The future of the IPCC

A New Scientist editorial suggests:

• keep intergovernmental status
• more studies on special topics (e.g. geo engineering, carbon sinks)
• yearly reports
• much more open discussion and transparency

Official: "We're fucked"

“The world is already at or above the worst case scenarios in terms of emissions,” said Gernot Klepper, of the Kiel Institute for World Economy in Kiel, Germany. “In terms of emissions, we are moving past the most pessimistic estimates of the I.P.C.C., and by some estimates we are above that red line.”

-- from U.N. Report Describes Risks of Inaction on Climate Change.

[International Energy Agency] officials have stressed that if a solution was not found to curb the growth of energy use and improve energy efficiency in India and China, the trend would become harder and harder to reverse. China and India are building huge numbers of power plants to meet energy over the next 10 years, and 90 percent will burn coal. Coal is a highly polluting but relatively inexpensive source of power, making it the choice for developing countries. While technology exists to make coal plants somewhat cleaner, it is expensive.

"What choices China and India make will be with us for 60 years," said Fatih Birol, the agency economist. "These are locked in investments."

-- from Dire climate warning linked to China and India.

'Radically rethinking climate policy'

Here are my notes from It’s the development path stupid, a talk by Steve Rayner at Oxford University Centre for the Environment on 8 Oct. The notes should not be taken as precise, complete or detailed record of what he actually said: they may contain errors, over-simplifications and unhelpful abbreviations, and certainly omit some important points.

Rayner said that the Kyoto Protocol had been an important symbolic expression of global concern. But it had failed.

Bill Clinton recognised this and left the body of Kyoto on a gurney in the basement of the Whitehouse. When George W. Bush moved in he ordered that the stinking body be buried.

We need to accept, said Rayner, that on climate change Bush was a bad guy doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. His biggest mistake was not to propose an alternative for at least six years.

Nevertheless, many (European governments, NGOs etc) continue to think that the solution is to do more of the same: a bigger, better Kyoto. This was a typical example of framing a problem incorrectly and then continuing to insist when you fail that a solution is to do more of what you did before.

Rayner was particularly critical of governments like the British one, whose (then) environment David Milliband could express an interest in personal carbon credits on almost the same day as his government announced two major new airport runways. [Scepticism with regard to the UK government may be reinforced by this article by George Monbiot]. Rayner also took issue with environmentalists such as Monbiot and Mark Lynas who, he said, overstated or misstated the issues – saying, for example, that scientists agree that climate change is the greatest danger humanity has ever faced. Scientists agree no such thing, said Rayner. What about nuclear war or the Black Death etc?

Kyoto is modelled on three earlier treaties – the Vienna Convention on stratospheric ozone (which preceded the Montreal Protocol); the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and the US EPA’s Acid Rain Program. But there were vital respects in which the challenges of anthropogenic climate change could not be met from within structures modelled on these.

Perhaps the most important contributions of the Stern Review, he said, was that it recognised that climate change is a moral problem, and confirmed that poor people in marginal environments [are being and] will be most affected.

In Rayner’s view, we need to hold several alternate views in mind when searching for a real solution: a clumsy ‘decision space’ in the triangle between ‘hierarchical’, ‘radical free-market’ and ‘radical egalitarian’ views. As Lancelot Capability Brown said in a different context, 'confront the object and draw nigh obliquely'.

Rayner, a lead author for IPPC Third and Fourth Assessment Reports, said he had proposed a special report on climate change and sustainable development (which requires a diversified approach, emphasises benefits of early adaptation and building for resilience, among other things). This proposal had, he said, been vetoed by China and the United States.

His five recommendations, which may be published in a co-authored comment in Nature ahead of COP 13 in Bali, were:

1. Abandon universalism – work with the fewer than 20 countries that ‘really’ matter (and only around 10 if EU is counted as a political block);
2. Allow genuine emissions markets to evolve from the bottom up;
3. Increase investment in adaptation (currently only around $1.5bn spent on adaptation as against approx. $19bn on mitigation). [Adaptation used to be taboo but no longer is. Geo-engineering is still taboo, but should not be];
4. Work the problem at appropriate sales (provinces, states, cities, local trading systems);
5. Make wartime levels of public investment in [green] energy R&D.

I mentioned that point 5 sounded similar to the recommendation made by Martin Rees in Science in August 2006, and asked what sort of levels of investment Rayner had in mind (were we looking at 'wartime' GDP allocation as in a total war like World War Two or as in the present perpetual war for perpetual peace), and how could political will be mobilised in support of such a goal. Rayner said he would be reasonably happy with up to half the current US spend on military R&D, which had roughly doubled under George W. Bush to $80bn – up from about $4bn today, most of which went on nuclear and 'clean' coal. The money should come from government(s), he said.

Someone else asked what should western NGOs like Oxfam best do to mobilise concern among their supporters. Rayner said they should concentrate on problems of most immediate concern to the poorest, such as provision of fresh water, rather than climate change (‘confront the object and draw nigh obliquely’). He was unimpressed by a recent Christian Aid campaign that showed a photograph of a South Asian women up to her neck in water 'calling' for readers to support a climate bill in the UK. A climate bill would not affect the stocks of GHG already in the atmosphere which might or might not be causing or contributing to present problems, he said, and this woman had much bigger problems than climate change on her plate.

In response to a questioner who looked like a Chinese government official, Rayner said the first best things China could do would be for the central goverment to mandate massive deployment of wind turbines and to rethink a model that brought about the premature death of millions of their citizens by exposing them to pollution from coal. It was at least feasible to trap particulates from coal fired power stations. This wouldn't stop CO2, of course, but it would limit the deposition of dust in the cryosphere which was thought to be contributing to accelerating polar warming by lowering albedo.

He tactfully agreed with a (I think) Brazilian questioner asking about repayment of ecological debt by saying that one of the best way to apply funds from the rich countries was to support clean energy in rapidly emerging economies on the best possible terms.

And he suggested to two other questioners that playing 'the historical blame game' was not going to solve the problem.

The day after

People will rarely acknowledge that an accustomed way of life is unsustainable except in the face of prolonged, devastating failure.

It may not come as a surprise to some who know me that I like this observation. Reducing the chance that it describes the current predicament with regard climate change (but not only this) is probably a central task in moral and political thought and in activism. What, then, to do?

Al Gore has been trying to build an effective approach in the U.S. since at least the early 1990s. The Live Earth concerts yesterday which he inspired are supposed to help build mass awareness among as many as two billion viewers, or nearly one in three people on the planet. He is asking people to demand that all governments join an international treaty within the next two years that, by 2050, results in greenhouse gases cuts of 90 per cent in developed countries and more than half worldwide.

At least two criticisms are made of Gore's approach by those who share his concern. The first is that he goes too far in building alliances with those who are too much a part of the problem to be a part of the solution, including SUV manufacturers for sponsors, and celebrity rock stars whose message of 'revolution' is falsified by super high consumption life styles and role as icons of a culture of instant gratification. See, for example The artists formerly known as huge carbon footprints (how, by the way, does Madonna reconcile her belief in the scientific method with a faith which says sperm ejaculated in onanistic practice are abandoned souls that become demons?).

A second, less common, criticism is that the Gore's suggested emissions reduction target is insufficent. This sobering note from Clive Hamilton (which continues a dialogue noted and linked here) might be used to support such a critique. Hamilton notes that the report of IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (WGI) suggests stabilisation of atmospheric greenhouse gases below about 400 ppm CO2 equivalent is required to keep the global temperature increase to less than 2 degrees C above the pre-industrial temperature. Since a concentration target of 400 ppm CO2(e) equates to a target of around 350-375 of CO2 and the current concentration is [about] 380 ppm, "we are already past the two degree threshold, and will without question go well beyond it. Even three degrees is looking very hard to avoid".

I support Gore’s pragmatism: you have to rally wealth generators to your side, and somehow wean them away from destructive practices of wealth generation; but I think there is something to both criticisms. Certainly, they speak to a gap between where things are and where they need to be. But being clear about the scale of the challenges and being an optimist-idealist that there may be solutions doesn't necessarily mean being dogmatic about what those solutions will be. What looks like a solution now may be superceded by events. Consider three technical(-political) issues and one political(-technical) one.

Nuclear power is endorsed by some who consider themselves environmentalists, while carbon capture and storage and geo-engineering are not. But these positions are probably wrong. While there may be some inaccuracies in the Oxford Research Group report Too Hot to Handle?, the fundamental points -- including that nuclear power is likely to increase the availability of plutonium in an unstable world, and that it ties up large amounts of capital that could be far more effectively deployed to reduce emissions in other ways -- are likely to stand the test of time. Both CCS and geo-engineering are sometimes described as 'get-out-of-jail-free cards' for the bad guys (although always not by the same people, and some apply the label to one but not the other). In my view (as outlined here and elsewhere), they probably be necessary evils.

[By they way, the use of probabilities to guide policy, which I adopted here, is strongly criticised by David Stainforth et el in Confidence, uncertainty and decision-support relevance in climate predictions and Issues in the interpretation of climate model ensembles to inform decisions -- Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A (2007) 365. See also Footnote 1]

Turning to a political(-technical) example, Kyoto 2 may offer a useful, pragmatic advance on the idealism of Contraction and Convergence. It 'parks' but does not abandon 'equity now' by allowing in the near term for rights to emit (under a declining cap) to go the highest bidder at auction. By not requiring that the rich world hand over lots of money to the poor world 'right away', it may be more politically workable than C&C and may offer a more effective route to reductions with lower transaction costs than the existing Kyoto Protocol and its likely successors. [To implement Kyoto2 would, of course, be hard and it could be as vulnerable to subversion by vested interests as some other approaches, but it is worth further consideration, as are carbon taxes. See here and here.]

Some of what ‘we’ (by which I mean self-defined progressives) do in the days after 07/07/07 is articulated in agendas like the one outlined by I Count. Even more essentially, ‘we’ need to go a lot further to combine (among other things) subtlety of thought, broad-mindedness and firmness of purpose.

Subtle thought because the insufficiently fine-grained kind can lead into traps such as a form of determinism. Thomas Homer-Dixon comes perilously close to it in the book in which he quotes the words I have put at the top of this post: by, for example, buying into the peak oil red-herring (see footnote 2).

Broad-mindedness because the challenges of climate change are seldom likely to be apparent on their own, but (like the three-dimensional chess game that Joseph Nye has described – see second item here: Imagining War) will rather be tied up with many other challenges requiring negotiation and struggle (see, for example, It was climate change wot made me do it). It’s vital, also, to fully acknowledge the limits of liberal democracies and the attractions and dangers of alternatives such as technocracy: a tension well explored by Louis Menand in his recent review of Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter.

And firmness of purpose because, informed by what science indicates about ecological limits, ‘we’ must stick to core humanist values. Where cultural traditions, including the Abrahamic triplets and other religions, accord with these (through, for example, a genuine and lived commitment to the imperatives of justice, balance, knowledge and loving kindness) they can be allies, but forget any Deus ex Machina: people living in freedom have a responsibility to sort out this mess and help others adapt or die trying.


Footnote 1: See also Another Global Warming Icon Comes Under Attack (Science, 6 July) reporting work by Robert Charlson, Stephen Schwartz and Henning Rodhe which argues that future warming could be much worse than most the climate modeling used by the IPCC suggests, or even more moderate.

Footnote 2: Homer-Dixon also leans towards fatalism/determinism in suggesting that migration and the demographic transition in Europe is necessarily a recipe for extreme instability. The dangers are clear, but precisely this can concentrate minds on renewing alliances for progressive politics which will include but not be limited to confronting brutal practices such as ‘honour’ killing and other kinds of subjugation which reinforce oppressive and destructive behaviour.]

Climate change communication

"The IPCC gets an A+ for scientific assessment, but a gentleman's C for communication." says climate modeler Richard Somerville of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California.

-- from Pushing the scary side of global warming (Richard A. Kerr in Science, 8 June 2007).

Thinkable: why geotherapy should not be taboo

When European Union governments agreed in 1996 that avoiding 'dangerous climate change' meant keeping global average temperature rise during the 21st century to less than 2°Celsius, it was widely said that this could be achieved by allowing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases to rise to about twice the pre-industrial level -- that is, about 550ppm CO2(e). (At present Angela Merkel and other European politicians remain adamant about the 2°C target, and it looks as if the European position will be buoyed by the Brazilian government, among others.)

But at least since a conference organised by the UK government in February 2005 (and Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change, an edited version of the conference papers published as a book early in 2006), it has been increasingly held as credible that stabilisation at 450ppm or less will be necessary to have a fair chance of avoiding a rise of more than 2°C.

Accepting this position for the sake of argument [as does a background paper I wrote earlier this year for a UN report that appears later this year], I'd like to highlight what I think could be a matter that is not as well or widely discussed as it should be: some forms of geo-engineering or geotherapy should not be dismissed at the start of serious discussion about how to manage climate change.

Consider a point made by Paul Baer and Michael Mastandrea in High Stakes (IPPR November 2006), and restated in Two Degrees, One Chance, a paper from 4 UK development NGOs published for this week's G8 conference. They note that the most stringent pathway for GHG reductions still carries a 9 - 26% [i.e., up to about 1 in 4] risk of exceeding 2°C. "This pathway requires emissions globally to peak in 2010 and then contract by 5% each year thereafter, reducing concentrations to below 400ppm by the end of the century" (page 7 of the latter document).

I have never met someone I would consider sane who believes that global emissions can be made to peak in 2010. So if Baer and Mastandrea's reasoning and the modelling on which it is based are correct, then (I think) this follows: to be reasonably confident of a greater than 3 in 4 chance of avoiding 'dangerous climate change' we need to find out what possibilites, if any, there may be to actively reduce GHG atmospheric *concentrations* (and not just emissions) within the next few (say, one to five) decades. Hence the likes of Richard Branson's CO2 prize.

Amongst the arguments against this case are:

1) it can *never* work;

2) the cure may be worse than the disease; and

3) it will encourage people to think they can continue to pollute now because someone else will bail them out later -- a version of 'moral hazard'.

I have not seen a convincing rationale for 1), but would be glad to read or hear one.

As for 2), well yes there will always be some truly terrible ideas out there; but it is not clear that one that has had some air play -- Paul Crutzen's thought experiment on injection of aerosols into the stratosphere -- will necessarily be worse than the full range of effects of 'dangerous climate change'. And put that to one side, there *may* be (I am not saying *are*) other ideas which could deliver actual benefits such as large scale but community-based and controlled creation of biochar (Johannes Lehmann of Cornell University says biochar in combination with biofuels could store up to 9.5 billion tonnes of carbon a year. He may or may not be right, and he is one of the first to call for more R&D. See: Which biofuels? 2)

And regarding 3), of course there are plenty of people looking for excuses to keep polluting and who may latch on to geo-engineering but I think this misses an important point about where we actually are. 'Moral hazard' is most often used in argument by people on the right of politics -- to argue, for example, that healthcare should not be free because this only leads to abuse of the system. That risk exists of course, but the reality can be rather different, as Malcolm Gladwell has shown. With regard to climate change we are already in the emergency room. The science seems to be making it pretty clear that we need to take all possible measures to reduce emissions, but even if we do there may still a high level of risk (i.e. up to 1 in 4) of dangerous climate change. It may therefore be prudent to look at the possibilities, if there are any, for accelerated reduction in atmospheric concentrations back down below 400 and even to pre-industrial levels within a few decades (something alluded to by Tom Goreau at least 15 years ago).

Whatever the truths of these matters, future argument will benefit from more thought and less emotion, moralising and opprobrium. On this point, though on little else, I partly agree with Josie Appleton who criticised Six Degrees for not talking 'the language of environmental management'. As I wrote in my own review Six Caveats about Six Degrees, '...The fifth caveat is that Six Degrees makes only a brief contribution on perhaps the biggest of all questions: what humanity needs to *do* to get its act together...'

Having got so many people excited about climate change maybe we need to work hard on making this issue a little more boring. But even agendas as ambitious as that outlined in Heat may be inadequate to the challenge.

(see also A 21st century greenhouse gas budget?)

The 3% solution

As a new father I am finding little time for coherent thought, and the following may be redundant re-statement of the bloody obvious, but here goes.

The headline figure in IPCC Working Group III summary of a 3% reduction in global GDP in order to stabilise atmospheric concentrations at less than 450ppm does not mean that global GDP would be reduced by 3% every year. Rather, the estimate is 0.12% lower annual global average growth each year up to the year 2030, meaning global GDP would be 3% lower in that year than it would otherwise be (Table SPM.4 on page 14).

The summary further notes:

depending on the existing tax system and spending of the revenues, costs may be substantially lower under the assumption that revenues from carbon taxes of auctioned permits are used to promote low carbon technologies or reform of existing taxes

and:

studies that assume the possibility that climate change policy induces enhanced technplogical change also give lower costs. However, this may require higher upfront investment (page 15)...

...in all analysed world regions near term health co-benefits from reduced air pollution as a result of action to reduce GHG emissions can be subtantial and may offset a substantial fraction of mitigation cost (page 16).

In other words, the cost could be less than 0.12% of GDP per year, and we can afford not to put the planet at high risk of dangerous climate change.

[P.S. Climate curbs: Who will buy? by Paul Reynolds is good as brief analysis goes]

450ppm would cost '3% of GDP'

Aiming for a total greenhouse gas concentration equivalent to 650 parts per million of carbon dioxide would reduce global GDP by about 0.2% [the IPCC report on mitigation will say], whereas...550ppm would cost about 0.6% of global GDP...

... many climate scientists now argue that only agreeing to keep below about 450ppm can prevent major climatic consequences. The IPCC draft says keeping concentrations at this level could cost up to 3% of GDP.

"I can tell you that the probability for achieving 450ppm in anything approaching the world as it now is is almost impossible," commented Professor Stephen Schneider from Stanford University in California, who helped draft the IPCC's first report this year on the science of climate change. "But a temperature rise over 2-3C leads to potential mass extinctions, serious problems with coasts, mountain glaciers disappearing, melting ice sheets... and one has to talk about stabilisation at 450-550ppm range to have a better than 20-30% chance of preventing that."

-- from Climate Talks Enter Final Phase, Richard Black, BBC online.

Creepers of the wholly baseless

Most countries sent delegates [to the IPCC] only from their environment ministries, but of the seven delegates representing Saudi Arabia at the negotiations, four were dispatched by the Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources.

-- from Saudis blocking reductions in fossil-fuel consumption (New Scientist, 27 April). See also More on IPCC censorship.

More on IPCC censorship

A journalist who was in Brussels on 6 April to report the launch of the IPCC Working Group 2 summary (see IPCC Censorship) and who I asked for further details has responded to note George Monbiot's 10 April column, and also said:

The chairs didn't seem to notice that the good news is now the first thing North American readers light on when they go to the regional section...[But] more problematic for [the] G8 process is removal by the sole Russian [of] the table linking CO2 with consequences.

I replied:

Putin and the Siloviki seem to buy the same argument as Gregg Easterbrook, with whom I debated 'winners and losers' on The World Tonight last Thursday [see here]: that global warming will be good news because it will bring a longer growing season to Siberia. Like the Soviet Union, this view may be overtaken by events.

[P.S. 12 April - Desmogblog compares the released version to the pre-censorship draft here.]

IPCC censorship

A few minutes ago BBC environment correspondent Roger Harrabin reported from Brussels that the struggle continued through much of the night over the final draft of the IPCC's document describing likely impacts of climate change. He quoted a paragraph describing significant negative impacts on North America which has been struck out, and quoted the next paragraph describing some positive impacts on North America in the near term which has been kept it. (Note, please can someone post these on the web?)

Call me naive, but if this is as described it is beyond shocking. It does, of course, serve the kind of comfortable message found in places such as Gregg Easterbrook's recent article (see previous post)

[P.S. 9.40 BST - the document has been published. The BBC reports: 'Several delegations, including the US, Saudi Arabia, China and India, had asked for the final version to reflect less certainty than the draft.']

A 21st century greenhouse gas budget?

How much greenhouse gas can the world safely emit? Is this a useful question to ask?

One working assumption for some (footnote 1) is that a global average temperature rise of more than 2 Centigrade during the 21st century may be “dangerous” – i.e. have severe adverse impacts on human development and the ecosystems on which it depends. (It is noted, however, that even if the rise is less than 2C there may still be adverse impacts.)

It is uncertain how much greenhouse gas may be emitted consistent with a politically acceptable risk of a temperature rise of no more than 2C. One line of reasoning might appear to suggest stabilisation of atmospheric concentrations at no more than 450 ppmvCO2e (or is it 475?) by 2030 to 2050 followed by a reduction, fits the bill (2).

First question: to what extent is this line of reasoning on the right track? What caveats should be attached? If you think this is the wrong track what would you recommend instead?

Second question: if this line of reasoning is on the right track (and even if it's not), what if anything can one glean from the IPPC Fourth Assessment Report summary (AR4), published on 2 Feb 07, regarding a 21st century greenhouse gas budget?

AR4 indicates that the only emissions scenario which, by best estimate, results in a rise of less than 2C is B1 (although it should be noted that “if radiative forcing were to be stabilised in 2100 at B1...levels, a further increase in global mean temperature of about 0.5C would still be expected, mostly by 2200”).

So how many gigatonnes of carbon (GtC) are emitted under B1? The Special Report on Emissions Scenarios prepared in relation to the Third Assessment Report (see here and here -- B1 is bottom left hand box) show emissions peaking at something over 10GtC per year between about 2015 and 2055 or 2060 (black line), declining to approx half present levels by end of this century.

The AR4 notes : “The climate-carbon cycle is expected to add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as the climate system warms, but the magnitude of this feedback is uncertain. This increases the uncertainty in the trajectory of carbon dioxide emissions required to achieve a particular stabilisation level of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. Based on current understanding of climate carbon cycle feedback, models suggest that to stabilise at 450ppm CO2 could require that cumulative emissions over the 21st be reduced from approximately 607 [630 to 710] GtC to approx 490 [375 to 600] GtC” (3).

490 GtC is at the bottom end of the cumulative emissions range envisaged under B1 in SRES (see here). An emission trajectory consistent with this bottom end would – I assume – be one in the area shaded green below the black line for B1 indicated here. That is, emissions peaking at no more than about 10GtC/yr by about 2020 (growing more slowly between now and that date than on the black line trajectory) and beginning to fall quite soon after 2030 to well under half (perhaps under a third) of current levels by the end of the century (4).

Third question: Is the best working assumption we can make for now that total global emissions of 490GtC are likely to be consistent with a probable temperature rise of less than a 2C? And can we characterise the range of this probability with any confidence? (5) Should we be looking at another approach altogether, and if so why? (6) If so, what is or are the best alternatives?

Notes

(1) 2C has been the EU target. Mastrandrea and Schneider identify 2.85C as their median threshold for dangerous anthropogenic influence (Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change, chapter 27).
(2) at least, according to one reading of Meinhausen (Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change, chapter 28)
(3) apparently this is CO2 only, not CO2e, and it’s not clear to me when AR4 is suggesting stabilisation at this level would occur.
(4) obviously [?] they could rise more quickly so long as they then fell more quickly, consistent with total 21st century emissions of 490GtC
(5) This question has political and operational implications. For example, Doniger et al suggest a total carbon budget for the United States of 84GtC on reasoning which I take to be along these lines. (An ambitious, centrist approach to global warming, Science, 3 November 2006)
(6) For example, that it is unrealistic. The Stern review on the economics of climate change says: 'To stabilize at 450 ppm Co2e without overshooting, global emissions would need to peak in the next ten years and then fall at more than 5% per year, reaching 70% below current levels by 2050. This is likely to be unachievable with current and foreseeable technologies.' (p 218). Writing in The Observer today, the UK government's chief scientific adviser does not indicate what a "realistic" stabilisation level might be.

It's all good

This [IPCC 4th Assessment] report is a comprehensive and accurate reflection of the current state of climate change science. [President George W. Bush] has put in place a comprehensive set of policies to address what he has called the "serious challenge" of climate change... the current set of policies are working.

-- Sharon Hayes of the White House office of Science and Technology Policy.

See also Richard Black on The semantics of climate change