Roger Pielke Jr.'s "The Climate Fix"

This was a better book than I expected. Pielke toes the party line about "global warming" but he is sensible and recognizes that the highly politicized approach that now dominates discussion and policy is backfiring. As a science policy specialist he can diagnose the problem and recommend fixes. This book is a "must read" for anybody who feels that the climate needs to be fixed. Pielke lays out a strategy that will work.

I like the fact that Pielke is honest. In one chapter he talks about climate disasters and admits that the research he has done shows that if you correct for population increase and property values going up, there is no evidence of worse floods, hurricanes, tornados, droughts, etc. over the past 100 years. He is highly critical of trying to scare people into calling for political action to control global warming. I admire the honesty.

He is also very honest in laying out his iron law of climate policy which says that people favour reducing greenhouse gases and global warming risk, but not at the expense of GDP and economic growth. He even admits that some fanatics think they can put in place carbon limits that will keep the bottom 1.5 billion people literally living in the dark while the developed world gets to "party on" with its current level of carbon emissions. This just won't work. Any serious policy that will work has to recognize the need of all people to rise to first world living standards. So Pielke recognizes there is a very real, very big need to grow energy supply, not cap it, not roll it back.

So... I find this book very refreshing. It is a serious look at global warming but from a policy perspective that is honest and looking for an effective means to control greenhouse emissions. I can respect that, and I can even support that!

Here are the guidelines he offers for any positive policy to fix the climate:

• Increasing carbon dioxide influences the climate system, perhaps dramatically and irreversibly.


• The climate system is subject to multiple human influences.


• Our ability to see the future is limited.


• Certainty is not forthcoming.


• Stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide does not stop climate change.

Those are sound propositions on which to build an effective climate remediation policy. I can sign up to this.

Here are his design criteria for a successful policy focused on decarbonization of the global economy:

1. Climate policies should flow with the current of public opinion rather than against it.


2. Efforts to sell the public on policies that will create short-term economic discomfort cannot succeed if that discomfort is perceived to be too great. The greater the discomfort, the greater the chances of policy failure. Short-term costs must be commensurate with short-term benefits.


3. Innovation in energy technology -- related both to the production of energy and to its consumption -- necessarily must be at the center of any effort to accelerate decarbonization of the global economy.

There are some sections of the book that are deadly boring, but I guess that is what you can expect from a policy buff deep into the details of climate. I find that I had to skip lightly over some parts of the book and focus more on the parts of interest to me.

The book has many interesting tidbits. I found this helped clarify for me the crazy "wars" over climate change:

Believe it or not, the main scientific and policy institutions responsible for climate change in the international arena do not even agree on what the phrase "climatge change" actually means. For example, if you take a look at the "Summary for Policy Makers" of the 2007 IPCC science working group, you'll find this, in its first footnote: "Climate change in IPCC usage refers to any change in climate over time, whether due to natural variability or as a result of human activity. This usage differs from that in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, where climate change refers to a change of climate that is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and that is in addition to natual climate variability observed over comparable time periods."

The policy community thus has a very narrow definition of climate change, which in essence refers to the effects of the emission of greenhouse gases due to human activity on climaate, when those effects exceed the bounds of natural climate variability. By contrast, the IPCC defines climate change much more broadly; for them, it means a change in the statistics of climate over a period of thirty to fifty years (or longer) beyond natural variability, irrespective of the cause of the change.

Think about that. All this battling and those shouting haven't even done the basics of defining common terms so that the larger public can understand the nature of the debate!

For example:

The two-definition problem has been recognized for some time. For instance, John Zillman, an Australian scientist and active participant in the IPCC, wrote in 1997, "When the IPCC says 'climate has changed over the past century,' it is simply saying the climate now is not the same as it was a century ago (whatever the cause), whereas the [Climate Convention] listener will reasonably interpret such a statement as the scientific community affirming that human influence has changed climate over the past century." This, he concluded, can only confuse the public. Indeed, such confusion is rampant in public and media discussions of climate change.

Pielke in several places talks about how the fanatics have decided to "shade the truth" in favour of convincing the public on some policy rather than stay true to the science. Here is a bit from a section where he talks about his research into whether natural disasters have gotten worse because of "climate change":
Furthermore, the IPCC somehow neglected to mention the many other peer-reviewed studies examining a wide range of places and time periods that found no signal of anthropogenic climate change after adjusting for societal factors, and while it cited our workshop report, it failed to report its conclusions about the present impossibility of attributing disaster losses to greenhouse gases. Either the IPCC was very sloppy, or it went to great lengths to suggest in a misleading manner a connection between rising temperatures and increasing disaster losses -- or both.

It turns out that several reviewers of the IPCC report had in fact raised questions about its treatment of the issue of disaster losses. One reviewer questioned the IPCC's suggestion that our normalization work had been superseded by events, and asked the IPCC directly, "What does Pielke think about this?" The IPCC responded on my behalf, explaining, "I believe Pielke agrees that adding 2004 and 2005 has the potential to change his earlier conclusions -- at least about the absence of a trend in US Cat[astrophe] losses." The problem with the IPCC response to the reviewe4r was that it was a complete fabrication. The problem with the IPCC response to the reviewer was that it was a complete fabrication. Just two months before I had published a paper with a version of Figure 7.6 (see page 171) showing clearly that the events of 2004 and 2005 did not change the overall picture at all. The IPCC included misleading information in its report and then fabricated a response to a reviewer, who identified the misleading information, to justify keeping that material in the report.

He goes on the cite numerous other examples where the fanatics in the global warming community have falsified data or include non-scientific "data" into IPCC reports pretending that this was peer-reviewed science. Read Pielke's book to get details. But this sleazy behaviour is what has undercut the global warming drive to push policymakers to etch laws and requirements in stone. As he points out Climategate was an epoch event that crystalized this situation. Pielke doesn't accept that the scientists faked the data, but he does admit that they refused to make data available, that they sabotaged any scientist with a contrary opinion, they lobbied to close journals to "deniers", and they pushed the agenda and made sure that people with the "right" views got the grants.

Pielke states:

The systematic misrepresentation of the science of climate impacts documented in the previous chapter only scratches the surface of the politicization of climate science. Such politicization manifests itself in the actions of climate scientists, in the presentation of climate science results to policy makers, and in the structuring of scientific research and assessments. Climate science is today a fully politicized enterprise, desperately in need of reform if integrity is to be restored and sustained.

And this:

The politicization of climate science revealed in the East Anglia e-mails [Climategate] -- as well as the appeals to fear and the efforts to misrepresent uncertainty -- is far more common in the behavior of leading climate scientists than many in the community would care to admit. Most scientists might prefer to stay out of the public eye and simply conduct their research, but influential and activist leaders of the community have sought to achieve political outcomes -- typically support for specific action in response to climate change -- through science, especially by using a shaping science as a tool to defeat the political enemies.

To which he makes this point:

In the end, fighting political battles under the guise of debating climate science will likely have little impact on overall public support for action, but rather, on public confidence in climate science itself. As the depth of the politicization of climate science has become more fully visibile, the consequences for the scientific enterprise have been significant. An irony here is that such efforts were always doomed to fail, as waging a political battle through science confers a significant advantage to those who are presented as being outside the scientific mainstream. David and Goliath are held to different standards, no matter which is supposed to be the good guy.

Here is why I'm happy with Pielke. He understands that the crazies of global warming cannot be allowed to freeze the wretched inequalities of poor vs. rich under the banner of "global warming":

Global emissions of carbon dioxide are the result of economic activity and the technologies of energy production and consumption. People in countries around the world expect to see continued economic growth, which means that, all else being equal, emissions will increase. In Chapter 2 I call this ... the iron law of climate policy. The iron law holds that for the foreseeable future, efforts to reduce emissions through a willful contraction of economic activity are simply not in the cards. Countries around the world -- rich and poor, North and South -- have expressed a commitment to sustaining economic growth, and these commitments are not going to change anytime soon, no matter how much activists, idealists, or dreamers complain to the contrary. People will pay some amount for environmental goals, but only so much before drawing the line. That is just the way it is, regardless of whether economic growth measures what matters most to a country's well-being or if there are other metrics that might better capture quality of life.

Given the iron law, then, there are only two ways that decarbonization of economic activity will occur. One is through improving the energy efficiency of the economy -- which includes changes both in the efficiency of specific activities, such as steelmaking and automobile gas mileage, as well as in the nature of the economy, such as the increasing role played by less energy-intensive services sectors -- and the other is through decarbonization of the energy supply.

In recent decades improvements in energy efficiency have been the primary driver behind decarbonization of the global economy, with decarbonization of energy supply a distant second. This must change...

I recommend this book. While I don't see eye-to-eye on how serious the threat of global warming is, I agree with Pielke that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. And I think he is very good on policy and pointing out that politicizing the science has created a disaster. If you want to fight global warming, this book should be your handbook.