ClimatePolicy

Requirements vs Requirements of scientists

I sit in my share of meetings on models and modeling. I listen to plans about model development and impassioned statements of the importance of “the science.” There are struggles on how to make the interface to other communities, the proverbial policymaker. In a room full of scientists they always come around to the need to follow “the science.”

What does it mean to follow “the science?” Science is a process of investigation – a method. It is one of several ways that we generate and accumulate knowledge.

Following the science always generates a number of research projects, which usually fall on two paths. There is the path of inclusion - adding additional processes to models, for example, adding land-ice parameterizations, making the carbon-cycle interactive or improving the radiative treatment of aerosols. There is a path of higher resolution and increased rigor and accuracy in a component model like the atmosphere; for example, moving to algorithms that represent the non-hydrostatic processes in the atmosphere and resolve the behavior of cloud systems. This is the path of increased fidelity to the first principles of physics – or chemistry, or biology. There is always tension between increased fidelity and more inclusion. The tension is related to both limited computational and intellectual resources.

The motivations that drive the advocacy for these different paths are well grounded. In general, a group of priorities rise to the top, and they address, demonstrably, important problems. The importance is determined, often, by uncertainty. For example, the uncertainty associated with the model’s ability or inability to represent clouds. Since increased clouds provide a cooling term, determination of changes to clouds are important to knowing how fast the planet will warm.

Scientists identify the uncertainties and the source of the uncertainties. They develop strategies to address these uncertainties. The determination of priorities to address these uncertainties is an imperfect process, and the “requirements” appear as a list of important problems. Outside of the science community, the value of addressing these uncertainties might be unclear.

The publication of the 2007 IPCC report fundamentally changes the demand for climate information by society. This challenges the traditional approach of developing requirements for model development based on the uncertainties of climate predictions. The result of this challenge will be two paths of scientific investigation: a traditional path of basic research that is focused on addressing the greatest uncertainties in climate predictions, and a second path that develops science-based climate information based on requirements that come from a wide variety of applications. This second path is applied research.

To some extent, both paths currently exist, but the exploding demand for climate information will amplify the applied research path. For a given application, for example the impact of the development of a large corn-based ethanol energy capability, it is possible to analyze the impact on water resources and carbon balances. An analysis can be made from existing data bases of observations and simulation experiments. But this is a process that relies largely on using information that was developed to perform basic research of the climate system. The details of the application extend the information in these data bases beyond the purposes for which the information was developed. Spatial and temporal resolution are, perhaps, too coarse; the impact of urban environments and water engineering not adequately considered. It would be possible to design numerical experiments with existing models and computational resources that would provide science-based investigation with, potentially, much more robust information for the application at hand.

The process of developing models to address the uncertainties in the climate system, the requirements of scientists, are often of little relevance to addressing the applications that are important for adaptation to climate change. Improvement of the representation of marine stratus clouds, a priority in improving our understanding of the climate system, will not be consequential to the water resource manager in the western United States. ( blog on role of uncertainty )

The time scale for the development of policy is, now, a small number of years. The life time for energy infrastructure is a small number of decades, and decisions on the nature of expenditures in energy infrastructure are needed today. The development and implementation of strategies to manage water in an environment where less water is stored in ice and snow are already under consideration. ( California water and climate change ) The design and funding of adaptation plans for societal infrastructure near sea level is imperative. ( Impacts of Climate Variability and Change on Transportation Systems and Infrastructure — Gulf Coast Study ) The information needed for these decisions will be demanded on time scales that are much shorter than the development cycles of climate models that are pursuing traditional scientific development paths.

It is imperative that the climate science community develop the capabilities to provide the best science-based answers to these externally posed applications at any given time. A natural response to this demand for information is the development of a climate service, perhaps in the spirit of the National Weather Service. In the U.S. this approach to providing environmental information has often led to the dichotomy of research versus operations. In this dichotomy the flow from research to operations is inefficient. We need a more modern approach.

This is a blog, not an essay … stopping here - looking for reactions.

r

Figure 1: From the European Sea Level Service , a focused collaborative organization.

Share This

Waiting Until We Are Sure:

I also write a blog at Wunderground.com. Since November the number of comments on that blog has exploded. Thousands and thousands of words are being written. Some things in the comments are crude, there is some good argument, and complaints about what might be called the climate change machine. Most of the people who write comments at Wunderground.com are people with more than a casual interest in the weather and the environment. They put up maps and figures. It will be interesting to look back on these comments some years from now.

I tried to extract and summarize some of the concepts that were appearing in the comments to the blog. (Here they are.) This blog will address one of the ideas that keeps coming up – uncertainty. There were a number of comments about uncertainty and the fact that our knowledge about climate change is based on model predictions. Several times and in several ways people have said “shouldn’t we wait until we are sure?”

Uncertainty is a part of science. Science does not systematically reveal a list of facts. Science is a process which involves the development and testing of hypotheses. The process is, formally, also transparent so that others can independently test the hypothesis. The process of science, the scientific-method, is not perfect, and it is not independent of the skills and emotions of its practitioners. However, it is, in general, a robust process that is open to challenge and testing. The knowledge generated by the scientific method is subject to change. A good scientific study generates a statement about what is learned, perhaps the knowledge, and a statement about what is uncertain in the determination of that knowledge.

Facts are developed over time, and could be viewed as knowledge whose uncertainty is very low. Theories evolve out of hypotheses that reveal related information.

Models: Models are used in all aspects of scientific investigation. Models are used in architecture and in economics. In fact, models are used in every day life. We use a model when we estimate how long it will take us to drive from home to work. We have the pure model that is distance divided the speed that we travel. We have the version of the model that determines whether or not we take the street with many traffic signals or the longer freeway that does not have traffic signals. We have the version of the model that worries about the possibility of congestion or traffic accidents. We consider rush hour, holiday traffic, the need to stop and get a taco, and whether or not 70,000 people are going to see a re-united Led Zeppelin as the opening act for “An Inconvenient Truth.” We have the model that follows from experience; that is, what have we learned from many years of commuting to work. We have an idea of how long it will take to get to work and some sense of uncertainty. Often we can collect information from traffic reports that help us define and refine the uncertainty for any particular commute. Models are everywhere; imperfect models are everywhere; and we use them to make decisions. (This model of distance = time X speed is not unrelated to a weather or climate model, which calculates the motion of air parcels.)

Types of models:

Intuitive or heuristic models: There are intuitive or heuristic models that come from our experience and observations. These types of models help us, in the beginning, to develop hypotheses. After much study, heuristic models allow us to extract the most important processes that describe the behavior of a set of observations.

Statistical Models: Statistical models are a formalized statement of our experience. We observe the behavior, and we define the mean of the observations and how the observations vary from that mean. We search for relationships that organize and define the variability; often we look for periodicity. Statistical models are often used to describe the stock market, and as William Sharpe said “The key issue is that past performance is a thin reed for how to predict future performance. …”

Physical Models: Another type of model is the physical model, which is based on physics that describe the behavior of the observations. For example, how far an air parcel moves depends on how fast the air parcel is moving and the forces that influence that motion. The strength of the physical model is that we have cause and effect, and with cause and effect we increase our confidence in the predictions that come from models.

All of these models are related; all have their use. For a physical system, like the climate, we often describe the behavior statistically and then work to extract the physical relationship that describes the behavior described by the statistics. The climate of the Earth is a complex system with many interacting physical processes of varying importance. The climate system is made up of many sub-systems. Some of these systems and processes we understand well; some we do not.

Decisions: We always make decisions in the presence of uncertainty. In fact a weakness often pointed out in sociology and management texts is the fallacy of waiting for uncertainty to be eliminated. It is skill or art to know when the uncertainty is at some sweet spot for decision making. It is my opinion that one of the weaknesses of U.S. climate science activities was the idea prevalent in the 1990’s that our investments in science would reduce the uncertainty for “decision makers.”

In decisions that are based on scientific investigation one must realize there will always be uncertainty. Good science includes an estimate of uncertainty. Uncertainty will be reduced for some aspects of investigation. In complex systems new sources of uncertainty will be revealed. This uncertainty can always be used to keep decisions from being made. Uncertainty can always be used to keep policy from converging. It is a form of argument, of rhetoric, of belief. ( Uncertainty and Climate Policy Blog at climatepolicy.org )

If we look at the climate problem then with high certainty we can say that the Earth’s surface will warm. Similarly, we can say that ice will melt and sea level will rise. It is far less certain what we can say about the specifics of regional drought and floods, but we can say with some confidence that the statistical behavior will change. People can and will make decisions in the face of uncertainty.

In the climate problem the non-scientific sources of uncertainty are, now, of much greater concern than scientific uncertainty. One of the reasons than businesses are so interested in the development of policy, is that the uncertainty of what the policy will be impacts the ability to make business decisions. As I pointed out in my report from the meeting on Chicago area businesses, these businesses see that we are past the point of arguing about the basic science; they need to know the policy environment in which they will be operating. ( Corporate Climate Response (Chicago) )

Conclusion: The argument that we must wait until we are sure is not the way we work as individuals or as groups or as a society. We always operate in the presence of uncertainty, and we choose which uncertainties we give priority. In the climate problem it is a point of argument, of rhetoric, or belief. Some will decide that the uncertainty is defined well enough to support their decision making; others will decide that the uncertainty is too large to support decision making. As with virtually every other aspect of life, these will form two groups, which can be described by the number of people in the groups, and if one group is much larger than the other then some will be motivated to say that there is a consensus. (Consensus (American Heritage Dictionary) 1. An opinion or position reached by a group as a whole. 2. General agreement or accord.)

Often if we wait until we are sure, then it is too late.

rbr

Wunderground.com prototype climate page.

Share This

The 2007 UN-sponsored climate change negotiations opened in Bali, Indonesia this week. By the end of the conference on December 14, the world community may agree to a two-year “roadmap,” as called for by the UN Secretary-General, for negotiating an agreement to guide climate change mitigation efforts after the end of the Kyoto Protocol’s 2008-2012 commitment period. A number of academics, analysts, nongovernmental organizations and related processes have proposed various ways of moving forward with international climate change policy, including the Pew Center on Global Climate Change’s Dialogue at Pocantico, the UN Foundation and the Club of Madrid’s Global Leadership for Climate Action, and the Centre for Global Studies’ L20 concept of engaging the most important developed and developing countries on this issue, which is similar to the Bush Administration’s Big Economies process.

Rob Stavins of the John F. Kennedy School of Government and I are leading the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements to complement these other efforts and to help identify key design elements of a scientifically sound, economically rational, and politically pragmatic post-2012 international policy architecture for global climate change. This project, funded as a part of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s Climate Policy Initiative, builds on the book we co-edited and recently published by Cambridge University Press, Architectures for Agreement: Addressing Global Climate Change in the Post-Kyoto World. The book provides six proposals for international climate policy architectures that span much of the policy space from centralized, top-down regimes akin to the Kyoto agreement to decentralized, bottom-up pledge and review approaches. Summaries of these proposals can be found at the Harvard Project website. The Harvard Project will undertake more analysis and research over the coming year to develop a small menu of promising frameworks and design principles and conduct outreach to inform relevant policymakers in the United States and around the world in late 2008 and 2009. Through the project, we will commission work from scholars in a variety of disciplines, including political science, law, economics, international relations, and the natural sciences from the developed and developing world.

Our focus on delivering new ideas over 2008 reflects the expectation that Bali will simply provide a framework to initiate a new negotiation. The Bali framework will focus efforts to craft a successor to the Kyoto Protocol by the 2009 UN climate change negotiations in Copenhagen. While I do not want to prejudge the outcome of our efforts through the Harvard Project, let me identify three objectives that I believe should be addressed on the road to Copenhagen.

1. The world has changed since 1992; so should our approach to differentiation. The Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol differentiate between two categories of countries: Annex I and Non-Annex I. The former, including most industrialized countries, have quantitative emission targets under the Kyoto Protocol, while the latter, primarily developing countries, do not. Many non-Annex I countries argue that they are too poor to take on commitments in the next agreement. But a review of the most recent data on per capita incomes (on a purchasing power parity basis from the Penn World Table ) shows that Romania, the poorest country with a target under Kyoto, now has lower income than more than 50 non-Annex I countries that don’t have targets. More than 110 countries in the world now have higher per capita incomes than the poorest country that agreed to join Annex I in the Framework Convention in 1990 (when the FCCC negotiation process began). The successor to Kyoto should reflect this changed world, and pursue a “variable geometry” of commitments. A more effective climate policy should break the two-class model and allow for greater gradation in commitments among countries.

2. We need to provide better incentives for participation and compliance. The status quo does not require four of the five largest emitting countries in the world to abate their emissions: the United States (1st in emissions) walked away from the Kyoto Protocol, China (2nd) and India (5th) do not have commitments under the agreement, and Russia (3rd) received such a lax target that it will not have to take any action to comply with its commitment. Moreover, there are clear signs now that a number of countries will have problems complying with their Kyoto commitments. Canada’s 2005 emissions of all greenhouse gases including land use change are a whopping 64% above its Kyoto target! Japan’s emissions are 14% above its Kyoto target, although many expect Japan to purchase credits and allowances through the global carbon market established under the agreement to ensure its compliance. The fast-growing periphery countries of the old EU-15 are well above their commitments, despite the generous reallocation within the EU-15 to give these countries more emission allowances. Spain (with an EU reallocated target of 1990+15%) is 39% above its target; Portugal (1990+27%) is 10% above its target; and Ireland (1990+13%) is also 10% above its target. With the large economies not required to abate greenhouse gas emissions and many other countries hard-pressed to comply with Kyoto, the next agreement needs to provide the right incentives for countries to participate more fully and, once they agree to participate, to undertake policies and actions necessary to ensure their compliance.

3. The goal of climate change policy should be to mitigate risks of global climate change. The Kyoto Protocol focuses primarily on emission mitigation. While it is laudable to aim to prevent climate change risks from occurring, we should also pursue policies that recognize that the climate is already changing and will continue to change even with ambitious emission abatement efforts. This suggests that we should also mitigate climate change risks through adaptation, i.e., we need to get used to some climate change. Efforts should be undertaken to facilitate adaptation in the most vulnerable developing countries that lack the resources and capacity to adapt to climate change without such assistance. In some cases, the best form of adaptation may be economic development. In other cases, more focused policies to promote climate-related adaptation may be merited.

An agreement that can address these issues could constitute a meaningful and productive next step after the Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period.

Finally, let me note that if you are attending the Bali COP, then please join us for the
Harvard Project side event at 15:30 Monday December 10 in the Solar Room at the Grand Hyatt. If you can’t make it, feel free to check out the Harvard Project website and sign up for e-alerts if you would like to learn more about our efforts.

Share This

Climate Management 101 — 4. Organizing or Not (Open Source?)

In this series I have maintained that there is a need for a sustained management of the climate. The global scale of the problem of controlling greenhouse gas emissions, the exceedingly long time scale before there are realizable benefits from our actions, the fact that the climate change problem is strongly correlated with energy consumption and societal success – these and an array of similarly enormous factors both demand and defy management.

Climate change is to a good approximation a problem of energy consumption. Energy resources are stressed, and there is growing energy-related stress on the economy and national security. The energy problem is urgent and immediate and will demand attention. It is possible to address the urgency of the energy demand and to make the climate problem worse – i.e. coal. It is possible to develop the illusion of addressing the energy problem while at the same time addressing the climate problem – i.e. corn ethanol. The climate change and energy use problems are correlated, but their solutions are not. Therefore, if we are going to address the climate change problem, then we need to define our goals and to manage towards those goals. (more …)

Share This

Readers of ClimatePolicy.org may remember a four-volume assessment of the social science research relevant to global climate change that appeared about a decade ago, entitled Human choice and climate change, edited by Steve Rayner and Elizabeth L. Malone. If not, here’s a bit of background. This was a truly extraordinary effort, centered on a Vancouver meeting in 1997, and involving more than one hundred contributors. Especially intriguing was a small satellite document issued with the assessment entitled “Ten suggestions for policymakers.” To quote Rayner and Malone:

“What can public and private decisionmakers learn from a wide-ranging look at the social sciences and the issue of human choice and climate change that illuminates the evaluation of policy goals, implementation strategies, and choices about paths forward? At present, proposed policies are heavily focused on the development and implementation of intergovernmental agreements on immediate emissions reductions. In the spirit of cognitive and analytic pluralism that has guided the creation of Human choice and climate change, we look beyond the present policy priorities to see if there are adjustments, or even wholesale changes, to the present course that could be made on the basis of a social science perspective. To this end we offer ten suggestions to complement and challenge existing approaches to public and private sector decisionmaking: (more …)

Share This

This post identifies real and perceived risks of climate policy and explores ways to minimize those risks. I’ll focus on four risks:

1) Damage to the economy as a whole
2) Damage to some sectors within the economy
3) Lost opportunities from the investment of limited resources on climate change
4) Potential political costs of supporting climate policy

Most risks, perceived & real, can be managed well but not all can be eliminated entirely. (more …)

Share This

Climate Management 101 — 3. Changes and Times

In the first blog of this series, I introduced the idea that here are both short-term and long-term considerations in the management of climate, and that policies and practices that are part of the short term may or may not be sustained in the long term. The management of climate? Given our population and our use of energy, we are managing the climate. The question is whether or not we do it with cognizance.

If we are to control emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, then we must examine our sources of energy and its consumption. To reduce the emissions, substantially, requires massive changes throughout society. During elections people always say they want change, but they really want someone else or something else to change. (more …)

Share This

The cost and environmental efficacy of either a cap-and-trade program or an emission tax will depend on several important design issues: the point of regulation; the coverage of emission sources; “complementary” programs; and possible hybrid policies that integrate elements of both approaches.

Point of regulation. It would be infeasible to regulate all greenhouse gas emissions at the very point where they enter the atmosphere – monitors will not be placed on every car and truck tailpipe, every home that heats with natural gas or heating oil, as well as every smokestack in the industrial and electricity sectors. One approach – often referred to as upstream regulation – would impose the emission tax or the requirement to hold permits on energy suppliers, such as at coal mines, natural gas wellheads, petroleum product refineries and importers. The carbon content of all fossil fuels that enter the U.S. energy system would be covered by this approach. This approach would be administratively simple and straightforward because it accounts for almost all U.S. CO2 emissions (more than 98 percent) by focusing on a relatively small number of firms; incorporates existing monitoring and measurement of fuel supplies; and takes advantage of the fundamental molecular properties of fossil fuels that allow for precise measurement of emissions based on the physical amounts of these fuels. (more …)

Share This

Building on my previous posts in this series providing an overview of cap-and-trade and emission taxes and a discussion of their similarities, this post illustrates some of the differences between cap-and-trade and an emission tax: the trade-off between cost certainty and emissions certainty, incentives for R&D, and revenue generation.

Cost certainty versus emissions certainty. In an uncertain world, it is impossible to design a policy that simultaneously guarantees an emissions outcome at a certain cost. An emission tax provides cost certainty – the incremental increase in energy prices is transparent and fixed under a tax – while cap-and-trade provides emissions certainty by capping aggregate emissions. Under a tax, emissions in aggregate can vary depending on the realized costs of abatement (that cannot be predicted ex ante with certainty), economic growth, relative changes in energy prices unrelated to a carbon policy, etc. These factors can likewise drive the variation in costs under a cap-and-trade program. (more …)

Share This

Cap-and-trade programs and emission taxes share several important similarities, including incentives for cost-effective mitigation, increasing energy prices, and raising revenues (assuming an auction in the cap-and-trade program).

Cost-Effective Mitigation. Cap-and-trade programs and emission taxes promote cost-effective emission mitigation by ensuring that every source of emissions faces the same marginal cost of abatement. Under an emission tax, firms should abate emissions until the last ton of abatement is equal to the tax. If they abate less than this amount, then they would make tax payments on some tons of emissions in excess of what it would have cost to abate those tons. If they abate more than this amount, then it would have cost more to abate some of those tons than it would by paying taxes on them. In a similar fashion under cap-and-trade, covered firms would make abatement decisions based on the clearing price of allowances in the market. If they can abate more tons for less than the current market price, then they would do so and sell any excess allowances. If they cannot, then they would buy additional allowances from the market at a lower cost than the emissions abatement would have cost. (more …)

Share This