Collide-a-scape

Someone I have a lot of respect for says all the Durban bashing is misinformed. To those who argue that the recent climate summit in South Africa produced nothing of consequence, Andrew Light counters:

The fact is that not only did Durban produce a package of agreements essential for any hope of a meaningful contribution to mitigation and adaptation to climate change out of this forum, but it also avoided a disaster that would have sent this process back to where it started in 1992.

Light makes a strong, detailed case for why the climate community should be more appreciative of the lemonade made out of the lemons:

Those who claim Durban is a failure are missing the big picture.  It emerged out of an incredibly hard process with multiple trip wires for failure.  If there is going to be an international agreement (or cluster of them) that helps bend down emissions to get us to the goals we need to achieve then Durban will be seen as essential to getting there.

UPDATE: Roger Pielke Jr. says not so fast and elaborates here.

There’s something remarkable happening this week in the climatesphere. People who routinely thunder that we are on the verge of climate doom have mostly shrugged at the lackluster outcome of the recent climate summit in South Africa. I’m wondering if they’ve self-medicated themselves with sedatives. Consider that, last week Grist’s David Roberts wrote (his emphasis):

If there is to be any hope of avoiding civilization-threatening climate disruption, the U.S. and other nations must act immediately and aggressively on an unprecedented scale. That means moving to emergency footing. War footing.

Yesterday, a more muted Roberts was waxing on about the importance of “symbolism” while chiding greens for holding to the ”illusion that an international treaty could compel national decision makers to cut emissions faster their their domestic populations are willing.”  So I’m curious to hear what mechanism he believes will compel the world to get on that “war footing.” Because I’m kinda thinking that “a plan about a plan,” with “holes big enough to drive a hummer through,” as Andy Revkin notes, and which, whatever it ends up being, doesn’t go into effect until 2020, is not anything to pin one’s hopes on.

Then there is Mr. Hell and High Water. Nobody consistently shouts louder from the climate doom mountaintop than Joe Romm. And nobody else relentlessly berates the media for failing to shout with him from the mountaintop. Like Roberts, Romm often argues that the urgency of global warming is at hand, and that continued dawdling will ensure climate catastrophe on a wide scale. Yet, seemingly determined to make lemonade out of lemons, Romm hailed the Durban agreement as a

a pretty big success, committing the entire world — not just rich countries — to develop a roadmap for reductions.

True, he also said that

from the perspective of what is needed to avert catastrophic climate change, the agreement was, sadly, lacking.

Which makes me wonder, according to the brutal logic of climate change, how Romm will define “success” going forward.

For as Fred Pearce observes in the New Scientist, the Durban deal

is a post-dated check. It won’t do anything to help the climate in the next decade – a decade that scientists say is critical to arresting global warming and turning the world’s energy infrastructure towards low-carbon sources.

So I’m still struggling to reconcile the feverish rhetoric and dire warnings with the cold reality of climate diplomacy. Stripped to its essence, what has the Durban agreement truly yielded? Eugene Robinson, in his Washinton Post column, pretty much nails it:

Durban’s real accomplishment was to keep the slow, torturous process of climate negotiations alive — with the biggest carbon emitters now involved. This buys time for real solutions to emerge.

I think he’s right about the first part, that the process is still alive, but more like a death row candidate buying time with legal appeals. Exactly how much time climate negotiators can buy for the climate is anyone’s guess, except those who laud the results of the process while saying time has already run out.

I want whatever David Roberts at Grist is smoking.

In his latest why-don’t-you-fools-get-it post, Roberts takes aim at his own “climate hawk coalition,” for…um…trying

a new approach that backgrounds climate change and refocuses the discussion on innovation, energy security, and economic competitiveness.

Now why would they do that? The old (business as usual) approach–Climate doom! Civilization is toast! Game over!–seemed to be working fine, right?

Well, just you never mind, because the point is, as Roberts has previously intoned, you can’t save the world if it’s not going to be expressly done on behalf of climate change. Absent that, he now argues, the “new approach” that seeks to bypass the messy, divisive politics of global warming “cannot work”:

At least it cannot work if we hope to avoid terrible consequences. Why not? It’s simple: If there is to be any hope of avoiding civilization-threatening climate disruption, the U.S. and other nations must act immediately and aggressively on an unprecedented scale. That means moving to emergency footing. War footing. “Hitler is on the march and our survival is at stake” footing. That simply won’t be possible unless a critical mass of people are on board. It’s not the kind of thing you can sneak in incrementally.

Okay, that clarifies things. Just one teensy question, if I may: How immediately is immediately? Because if it’s not next week, or even next year, some people might actually give up hope, or start to wonder if there’s still time to avert climate catastrophe. Then what do you say to them?

Last week, after a second batch of climate science emails were publicly released, I got the sense that most science and environmental reporters assigned to cover the story were holding their noses. They dutifully reported the basics, but were not inclined to treat the latest disclosures as especially newsworthy, much less as a story with new revelations or wrinkles.

In fact, some, such as Damian Carrington at the Guardian, claimed the opposite, that “the real scandal” was “the failure to catch the email hacker.” Kate Sheppard at Mother Jones said the hacker’s identity was the “real remaining question of ‘Climategate.’” Picking up on this theme, the Guardian’s Leo Hickman has asked readers to help crowdsource “the hacker’s profile.”  (More on this in a minute.)

Only a few journalists (who don’t work for Fox News or dismiss climate change as a hoax) have thus far dared to suggest that there is more to this story than advocacy outlets and representatives for the climate science community would lead us believe. I can count them on two fingers. There is freelancer David Appell, who writes on his blog that the latest email dump

doesn’t show anything nefarious, but I think it does raise questions about how much purported unanimity has been artificially created by IPCC reports, and whether the full state of uncertainty is being communicated.

Similarly, Andy Revkin gives this perspective:

Do I trust climate science? As a living body of intellectual inquiry exploring profoundly complex questions, yes.

Do I trust all climate scientists, research institutions, funding sources, journals and others involved in this arena to convey the full context of findings and to avoid sometimes stepping beyond the data? I wouldn’t be a journalist if I answered yes.

Translation: I trust climate science but not everybody and everything associated with it. Some people have agendas that tend to skew the science.

Can we all agree that this a reasonable position for a journalist to take?

So why the seeming reluctance of mainstream climate reporters to look beyond the surface of these emails and acknowledge that the story is not so black and white as: Nothing in these exchanges overturns or undermines the basic findings of climate science (the earth is warming, humans are contributing, we probably want to take that more seriously, etc). I mean, if we really want to get past that simplistic angle, there’s great fodder in the emails for a more substantive, nuanced discussion on the kinds of uncertainties that get seized on (and often distorted) by the more politicized climate skeptics and contrarians. But because proxies for the climate science community have declared this latest episode a no-fly zone, they effectively cede the debate over vexing climate change questions to skeptics, who are now laboriously wading through the whole file and mining it for nuggets that advance their own agendas.

Instead, as I mentioned above, there seems to be more journalistic appetite for unmasking the identity of the hacker/leaker. And just to be clear, that is a legitimate line of media inquiry (who doesn’t like a good mystery?). But this effort along those lines in the Guardian seems to have rubbed its readers the wrong way. Responses have ranged from outrage to sarcasm, such as this one:

I take it your next project will be to enlist help identifying anyone and everyone who has ever provided leaks to wikileaks, right?

The Wikileaks comparison was brought up by numerous readers (the Guardian has notably collaborated with Julian Assange on several occasions). But Leo Hickman (author of the help us-catch-the-email-hacker article) and a Guardian editor, each who participated in the thread, ignored the repeated mention of the Wikileaks parallels. [See update below] Readers noticed:

Leo, some of us wish you would respond to your critics who have pointed out the difference between the Guardian’s enthusiastic participation in Wikileaks and its determination to out the individual responsible for this one.

Could you kindly tell us your rationale?

I’d like to hear it, too. I’d also like to know why the illicitly received communications about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the confidential embassy cables of government diplomats are considered fair game (by reporters), but not the frank exchanges between climate scientists that sheds light on the inner workings of a field that informs public policy and political messaging on a host of energy and climate issues.

This is not to say I condone illegal theft of government/university/industry-related communications, whether that involves international relations, military deliberations, private company practices, or scientific disagreements. But let’s not pretend–especially in the media–that there is a difference between how information has been received in any of the recent high profile cases, be it Wikileaks and say, the trove of embassy cables it turned loose, or the anonymous hacker/leaker who has made public thousands of climate science emails.

Journalists who turn up their noses at the latter and willfully look away aren’t acting like journalists.

UPDATE: I should have mentioned that I had a brief twitter exchange with Leo Hickman several days ago, related to the article of his that I discuss. He did acknowledge that there is an “interesting debate…about the moral equivalence between these two types of ‘whistleblowers” but at the same time he wondered if the whistleblower was  ”*always* justified just because the blower feels they’re justified? A chewy debate…” He also said he “didn’t respond” to the Wikileaks comparisons “because it would have prob[ably] been considered off-topic” by Guardian moderators.

UPDATE: For those wishing to see Leo’s full responses in that twitter thread, you can start here and here, then follow the sequence on that November 26th string. Additionally, as Hickman reminds me, the Guardian conducted an exhaustive investigation of the first “Climategate” affair (which did not endear them to the proprietors of Real Climate).

Governments of the world’s richest countries have given up on forging a new treaty on climate change to take effect this decade, with potentially disastrous consequences for the environment through global warming.

Ahead of critical talks starting next week, most of the world’s leading economies now privately admit that no new global climate agreement will be reached before 2016 at the earliest, and that even if it were negotiated by then, they would stipulate it could not come into force until 2020.

Nobody wants to say this for the record, of course, but in order to keep up the charade, representatives of “those richest countries” will probably feign surprise at this Guardian piece and publicly respond, Not us. We’re on board. Let’s keep at it!

Michael Levi, a climate and energy analyst with the Council on Foreign Relations, shoots down Joe Romm and Real Climate in one post. I sense that it pains him to do this, especially with regard to the latter. More on that in a minute.

First, I want to point out that Levi’s argument about the Canadian oil sands oil issue and the proposed pipeline make perfect sense.  But there’s a reason why a main theme of the original Star Trek series was the tension between Dr. Spock’s clinical logic and Captain Kirk’s emotionally charged nature. These two essential human characteristics were brilliantly juxtaposed in every episode.

So I find it ironic that Levi titles his post, “Missing the Big Picture on Keystone XL,” because both he and the pipeline protesters are talking about two different big pictures. Yes, Levi is right that blocking the pipeline doesn’t change the demand equation of this problem. But Bill McKibben is a smart person. He recognizes that political action on global warming is severely constrained by the U.S. political landscape and the global dynamics of energy demand (Levi’s Big Picture).

McKibben also knows that the complexity of climate change offers few tangible symbols. So the Keystone pipeline has become an effective rallying point, with serendipitous tail winds coming from the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Keystone is now representative of McKibben’s Big Picture–which is about spotlighting the urgency of climate change and the need for action.

Levi seems not to grasp this, because he writes (my emphasis):

I’ve clearly failed in my previously stated goal of largely avoiding the debate over the Keystone XL pipeline, which has somehow become one of the biggest energy issues in the United States.

It’s not an energy issue. It’s about climate change. And it has “somehow” become a focal point precisely because climate activists have nothing else to rally around. They are desperate. U.S. climate legislation has failed. Global climate treaty negotiations are Kabuki theater. President Obama is ramping up domestic drilling and Republicans spit when they mention climate change.

Yet Levi wants McKibben and his fellow pipeline protesters to understand that what they are doing does not make logical sense:

What is it about Keystone XL that will cement our oil addiction that nearly ten million barrels a day (and rising) of U.S. domestic production won’t? How will Keystone XL qualitatively alter U.S. dependence on the oil sands when other pipelines are already importing crude from there?

To McKibben and the protesters, though, that is irrelevant. Which perplexes Levi. As Spock has said:

Logic and practical information do not seem to apply here.

Indeed. McKibben might respond that using cold logic to tackle climate change at this juncture is useless. Additionally, countries are behaving rationally by putting their self-interest ahead of the planet’s. So, as Spock might also say, an appeal to something other than reason (such as emotion) makes total sense.

***

Finally, Levi slaps down Real Climate here:

A few people have asked me whether I plan to respond to the anti-Keystone post that went up at RealClimate last Friday. I probably won’t. The post is a mix of correct arithmetic concerning oil sands emissions and some pretty awful economic and political analysis. The bad economics assumes that Canadian production won’t affect what happens elsewhere in the world; the bad political science implies that the Keystone XL decision will determine what happens to the oil sands over the next thousand or so years. None of that has any support in reality, but adopting it makes the careful arithmetic irrelevant. I’ve gone through these arguments before, and don’t see much value in going through them again. I’m a bit worried, though, that by straying from good climate science into bad economics and politics, RealClimate – which I normally love – will hurt its brand and credibility.

Now that’s what I call tough love.

Don’t bet on it. Sure, this AP story about the 2010 global emissions spike is quite the shocker. But as I discuss at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, it should not be surprising.

And while the news may hang over the upcoming COP talks in South Africa, it won’t change the near certain Groundhog Day outcome.

In his 2010 book, The Climate Fix, Roger Pielke Jr. writes:

The view that decarbonization of the global economy is a political problem and not a technological problem has been strongly influenced by a 2004 analysis by two Princeton researchers, Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow, that was published in Science. The analysis is often referred to by its very useful focus on a concept called a “stabilization wedge”…In their paper, Pacala and Socolow identified fifteen possible stabilization wedges, including approaches such as carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) from coal power plants, enhanced nuclear power, and improved soil management in agriculture.”

After detailing a major critique of the wedges approach by NYU’s Martin Hoffert,  RPJ goes on to write:

The stabilization wedges and the IPCC have shaped the policy debate on decarbonization away from technological innovation, under an assumption that we have all the technologies that we need (or soon will have them). In a very practical sense, that assumption is very likely to be wrong….any commonsense climate policy will take a look at the real numbers behind the stabilization wedges and recognize that technological innovation must  be a central strategy behind any effective policy focused on accelerating decarbonization.

Earlier this year, it was widely reported that one of the co-authors, Robert Socolow, had come to regret that the “wedges” thesis was grossly oversimplified by climate advocates, making it seem that it would be easier to achieve than it really was. However, he quickly walked back that story and now, this week, has firmly doubled down on the “wedges” scheme.

Andy Revkin has valuably elicited reactions from experts over at Dot Earth. He also links to reactions from Freeman Dyson and Nicholas Stern. So Andy has provided a nice one-stop shop for this renewed, and very important debate.

This one is from the left, and it was laid out last week by Bill McKibben in a Washington Post op-ed, in advance of the climate protests now underway in Washington DC:

The issue is simple: We want the president to block construction of Keystone XL, a pipeline that would carry oil from the tar sands of northern Alberta down to the Gulf of Mexico. We have, not surprisingly, concerns about potential spills and environmental degradation from construction of the pipeline. But those tar sands are also the second-largest pool of carbon in the atmosphere, behind only the oil fields of Saudi Arabia.

But as Bryan Walsh at Time explains today, the issue is not that simple:

Whatever oil we refuse to buy from Canada will likely just be replaced by politically risky crude from the Middle East or Russia or Venezuela—or perhaps, by environmentally riskier developments in the Niger Delta or the Alaskan Arctic. While blocking the Keystone XL pipeline would slow the development of oil sands, it wouldn’t stop it. Oil is a fungible commodity, and if the price goes high enough—and there’s little reason to expect it wouldn’t—eventually Canada would sell that crude elsewhere, perhaps piping it to the west coast and shipping it to a thirsty China, even if that is more expensive and difficult than simple selling it to the U.S.

Walsh is sympathetic to McKibben and the climate protesters, but he also thinks that their stand on the pipeline is too simplistic:

I worry that the oil sands are going to be burned no matter what Obama does, and it’s wrong to make the pipeline a climate red line for Obama.

Anybody want to venture a guess as to which way President Obama will decide?

At the NYT Green blog, Justin Gillis writes (my emphasis):

Climate scientists have long called for steps to limit the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and they are growing more and more worried about the slow pace of action. Yet their sense of urgency has not permeated society at large, and it certainly does not seem to be influencing the course of events in Washington, where climate legislation stalled last year.

All true.

So if we know that progress on the domestic and international policy fronts is stalled, then this leaves one last option for the climate concerned community: generating a larger “sense of urgency.”

Hence the new report from the San Francisco-based ClimateWorks Foundation that, says Gillis, “does the best job I have seen of explaining, in layman’s terms, why scientists keep pressing the [climate] issue.” The report cuts right to the chase (my emphasis):

The physics of the earth harbor a frightening punch line for the climate change story: Even though the consequences of climate change persist for the very long term, the time to avoid those consequences is very short. A delay — of even a decade —in reducing CO2 emissions will lock in large-scale, irreversible change. Delay also increases the risk that the whole climate system will spin out of control. This message may be alarming, but it is not alarmism; it’s physics. And the earth’s climate physics have serious implications for political action and technological innovation in the coming decade.

So the clock is ticking. But the real punch line–which I’ve bolded below–comes at the end of the report:

ClimateWorks’ goal is to limit annual global greenhouse gas emissions to 44 billion metric tons by the year 2020 (25 percent below business-as-usual projections) and 35 billion metric tons by the year 2030 (50 percent below projections). These ambitious targets require the immediate and widespread adoption of smart energy and land use policies. ClimateWorks and its network of affiliated organizations promote these policies in the regions and sectors responsible for most greenhouse gas emissions.

“Immediate,” as in now? Next week? Next year, or just by 2020? And what does “widespread” mean? I’m kinda thinking it’s another way of saying much of the world.

So what happens if the world is no closer to adopting these ambitious targets by, say, 2015? What if we’re still having the same debates then? What if there is still no sense of urgency permeating society at large?

Does the climate concerned community continue blaming oil companies, “deniers,” and the media for the lack of progress? Do they have a Plan B?

To avert “large-scale, irreversible change,” does ClimateWorks have particular “smart energy and land policies” in mind?

The clock is ticking.