by John Q on December 16, 2007
The outcome of the international climate talks in Bali has been a huge win for the planet. Given the participation of the Bush Administration, we were never going to get firm short-term targets in the agreement of this round of negotiations (except as the result of a US walkout, and a deal struck by the rest of the world). But on just about every other score, the outcome has been better than anyone could reasonably have expected, including:
* Agreement in principle on a 2050 target of halving emissions
* Agreement to negotiate a binding deal in 2009, when Bush will be gone, and short-term targets back on the table
* Agreement to provide assistance to developing countries for both mitigation and adaptation
* Agreement by China to pursue emissions-cutting actions that are “measurable, reportable and verifiable.”
There are of course, some individual winners too, of whom the most notable is undoubtedly Al Gore. His intervention, correctly blaming the US Administration for the lack of progress at the talks, and putting effective pressure on its remaining allies, the governments of Canada and Japan, made it clear that the political price for a failure would be paid by the US, and that those who backed Bush now would find themselves alone in the near future.
Australia’s new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has also been a big winner. Until his election, Australia, as the only other significant country not to ratify Kyoto, was Bush’s most important supporter. After the switch, Australia was able to pursue a negotiating strategy which sometimes seemed to accommodating to the US, but ultimately produced an excellent outcome.
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by John Q on December 15, 2007
A lot of discussion of climate change is based on the implicit or explicit premise that, since we use energy in everything we do, and most energy is derived from carbon-based fuels, large reductions in CO2 emissions will require radical changes in the way we live. Some people welcome this prospect, but most do not.
Having looked at this problem in various different ways, I’m convinced that this premise is wrong, and that quite modest changes, many of which would follow more or less directly from the imposition of a suitable cost on CO2 emissions, could achieve large reductions in emissions. I’ve argued this at the macro level, based on demand elasticity estimates, and also at the micro level in terms of road transport. I thought it might be a good idea to attempt more micro estimates and, as I was visiting Cairns last week[1], my thoughts naturally turned to long-distance tourism.
So, this is hoped to be the first in a series where I consider the question: Could we reduce emissions in a given sector of the economy by 75 per cent in a way that wouldn’t substantially change the services delivered by that sector?
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by John Q on December 3, 2007
by John Q on October 29, 2007
Not surprisingly, this Nature article by Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner entitled Time to ditch Kyoto, has attracted plenty of attention. I’m responding quickly and therefore somewhat brusquely. I’ll try to write something more considered a bit later.
Before giving a detailed response, let me observe that a reader with limited time need only look at the following few sentences
In September, the United States convened the top 16 polluters. Such initiatives are summarily dismissed by Kyoto’s true believers, who see them as diversions rather than necessary first steps. However, these approaches begin to recognize the reality that fewer than 20 countries are responsible for about 80% of the world’s emissions.
This argument is premised on the assumption that the Bush Administration, representing the world’s largest source of emissions (though China is catching up fast), sincerely wants to do something about climate change and called the September meeting with this purpose in mind. If anyone believes this, I have just become aware of a business opportunity from Nigeria in which they may be interested.
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by John Q on October 20, 2007
I spent the last couple of days in Canberra at the Coral Reef Futures Forum, as part of my new Federation Fellowship is to look at economic approaches to management of the Great Barrier Reef. As one of the speakers said, a lot of the talks had people staring at their shoes in gloom, though the tone got a little more positive towards the end. I’m an optimist on ecological issues which is fortunate, because when you look at the threats facing coral reefs, you need a lot of optimism. Looking at historical data, even the GBR, which is much better managed than most reef systems is significantly degraded relative to 100 years ago, and a large proportion of reefs are at or near the point of no return, thanks to overfishing, destructive fishing methods and marine pollution. When you add regular bleaching due to climate change, and also acidification due to higher CO2 levels, the chances of saving much of the world’s coral reef systems do not look too good.
The most hopeful view is that, if we can fix the local threats like overfishing and poor water quality, the resulting increase in resilience (part of my project is to develop a more rigorous understanding of this popular buzzword) will offset moderate global warming, so that if we can stabilise the climate (an increase of no more than 2 degrees) we might save at least some reef systems.
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by John Q on October 12, 2007
To Al Gore and the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change for the award of the Nobel Peace Prize. This is the second time the Nobel prizes have honored work on climate change, the first being the award of the 1995 Chemistry Prize to Crutzen, Molina and Sherwood for their discovery of the chemical reactions that led CFCs to deplete the ozone layer.
That award came at an opportune time. Although the world had agreed under the Montreal protocol to phase out CFCs, US Republicans working through the aptly-named DeLay-Doolittle committee were working to undermine it, attacking the science and so on, with the support of a number ofleading delusionists (Sallie Baliunas, Pat Michaels, Fred Singer and others). The Nobel award took the wind out of their sails and most of the “skeptical scientists” involved went very quiet on the issue thereafter. That didn’t stop them using the same tactics and arguments regarding CO2 and global warming.
I hope the 2007 Peace Prize award will have a similar impact. While it’s not a science prize, it would certainly not have been awarded if there was any serious doubt about (rather than politically motivated opposition to) the science of climate change. And it rightly honors Gore’s role in solidifying public opinion on the issue.
Of course, for those inside the Republican bubble of delusion, it will have the opposite impact (since they are opposed to both peace and science, it could hardly do otherwise). But it will certainly have an impact on the imminent election campaign in Australia, leaving those who have been scathing about Gore and the IPCC with (yet more) egg on their faces. Of course, that group includes PM John Howard who refused to meet Gore last year, though he has modified his position since then. Since he seems to be in the mood for changing his tune , he would be well advised to take this opportunity to ratify Kyoto.
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by John Q on September 22, 2007
One of the stranger efforts of the political right over the last decade has been the effort to paint Rachel Carson as a mass murderer, on the basis of bogus claims conflating the US ban on non-public health uses of DDT with a non-existent ban on the use of DDT for indoor spraying against malarial mosquitoes. Starting from the lunatic fringe of the LaRouche movement and promoted primarily by current and retired hacks for the tobacco industry, this claim has become received wisdom throughout the US Republican party and its offshoots, and has deceived quite a few people, including writers for the NY Times. Although this nonsense has been comprehensively demolished by bloggers, most notably Tim Lambert, article-length refutations are desperately needed. Now Aaron Swartz has a piece published in Extra!. It’s great to see this but, as the global warming debate has shown, one refutation is never enough in resisting the Republican War on Science.
by Henry Farrell on August 27, 2007
One bit of the Snyder, Shapiro and Bloch-Elkon “paper”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/unipolarity.pdf that I linked to last week was overshadowed by the discussion of the Iraq war. They report survey evidence saying that:
Since September 11, there is not only a wider gap between Republicans and Democrats across a broad range of foreign policy issues, but their views have moved in opposite directions in response to new information. In 1998, 31 percent of Republicans believed that the planet was warming, but by 2006
only 26% did, whereas Democrats increased from 39 to 46% and Independents from 31 to 45%.1
To my mind this suggests2 some interesting connections between new information, the dynamics of opinion change and partisanship. This same period saw an unmistakable convergence of scientific opinion, as many scientists who had previously been agnostic or skeptical came to accept mounting evidence that climate change was occurring. It also saw a clear convergence between Democratic voters and independents. But Republicans, if anything, would appear to have become _less_ likely to believe strongly that climate change was happening during the same period. Either they weren’t getting the same information as scientists, Democrats and independents, or they were interpreting this information in different ways. My best guess (and I am not a public opinion specialist by any stretch of the imagination) is that two things are going on here. First, some Republicans _are_ being exposed to different information than other voters, through talk radio, targeted mailings, frothing-at-the-mouth blogs and other media. Second, even those Republicans who _aren’t_ (or who are only minimally exposed to this information) are increasingly coming to treat global warming as a partisan issue, where conceding that it is happening is in some sense giving ground to ‘the other side.’
1 A summary of the poll evidence is available in PDF form “here”:http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/1009a1GlobalWarming.pdf.
2 The one proviso I have here, is that the summary only reports differences over whether Republicans, Democrats and Independents are ‘sure’ that global warming is happening. They don’t report differences over whether people with different partisan alignments think that global warming is ‘probably’ happening. If there aren’t major differences in the ‘probably happening’ figures, then obviously there is much less going on here.
by Henry Farrell on August 25, 2007
I did an interview with Chris Mooney on his new book, _Storm World_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=chris%20mooney%20storm%20world, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FStorm-World-Hurricanes-Politics-Warming%2Fdp%2F0151012873%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1188050763%26sr%3D8-1&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 ); it’s now up at “Bloggingheads.tv”:http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=367 for those who are interested. I think it’s a very good book – much less on the relationship between science and politics than his old book, and much more about the politics within science, and especially within scientific debates that get sucked into wider public controversies.
by John Q on August 9, 2007
I got an email today from Phillip Coticelli at Africa Fighting Malaria pointing to a study by Donald Roberts (PDF), showing that DDT has a repellent effect in addition to its toxicity. The key finding is that that three out of five DDT-resistant Aedes aegypti mosquitoes avoid huts sprayed with DDT. Roberts argues that this is a reason for preferring DDT to alternative pesticides such as dieldrin. A few points about this are worth making
* First, it’s good to see AFM acknowledging the fact of pesticide resistance, which primarily accounts for the abandonment of large-scale attempts to eradicate malaria-carrying mosquitoes with pesticides. The libel put out by people like Steven Milloy and AFM founder Roger Bate[1], in which it is suggested that the failure of the eradication program was due to a mythical ban on DDT imposed at the behest of environmentalists, who callously caused millions of deaths, depends critically on ignoring resistance.
* Second, although the study is new, the claim is not. Roberts has been arguing the importance of repellent and irritant effects for a long time. And while the reporting of this study suggests that these benefits are unique to DDT, other work by Roberts has found that permethrin and deltamethrin are just as effective in this respect.
How does this relate to the general debate over the use of hut spraying as a strategy to fight malaria?
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by Chris Bertram on July 24, 2007
The Guardian has “a photo gallery”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/gallery/2007/jul/23/flooding?picture=330241388 of the floods. (And Chris Brooke “has some pictures of Oxford”:http://virtualstoa.net/2007/07/23/oxford-floods/ .) The excellent Bottle Rockets have their song “Get Down River” available for “download”:http://www.bottlerocketsmusic.com/2007/06/free-download-get-down-river.html from their website.
by Kieran Healy on July 19, 2007
Here is a likely poorly-specified question for biologists, prompted by wanting to buy Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us and then reading a story about genetically modified mice. Weisman’s book asks how the world would change and what of us would survive if humans were all wiped out overnight or just disappeared by something (a virus, the Rapture). The premise is unlikely (something that kills people — all people — but leaves the rest of the world standing) but intriguing.
So I wondered, what if, long, long after our disappearance, some other species arose on earth at least as intelligent as us and eventually started doing evolutionary and molecular biology. Let’s say they have a working theory of evolution much like our own. Now say for the sake of argument that a bunch of transgenic organisms produced by humans have survived and prospered in the interim. So our future biologists find things like a bacteria that produces insulin, or a plant that secretes insecticide, or rice that is high in beta carotene, or more exotic stuff as needed.[1]
I’m wondering, would such organisms even present themselves as empirical anomalies? (That is, how much would you have to know about genomes and evolution for them to seem odd?) And if they did seem odd, how would they be explained? That is, would the evidence of their intelligent design by a previous, now-extinct species be clear? You can see that I’m just irony-mongering here. Would some Arthropod-staffed functional-equivalent of the Discovery Institute point its claw at some of these organisms, saying they were anomalies that could only be explained by the intervention of a divine intelligence? Would Charles Crustacean find a story that could account for their evolution by natural selection? I’m particularly interested in whether the artificial provenance of transgenic organisms would be clear on internal evidence alone. I don’t know anything about this stuff, so probably the answer is “Yes” for reasons obvious to experts. But if it weren’t …
From the sound of Weisman’s book, though, internal evidence wouldn’t be all that was available. Our putative Arthropod successors would likely be able to conjecuture as follows: “The lost civilization who did this is probably the same one responsible for leaving those giant goddamn piles of steel-belted rubber rings and miscellaneous plastic items piled around the place.” To which someone would no doubt reply, “Come off it, no organism that spent its time making rubber tubes and piling them up in giant mountains would have ever been smart enough to figure out genetic engineering.”
[1] It occurs to me that rice requires a lot of cultivation to prosper, but there aren’t any humans to take care of it. Hence, “insert example as needed.”
by John Q on July 12, 2007
Under intense pressure from the rightwing commentariat (several members of which have been appointed to its board by the Howard government) the Australian Broadcasting Corporation presented a shortened version of Martin Durkin’s The Great Global Warming Swindle last night. Our local climate science delusionists looked forward to this event with keen anticipation, but they were in for a nasty shock.
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by Kieran Healy on June 15, 2007
“Alan”:http://www.schussman.com, a former student and co-author of mine (and recent graduate, congrats Alan), goes hiking in “Black Canyon National Park”:http://www.nps.gov/blca/ and reminds me how spectacular the American West is. Sheer canyon walls with “crazy rock climbers”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/belay/544579199/in/set-72157600350091740/, fly-fishing for “rainbow trout”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/belay/550006617/in/set-72157600350091740/ and “terrific views”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/belay/548660116/in/set-72157600350091740/ along the way.
by Henry Farrell on June 14, 2007
As a follow-up to the op-ed discussed below, the _Financial Times_ are running a “questions and answers session”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/e9df7200-19c7-11dc-99c5-000b5df10621.html with Vaclav Klaus on global warming. I warmly encourage CT readers with an interest in maintaining the high quality of scientific discussion in our business press to contribute questions to the conversation. These questions should be polite (I presume that overly impolite ones will be zapped by the moderators in any event), but I don’t see why readers with scientific expertise shouldn’t make some pointed and specific queries regarding the state of debate, and Mr. Klaus’s own particular take on it. Details below.
Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, argues in the Financial Times that ambitious environmentalism is the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity.
Mr Klaus writes that “global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem” and the issue “is more about social than natural sciences and more about man and his freedom than about tenths of a degree Celsius changes in average global temperature.”
Do you agree? Or do small climate changes demand far-reaching restrictive measures? Mr Klaus will answer your questions in an online Q&A. Post a question now to ask@ft.com or use the online submissions form below – his answers will appear on Thursday June 21 from 1pm BST.
