Climate Progress: An insider's view of climate science, politics, and solutions

If you average your net worth with Bill Gates’, you’re both billionaires.

What’s this got to do with global warming? When the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues their Fourth Assessment Report early next year, the headline will be their forecast of global average temperature increases in 2100 (which has been widely misreported to be 2°-4.5°C, as noted).

This time around, the IPCC is trying to do a better job of looking at regional effects, but if the past is prologue, the press, politicians and policy-makers will center debates about how to respond to global warming on the global average temperature increases and the Global Warming Delayers will gleefully join them.

There are lots of problems with this. For one, Australian climatologist Barry Pittock (among others) has shown that the IPCC projections are almost certainly too low. Yet even if the IPCC’s global figures were accurate, they could do more to misinform than to inform. To understand why, we need to understand the power of “outliers” and the Black Swan.

As author Nassim Taleb notes notes, “A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations. Most people expect all swans to be white because that’s what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise.”

The polar regions, which are warming up to three times as fast as the rest of the planet, are our black swan.

With increasing evidence that the warmed world faces the release of massive amounts of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas, from a superheated tundra, this particular black swan will drive what happens in the rest of the world.

If we continue to focus on “global averages,” the Fifth IPCC Assessment (circa 2013) is likely to be little more than an evaluation of how we could have been so wrong in Fourth Assessment, which largely ignores the impact of amplifying feedbacks from the tundra.

Apparently in Maine, you won’t be able to get news coverage of Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth until Kevin Costner’s infamous work of cinematic fiction is also a documentary.

The story in today’s New York Times defies logic even more than the script to Costner’s movie, but is far more worth a look:

At 2 TV Stations in Maine, What Al Gore’s Movie Says Isn’t News

How important is global warming in Maine? Not important enough for local television.

Michael Palmer, the general manager of television stations WVII and WFVX, ABC and Fox affiliates in Bangor, has told his joint staff of nine men and women that when “Bar Harbor is underwater, then we can do global warming stories.”

“Until then,” he added. “No more.”

Mr. Palmer laid out his policy in an e-mail message sent out during the summer. A copy was sent to The New York Times. Mr. Palmer did not respond to a phone message left with an employee of the stations nor to an e-mail message. But a former staff member confirmed the e-mail message that went out during the summer after the stations broadcast a live report from a movie theater in Maine where Al Gore’s movie on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” was opening.

Mr. Palmer began his e-mail message: “I was wondering where we should send the bill for the live shot Friday at the theater for the Al Gore commercial we aired.”

Mr. Palmer said he wanted no more stories broadcast on global warming because: “a) we do local news, b) the issue evolved from hard science into hard politics and c) despite what you may have heard from the mainstream media, this science is far from conclusive.” Mr. Palmer said in his e-mail message to his operations manager and two women who served as a news anchor and a reporter that he placed “global warming stories in the same category as ‘the killer African bee scare’ from the 1970s or, more recently, the Y2K scare when everyone’s computer was going to self-destruct.”

Dr. James Hansen, the director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University, said in an interview yesterday that the station’s policy on coverage was irresponsible.

“If you wait until Bar Harbor is underwater, it’s too late,” Dr. Hansen said. “It won’t be just Bar Harbor that is underwater, but many places around the globe including parts of Florida, Bangladesh and the Nile Delta.”

Every state will suffer the harsh effects of global warming if we fail to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So every state should take action to reduce those emissions.

We have already seen this with California, and Arizona’s governor Janet Napolitano last month signed an executive order that “establishes a statewide goal to reduce Arizona’s future GHG emissions to the 2000 emissions level by the year 2020, and to 50% below the 2000 level by 2040.”

Why not simply wait for action from President Bush? The ABC news headline summed up part of the answer to that question: “Arizona seeks to bypass Bush on CO2 emissions.” Equally important, the state faces many potentially dangerous climate impacts. The state is particularly vulnerable to climate change because it is already so hot and dry and drought-prone.

So if it wishes to avoid the trend for desertification that global warming is likely to bring, it needs to take action itself. Kudos for doing so.

The print edition of the Post I received today has a major story in the business section titled “The Petroleum Paradox: As Prices Retreat, Interest in New Energy Sources Wanes.” The online edition you can access has a different spin: “A Down Market’s Ripple Effect: If Oil Prices Fall, Will Interest in New Energy Sources Wane?”

The original headline makes no sense — it is not a “paradox” that when the price of a product drops, its competition suffers in the marketplace. That would simply be considered an economic truism.

As for the original sub-headline, the story doesn’t actually provide very much evidence for this–mainly because it isn’t really true, at least for investment in clean energy (as opposed to investment in conventional and unconventional oil, which is what the article mainly focuses on). As but one of thousands of examples, solar energy is experiencing a massive and growing investment by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs as the L.A. Times reported today, and “The industry is expected to grow from $11 billion in 2005 to $51 billion in 2015.”

The online sub-head is much more accurate, since it poses the issue as a question. But even here, the headline is far from perfect, since it replaces “Paradox” with “Ripple Effect,” again implying this disinvestment in clean energy sources has somehow begun in earnest. I’m not saying that lower oil prices won’t discourage some investors, and perhaps will discourage some buyers of fuel-efficient cars (although I don’t really consider fuel-efficient cars count as a new energy source).

But the entire market for clean energy is exploding around the world as more as more people understand the driving force for clean energy will increasingly be the urgent need to take action on climate change. The best recent report on this is “American Energy: The Renewable Path to Energy Security,” by the Center for American Progress and the Worldwatch Institute.

Yes, that bastion of conservatism, the Wall Street Journal, which, like most bastions of conservatism, does not support conservation — is singing a different tune today (”ultraviolet moon”). They have actually published an article calling for the more efficient use of electricity titled, “Less Power to the People” (a subscription is required — but I’m sure you’re go to want to own the collector’s edition).

This article even contains the sentence “Conservation seems a much more feasible solution than quickly building dozens of new power plants to add generating capacity — especially if reducing emissions is a goal.” What a concept — reducing emissions.

A blue moon is a rare event — two full moons in one month. An ultraviolet moon is rarer still — when conservatives contemplate conservation to reduce emissions.

Global warming-driven “changes could make insurance unaffordable for customers in high-risk areas.” So concludes “Climate Change and Insurance: An Agenda for Action in the United States,” a report by the conservation group World Wildlife Fund and the Allianz Group, one of the world’s largest insurance providers.

High-risk areas include

• Florida and other hurricane-prone regions, since the most severe tropical storms are on the rise
• All coastal cities, since sea levels are also on the rise
• Regions susceptible to forest fires, which are also on the rise.

Clem Booth, a board member of Allianz, told Reuters: “That it will cost more, there’s no question; we can put that on the table right at the beginning.”

While the political leadership inside the Beltway refuses to act, the good news is that, “There’s no question that business leaders like Allianz, GE and others are way ahead of the current administration,” in the words of Carter Roberts, president of WWF in the United States.

Action now is the only true insurance against catastrophic climate change.