by Eric Roston
First things first: With the electorate
angry and frustrated, President Obama delivered a State of the Union
address last night that articulated his goals for, among other things,
modernizing the U.S. energy system and infrastructure, and addressing
climate change. The president called for “a comprehensive energy and climate bill with incentives that will
finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in America,”
including nuclear power. New Va. Gov. Bob McDonnell gave the Republican response,
imploring the nation that, “Advances in technology can unleash more
natural gas, nuclear, wind, coal, and alternative energy to lower your
utility bills.”
The speech punctuated a week where everything in the
climate-and-energy space appeared to be in motion. The troika of Sens.
John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Joe Lieberman
(I-Conn.) pressed ahead developing their legislation. Kerry shouted
down the New York Times for an article suggesting the legislators had scaled back their goals. Graham told the Clean Energy, Jobs and Security Forum that “There will never be 60 votes for climate change legislation as it
exists today. And it would be a shame if that is the end of the story.”
Todd Wooten, director of the Nicholas Institute’s Southeast Climate
Resources Center, spoke on a climate, security, and agriculture panel
with Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and Roger Johnson, president of the
National Farmers Union.
The BASIC countries—Brazil, South Africa, India, and China—met this week in advance of the Jan. 31 Copenhagen Accord soft deadline for
submitting descriptions of their greenhouse gas mitigation actions to
the UNFCC. They also called on developed nations to distribute their
$10 billion in pledged adaptation aid to poor countries.
Business as usual?: The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will issue interpretive guidance to help companies evaluate in disclosure documents the risks and
opportunities they face from climate legislation, treaties, and other
developments—including potential global change itself. The move comes
the same week that the CEOs of 83 companies sent a letter to Obama
asking him to push for major legislation.
The five commissioners voted along party lines. Their statements
provide an interesting snapshot of competing thought on how our
venerable institutions are responding to climate risk (Schapiro; Casey; Walter; Paredes; Aguilar).
Chairman Mary Schapiro emphasized that the guidance is neither
commentary on the vast topic “climate change” nor a set of new rules
for businesses to follow. Rather, the rules should help bring
consistency to reporting on an emerging public concern. Dissenting
commissioners (Casey and Paredes) questioned assigning SEC resources to
the fruits of social and environmental advocacy when investors and
markets require so much attention elsewhere.
These competing views encapsulate Washington’s two minds on the
issues: One view, going forward and in the long term, the U.S. can not
assume without risk that the relative climate stability it has enjoyed
for 233 years will continue for, say, another 233 years; and a second
view, that existing regulations cover what’s needed for climate
disclosure, and the SEC should attend to immediate matters. (The actual
guidance has not yet been published.)
Global uncertainty: The SEC refrained from
comment on climate change itself, or came close. Commissioner Kathleen
Casey added this sentence to her critique of the interpretive guidance: “This guidance is premature at best, as the science surrounding global warming remains far from settled.” [Emphasis added.] Certainly, that’s an easy conclusion to come to, looking at headlines. A new poll shows that Americans concern about climate change has dropped 14
points, to 57 percent, since 2008. It also shows that people trust
their local weather forecasters more than traditional reporting outlets
(although weather forecasters disproportionately resist global warming). Casey isn’t alone. Some legislators vocalized
discomfort with Obama’s mention of climate science in his address.
China’s top climate negotiator said he is unready to attribute observed warming to human activity.
IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri has come under fire for the body’s
mistaken prediction that the Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035, and
for potential business conflicts with his IPCC work. The
highest-profile all for his resignation came from the German
newsmagazine Spiegel, where Richard Tol, Roger Pielke Jr, and Hans von Storch write, “Astoundingly, it appears that Pachauri has not broken any rules for
the simple reason that there is no code of conduct governing conflicts
of interest for IPCC participants and leaders.” Pachauri has defended
himself and vowed to stay put. The IPCC has responded aggressively to [pdf] a Sunday Times (U.K.) article about climate change and extreme weather events.
Don’t forget to check your work: Last
week, a reader wrote in for more information about which 2007 IPCC
predictions have proven to be too modest. One of the sources I
suggested as reference was the UNEP’s Climate Change Science Compendium 2009, a review of the professional literature for policymakers in
advance of the Copenhagen meeting. The next day, thinking about the
recently exposed IPCC error, I started checking through the footnotes.
In the opening few pages of my hard copy, there’s a reproduction of the
famous “hockey stick”
graph, showing proxy evidence for temperature and CO2 over the last
1,000 years or so. I saw the reference, to “Hanno 2009,” and looked it
up in the bibliography, but it wasn’t there. Another boneheaded
fact-checking mistake, I thought. It’s actually worse than that. “Hanno
2009” isn’t a peer-reviewed journal article at all but a Wikipedia
entry (!). Steve McIntyre of ClimateAudit.org had found it last
September and written about it here.
The Himalayan 2035 error returned to the conversation the phrase “gray literature”—science writing that has not been peer-reviewed and
published in professional journals. But I was surprised and dismayed to
see the UNEP rely on a source that wouldn’t pass muster in a descent
high school composition class—and then not share the source.
The UNEP in October deleted the “Hanno 2009” graph and replaced it with a graph from this peer-reviewed paper, and a note that says, in part, “UNEP welcomes
further constructive comments so that the report evolves as a living
document containing the latest peer-reviewed science.” Would I
recommend the report again? Probably, keeping in mind that everything
said on the topic is one or another kind of “living document.” If
something else smells fishy, follow the notes. The ultimate value in
these review reports isn’t the actual assembled narrative but in the
bibliography of primary research papers. You just have to have time and
patience to fall down the rabbit hole, which few people have. And
there’s always plenty of other interesting material around to consider. Here’s the Wikipedia page with a history of Hanno 2009, clearly written by someone angry about the matter.
So, is the science unsettled? There are a lot of things we’d like to know better (Nature,
sub. req.). But when it comes down to atmospheric physics, it sure
seems like a lot of smart people have been working hard and coming up
with the same answers for quite some time now. What to do about it is
currently up to the Senate, in part. If you have any thoughts feel free
to contribute to the comments section or email since Climate Post is a living document.
About the Future …: There’s a tendency
among probably all the interest-group silos in Washington, whichever
one you choose, to think that policymakers, by not doing specifically
what it is advocates want, are ruining the future. There’s also a
tendency to lose track of other policy issues given the focus on one’s
own. With that in mind, consider David Broder’s Washington Post op-ed this morning about the U.S.‘s fiscal health, upon which so many of these silo’ed policy discussions depend on for resolution.
Related Links:
In State of the Union, Obama panders to conservatives on ‘clean energy’
The climate and energy section of Obama’s State of the Union speech
State of the Union: Inefficient
