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Richard Tol says wildly optimistic MIT/NBER study is 'way too pessimistic'

An amazing comment (here) from climate economist luminary Richard Tol epitomizes the narrow, linear, non-scientific thinking of the economics profession in the climate arena.

In Voodoo economists, part 3, I explained why a recent study, "Climate Shocks and Economic Growth [PDF], was a new favorite of global warming deniers. In projecting the economic consequences of global warming this century, the authors:

• knowingly ignored many of the key impacts (like sea-level rise, extreme weather, species loss)
• (unknowingly?) ignored all the other key impacts (like desertification and loss of the inland glaciers and ocean acidification)
• assumed the the tiny global warming impacts we have experienced in the last few decades could be be extrapolated in a linear fashion to determine the huge global warming impacts projected for this century on the business-as-usual emissions path
• absurdly did not assign China and India "significant negative consequences of climate change" because those countries would soon be rich.

That's the only way they could come up with conclusions like "we find very little impact of long-run climate change on world GDP" or "Changes in precipitation had no substantial effects on growth in either poor or rich countries" -- conclusions the right wing deniers at the Heritage Foundation and elsewhere were quick to embrace. But Richard Tol posted a comment here:

Observations and reflections from a House hearing on stimulus, efficiency, and green jobs

On Thursday I attended a hearing of the House global warming select committee on stimulus, efficiency, and green jobs. You can find a list of attendees, their full written testimony, and some pictures on the committee website.

Just a few observations.

First, and this will shock no one, Van Jones is a marvel. (It is not normal for Congressional testimony to solicit applause.) To take one example from today: I have labored through thousands of words on Grist to try to explain why the most common economic models fail to fully account for the benefits of efficiency investments. In doing so I have bored even myself and built great, airy rhetorical castles that only masochists would want to explore.

Here's what Jones said at the hearing: "Get the math right: don't just count what you spend, count what you save."

Um ... dammit. Why didn't I think of putting it that way? I could have trimmed 14,000 words down to 14.

Here's his opening statement, if you're interested:

How often do natural and unnatural flights collide?

A plane crashes into the Hudson River. By great good luck, all 155 people aboard survive. The cause of the accident? “A double bird strike.” So how often do birds, going about their wild-thing business, bring down our massive metal machines? More often than you might think — and yet, way less often than you’d […]

Must-read: Van Jones and the English language

I'm a big fan of people who are persuasive advocates for clean energy -- and an even bigger fan of those who keep trying to improve their language skills.

And that brings me to Van Jones, founder of Green for All, an organization promoting green-collar jobs and opportunities for the disadvantaged (and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress). He is the subject of a must-read New Yorker profile by Elizabeth Kolbert, "Greening the Ghetto: Can a remedy serve for both global warming and poverty?"

This is the part that got my attention:

He spends a lot of time listening to speeches -- the way most people download Coltrane or Mozart, he's got Churchill and Martin Luther King on his iPod.

"Ronald Reagan I admire greatly," he once told me. "You look at what he gets away with in a speech -- unbelievable. He's able to take fairly complex prose and convey it in such a natural and conversational way that the beauty of the language and the power of the language are there, but you stay comfortable. That's very hard to do."

Precisely. We are constantly being told people have the "gift of gab" as if it is something you were born with. Facility with persuasive language is a skill that is developed and improved through practice and study.

Lincoln didn't become our most eloquent president through happenstance. He consciously decided to educate himself in rhetoric. Indeed, much as Van Jones listens to Churchill and Martin Luther King Jr., Lincoln studied, listen to, memorized, and recited the works of the greatest master of rhetoric in the English language -- William Shakespeare.

Churchill himself studied the art of rhetoric and the figures of speech all his life and at the age of 23 wrote a brilliant, unpublished essay, "The Scaffolding of Rhetoric," that explains:

Time for new thinking — and new blood? — in the White House economics team

In 2005, Henry Paulson stepped down as chief of Goldman Sachs to become President George W. Bush's Treasury secretary. The Wall Street-to-Treasury story is a bit dog-bites-man; Robert Rubin had taken the exact same path a decade before under Clinton.

Yet Paulson's appointment generated excitement in green circles, of all places. The new secretary had sat on the board of the Nature Conservancy and collaborated on projects with Conservation International. An article by Grist's own Amanda Griscom Little summed up the mood. She quoted Conservation International Chair and CEO Peter Seligmann:

My hope is that Paulson will raise the level of understanding around these issues [i.e., climate] within this inner circle, and rally a critical mass that will push the administration to make substantive moves in the right direction.

Since then, of course, Bush has done approximately nothing on climate. And Paulson has evidently been a less-than-constructive presence, as David Roberts recently pointed out.

So the Wall Street-friendly finance minister, despite his Big Green cred, ended up caving on climate. What does this tell us, as the Obama administration prepares to install its own Wall Street-friendly economics team?

Kids stay off lawns, debunk ethanol fantasies

Those of us of a certain vintage recall a showman named Art Linkletter, an avuncular old guy who seemed to have a knack for connecting with kids and getting the kids to talk to him like they talk to each other, leading to shows and books on the theme of "Kids say the darnedest things."

Well, some slightly older kids have shown that kid wisdom is still around:

Survey says rich people want luxury!

According to an email we just received, eco-resorts have got to spiff up a bit if they want to attract "high spenders." Of 283 travelers surveyed, more than 60 percent would pay a premium for an eco-resort. But among the delicious tidbits: "Air conditioning and Internet access were the two most missed items if not available."

This comes courtesy of a company that's building "chic eco-homes" at the tip of a biosphere reserve in the Philippines. Sigh.

Marc Morano agrees that only experts in climate feedbacks can make judgments on climate

Tuesday, I received an email from Marc Marano, staffer for Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.). Usually, these are vectored straight into my junk folder, but apparently my computer's spam filter has a sense of humor, because this email made it into my inbox. And what I saw astounded me.

Marc's email contained a link to a recent post by Roy Spencer. In it, Spencer claims:

Obviously, the thermostat (feedback) issue is the most critical one that determines whether manmade global warming will be catastrophic or benign. In this context, it is critical for the public and politicians to understand that the vast majority of climate researchers do not work on feedbacks.

In popular political parlance, most climate researchers do not appreciate the nuanced details of how one estimates feedbacks in nature, and therefore they are not qualified to pass judgment on this issue. Therefore, any claims about how many thousands of scientists agree with the IPCC's official position on global warming are meaningless.

Did I read that right? The only people qualified to make judgments on the science of climate change are experts in climate feedbacks?

I'll ignore the questionable and obviously self-serving nature of this claim for now. The surprising point here is that Roy has clearly disqualified virtually every member of Inhofe's list of 650 "experts" who dismiss the IPCC's view of climate science. Not only are the Inhofe 650 members not experts on climate feedbacks, but also most of them are not experts on any aspect of the climate. (Note, however, that I'm still an expert because I actually do work on climate feedbacks.)

And since Marc Moreno sent out a link to this post, he obviously agrees that Inhofe's list is a pile of rubbish.

Finally, something Marc and I can agree on.

American Meteorological Society gives James Hansen its top honor

(I'd be happy to forward to Hansen any comments people have on his quarter-century-long effort to inform the public and policymakers of the grave dangers we face on our current greenhouse gas emissions path -- in the face of withering attacks by the right-wing deniers and the attempted muzzling by the Bush administration.)

The American Meteorological Society awarded the country's top climate scientist its highest honor, the 2009 Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal [PDF]:

For outstanding contributions to climate modeling, understanding climate change forcings and sensitivity, and for clear communication of climate science in the public arena.

Hansen is the longtime director of the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies. NASA also announced:

In a separate announcement on Dec. 30, Hansen was also named by EarthSky Communications and a panel of 600 scientist-advisors as the Scientist Communicator of the Year. Peers cited Hansen as an "outspoken authority on climate change" who had "best communicated with the public about vital science issues or concepts during 2008."

Kudos to Hansen for these well-deserved awards. I, for one, wouldn't be writing this blog if it weren't for him.

Worldwatch Institute’s 2009 report is one long call to climate action

President-elect Obama wants to work toward reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050, but a new study from a D.C. research group says even that rate won't be enough to avoid potentially catastrophic disruptions to the world's climate. The Worldwatch Institute, which sounds a little like a group with an underground lair in a James Bond film, released its 2009 State of the World report this week, claiming the world will have to reach near-zero emissions by mid-century if it wants to avoid the worst consequences of a changing climate.

As you might guess from the title "State of the World," the annual report is ambitious in scope, synthesizing an impressive amount of climate and energy research and recruiting a variety of scientists and analysts to write chapters. It includes chapters on how to restructure energy systems, rural land use, and the "resiliency" of political and social networks as they strain under the effects of climate change. The institute says it included more contributors from developing nations than ever before, because those countries are likely to be the most affected, and least equipped to adapt, to climate change.

In an early chapter, climate scientist W.L. Hare tracks the increase in our planet's average temperature since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century -- 0.8 degrees Celsius (1.4 degrees Fahrenheit). He calculates that a further increase of even 2 degrees Celsius -- an amount climatologists predict will be very difficult to avoid given the world's continued reliance on fossil fuels -- would trigger rising sea levels, coastal flooding, major disruption to food-growing in developing countries, and reductions in biodiversity.

Much of the rest of the report focuses on solutions. In one of the strongest chapters, on farming and land use, Sara Scherr and Sajal Sthapit explain that the Earth's soil and vegetation hold some 2,000 billion tons of carbon, three times as much as the atmosphere holds. They sketch out five land-use techniques that would slow the damage of climate change: enriching soil carbon, creating high-carbon cropping systems, promoting climate-friendly livestock production systems, protecting existing carbon stores in natural forests and grasslands, and restoring vegetation in degraded areas. The chapter [PDF] forms a useful primer in eco-agriculture (not that you don't know all about those techniques already).

The report largely avoids the debates over the flashpoints of nuclear energy and carbon sequestration, devoting more ink to renewables, chiefly wind and solar: "Renewable energy combined with energy efficiency can do the job, and renewables are the only technologies available right now that can achieve the emissions reductions needed in the near term."

In using phrases like "a multicentury commitment to action," the report sounds pretty lofty, as if climate change were chiefly an academic puzzle, not a messy political one. But sections on the urgency of international climate meetings and on the problem of making climate action fair to developing nations put the report's prescriptions into a helpful context. If parts of the report feel like an intellectual exercise, it's still likely to be useful for those hashing out political plans.