What if you’re wrong?

Sasha Ilnyckyj concentrating

Whatever your position on climate change policy, this question is a good one to ask. It drives you to do two important things: consider what it would take to change your mind, and consider the risks associated with making the wrong choice.

I would change my position on what action we should take in response to climate change if any of the following was adequately demonstrated:

  1. The Earth’s climate is not changing.
  2. Greenhouse gas emissions are not the cause of warming.
  3. Warming will not be dangerous.

Exactly what level of evidence would be required is difficult to pre-judge, but the definitive rebuttal of any of those positions would be sufficient to prompt a major change in the policies I would advocate.

On the question of risks, there are two major kinds of error we could make: over- and under-reacting. If we over-react to climate change, we would sacrifice wealth and other opportunities in order to cut out emissions, achieving no good purpose. At the very worst, we would seriously damage the global economy for an indefinite span of time, and delay the emergence of many people from extreme poverty. If we under-react, the very worst outcome would be the undermining of the capability of the planet to support human life. This is clearly a much worse outcome, though it is not an easy task to determine how probable it is, relative to the ‘overreact and go broke’ possibility. Clearly, I think that the risks of climate change as it is now understood justify much more action than we have taken to date.

Another thing to bear in mind is that there are co-benefits to shifting the energy basis of our society from fossil fuels to zero-carbon and renewable options. In his response to the Munk Debate, Tyler Hamilton lays out a few: “I mean, even in the unlikely event that climate change science shows us we overreacted, is it such a bad thing that we also acted to reduce air pollution, mercury emissions, the use of water in thermal power plants, and the other environmental footprints caused by our addiction to fossil fuels. That’s a pretty nice consolation prize.” In a situation where we took aggressive action, we would also be better protected from the distinct but related challenge of peak oil. Fossil fuels are inevitably going to run out anyhow, so the real cost here is of making the transition away from them earlier than we otherwise would. Climate change or not, a fossil fuel based economy simply cannot keep going forever.

Ultimately, the choice we make on climate change policies is a matter of risk management. Being able to hedge against a potentially catastrophic risk, and secure co-benefits, while simultaneously running some risk of overreacting seems much more prudent and sensible than doing the opposite.

Military assessments of climate change

In his scrupulously evenhanded book What’s the Worst That Could Happen? A Rational Response to the Climate Change Debate, Greg Craven makes reference to four different assessments of climate change conducted by organizations with a link to the American military. All conclude that climate change is a serious problem, and that actions must be taken to mitigate it.

The first is the 2008 National Intelligence Assessment, drafted by 16 U.S. intelligence agencies including the CIA, FBI, and NSA. While the report itself is classified, the chairman said that climate change could disrupt US access to raw materials, create millions of refugees, and cause water shortages and damage from melting permafrost.

Another is a 2003 Pentagon study: An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security: Imagining the Unthinkable. It considers a worst-case but plausible scenario, and concludes that abrupt climate change could destabilize the geopolitical environment:

In short, while the US itself will be relatively better off and with more adaptive capacity, it will find itself in a world where Europe will be struggling internally, large number so [sic] refugees washing up on its shores and Asia in serious crisis over food and water. Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life.

It also argues that “with inadequate preparation, the result [of abrupt climate change] could be a significant drop in the human carrying capacity of the Earth’s environment.”

The third report is from the Center for Naval Analyses. Their “blue-ribbon panel of retired admirals and generals from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines” produced the report National Security and the Threat of Climate Change. It calls climate change “potentially devastating” and advises that the risks to national security will “almost certainly” get worse if mitigation action is delayed. It also stresses how we don’t require 100% certainty about the precise seriousness of a threat before it starts making sense to address it.

The last report was drafted by two national security think tanks: the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security. Their 2007 report is titled: The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change. Their team included the head of the National Academy of Sciences, one Nobel laureate economist, a former CIA director, a former presidential chief of staff, climatologists, and others. They concluded that current projections from climate models are “too conservative” and that “at higher ranges of the [warming] spectrum, chaos awaits.” The authors conclude that an effective response would have to occur in less than a decade “in order to have any chance” of preventing irreversible disaster.”

The only fair conclusion that it seems possible to reach about these reports is that they have been ignored. If American policy-makers and members of the general public accepted these conclusions – and interpreted them with the seriousness accorded to matters of national security – we would not be seeing so much doddering around before meaningful action is taken. While the military does have an incentive to scare people, since doing so likely increases their funding, Craven is probably right to claim that the overall bias of these organizations is towards economic strength rather than environmental protection. That, and the calibre of the individuals associated with these reports, seems to provide good reason for taking them seriously.

Note that the issue of climate change and security has been discussed here previously.

Black carbon and climate change

[Image removed at the request of a subject (2019-10-01)]

Al Gore’s latest book – Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis – includes a fair bit of discussion of black carbon, a human pollutant that causes global warming, but not in the same way carbon dioxide (CO2) does. Greenhouse gasses like CO2 prevent long-wave infrared radiation from leaving the Earth into space. Black carbon, by contrast, warms the planet by absorbing a lot of short-wave radiation from the sun. In essence, it has a very low albedo.

Some other pertinent things to know about black carbon:

  • The largest source is biomass combustion – such as burning forests and grasslands to clear them for agriculture.
  • The areas where this is happening most are Brazil, Indonesia, and Central Africa.
  • Black carbon settling in the Arctic is a major cause of warming there: possibly responsible for 1°C of the 2.5°C of warming already observed there.
  • Black carbon is also a major threat to Himalayan glaciers, which in turn provide the source water for rivers of critical human importance, such as the Ganges.
  • Black carbon is washed out of the atmosphere by rain, and only has a lifetime of a few weeks. If we stopped emitting it, its contribution to climate change would cease quickly.

The last of those is very encouraging. Unlike CO2, which remains in the atmosphere for a very long span of time, black carbon is something we could tackle on a short timescale, by mandating things like filters on diesel engines and the cleaner burning of coal and biomass.

As mentioned before, recent research has also highlighted the importance of non-CO2 greenhouse gasses. Anything that allows us to take more rapid and effective action to halt climate change is welcome news. Also, it requires a lot less political will to install better filters on diesel engines than it does to curb activities that are critically linked to greenhouse gas emissions.

Obama’s 17% climate mitigation target

Writing at Boing Boing, Saul Griffith has come up with a good analysis of President Barack Obama’s recently pledged climate change mitigation target of “17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050:”

As you’ll note, a 17% reduction over 2005 levels means only a 0.3% reduction over 1990 levels.

What you’ll also see is that Obama is making a commitment to emit 59 Gigatons from the US alone from 2010-2020, and a further 88 Gigatons from 2020-2050, for a total of 147 Gigatons of CO2. This is 22.7% of the 650 Gigaton limit implied by Meinshausen. This helps to see why it’s hard to get an agreement in Copenhagen. In order to avoid “dangerous levels of climate change” the US is committing to reduce its output to “only” 22.7% of global emissions, despite having only 4.5% of the global population. The other point to note is that even these reductions don’t satisfy the “emissions go to zero” aspect of this CO2 budget, as the US would still be emitting a gigaton of CO2 per year in 2050 under this plan.

As discussed here before, crafting a global emissions pathway to keep warming below 2°C is very challenging, particularly because of how countries with high per-capita emissions need to begin deep cuts very quickly. There is still an enormous gap between what is physically necessary to prevent dangerous climate change and the commitments that governments and politicians are willing to make.

That said, Obama’s target can legitimately be seen as part of an iterative process: a recognition that America cannot continue to emit greenhouse gasses in an unrestrained way. Eventually, however, the proposed cuts are going to need to get much deeper, or we are all going to have to start bracing for the changed world that more than 2°C of climate change would produce.

Canada as a climate change pariah

Lauren Sweeney in the National Gallery, Ottawa

Organizations including the World Development Movement, the Polaris Institute, and Greenpeace have suggested that Canada be suspended from the Commonwealth due to its poor climate change policies.

While there is no prospect of that happening now, the situation does make you think about just how long Canada can continue to delay mitigation at home, even in the event that other states reach an agreement to cut their emissions. It doesn’t seem impossible that Canada could be one of the last hold-outs, when most of the world has started taking serious action on the issue. If so, campaigns to suspend Canada’s participation in international organizations, sporting bans, and the like could become both effective and appropriate. Canadians like to think that they are responsible members of the international community. As time goes by, contributing to the global climate change mitigation effort with be an increasingly important yardstick by which countries judge one another.

Monbiot’s open letter to Canada

In Monday’s Globe and Mail, British journalist George Monbiot penned an open letter to Canada about climate change. Monbiot points out how Canada “will be the only [Kyoto Protocol] signatory to wildly miss its targets,” and calls for Canada to curb oil sands development and engage more effectively in international negotiations. He argues that: “The oil-sands industry is causing damage out of all proportion to its value – not only to the world’s ecosystems but also to Canada’s.”

Along with Elizabeth May, he will be debating what action Canada should take on climate change, with Bjorn Lomborg and Nigel Lawson arguing that Canada should not undertake a strong response.

Climate Cover-Up

Guitar playing man

James Hoggan’s Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming is a valuable exposé of the efforts that have been made by self-interested actors to prevent political action on climate change, by manipulating the public debate and confusing people about the strength of the science. Written by a Canadian public relations professional, and written with a focus on actors and events in Canada, Hoggan’s book examines how the media has been involved in the debate, how companies have worked to create false grassroots campaigns (‘astroturfing’), the role played by think tanks, the use of lawsuits to intimidate and silence critics, the ‘echo chamber’ effect wherein false claims are endlessly repeated by sympathetic sources, and more. Hoggan makes a convincing case that status quo actors – particularly petrochemical firms – have been working for decades to keep the public confused, and keep legislators inactive.

Hoggan provides both logical and documentary evidence to back up his claims – pointing out things like how most of the scientists that actively deny the consensus view of climate change are being funded as advocates, not as scientists:

The Intermountain Rural Electric Association isn’t paying Pat Michaels to go back into his lab and do research helping the world to a better understanding of how human activities are affecting the climate. The coal-fired utility owners are paying him to “stand up against the alarmists and bring a balance to the discussion.”

Hoggan provides many specific examples of malfeasance, and argues that the public relations personal directing the campaign against action on climate change are often indifferent to whether the claims they are making are true or false. They are tested for how well they affect public opinion, not how well they represent the reality of the situation.

Hoggan does sometimes present information in a misleading way. For instance, he compares the risk of climate change with the risk of car and house insurance, and says that: “in both cases the risk of disaster is significantly less than the greater than 90 percent certainty that scientists ascribe to the climate crisis.” He is referring to how the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report concluded that: “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations.” and defined ‘very likely’ as cases where “expert judgment and statistical analysis of a body of evidence” support an assessed probability of over 90%. The IPCC was saying that there is a scientific consensus that there is a 90% chance that the unequivocal warming that has been observed has anthropogenic causes, not that the “risk of disaster” is 90%. The question of how serious the consequences of warming will be is distinct from the question of what is causing warming. Another odd error is one sentence written as though the consulting company McKinsey was a person: “When McKinsey talks about a carbon revolution, he strikes the right tone.”

That said, Climate Cover-Up succeeds in its key purpose: revealing that not everyone is engaging in the climate debate in an honest or ethical manner. The scientific consensus that climate change is real and risky is exceedingly strong, and yet the public and policy-makers have been very effectively confused and encouraged to delay action. By revealing the extent to which the debate has been manipulated, Hoggan’s book will hopefully contribute to the eventual improvement of public understanding of climate change, and the development of a will to act sufficiently strong to sort out the problem before the worst potential consequences become inevitable. Hoggan also continues that effort through DeSmogBlog – a site he created to provide ongoing updates on climate change misinformation campaigns.

[Update: 13 October 2010] Another good book on the same topic is Naomi Oreskes’ Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.