Climate Risk Management

The NY Times had an article yesterday about a "middle stance" about global warming:

They agree that accumulating carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases probably pose a momentous environmental challenge, but say the appropriate response is more akin to buying fire insurance and installing sprinklers and new wiring in an old, irreplaceable house (the home planet) than to fighting a fire already raging.

Middle Stance Emerges in Debate Over Climate, By ANDREW C. REVKIN, New York Times, January 1, 2007

Hm, this sounds like risk management.

One climatologist spells this out even more:

“This is a mega-ethical challenge,” said Jerry D. Mahlman, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who has studied global warming for more than three decades. “In space, it’s the size of a planet, and in time, it has scales far broader than what we go-go Homo sapiens are accustomed to dealing with.”

...

Because of the scale and time lag, a better strategy, Dr. Mahlman and others say, is to treat human-caused warming more as a risk to be reduced than a problem to be solved.

Yep, risk management.

The title of the article and much of its content tries to promote the idea of middle way between two competing camps:

These experts see a clear need for the public to engage now, but not to panic. They worry that portrayals of the issue like that in “An Inconvenient Truth,” the documentary focused on the views of Mr. Gore, may push too hard.

One might get the impression that this is capitulation to the oil company funded disinformation campaign that claims there's a debate when there isn't, really.

But on closer examination, this middle way isn't really in the middle:

buying fire insurance and installing sprinklers and new wiring

Er, isn't that a pretty good metaphor for what Gore is proposing? And when do people start buying insurance, anyway? After they can't deny there's a problem anymore....

Which is where Gore has been very helpful. His presentation has gotten many people past denial.

Famous military strategist Thomas P.M. Barnett says he's been waiting for years to blog this story. Let's look at what Barnett says he and some of his buddies proposed in a workshop several years ago:

Our operating premises were:

1. there's no turning back the enlargement of the global economy (the rising New Core);
2. that New Core's rising energy consumption would shape global foreign direct investment for decades (our first two workshops on energy and FDI);
3. 3) that growth would send both regional pollution (the sort we've basically conquered) and global pollution (the CO2) jumping;
4. following our cap-and-trade schemes on regional pollution, Asia would logically surmount its problems (like all developed states before it), but in that growth trajectory, new opportunities would arise for solution sets to deal with global pollution problems, with global warming (the driver of the game) providing the impetus;
5. and that solution set would logically lie somewhere between the extreme positions of panic and denial (already clearly in view by 2001).

An article I've been waiting years to blog, Thomas P.M. Barnett in his blog, 1 Jan 2007.

Isn't point (5) exactly what Gore says at the end of An Inconvenient Truth, that we shouldn't jump directly from denial to panic or despair, rather we should go about doing something about the problem? And isn't a cap-and-trade scheme for CO2 one of Gore's specific proposals? The only mismatch is in characterizing Gore as panicking; see below for more on that.

Regarding point (1), I haven't seen anywhere that Gore said that the global economy wouldn't keep enlarging. It's the warming deniers who fluff up that straw man. Me, I keep saying that getting on with addressing global warming will help the economy, just as getting on with building computers did. Look at Toyota compared to GM or Ford. Which one got on with selling the Prius?

So if the NY Times wants to reframe discussions about global warming as yes there's a debate, and there's a middle way, and it turns out the middle way is what Gore and Barnett were both already proposing, I actually have no problem with that. People don't watch Gore's movie usually don't do so because they're in denial.

This is not unlike how people deal with every other threat they perceive as a big risk but far a way in time: denial is the standard response, from tornadoes in Massachusetts to tsunamis in Thailand.

If reframing helps get people past denial, they'll quickly realize Gore and the rest of us aren't panicking at all; we're just facing facts. So if such reframing is what it takes to get more people past the bogus debate and on to doing something, I'm for it.

 

Especially since the something is risk management. As the Economist said back in September:

So is it really worth using public resources now to avert an uncertain, distant risk, especially when the cash could be spent instead on goods and services that would have a measurable near-term benefit?

If the risk is big enough, yes. Governments do it all the time. They spend a small slice of tax revenue on keeping standing armies not because they think their countries are in imminent danger of invasion but because, if it happened, the consequences would be catastrophic. Individuals do so too. They spend a little of their incomes on household insurance not because they think their homes are likely to be torched next week but because, if it happened, the results would be disastrous. Similarly, a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that the risk of a climatic catastrophe is high enough for the world to spend a small proportion of its income trying to prevent one from happening.

And the slice of global output that would have to be spent to control emissions is probably not huge. The cost differential between fossil-fuel-generated energy and some alternatives is already small, and is likely to come down. Economists trying to guess the ultimate cost of limiting carbon dioxide concentrations to 550 parts per million or below (the current level is 380ppm, 450ppm is reckoned to be ambitious and 550ppm liveable with) struggle with uncertainties too. Some models suggest there would be no cost; others that global output could be as much as 5% lower by the end of the century than if there were no attempt to control emissions. But most estimates are at the low end—below 1%.

The heat is on<,/a>, The Economist, Sep 7th 2006

Small cost now to avert huge risk not long from now, with significant chance of little actual cost or even profit. That sounds like good risk management to me.

-jsq

Comments

[John Pate]

This all sounds very reasonable until you step back and take a look at the basic premises, for instance...

``the current level is 380ppm, 450ppm is reckoned to be ambitious and 550ppm liveable with''

Plucking numbers out of the air. James Lovelock, the father of all climate modelling, would have us believe we've already done too much and no remediation can help.

Fortunately for ``risk management'' you can find a climate model that will give ``appropriate'' results for whatever figures you choose--even by insurance industry standards this takes the biscuit.

The actual situation is:

* we can't control the climate (do you want global cooling, if so how much?);

* human effects on the climate are orders of magnitude below any kind of significance, except in the virtual world of the climate modellers.

Of course, I'm one of the increasingly lonely remnants of people who believe science implies falsifiability. Climatology scenarios do not resemble any such beast.

As for ``governments maintain standing armies as an insurance policy.'' I'd laugh, except that's too absurd even for laughter. Take a look at the Middle East and tell me what that's got to do with insurance. (For a country without a standing army, please see Switzerland, who managed to avoid WW1 and WW2 in spite of being smack bang in the middle of them.)

The world's economy will wander along whatever but surely the money could be better spent bringing clean water and basic medicine to third world.

[Marion Delgado]

* we can't control the climate (do you want global cooling, if so how much?);

We have 1 trend, the tail end of a mini ice age. We have another trend, namely global dimming, almost entirely human caused - and already having a large effect. It acts to mask the effects of global warming, for one thing. So the answer is we have severe human-caused loss of sunlight energy in the form of sunlight, but an increased trapping of heat energy - which is less useful and more dangerous. Moreover, global warming could disrupt the Gulf stream and the Japanese current and so on. You might well get much colder average temperatures in the North, which, coupled with global dimming, would mean many of us would experience global cooling.

Plus, we could do more to control the climate, we could set off bombs or drop sulfur high in the atmosphere over the poles. it's simply an ill-advised thing to do. Human-caused global warming is accelerating a threat. If we get the methane from under ice packs, that could step it up. If we go so far as to get methane and sulfur-rich gases from low down in the ocean up into the atmosphere, that would be the end of everything.

What's going on is if we had a meteor heading near earth, and creeps like you were making money off of attaching motors to it, to make it head to earth much faster, and correct its course to make sure it hit the Earth. Since you still might miss the Earth, and since it's a big meteor, you'd ridicule our complaints about your behavior.

What you're doing is trying to drastically lower the time people have to prepare to either reduce or adapt to climate change. Because you're a market fundamentalist nutjob who, like creationists, thinks mimicking the language of science is every bit as good as being scientifically trained, educated, and honest.

* human effects on the climate are orders of magnitude below any kind of significance, except in the virtual world of the climate modellers.

Actually, if you're saying that's the scientific consensus, you're simply lying.

"Of course, I'm one of the increasingly lonely remnants of people who believe science implies falsifiability. Climatology scenarios do not resemble any such beast."

That's it, science is not kissing Ayn Rand ass, not making money for the largest multinationals, not providing what the commissar dictated it provide, so go ahead, just say most scientists don't believe in falsifiability and take your ball and bat and go home.

Actually, I dunno how many scientists go how far with Karl Popper - but they ALL believe in peer review. Or, like you, they're not scientists or engaging with or in science.

Peer review and falsifiability are not identical. How do you falsify plate tectonics (before we had the ability to survey down deep into the Earth)? Wait 10,000 years and say, look, it didn't move! Clearly, socialism and environmentalism are what creates volcanoes and earthquakes?

What science looks for is whatever it can get to find a best fit. Often that's a preponderance of evidence instead of "beyond a reasonable doubt."

Every single step of the process going into the climate change model is falsifiable completely. Everything from core samples to weather observations. If I say someone firing a gun into you would likely kill you, you might respond that that's not "falsifiable" - at which point you leave the rails and are no longer allowed to pretend you even know the meaning of the word science.

Moreover, no one's fooled by the fake concern of market fundamentalists and shills for the third world.

As a last thought, not all climate scientists are the same. Some are experts in the change in conditions. Others are chemists, physicists, geologists, even.

What we have now is a consensus, growing larger every year, of people who measure changes, that greenhouse gases and global temperatures are both rising.

We have a consensus, growing larger every year, among people who follow atmospheric pollution that human activity is the leading contributor to the change in greenhouse gases.

We have a best fit consensus that there is a greenhouse model among a variety of atmospheric scientists that fits all the data.

We have information from economists and specialists in environmental engineering that some steps will do x amount towards alleviating the problem.

Etc.

What your sort will have to do is not find a climate scientist or even a bunch who say it's too expensive to fix global warming. or an economist who says there's no increase in greenhouse gases. Or whatever. You have to demonstrate that the consensus in a particular field on a particular question is going your way. It's not. not anywhere.

At this point, global warming deniers are combining the most unlovely aspects of holocaust deniers, tobacco industry "scientists," paid testifying scientific experts and creationists.

[John Pate]

Marion Delgado sets up a whole slew of straw men, accuses me of saying things I didn't, and throws in some ad hominem for good measure.

It's interesting she mentions geologists. Geologist have some interesting things to say about the Earth's climate in the past.

Many well-respected, peer-reviewed scientists believe solar effects completely swamp any anthropenic effects. If you don't believe me, simply do some research.

Delgado's comment about asteroids is particularly amusing in view of the fact I recently sent a (personal) email to JSQ predicting that the next ``global crisis requiring global action'' would be a mania for developing systems to deflect the ``threat'' of asteroid/comet collision with the Earth. I put that about 10-20 years in the future (when launch-to-orbit tech picks up a bit).

There's little point in addressing Delgado's rant about what she imagines Popper is about. The comments about falsifiability are so far wide of the mark I simply don't know where to start to address them.

As for peer review, anyone who can't see that's broken really is paddling in that well-known river in Egypt. Repeat after me, science is not about consensus.

Here's a falsifiable prediction: within 20 years it will be widely accepted that changes in solar output have lead to a marked cooling of the planet.

[John Pate]

Here's a link worth checking out...

The original denier: into the cold.

http://www.urban-renaissance.org/urbanren/index.cfm?DSP=contentContentID=16804

[Marion D]

2 years on, how's Flat Earth science working for you, John Pate?

*snicker*