Climate War Game – Reduction Illusion?

Is the cup half empty or half full? It seems to me that there are opportunities to get tripped up by even the simplest emissions math, as is the case with the MPG illusion. That complicates negotiations by introducing variations in regions’ perception of fairness, on top of contested value judgments.

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Climate War Game – Is 2050 Temperature Locked In?

This slide became known as “the Angry Red Future” at the war game:
The Angry Red Future

Source: ORNL & Pew via Nature In the Field

After seeing the presentation around it, Eli Kintisch of Science asked me whether it was realistic to assume that 2050 climate is already locked in. (Keep in mind that we were living in 2015.) I guessed yes, then quickly ran a few simulations to verify. Then I lost my train of thought and lost track of Eli. So, for what it’s still worth, here’s the answer.

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Climate War Game – Coverage

Jeff Tollefson has great coverage of the Clout & Climate Change war game at NatureIn the Field.

CNAS has set up a web site for the game, which will include materials and a podcast of Rajendra Pachauri’s keynote.

Update 8/4/2008

Remarks from Rajendra Pachauri and Diana Farrell are now on the CNAS web site.

ORNL has a site documenting the scientific input to the scenarios, here.

Update 8/6/2008

ABC was covering the war game, as part of Earth 2100.

Update 9/24/2008

Drew Jones has an entry at Climate Interactive.

US Regional Climate Initiatives – Model Roll Call

The Pew Climate Center has a roster of international, US federal, and US state & regional climate initiatives. Wikipedia has a list of climate initiatives. The EPA maintains a database of state and regional initiatives, which they’ve summarized on cool maps. The Center for Climate Strategies also has a map of links. All of these give some idea as to what regions are doing, but not always why. I’m more interested in the why, so this post takes a look at the models used in the analyses that back up various proposals.

EPA State Climate Initiatives Map

In a perfect world, the why would start with analysis targeted at identifying options and tradeoffs for society. That analysis would inevitably involve models, due to the complexity of the problem. Then it would fall to politics to determine the what, by choosing among conflicting stakeholder values and benefits, subject to constraints identified by analysis. In practice, the process seems to run backwards: some idea about what to do bubbles up in the political sphere, which then mandates that various agencies implement something, subject to constraints from enabling legislation and other legacies that do not necessarily facilitate the best outcome. As a result, analysis and modeling jumps right to a detailed design phase, without pausing to consider the big picture from the top down. This tendency is somewhat reinforced by the fact that most models available to support analysis are fairly detailed and tactical; that makes them too narrow or too cumbersome to redirect at the broadest questions facing society. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with the models; they just aren’t suited to the task at hand.

My fear is that the analysis of GHG initiatives will ultimately prove overconstrained and underpowered, and that as a result implementation will ultimately crumble when called upon to make real changes (like California’s ambitious executive order targeting 2050 emissions 80% below 1990 levels). California’s electric power market restructuring debacle jumps to mind. I think underpowered analysis is partly a function of history. Other programs, like emissions markets for SOx, energy efficiency programs, and local regulation of criteria air pollutants have all worked OK in the past. However, these activities have all been marginal, in the sense that they affect only a small fraction of energy costs and a tinier fraction of GDP. Thus they had limited potential to create noticeable unwanted side effects that might lead to damaging economic ripple effects or the undoing of the policy. Given that, it was feasible to proceed by cautious experimentation. Greenhouse gas regulation, if it is to meet ambitious goals, will not be marginal; it will be pervasive and obvious. Analysis budgets of a few million dollars (much less in most regions) seem out of proportion with the multibillion $/year scale of the problem.

One result of the omission of a true top-down design process is that there has been no serious comparison of proposed emissions trading schemes with carbon taxes, though there are many strong substantive arguments in favor of the latter. In California, for example, the CPUC Interim Opinion on Greenhouse Gas Regulatory Strategies states, “We did not seriously consider the carbon tax option in the course of this proceeding, due to the fact that, if such a policy were implemented, it would most likely be imposed on the economy as a whole by ARB.” It’s hard for CARB to consider a tax, because legislation does not authorize it. It’s hard for legislators to enable a tax, because a supermajority is required and it’s generally considered poor form to say the word “tax” out loud. Thus, for better or for worse, a major option is foreclosed at the outset.

With that little rant aside, here’s a survey of some of the modeling activity I’m familiar with:

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Exhibit A – the Social Cost of Carbon

I recently discovered a cool set of tools from MIT’s Simile project. My favorites are Timeline and Exhibit, which provide a fairly easy way to create web sites where visitors can interact with data. As a test, I built an Exhibit containing Richard Tol’s survey of assessments of the social cost of carbon (SCC):

Social Cost of Carbon Exhibit

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Better Get a Bucket

Nature News and Climate Feedback report that cooling of sea surface temperatures ca. 1945 is an artifact of changes in measurement technology. ClimateAudit claims priority. Lucia comments.

Will this – like the satellite temperature trend – be another case of model-data discrepancies resolved in favor of the models?

Update: Prometheus wonders if this changes IPCC conclusions.

Business & Climate – What to Wish For?

One observation from my recent experience with climate policy in California is that businesses – even energy intensive ones – are uncertain how to engage in the public debate. Climate policy is a messy space with many competing options, and it’s hard to know what to wish for. With that in mind, here’s a quick survey of what various business groups are saying.

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God is my coauthor

DeSmogBlog documents scientists’ outrage at inclusion on Dennis Avery’s list of 500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares. Amusingly, the scientists concerned, a few of whom are deceased, are listed as “Co-Authors”. I’m going to put this new “open coauthoring” concept to work – I’m already working on abstracts. First, I think I’ll lower my Erdős number – Paul, dude, you can be my second. Next, I think I’ll team up with Einstein and Bohr to finish up quantum gravity.