Lethal Heating: 12/25/16

25/12/2016

Ignoring Climate Change Just Got More Expensive

Bloomberg - Eric Roston

Meltdown: The Science Behind Climate Change

If President-elect Donald Trump stops taking climate change into account when making federal energy policy, he’ll do so just as a leading projection of climate-related costs bolts upward.
William Nordhaus of Yale University is a central figure in the study of climate change and economics. In the early 1990s he developed what became the leading computer model for studying the effects of warming on the global economy. The Dynamic Integrated model of Climate & the Economy (DICE) has long given resource economists, students, and policymakers an opportunity to test how different scenarios might lead to quite different future climates.
Nordhaus recently updated DICE. He published results of an early test-drive of it this week in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, titled “Projections and Uncertainties About Climate Change in an Era of Minimal Climate Policies.”
Readers of recent headlines might be forgiven for assuming the “era of minimal climate policies” referred to is about the next four years. In fact, Nordhaus suggests, the “minimal policy” era is the one we’re currently in. (Nordhaus couldn’t be reached for comment.)
The paper’s findings “pertain primarily to a world without climate policies, which is reasonably accurate for virtually the entire globe today,” he writes. “The results show rapidly rising accumulation of CO2, temperature changes, and damages.”
Even after adjusting for uncertainty, he writes, there is “virtually no chance” that nations will prevent the world from warming more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), the upper bound for avoiding cascading catastrophes. With revisions to methods and data in the model, he estimates that the price associated with each ton of carbon dioxide emitted should be about 50 percent higher than the previous version of DICE.
His simulations echo findings of analyses such as the Climate Action Tracker project, which suggest current policies might lead to average warming of 3.6 Celsius. The United Nations Environment Program estimates that the world needs to slash emissions about 25 percent below what’s projected in 2030.
Here’s why the research is so consequential. DICE is one of three major “integrated assessment models” used by governments and the private sector to estimate the cost, in today’s dollars, of the damage climate change will cause. The Obama administration relied on these models to produce the “social cost of carbon” (SCC) at the heart of dozens of energy-related federal rules. The measure is expressed in dollars per ton of carbon dioxide emitted. The current U.S. estimate is about $40.
The SCC, paradoxically, has become semi-famous just by being so obscure. It has always drawn attention within the climate policy world because it’s so influential and complicated. Different assumptions entered into the models can yield dramatically different results. The measure has popped up at least twice since the 2016 election. Once, in a questionnaire that a Trump transition official sent to the Department of Energy (the document was later disavowed by the transition team). It also appeared on a post-election energy-policy wish list of the Institute for Energy Research (IER), a nonprofit, which said the estimates should no longer be used. IER’s president, Thomas Pyle, a former Koch Industries lobbyist, became head of the Trump Energy Department transition last month.
The National Academies has undertaken a major study of how best to update the SCC, with the final report due early next year. The current process was approved by a federal court as recently as August.
Tea-leaf-reading aside, the new administration’s actual intentions and priorities will become clear only after Jan. 20. The planet, meanwhile, seems to have intentions and priorities of its own, judging by the unprecedented warm Christmas near the top of the world.

Links

In The Age Of Trump, A Climate Change Libel Suit Heads To Trial

Washington Post - Chelsea Harvey

Michael Mann in Iceland, in 2016. (Courtesy of Michael Mann)

A defamation lawsuit filed by a high-profile climate scientist will be allowed to proceed, an appeals court ruled on Thursday.
The case is being brought by Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, who is perhaps best known for helping develop the famous “hockey stick” graph used to illustrate global warming. Mann is suing two bloggers who accused him of scientific and academic misconduct in 2012. On Thursday, the D.C. Court of Appeals unanimously ruled that Mann has the right to proceed with the lawsuit.
“Dr. Mann has supplied sufficient evidence for a reasonable jury to find, by a preponderance of the evidence, that statements in the articles written by Mr. Simberg and Mr. Steyn were false, defamatory, and published by appellants to third parties, and, by clear and convincing evidence, that appellants did so with actual malice,” wrote Senior Judge Vanessa Ruiz in the court’s opinion.
The decision suggests that, even as the climate-skeptical Trump administration comes into office, a high profile lawsuit could be underway in Washington, D.C., that also partly turns on the evidence for, and against, climate change.

The origins of the lawsuit
Mann and several other colleagues first published the hockey stick graph in the late 1990s, and it has since become one of the most recognizable visual illustrations of human-caused–or anthropogenic–climate change. The graph used temperature data acquired from a variety of sources including tree rings, coral samples and ancient sediments to depicts a sharp uptick in global temperatures in the 20th century in comparison with prior centuries.

Hockey Stick Graph

Scientists attribute the rise to a spike in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations brought on by human industrial activities.
Here’s one depiction presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The graph received widespread criticism from climate doubters, whose skepticism was further fueled by a 2009 incident now known as “Climategate,” in which hackers uncovered and anonymously published thousands of emails from Mann and other climate scientists. At the time, many climate skeptics argued that the emails’ content suggested global warming was a conspiracy, the product of manipulated data and scientific fraud.
As a result, multiple agencies — including committees from both Penn State and the U.S. government — launched investigations into the affair. They all concluded that Mann had not committed any misconduct.
The current lawsuit revolves around a pair of blog posts written in 2012 after the investigations were complete. The first was allegedly authored by Rand Simberg for the Competitive Enterprise Institute and suggested that “Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.” (This line has since been removed from the post.)
The second was posted allegedly by Mark Steyn in National Review — it quoted from Simberg’s post and added that “Michael Mann was the man behind the fraudulent climate-change ‘hockey-stick’ graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus.” Both posts suggested that Penn State’s investigation may have resulted in a cover-up.
The current case brings a defamation lawsuit against Steyn, Simberg, National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute “for their utterly false and defamatory statements against Dr. Mann—accusing him of academic fraud and comparing him to a convicted child molester, Jerry Sandusky, the disgraced former football coach at Pennsylvania State University.”
When the lawsuit was first brought in a lower court, the defendants asked the judge to dismiss the case and were denied. They appealed, and now the D.C. Court of Appeals has also denied the motion to dismiss, finding that “Dr. Mann has presented evidence sufficient to defeat the special motions to dismiss as to some of his claims.”

Moving forward
The case will now move to trial court, although how quickly it proceeds remains to be seen. For now, what may be most interesting about the appeals court’s opinion is its effort to distinguish between the larger phenomenon of climate change doubt that exists in the U.S. and the specific accusations of fraud that a jury could potentially find defamatory.
“Tarnishing the personal integrity and reputation of a scientist important to one side may be a tactic to gain advantage in a no-holds-barred debate over global warming,” wrote Senior Judge Vanessa Ruiz in the court’s opinion. “That the challenged statements were made as part of such debate provides important context and requires careful parsing in light of constitutional standards. But if the statements assert or imply false facts that defame the individual, they do not find shelter under the First Amendment simply because they are embedded in a larger policy debate.”
This distinction has been pointed out by other climate scientists following the case as well. In a series of tweets on Thursday, NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt called the ruling “nuanced” and “well argued.”
“Judges make clear that there is a large constitutional gap btw criticism of scientific conclusions or methodology… & allegations of misconduct and fraud,” he tweeted.
That said, the court of appeals has only ruled that the case may proceed to trial. From there, a jury will decide whether the content of the blog posts actually constitutes defamation — and because Mann is considered a “limited public figure” in this case, the decision could hinge on whether the jury finds that the defendants acted with “actual malice.”
In a recent blog post, defendant Mark Steyn expressed his disagreement with the ruling.
“The ‘sufficient evidence’ Dr Mann has supplied are a series of mendacious claims to have been ‘investigated‘ and ‘exonerated‘ by multiple Anglo-American bodies that did, in fact, do neither,” he wrote (his links).
And there are others — even those who accept the science of anthropogenic climate change — who take issue with the court’s decision from a constitutional perspective.
“While a direct accusation of scientific fraud may be actionable — particularly when made against a non-public figure — challenges to scientific conclusions and interpretations of scientific studies are clearly protected by the First Amendment,” wrote Jonathan Adler, a law professor at the Case Western University School of Law, in a recent blog post. “So are erroneous interpretations of scientific conclusions and — particularly relevant here — criticisms of the conclusions of investigatory bodies.”
“In refusing to dismiss claims against Steyn and Simberg, the D.C. Court of Appeals placed tremendous weight on the fact that Penn State and other institutions investigated Mann and did not find evidence of academic misconduct,” he continued. “Yet it is the alleged inadequacy of Penn State’s investigation that was the focus of the very posts at issue.”
And over the years, the defendants have received similar expressions of support from other sources. In 2014, The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and 26 other organizations — including The Washington Post and other media groups — filed an amicus brief in support of the defendants, suggesting that “defendants were expressing constitutionally protected opinions about both (a) the validity of Mann’s scientific conclusions on climate change and (b) the findings of governmental bodies that had endorsed his views.”
At the time, the brief called for the court to hear the appellants’ appeal and reverse the denial of the motion to dismiss, lest the decision “work a profound chill on expressions of opinion about important scientific and public policy issues.”
But the most recent court opinion points out that multiple committees conducted investigations and found no evidence of misconduct, adding that “appellants do not counter any of these reports with other investigations into the CRU emails that reach a contrary conclusion about Dr. Mann’s integrity.”
“On the current record, where the notion that the emails support that Dr. Mann has engaged in misconduct has been so definitively discredited, a reasonable jury could, if it so chooses, doubt the veracity of appellants’ claimed honest belief in that very notion,” the opinion stated.

Links

Malcolm Turnbull: A Brief Lament

The Monthly - Robert Manne*

The climate-science champion of 2010 has morphed into the fossil-fuel supporter of 2016

There are two kinds of political people in today’s world: a minority who believe that climate change is the most consequential problem humans now face or have ever faced, and a majority for whom, for one reason or another, the penny has not dropped. I once held Malcolm Turnbull in some esteem because I believed he belonged sincerely to the minority. I now realise what a fool I was.
During the 2010 federal election campaign, Turnbull, who some eight months earlier had lost the leadership of the Opposition on the question of climate change, strode onto the stage of a packed Sydney Town Hall at the launch of Beyond Zero Emissions’ Stationary Energy Plan. The person who introduced him mentioned that Turnbull was now a climate-change “pariah” among his political colleagues. Turnbull welcomed the description as “distinctly” a privilege.
To intermittent loud applause, Turnbull argued that there was a hunger among Australians for information about how their country might move “to a situation where all or almost all of our energy comes from zero- or very near zero-emission sources”. Turnbull argued that we must be “guided by science”; that humans were now “conducting a massive science experiment with this planet”, the only one we had; and that in their predictions about the “catastrophic” consequences of climate change the scientists might, if anything, very well be erring “on the conservative side”.
Turnbull pointed out that 2010 was the “warmest year on record”. Although it might not be possible to link each weather disaster with the changes in the climate, “we know” that “extreme weather events are occurring with greater and greater frequency” and that “these trends are entirely consistent with the climate-change forecasts, with the climate models that the scientists are relying on”.
Climate change was a “profound moral challenge”, said Turnbull. It was a profound moral challenge because “we as a human species have a deep and abiding obligation to this planet and to the generations that will come after us”. There was loud applause in the Sydney Town Hall. “In order to discharge that obligation we must make a dramatic reduction in the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.”
Of what order? What was necessary was a 50% global reduction of emissions by 2050 compared to what they were in the late 20^th century. “I promise you [that] you cannot achieve that cut without getting to a point by mid-century where all or almost all of our stationary energy … from power stations and big factories and so forth comes from zero-emission sources.”
Turnbull admitted that he had once held out hopes for “clean coal”, by which he and everyone else in 2010 meant burning the coal but then capturing and storing underground the carbon dioxide that was released. He now had grave doubts. The future could equally lie with solar or wind or other zero-emissions technologies. The role of government was to put a price on carbon emissions, provide some modest research and development finance, and then leave it to the market to decide which zero-emissions technologies would win out. One thing only was clear. “The zero-emission future is absolutely essential if we are to leave a safe planet to our children and the generations that come after them.” Cue loud and sustained applause.
In 2010 Turnbull had argued that natural weather disasters were entirely consistent with climate scientists’ models and warnings about future catastrophe, and that the earth’s future rested on the rapid adoption of renewable-energy technology.
In late September 2016, at a time when South Australians were still fighting the effects of wild winds and floods, Turnbull seized upon the opportunity presented not to dramatise the dangers of climate change but to discredit those who believed that the future of the earth and of our children and our grandchildren relied on the progress of zero-emissions renewable technology.
Turnbull lambasted his political opponents for their wildly irresponsible renewable-energy targets. “If you are stuck in an elevator, if the lights won’t go on, if your fridge is thawing out … you are not going to be concerned about the particular source of that power – whether it is hydro, wind, solar, coal or gas.” He continued, “I regret to say that a number of state Labor governments have over the years set priorities and renewable targets that are extremely aggressive, extremely unrealistic.” The “incident” in South Australia was a “wake-up call”.
Ambitious renewable-energy targets – of precisely the kind he championed with apparent conviction in 2010 – now represented for Turnbull the triumph of “ideology”, a political disease to which Labor was prone, over common sense and practical reality. Modest renewable-energy targets were certainly permissible. But only so far as they did not threaten what Turnbull emphasised must always be the “key priority” of his government and indeed of all governments, namely “energy security”. For Turnbull in 2016 energy security was more important than any nonsense about the zero-emissions targets that Turnbull in 2010 argued were vital.
In October 2016, Turnbull was in Brisbane, touting the virtues of legislation aimed at preventing environmental groups from taking legal action against fossil-fuel developments. During a radio interview, the ABC’s Steve Austin put to Turnbull the arguments of the Queensland Resources Council. According to the council, the export of coal should be actively encouraged, because Australia produced “some of the cleanest coal in the world … [which] burns at a far cleaner rate, [with] less sulphur etc”. “Is that,” Austin asked Turnbull, “how you see it?”
As it turned out, indeed it was. “The reality is that Australia’s coal compared to that from other countries is relatively clean,” said Turnbull. “The fact is if we stop all our coal exports tomorrow, you would simply have more coal exported from other countries … that would be filling the gap … Trying to strangle the Australian coal industry is not going to do anything … to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.”
“Coal,” said Turnbull, “is going to be an important part of our energy mix – there’s no question about that – for many, many, many decades to come.”
In 2010 Malcolm Turnbull had serious doubts about the viability of what clean coal then meant – that is to say, carbon capture and storage. By 2016 he had no doubts that a certain kind of coal, serendipitously found in Australia, could be burned comparatively safely without capturing and storing the carbon released, and could thus reasonably be described as clean.
In 2010 Turnbull thought that we were recklessly conducting a dangerous experiment that was imperilling our planet, and that the only prudent course was to reduce the emissions of stationary energy sources to zero by 2050. By 2016 he was criticising the state Labor governments as ideological zealots because of their ambitious renewable-energy targets.
Even more significantly, the man who in 2010 believed zero emissions for stationary energy was vital and achievable by 2050 was by 2016 cheerfully embracing the idea that coal would be part of the world’s energy mix, not for “many decades”, or even “many, many decades”, but for “many, many, many decades” into the future. Many, many, many decades is, by any calculation, a very long time. Turnbull did not show the slightest alarm at the thought that our species would be burning coal, preferably Australian coal, for our energy needs well into the 22^nd century.
The zero-emissions pariah had seamlessly become the fossil-fuel realist-cum-enthusiast in the space of six short years. In its own way, this was a remarkable achievement.
There is no need to argue why this metamorphosis has occurred. Everyone who follows Australian politics knows the reason: ambition. Without repudiating his earlier climate-change views, Turnbull would never have become prime minister of Australia. What is more interesting is what it reveals about his character.
Even when I still kind-of admired Turnbull, I had my doubts about him. How could someone, I wondered, who entered Australian politics as a supposedly passionate republican lose all apparent interest in the cause very shortly after the defeat of the referendum proposal, which he argued had broken Australia’s heart?
I now think that this provides a clue. Malcolm Turnbull is a barrister by training and inclination. For him, causes are quasi-clients that he voluntarily and serially embraces – with the kind of sincerity barristers must routinely muster in a court of law – in order to advance his career. At a certain moment, however, Turnbull appears to realise that this or that cause poses a danger to his progress. At this moment, the cause is quietly dropped, with as much dignity and disguise as possible. It is dropped because in the end there is only one cause that ultimately counts for him – the cause of Malcolm Turnbull. Perhaps almost all successful politicians have this quality to some degree. But with Turnbull, it appears to be definitive.

*Robert Manne is Emeritus Professor of Politics and Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at La Trobe University and has twice been voted Australia’s leading public intellectual. His most recent book is The Mind of the Islamic State.

Links