About Social Media Today
I’d guess that most people here have seen the warnings that much of the computer modeling and other science done related to climate is slightly to very conservative. Not in the political sense, but in terms of not leaping to conclusions.[1] I’ve made the case repeatedly that this is a good thing, even in our current situation. The last thing we want to do is make some country-, regional-, or global-level decision about public policy based on something we thought we knew, but which turned out not to be true at all. The potential costs of such a mistake in terms of greater impacts from lost time, or even actively doing something that causes more problems than it solves, are sobering. Still, we don’t have a lot of time to waste, so we need the scientists not only to be right about some questions of withering complexity, but to do it in record time. It’s a good thing we don’t ask much of them.
Integrated assessment models (IAMs) used by researchers today – where climate change data is integrated with economic data – are dangerously flawed because they are based on naïve assumptions, according to Kevin Anderson from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change at the University of Manchester, UK.
Anderson told environmentalresearchweb: “The vast majority of IAMs assume low emission growth rates; early emission peaks; annual reduction rates limited to between 2 and 4%; untested geoengineering; and a high penetration of nuclear power alongside untested ‘carbon capture and storage’ technologies. Because IAMs typically use similar and inappropriate sets of assumptions, they repeatedly come up with the same narrow and fundamentally flawed answers.”
Anderson argues that actual emissions growth rates are much higher than those used by most IAMs, and that even ambitious emission peaks are much nearer 2020–2030 than the naïve estimates of 2010–2016 used by most models. His calculations have shown that, if we want to aim for a high chance of not exceeding a 2°C increase in global temperature by the end of the century, our energy emissions need to be cut by nearer 10% annually rather than the 2–4% that economists say is possible with a growing economy.
“The output from today’s models is politically palatable,” said Anderson. “The reality is far more depressing, but many scientists are too afraid to stand up and speak out for fear of being ridiculed. Our job is not to be liked but to give a raw and dispassionate assessment of the scale of the challenge faced by the global community.” In a recent paper in Philosophical Transactions, Anderson and his colleague Alice Bows of the Sustainable Consumption Institute at the University of Manchester warn that “there is now little to no chance of maintaining the rise in global mean surface temperature at below 2°C, despite repeated high-level statements to the contrary”.
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He believes that this false hope that the output from these models has been spreading is one reason why policymakers and the general public have not engaged with the sweeping changes necessary for industrialised nations to drastically reduce their emissions. “This requires radical changes in behaviour, particularly from those of us with very high energy consumption,” said Anderson. “But as long as the scientists continue to spread the message that we will be ok if we all make a few small changes, then climate change will never be on top of the policy agenda and we will fail to meet our international commitments to avoid a 2°C rise.”
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In all honesty, I’m not sure what to make of this. While I’ve asked some experts for an opinion, I decided to bring it up here before I hear from them. I will write a follow-up post, as needed.
The basic idea of IAMs using too rosy scenarios is certainly plausible. After all, it’s similar assumptions that lead to the US Dept. of Energy issuing wildly off-base projections in their Annual Energy Outlook. And the examples Anderson cites are somewhere between “very optimistic” and “delusional”. I have no idea how widespread this basic problem is, though.
As for the effect on policymakers, that’s where I get the feeling that Anderson is being a bit kind to our elected representatives. I’ve long contended that the vast majority of politicians at the national level in major countries know at least the major bullet points of our climate situation by the time they’ve been in office for a couple of years, at the very latest, and are all engaged in an exercise of kicking the can down the street, hoping that the impacts and the political payback will come after they’re out of office. The fact that some of them, e.g. Senator James Inhoffe and basically the entire Tea Party contingent, openly deny climate change and reject any suggestion we do something about it merely makes them a more brazen form of liar than the ones who smile, shake hands, kiss babies, and ignore the issue.
Of course, one might ask just how much more dire the evidence has to get before all politicians lose their veil of plausible deniability. If you read this site and follow up even a portion of the scientific findings I mention, you know that there’s more than enough “it’s worse than we thought” news to expose the politicians’ posturing, assuming that voters paid enough attention to it and connected those ever elusive dots.
And there’s the real problem: The disconnect between scientists and the lay public is not just a failure of scientists to communicate properly, as so many are quick to claim, and it’s not merely a side effect of our current culture and the schedule/stress level so many people endure. It’s also a function of politicians who make virtually no effort as a group to help educate the public. This is understandable, but by no means excusable.[2]
I can only wonder what the effective carbon footprint is of telling ourselves fairy tales while we accelerate toward the cliff ahead.
[1] Do I have to do the black sheep story again? OK, one last time: Three scientists are walking through a field when one of them points to a sheep in the distance and says, “I didn’t know there were black sheep around here.” The second scientist wags a finger at the first and says, “Not so fast! You’ve only seen one black sheep.” A moment later the third scientist admonishes the first two, “No, all we’ve seen is one black side of one sheep. What color is the other side?” (There’s probably a funnier version of this that involves putting more specific labels on the scientists, like “physicist” or “medical researcher”, but I’ll leave it at that…)
[2] One prior Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board, Paul Volcker, I think, once famously said about the task of raising interest rates to keep the economy from overheating when everything was booming right along, that it was his job to take away the punch bowl at the party. Politicians today are not only being asked to take away the punch bowl, but to give us the huge bill for the party and then tell us we have to clean up the mess. They get no sympathy from me; if they didn’t want the job then they shouldn’t have run for office.
