The Volokh Conspiracy

The NYT reports on various efforts to restore the credibility of climate science and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in the wake of “ClimateGate” and the discovery of a handful false claims and misrepresentation of scientific research in portions of the IPCC reports.

The unauthorized release last fall of hundreds of e-mail messages from a major climate research center in England, and more recent revelations of a handful of errors in a supposedly authoritative United Nations report on climate change, have created what a number of top scientists say is a major breach of faith in their research. They say the uproar threatens to undermine decades of work and has badly damaged public trust in the scientific enterprise.

The e-mail episode, dubbed “climategate” by critics, revealed arrogance and what one top climate researcher called “tribalism” among some scientists. The correspondence appears to show efforts to limit publication of contrary opinion and to evade Freedom of Information Act requests. The content of the messages opened some well-known scientists to charges of concealing temperature data from rival researchers and manipulating results to conform to precooked conclusions. . . .

A survey conducted in late December by Yale University and George Mason University found that the number of Americans who believed that climate change was a hoax or scientific conspiracy had more than doubled since 2008, to 16 percent of the population from 7 percent. An additional 13 percent of Americans said they thought that even if the planet was warming, it was a result solely of natural factors and was not a significant concern.

Climate scientists have been shaken by the criticism and are beginning to look for ways to recover their reputation. They are learning a little humility and trying to make sure they avoid crossing a line into policy advocacy. . . .

A number of institutions are beginning efforts to improve the quality of their science and to make their work more transparent. The official British climate agency is undertaking a complete review of its temperature data and will make its records and analysis fully public for the first time, allowing outside scrutiny of methods and conclusions. The United Nations panel on climate change will accept external oversight of its research practices, also for the first time.

Two universities are investigating the work of top climate scientists to determine whether they have violated academic standards and undermined faith in science. The National Academy of Sciences is preparing to publish a nontechnical paper outlining what is known — and not known — about changes to the global climate. And a vigorous debate is under way among climate scientists on how to make their work more transparent and regain public confidence.

These are all positive steps, but the problems for climate science are deeper.  As ASU’s Dan Sarewitz explains in Nature, part of the problem has been that participants in the climate policy debate have focuses on climate science, as if some climate consensus could translate into clear policy mandates.  This is fool’s errand, as climate science will not generate the requisite degree of certainty, let alone consensus policy prescriptions in the absence of a broader political consensus.  He writes:

The idea that a mounting weight of scientific evidence would gradually overwhelm ideological opposition to the climate policy regime is not just false but backwards. Science is muchmore pliable and permissive than deeply held beliefs about how the world should work. Scientific understanding of the complex, coupled ocean–atmosphere–society system is always incomplete, and gives the competing sides plenty of support for their pre-existing political preferences — as well as plenty to hide behind in claiming that those preferences are supported by science. Science can decisively support policy only after fundamental political differences have been resolved.

Science may tell us that certain emission projections create a risk of certain climatic changes, but it won’t tell us what (if anything) to do about it, as such policy prescriptions are also dependent upon normative judgments that may be informed, but not dictated, by scientific conclusions.  Sarewitz further argues that conservatives and liberals alike have to stop pretending as if science does — or even can — support only their preferred policy approach.

Speaking of those who pretend as if climate science supports their preferred policy agenda, and no other, Joe Romm of the Center for American Progress has been challenged to debate climate policy with Roger Pielke Jr. to be hosted by Foreign Policy. But it seems this debate won’t take place.  Romm regularly attacks Pielke’s work on his blog, for even though Pielke believes climate change is a serious problem, he disagrees with Romm’s policy prescriptions.  Yet even after several dozen anti-Pielke comments and blog posts, Romm is refusing to go mano-a-mano.

What’s going on?  Some advocates of steep emission reductions refuse to debate those who argue against the existence of an anthropogenic contribution to global warming because they don’t want to “legitimize” such perspectives, but not Romm.  He’s debated Marc Morano of Climate Depot, among other so-called “skeptics.”  Then why not debate a non-skeptic like Pielke?  Perhaps because this would require the admission that there is a greater diversity of mainstream liberal policy views about climate change.  Debating Pielke could force Romm to admit that one can believe climate change is a serious concern, and nonetheless believe there are problems with the IPCC process and conventional emission-reduction proposals.  Perhaps such an admission poses a greater threat to Romm’s narrative (and  “Climate McCarthyism”) than the actual skeptics. More from Ron Bailey here.

Last week, GOP Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) declared “Cap-and-trade is dead.” There is no way the Senate will pass the Waxman-Markey climate change bill that passed the House. But Sen. Graham is working with Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) on an alternative proposal to control greenhouse gas emissions and promote the development of alternative energy sources. ClimateWire describes the outlines of their approach:

The Kerry-Graham-Lieberman draft to be circulated this week starts with an overall goal of reducing U.S. greenhouse gases by 2020 in the range of 17 percent below 2005 levels. . . .

Rather than include all major industrial sources of greenhouse gases in one broad economywide cap-and-trade system, the Senate trio will propose different types of limits for different sectors of the economy, beginning with electric utilities and then turning later to manufacturers such as chemical plants and pulp and paper mills.

“The bottom line with utilities is they’ll assume a compliance obligation from day one of the program,” the Senate staffer said, adding that no decisions have been made on how to allocate valuable emission allowances to the power companies except to incorporate an industry recommendation to shuttle revenue toward consumers to help pay for higher energy bills.

Transportation fuels can expect a carbon tax that rises based on the compliance costs faced by the other major emitters. Several major oil companies, including Shell Oil Co., ConocoPhillips and BP America, floated the original idea on Capitol Hill, and the Senate trio has evolved their plan by funneling revenue toward transportation projects, reducing fuel consumption and lowering domestic reliance on foreign oil. The Highway Trust Fund is also a potential recipient of the carbon tax revenue, Senate aides said.

Manufacturers would face a series of greenhouse gas limits after power plants, but talks are still ongoing over when the phase-in begins and what specific industries fall into the suite of restrictions.

The senators plan to present several other energy-related proposals to their colleagues, including ideas to promote the development of nuclear power and carbon capture and sequestration at coal-fired power plants. Agreements are also in sight on how to incorporate agriculture and forestry offsets into the mix, as well as other cost-containment mechanisms to brace industry and consumers from higher prices.

Based on the outlines reported in the press, Ron Bailey thinks the Graham-Kerry-Lieberman approach “may be good politics, but it is bad economics.”  According to Bailey,

The virtue of creating an artificial market applying to all greenhouse gas emissions is that market participants can figure out the most efficient way to cut emissions among themselves. Isolating favored segments means that market participants will not be able to find the least expensive ways to cut carbon emissions, raising the overall price of energy more than it would otherwise be. So the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman bill does not initially appear to be much of an improvement on the Waxman-Markey horror.

I think this is right.  Bailey prefers an alternative proposal.

Assuming that carbon emissions pose a significant danger to the global climate, there is a much better proposal (cheaper) circulating on Capitol Hill: the Carbon Limits and Energy for America’s Renewal (CLEAR) Act. The CLEAR act is a short, sweet bill introduced by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). The CLEAR Act sets a gradually declining cap on carbon dioxide emissions (20 percent below 2005 by 2020). It limits carbon dioxide emissions by requiring producers and importers of coal, natural gas, and oil to buy permits at a monthly auction for each ton of carbon in the fuels they sell in the U.S. The requirement would apply to 2,000 to 3,000 fossil fuel producers and importers.

Unlike Waxman-Markey or the new Kerry-Graham-Lieberman proposal, the CLEAR Act would largely avoid picking winners and losers among technologies, special interest groups, or industries. Seventy-five percent of the proceeds from the auction would be rebated on a per capita basis in equal monthly lump sum payments. Cantwell and Collins estimate that 80 percent of consumers would incur no net costs while the top 20 percent in income would see less than a 0.3 percent decrease in their incomes. The remaining 25 percent of the auction revenues would be used to fund energy research and development, adaptation to climate change, and help workers who lose their jobs because of higher energy prices.

Of course, failing to rebate these auction revenues somewhat undercuts the claim by Cantwell and Collins that they are not picking winners and losers. In addition, it would be more economically efficient (and cheaper) to rebate the entire amount rather than let Congress allocate money to favored projects. . . . But if we must do something—and it seems that Congress and the president believe that we must—the CLEAR Act, clocking in at 39 pages, has more appeal than Waxman-Markey’s 1,200. Sometimes simpler is better.

I largely agree, but believe that a revenue-neutral carbon tax, such as those proposed by Rep. Bob Inglis (R-SC) and Arthur Laffer or NASA’s James Hansen are better still. Such proposals would be more efficient, more transparent, and easier to implement.  The purported policy benefits of cap-and-trade over a carbon tax are illusory — and now it appears cap-and-trade’s purported political advantage is evaporating as well.  Perhaps there’s still hope for a rational climate policy.

[Note: In anticipation of the inevitable comments that the truly rational climate policy is to do nothing, I think there are plenty of independent reasons to prefer taxing consumption over taxing income even if one is unconcerned about carbon dioxide and other emissions.]

My article from the March 2010 Reason on the Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment finding” that triggers the regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act is now available online.  It begins:

On December 7, as delegates from around the world gathered in Copenhagen for the United Nations climate conference, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson announced that her bureaucracy would begin to regulate the emission of carbon dioxide and other gases deemed to be warming the planet. “Today, I’m proud to announce that EPA has finalized its endangerment finding on greenhouse gas pollution,” Jackson proclaimed. As a consequence, the agency “is now authorized and obligated to take reasonable efforts to reduce greenhouse pollutants under the Clean Air Act.”

“Reasonable” here is in the eye of the beholder. The 1990 Clean Air Act was designed for conventional air pollutants such as particulates and ozone smog, not for carbon dioxide. Applying those rules to CO2 will mean imposing costly regulations not just on cars and factories but on commercial buildings, churches, and even residences. All told, more than 1 million entities could become subject to new federal controls on greenhouse emissions.

The EPA power grab was no surprise; indeed, it was inevitable. The regulatory train was set in motion in 2007, when the Supreme Court ruled by a 5–4 vote in Massachusetts v. EPA that the Clean Air Act applied to greenhouse gases. The EPA probably would have made the same move had John McCain been president, by court order if not voluntarily. Now that the train is picking up speed, it will be almost impossible to stop and difficult to control. If you think federal environmental regulation is costly and inefficient, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

You can read the whole thing here.

It’s worth noting that while I am very critical of plans to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, I believe such regulation is effectively compelled by the Supreme Court’s Massachusetts v. EPA decsion, and (as I note briefly at the end of the article) legal challenges to the EPA’s endangerment finding — such as that filed by Texas and others — are almost certain to fail.  I’ll post more on this latter point in the next few days.

What does the “snowpocalypse” tell us about the likelihood of climate change?  Nothing.  As Roger Pielke Jr. explains:

What happens in the weather this week or next tells us absolutely nothing about the role of humans in influencing the climate system. It is unjustifiable to claim that a cold snap or heavy snow disproves or even casts doubts predictions of long-term climate change. It is equally unjustifiable to say that a cold snap or heavy snow in any way offers empirical support for predictions of long-term climate change. This goes for all weather events.

Further, it is professionally irresponsible for scientists to claim that some observed weather is “consistent with” long-term predictions of climate change. Any and all weather fits this criteria. Similarly, any and all weather is also “consistent with” failing predictions of long-term climate change. The “consistent with” canard is purposely misleading.

Knowledge of climate requires long-term records — on the time scale of a decade and longer. Don’t look to the weather to learn about climate, unless you have a long time to watch. Using the weather to score cheap political points in the climate debate appears to be a tactical area of agreement among those who otherwise disagree about climate change.

British news organizations are now combing through the IPCC reports, finding more errors and material sourced to non-peer-reviewed material, including student papers and reports by advocacy organizations.  Most of these errors continue to relate to the more policy-oriented aspects of the IPCC reports — practical consequences of climate change and potential policy responses.  This is further evidence that the more IPCC sought to make its reports relevant to policy-makers, the less reliable the reports became.

UPDATE: According to the Telegraph, former IPCC head Robert Watson believes the IPCC will lose credibility if it does not address its mistakes.

The Washington Legal Foundation has just released an interesting paper by Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, co-authored with HLS student Joshua D. Branson and Shook, Hardy & Bacon attorney Tristan L. Duncan, arguing that public nuisance lawsuits against utilities for their alleged contributions to climate change should be considered non-justiciable political questions.  They write:

global climate change raises such manifestly insuperable obstacles to principled judicial management that its very identification as a judicially redressable source of injury cries out for the response that the plaintiffs have taken their “petition for redress of grievances” to the wrong institution altogether.

Yet in a pair of recent high-profile cases, two U.S. Courts of Appeal allowed common law claims against carbon emitters and producers to proceed, holding that the nuisance doctrine sufficiently equips courts to redress the injuries caused by global climate change. Their holdings rested on two basic arguments. First, because the plaintiffs’ cause of action—the common law of nuisance—is both familiar and quintessentially judicial in nature, the claims must be justiciable. Second, . . . climate change plaintiffs do not ask for an explicitly wholesale rewriting of national energy policy, so their claims are insufficiently legislative in character to be nonjusticiable. Both of these arguments reflect a deep misunderstanding of the political question doctrine and its foundations.

The paper also argues that lawsuits against gasoline retailers alleging fraud because fuel quantities dispensed at gas stations is affected by temperature involve a non-justiciable political question as well, albeit on different grounds.  In the case of the fuel litigation, the Constitution expressly delegates to Congress the authority to fix weights and measures.

The paper concludes:

Some prognosticators opine that the political question doctrine has fallen into disrepute and that it no longer constitutes a viable basis upon which to combat unconstitutional judicial overreaching. No doubt the standing doctrine could theoretically suffice to prevent some of the most audacious judicial sallies into the political thicket, as it might in the climate change case, where plaintiffs assert only undifferentiated and generalized causal chains from their chosen defendants to their alleged injuries. But when courts lose sight of the important limitations that the political question doctrine independently imposes upon judicial power–even where standing problems are at low ebb, as with the Motor Fuel case–then constitutional governance, and in turn the protection of individual rights and preservation of legal boundaries, suffer. The specter of two leading circuit courts manifestly losing their
way in the equally real thicket of political question doctrine underscores the urgency, perhaps through the intervention of the Supreme Court, of restoring the checks and balances of our constitutional system by reinforcing rather than eroding the doctrine’s bulwark against judicial meddling in disputes either expressly entrusted by the Constitution to the political branches or so plainly immune to coherent judicial management as to be implicitly entrusted to political processes. It is not only the climate of the globe that carries profound implications for our future; it is also the climate of the times and its implications for how we govern ourselves.

This is an interesting paper.  I’ve been unpersuaded that the climate change cases are non-justiciable political quesitons, although I have also been unpersuaded that plaintiffs in the various climate cases (including Massachsuetts v. EPA) satisfied the requirements of Article III standing.

One implication of the argument by Tribe et al. could be that the Court was correct to consider Massachusetts v. EPA insofar as it entailed questions of statutory interpretation and administrative law, but that courts should not hear nuisance and other cases that lack any statutory grounding.  In Mass v. EPA, the Court could look to the text of the Clean Air Act and the EPA’s decision to forego regulation.  In the various nuisance cases, however, there is no equivalent source of a judicially manageable standard for a decision, so courts should stay their hands.

The Guardian’s George Monbiot is again calling for resignations at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit.

This is a tough time for climate science. The Guardian’s new revelations about the hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia might help to explain the university’s utter failure to confront its critics. They could also explain why the head of the unit, Phil Jones, blocked freedom of information requests and proposed that material subject to those requests be deleted. . . .

The vast body of climate science still shows that manmade climate change is real and that it presents a massive challenge to human survival. But those of us who seek to explain its implications and call for action must demand the highest possible standards from the people whose work we promote, and condemn any failures to release data or admit and rectify mistakes. We do no one any favours – least of all ourselves – by wasting our time promoting false claims.

Can a call for the resignation of IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri be far behind? [UPDATE: Nope.  Greenpeace UK is calling for him to step down.]

UPDATE: The NYT reports Penn State University climate scientist Michael Mann has been “largely cleared” by an internal university investigation.

The UK Information Commissioner’s Office recently confirmed that the disclosure of e-mails and other documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit revealed that some of the scientists violated the UK’s Freedom of Information law by failing to respond to legitimate document requests from other researchers.  I blogged on this development here.  Initial British news reports indicated that the scientists could not be prosecuted, however, as the legal violations occurred too long ago.  But is this really the case?  As the Telegraph reports, the relevant provisions in British law appear to preclude prosecution more than six months after authorities became aware of the misconduct, not six months after the misconduct occurred.  If this is correct — and I’m not expert on British law — some of the scientists could still be prosecuted for violating England’s Freedom of Information law.

Meanwhile, there are still more (more?!?) revelations of potential scientific misconduct by researchers connected to the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit.  Details here and here.

2010 has not been kind to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  This U.N. sanctioned body is supposed to issue periodic reports that summarize the state of the science of global climate change based upon a comprehensive review and synthesis of the relevant peer-reviewed scientific literature.  In the past few weeks, however, it has been revealed that the IPCC’s 2007 Working Group II report on “Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability” contains claims about the projected impacts of climate change that are completely unfounded, based upon non-scientific (let alone peer reviewed) sources, or misrepresent the underlying scientific literature.

The first revelation was that there was no scientific basis for the IPCC’s widely-hyped claim that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.  This projection is off by a few centuries, at best.   When an Indian climate researcher first challenged this claim, suggesting there is no evidence (yet) of warming-induced glacial retreat in the Himalayas, IPCC chief Rajenda Pachauri was dismissive.  Now, however, he’s changed his tune, and the IPCC has acknowledged the error.  This was more than a simple mistake, however, as it appears the IPCC was informed of the error before the report was finalized, but failed to make any changes, nor was Pachauri quick to acknowledge the error once it was brought to his attention.

It has also become clear that the IPCC report systematically misrepresents the peer-reviewed literature on the effect of climate change hurricanes and natural disasters.  Specifically, the report falsely claims there is evidence that human-induced climate change is producing an increase in extreme weather events and associated losses and includes a graph that is not based upon published, peer-reviewed work.  Yet the studies upon which the IPCC purports to base its claim — including one that was not peer-reviewed and should not have been cited at all — say no such thing. Worse, when the IPCC’s erroneous claims were challenged during the review process, an IPCC author fabricated a response to defend the erroneous claim.  In response, the IPCC now claims it “carefully followed” its official procedures. Yet as Roger Pielke Jr., one of the researchers whose work is misrepresented in the report, responds, this claim is simply false as the IPCC “relied on an unpublished, non-peer reviewed source to produce its top line conclusions in this section,” ignored the complaints of reviewers, and fabricated a defense of the claim. Indeed, when the then-unpublished, un-peer-reviewed paper upon which the IPCC purported to rely was eventually published, it rejected the climate-disaster loss link asserted by the IPCC.

But wait, there’s more.It turns out that other claims in the IPCC’s WGII report were also based upon non-scientific sources, including magazine articles and reports by advocacy groups.  For instance, the IPCC’s claim that climate change could endanger up to 40 percent of the Amazonian rain forest is based upon a report issued by an environmental advocacy organization, not a peer-reviewed scientific study, and the advocacy report misrepresented peer-reviewed studies to reach its conclusion.  It also appears other IPCC claims about glaciers in the Andes and Alps were based upon a magazine article and student’s dissertation.

What’ s interesting is that all of these errors are in the WG II report — the report that is supposed to highlight the practical effects of a gradually warming climate — as opposed to the WG I report, which focuses on the underlying scientific evidence that increases in greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to climate change.  For this reason, these revelations do not dissuade me that human activity is likely contributing to atmospheric warming.  But it does provide further evidence that many scientists have adopted an unscientific, advocacy stance in which they seek to convince the public that there is incontrovertable proof of an impending climatic disaster so as to build the case for drastic action.  This problem is actually exacerbated by the IPCC process, which seeks to formulate an “official,” government-approved, scientific “consensus,” as I explained here.

Climate change is a serious concern, even if it does not threaten to eradicate Himalayan glaciers in my lifetime or wipe coastal cities off the map.  If we are to have a serious and honest debate about climate policy, we have to have more honest and responsible conduct by climate scientists.  While ClimateGate and the above-mentioned IPCC errors may have been the work of only a handful of climate scientists, unless the climate science community does a better job of policing its own, and accomodating legitimate dissenting views, it will become increasingly unable to inform and enlighten the policy debate.

UPDATE: In the comment thread to a prior post, some asked why I still believe in anthropogenic global warming, and support certain climate policy measures, after repeated instances of misconduct by climate scientists.  Given the thrust of many comments below, I thought I’d restate my answer here:

My belief that human activity is contributing to climatic warming is based upon my understanding of the accumulated scientific evidence about how our climate works and the effect of increasing contributions of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that I have reviewed and considered over the past 15-plus years during which I’ve been following and often working on this issue, including the nine years I spent at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, during which time I edited this book on climate change policy and authored a 1998 National Review cover story on how many risks of climate change are overstated. Much of the relevant scientific research is summarized (if occasionally exaggerated) in the IPCC’s Working Group I report on the basic science of warming (which is a separate report from the Working Group II report on impacts, some claims from which are unfounded and/or not properly cited).

Most so-called “skeptics” within the scientific community also accept the basic claims about the likely anticipated effect of anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. The primary areas of disagreement are over the nature and extent of various feedback mechanisms in the climate which could augment or dampen greenhouse warming and the practical effects of climatic warming. So, for instance, noted climate skeptics Patrick Michaels and Robert Balling Jr. write in their recent book for the Cato Institute, Climate of Extremes: The Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know, that there is a warming trend and that human activity shares some of the blame. As they summarize on page 27: “AGW (anthropogenic global warming), yes. But DAGW [dangerous anthropogenic global warming]? We think not!”

I believe that certain policy responses are justified because even if one accepts a fairly “skeptical” view of the science, the best estimate is that human activity will produce some warming that will have deleterious effects in some parts of the globe, particularly in areas that have not done much to contribute to the warming. As I explain in this paper (and in shorter pieces here, here, and here), these effects should be sufficient to justify a policy response, particularly if one believes in the importance of property rights, as I do. I also believe that taxes on consumption, including energy consumption, are preferable to taxes on income, and so would welcome a revenue-neutral carbon tax.

The UK Daily Mail reports:

Scientist at the heart of the ‘Climategate’ email scandal broke the law when they refused to give raw data to the public, the privacy watchdog has ruled.

The Information Commissioner’s office said University of East Anglia researchers breached the Freedom of Information Act when handling requests from climate change sceptics.

But the scientists will escape prosecution because the offences took place more than six months ago.

The London Times has more.

A spokesman for the ICO said: “The legislation prevents us from taking any action but from looking at the emails it’s clear to us a breach has occurred.” Breaches of the act are punishable by an unlimited fine.

The complaint to the ICO was made by David Holland, a retired engineer from Northampton. He had been seeking information to support his theory that the unit broke the IPCC’s rules to discredit sceptic scientists.

In a statement, Graham Smith, Deputy Commissioner at the ICO, said: “The e-mails which are now public reveal that Mr Holland’s requests under the Freedom of Information Act were not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation. Section 77 of the Act makes it an offence for public authorities to act so as to prevent intentionally the disclosure of requested information.”

He added: “The ICO is gathering evidence from this and other time-barred cases to support the case for a change in the law. We will be advising the university about the importance of effective records management and their legal obligations in respect of future requests for information.”

As these stories make clear, several of the scientists whose e-mail and other documents were disclosed engaged in both unethical and illegal conduct.  As I’ve said many times, I do not believe this disproves global warming.  I still believe the balance of evidence supports the theory that human activity is causing the climate to become warmer than it would otherwise be, and I still believe that the threat of warming justifies a policy response.  But the ClimateGate revelations do provide further evidence that many prominent climate scientists have sought to suppress dissent and exaggerate certain warming-related claims.

In related news, new evidence has emerged of breakdowns in the IPCC drafting and review process that resulted in the inclusion of unsubstantiated claims in portions of the IPCC’s latest reports.  More on that later.

The AP reports:

Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden has called for the world to boycott American goods and the U.S. dollar, blaming the United States and other industrialized countries for global warming, according to a new audiotape released Friday.In the tape, broadcast in part on Al-Jazeera television, bin Laden warned of the dangers of climate change and says that the way to stop it is to bring “the wheels of the American economy” to a halt.

He blamed Western industrialized nations for hunger, desertification and floods across the globe, and called for “drastic solutions” to global warming, and “not solutions that partially reduce the effect of climate change.”

The Securities and Exchange Commission voted 3–2 to issue an interpretive guidance to publicly traded companies on when they should disclose information to investors on the potential impact of business or legal developments relating to the issue of climate change.  According to the Washington Post, the vote was along party lines, and the Republican commissioners “vehemently” opposed the decision.

Chairman Mary L. Schapiro and the two Democrats on the commission supported the new requirements, while the two Republicans vehemently opposed them.

“I can only conclude that the purpose of this release is to place the imprimatur of the commission on the agenda of the social and environmental policy lobby, an agenda that falls outside of our expertise and beyond our fundamental mission of investor protection,” Republican commissioner Kathleen L. Casey said.

Democratic commissioner Elisse B. Walter said the new requirements are “designed to improve the quality of disclosures filed by U.S. public companies for the benefit of investors.”

Here is how a release on the SEC’s website described the decision:

The interpretive release approved today provides guidance on certain existing disclosure rules that may require a company to disclose the impact that business or legal developments related to climate change may have on its business. The relevant rules cover a company’s risk factors, business description, legal proceedings, and management discussion and analysis. . . .

Specifically, the SEC’s interpretative guidance highlights the following areas as examples of where climate change may trigger disclosure requirements:

• Impact of Legislation and Regulation: When assessing potential disclosure obligations, a company should consider whether the impact of certain existing laws and regulations regarding climate change is material. In certain circumstances, a company should also evaluate the potential impact of pending legislation and regulation related to this topic.
• Impact of International Accords: A company should consider, and disclose when material, the risks or effects on its business of international accords and treaties relating to climate change.
• Indirect Consequences of Regulation or Business Trends: Legal, technological, political and scientific developments regarding climate change may create new opportunities or risks for companies. For instance, a company may face decreased demand for goods that produce significant greenhouse gas emissions or increased demand for goods that result in lower emissions than competing products. As such, a company should consider, for disclosure purposes, the actual or potential indirect consequences it may face due to climate change related regulatory or business trends.
• Physical Impacts of Climate Change: Companies should also evaluate for disclosure purposes the actual and potential material impacts of environmental matters on their business.

The release also quotes SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro on the decision:

“We are not opining on whether the world’s climate is changing, at what pace it might be changing, or due to what causes. Nothing that the Commission does today should be construed as weighing in on those topics,” said SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro. “Today’s guidance will help to ensure that our disclosure rules are consistently applied.”

Her full statement is here.  Megan McArdle comments skeptically here.

The NYT reports on a potential environmental backlash against proposed greenhouse gas regulations designed to reduce the carbon footprint of buildings in the San Francisco Bay area.

some environmentalists and city planners fear that the new set of guidelines being considered by the region’s air quality regulators could have an unintended consequence, making it more difficult and more expensive for developers to construct buildings within already urbanized areas.That would run counter to the notion that builders should be given incentives to shift future population growth from the car-dependent outer suburbs to places where public services are already available and public transit is a more viable option to get people out of their cars.

The recent Copenhagen Conference on global warming has led to renewed claims that we cannot effectively combat global warming without “global governance,” or perhaps even a full-fledged world government. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon recently claimed that “A [climate change] deal must include an equitable global governance structure” and many other political leaders and environmental activists have expressed similar views. Political scientist Campbell Craig summarized the standard argument for global governance to address climate change in this 2008 article:

[O]ne of the most evident failures of the nation-state system in recent years has been its inability to deal successfully with problems that endanger much or most of the world’s population. As the world has become more globalized—economically integrated and culturally interconnected—individual countries have become increasingly averse to dealing with international problems that are not caused by any single state and cannot be fixed even by the focused efforts of individual governments. Political scientists refer to this quandary as the “collective action problem,” by which they mean the dilemma that emerges when several actors have an interest in eradicating a problem that harms all of them, but when each would prefer that someone else do the dirty work of solving it. If everyone benefits more or less equally from the problem’s solution, but only the actor that addresses it pays the costs, then all are likely to want to “free ride” on the other’s efforts. The result is that no one tackles the problem, and everyone suffers.

Several such collective action problems dominate much of international politics today, and scholars of course debate their importance and relevance to world government. Nevertheless, a few obvious ones stand out, notably the imminent danger of climate change....

Essentially, the argument is that global warming is a collective action problem that only an international entity will have incentives to solve. If not a world government, it will have to be a “global governance” structure that is to a large degree independent of individual governments and has the power to compel them to take necessary measures, such as reducing carbon dioxide emissions. 

In my view, such global governance is neither necessary nor sufficient to prevent global warming. As co-blogger Eric Posner points out, an effective climate change deal requires the agreement of only about 20 or so major emitting nations, such as the US, China, India, Russia, and several major European states. Obviously, most of these states would suffer serious harm if catastrophic global warming scenarios turn out to be true. They therefore have strong incentives to reach a deal. Collective action problems are not a serious danger when a solution only requires the cooperation of a few major actors, each of whom knows that their participation is essential to the success of the overall project. There is little incentive to free-ride if the potential “free-rider” knows that the problem can’t be solved without his participation. I have spelled this logic and its application to global problems in more detail here. For a more extended treatment, see Todd Sandler’s book Global Collective Action, which, among other things, shows how cooperation between a few big powers was enough to address the problem of ozone layer deterioration in the 1980s.

Of course, big power cooperation isn’t guaranteed to solve the global warming problem. It has several potential flaws. In each case, however, global governance has similar or even worse weaknesses.

One potential problem is that national governments aren’t always representative of the interests of their people and therefore won’t take full account of the dangers that global warming poses to them. However, any global governance structure is likely to be even less democratic and less representative than national governments are, especially those of liberal democracies such as the US. As John McGinnis and explain here and here, the existing international institutions that influence the content of international law are highly undemocratic, and any new global governance structure is likely to be the same. The personnel of any such entity will be chosen either by relatively unaccountable international elites, or by national governments (with a hefty dose of influence by authoritarian states).

A second danger is that one or more important governments will decide that the benefits of preventing global warming aren’t worth the costs. For example, China and India might decide that severe emissions restrictions pose too great a risk to their economies, and Western nations might be unwilling to make large enough payments to them to get them to change their minds. Obviously however, a world government or global governance agency could also decide that the costs of preventing warming outweigh the benefits. Any such structure would have to take Chinese and Indian interests into account. Moreover, we wouldn’t want to foreclose the possibility of such a decision. The costs of greatly reducing emissions are substantial, potentially even catastrophic. Even to those who, like me, believe that global warming is a genuine danger, it’s not obvious that those costs are necessarily worth paying.

Finally, national governments could underestimate the dangers of climate change; for example by buying into flawed scientific analyses. Here too, a global governance structure could make similar mistakes. Moreover, this risk has to be balanced against the danger that either national governments or the global governance decision-makers could err in the opposite direction: buying into an overly pessimistic view of global warming, and therefore enacting costly measures that turn out to be excessive. Overall, I think analytical error is less likely if we allow different nation-states to reach independent conclusions and make a compromise than if the decision is left up to a single global entity that is more likely to fall prey to groupthink. The recent Climategate scandal underlines the dangers of like-minded small groups falsifying evidence and excluding opposing views. A system of global governance over climate change issues would make this danger more severe, not less. If, at the end of the day, governments continue to disagree over the severity of the global warming danger, those with more pessimistic views could potentially offer side payments to convince the doubters to take more aggressive preventive measures.

The movement to institute global governance as a response to climate change wouldn’t be problematic if such governance did not pose any risks of its own. In fact, however, global governance itself would create potentially grave longterm threats to the future of humanity. These risks might be acceptable if there was no other way to prevent worldwide catastrophe. In fact, however, we don’t need global governance to combat global warming.

Among other things, the release of e-mails and documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit has laid bare the efforts of a handful of climate scientists to manipulate how the peer review process handled research that could undermine claims of a climate science “consensus.”  As climate scientists David Douglass and John Christy detail here, the CRU e-mails reveal a concerted effort to sandbag one of their publications, both in the peer-reviewed scientific literature as well as on the purportedly neutral climate science blog RealClimate.  Patrick Michaels and Roger Pielke Jr. have more.

What these and other episodes reveal was that there was a concerted effort to stage-manage the appearance of an ironclad consensus at the expense of the scientific process.  Rather than make an open and honest argument that, despite persistent uncertainties, there is substantial theoretical and empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that human activity is contributing to a gradual warming of the atmosphere, they focused on squelching dissenting scientific views, corrupting science in the process.  As I’ve noted many times on this blog, I believe there is sufficient evidence of human contributions to climate change to justify a meaningful policy response, including measures to accelerate energy sector innovation and a revenue-neutral carbon tax.  But such policies should be advanced on the merits, not scientific subterfuge of the sort engaged in by those at CRU.

[Note: I originally wrote “laid bear” instead of “laid bare,” much to the amusement of some commenters below.]

From Wired:

Any number of undiscovered near-Earth objects could one day careen into the Earth, and there is a lot of talk here at the American Geophysical Union meeting about tracking them. So far, though, only one discovered object has seemed even mildly likely to hit our planet.That asteroid is Apophis, a 900-foot asteroid. Calculations released on Christmas Eve 2004 appeared to show that there was a greater than 2 percent chance the asteroid would hit the Earth in 2029. The asteroid appeared ready to give the Earth its closest shave since astronomers began looking for such things. It was judged a 4 on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale for a short time, the highest rating any near-Earth object has received.

As it turned out, more precise observations brought the risk of collision down to just 1 in 250,000, but the scare sparked greater interest and study in the fields of asteroid detection and defense.

While  the risk remains small, this might provide a test of Eric’s hypothesis, though it appears there are distributional consequences (and hence diplomatic obstacles) to asteroid deflection just as there are for climate change.

(Links via Instapundit)

The agreement-to-agree did three things.  It established that a critical mass of developed and highly industrialized developing countries such as China agree that climate change is a significant problem, and that these countries need to reduce their emissions.  It provided that countries will have to submit to a monitoring system.  And it suggested that rich countries will have to make a payoff of some sort to poor countries.  But it did not produce agreement on particular targets or amounts, let alone a treaty.  Indeed, most of the world did not [corrected, 12/20] even formally sign onto the Copenhagen Accord, which contains these quasi-commitments.  You can read the Copenhagen Accord here.

Why the failure?  Here are some hypotheses:

1.  We are far from global democracy: the only workable agreement is one that a small number of states, fewer than twenty probably, can negotiate.  As the number of negotiators increases, the potential for holdout, bickering, and other transaction costs increases exponentially.  After much wasted time, the major emitters appear to have agreed to go forward on their own, over the next months and years.  It is fortunate that fewer than 20 countries account for nearly all carbon emissions, but this probably won’t be true farther in the future, which is an extremely serious problem.

2.  The rich countries took too seriously the demands of the poor countries.  The poor countries have always demanded money from rich countries—the “climate debt” is just the latest rationale.  But the legacy-of-imperialism and globalization-causes-poverty arguments failed to move the rich countries, and the climate debt argument won’t as well.  It is, first of all, a not very good argument, for reasons I have discussed elsewhere.  Beyond that, the rich countries know that their citizens will not countenance a climate pact that requires the transfers of tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to poor countries.  Foreign aid has never been popular; it has never been generous (most foreign aid payments are not motivated by altruism but by particular foreign policy goals).  I suspect that the rich countries offered the money to try to avoid the political cost of failure at Copenhagen, but never intended to pay it.  The poor countries understand this, which is why they refused to cooperate.  (See Ken’s post for more.)  In future, the rich countries will freeze out the poor countries in the negotiations, offering some token amount of money for technical assistance and adaptation.  When the take-it-or-leave-it-ness of the deal becomes clear, poor countries will reluctantly sign on in order to get their scraps.  This should have been anticipated; the political cost of failure at Copenhagen was the price to be paid for failing to be realistic about this problem.

3.  The United States lacked credibility.  The Senate has not passed a climate bill.  Even if a bill does pass, the world understands that the American public has little enthusiasm for a climate treaty—a huge fraction of Americans do not even believe in anthropogenic climate change.  Americans also hate foreign aid (which they stubbornly overestimate) and distrust international institutions—and a climate treaty will probably require a bunch of them.  If the United States cannot credibly promise to reduce emissions by an adequate amount, then other countries have no reason to make politically costly commitments on their own side.  President Obama’s personal commitment to climate mitigation cannot overcome this rational skepticism.

See also Ken’s recent post.

(Updated below ...  Give me global oligopoly or give me climate death!)

I

Post-Copenhagen.  At bottom, the question is legitimacy.  The global New Class met in Copenhagen, convinced, as ever, that it had legitimacy to act as it proposed to act, with the UN as its vehicle, because legitimacy was conferred by “expertise.”  The UN bureaucracy, its permanent culture of functionaries, endorsed the global New Class elites and their claim of legitimacy through expertise, because, after all, the experts were using the UN as the vehicle and thereby conferring upon it governance legitimacy — if you are Ban Ki Moon, what’s not to like about that?  Together, they thought they had found the formula to buy off the poor world through the climate fund.  They also thought they had found a formula that would bring the BRICs on board, by endorsing the Kyoto formula of encouraging industry to move from the rich world to China and India.  Obama and the Democrats would deliver the United States.

In the event, it turned out that the BRICS and the developing world decided to exercise their particular forms of legitimacy — the legitimacy of the sovereign equality of member states at the UN — in order to demand more for relaxing their “hold-up.”  Global New Class legitimacy at the UN encountered  that other form of global governance legitimacy, that of the mass of member states.  Whose legitimacy matters and for what?  And what does it mean to say that a climate change deal requires, in Secretary General Ban’s words, an “equitable global governance structure” to administer it — especially given the many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many things that are apparently to fall under its tent, from global free trade to ice water in our glasses?  What is this global governance, anyway?  What makes it “equitable” and supposedly, therefore, legitimate?  Is it legitimate to do a deal of global proportions, on climate change or anything else, and not involve everyone?  Is “expertise” enough grounds for global legitimacy, the legitimacy required to remake relations from the top to the bottom, trade, jobs, lifestyles, you name it?

II

If your issue is simply the substance of climate change policy, and not UN politics, then you perhaps don’t much care about these abstract issues of legitimacy, global governance, and the UN.  Until the end of Copenhagen, however, because it turns out that (given the breathtaking scope of things to be governed under the rubric of climate change, starting, really, with the whole global economy, as it affects ordinary people) that the meanings of global governance, legitimacy, and the UN matter after all.

What we call “legitimacy” and what Ban called “equitable,” after all, translated in the event, among other things, into a hold-up premium for the G-77 and a corresponding unwillingness of the G-rest to pay up past a certain point.  Global governance, but “legitimate global governance,” meaning, it appears from Copenhagen, not just solemn obeisance to experts, but solemn obeisance to the ‘sovereign equality of states’ — which is to say, the UN and, in particular, the countries of the General Assembly.

For some of Copenhagen’s participants who believe(d) both that

• climate change is the existential problem of now and the future, but who are (were) also
• committed to global governance as an activity of the world together, and so committed to the legitimacy that comes with the UN over any nation-state that might act unilaterally, or little conspiracies of the great powers foisting off their oligopolistic deals on the rest of the world

... for them, legitimacy, particularly via the sovereign equality of states, is a problem.   Continue reading ‘Copenhagen as UN Politics, Not Climate Change Substance’ »

Okay, I’ll bite on Fen’s comment in my previous post on opinion polls and climate change.

Suppose that you wanted, at the retail investor level, the cheapest and most efficient ways to go short on climate change policies, carbon regimes, whatever you think is relevant.  (In general, I’m a believer in sort-of efficient markets, despite all ... however, in matters political, I don’t think they are necessarily efficient even in the sense of predicting and pricing in political actions and policy.  I think there are exploitable inefficiencies arising from politicized markets.  Correct or not, go with the assumption.)  So, what’s your short strategy?  Not limited to stocks — tell me about bonds and credit instruments if you like, options and other strategies.  Or, for that matter, is it ultimately unshortable because it is driven, or eventually will be driven, by taxes across the board?

However, tell me how you would do it at the level of the small retail middle class investor, and in addition, what hedges you would include even in a generally short strategy?  Or is this kind of political risk — regulatory arbitrage bet too risky for small retail investors?  Get thee to thy index funds, etc.?

(I understand, by the way, if you think the question merely a provocation.  It is.  But not completely.  Speaking not politically, but as corporate finance professor, I would ordinarily advise someone that if you want to ensure that you truly understand your own financing strategy — at least if it involves public companies and instruments — you should be able to state clearly how you would go about shorting it and hedging it, and what the attendant costs and risks would be.)

This Washington Post article sums up pretty well, I think, the results of the ABC-WP opinion poll looking at American views of climate change, science and scientists involved in climatology, Copenhagen, President Obama’s role and that of the administration, and the idea of spending US tax money on the climate change fund.  The President’s

approval rating on dealing with global warming has crumbled at home and there is broad opposition to spending taxpayer money to encourage developing nations to curtail their energy use ...  There’s also rising public doubt and growing political polarization about what scientists have to say on the environment, and a widespread perception that there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether global warming is happening.

But for all the challenges American policymakers have to overcome, nearly two-thirds of people surveyed say the federal government should regulate the release of greenhouse gases from sources like power plants, cars and factories in an effort to curb global warming ... Most, however, oppose a widely floated proposal in which the United States and other industrialized countries would contribute $10 billion a year to help developing countries pay for reducing the amount of greenhouse gases they release.

Anecdotally, my sense is that’s about right in assessing where American opinion stands at this moment.  The graphic presentation of the poll results is very interesting in addition to the narrative article.

I suspect that American public skepticism is going to grow, about the science and the scientists of climatology, as well as the policy, following Copenhagen.  My uninformed guess, just as a description, is that it will be seen less as climate and more about an open-ended foreign aid program under the rubric of climate.  I think that is partly foreshadowed by the poll result noting that Americans tend to oppose the foreign aid climate fund but are willing to spend some amount on domestic measures at home.

I’d further guess that Americans will see this as an attempt to end-run a global industrial policy, including something that amounts to a standby anti-free-trade regime, under a climate rubric.  And they suspect that China will benefit at the expense of the United States, from a trade standpoint, because its mercantalist policies will allow it to capture industries funded by green subsidies elsewhere in the world, but ignore the agreed-upon limits on its own behavior.  (Of course the public is not aware of this directly — still, how much reliance can one place on most granular numbers on the internal Chinese economy — the banking sector, for example, or even basics of output?  Does one really think that, even if “examined” by experts (how many of whom are able to read the original sources?), outsiders will be able to audit Chinese emissions?  Really?)

Which is to say, I don’t think Americans view Copenhagen as climate change policy, but instead as a convoluted foreign-aid-trade industrial policy arrangement attractive to governments in part because of capture by particular constituencies, and partly because the possibilities for new taxation regimes are irresistible — a point as true for the Obama administration as elsewhere.

If that’s so, and of course it might not be, the ironic result is that the White House, despite the immediate downside of bringing home something less comprehensive/draconian (depending on how you see it) than hoped for, might turn out to be thankful that the thing didn’t get as far along as anticipated.  Would the President really wanted to own what either the draft text was saying or even what the smaller groups of European states were calling for?  The President might even collect some upside if he is attacked by the international left and particularly by its global elites.

(And if you think that I think there’s a 100% correlation at this moment between my own views and those I’m freely ascribing to the American public, you’re right.  Maybe I’m all wrong about how ordinary Americans view this, but I suspect that in this case, my personal impressions map the public pretty well.  As a phenomenon, it won’t last, though; I’m ordinarily an unabashed elitist with very little sense of public opinion.)

It takes a lot of energy to hold a UN climate conference — and lots more for delegates, activists, journalists and others to get there.  That means a lot of carbon emissions.  Reuters reports: “Despite efforts by the Danish government to reduce the conference’s carbon footprint, around 5,700 tonnes of carbon dioxide will be created by the summit and a further 40,500 tonnes created by attendees’ flights to Copenhagen.” According to the same report, the this is the equivalent of the amount of CO2 generated in a year by 2,300 Americans or 660,000 Ethiopians.

UPDATE: Of course it’s impossible to have a carbon-free UN conference.  Some day, virtual interaction and teleconferencing might be a replacement for face-to-face negoations, but not yet.  Still, by any measure, the carbon use for this conference was excessive.  As the Telegraph reported, conference attendees rented over 1,200 limos, only a handful of which were hybrids or electrics.  The Copenhagen airport also reported an extra 140 private jets at the peak of the conference.  This exceeded the airport’s hanger capacity, so many of these planes had to fly to other regional airports to park.  If convention delegates and other attendees were really interested in sending a message, much of this excess would have been avoided.

Ever since the Copenhagen conference got going, and rapidly turned into an argument over wealth transfer from the rich world to the poor world, it has seemed to me that the exercise is best understood not as an argument about climate change, but instead about internaitonal economic development policy.

That is, the basic problem with international development policy is not the usual collective action problem.  The usual collective action problem is that which bedevils a Copenhagen deal to replace Kyoto, if one makes the assumptions about the science that, apparently, is beyond question:  even if everyone agrees as to the problem and the desirable collective solution, temptations to defect and to free-riding wreck it, either at the front end because no one agrees or at the back end.  Everyone has an interest; you just can’t get them all past the prisoners dilemma (or variant thereof) problem.

Many clever international lawyer-academics have quite patiently explained to me how that problem is solved this time around; none of them has convinced me.  On the contrary, my lens on this is not as someone coming to this from environmental law — but instead from watching iteration after iteration of crises at the UN that are, in each and every instance, something like the end of the world if the conference does not come to some agreement ... and then it’s not.

The last time around for this pattern was, what, the 2005 UN reform summit.  Anyone besides John Bolton, Kofi Annan, and me remember it?  I realize that if you are an environmental law person or activist or student or etc., what happened at some unrelated UN confab does not seem at all relevant to a conference in which the Fate of the Planet Hangs in the Balance.  But believe me, whatever this is as an environmental matter, it is also, just as importantly, a UN event.  It follows, and is following as we speak, a certain UN pattern of “perpetual crisis” that never turns out to be the crisis that was foretold.

The institutional nature of the UN is an institution that follows a track of ‘punctuated equilibrium’.  It lurches along, largely but not completely epiphenomenal to the real world, and then goes through periodic spasms in which all will be lost if the UN does not act.  Sometimes it acts, which is to say, it puts words down on a paper.  And that is largely the end of it, and it is considered rude and tactless to do, when the next crisis comes up, precisely what I am doing now, pointing out that the breathless sense of urgent crisis was the same five years ago.  Again, I realize that if your point of reference is that this conference is about something different and unique and like no other in human history or at least UN history, then none of this will strike you as relevant experience.  But bear in mind, again, that this is as much UN as climate, and the UN has a long track record of perpetual crisis that isn’t truly a crisis.  The climate change movement has hitched itself to a process and institution that has its own history, own dynamics, and while the NGO activists think that they own it, it is just as much the other way around — hitched to the eternal nature of the UN, which is to be perpetually becoming but never actually getting there.

So this time around the collective action problem at the UN will at last be solved, though it was not solved in any earlier iteration of crisis.  But then comes the argument over the climate change fund.  It has a curious aspect to it.  At bottom, seen not from the glorious standpoint of climate change issues, but just as money and from the standpoint of the developing world governments (and others) clamoring for money, it looks for all of that like a development program.  A development program that involves transferring a large amount of money from rich governments to poor governments.

That is not a collective action problem, however, it is an altruism problem.  The rich countries do not see anything in it for them at the hard core, realistic, practical level — yes, climate justice, etc., but at bottom it looks like an altruistic transfer.  Those transfers don’t readily get made — they are even harder to manage than collective actions.

Seen as a development program, and ignoring climate change as such, then, the special feature about the Copenhagen talks is that they purport to get around the altruism problem by making it a problem of all the world — do this, or we all bake and fry and sizzle and simmer, together.  Everyone is in this together, and voila, suddenly it is not altruism, it’s a collective action problem.  That does not solve the collective action problem, which, even if it were true, remains as seemingly intractable as ever — but it recasts it as collective action, rather than altruism.

The problem, however, is that the rich countries don’t really believe we are really all in this together, and neither, come to that, do the poor countries.  Regardless of the speechifying in Copenhagen, this is seen as a transfer from rich to poor.  Which is to say altruism, not collective action.  Which is further to say, it’s functionally a development program.

Now, if all that is the case — and maybe it isn’t, I’m just spinning out my sense of this as a student of UN processes as well as pretty hard-boiled development person, not a climate change person — then I wonder, whatever happened to the UN’s famous Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)?  The famous MDGs, elaborated in 2000 by Jeffrey Sachs, the UN’s essentially command-and-control five year plans for cutting global poverty by leaps and bounds over a fifteen year period?  I have a stack of books under my desk (I’m finishing a book on the UN) and one on my desk titled, Achieving the Millennium Development Goals, extremely dry and heavy reading, and until not long ago, and despite the failures of funding of the MDGs, I thought I should read the technical literature (Palgrave-UN University Press 2008, it’ll set you back $90–100, and face it, I’m very sorry I got the school library to buy it).

Today, the MDGs no longer look especially relevant.  It looks, to my innocent eye, as though they are in the process of being replaced in Copenhagen.  Because, in very round numbers, the amounts talked about in this climate change fund look somewhat like the kinds of numbers called for in Sachs’ MDGs — tens to hundreds of billions annually.  So here’s my question ... is the climate fund, looked at without regard to, er, climate, really just the latest, crisis-driven version of the MDGs — which in any case have pretty much failed for lack of funding?

Sachs had an interesting op-ed in the Financial Times today (probably behind sub wall) in which he lamented, more or less, the fate of the MDGs (without giving up on them, however), on the grounds that they were an exercise in altruism, and countries didn’t pony up the amounts they said they would.  And he seems a bit surprised.  So he says that the way to avoid this is to use “assessed amounts” — voluntary payments, in the sense that they are not formal UN dues, but still assessed, meaning that there is an obligation undertaken in advance by which each country agrees with each other on a multilateral basis how much it will contribute.

UN Peacekeeping Operations notably works this way, and works reasonably well (and, yes, it does, even with procurement fraud and the not-small matter of sexual abuse by PKO forces in the field and other problems; it is a bright spot at the UN).  PKOs costs billions more than the regular UN budget, and it can’t work out successfully for precisely the reasons Sachs identifies, unless everyone knows in advance that the large sums needed as pooled sums are actually going to be there.  It works in PKO for three fundamental reasons.  First, although in one sense, it is altruism, in another sense it is seen by the donor states as outsourcing some basic global security functions that they would like to see performed, partly as altruism but partly as interest.  And, second, because the US sees it as being in its interest as the (still) security hegemon, the extra-collective-security hegemon.  Finally, conditioned by the first two reasons, there is a genuine aspect of reputation and repeat play in something, I stress, in which the basic condition of interest is met.

That was never true of the MDGs; one can call all one likes for assessed amounts, but the problem is much more fundamental, which is that these payments are seen as global altruism and not as essentially self-interested.  Create an assessment mechanism and perhaps reputation and repeat play matter modestly more; but at bottom, it is just another multilateral agreement to be ignored.  If one sees the climate change fund as a development program in that way, then Sachs’s idea of assessments for it has the same basic problem.

I suppose it is possible that the states involved will really see this as more than altruism, and so move the negotiations into the realm of collective action.  The collective action problems are as daunting as ever.  But with respect to transfers from rich to poor — my view is that it does not matter how much one recharacterizes them ideologically or as a matter of imagination, at bottom this is a development program, understood as altruism by donors and donees, and each will act accordingly.  It does seem very much like the replacement program for the failed MDGs — and in some sense, Sachs today said as much.

(Note:  Writing fast and I’m sure there some things I want to correct, but I will put this up and come back to it and make changes tomorrow.  What I put in blogs is first draft; this is super-first-draft.)

Daniel Sarewitz and Samuel Thernstrom, of Arizona State University’s Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes and the American Enterprise Institute respectively, co-authored an op-ed in today’s Los Angeles Times on how the debate over leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, and climate change more broadly, is colored by the mistaken idea that science can resolve contentious policy questions that implicate fundamental values.  As the note, “If ‘pure’ science dictates our actions, then there is no need to acknowledge the role that political interests and social values play in deciding how society should address climate change.”  It also leads to excessively politicized conflict over scientific findings and prevents honest debate over the underlying policy questions.

problems such as climate change are much more scientifically complex than determining the charge on an electron or even the structure of DNA. The research deals not with building blocks of nature but with dynamic systems that are inherently uncertain, unpredictable and complex. Such science is often not subject to replicable experiments or verification; rather, knowledge and insight emerge from the weight of theory, data and evidence, usually freighted with considerable uncertainty, disagreement and internal contradiction.

Thus, we write neither to attack nor to defend the East Anglia scientists, but to make clear that the ideal of pure science as a source of truth that can cut through politics is false. The authority of pure science is a two-edged sword, and it cuts deeply in both directions in the climate debate: For those who favor action, the myth of scientific purity confers unique legitimacy upon the evidence they bring to political debates. And for those who oppose action, the myth provides a powerful foundation for counterattack whenever deviations from the unattainable ideal come to light. . . .

The real scandal illustrated by the e-mails is not that scientists tried to undermine peer review, fudge and conceal data, and torpedo competitors, but that scientists and advocates on both sides of the climate debate continue to claim political authority derived from a false ideal of pure science. This charade is a disservice to both science and democracy. To science, because the reality cannot live up to the myth; to democracy, because the difficult political choices created by the genuine but also uncertain threat of climate change are concealed by the scientific debate.

Over at Opinio Juris this week, a special lineup of international law experts blogging on Copenhagen — addressing topics ranging from proposals to pay for things to the questions of how whatever emerges is supposed to be enforced.  It’s a highly expert group of guest bloggers, often in quite technical terms of either law or economics or other things, but if you want a sense of the technical level debates, this is a good group to read.  (It is not a group of skeptics, far from it, please be aware; you have to start from where they start in order for it to make sense, regardless of where you start.  Climate change and the desirability of doing all sorts of radical things is taken for granted, so you have to read starting from those assumptions.  I myself am agnostic about the science, although trending more skeptical as the scientists are starting to look more like priests and preachers; and definitely skeptical about the way in which Copenhagen is approaching the cost benefit analysis issues even on the assumption of climate change.)

According to press reports, Penn State University is conducting an inquiry to determine whether it should institute a formal ethical investigation of Michael Mann, the Penn State professor who was the lead author of the paper that invented the “Hockey Stick.” At issue are CRU emails and his role in ClimateGate.

Frankly, I am not a big fan of academic investigations.

First, academic investigations are not how science – or social science – is supposed to operate. They are a hard type of official coercion, which ought to be reserved for only the most egregious cases. 

For one or more of these reasons, I fully expect Penn State not to bring formal charges against Professor Mann – and if it does, I expect him to be cleared by his colleagues. Though I have read only a few dozen CRU emails, in my opinion Mann’s errors should be corrected in the usual way, not by organized groups telling people what to think.

But if I were Professor Mann’s dean at Penn State, I would try to determine whether he has fully shared his data, metadata, and computer code. To the extent that he hasn’t already, I would try to make him do so – at least for his most important or most controversial articles in recent years. And, for reason #3 above, I wouldn’t take Mann’s word for it. I’d call his critics and ask them to name the few most important Mann papers for which the data and computer code are needed for replication. 

If Mann is still withholding the data and code necessary for replication, I’d ask him to replicate his most important or most controversial recent work (certainly not everything) and to release the data and code so that others might do so. If Mann couldn’t replicate his own work, I would ask him to announce that fact to the scientific community, so that serious scientists would know whether his work is replicable.

Thus, if I were Professor Mann’s dean, probably the only power I’d use would be to further the scientific enterprise. And even that would not be necessary if ethical standards were higher in the subfield of paleoclimatology.

(For those who might be wondering, I did not call for a formal investigation of Michael Bellesiles back in 2000–2002. It was Bellesiles’s supporters who most frequently called for an investigation, though some of his critics did as well. Emory’s investigation was triggered by prominent members of its faculty pushing privately for a formal inquiry. Apparently, Bellesiles’s public supporters, being too lazy or too biased to bother checking the evidence that could be found in an hour or two in any major academic research library, miscalculated that Bellesiles would be vindicated. He wasn’t.)

Diane Francis, the Editor at Large of the Financial Post (Canada), argues for taking away basic human reproductive rights:

The “inconvenient truth” overhanging the UN’s Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.

A planetary law, such as China’s one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.

The world’s other species, vegetation, resources, oceans, arable land, water supplies and atmosphere are being destroyed and pushed out of existence as a result of humanity’s soaring reproduction rate.

Ironically, China, despite its dirty coal plants, is the world’s leader in terms of fashioning policy to combat environmental degradation, thanks to its one-child-only edict.

The intelligence behind this is the following:

–If only one child per female was born as of now, the world’s population would drop from its current 6.5 billion to 5.5 billion by 2050, according to a study done for scientific academy Vienna Institute of Demography.

–By 2075, there would be 3.43 billion humans on the planet. This would have immediate positive effects on the world’s forests, other species, the oceans, atmospheric quality and living standards.

–Doing nothing, by contrast, will result in an unsustainable population of nine billion by 2050.

Humans are the only rational animals but have yet to prove it. Medical and other scientific advances have benefited by delivering lower infant mortality rates as well as longevity. Both are welcome, but humankind has not yet recalibrated its behavior to account for the fact that the world can only accommodate so many people, especially if billions get indoor plumbing and cars.

The fix is simple. It’s dramatic. And yet the world’s leaders don’t even have this on their agenda in Copenhagen. 

A welfare state is in one sense a big Ponzi scheme. Without increasing numbers of people entering the scheme, there is no money to pay the people receiving the money. As Mark Steyn has repeatedly pointed out, you can’t run a welfare state without a growing population. 

Francis, a visiting professor at Ryerson University, also blogs at the Huffington Post. BTW, Jim Geraghty reports that she has two children, which is one more than I have (tip to Jonah Goldberg).

John Stossel’s new show premieres tonight on Fox Business Channel at 8pm ET.

His topic is global warming. He has called the opening film shown to delegates at the Copenhagen conference “fear-mongering.” 

Here it is:

One of the minor brouhahas at Copenhagen has been over one of the many pieces of public art put up for the conference, Survival of the Fattest, sculpted by artist Jens Galschiot (2004), sponsored by sevenmeters.net.

(I am putting up an image from a blog I frequently read, the “I am a middle-aged gay libertarian Conservative, living in dignified isolation in rural Eastern Ontario, Canada” Diogenes Borealis blog.  It has a longer post on various pieces of art at the Copenhagen conference, titled “Hideous Public Art, Copenhagen Edition.” Eric has a good commentary on the problems of political art, activist art, looking not just at this piece but several others at Copenhagen as well.  Read the whole thing, as Glenn R. might say.  Reactions to art, and political art, differ, so if you want a different take than Eric’s, check out this post with lots of photos on the sculpture, as well as how it was vandalized by someone pushing it over into the water, and then set back up again with a crane.)

Rich world sits atop starving African man, sculpture at Copenhagen

The sculpture is accompanied by text, reading in part:

I’m sitting on the back of a man.
He is sinking under the burden.
I would do anything to help him.
Except stepping down from his back.

The website goes on to explain (in part):

The sculpture ’Survival of the Fattest’ is a symbol of the rich worlds (i.e. the fat woman, ‘Justitia’) self-complacent ‘righteousness’. With a pair of scales in her hand she sits on the back of starved African man (i.e. the third world), while pretending to do what is best for him.

The sculpture dates back to 2004, when it was exhibited in London.  On that occasion, it apparently was to symbolize the evils of globalization and free trade; it has morphed into a new message about climate change with apparently little need to change anything except the captions.  One wonders in what cause it will be re-deployed, with a quick change of the captions and text in a few years, in some other European city.  The rest of the statement accompanying the photo says that the rich world is responsible for what climate change will do, it says, to Africa.  (The sculpture itself?  In my view, while puerile as agit-prop, if completely stripped of the fashionable, and fashionably shifting, political references, it is an interesting piece as sculpture of the body.  If it were simply placed in a sculpture garden somewhere, without the pretentiousness of the politics, I would rather like it, particularly as a late derivative work in a declining tradition.) Continue reading ‘Survival of the Fattest and the Global Superfluous Poor in the Negotiations in Copenhagen’ »

One major problem with most invocations of the precautionary principle is that people tend to apply it to whatever danger they want to prevent, but largely ignore it in considering the potential dangers created by the policies they advocate. For example, Dick Cheney applied a version of the principle to the threat of terrorism, arguing that even a small chance of a catastrophic terrorist attack justified taking sweeping measures to eliminate it. At the same time, he tended to ignore the potential dangers of the anti-terrorist measures themselves. Similarly, environmentalists apply the precautionary principle to global warming, but not to the risks created by policies intended to alleviate global warming. 

If we have to take seriously the dangers of a global warming catastrophe, we should give equally serious consideration to the risks on the other side. For example, it’s possible that cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 80%, as some environmentalists advocate, would devastate the global economy, impoverishing millions and causing widespread suffering and death. Moreover, enforcing a worldwide cap and trade regime strong enough to compel obedience by China, India, Russia, and other potentially recalcitrant states might require a global authority with massive powers; even if these states formally agree to a cap and trade system, they might not enforce it aggressively against their own industries, unless compelled. The vast powers necessary to impose compliance could easily be abused in a variety of ways. In the most extreme scenario, the enforcement authority could eventually become an oppressive or even totalitarian world government from which there is no hope of escape. These two scenarios are admittedly unlikely (though the first is improbable largely because an 80% emissions cut is likely to be politically infeasible for the foreseeable future), but they can’t be completely ruled out. If, as Thomas Friedman says, the precautionary principle requires us to “buy insurance” against “a[ny] problem that has even a 1 percent probability of occurring and is ‘irreversible’ and potentially ‘catastrophic,’” these extreme scenarios have to be considered and strong precautions taken to forestall them before any large-scale anti-global warming initiative can be adopted. 

Less extreme, but still major catastrophes, are also possible — and far more likely than the worst-case scenarios noted above. For example, as co-blogger Jonathan Adler explains, a cap and trade program could create a bonanaza for interest group rent-seekers who will use it to exploit the general public, while simultaneously falling far short of achieving the level of emission reductions that would be necessary to have a serious impact on global warming. Such large-scale inefficiency might well reduce economic growth. And even small (but persistent) reductions in annual world economic growth would consign millions of people to poverty or an early death, because of the enormous impact of compound growth over time. For example, if India had abandoned its flawed economic policies just a few years earlier than it did in the 1980s and 90s, millions of children who died young might have survived to adulthood. Similar devastating cumulative results could occur if anti-global warming measures slow down Indian or other Third World growth rates today. 

Perhaps these dangers could be avoided or minimized if we had a perfectly functioning political system or something close to it; then we could count on policymakers to use their new powers to promote only those emissions-cutting policies that create benefits that outweigh their costs. In reality, government decision-making suffers from systematic flaws caused by widespread voter ignorance, interest group power, and information problems among policymakers. These dangers are exacerbated if the policy in question is complex (and therefore difficult for rationally ignorant voters to monitor), and if decisions are made in a crisis atmosphere. Global warming policy is, of course, both highly complicated and conducted amidst dire warnings that we will have a major crisis on our hands if we don’t act quickly.

None of this proves that global warming isn’t a real danger (even in the wake of Climategate, I think it probably is), or that we shouldn’t take any steps to reduce it. Like Jonathan Adler and James Hansen, I am sympathetic to the idea of using a revenue-neutral carbon tax to counter warming, though I fear that such a plan might not be politically feasible, and also qualify my support by my admitted ignorance of much of the relevant science. These considerations do, however, undercut simplistic arguments claiming that the precautionary principle unequivocally justifies taking immediate drastic measures to prevent global warming.

When there are major potential risks on both sides, the precautionary principle leads to paralysis. Whatever we do (including doing nothing), there is at least a small chance of catastrophe; thus, the principle would lead us to reject all the available options, which isn’t exactly helpful. For that reason, I agree with Cass Sunstein’s view that it is ultimately a poor guide to policy. But those who do believe in it have to be consistent in considering its implications for the possible dangers created by their preferred policies, as well as for the risks those policies are supposed to mitigate. 

Meanwhile, those of us who reject the precautionary principle should still take to heart the lesson that we must give serious consideration to the possible dangers policies intended to forestall potential “catastrophic” risks. This is especially the case with policies that would create massive new concentrations of government power. The last century showed all too clearly that concentrated state power has been a major cause of many of our greatest catastrophes.

Europol, the European police consortium, has issued the following press release:

The Hague, 09 December 2009

Carbon Credit fraud causes more than 5 billion euros damage for European Taxpayer

The European Union (EU) Emission Trading System (ETS) has been the victim of fraudulent traders in the past 18 months. This resulted in losses of approximately 5 billion euros for several national tax revenues. It is estimated that in some countries, up to 90% of the whole market volume was caused by fraudulent activities.

Indications of suspicious trading activities were noted in late 2008, when several market platforms saw an unprecedented increase in the trade volume of European Unit Allowances (EUAs). Market volume peaked in May 2009, with several hundred million EUAs traded in e.g. in France and Denmark. At that time the market price of 1 EUA, which equals 1 ton of carbon dioxide, was around EUR 12,5.

As an immediate measure to prevent further losses France, the Netherlands, the UK and most recently Spain, have all changed their taxation rules on these transactions. After these measures were taken, the market volume in the aforementioned countries dropped by up to 90 percent.

With the support of Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom Europol has set up a specific project to collect and analyse information in order to identify and disrupt the organised criminal structures behind these fraud schemes. There are reasons to believe that fraudsters might soon migrate towards the gas and electricity branches of the energy sector.

Mr. Wainwright, Director of Europol, says “These criminal activities endanger the credibility of the European Union Emission Trading System and lead to the loss of significant tax revenue for governments. Europol is using its expertise and information capabilities to help target the organised crime groups involved”. Europol has therefore offered its support to the European Commission — DG Environment to safeguard the integrity of the Community Independent Transaction Log.”

This is not terribly surprising, though I suspect that the problem is much more widespread than even this report alleges. 

This is further to Jim’s post below on the Precautionary Principle and climate change; it also goes obliquely to a couple of Eric’s posts on the climate change debates.  I’ve been meaning to raise Cass Sunstein and his very interesting book Worst-Case Scenarios in this context, but I’ll be very brief.

Jim points out that Friedman wants to “go Cheney on climate change” — meaning by that, Vice-president Cheney famously embraced the so-called 1% doctrine, according to which if some horribly, truly unacceptable catastrophe has a 1% chance of happening, you have to treat it as 100%.  Sunstein points out, correctly, that Cheney has a potential contradiction here, because although that is his stance regarding terrorism, it is not his position regarding climate change.  Cheney would have a response in this debate, that a single discrete event, such as a catastrophic terrorist attack, or even a series of them, is not really like the diffuse accumulation of changes over a long term that constitutes climate change.  Several commentators made that observation with respect to Eric’s asteroid post, and I don’t want to carry that discussion further here, though I do think the disanalogies are very important in dealing with policy.

What I wanted to point out is that Friedman characterizes Sunstein’s view as follows:

[T]he legal scholar Cass Sunstein, who then was at the University of Chicago, pointed out that Mr. Cheney seemed to be endorsing the same “precautionary principle” that also animated environmentalists. Sunstein wrote in his blog: “According to the Precautionary Principle, it is appropriate to respond aggressively to low-probability, high-impact events — such as climate change. Indeed, another vice president — Al Gore — can be understood to be arguing for a precautionary principle for climate change (though he believes that the chance of disaster is well over 1 percent).”

Friedman goes on to endorse the Cheney view as applied not to terrorism, but to climate change.  What he does not mention is that Sunstein has an entire book, Worst-Case Scenarios, explaining why the Precautionary Principle is a bad idea whether applied to terrorism or to climate change.  Sunstein’s book substitutes for the Precautionary Principle a far more subtle and complicated set of principles instead, principles that go precisely to the issues above that Friedman bulldozes over in the name of urging Cheney-ism with respect to climate change.  (I, at least, did not think that evident from the Friedman column; one might have come away plausibly thinking that Friedman thought Sunstein would agree with him.)

Sunstein does, I take it, think climate change is real and that serious steps ought to be taken, perhaps even exactly those that Friedman urges.  Those steps are much more, I also take it, than, say, a CBA consequentialist such as Bjorn Lomborg would see as justified.  But certainly Sunstein does not reach whatever his exact views are on the basis of Friedman’s simplistic reasoning.  (Friedman quotes from Sunstein’s blog but, with all respect to our scholarly blogging, sometimes one needs to read the book.)  I won’t try to do justice to the many steps in Sunstein’s view, but just quote from early in the book (p. 14):

[N]otwithstanding its international influence, the Precautionary Principle is incoherent; it condemns the very steps that it requires.  To see the point, imagine if we adopted a universal One Percent Doctrine [Cheney doctrine], forbidding any course of action that had a 1 percent chance of causing significant harm.  The likely result would be paralysis, because so many courses of action would be forbidden.  (Even doing nothing might be prohibited...) But narrower and better precautionary principles can be devised.

Sunstein’s insight here is the incoherence of the Precautionary Principle, in the form that Friedman (or Cheney) endorses it; it can’t be universalized as a guide to action.  I have some problems with the alternatives provided in the book — to some extent, it seems as though principles are introduced ad hoc.  I also don’t think the discussion of catastrophic terrorism is correct — although, to be sure, climate, not terrorism is really the focus of Worst Case Scenarios — for reasons that I discuss in part here (not brilliantly, alas, but anyway it makes this point).  In any case, Sunstein is no fan of the Precautionary Principle as endorsed by Friedman — an observation that I think is more than merely pedantic.

Last night I was talking with a colleague about writing something on the “Precautionary Principle.”

This morning I see John Miller at the Corner writing about a Tom Friedman column pushing that very principle.

After raising Dick Cheney’s views on meeting low-probability threats from Al Qaeda and quoting Cass Sunstein on the precautionary principle, Friedman wrote:

When I see a problem that has even a 1 percent probability of occurring and is “irreversible” and potentially “catastrophic,” I buy insurance. That is what taking climate change seriously is all about.

If we prepare for climate change by building a clean-power economy, but climate change turns out to be a hoax, what would be the result? Well, during a transition period, we would have higher energy prices. But gradually we would be driving battery-powered electric cars and powering more and more of our homes and factories with wind, solar, nuclear and second-generation biofuels. We would be much less dependent on oil dictators who have drawn a bull’s-eye on our backs; our trade deficit would improve; the dollar would strengthen; and the air we breathe would be cleaner. In short, as a country, we would be stronger, more innovative and more energy independent.

But if we don’t prepare, and climate change turns out to be real, life on this planet could become a living hell. And that’s why I’m for doing the Cheney-thing on climate — preparing for 1 percent. 

Miller responds:

The “precautionary principle” drives me batty. In principle (so to speak), I’m all for it. It’s a profoundly small-c conservative concept. It urges humility and restraint in all areas of life, including public policy, where it serves as a useful guard against the unintended consequences that so often accompany Big Plans.

Then there’s its actual application by guys like Thomas Friedman, who deploy it whenever they find it helpful to their political agenda and ignore it when they don’t.

In his NYT column today, Friedman says there’s a greater than 1-percent chance that our planet is in the midst of a human-made global-warming disaster. So he wants to take action, which he likens to buying an insurance policy. But the very same logic could be used against kneecap-and-trade and all of the other draconian schemes that the environmental left has concocted: There’s a greater than 1-percent chance that their hubris will impoverish the world through strangling regulations and accomplish nothing in the face of a phony problem. In this context, the precautionary principle urges us to avoid buying Friedman’s expensive and risky insurance policy.

It takes sound judgment to know when the precautionary principle makes sense and when it doesn’t. Everything else is just rhetoric.

What Friedman doesn’t seem to recognize is that cutting carbon emissions by 80% is highly likely to impoverish the world. And poverty kills real people–lots of them. So by government fiat we could achieve the “living hell,” the death and economic destruction, that he fears might happen if the Al Gores of this world are right about global warming. 

Further, I suggest that people actually read the UN IPCC area reports on what might happen if global warming continues unchecked. Consider Chapter 14 on North American impacts. Given the corruption of the IPCC process, these should be taken with a grain of salt, but even these do not describe a “living hell.” We would have longer growing seasons and more rainfall over most of North America. The words “ski” or “skiing” appear five times in the report, but even there the report mentions snow-making machines offsetting the losses. (Perhaps because I don’t ski, I wouldn’t view even the total destruction of the ski industry as a significant contribution to a “living hell.”)

More seriously, the IPCC claims that there would be more frequent major storms, but the science behind that claim now looks more doubtful than it did when they wrote it. Among the many problems identified in the report, the biggest one would be threats to coastal communities from rising sea water — a problem to which North Americans would gradually adapt. (Unfortunately, this adaptation can be slowed by foolish governments pouring money into rebuilding areas below sea level, as the Bush Administration did in New Orleans after the floods.)

The “living hell” would presumably fall on areas of the globe where people are not rich enough to adapt to climate change. Personally, I doubt that impoverishing them further would help in this adaptation.

Of course, what the IPCC doesn’t adequately address is why warming would be so bad this time when warming periods in the past were on balance so beneficial to humans, plants, and agriculture. See, generally, Ian Plimer’s Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science.

When the CRU at East Anglia disclosed that it had lost some of the raw temperature data, leaving only the “homogenized” data, some honest commentators expressed the hope that the homogenizing was competently done.

Anyone who has been following Climate Audit for the last few years knows that at least some of the adjustments to the raw data done by the major data depositories appear to have been incompetently done at best. The statistical techniques used in the scientific backwater of historical climatology are often ad hoc, bearing little relation to the techniques that are standard in other fields. In particular, their techniques for handling missing data are particularly unscientific.

Perhaps the most accessible blog post demonstrating the effects of homogenization adjustments on a set of temperature records is by Willis Eschenbach at Watts Up With That.

The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero

People keep saying “Yes, the Climategate scientists behaved badly. But that doesn’t mean the data is bad. That doesn’t mean the earth is not warming.”

Let me start with the second objection first. The earth has generally been warming since the Little Ice Age, around 1650. There is general agreement that the earth has warmed since then. See e.g. Akasofu. Climategate doesn’t affect that.

The second question, the integrity of the data, is different. People say “Yes, they destroyed emails, and hid from Freedom of information Acts, and messed with proxies, and fought to keep other scientists’ papers out of the journals … but that doesn’t affect the data, the data is still good.” Which sounds reasonable.

There are three main global temperature datasets. One is at the CRU, Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, where we’ve been trying to get access to the raw numbers. One is at NOAA/GHCN, the Global Historical Climate Network. The final one is at NASA/GISS, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The three groups take raw data, and they “homogenize” it to remove things like when a station was moved to a warmer location and there’s a 2C jump in the temperature. The three global temperature records are usually called CRU, GISS, and GHCN. Both GISS and CRU, however, get almost all of their raw data from GHCN. All three produce very similar global historical temperature records from the raw data.

So I’m still on my multi-year quest to understand the climate data. You never know where this data chase will lead. This time, it has ended me up in Australia. I got to thinking about Professor Wibjorn Karlen’s statement about Australia that I quoted here:

Another example is Australia. NASA [GHCN] only presents 3 stations covering the period 1897–1992. What kind of data is the IPCC Australia diagram based on?

If any trend it is a slight cooling. However, if a shorter period (1949–2005) is used, the temperature has increased substantially. The Australians have many stations and have published more detailed maps of changes and trends.

The folks at CRU told Wibjorn that he was just plain wrong. Here’s what they said is right, the record that Wibjorn was talking about, Fig. 9.12 in the UN IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, showing Northern Australia:

Figure 1. Temperature trends and model results in Northern Australia. Black line is observations (From Fig. 9.12 from the UN IPCC Fourth Annual Report). Covers the area from 110E to 155E, and from 30S to 11S. Based on the CRU land temperature.) Data from the CRU.

One of the things that was revealed in the released CRU emails is that the CRU basically uses the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) dataset for its raw data. So I looked at the GHCN dataset. There, I find three stations in North Australia as Wibjorn had said, and nine stations in all of Australia, that cover the period 1900–2000. Here is the average of the GHCN unadjusted data for those three Northern stations, from AIS:

Figure 2. GHCN Raw Data, All 100-yr stations in IPCC area above.

So once again Wibjorn is correct, this looks nothing like the corresponding IPCC temperature record for Australia. But it’s too soon to tell. Professor Karlen is only showing 3 stations. Three is not a lot of stations, but that’s all of the century-long Australian records we have in the IPCC specified region. OK, we’ve seen the longest stations record, so lets throw more records into the mix. Here’s every station in the UN IPCC specified region which contains temperature records that extend up to the year 2000 no matter when they started, which is 30 stations.

Figure 3. GHCN Raw Data, All stations extending to 2000 in IPCC area above.

Still no similarity with IPCC. So I looked at every station in the area. That’s 222 stations. Here’s that result:

Figure 4. GHCN Raw Data, All stations extending to 2000 in IPCC area above.

So you can see why Wibjorn was concerned. This looks nothing like the UN IPCC data, which came from the CRU, which was based on the GHCN data. Why the difference?

The answer is, these graphs all use the raw GHCN data. But the IPCC uses the “adjusted” data. GHCN adjusts the data to remove what it calls “inhomogeneities”. So on a whim I thought I’d take a look at the first station on the list, Darwin Airport, so I could see what an inhomogeneity might look like when it was at home. And I could find out how large the GHCN adjustment for Darwin inhomogeneities was. 

Eschenbach proceeds to set out what an “inhomogeneity” is and show that the GHCN must have done something other than they claimed to have done to make the adjustments they did. In the course of this, he shows some stunning anomalies:

Then I went to look at what happens when the GHCN removes the “in-homogeneities” to “adjust” the data. Of the five raw datasets, the GHCN discards two, likely because they are short and duplicate existing longer records. The three remaining records are first “homogenized” and then averaged to give the “GHCN Adjusted” temperature record for Darwin.

To my great surprise, here’s what I found. To explain the full effect, I am showing this with both datasets starting at the same point (rather than ending at the same point as they are often shown).

Figure 7. GHCN homogeneity adjustments to Darwin Airport combined record

YIKES! Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celcius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century … when those guys “adjust”, they don’t mess around. And the adjustment is an odd shape, with the adjustment first going stepwise, then climbing roughly to stop at 2.4C.

Eschenbach goes on:

Intrigued by the curious shape of the average of the homogenized Darwin records, I then went to see how they had homogenized each of the individual station records. What made up that strange average shown in Fig. 7? I started at zero with the earliest record. Here is Station Zero at Darwin, showing the raw and the homogenized versions.

Figure 8 Darwin Zero Homogeneity Adjustments. Black line shows amount and timing of adjustments.

Yikes again, double yikes! What on earth justifies that adjustment? How can they do that? We have five different records covering Darwin from 1941 on. They all agree almost exactly. Why adjust them at all? They’ve just added a huge artificial totally imaginary trend to the last half of the raw data! Now it looks like the IPCC diagram in Figure 1, all right … but a six degree per century trend? And in the shape of a regular stepped pyramid climbing to heaven? What’s up with that?

Those, dear friends, are the clumsy fingerprints of someone messing with the data Egyptian style … they are indisputable evidence that the “homogenized” data has been changed to fit someone’s preconceptions about whether the earth is warming.

One thing is clear from this. People who say that “Climategate was only about scientists behaving badly, but the data is OK” are wrong. At least one part of the data is bad, too. The Smoking Gun for that statement is at Darwin Zero.

So once again, I’m left with an unsolved mystery. How and why did the GHCN “adjust” Darwin’s historical temperature to show radical warming? Why did they adjust it stepwise? Do Phil Jones and the CRU folks use the “adjusted” or the raw GHCN dataset? My guess is the adjusted one since it shows warming, but of course we still don’t know … because despite all of this, the CRU still hasn’t released the list of data that they actually use, just the station list.

Another odd fact, the GHCN adjusted Station 1 to match Darwin Zero’s strange adjustment, but they left Station 2 (which covers much of the same period, and as per Fig. 5 is in excellent agreement with Station Zero and Station 1) totally untouched. They only homogenized two of the three. Then they averaged them.

That way, you get an average that looks kinda real, I guess, it “hides the decline”.

Oh, and for what it’s worth, care to know the way that GISS deals with this problem? Well, they only use the Darwin data after 1963, a fine way of neatly avoiding the question … and also a fine way to throw away all of the inconveniently colder data prior to 1941. It’s likely a better choice than the GHCN monstrosity, but it’s a hard one to justify. 

Figures 7 and 8 are indeed stunners: “homogenizing” in effect changes slight temperature declines into huge temperature increases. 

To get the full flow of the argument, please read Eschenbach’s whole post. 

Turning declines in raw data into rises in one’s tables is one of the things that led to Michael Bellesiles’s resignation from Emory in the Arming America scandal.

Remember, people are usually at least somewhat circumspect in writing emails to professional colleagues around the world. Thus, is it likely that the corruption in this subfield of climatology is LESS serious or MORE serious than the scientists would disclose to their colleagues in their own emails? 

NYT columnist Paul Krugman is not happy with NASA climate scientist James Hansen for the latter’s op-ed attacking cap-and-trade and proposing a tax-based alternative (which I blogged about here).  Such arguments are “unhelpful,” Krugman says, because they ignore the fact that in the theoretical world of transaction-cost free blackboard economics caps and taxes are the same, and that cap-and-trade is the only game in town.  While Krugman is correct that Hansen makes some silly, populist arguments, Hansen’s ultimate conclusion — that a fully rebated carbon tax is preferable to cap-and-trade — is completely sound.

On the difference between a carbon tax and cap-and-trade, Krugman argues that they are the same because any given cap equates to a given price and vice-versa.  He even produces a graph to prove it.

The only difference is the nature of uncertainty over the aggregate outcome. If you use a tax, you know what the price of emissions will be, but you don’t know the quantity of emissions; if you use a cap, you know the quantity but not the price. Yes, this means that if some people do more than expected to reduce emissions, they’ll just free up permits for others — which worries Hansen. But it also means that if some people do less to reduce emissions than expected, someone else will have to make up the shortfall. It’s symmetric; there’s no reason to emphasize only one side of the story.

That’s true as a theoretical matter, particularly if one assumes that either policy will be implemented in a “clean” fashion, uncorrupted by political side deals, and if one ignores the fact that, ex ante, the government has no way of determining with any precision what carbon price will equal what level of emissions.  And it’s silly to endorse any particular cap without any consideration of its potential cost.

In the real world, one effect of a cap is extreme price volatility (as we saw with the acid rain program and the EU’s carbon trading system).  If allowed to persist, such price volatility kills new investment and technological innovation, which are essential if we are ever to have any prayer of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to the levels President Obama and others have proposed.  TO avoid this problem, a cap-and-trade regime can have a safety valve — a means of loosening the cap if prices rise too high — but this then kills cap-and-trade’s primary (only?) advantage over a tax, which is the imposition of a hard cap on emissions.

Two other big problems Krugman ignores are that cap-and-trade systems are more vulnerable to special interest pleading and that such programs inevitably come with offset provisions that further undermine the reliability of the cap.  In the case of Waxman-Markey, the offsets provisions are such that the bill has no prayer of achieving its stated emission reduciton goals, even with all the regulatory bells and whistles littered throughout the bill.  It’s also worth noting that a cap-and-trade program is difficult to administer and implement.  It took the EPA about five years to write the rules for the acid rain program, and it only covered a few hundred facilities.  If we’re in a rush to impose emission controls, as Krugman claims, this is the wrong path to take.  By comparison, British Columbia got a carbon tax system up in place within five months, and created incentives to reduce carbon emissions right away.

There’s more to say, but other pending matters demand my attention.  So here’s more from Reihan Salam and David Frum.  And here’s a final thought from Andrew Sullivan:

Krugman’s core point is political: cap and trade is all our system can achieve; it’s that or nothing; so shut up.I hope Hansen doesn’t shut up. His proposal is simpler, clearer, fairer and more likely to wean us off carbon sooner.

This afternoon, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will announce that it has made a formal determination that, in the judgment of the EPA Administrator, the emission of greenhouse gases cause, or contribute to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.  This is the so-called “endangerment finding” which will trigger the EPA’s obligation to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.  Regulations limiting such emissions from motor vehicles and other sources will follow.  Here is coverage from the Washington Post, and New York Times’ Green Inc. blog.

There is little doubt the announcement is timed to bolster the U.S. position at the Copenhagen climate summit, and create the impression of greater U.S. action on climate change.  Although regulation under the Clean Air Act is unlikely to produce substantial emission reductions — certainly not the level of reductions the Obama Administration has called for — the willingness to proceed with such regulation is a sign that the current Administration wants to act.  The threat of such regulation could also provide a spur for climate legislation in Congress.  However bad the cap-and-trade proposals in Congress are (and they’re pretty bad), there’s a strong case that greenhouse gas regulation under the Clean Air Act would be much worse, particularly for major corporations.

The timing of the announcement also makes it clear that the EPA was not troubled by the ClimateGate revelations.  Decisions of this sort are not made quickly, and it takes time to prepre the relevant documents.  Does this matter? Probably not, though it will depend in part on how the EPA defends its decision.  Judicial review of the EPA’s endangerment finding will be quite deferential. The EPA is not required to prove global warming is an imminent threat, only that the Agency could conclude that it “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”  Further, the Act makes clear that this is up to the “judgment” of the EPA Administrator.  This means that all the agency has to show is that its decision is a reasonable interpretation of the relevant scientific information — not the best interpretation, just a reasonable one — and any reviewing court will defer to the Agency’s assessment of the relevant scientific literature.

The only way ClimateGate creates a real problem for the Agency is if the EPA’s attorneys didn’t do their job, and relied uncritically on some of the specific studies called into question by the controversy, and this would only happen if the EPA’s attorneys were asleep at the switch.  In a field where the science is so highly contested, what an Agency should do is lay out all of the evidence, acknowledge some degree of uncertainty, and then note explicitly that even if some pieces are contested or disproven, ample evidence remains to support its ultimate conclusion.  At the same time, the Agency should note that the Act empowers the Administrator to take a precuationary view of the relevant scientific evidence.  If this is what the Agency did, then it does not matter if one data series or another is undermined, nor is it relevant that reasonable people may have a basis to be skeptical of the agency’s scientific conclusions.  What matters is whether the EPA could reasonably have come to the conclusion that greenhouse gases are a threat, and that should be an easy case to make, ClimateGate notwithstanding.

With the endangerment finding on the books, Clean Air Act regulation of greenhouse gas emissions will follow.  Indeed, once the endangerment finding is made, the EPA is compelled to act.  As a consequence, the only way to prevent the regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act is through new legislation.  The cap-and-trade monstrosities proposed in Congress are one option.  A revenue-neutral carbon tax, such as that proposed by James Hansen or Rep. Bob Inglis and Arthur Laffer, would be another.  But the bottom line is that unless Congress passes something, EPA regulation of greenhouse gases will proceed.

NOTE: The Washington Post story noted above erroneously reports “Facilities that produce at least 250,000 tons of carbon dioxide or its equivalent yearly account for more than 70 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.”  This sentence is wrong.  Rather, facilities that emit at least 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide or its equivalent (the threshold for this proposed EPA rule) are responsible for “nearly 70 percent” of stationary source emissions, according to the EPA, which in turn represent approximately two-thirds of domestic greenhouse gas emissions.   [UPDATE: The Post story is now fixed.]  I should also note (as I did here) that the 25,000 ton threshold embraced by the EPA is an arbitrary threshold entirely of the agency’s creation, as the relevant provision of the Clean Air Act applies to all stationary sources that emit over 250 tons of regulated pollutants.

NASA’s James Hansen, one of the most prominent (and alarmist) climate scientists, argues against cap-and-trade plans in today’s NYT.  While I don’t quite agree with every point in his analysis, I agree with his bottom line.  Cap-and-trade is unlikely to produce meaningful emission reductions, but will require the creation of a massive regulatory bureaucracy and provide a rent-seeking bonanza for special interests (something prominent defenders of cap-and-trade legislation used to recognize).  In place of cap-and-trade, Hansen proposes an alternative: Fee-and-Dividend.

Under this approach, a gradually rising carbon fee would be collected at the mine or port of entry for each fossil fuel (coal, oil and gas). The fee would be uniform, a certain number of dollars per ton of carbon dioxide in the fuel. The public would not directly pay any fee, but the price of goods would rise in proportion to how much carbon-emitting fuel is used in their production.

All of the collected fees would then be distributed to the public. Prudent people would use their dividend wisely, adjusting their lifestyle, choice of vehicle and so on. Those who do better than average in choosing less-polluting goods would receive more in the dividend than they pay in added costs.

For example, when the fee reached $115 per ton of carbon dioxide it would add $1 per gallon to the price of gasoline and 5 to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour to the price of electricity. Given the amount of oil, gas and coal used in the United States in 2007, that carbon fee would yield about $600 billion per year. The resulting dividend for each adult American would be as much as $3,000 per year. As the fee rose, tipping points would be reached at which various carbon-free energies and carbon-saving technologies would become cheaper than fossil fuels plus their fees. As time goes on, fossil fuel use would collapse. . . .

In a fee-and-dividend system, every action to reduce emissions — and to keep reducing emissions — would be rewarded. Indeed, knowing that you were saving money by buying a small car might inspire your neighbor to follow suit. Popular demand for efficient vehicles could drive gas guzzlers off the market. Such snowballing effects could speed us toward a pollution-free world.

A Fee-and-Dividend approach would be more transparent, less vulnerable to special interest pleading, more conducive to investment in technological innovation (because it would avoid the price volatility produced by cap-and-trade), would be easier to implement within existing trade rules (and would not require a new international agreement for this purpose), and — if implemented as Hansen suggests — be less costly to most Americans.

Given that meaningful cap-and-trade legislation is unlikely to pass Congress — even the lard-heavy Wazman-Markey just squeaked through the House with 218 votes, and that was before ClimateGate — those interested in serious climate policy should consider this sort of alternative.

In his post below, Eric Posner asks why ozone depletion and the phaseout of CFCs and other ozone-depleting substances did not produce the same degree of backlash as does global warming.

Where were the Climate Skeptics back then?  Or was ozonegate, like asteroidgate, a non-event because the climate is a “complex system” whereas, um….  Why didn’t “hierarchical and individualist” citizens find the Montreal Protocol “threatening to their identities”?  (Cf. Dave Hoffman on asteroidgate.)  Were scientists more honest in those days?  Commentators more sober?  The public more credulous?

I would challenge some of Eric’s assumptions.  There were climate skeptics back then (indeed, some of the ozone skeptics back then are climate skeptics now) and “hierarchical and individualist” citizens (as represented by right-of-center authors, commentators, and think tanks) challenged the scientific claims.  Accepting his implicit assumption that the scientific case for a link between CFCs and ozone depletion at the time was no greater than for apocalyptic climate change today, there was still much less at stake, so the scientific debate had less salience, and there was less political controversy.  I’ll briefly expand on each point.

First, there was significant skepticism about initial ozone depletion claims, skepticism that was echoed and amplified by those who opposed government regulation.  Questions about ozone depletion were raised in Dixy Lee Ray’s best-selling Trashing the Planet and echoed by Rush Limbaugh.  In 1989, National Review published the article “My Adventures in the Ozone Layer” by Dr. Fred Singer, a prominent skeptic of both ozone depletion concerns and climate change.  Early on, such skepticism was warranted, but as scientific evidence accumulated, many of those inclined toward skepticism accepted the basic claim that CFCs could and did cause ozone depletion.  Ronald Bailey’s 1993 Eco-Scam, for instance, accepted the basic scientific claims and acknowledged that ozone depletion could have been a significant concern.  Still, even today there are pockets of skepticism related to ozone depletion, particularly about the contribution of certain chemicals, such as methyl bromide.

Second, policies to control ozone depletion are not nearly as far-reaching or intrusive as policies to limit the emission of greenhouse gases.  CFCs and other ozone-depleting substances were always specialized chemicals.  They were in widespread use as coolants, but they still don’t compare to carbon dioxide, the most ubiquitous by-product of modern industrial civilization.  Buying new refrigerators and retrofitting car air-conditioners may be expensive or inconvenient, but it hardly compares to the sorts of measures contemplated to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.   So it’s not surprising that there was less outrage or resistance to the scientific claims.  [This also highlights an important difference between climate change and Eric’s asteroid example: the anti-asteroid rockets would presumably be financed by general tax revenues and provided as a public good, whereas climate policies will impose disproportionate costs and controls on specific sectors of the economy.]

Third, there’s an important wrinkle in the history of U.S. policy on ozone depletion that Eric omits.  Initially, the U.S. government was adamantly opposed to controlling CFCs, beyond the initial 1978 ban on their use in aerosol cans.  In the 1980s, however, the U.S. government did not support a CFC phase-out until industry was on board.  And industry was not on board until the leading CFC manufacturer, DuPont, faced significant competition for its patented CFC compounds and and was well-positioned to dominate the replacement market. When DuPont joined the call for a complete phaseout in 1988, the CFC trade industry still voiced some  skepticism about the science, but DuPont was ready to sell more expensive CFC substitutes — compounds for which there would have been no real market without the phaseout.  [For those interested, I summarized this history near the end of my 1996 article, Rent-Seeking Behind the Green Curtain.]

In retrospect, the CFC phaseout was a good idea, but even assuming that the level of scientific certainty was no greater when the CFC phaseout was adopted than there is with climate change today, there are many important differences between the two policy debates.  First,there was less reason for skepticism to blossom into sustained political opposition because there was less at stake — the phaseout’s costs were concentrated on a few industries, not spread economy wide, and a CFC phaseout did not threaten regulatory controls on ordinary Americans.  Second, the potential economic benefits to dominant industry players meant powerful economic  interests supported the phaseout, interests that far outweighed those sectors likely to experience significant costs (and, in these sectors as well, groups rapidly emerged to capture the rents a phaseout could produce).  So there were powerful “bootleggers” to support the environmental “baptists.”  Third, the most significant effects of a phaseout were likely to be felt overseas, in those nations in which a CFC phaseout would diminish the availability of affordable refrigeration technologies, and those nations could be easily bought off.  I also think the nature of the CFC threat — a potential increased risk of skin cancer — generates more political traction than a change in temperature.

Another important difference between ozone depletion and climate change, is that there was reason to believe that a near-total phaseout of CFCs was the only meaningful way to address the threat of ozone depletion, whereas there may be ways to address climate change concerns that don’t involve empowering a massive regulatory bureaucracy.  While most climate policy proponents advocate far-reaching regulatory programs, covering everything from industrial emissions and transportation to product design and land-use, there are alternative ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, atmospheric concentrations, or the threat of enhanced greenhouse warming (if not all three), ranging from revenue-neutral carbon taxes to technological fixes, to various forms of geoengineering.  Because there is a disproportionate emphasis on regulatory controls, some opponents of clmate policies suspect some climate policy advocates are as interested in imposing such controls as they are in saving the planet — as then-Senator Tim Wirth said some 20 years ago, global warming was an excuse to “do the right thing” even if the problem wasn’t real.

To reiterate my own views, I believe that human activity contributes to global warming, and that it is a serious concern (even if I don’t accept claims that global warming threatens human civilization).  ClimateGate is a real scientific scandal that may justify increased caution about some of the more definitive or apocalyptic statements about climate science, but I do not see it compromising the essential case for a human contribution to climate change.  My policy preference is for measures that do the most to address the actual threats posed by warming while minimizing consequent restrictions on liberty or the imposition of costs on those who have not contributed signficantly to the problem.  I think massive regulatory programs are ill-adivsed, and that proposed cap-and-trade programs will provide massive opportunities for rent-seeking while doing little to reduce actual emissions or enhance our capacity to deal with the problem.  On the other hand, I would welcome a revenue-neutral carbon tax, combined with other policies to enhance technological innovation, and believe that industrialized nations should help more vulnerable nations adapt to the inevitable, and at this point unavoidable, near to medium term effects of projected warming.  I’ve also argued (in this article) that principled adherence to libertarian principles justifies greater action on climate change.

In 1974, a pair of scientists published a paper claiming that chlorofluorocarbons, a compound used in refrigerators, air conditioners, aerosol spray cans, and other devices, migrated into the atmosphere, where they damaged the ozone layer.  The ozone layer protects human beings from some of the harmful effects of the sun; the predictable consequence of its loss would be millions of skin cancer cases.  The scientists’ work was hotly contested; it eventually gained support in the scientific community, but there were also dissenters.  EPA would later regulate the use of CFCs in aerosols, but it was clear that unilateral regulation by the U.S. government would not solve the problem.  CFCs manufactured and used in any country could damage the ozone layer.

The American government turned to the Europeans, the other major manufacturers and users of CFCs.  Europeans, however, did not trust the science and expressed skepticism about the CFC theory.  After further scientific research established that an ozone hole had opened up above Antarctica, and that the likely cause was the emission of CFCs, the Americans dragged the still skeptical Europeans into a treaty regime that tightly regulated the use of CFCs and other ozone-depleting gases.  The Montreal Protocol is the most successful environmental treaty ever (the only successful environmental treaty?).  The hole has been gradually shrinking and is expected to disappear later this century.

The odd part of this story is that, while not everyone agreed with the scientists who found the link between CFCs and ozone depletion, and that indeed, like everything else, the link was uncertain, albeit likely, governments were able to agree on a treaty regime.  The leading supporters of a treaty were those tree-huggers in the Reagan administration, who were persuaded by a cost-benefit analysis that the benefits from a ban on CFC greatly exceeded the costs—with the benefits properly discounted given residual scientific uncertainty.  There were ozone skeptics, but no Ozone Skeptics.  There was a reasonable scientific theory but no models that got everything right all the time.  There was an observable hole (if you believed the scientists who measured it) but the physical processes that linked it to refrigerators and aerosol cans could obviously not be demonstrated to the public.

Where were the Climate Skeptics back then?  Or was ozonegate, like asteroidgate, a non-event because the climate is a “complex system” whereas, um….  Why didn’t “hierarchical and individualist” citizens find the Montreal Protocol “threatening to their identities”?  (Cf. Dave Hoffman on asteroidgate.)  Were scientists more honest in those days?  Commentators more sober?  The public more credulous?

While the wider world is just beginning to realize that the subfield of paleoclimatology is in shambles (and has been for the last decade), scientists in related disciplines are increasingly fighting back against the shoddy work and orthodoxy that was foisted on them.

A small group, including several prominent physicists, are asking the American Physical Society to rescind its political statement on climate change (tip to Bishop Hill):

Dear fellow member of the American Physical Society:

This is a matter of great importance to the integrity of the Society. It is being sent to a random fraction of the membership, so we hope you will pass it on.

By now everyone has heard of what has come to be known as ClimateGate, which was and is an international scientific fraud, the worst any of us have seen in our cumulative 223 years of APS membership. For those who have missed the news we recommend the excellent summary article by Richard Lindzen in the November 30 edition of the Wall Street journal, entitled “The Climate Science isn’t Settled,” for a balanced account of the situation. It was written by a scientist of unquestioned authority and integrity. A copy can be found among the items at http://tinyurl.com/lg266u, and a visit to http://www.ClimateDepot.com can fill in the details of the scandal, while adding spice.

What has this to do with APS? In 2007 the APS Council adopted a Statement on global warming (also reproduced at the tinyurl site mentioned above) that was based largely on the scientific work that is now revealed to have been corrupted. (The principals in this escapade have not denied what they did, but have sought to dismiss it by saying that it is normal practice among scientists. You know and we know that that is simply untrue. Physicists are not expected to cheat.)

We have asked the APS management to put the 2007 Statement on ice until the extent to which it is tainted can be determined, but that has not been done. We have also asked that the membership be consulted on this point, but that too has not been done.

None of us would use corrupted science in our own work, nor would we sign off on a thesis by a student who did so. This is not only a matter of science, it is a matter of integrity, and the integrity of the APS is now at stake. That is why we are taking the unusual step of communicating directly with at least a fraction of the membership.

If you believe that the APS should withdraw a Policy Statement that is based on admittedly corrupted science, and should then undertake to clarify the real state of the art in the best tradition of a learned society, please send a note to the incoming President of the APS ccallan@princeton.edu, with the single word YES in the subject line. That will make it easier for him to count.

Bob Austin, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Hal Lewis, emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara
Will Happer, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Larry Gould, Professor of Physics, Hartford
Roger Cohen, former Manager, Strategic Planning, ExxonMobil

Steven Hayward (of AEI) has an excellent article in the Weekly Standard on the CRU scandal (tip to Powerline and Adler below).

Hayward concludes:

The distinction between utterly politicized scientists such as Jones, Mann, and NASA’s James Hansen, and other more sober scientists has been lost on the media and climate campaigners for a long time now, and as a result, the CRUtape letters will cast a shadow on the entire field. There is no doubt plenty more of this kind of corruption in other hotbeds of climate science, but there are also a lot of unbiased scientists trying to do important and valuable work. Climate alarmists and their media cheerleaders are fond of warning about “tipping points” to disaster, but ironically this episode may represent a tipping point against the alarmists. The biggest hazard to serious climate science all along was not so much contrarian arguments from skeptics, but rather the damage that the hyperbole of the environmental community would inflict on their own cause.

Climate change is a genuine phenomenon, and there is a nontrivial risk of major consequences in the future. Yet the hysteria of the global warming campaigners and their monomaniacal advocacy of absurdly expensive curbs on fossil fuel use have led to a political dead end that will become more apparent with the imminent collapse of the Kyoto-Copenhagen process. I have long expected that 20 or so years from now we will look back on the turn-of-the-millennium climate hysteria in the same way we look back now on the population bomb hysteria of the late 1960s and early 1970s–as a phenomenon whose magnitude and effects were vastly overestimated, and whose proposed solutions were wrongheaded and often genuinely evil (such as the forced sterilizations of thousands of Indian men in the 1970s, much of it funded by the Ford Foundation). Today the climate campaigners want to forcibly sterilize the world’s energy supply, and until recently they looked to be within an ace of doing so. But even before Climategate, the campaign was beginning to resemble a Broadway musical that had run too long, with sagging box office and declining enthusiasm from a dwindling audience. Someone needs to break the bad news to the players that it’s closing time for the climate horror show.