Politicizing Climate Change

While everyone agrees there's too much politics in climatology, people overseas will be amazed at the extent to which there's insufficient climatology in US politics.

With oil at $100/barrel, even energy policy gets short shrift.

I recommend, especially to American readers, an article on Daily Kos about the near invisibility of what after all is obviously a defining issue of our time.

(Disclaimer: while I am an unabashed liberal I'm not a Democratic partisan. I don't plan to take this blog too far into campaign politics. The referenced site is explicitly political and big-D Democratic. In this case, though, it raises an interesting point that even those disagreeing with its inclinations ought to consider.)

Notable in the presidential debates, on both sides of the aisle, has been a relative silence on such minor issues as energy and Global Warming. Peak Oil matter? Evidently not, based on the hours of debates. Global Warming? Well, Tim Russert [moderator of the venerable interview program Meet the Press --mt] has asked over 200 questions, not one related to this that I can find. Nor, for example, did it come up at the Yearly Kos Presidential forum in August.

...

The League of Conservation Voters put out a press release last week pointing out that Russert has had the presidential candidates on Meet the Press at least a dozen times and never used the words "global warming". And, well, it isn't just Russert. It was noted, at Yearly Kos, by a number of the candidates in their sessions after the Presidential Forum in August. (Richardson opened his comments noting this.) As long as reporters (and we) are not asking the questions, the issue won't rise to the top of the debate.

The Overton window not only decides what positions can be discussed in polite company. It also apparently decides what features of the landscape we even look at. To reach 2008 with debate on energy hardly visible in national politics is ludicrous in the extreme.

It's not as if the problem were some sort of secret, either. Everyone except the politicians talks about it constantly. Americans are obsessed about an elephant in the room that the press and the parties are dancing around and trying to sweep under a rug.

It makes the media and political power centers look ever more shabby. The hypocrisy is approaching Soviet levels. Nobody outside the power centers is taking the political process seriously. At least part of the reason is that the topics addressed and the attitudes expressed by politicians and the press seem to refer to a different country and a different time.

It's not as if Mr Gore is entirely off the hook, either. I recall that these matters disappeared from his vocabulary at about the time he started running for President in earnest in 2000.

There must be some awfully powerful pressures that I can't quite understand to keep a lid on the energy tangle. Someone in DC should read the safety warning that comes with an everyday kitchen pressure cooker.

Argument for Carrying Capacity of 7.5 G

My good friend Howie spotted an as-yet obscure blog from Sweden, in English, by Folke Gunther.

Gunther is basing an argument for the world's carrying capacity on the private asteroid argument, turned on its head. Exactly how much land do you need? That is, what is each human's minimum share of the entire planet? He argues that you need just about the share you currently have.

Hansen

Climate Progress has a link to Hansen's cogent testimony to the Iowa legislature regarding the risks of new coal plants. The figures constituting the second half of that document are especially good.

There's an interesting biography of James Hansen recently posted by NASA.

Journalism Cannot Be Neutral

I was otherwise busy, but Irene had time to catch Jim Lehrer's lecture to the Journalism school this evening. (He gave a similar talk at my alma mater last month.) Lehrer upheld the conventional tenets of journalism; he is alarmed at the decay of discourse, but it seems Gore and Gingrich agree on that too.

It's an important question, how we came to this pass.

I suspect, and here Lehrer will not agree, that responsible, staid journalism like his, as practiced in America, is part of the problem. The attempt at "balance" requires some definition of the scope of acceptable opinion. As Eli taught me, the implicit limits of discourse, which oddly include Singer and exclude Lovelock, for instance, is called the Overton WIndow in some circles.

Here's an easy place to start. As Gore suggests, don't give equal time to sense and nonsense.

If the window of acceptable opinion doesn't move with the evidence, journalists aren't doing their job of presenting evidence. If they hold a misguided scruple against making judgments, the window will wander around in ways that don't have much to do with reality. That's when Mamet's principle kicks in, that's why we have lost the capacity to cope collectively, and that's why at this point all genuine optimism in America is centered around the idea of abandoning the collective altogether, which unfortunately won't work.

Jim Lehrer is a very nice man, a very smart man, a very serious man, and a very well-intentioned man. And Jim Lehrer is part of the problem.

Update: The CBC ombudsman is quoted as follows on DeSmog:

"The CBC, in its decision making process, is entitled to make its own editorial determination about what opinions are in the mainstream, and need to be reflected, and what opinions are on the margins, and can be given the editorial hook they so often deserve…"

That is pretty much the point. Journalism is not only entitled to make such decisions. It is obligated to do so, and it is obligated to do so responsibly and competently. That is what we pay our journalists for.

Green Mainframes: Big is Beautiful

Via Slashdot, where there follows some interesting discussion about cap-and-trade, IBM is going to offer carbon credits for moving from no-longer-especially-personal PCs (which really are not typically in the user's full control even in a home setting anymore) back to mainframes which have economies of scale in energy consumption.

If high speed home internet bandwidth weren't being gobbled up by rather ill-designed and accidental video-on-demand system, the time for thin clients at home would already have arrived. iPhones... OK, maybe that's off topic for this blog.. Never mind...

The interesting thing for us here is the emergence of private sector carbon credits. Not only are we reverting to mainframes, we are reverting to private mints as well! Essentially IBM is offering you a private endorsement which can be traded for value and openly exchanged.

As far as carbon goes, this is certainly more silver buckshot than silver bullet, but if it works, more power (er, more conservation...) to IBM and Google too.

There is a Big is Beautiful theme here that I'd like to ponder some more.

Carbon Cycle Misfortunes

The National Academy is releasing a PNAS paper on the carbon cycle by Canadell et al. to the public. A summary is available on Environmental Research Web.

The news is grim. The carbon intensity of the global economy has stopped improving and the efficiency of the ocean sink is declining. Consequently CO2 accumulation has not only continued but has accelerated over the past six years.

Recent carbon emissions growth substantially exceeds
the IPCC's most pessimistic emissions scenario!

There is a very effective Powerpoint presentation . The charts are excellent. (Nice choice of text font, too.)

Here are the ones I found most outstanding. The first one should warm the heart of any accountant; it's a budget.

An important point to note from the first image is that emissions are increasing and the ocean is not keeping up; while its total absorption of carbon is roughly constant, its fractional contribution is clearly declining. That means a larger proportion of our emissions contribute to climate change.


Total emissions can be seen as the product of three terms: population, per capita wealth, and carbon intensity. Until very recently the carbon intensity was balancing one of the other two, but now it is trending the wrong way. This is an economic way of parsing out the recent deterioration in the carbon situation. According to this analysis, we don't have more growth than usual. It is just much dirtier growth than usual.

Here's the punchline. It is starting to look like the IPCC scenario spread is far too optimistic.


Fun, huh?

Update 11/2: A similar blog posting is here at "ice-blog", in French. That article also directed me to the related PNAS article by Raupach et al which breaks the emissions scenario down regionally. Here is ice-blog's excellent summary:

Au total, les auteurs décomposent la hausse du taux d'augmentation du CO2 atmosphérique entre 70-99 et 2000-2006 (de 1.5 à 1.9 ppm/an, en gros) comme suit:
* 65 % (+/-16) pour l'augmentation de l'activité économique mondiale
* 17 % (+/- 6 ) pour la dégradation de l'intensité en carbone de l'économie
* 18 % (+/- 15) pour la diminution de l'efficacité des puits naturels.

Enfin, last but not least, les auteurs indiquent que les modèles couplés climat/cycle du carbone (couplage qui n'est pas inclus dans les modèles du GIEC, au passage...) indiquent bien un affaiblissement des puits pour le 21ème siècle (causant une augmention supplémentaire de 20 à 200ppm de CO2 atmo d'ici 2100 par rapport aux scenarios IPCC, voir Friedlingstein et al. 2006 ), mais pas pour la période 1959-2006: pour cette période ils indiquent plutôt une baisse de l'Airborne Fraction (i-e, des puits plus forts).

Ceci suggèrerait d'après eux que les feedbacks carbone/climat se produisent plus rapidement que notre compréhension des phénomènes gouvernant l'absorption des puits ne le laissait penser.

Pour résumer: nos émissions de CO2 accélèrent, sa concentration atmosphérique augmente de plus en plus vite, et, si l'on en croit ce nouveau papier, les puits naturels commenceraient à faiblir plus tôt que prévu...

Voilà un scenario prometteur, en tout cas...

There's an mp3 of an excellent CBC interview (Quirks and Quarks) of one of the authors, Chris Field; you'll have to put up with some introductory sound effects and promotional bluster.

Anybody else care to point to this? I think it's about as important as it gets.

Newt Gingrich???

of all people, says some reasonable things and comes across like a responsible conservative, a species I had considered practically extinct.

Not only is he talking about taking the nexus of environmental threats seriously, he said stuff very reminiscent of Gore's "Assault on Reason", which of course any real conservative would do, if there were any of them left. Gore's position in that book, with which I wholeheartedly agree, is fundamentally Tory. Any so-called conservatives who have a shred of seriousness and decency left ought to embrace that book wholeheartedly. (See also Krugman on media discourse.)

Of course Gingrich doesn't admit to agreeing with Gore, but still it's refreshing to hear critiques from the right of the idiotic way in which public discourse takes place these days.

I remember being very depressed when Gingrich took over the congress and, I thought, started torpedoing Clinton in the most cynical imaginable ways. Did I misjudge him then, or is it just that anybody looks good after six years of the Peachfuzz administration?

Shedding some light on this question, David Roberts is extremely skeptical of Gingrich's sincerity.

It's true I didn't hear Gingrich renouncing his past, but maybe that isn't the most useful thing he might do at this point. Politicians will be politicians, I suppose. On the whole it's nice to hear someone like Gingrich talking something resembling sense.

The code is not the model

I have a new essay up on Correlations, wherein I try to get the reader comfortable with the idea of a "model".

In writing this, I came to understand that the way the word "model" is used in the climate sciences is confusing. An executable software package (a "program") is often called a "model" but this overvalues the code and undervalues the model. The code is an attempted embodiment of the model. The model is the science. The realization of the model ("running the code") is the prediction. The code itself is just an instrument.

It's hopeless to demand that we stop calling it a "model". It's just too ingrained. We should be aware, though, that this is sloppy thinking. The code is just code.

Speaking of Dramatic Changes

Via Slashdot, Matthew Chapman of the Washington Post makes the modest suggestion that the presidential candidates have a debate on science. A closed book exam as it were.

The Slashdot discussion seems better than their norm these days, maybe because it is about ideas and not about facts. hmmmm... There's some irony there.

Remember the Future?

Do you remember progress? Probably, if you do you, then you are an older sort like me, or an oddball collector of paleo-futurism.

Michael Chabon has a wistful eulogy for the future at Long Now.

The odd thing about contemporary market triumphalism is that it celebrates an incapacity to redesign the world. This so-called "realism", which is in fact a deep pessimism, is not really new, but it is a spectacular retreat from the the optimism that prevailed when I was an adolescent with a season pass to Expo '67.

We don't even have World's Fairs anymore.

This may be the explanation of the lack of activism in today's youth. It's not that they like what's going on. They simply don't believe that the course of history can actually be changed by human will. They retreat to sarcasm, at which they excel.

I think it may fall to us boomers again, to make change happen. We mostly still believe in the likes of Gandhi or Martin Luther King to actually change the world, but our own courage appears to have vanished along with our naivete.