The Washington Examiner celebrates Earth Day by taking a swipe at recycling:
Governments across the Washington region spend millions of dollars on recycling each year, but national recycling experts say a lot of that taxpayer cash is going to waste.
Maryland, Virginia and the District require residents and businesses to recycle, and localities pay millions of dollars to enforce those laws and hit recycling targets.
But some national recycling experts have begun calling for government restraint in trash recycling, which can be more costly and environmentally damaging than dumping.
"We just assume recycling is always better," said J. Winston Porter, president of the Waste Policy Center, an environmental consulting and policy organization. "But there's a point at which you shouldn't just recycle for recycling's sake."
This effort from Europe reported earlier in the NYT caught my eye:
HORSHOLM, Denmark — The lawyers and engineers who dwell in an elegant enclave here are at peace with the hulking neighbor just over the back fence: a vast energy plant that burns thousands of tons of household garbage and industrial waste, round the clock.
Far cleaner than conventional incinerators, this new type of plant converts local trash into heat and electricity. Dozens of filters catch pollutants, from mercury to dioxin, that would have emerged from its smokestack only a decade ago.
... Their use has not only reduced the country’s energy costs and reliance on oil and gas, but also benefited the environment, diminishing the use of landfills and cutting carbon dioxide emissions. The plants run so cleanly that many times more dioxin is now released from home fireplaces and backyard barbecues than from incineration.
With all these innovations, Denmark now regards garbage as a clean alternative fuel rather than a smelly, unsightly problem. And the incinerators, known as waste-to-energy plants, have acquired considerable cachet as communities like Horsholm vie to have them built.
Denmark now has 29 such plants, serving 98 municipalities in a country of 5.5 million people, and 10 more are planned or under construction. Across Europe, there are about 400 plants, with Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands leading the pack in expanding them and building new ones.
By contrast, no new waste-to-energy plants are being planned or built in the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency says — even though the federal government and 24 states now classify waste that is burned this way for energy as a renewable fuel, in many cases eligible for subsidies. There are only 87 trash-burning power plants in the United States, a country of more than 300 million people, and almost all were built at least 15 years ago.
Instead, distant landfills remain the end point for most of the nation’s trash. New York City alone sends 10,500 tons of residential waste each day to landfills in places like Ohio and South Carolina.
... powerful environmental groups have fought the concept passionately. “Incinerators are really the devil,” said Laura Haight, a senior environmental associate with the New York Public Interest Research Group.
Investing in garbage as a green resource is simply perverse when governments should be mandating recycling, she said. “Once you build a waste-to-energy plant, you then have to feed it. Our priority is pushing for zero waste.”
Showing posts with label Climate Change. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Climate Change. Show all posts
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Sea level rise and investment
First there's this from LA Times:
An island midway between India and Bangladesh that became a catalyst for military threats in the 1980s is now submerged under the rising sea.The Bay of Bengal island, which India called New Moore Island and Bangladesh referred to as South Talpatti, has ceased to exist, the Jadavpur University's School of Oceanic Studies declared this week.
Some also think that the Maldives will also be a victime of sea level rise in the future. So what does it mean when I read the following:
The just-opened Shangri-La Villingili in the Maldives, with overwater bungalows (my dream accommodation), postcard-perfect powder white sand, and crystal-clear water. There's also a spa with a yoga pavilion overlooking the Indian Ocean--yoga with a view is, naturally, more conducive to a deep meditational state. I also like the idea of the 11-mile bike path that leads across five islands past villages and lush jungle.
In fact, several resorts are either in the pipeline or are already opened.
Suppose an investor commits $100 million to a new resort with an annual operating cost of $1 million per year. What does this imply about:
1. Expectation of sea-level rise (in terms of years in the future that it will happen)
2. Discount rate assuming that sea-level rise is imminent in 10 years?
An island midway between India and Bangladesh that became a catalyst for military threats in the 1980s is now submerged under the rising sea.The Bay of Bengal island, which India called New Moore Island and Bangladesh referred to as South Talpatti, has ceased to exist, the Jadavpur University's School of Oceanic Studies declared this week.
Some also think that the Maldives will also be a victime of sea level rise in the future. So what does it mean when I read the following:
The just-opened Shangri-La Villingili in the Maldives, with overwater bungalows (my dream accommodation), postcard-perfect powder white sand, and crystal-clear water. There's also a spa with a yoga pavilion overlooking the Indian Ocean--yoga with a view is, naturally, more conducive to a deep meditational state. I also like the idea of the 11-mile bike path that leads across five islands past villages and lush jungle.
In fact, several resorts are either in the pipeline or are already opened.
Suppose an investor commits $100 million to a new resort with an annual operating cost of $1 million per year. What does this imply about:
1. Expectation of sea-level rise (in terms of years in the future that it will happen)
2. Discount rate assuming that sea-level rise is imminent in 10 years?
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Greenhouse gas abate and the Jacksonia Mode of Discourse
Ted Gayer's piece seems to be a possible example of non-Jacksonian mode of discourse which I would applaud. There is a puzzle about the negative MC of abatement in the McKinsey report:
The main point of the McKinsey study is provided in their Exhibit B, which illustrates a rather peculiar finding that there are a significant number of pollution abatement options that can be achieved at “negative cost.” This finding violates the basic principles of economics. If firms (or consumers) could reduce emissions at negative cost, then they would do so. To say otherwise is to say that they are willingly or ignorantly passing up profits.
What, then, can explain a finding of negative cost? There are four possibilities:
First, the estimated costs of abatement are simply incorrect. ...
Second, the costs of abatement are incompletely estimated. ...
Third, the private discount rate is incorrectly estimated. ...
The fourth possible reason for the negative cost finding is that firms do indeed irrationally forego profit-maximizing activities, or they are ignorant of such activities.
To the category of second falls costs such as information and coordination costs. From the McKinsey report:
Unlocking the negative cost options would require overcoming persistent barriers to market efficiency such as mismatches between who pays the cost of an option and who gains the benefit (e.g. homebuilder versus homeowner), lack of information about the impact of individual decisions, and consumer desire for a rapid payback (typically 2 to 3 years) whn incremental up front investment is required.
Here is a concrete (but not necessarily correct) example:
I'd like to install solar panels. Say for that the upfront cost is $20,000 and the life of the panels is 30 years in which I may recoup the cost in 20 years. But I don't plan to be in the house for 20 years.
Perhaps the panels add value to the house - but how much. Here the cost of acquiring the information is not included. The added uncertainty of this option makes me decide not to install solar panels. There is a role for the government - they could step in and say that when I sell my house they will pay me the difference (in PV terms assuming some "correct" discount rate) of my up-front cost and the amount I've recouped in terms of electricity savings. How do we calculate this savings? Again some cost of information is left out of this equation which needs to be made clear.
These are what Ted Gayer may be saying about incomplete costs and is perhaps a reason why a carbon tax is much easier to implement.
The main point of the McKinsey study is provided in their Exhibit B, which illustrates a rather peculiar finding that there are a significant number of pollution abatement options that can be achieved at “negative cost.” This finding violates the basic principles of economics. If firms (or consumers) could reduce emissions at negative cost, then they would do so. To say otherwise is to say that they are willingly or ignorantly passing up profits.
What, then, can explain a finding of negative cost? There are four possibilities:
First, the estimated costs of abatement are simply incorrect. ...
Second, the costs of abatement are incompletely estimated. ...
Third, the private discount rate is incorrectly estimated. ...
The fourth possible reason for the negative cost finding is that firms do indeed irrationally forego profit-maximizing activities, or they are ignorant of such activities.
To the category of second falls costs such as information and coordination costs. From the McKinsey report:
Unlocking the negative cost options would require overcoming persistent barriers to market efficiency such as mismatches between who pays the cost of an option and who gains the benefit (e.g. homebuilder versus homeowner), lack of information about the impact of individual decisions, and consumer desire for a rapid payback (typically 2 to 3 years) whn incremental up front investment is required.
Here is a concrete (but not necessarily correct) example:
I'd like to install solar panels. Say for that the upfront cost is $20,000 and the life of the panels is 30 years in which I may recoup the cost in 20 years. But I don't plan to be in the house for 20 years.
Perhaps the panels add value to the house - but how much. Here the cost of acquiring the information is not included. The added uncertainty of this option makes me decide not to install solar panels. There is a role for the government - they could step in and say that when I sell my house they will pay me the difference (in PV terms assuming some "correct" discount rate) of my up-front cost and the amount I've recouped in terms of electricity savings. How do we calculate this savings? Again some cost of information is left out of this equation which needs to be made clear.
These are what Ted Gayer may be saying about incomplete costs and is perhaps a reason why a carbon tax is much easier to implement.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
History of renewable energy
An excellent article by Joshua Green. Some excerpts:
But the [wind farm] industry encountered serious quality-control issues, and one reason was the nature of the government’s support. A tax credit on investment created an incentive to put up turbines quickly and plentifully and collect a check. But the tax code had nothing to say about how those turbines performed. And many of them did not. “If you look at Palm Springs,” Zaelke said, “the turbines are set one alongside the other in corn rows because you got paid by how many you installed, not by how well they produced. ...
Plotted on a graph, the history of clean-energy production in the United States resembles the blade of a saw, rising and falling each time subsidies came and went. Japan, Germany, Spain, and Denmark show smooth, upward-sloping yield curves, a reflection of consistent government policy. ...
The nut of the problem traces all the way back to Jimmy Carter’s choice of tax credits as the vehicle for subsidizing renewable energy. Direct grants would have been simpler. But Congress had recently changed the federal-budget process to keep closer track of how much money was being spent. It suddenly became easier to spend indirectly, by manipulating the tax code. Although no one realized it at the time, Carter’s decision to use tax credits lit the very long fuse on a bomb that detonated last fall and nearly took down the entire renewable-energy industry in America.
The trouble with tax credits is that in order to make use of them, you must owe taxes, and most start-ups struggling toward profitability do not. So while a company looking to build a wind or solar facility would qualify for valuable benefits, it had no means of realizing this “tax equity.” The work-around was to partner with someone who did, someone large enough to finance a $500 million facility and profitable enough to incur a large tax bill. Having witnessed two decades of busts and bankruptcies, traditional U.S. banks wanted no part of this. European banks, going by their more positive experience, were comfortable funding large renewable projects, but didn’t qualify for U.S. tax credits. The perversity of the government’s incentives demanded a big balance sheet, huge profits, and an indifference to risk. Enter Wall Street.
Investment banks and hedge funds stepped in to fill the void, engineering tax-equity vehicles with suspiciously complicated-sounding names, like “partnership flip structure” and “inverted passthrough lease,” to exploit the tax benefits. These deals amounted to financing agreements for large infrastructure projects, given in exchange for tax credits, often worth hundreds of millions of dollars, that could be applied against profits earned primarily on other investments (like mortgage-backed securities). For renewable-energy companies, tax-equity deals meant life or death: the combination of credits could offset two-thirds of the capital cost of a project. Companies like Lehman Brothers, Wachovia, and AIG became an integral part—even the integral part—of the renewables industry, because the utility-scale projects they financed produce the overwhelming majority of clean energy in the United States.
Basing the entire system of federal incentives on tax equity had two weaknesses, one that has always been clear and another that became clear only recently. Forcing renewables companies to route government support through Wall Street, thereby sacrificing a portion of it, was needless and inefficient. But it also tied the industry’s fate to that of the financial world’s most aggressive players. Just as Wall Street bankers bet that housing prices could never fall and got wiped out when proved wrong, Congress seems never to have imagined that Wall Street might someday have no profits and need no tax equity.
But the [wind farm] industry encountered serious quality-control issues, and one reason was the nature of the government’s support. A tax credit on investment created an incentive to put up turbines quickly and plentifully and collect a check. But the tax code had nothing to say about how those turbines performed. And many of them did not. “If you look at Palm Springs,” Zaelke said, “the turbines are set one alongside the other in corn rows because you got paid by how many you installed, not by how well they produced. ...
Plotted on a graph, the history of clean-energy production in the United States resembles the blade of a saw, rising and falling each time subsidies came and went. Japan, Germany, Spain, and Denmark show smooth, upward-sloping yield curves, a reflection of consistent government policy. ...
The nut of the problem traces all the way back to Jimmy Carter’s choice of tax credits as the vehicle for subsidizing renewable energy. Direct grants would have been simpler. But Congress had recently changed the federal-budget process to keep closer track of how much money was being spent. It suddenly became easier to spend indirectly, by manipulating the tax code. Although no one realized it at the time, Carter’s decision to use tax credits lit the very long fuse on a bomb that detonated last fall and nearly took down the entire renewable-energy industry in America.
The trouble with tax credits is that in order to make use of them, you must owe taxes, and most start-ups struggling toward profitability do not. So while a company looking to build a wind or solar facility would qualify for valuable benefits, it had no means of realizing this “tax equity.” The work-around was to partner with someone who did, someone large enough to finance a $500 million facility and profitable enough to incur a large tax bill. Having witnessed two decades of busts and bankruptcies, traditional U.S. banks wanted no part of this. European banks, going by their more positive experience, were comfortable funding large renewable projects, but didn’t qualify for U.S. tax credits. The perversity of the government’s incentives demanded a big balance sheet, huge profits, and an indifference to risk. Enter Wall Street.
Investment banks and hedge funds stepped in to fill the void, engineering tax-equity vehicles with suspiciously complicated-sounding names, like “partnership flip structure” and “inverted passthrough lease,” to exploit the tax benefits. These deals amounted to financing agreements for large infrastructure projects, given in exchange for tax credits, often worth hundreds of millions of dollars, that could be applied against profits earned primarily on other investments (like mortgage-backed securities). For renewable-energy companies, tax-equity deals meant life or death: the combination of credits could offset two-thirds of the capital cost of a project. Companies like Lehman Brothers, Wachovia, and AIG became an integral part—even the integral part—of the renewables industry, because the utility-scale projects they financed produce the overwhelming majority of clean energy in the United States.
Basing the entire system of federal incentives on tax equity had two weaknesses, one that has always been clear and another that became clear only recently. Forcing renewables companies to route government support through Wall Street, thereby sacrificing a portion of it, was needless and inefficient. But it also tied the industry’s fate to that of the financial world’s most aggressive players. Just as Wall Street bankers bet that housing prices could never fall and got wiped out when proved wrong, Congress seems never to have imagined that Wall Street might someday have no profits and need no tax equity.
Return of climate engineering
An old post referred to this but Graeme Wood updates us:
Roger Angel, an astronomy and optics professor at the University of Arizona, would block the sun by building a giant visor in space. He proposes constructing 20 electromagnetic guns, each more than a mile long and positioned at high altitudes, that would shoot Frisbee-size ceramic disks. Each gun would launch 800,000 disks every five minutes—day and night, weekends and holidays—for 10 years. The guns would aim at the gravitational midpoint between the Earth and the sun, so that the disks would hang in space, providing a huge array of sunshades that would block and scatter sunlight and put the Earth in a permanent state of annular eclipse. Angel’s scheme relies on launch technology that doesn’t yet exist (no one has ever wanted to shoot Frisbees at the sun before), and would cost several trillion dollars. “I know it sounds like mad science,” he says. “But unfortunately we have a mad planet.”
Of all the ideas circulating for blocking solar heat, however, sulfur-aerosol injection—the Blade Runner scenario—may actually be the least mad. And it provides an illustrative example of the trade-offs that all geo-engineering projects of its scale must confront. The approach is already known to work. When Mount Tambora erupted in Indonesia in 1815 and spewed sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, farmers in New England recorded a summer so chilly that their fields frosted over in July. The Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines in 1991 cooled global temperatures by about half a degree Celsius for the next few years. A sulfur-aerosol project could produce a Pinatubo of sulfur dioxide every four years.
The aerosol plan is also cheap—so cheap that it completely overturns conventional analysis of how to mitigate climate change. Thomas C. Schelling, who won the 2005 Nobel Prize in economics, has pointed out how difficult it is to get vast international agreements—such as the Kyoto Protocol—to stick. But a geo-engineering strategy like sulfur aerosol “changes everything,” he says. Suddenly, instead of a situation where any one country can foil efforts to curb global warming, any one country can curb global warming all on its own. Pumping sulfur into the atmosphere is a lot easier than trying to orchestrate the actions of 200 countries—or, for that matter, 7 billion individuals—each of whom has strong incentives to cheat. ...
The scariest thing about geo-engineering, as it happens, is also the thing that makes it such a game-changer in the global-warming debate: it’s incredibly cheap. Many scientists, in fact, prefer not to mention just how cheap it is. ... a single rogue nation could have the resources to change the climate. Most of Bangladesh’s population lives in low-elevation coastal zones that would wash away if sea levels rose. For a fraction of its GDP, Bangladesh could refreeze the ice caps using sulfur aerosols (though, in a typical trade-off, this might affect its monsoons). If refreezing them would save the lives of millions of Bangladeshis, who could blame their government for acting? Such a scenario is unlikely; most countries would hesitate to violate international law and become a pariah. But it illustrates the political and regulatory complications that large-scale climate-changing schemes would trigger.
Roger Angel, an astronomy and optics professor at the University of Arizona, would block the sun by building a giant visor in space. He proposes constructing 20 electromagnetic guns, each more than a mile long and positioned at high altitudes, that would shoot Frisbee-size ceramic disks. Each gun would launch 800,000 disks every five minutes—day and night, weekends and holidays—for 10 years. The guns would aim at the gravitational midpoint between the Earth and the sun, so that the disks would hang in space, providing a huge array of sunshades that would block and scatter sunlight and put the Earth in a permanent state of annular eclipse. Angel’s scheme relies on launch technology that doesn’t yet exist (no one has ever wanted to shoot Frisbees at the sun before), and would cost several trillion dollars. “I know it sounds like mad science,” he says. “But unfortunately we have a mad planet.”
Of all the ideas circulating for blocking solar heat, however, sulfur-aerosol injection—the Blade Runner scenario—may actually be the least mad. And it provides an illustrative example of the trade-offs that all geo-engineering projects of its scale must confront. The approach is already known to work. When Mount Tambora erupted in Indonesia in 1815 and spewed sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, farmers in New England recorded a summer so chilly that their fields frosted over in July. The Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines in 1991 cooled global temperatures by about half a degree Celsius for the next few years. A sulfur-aerosol project could produce a Pinatubo of sulfur dioxide every four years.
The aerosol plan is also cheap—so cheap that it completely overturns conventional analysis of how to mitigate climate change. Thomas C. Schelling, who won the 2005 Nobel Prize in economics, has pointed out how difficult it is to get vast international agreements—such as the Kyoto Protocol—to stick. But a geo-engineering strategy like sulfur aerosol “changes everything,” he says. Suddenly, instead of a situation where any one country can foil efforts to curb global warming, any one country can curb global warming all on its own. Pumping sulfur into the atmosphere is a lot easier than trying to orchestrate the actions of 200 countries—or, for that matter, 7 billion individuals—each of whom has strong incentives to cheat. ...
The scariest thing about geo-engineering, as it happens, is also the thing that makes it such a game-changer in the global-warming debate: it’s incredibly cheap. Many scientists, in fact, prefer not to mention just how cheap it is. ... a single rogue nation could have the resources to change the climate. Most of Bangladesh’s population lives in low-elevation coastal zones that would wash away if sea levels rose. For a fraction of its GDP, Bangladesh could refreeze the ice caps using sulfur aerosols (though, in a typical trade-off, this might affect its monsoons). If refreezing them would save the lives of millions of Bangladeshis, who could blame their government for acting? Such a scenario is unlikely; most countries would hesitate to violate international law and become a pariah. But it illustrates the political and regulatory complications that large-scale climate-changing schemes would trigger.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
My CFL died and I'm about to poison the earth
After about a year one of our compact fluorescent bulbs stopped working - emitting a foul odor as it fizzled and died. I've placed it into a non-recycleable (at least in our county) plastic container and am thinking of giving it a decent burial. I will mourn its passing since it died well short of its expected life span.
Unfortunately, burial is not an option since it contains mercury. I guess I'll try our local recycling and wasted center.
Unfortunately, burial is not an option since it contains mercury. I guess I'll try our local recycling and wasted center.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Comparative advantage in carbon trading
Do developing countries have a comparative advantage in carbon trading?
This is one of the questions raised by NGM's article Forests of the Tides on mangroves. (Incidentally, there was an excellent exhibit at the KL Aquaria on mangroves which we got to see last summer).
1. "Wherever they live, they share one thing in common: They're brilliant adapters. Each mangrove has an ultrafiltration system to keep much of the salt out and a complex root system that allows it to survive in the intertidal zone. Some have snorkel-like roots called pneumatophores that stick out of the mud to help them take in air; others use prop roots or buttresses to keep their trunks upright in the soft sediments at tide's edge."
2. "Bangladesh has not lost sight of that logic, putting a great premium on the ability of mangroves to stabilize shores and trap sediments. A low-lying country with a long, vulnerable coastline, Bangladesh is also land starved, with a crushing population density of 2,500 persons per square mile (2.6 square kilometers). By planting mangroves on delta sediments washed down from the Himalaya, it has gained over 300,000 acres (120,000 hectares) of new land on the Bay of Bengal."
3. For more than 25 years Jin Eong Ong, a retired professor of marine and coastal studies in Penang, Malaysia, has been exploring a less obvious mangrove contribution: What role might these forests play in climate change? Ong and his colleagues have been studying the carbon budget of mangroves—the balance sheet that compares all the carbon inputs and outputs of the mangrove ecosystem—and they've found that these forests are highly effective carbon sinks. They absorb carbon dioxide, taking carbon out of circulation and reducing the amount of greenhouse gas.
By measuring photosynthesis, sap flow, and other processes in the leaves of the forest canopy, Ong and his team can tell how much carbon is assimilated into mangrove leaves, how much is stored in living trees, and how much eventually makes its way into nearby waterways. The measurements suggest that mangroves may have the highest net productivity of carbon of any natural ecosystem (about a hundred pounds per acre [45 kilograms per 0.4 hectares] per day) and that as much as a third of this may be exported in the form of organic compounds to mudflats. Mangroves, it seems, are carbon factories, and their demolition robs the marine environment of a vital element.
Ong's team has also shown that a significant portion of the carbon ends up in forest sediments, remaining sequestered there for thousands of years. Conversion of a mangrove forest to a shrimp pond changes a carbon sink into a carbon source, liberating the accumulated carbon back into the atmosphere—but 50 times faster than it was sequestered.
If mangroves were to become recognized as carbon-storage assets, that could radically alter the way these forests are valued, says Ong. If carbon trading becomes a reality—that is, if forest-rich, carbon-absorbing countries are able to sell so-called emissions credits to more industrialized, carbon-emitting countries—it could, at the least, provide a stay of execution for mangroves.
But Ong notes that the financial incentives have to be great enough to make forest preservation economically viable. "Take Indonesia, which has the largest total area of mangroves of any country in the world. It can't afford to save them for nothing," he says. "But if the Indonesians could trade the carbon-storage potential of their mangroves as a commodity, that would create a great incentive to stop bulldozing them for shrimp ponds or chipping them for the production of rayon."
4. Eritrea was reeling from war and famine when Sato first traveled there in the mid-1980s. Since water is such a scarce resource in this arid country, Sato wondered if he could develop some form of salt water–based agriculture on Eritrea's long coastline, to help provide food for the hungry. Mangroves seemed a logical, if unconventional, choice. They occurred naturally, though patchily, along the Red Sea shore, they flourished in salt water, and camels were known to eat the leaves. If camels ate them, why not feed the foliage to sheep and goats? Grow enough mangroves, Sato reasoned, and you could provide food security for thousands.
So, like a maritime Johnny Appleseed, he began planting—and failed. All the saplings died. Undaunted, Sato looked closely at places on the Eritrean coast where mangroves were growing naturally, and he noticed they occurred only where fresh water was channeled during the brief rains that fall on this desert coast. Sato reasoned it was not fresh water the trees needed but minerals the water was bringing from inland—specifically nitrogen, phosphorus, and iron, elements in which seawater is deficient.
By conducting a few simple trials, Sato and a small team of helpers from the Eritrean Ministry of Fisheries assessed how much of the three elements mangrove seedlings needed and devised a low-tech method of supplying them. When the propagules are planted, a small piece of iron is buried alongside. So, too, is a small plastic bag with holes punched in it containing a fertilizer rich in nitrogen and phosphorus.
Now, six years on, 700,000 mangroves are growing on the formerly treeless shore of Hirgigo. Sato calls the project Manzanar, after the World War II internment camp in the California desert where, during his teens, he and his family were relocated, along with thousands of other Japanese Americans. It was the memory of older internees there coaxing crops from the arid soil that inspired him all these years later.
At Sato's Manzanar many of the mangrove trees are now well above head height, and the yellow-green coats of ripe propagules are beginning to split open, showing the plump green leaves within. The mangrove mud is sprouting pneumatophores, as if someone had sown a crop of pencils. Barnacles and oysters have started to settle on them, and crab and winkle trails crisscross the sediment. Plant a few trees, and you usher in an ecosystem. Build nature a house, and she makes it her home.
Since planting began, Hirgigo's fishermen have started to catch small species such as mullet. Ibrahim put the equation simply: "No mangroves, no mullet." And the little fish that make the mangroves their home attract bigger, predatory fish—the kind that snag in Ibrahim's net and sell for good prices in the Massawa market.
This is one of the questions raised by NGM's article Forests of the Tides on mangroves. (Incidentally, there was an excellent exhibit at the KL Aquaria on mangroves which we got to see last summer).
1. "Wherever they live, they share one thing in common: They're brilliant adapters. Each mangrove has an ultrafiltration system to keep much of the salt out and a complex root system that allows it to survive in the intertidal zone. Some have snorkel-like roots called pneumatophores that stick out of the mud to help them take in air; others use prop roots or buttresses to keep their trunks upright in the soft sediments at tide's edge."
2. "Bangladesh has not lost sight of that logic, putting a great premium on the ability of mangroves to stabilize shores and trap sediments. A low-lying country with a long, vulnerable coastline, Bangladesh is also land starved, with a crushing population density of 2,500 persons per square mile (2.6 square kilometers). By planting mangroves on delta sediments washed down from the Himalaya, it has gained over 300,000 acres (120,000 hectares) of new land on the Bay of Bengal."
3. For more than 25 years Jin Eong Ong, a retired professor of marine and coastal studies in Penang, Malaysia, has been exploring a less obvious mangrove contribution: What role might these forests play in climate change? Ong and his colleagues have been studying the carbon budget of mangroves—the balance sheet that compares all the carbon inputs and outputs of the mangrove ecosystem—and they've found that these forests are highly effective carbon sinks. They absorb carbon dioxide, taking carbon out of circulation and reducing the amount of greenhouse gas.
By measuring photosynthesis, sap flow, and other processes in the leaves of the forest canopy, Ong and his team can tell how much carbon is assimilated into mangrove leaves, how much is stored in living trees, and how much eventually makes its way into nearby waterways. The measurements suggest that mangroves may have the highest net productivity of carbon of any natural ecosystem (about a hundred pounds per acre [45 kilograms per 0.4 hectares] per day) and that as much as a third of this may be exported in the form of organic compounds to mudflats. Mangroves, it seems, are carbon factories, and their demolition robs the marine environment of a vital element.
Ong's team has also shown that a significant portion of the carbon ends up in forest sediments, remaining sequestered there for thousands of years. Conversion of a mangrove forest to a shrimp pond changes a carbon sink into a carbon source, liberating the accumulated carbon back into the atmosphere—but 50 times faster than it was sequestered.
If mangroves were to become recognized as carbon-storage assets, that could radically alter the way these forests are valued, says Ong. If carbon trading becomes a reality—that is, if forest-rich, carbon-absorbing countries are able to sell so-called emissions credits to more industrialized, carbon-emitting countries—it could, at the least, provide a stay of execution for mangroves.
But Ong notes that the financial incentives have to be great enough to make forest preservation economically viable. "Take Indonesia, which has the largest total area of mangroves of any country in the world. It can't afford to save them for nothing," he says. "But if the Indonesians could trade the carbon-storage potential of their mangroves as a commodity, that would create a great incentive to stop bulldozing them for shrimp ponds or chipping them for the production of rayon."
4. Eritrea was reeling from war and famine when Sato first traveled there in the mid-1980s. Since water is such a scarce resource in this arid country, Sato wondered if he could develop some form of salt water–based agriculture on Eritrea's long coastline, to help provide food for the hungry. Mangroves seemed a logical, if unconventional, choice. They occurred naturally, though patchily, along the Red Sea shore, they flourished in salt water, and camels were known to eat the leaves. If camels ate them, why not feed the foliage to sheep and goats? Grow enough mangroves, Sato reasoned, and you could provide food security for thousands.
So, like a maritime Johnny Appleseed, he began planting—and failed. All the saplings died. Undaunted, Sato looked closely at places on the Eritrean coast where mangroves were growing naturally, and he noticed they occurred only where fresh water was channeled during the brief rains that fall on this desert coast. Sato reasoned it was not fresh water the trees needed but minerals the water was bringing from inland—specifically nitrogen, phosphorus, and iron, elements in which seawater is deficient.
By conducting a few simple trials, Sato and a small team of helpers from the Eritrean Ministry of Fisheries assessed how much of the three elements mangrove seedlings needed and devised a low-tech method of supplying them. When the propagules are planted, a small piece of iron is buried alongside. So, too, is a small plastic bag with holes punched in it containing a fertilizer rich in nitrogen and phosphorus.
Now, six years on, 700,000 mangroves are growing on the formerly treeless shore of Hirgigo. Sato calls the project Manzanar, after the World War II internment camp in the California desert where, during his teens, he and his family were relocated, along with thousands of other Japanese Americans. It was the memory of older internees there coaxing crops from the arid soil that inspired him all these years later.
At Sato's Manzanar many of the mangrove trees are now well above head height, and the yellow-green coats of ripe propagules are beginning to split open, showing the plump green leaves within. The mangrove mud is sprouting pneumatophores, as if someone had sown a crop of pencils. Barnacles and oysters have started to settle on them, and crab and winkle trails crisscross the sediment. Plant a few trees, and you usher in an ecosystem. Build nature a house, and she makes it her home.
Since planting began, Hirgigo's fishermen have started to catch small species such as mullet. Ibrahim put the equation simply: "No mangroves, no mullet." And the little fish that make the mangroves their home attract bigger, predatory fish—the kind that snag in Ibrahim's net and sell for good prices in the Massawa market.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Carbon tax or Pigou Club, whatever...
I've been skeptical of the carbon tax, well not the tax per se but the way some economists seem to want to implement it:
"We should raise the tax on gasoline. Not quickly, but substantially. I would like to see Congress increase the gas tax by $1 per gallon, phased in gradually by 10 cents per year over the next decade."
Gas prices have risen by more than 10 cents per year this year and I see no change in our driving behavior:
"We should raise the tax on gasoline. Not quickly, but substantially. I would like to see Congress increase the gas tax by $1 per gallon, phased in gradually by 10 cents per year over the next decade."
Gas prices have risen by more than 10 cents per year this year and I see no change in our driving behavior:
Source: http://www.newjerseygasprices.com/retail_price_chart.aspx
I've often thought that a higher tax would be needed to change behavior and as far as I can tell right now even with a 50 cents tax I don't see us (personally with all our errands and kids activities) changing our driving habits in the short run (at least for the next 2-3 years). We've got to go where we've got to go. See Matthew Kahn's "The Environmental Impact of Suburbanization" in Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (2000). However, here's a story that contradicts my point:
The high cost of gasoline has helped fuel a sharp increase in MBTA riders over the first two months of the year and a decrease in the number and length of traffic jams, according to T officials and traffic specialists. The number of T trips rose from 27 million in February 2007 to nearly 30 million in February 2008, up more than 11 percent for the month, Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority officials said. The numbers were up about 5 percent for January. Combined, the average increase is 8.3 percent.
I don't see a similar story for the Washington region however with its Metro system chronically underfunded and overstretched.
Studies of the price elasticity of gasoline are inconclusive. For instance, Thomas Sterner's
"Fuel taxes: An important instrument for climate policy" published in Energy Policy (2006) finds the elasticity to be high but only in the long run but does not address how long the long run is. Jonathan E. Hughes, Christopher R. Knittel, and Daniel Sperling's "Evidence of a Shift in the Short-Run Price Elasticity of Gasoline Demand", UCEI WP (2006) finds "that gasoline taxes would need to be significantly larger today in order to achieve an equivalent reduction in gasoline consumption."
Lastly, a cautionary tale from Monica Prasad:
"But a carbon tax isn’t a new idea. Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden have had carbon taxes in place since the 1990s, but the tax has not led to large declines in emissions in most of these countries — in the case of Norway, emissions have actually increased by 43 percent per capita. An economist might say this is fine; as long as the cost of the environmental damage is being internalized, the tax is working — and emissions might have been even higher without the tax. But what environmentalist would be happy with a 43 percent increase in emissions?"
Friday, November 30, 2007
Deforestation
I had previously wondered here about the source for Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth claim that 30 percent of CO2 was from forest burning. I'm reading this claim here by Nicholas Stern on Voxeu although the number is lower (probably because the base is greenhouse gases and not C02).
... there should be a coherent, integrated international programme to combat deforestation, which contributes 15-20% of greenhouse gas emissions...
Unfortunately, there is no source for this either although he notes this as a way to decrease GHG. Gore did not target this in his book which I had thought was a a large source of GHG.
... there should be a coherent, integrated international programme to combat deforestation, which contributes 15-20% of greenhouse gas emissions...
Unfortunately, there is no source for this either although he notes this as a way to decrease GHG. Gore did not target this in his book which I had thought was a a large source of GHG.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
I wish An Inconvenient Truth had footnotes
Liked the book and the movie but I've been trying to find the source of this passage:
Much of the forest destruction comes from burning. Almost 30% of the CO2 released into the atmosphere each year is a result of the burning of brushland for subsistence agriculture and wood fires used for cooking. (p. 227)
This seems like one area to target but the book does not discuss it.
Much of the forest destruction comes from burning. Almost 30% of the CO2 released into the atmosphere each year is a result of the burning of brushland for subsistence agriculture and wood fires used for cooking. (p. 227)
This seems like one area to target but the book does not discuss it.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Climate engineering
Prof. Mankiw and Economists View (probably among many others) blogged about this NYT article: How to Cool the Globe. I thought I'd link to an article I just read at Wilson Quarterly called Climate Engineers by James Fleming. Here's an excerpt:
“Mitigation is not happening and is not going to happen,” physicist Lowell Wood declared at the NASA conference. Wood, the star of the gathering, spent four decades at the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he served as one of the Pentagon’s chief weapon designers and threat analysts. (He reportedly enjoys the “Dr. Evil” nickname bestowed by his critics.) The time has come, he said, for “an intelligent elimination of undesired heat from the biosphere by technical ways and means,” which, he asserted, could be achieved for a tiny fraction of the cost of “the bureaucratic suppression of CO2.” His engineering approach, he boasted, would provide “instant climatic gratification.”
Wood advanced several ideas to “fix” the earth’s climate, including building up Arctic sea ice to make it function like a planetary air conditioner to “suck heat in from the midlatitude heat bath.” A “surprisingly practical” way of achieving this, he said, would be to use large artillery pieces to shoot as much as a million tons of highly reflective sulfate aerosols or specially engineered nanoparticles into the Arctic stratosphere to deflect the sun’s rays. Delivering up to a million tons of material via artillery would require a constant bombardment—basically declaring war on the stratosphere. Alternatively, a fleet of B-747 “crop dusters” could deliver the particles by flying continuously around the Arctic Circle. Or a 25-kilometer-long sky hose could be tethered to a military superblimp high above the planet’s surface to pump reflective particles into the atmosphere.
“Mitigation is not happening and is not going to happen,” physicist Lowell Wood declared at the NASA conference. Wood, the star of the gathering, spent four decades at the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he served as one of the Pentagon’s chief weapon designers and threat analysts. (He reportedly enjoys the “Dr. Evil” nickname bestowed by his critics.) The time has come, he said, for “an intelligent elimination of undesired heat from the biosphere by technical ways and means,” which, he asserted, could be achieved for a tiny fraction of the cost of “the bureaucratic suppression of CO2.” His engineering approach, he boasted, would provide “instant climatic gratification.”
Wood advanced several ideas to “fix” the earth’s climate, including building up Arctic sea ice to make it function like a planetary air conditioner to “suck heat in from the midlatitude heat bath.” A “surprisingly practical” way of achieving this, he said, would be to use large artillery pieces to shoot as much as a million tons of highly reflective sulfate aerosols or specially engineered nanoparticles into the Arctic stratosphere to deflect the sun’s rays. Delivering up to a million tons of material via artillery would require a constant bombardment—basically declaring war on the stratosphere. Alternatively, a fleet of B-747 “crop dusters” could deliver the particles by flying continuously around the Arctic Circle. Or a 25-kilometer-long sky hose could be tethered to a military superblimp high above the planet’s surface to pump reflective particles into the atmosphere.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Comparing economic research to meteorological research
From Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming by Chris Mooney.
While reading this it is hard not to draw parallels between economic modeling and weather forecasting - the balance between models and data and the need to simplify the models:
On comparing models with data: Theoretically based predictions, however, don't hit you in the gut like hard data. (p. 8)
[This] seems to be a rule in our science: progress is impeded by want of meteorological knowledge on the part of theoreticians and by a too poor mathematical training of weather-men.
-Swedish meteorologist Tor Bergeron, "Methods in Scientific Weather Analysis and Forecasting", 1959 (Introduction to Part I)
... in the absence of a complete theoretical understanding, models themselves can become the source of experiments. Vary the equations or other aspects of the model, plug the data back in, and see how much closer to reality you can get. But from the perspective of some scientific empricists, this seemed an ungrounded and even suspicious way of doing things. "Tuning" the models to make them line up better with observations sounded like rigging the game. (p. 50)
For an analysis of season length, the record breaking 2005 Atlantic hurricane year provided only one data point and could not in itself justify broader conclusions. (p. 179)
Yet data alone, without a physical understanding of what's happening, can also blind and mislead. Correlations don't prove causation. Sahel rainfall can change in lockstep with Atlantic hurricanes without causing changes in that activity. ... That's why any healthy science will inevitably balance both theoretical and empirical approaches. ... No such model result should be considered an unerring prediction; instead climate models are perhaps most useful when employed to test hypotheses thtat scientists come up with about how the real world works, and what is likely to happen if various natural or human influences occur in the future. Whatever the inevitable shortcomings of a given model, if it contains the relevant phyiscal processes and gives the expected result, the hypothesis has at least been confirmed within the constraints of that particular model. (pp. 268-269)
On simplifying features in models and fads in the field:
CISK (conditional instability of the second kind) had a number of key problems, many of which sprang from the attempt, so characteristic of Charney, to strip hurricanes down to mathematical essentials rather than study them in their full-blownn reality. (p. 52)
"There are fashions in science, and that was a fashion," recalls University of Oklahoma meteorologist Doug Lilly, a skeptic of CISK who supported a "heat engine" revival in the 1980s. (p. 52)
From the 1960s until the 1980s, when it began to fall out of favor, CISK thus distracted attentiona away from the concept of hurricanes as ocean-driven "heat engines." In fairness, the theory also prompted a great deal of thinking - wrong ideas can be productive in that way. But CISK has also been characterized as a "setback" for the field ... By then, however, CISK was well on its way to becoming yet another dominant paradigm. (p. 53)
... [William] Gray replied, "and the trouble with that is they don't know how the atmosphere ticks. They're modelers. The're people that make assumptions that are not valid, and they believe them." (p. 174)
Judith Curry on interactions with media, politics and science which were excised from her article:
The prevailing views on the topic of hurricanes and global change differ considerably between hurricane forecasters and climate researchers. The consensus view of hurricane forecasters is to attribute the warming in the North Atlantic and the associated in increase in hurricane frequency and intensity to natural variability. The consensus view of climate researchers is to attribute the warming, particularly since 1970, to have a substantial component associated with greenhouse warming. These discrepancies can be understood at least in part by clarifying the source of these differing perspectives. The hurricane forecaster focuses on predicting the path and intensity of land falling hurricanes, and also makes seasonal forecasts. They work on verifying their forecasts, and they are also experts on hurricane data. On the other hand, the climate researcher does not focus on forecasting but rather applies the scientific method to understanding the underlying physical processes and causes of climate variability. The climate researcher has expertise on climate data records and statistical methods. (pp. 237-238)
The rest of the excised material is the following paragraph from RealClimate.org:
The richness of the meteorological community, including both scientific researchers and the operational forecasting community, provides the community with both benefits and challenges. As a result of the utility of operational forecasting and the utility of the reanalysis products, some sloppy practices have crept into the meteorological research community in terms of careful assessment of the errors of data sets and hypothesis testing. The public views the meteorological community in a monolithic way and seems prepared to accept the opinions of TV weather forecasters on issues such as global warming, in spite of the fact that this community has most often no expertise on this topic. A dichotomy has developed in the U.S. between the operational forecasting community and the meteorological research community, a dichotomy that does not exist in Europe. Some of the most challenging scientific issues that are also of the highest policy relevance are at the interface of climate change and weather extremes. The operational forecasting communities and the research communities need to work together on these issues, and NOAA and the AMS can play a major role in facilitating this collaboration. We must make every effort to avoid institutionalized scientific bias in our community, whereby an organization or group of scientists or other professionals discount what is not known by them personally or collectively, or a group of scientists becomes protective of a scientific research area as being their ‘turf’. The end result of this debate is likely to be that this public fragmentation of the meteorological community has generally lessened the possibility for this community to influence policy.
[These are comments by Judith Curry on Real Climate].
While the subject matter of atmospheric science and forecast meteorology shares much common ground, forecast meteorologists operate in more of an engineering environment relative to the research branch of atmospheric science (I value a good weather forecast as much as anyone!). Bill Gray is an interesting ‘hybridâ’ in that while he worked for decades in the university environment and publishes frequently in the scientific literature, his heritage and mode of thinking seems to be more in line with the meteorological forecasting community (Bill Gray’s lengthy interview with Joel Achenbach would seem to support this characterization).
Meteorologists with a B.S. degree (note many TV meteorologists do not even have this credential) would rarely take a course in climate and global change; this course is not even listed on the NOAA/NWS or AMS certification guidelines for meteorologists. This lack of knowledge even trickles up to the Ph.D. level in meteorology, where I suspect many Ph.D. meteorologists have never taken a course in climate and global change. Further, the entire meteorological education is focused on forecasting: understanding short-term weather patterns, looking for analogues, etc. and the ‘experience’ of weather forecasters is actually important here in being able to call up ‘analogues’ of past disturbances or seasons. Bill Gray certainly has more experience than anyone in this regard in the hurricane world, which is why he has made statements that he is the authority and that ‘we’ are not qualified (again, refer to the Achenbach article), and the length of his experience (50 years) contributes mightily to the support of his views in the hurricane forecasting community. This is vastly different from the research community, whereby a Ph.D. student can legitimately and effectively challenge the research of a Nobel Laureate through the refereed scientific literature. Further, owing to the emphasis on forecasting, this community does not operate in the same way that atmospheric science researchers (outside the forecasting community) operate in terms of hypothesis testing etc., which is why I focused the article in terms of laying out the scientific method, fallacies, etc. (note all of the fallacies came from the hurricane forecasting community via the media; I included specific citations in the 2nd version of the paper, but this was also nixed). Even among Ph.D. meteorologists, global warming is not widely accepted. In addition to the issues previously raised, there has been some ‘resentment’ among the meteorological community about the success (particularly in terms of funding) of the U.S. climate research programs, which they view as coming at the expense of meteorological/weather research (with initiatives such as STORM, the U.S. Weather Research Program, THORPEX receiving orders of magnitude less funding).
This issue re funding for climate science has been mentioned numerous times by Bill Gray in the media. Am I criticizing forecast meteorologists? I highly value their forecasts, and believe that they are for the most part hardworking and honest human beings (although I have my doubts about of few of them in the private sector), and many of them are probably quite brilliant. But something is wrong with the system, and this brings us to NOAA (and to a lesser extent the American Meteorological Society).
Mix all of the above with a ‘political agenda’ that is anti-greenhouse warming with the Undersecretary of NOAA (a political appointee) saying that we do not know what to attribute the recent warming to, then we have a complex situation indeed. NOAA is a large and complex organization, and I don’t envy anyone that is trying to administer all that. But the hurricane and global warming debate has illuminated some glaring problems in my opinion. There is a substantial disconnect between the various branches of NOAA: there are numerous NOAA agencies with substantial expertise in climate change global warming, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), the Boulder Labs, and GFDL to name a few. Apparently there is little to no interaction of these agencies with the National Weather Service NWS (although there is apparently some interaction with GFDL). This lack of interaction is to the detriment of both scientific research and the forecasts. The Europeans (notably ECMWF) do not have the dichotomy between forecasting and research, and weather and climate that we see in the U.S., and their forecasts are far better than those in the U.S. (particularly ECMWF).
Now, to the American Meteorological Society, of which I am an active member and have previously served as Councillor. 20 years ago, the AMS was the main professional society for atmospheric scientists: NOAA, university, and private sector with the majority of members from NOAA. As atmospheric sciences broadened as a field and became more interdisciplinary, many of the university types became affiliated primarily with the American Geophysical Union, which is dominated by research scientists. Most of the ‘older’ atmospheric scientists (like me) have maintained a membership in the AMS, but the demographics of the AMS are now such that the membership is approaching 50% private sector. The AMS however maintains an excellent series of scientific journals which score at least as high as the AGU journals in terms of citations/impact. The AMS has struggled in recent years with the conflicts between public sector (NOAA) meteorologists and private sector meteorologists. There is obviously another challenge for the AMS in bridging the broader community of forecast meteorologists with the research community particularly on the topic of climate change.
Particularly on the hurricane and global warming issue, Peter Webster and I are now ‘card carrying’ members of the tropical listserv (Emanuel and Holland are long term members) which is the main venue for communications mostly about hurricanes by operational forecasters with researchers mainly seeming to lurk and occasionally post (note this is not a blog, but a private listserv). I posted the BAMS article on this listserv, so far no one has posted any public responses (although I have received a few personal emails). Obviously a very different response from the realclimate community.
We certainly live in interesting times, and the blogosphere adds a unique element to this, I appreciate the opportunity for a venue to post what I couldn’t publish on the topic.
While reading this it is hard not to draw parallels between economic modeling and weather forecasting - the balance between models and data and the need to simplify the models:
On comparing models with data: Theoretically based predictions, however, don't hit you in the gut like hard data. (p. 8)
[This] seems to be a rule in our science: progress is impeded by want of meteorological knowledge on the part of theoreticians and by a too poor mathematical training of weather-men.
-Swedish meteorologist Tor Bergeron, "Methods in Scientific Weather Analysis and Forecasting", 1959 (Introduction to Part I)
... in the absence of a complete theoretical understanding, models themselves can become the source of experiments. Vary the equations or other aspects of the model, plug the data back in, and see how much closer to reality you can get. But from the perspective of some scientific empricists, this seemed an ungrounded and even suspicious way of doing things. "Tuning" the models to make them line up better with observations sounded like rigging the game. (p. 50)
For an analysis of season length, the record breaking 2005 Atlantic hurricane year provided only one data point and could not in itself justify broader conclusions. (p. 179)
Yet data alone, without a physical understanding of what's happening, can also blind and mislead. Correlations don't prove causation. Sahel rainfall can change in lockstep with Atlantic hurricanes without causing changes in that activity. ... That's why any healthy science will inevitably balance both theoretical and empirical approaches. ... No such model result should be considered an unerring prediction; instead climate models are perhaps most useful when employed to test hypotheses thtat scientists come up with about how the real world works, and what is likely to happen if various natural or human influences occur in the future. Whatever the inevitable shortcomings of a given model, if it contains the relevant phyiscal processes and gives the expected result, the hypothesis has at least been confirmed within the constraints of that particular model. (pp. 268-269)
On simplifying features in models and fads in the field:
CISK (conditional instability of the second kind) had a number of key problems, many of which sprang from the attempt, so characteristic of Charney, to strip hurricanes down to mathematical essentials rather than study them in their full-blownn reality. (p. 52)
"There are fashions in science, and that was a fashion," recalls University of Oklahoma meteorologist Doug Lilly, a skeptic of CISK who supported a "heat engine" revival in the 1980s. (p. 52)
From the 1960s until the 1980s, when it began to fall out of favor, CISK thus distracted attentiona away from the concept of hurricanes as ocean-driven "heat engines." In fairness, the theory also prompted a great deal of thinking - wrong ideas can be productive in that way. But CISK has also been characterized as a "setback" for the field ... By then, however, CISK was well on its way to becoming yet another dominant paradigm. (p. 53)
... [William] Gray replied, "and the trouble with that is they don't know how the atmosphere ticks. They're modelers. The're people that make assumptions that are not valid, and they believe them." (p. 174)
Judith Curry on interactions with media, politics and science which were excised from her article:
The prevailing views on the topic of hurricanes and global change differ considerably between hurricane forecasters and climate researchers. The consensus view of hurricane forecasters is to attribute the warming in the North Atlantic and the associated in increase in hurricane frequency and intensity to natural variability. The consensus view of climate researchers is to attribute the warming, particularly since 1970, to have a substantial component associated with greenhouse warming. These discrepancies can be understood at least in part by clarifying the source of these differing perspectives. The hurricane forecaster focuses on predicting the path and intensity of land falling hurricanes, and also makes seasonal forecasts. They work on verifying their forecasts, and they are also experts on hurricane data. On the other hand, the climate researcher does not focus on forecasting but rather applies the scientific method to understanding the underlying physical processes and causes of climate variability. The climate researcher has expertise on climate data records and statistical methods. (pp. 237-238)
The rest of the excised material is the following paragraph from RealClimate.org:
The richness of the meteorological community, including both scientific researchers and the operational forecasting community, provides the community with both benefits and challenges. As a result of the utility of operational forecasting and the utility of the reanalysis products, some sloppy practices have crept into the meteorological research community in terms of careful assessment of the errors of data sets and hypothesis testing. The public views the meteorological community in a monolithic way and seems prepared to accept the opinions of TV weather forecasters on issues such as global warming, in spite of the fact that this community has most often no expertise on this topic. A dichotomy has developed in the U.S. between the operational forecasting community and the meteorological research community, a dichotomy that does not exist in Europe. Some of the most challenging scientific issues that are also of the highest policy relevance are at the interface of climate change and weather extremes. The operational forecasting communities and the research communities need to work together on these issues, and NOAA and the AMS can play a major role in facilitating this collaboration. We must make every effort to avoid institutionalized scientific bias in our community, whereby an organization or group of scientists or other professionals discount what is not known by them personally or collectively, or a group of scientists becomes protective of a scientific research area as being their ‘turf’. The end result of this debate is likely to be that this public fragmentation of the meteorological community has generally lessened the possibility for this community to influence policy.
[These are comments by Judith Curry on Real Climate].
While the subject matter of atmospheric science and forecast meteorology shares much common ground, forecast meteorologists operate in more of an engineering environment relative to the research branch of atmospheric science (I value a good weather forecast as much as anyone!). Bill Gray is an interesting ‘hybridâ’ in that while he worked for decades in the university environment and publishes frequently in the scientific literature, his heritage and mode of thinking seems to be more in line with the meteorological forecasting community (Bill Gray’s lengthy interview with Joel Achenbach would seem to support this characterization).
Meteorologists with a B.S. degree (note many TV meteorologists do not even have this credential) would rarely take a course in climate and global change; this course is not even listed on the NOAA/NWS or AMS certification guidelines for meteorologists. This lack of knowledge even trickles up to the Ph.D. level in meteorology, where I suspect many Ph.D. meteorologists have never taken a course in climate and global change. Further, the entire meteorological education is focused on forecasting: understanding short-term weather patterns, looking for analogues, etc. and the ‘experience’ of weather forecasters is actually important here in being able to call up ‘analogues’ of past disturbances or seasons. Bill Gray certainly has more experience than anyone in this regard in the hurricane world, which is why he has made statements that he is the authority and that ‘we’ are not qualified (again, refer to the Achenbach article), and the length of his experience (50 years) contributes mightily to the support of his views in the hurricane forecasting community. This is vastly different from the research community, whereby a Ph.D. student can legitimately and effectively challenge the research of a Nobel Laureate through the refereed scientific literature. Further, owing to the emphasis on forecasting, this community does not operate in the same way that atmospheric science researchers (outside the forecasting community) operate in terms of hypothesis testing etc., which is why I focused the article in terms of laying out the scientific method, fallacies, etc. (note all of the fallacies came from the hurricane forecasting community via the media; I included specific citations in the 2nd version of the paper, but this was also nixed). Even among Ph.D. meteorologists, global warming is not widely accepted. In addition to the issues previously raised, there has been some ‘resentment’ among the meteorological community about the success (particularly in terms of funding) of the U.S. climate research programs, which they view as coming at the expense of meteorological/weather research (with initiatives such as STORM, the U.S. Weather Research Program, THORPEX receiving orders of magnitude less funding).
This issue re funding for climate science has been mentioned numerous times by Bill Gray in the media. Am I criticizing forecast meteorologists? I highly value their forecasts, and believe that they are for the most part hardworking and honest human beings (although I have my doubts about of few of them in the private sector), and many of them are probably quite brilliant. But something is wrong with the system, and this brings us to NOAA (and to a lesser extent the American Meteorological Society).
Mix all of the above with a ‘political agenda’ that is anti-greenhouse warming with the Undersecretary of NOAA (a political appointee) saying that we do not know what to attribute the recent warming to, then we have a complex situation indeed. NOAA is a large and complex organization, and I don’t envy anyone that is trying to administer all that. But the hurricane and global warming debate has illuminated some glaring problems in my opinion. There is a substantial disconnect between the various branches of NOAA: there are numerous NOAA agencies with substantial expertise in climate change global warming, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), the Boulder Labs, and GFDL to name a few. Apparently there is little to no interaction of these agencies with the National Weather Service NWS (although there is apparently some interaction with GFDL). This lack of interaction is to the detriment of both scientific research and the forecasts. The Europeans (notably ECMWF) do not have the dichotomy between forecasting and research, and weather and climate that we see in the U.S., and their forecasts are far better than those in the U.S. (particularly ECMWF).
Now, to the American Meteorological Society, of which I am an active member and have previously served as Councillor. 20 years ago, the AMS was the main professional society for atmospheric scientists: NOAA, university, and private sector with the majority of members from NOAA. As atmospheric sciences broadened as a field and became more interdisciplinary, many of the university types became affiliated primarily with the American Geophysical Union, which is dominated by research scientists. Most of the ‘older’ atmospheric scientists (like me) have maintained a membership in the AMS, but the demographics of the AMS are now such that the membership is approaching 50% private sector. The AMS however maintains an excellent series of scientific journals which score at least as high as the AGU journals in terms of citations/impact. The AMS has struggled in recent years with the conflicts between public sector (NOAA) meteorologists and private sector meteorologists. There is obviously another challenge for the AMS in bridging the broader community of forecast meteorologists with the research community particularly on the topic of climate change.
Particularly on the hurricane and global warming issue, Peter Webster and I are now ‘card carrying’ members of the tropical listserv (Emanuel and Holland are long term members) which is the main venue for communications mostly about hurricanes by operational forecasters with researchers mainly seeming to lurk and occasionally post (note this is not a blog, but a private listserv). I posted the BAMS article on this listserv, so far no one has posted any public responses (although I have received a few personal emails). Obviously a very different response from the realclimate community.
We certainly live in interesting times, and the blogosphere adds a unique element to this, I appreciate the opportunity for a venue to post what I couldn’t publish on the topic.
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