Climate Progress

[JR: Ken Levenson, who blogs at checklisttowardzerocarbon, wins. The excellent analogy to Apollo 13 makes this post a must-read. And while I don’t agree with every word, the analysis is solid.]

Joe’s Question #3 — “I specifically challenge Pielke and B.I. to state what “atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations” are “acceptable.”"

[Pielke’s] Answer: We define “acceptable levels” in our Nature paper as 500 ppm (the level focused on by IPCC WG III) and 450 ppm (the level focused on by the EU and implicitly in the FCCC).

My take on it:
Pielke never states that 500ppm is the acceptable goal or appropriate or any such thing — he takes no position. 500ppm is merely presented as pivot point for his attempt to discredit another aspect of the IPCC report. It’s a bizarre and audacious follow-up bait-and-switch, to try and get away with.

Joe’s Question #2 - “I also challenge Pielke and B.I. to indicate where the IPCC ever said “we already have all the technology we need to deal with climate change.”

[Pielke’s] Answer: The IPCC SPM WG III writes, “The range of stabilization levels assessed can be achieved by deployment of a portfolio of technologies that are currently available and those that are expected to be commercialised in coming decades.” Assessed stabilization ranges include 450 ppm CO2eq (or about 400 CO2).

My take on it:
The quote Pielke cites is, to be kind, a stretch. Seems Pielke’s more interested in a debating point than progress.

Yes, reading this at face value without any context one might agree with him — but that strikes me as not terribly rigorous. Let’s simply ask what might those technologies be that are expected to be commercialized in the coming decades? The IPCC tells us just a few pages prior, in Table SPM.5. The table clearly states they will include: carbon capture, advanced electric and hybrid vehicles, intelligent building meters that provide feedback and control, advanced energy efficiency for industrial process and so on and so on. Bringing all those to market will take significant technological innovations. It’s not radical or overly conservative, it seems to me, if we merely take the rate of technological innovation over the last 25 years and project it forward 25 years — with no acceleration. While no paradigm shifting breakthroughs in themselves perhaps, there will be major innovations. And these would be the IPCC’s built-in innovations, no?

But to ignore the clear intent of the IPCC is not enough — for the sake of argument I can only surmise - Pielke embraces the idea of static technology, and freezes the technology at a baseline, to “help us understand.” His funniest line has to be “The significance of starting with a frozen-technology baseline is not yet widely appreciated.” It’s plenty appreciated — just not in the way he might desire. WTF comes to mind.

Let’s contemplate this: his bar chart is predicated on “frozen 1990 technology”.

Can you, with a straight face, think of doing anything today with an Intel 468 computer chip, let alone propose it to policy makers? There’s nothing quite as wasteful as creating an artificial mote to then set out to conquer. And it strikes me that that’s the kind of nonsense Pielke is asking us to buy into.

Pielke cherry picked a poorly worded phrase in the IPCC summary for a convenient cheap shot. Pielke should be embarrassed. He should be embarrassed too because he most assuredly turns his own argument on its head with this “frozen technology” nonsense. For if you can’t stomach the idea that our technology gap should be predicated on an Intel 468 chip. (Certainly the WWII war planners didn’t predicate their arms build-up on the biplanes and the cavalry!!!!) then certainly the technology gap is by default significantly smaller than Pielke’s false “revelation” - and perhaps quite manageable to boot.

Joe’s Question #1 - “I challenge Pielke or Hoffert or Shellenberger or Nordhaus or anyone else at B.I. [or anyone on the face of the planet] to show me where in the Nature piece it “shatters the notion we have all the technology we need to deal with climate change”?”

[Pielke’s] Answer: Here is what the paper asserts:

“Enormous advances in energy technology will be needed to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations at acceptable levels. If much of these advances occur spontaneously, as suggested by the scenarios used by the IPCC, then the challenge of stabilization might be less complicated and costly. However, if most decarbonization does not occur automatically, then the challenge to stabilization could in fact be much larger than presented by the IPCC.”

My take on it:

(Bad question Joe — step out of their frames.) It’s a non-answer, answer — the closest thing it resembles is a White House press briefing. But to give some credit, Pielke’s larger argument does one better than just hoisting up a straw man. It’s a special kind of straw man with the properties of a water balloon. What do I mean? His argument is nebulous at best, neglecting to quantify or define in any meaningful way what the magnitude of the technological challenge might be — there is no there, there. And his non-answer shows him to be trapped by this incoherence.

But you say Pielk’s got his “blue bars” showing a majority of emissions cuts dependant on “frozen 1990 technology”. I say we’ve got a blue balloon, an artificial mote, that resembles something more nefarious: JFK’s “missile gap”.

I say that not only is Pielke’s commentary b.s., it’s a dangerous sort of b.s. - and to me shows the bankruptcy of his argument. He claims lofty goals of wanting to alert the world of the IPCC shortcomings so that we may “better inform climate policy”. Yet he provides us a platter of misleading mush and anxiety. As the missile gap b.s. was most dangerous and counterproductive to our Cold War efforts, so this phony controversy serves to do no more than become another impediment to our understanding.

JFK employed the deceit to get elected. What are Pielke’s motives? Let me be clear, I don’t think Pielke’s motives are nefarious. It’s always the banality that’s startling. He’s an academic that needs to produce papers and make waves and produce, produce, produce and he’s found a nice little cottage industry with the IPCC reports and he’s milking it.

Let’s get serious about all this “debate” regarding the IPCC reports. Bickering with the IPCC conclusions is a straw man exercise at every level and a diabolical distraction. First, there are only three basic things that need to be taken from the IPCC reports:

1. The reports are the result of political compromise and therefore every item they contain and conclusion they draw is suspect and debatable FOREVER…or at least until humanity, as we know it, is wiped from the earth.
2. The result of the political compromises invariably understates the crisis at hand and what needs to be done.
3. The opportunity costs for each year of delay in addressing the crisis is practically incalculable.

Therefore, the idea that Pielke and others are making a career out debunking every piece of straw in their perfect straw man, as if somehow they were uncovering a fake Rosetta Stone, is asinine. Which brings me back to the only logical reason for doing so — to pad the good old academic CV — or perhaps delay, delay, delay as Joe argues.

As the IPCC leaders have been screaming of late we only have a few years (like 3!) to start to seriously turn this ship around. So while WWII or perhaps the Apollo program may be useful analogies what we need to be doing now is more akin to the Apollo 13 mission. The astronauts had no luxury of time, resources or of technological development - they had to address the life threatening problem at hand with the what they had. And bless them, they pulled it off.

Forget about Pielke and this endless debate. (Pielke throws out many other straw men such as China, for which it would be helpful for him to note went off the rails after Bush walked away from Kyoto and is the one country that doesn’t need a “political consensus” to get back on track, just clear leadership that America is serious about it too.) Revkin and others give it far too much credence and hence credibility.

Think Apollo 13. Think about Jim Hansen practically demanding a meeting with James Rogers of Duke Energy and other leaders in energy production to forge away toward solving the problems now. Pielke is a court jester. Jim Hansen and others like him are the leaders, the astronauts.

[JR: Kudos to Ken. He wins the chance to post here weekly. I’ll post my own reply to Pielke this week.]

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 8:24 amand is filed under Solutions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.