here -- he’s the president’s science advisor --on the sea level rise? His testimony was that it would rise 12 feet. You know when the ice all falls and melts into the ocean. The proper person measured it, as you know the very next year the so-called gold standard of scientific consensus by global warming advocates projected that the oceans would rise by 7 and 23 inches. So that’s who’s advising the president and that’s the reason that we are in all the trouble we’re in right now.

About 5 minutes later when being questioned by another member, Emanuel took the opportunity to direct some comments back to Hall:

EMANUEL: Mr. Chairman, I think that you misquoted Dr. Holdren. He was referring to what would happen if all of Greenland’s ice disappeared. That is not projected to happen. But his numbers are correct, if it did we would see a sea level rise of about 22 feet. Unfortunately it is a risk. It’s way out there because we don’t understand the physics of ice, but I think that is what he is referring to.

Hall responded to Emanuel and they engaged in a short exchange:

HALL: In a recent hearing Dr. Holdren was sitting right there where you are there and he said that the Republicans needed to be educated on the issue. In an August 2006 interview with the BBC news he reportedly said that if the current pace of change continued catastrophic sea level rise of four meters – that’s 13 feet not 12 feet – I was wrong, was within the realm of possibility. While you were going with the interview I asked “how sure were you about your prediction”? And the hard cold facts were that the very next year the so-called gold standard of scientific consensus by global warming advocates projected that the oceans would rise between 7 and 23 inches between now and 2100. How sure was the scientific community of its predictions, that’s my recollection of it, but you probably know more about it than I do.

EMANUEL: I would only simply add to that that the IPCC in making a projection very explicitly excluded any calculation of the melting of land ice. I think they were wise to do that because we don’t understand the physics very well.

HALL: All I was trying to emphasize was that he guessed it 13 feet and he was 12 feet wrong.

EMANUEL: I think that his statement that it was within the realm of possibility is correct.

HALL: I’m not very good on math. In school there were three things I couldn’t do and that is add and subtract.

EMANUEL: The notion that it is within the realm of possibility is correct on his part. That is different than a projection.

HALL: You make a good point and you’ve been a good witness.

A big problem with this exchange is that both Hall and Emanuel are incorrect in their assertions.

First, Hall’s recollection of John Holdren’s testimony is incorrect. On February 18, 2011 Holdren was the sole witness at a Science Committee hearing where Hall asked him about his sea level projection (quotes from this webcast):

HALL: In August, 2006 -- you knew I was going to ask you about the interview that you had with BBC News, didn’t you? – you reportedly said that if the current pace of change continues catastrophic sea level rise would be 4 meters – that is 13 feet – was within the realm of possibility. While you were giving the interview, how sure were you about your prediction? Do you know that the very next year the so-called gold standard view of the scientific consensus by global warming advocates projected that the oceans would rise between 7 and 23 inches, not 13 feet but less than 2 inches (sic) between now and 2100. Let me ask you, how sure was the scientific community of their prediction?

HOLDREN: There are several questions there but let me start with the most recent, the one of sea level rise. At the time there had been two peer reviewed referred publications in the scientific literature that pointed out that twice in the last 19,000 years the rate of sea level went up as much as 3-5 meters per century. Under forcings – that is, influences on the climate, but natural ones in this case – that were in the same range or smaller than the forces that are now being imposed on the climate, we believe mainly by human activity. At that time, therefore, the view that a sea level rise of as much as four meters which was in the middle of the range of 3-5 was a reasonable statement based on what was in the peer reviewed literature. Subsequently newer analyses have reduced that figure somewhat but the upper end of the range remains in the domain of 1-2 meters over the century we’re now in at worse.

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change arrived at the estimates which you’ve quoted Mr. Chairman the explicitly excluded and they said so in a footnote the dynamic processes which led in the past to these more rapid increases in sea level and they said they were leaving those out because they didn’t believe that the scientific basis for modeling them quantitatively was yet adequate to support a particular number. Since that time – that was the 2007 report of the IPCC whose scientific inputs were finalized in December 2005 – since that time there have been extensive new analyses which have supported the proposition that the sea level rise in this century could be in the range of one to as much as two meters. That is not a particular prediction, the range of uncertainty is large, but even half a meter would be an extremely consequential matter for people and businesses with ocean front property.

It was not the first time that Holdren had been asked about that 2006 BBC interview in which he said:

[Holdren] added that if the current pace of change continued, a catastrophic sea level rise of 4m (13ft) this century was within the realm of possibility; much higher than previous forecasts.

It was also not the first time that Holdren had explained to Congress that he had changed his mind since that interview took place. For instance, in December, 2009 Holdren testified before the House Select Committee on Global Warming and discussed the BBC interview with Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI)

SENSENBRENNER: You gave an interview in August of 2006 with BBC News in the UK. And you said that a sea-level rise of up to 13 feet was in the realm of possibility. However, that is 11 feet higher than what the IPCC has estimated over this period of time, which is somewhere between seven and 23 inches.

HOLDREN [a bit later in the hearing]: Well, let me, Congressman, take the opportunity of this particular question to answer part of Congressman Sensenbrenner's, because he referred to the IPCC's finding in its fourth assessment report about sea-level rise.

In that report, the IPCC made clear that they were only considering the thermal expansion of seawater and a small contribution from the melting of mountain glaciers in their sea-level rise estimate for the 21st century, leaving out deliberately the mechanism thought to have caused the more rapid rises in sea level that have occurred from time to time in the geologic past.

And the reason they left out those mechanisms that are capable of causing more rapid sea-level rises, they explained in their report, was that we do not yet understand those mechanisms well enough to model them and arrive at the sort of quantitative conclusion that the IPCC was emphasizing. And, in addition, we didn't know at that time, we didn't have enough data to know whether, on balance, the Antarctic ice sheet, the larger of the two, was gaining mass or losing mass.

Since that IPCC report, there has been a great deal of additional work on these questions. We now know that both the Antarctic and the Greenland ice sheet are losing mass. We know that the rate of sea-level rise today is more than twice the rate of sea-level rise averaged over the 20th century.

And the current best estimates of the peak sea-level rise to be expected in this century are one to two meters. That is not as high as my number from 2006. The advancing science has ruled out the high end of that range. But it makes me wrong in 2006 by about a factor of two.

So when Hall told Kerry Emanuel that Holdren had testified that sea levels could rise by 13 feet, he was in fact misrepresenting what Holdren had told him earlier this year, which was that he has changed his views based on more recent research.

But Emanuel, for whatever reason, decided to defend the statements attributed to Holdren. The result was that Emanuel claimed that Holdren meant something different than Hall suggested and he also indicated that a sea level rise by 2100 was indeed “within the realm of possibility.” Ironically, this contradicts what Holdren actually said, that “advancing science has ruled out the high end of that range.”

Tad Pfeffer, a colleague of mine here at the University of Colorado and an expert on sea level rise reacted to this when I shared it with him as follows, quoted with his permission:

Holdren is doing the best he can with a bad situation. His job, and the job of many others, would be a hell of lot simpler if we had never got into the 3-to-5 m SLR in the next century business in the first place. We knew that the circumstances at 18K and 125K are not good analogs for today right from the start (global ice coverage at 18K was very different than today and the evidence for very fast sea level rise at 125K was and remains very weak), but the notion of 3-to-5 m SLR in the next century was allowed to flourish over the next few years regardless. We wrote the 2008 kinematic constraints paper specifically to put a stop to that business, which it has to a large degree, but now the volatile history of the projected numbers, from less than 1 meter at AR4, to several meters post-AR4, to 1-to-2 m max today, are generating a lot of scrutiny, and the 'catastrophic' 3-to-5 m ideas, especially, are being used as bludgeons against people like Holdren who are trying to explain the behavior and train of thought of supposedly rational scientists.

It is my view that sea level is an example of a context in which the scientific community lost control of a narrative (and some might say helped to push it along) in a manner that has contributed to damaging the credibility of the climate science community. Holdren’s 2006 BBC statements were a part of that process, which I discuss more generally in Chapters 7 and 8 of The Climate Fix.

What are the lessons here for experts who testify before Congress?

I can think of several:

1. Decide what your role is. Regardless of which party invites you, decide whether you are there to defend that political party’s views (on science or policy) or if you are there to share what you know about questions for which you have expertise. These are not always the same thing.

2. Appreciate that statements that you make in the media that cherrypick, emphasize extremes (on any side of an issue) or otherwise go out on a limb could set your scientific colleagues up for difficulties in the future when they are asked to defend those statements in a political setting.  At that point, the scientist being asked to defend the dodgy statements may face a trade-off between scientific accuracy and political solidarity.

3. Speak for yourself and let others speak for themselves. This is of course can be very difficult when participating in a shared campaign, either for action or a perspective. Even if you are not actively participating in that campaign you may be forced to render a judgement on it, e.g., "Ms. Scientist the IPCC consensus says X, what do you think?"

4. Recognize that when incorrect statements are made in a public setting, the consequences for you as an expert will be much higher than for politicians. That is just the way that it is.  The consequences for folksy, grandfatherly Ralph Hall of being wrong will never be as significant as for a scientist testifying before him. So always be able to defend claims that you make.

5. Stick to your area of expertise when testifying as an expert.  This seems obvious but is routinely violated.

6.  Finally, it should be obvious that a decision to accept an invitation to testify is a political act.  No, it does not mean that you shared the political agenda or scientific views of those who invite you.  But it does mean that your participation in the process will be more thoughtful and more effective if you have considered your role in the political process, and especially your stance on advocacy versus arbitration.  The risk of not thinking these issues through is of course a greater likelihood that you'll simply be a stage prop in a political theater.

On sea level rise, the statements made by Holdren in 2006 to the BBC as AAAS President and environmental activist were far less measured and responsible than his statements made in 2009 and 2011 on the same subject as science advisor to the president before Congress. The difference -- which I attribute as much to setting as to any changes in the science of sea level -- helps to illustrate the difference between an expert who seeks to use science selectively as a basis for political advocacy and one who wishes to faithfully arbitrate scientific questions for policy makers. While these roles are not necessarily mutually exclusive, typically a choice must be made.

Postscript: I emailed a draft of this blog post to Emanuel for his comments and he wrote back that he has no issues with the characterizations made here on the exchange with Hall. He did say that during the hearing he did not catch Hall's reference to 2100 and thought that he meant sea level in the very long term. Emanuel was unaware of Holdren's earlier statements on sea level rise. Nonetheless, Emanuel takes strong issue with Hall's reference to the IPCC sea level rise estimates without noting that they omit land surface ice dynamics. Emanuel remains troubled with how the Republicans are treating climate science.

Q&A with Tom Fuller

1. Could you summarise your view of global climate change for us?

I provided such a summary in testimony I gave before the U.S. Congress in 2006, and it remains pretty much my current view. Here are my take-home points from that testimony:

1. Human-caused climate change is real and requires attention by policy makers to both mitigation and adaptation – but there is no quick fix; the issue will be with us for decades and longer.

2. Any conceivable emissions reductions policies, even if successful, cannot have a perceptible impact on the climate for many decades.

3. Consequently, costs (whatever they may be) are borne in the near term and benefits related to influencing the climate system are achieved in the distant future.

4. However, many policies that result in a reduction in emissions also provide benefits in the short term unrelated to climate change.

5. Similarly adaptation policies can provide immediate benefits.

6. But climate policy, particularly international climate policy under the Framework Convention on Climate Change, has been structured to keep policy related to long-term climate change distinct from policies related to shorter-term issues of energy policy and adaptation.

7. Following the political organization of international climate change policy, research agendas have emphasized the long-term, meaning that relatively very little attention is paid to developing specific policy options or near-term technologies that might be put into place with both short-term and long-term benefits.

8. The climate debate may have begun to slowly reflect these realities, but the research and development community has not yet focused much attention on developing policy and technological options that might be politically viable, cost effective, and practically feasible.

You can read about these points in more depth at this PDF.

2. If you were a member of Congress, would you vote for the current cap and trade legislation?

The legislation that passed the House last week (Waxman-Markey) is, to paraphrase, Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), a stinker. Even many of those who supported it did so while holding their noses. As a matter of policy it deserves no one’s vote. As a matter of politics, if I were a Democratic member of the House I would likely have voted for the bill to please my party and the president, unless I were from a closely held district with agriculture, fossil fuel, or other similar interests. In that case I would have asked the president and the party for permission to vote against it. So long as the bill passed the president would understand. If I were a Republican member I would almost certainly vote against the bill, unless of course my district were to be the beneficiary of oodles of cap-and-trade pork from the bill.

It is of course easy to play the “how would I have voted” game when you don’t represent anyone and don’t have to run for re-election in 2010;-)

3. Who in the debate is playing fairly and who is not? (I have not yet gotten a complete answer to this question from your father, Stephen Schneider or Bjorn Lomborg--maybe you'll be the first...)

I’m not sure I understand this question, but I'll give it a go.

Many people, on all sides of the climate debate are very sincere in their views and work hard to express them as best they can. But among many, especially in the blogosphere where differences in perspectives are magnified and common courtesies seem to be forgotten, there is too often little willingness to accept the fact that different people have legitimately different views. People often forget that it is OK to agree to disagree. At the same time there are of course people on all sides of the debate who misrepresent information deliberately, attack people’s character, and worse. Having been on the receiving end of some of these tactics I guess I’d say if you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen. But we should all try to elevate the quality of debate.

As far as playing “fair” in my experience in the blogosphere there are (remarkably) only two websites that have refused to allow me to comment on their site, even when they are discussing my work, and those sites are run by Joe Romm (Climate Progress) and Gavin Schmidt (Real Climate). They can run their sites as they wish, of course, but their actions speak loudly. Why are these guys afraid of open discussion?

More broadly and significantly, I have little sympathy for those who use legitimate processes such as journal peer review and government advisory reports to advance personal or political agendas. This is a failure of process and those in leadership positions who oversee those processes. The systematic misrepresentation of my research in climate science reports provides a troubling example of this sort of failure.

4. Is climate science such an elite field that experts in other domains cannot offer qualified commentary? I'm thinking of Freeman Dyson and Ivar Giaever, specifically.

Of course not, (but I did have to Google Ivar Giaever before answering;-). If it were then no one could comment on the subject as no one is an expert is all aspects of climate change, which involves expertise ranging from demographics to economics to energy technologies to clouds to oceans to ecosystems to cryospheric dynamics and on and on. No one has this comprehensive expertise, though many are very qualified on important parts of the issue. Balancing authority and inclusion is a central challenge of democracies, and I tend to favor inclusion over authoritarianism, but many others will disagree (especailly on the climate issue).

Dan Sarewitz of ASU documented a public dispute between John Holdren and Tom Wigley from a few years back on this question in an excellent paper. Wigley was arguing for a narrow definition of expertise, Holdren for a broader concept. My views on this are similar to Holdren's. Of course, the credential card is often played as an appeal to authority in public debates to discredit someone or their views, without having to actually engage the substance.

5. As a citizen, do you believe that President Obama's energy program takes the right direction, commits the correct level of resources, and is likely to be beneficial for this country?

I think that President Obama has a powerful vision for where he wants the country to go and I admire and support his energy policy ambitions. However, thus far the main vehicle for achieving those ambitions is, as I mentioned above, a stinker. Getting policy to match political ambitions can be a tough task. In this case the policy is nowhere close.

6. Has the energy of tropical storms increased or decreased over the past 30 years? Are there regular cycles to tropical storm strength, and how does this affect your answer?

You can see data on tropical cyclone energy (measured over a 24-month period using a metric called ACE) from Ryan Maue's website. You can see from the graph below that, in Maue's words, "the recent downturn in global TC energy is nearing record low levels of inactivity."

7. Has the actual number of tropical storms increased or decreased over the past 30 years? Are there regular cycles to tropical storm numbers, and how does this affect your answer?

The answer depends on what basin you look at, what time period and on judgments about data quality. Here are a few peer-reviewed papers that try to address this question: here and here and here in PDF. But if it is landfalls that you are interested in, then there have been no long-term trends documented, anywhere.

8. What prescriptions would you offer to zoning regulations, building permits, architectural standards and community siting to make American communities more resilient to the impacts of large scale weather-related events?

This is a huge question with many answers that I cannot begin to do justice to here (though if you are interested I have written much on flood and hurricane policies). The most important general answer is for communities (where most of these decisions are made) to understand the risks they face and the uncertainties in that risk, and to ensure that their policies match up. Too often this sort of evaluative question gets hung up on questions of risk and leaves out the questions of policy. In general, U.S. disaster policy is based on the idea that risks should be subsidized by the public with predictable consequences. I recommend Rud Platt's book, Disasters and Democracy: The Politics Of Extreme Natural Events, which I reviewed here.

9. The government report has, you say, mischaracterised your research. How would you rephrase their comments so that it would accord with your published work?

It was not just a single government report, but multiple reports by the US government and the IPCC. The misrepresentation has been systematic. The US National Science Foundation, along with government's of Germany and the UK, as well as Munich Re, supported a 2006 workshop in Hohenkammer, Germany to develop a consensus, scientific perspective on the factor leading to the dramataic increase in disaster costs around the world. We reached a consensus and it still holds. I don't see any reason for a major assessment report to ignore the Hohenkammer conesensus or present conclusions counter to it without a justification. Here are our 20 consensus statements (full report here):

The focus of the workshop was on two central questions:

• What factors account for increasing costs of weather related disasters in recent decades?
• What are the implications of these understandings, for both research and policy?

To be clear about terminology, we adopted the IPCC definition of climate change. According to the IPCC (2001) climate change is

“Climate change refers to a statistically significant variation in either the mean state of the climate or in its variability, persisting for an extended period (typically decades or longer). Climate change may be due to natural internal processes or external forcings, or to persistent anthropogenic changes in the composition of the atmosphere or in land use.”

The IPCC also defines climate variability to be

“Climate variability refers to variations in the mean state and other statistics (such as standard deviations, the occurrence of extremes, etc.) of the climate on all temporal and spatial scales beyond that of individual weather events. Variability may be due to natural internal processes within the climate system (internal variability), or to variations in natural or anthropogenic external forcing (external variability).”

We use the phrase anthropogenic climate change to refer to human-caused effects on climate.

Consensus (unanimous) statements of the workshop participants:

1. Climate change is real, and has a significant human component related to greenhouse gases.

2. Direct economic losses of global disasters have increased in recent decades with particularly large increases since the 1980s.

3. The increases in disaster losses primarily result from weather related events, in particular storms and floods.

4. Climate change and variability are factors which influence trends in disasters.

5. Although there are peer reviewed papers indicating trends in storms and floods there is still scientific debate over the attribution to anthropogenic climate change or natural climate variability. There is also concern overgeophysical data quality.

6. IPCC (2001) did not achieve detection and attribution of trends in extreme events at the global level.

7. High quality long-term disaster loss records exist, some of which are suitable for research purposes, such as to identify the effects of climate and/or climate change on the loss records.

8. Analyses of long-term records of disaster losses indicate that societal change and economic development are the principal factors responsible for the documented increasing losses to date.

9. The vulnerability of communities to natural disasters is determined by their economic development and other social characteristics.

10. There is evidence that changing patterns of extreme events are drivers for recent increases in global losses.

11. Because of issues related to data quality, the stochastic nature of extreme event impacts, length of time series, and various societal factors present in the disaster loss record, it is still not possible to determine the portion of the increase in damages that might be attributed to climate change due to GHG emissions

12. For future decades the IPCC (2001) expects increases in the occurrence and/or intensity of some extreme events as a result of anthropogenic climate change. Such increases will further increase losses in the absence of disaster reduction measures.

13. In the near future the quantitative link (attribution) of trends in storm and flood losses to climate changes
related to GHG emissions is unlikely to be answered unequivocally.

Policy implications identified by the workshop participants

14. Adaptation to extreme weather events should play a central role in reducing societal vulnerabilities to climate and climate change.

15. Mitigation of GHG emissions should also play a central role in response to anthropogenic climate change,
though it does not have an effect for several decades on the hazard risk.

16. We recommend further research on different combinations of adaptation and mitigation policies.

17. We recommend the creation of an open-source disaster database according to agreed upon standards.

18. In addition to fundamental research on climate, research priorities should consider needs of decision makers in areas related to both adaptation and mitigation.

19. For improved understanding of loss trends, there is a need to continue to collect and improve long-term and homogenous datasets related to both climate parameters and disaster losses.

20. The community needs to agree upon peer reviewed procedures for normalizing economic loss data.

10. On a scale from 1-10, where 1 is not at all important and 10 is of the highest importance, where would you rank global climate change in terms of its likely impact on human development? Please feel free to explain.

Climate change as a very important topic, and one that I have devoted a good part of my career to working on over almost two decades. So I would fairly obviously and self-servingly give it a high ranking on your scale, probably a 10. But there are also many other issues that are 10s as well, such as health and disease, wars and famine, nuclear proliferation, energy security, economic stability and growth and so on. The challenge of policy is not to identify one issue that is more important than all others, but to craft policy responses that are effective and efficient, given that we have to do many things at the same time. So yes climate change is important, but we have to move beyond exhortation to actual development of effective policy options, and my view is that far more time is spent on the former than the latter.

New Paper on Global Disaster Losses

Shali Mohleji, of the AMS Policy Program, and I have a new paper out, which builds on her dissertation work. In the paper we take a close look at the dataset on global disaster losses, maintain by Munich Re. The folks at Munich Re were extremely helpful in this work.

Our paper focused on dis-aggregating the Munich Re global dataset into its regional and phenonmena components, and then comparing trends among the dis-aggregation with the peer-reviewed literature on disaster losses in regions and for specific phenomena.

The conclusion of the analysis is:

The bottom line here is that a signal of greenhouse gas emissions cannot be found in the aggregate loss data from Munich Re. Those making claims to the contrary should take note.

If that sounds familiar, it should, as Bouwer (2011), Neumayer and Bartel (2011) and IPCC (2012) came to the same conclusion. With apologies to John Holdren, this is the scientific mainstream, get on board.

One other quick bit from the paper: The post-1980 trend of increasing "global" losses Munich Re dataset is mainly the signal of US hurricane losses -- 57% of the overall trend.

Here is the abstract:

Mohleji, S. and Pielke, R., Jr. (2014). "Reconciliation of Trends in Global and Regional Economic Losses from Weather Events: 1980–2008." Nat. Hazards Rev., 10.1061/(ASCE)NH.1527-6996.0000141 (Feb. 22, 2014).

Reconciliation of Trends in Global and Regional Economic Losses from Weather Events: 1980–2008

Shalini Mohleji1 and Roger Pielke Jr.2

1 American Meteorological Society Policy Program, 1200 New York Avenue NW, Suite 450, Washington, D.C. 20005, USA.

2 Corresponding author, Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Colorado, 1333 Grandview Ave, Campus Box 488, Boulder, CO 80309, USA. Corresponding author. Tel 303 735 0451; fax: 303 735 1576. E-Mail address: pielke@colorado.edu.

In recent years claims have been made in venues including the authoritative reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and in testimony before the US Congress that economic losses from weather events have been increasing beyond that which can be explained by societal change, based on loss data from the reinsurance industry and aggregated since 1980 at the global level. Such claims imply a contradiction with a large set of peer-reviewed studies focused on regional losses, typically over a much longer time period, which concludes that loss trends are explained entirely by societal change. To address this implied mismatch, we disaggregate global losses from a widely utilized reinsurance dataset into regional components and compare this disaggregation directly to the findings from the literature at the regional scale, most of which reach back much further in time. We find that global losses increased at a rate of $3.1 billion/year (2008 USD) from 1980–2008 and losses from North American, Asian, European, and Australian storms and floods account for 97% of the increase. In particular, North American storms, of which U.S. hurricane losses compose the bulk, account for 57% of global economic losses. Longer-term loss trends in these regions can be explained entirely by socioeconomic factors in each region such as increasing wealth, population growth, and increasing development in vulnerable areas. The remaining 3% of the global increase 1980 to 2008 is the result of losses for which regionally based studies have not yet been completed. On climate time scales, societal change is sufficient to explain the increasing costs of disasters at the global level and claims to the contrary are not supported by aggregate loss data from the reinsurance industry.

If you would like a pre-publication copy of the full manuscript, please send me an email request.

UPDATE: Here is Warren Buffett on CNBC today talking insurance and climate change: