Bishop Hill The price of life: the IPCC's first and forgotten controversy
Feb 26, 2013 Climate: WG2 Climate: WG3 This is a guest post by Bernie Lewin.
Mostly on the blogs we give our attention to the corruption of climate science by the politics of climate change. However, beyond the physics of climate and its physical impact, recently there has been a small revival of interest in the economic damages climate change is expected to cause, and how the costings of these damages is weighed against the costings of various mitigation efforts.
Such cost/benefit analysis should be the ultimate instruction to policy action, yet it introduces whole new layers of uncertainty that render such assessments even less tolerable to sceptics. This analysis is no more tolerable, or tolerated, even where the results present sober and moderate, even when they all but call off the alarm. This hit home hard with the recent treatment of work by a reader and commenter on this site: Richard Tol might be one of the most vocal and scathing expert critics of the Stern Review, but he still had to weather the onslaught against his own sobering damage assessment when it was posted on WUWT.
Tol’s willingness to engage across the borders of this fractious debate is admirable, and some BH readers may know of his previous work with Bjørn Lomborg on the Copenhagen Consensus. But many readers may not know that Tol’s very academic career was baptised in an earlier fiery controversy. While still a PhD candidate in his early 20s, Tol was swept up in the first public controversy ever to hit the IPCC.
The tale of this ‘price of life controversy’, like the tale of Tol’s career, is not easily reduced to a simple yarn of black and white, sceptic/alarmist, good and evil. Its significance presents in more subtle ways, and sometime in direct contradiction to the motives of the various actors. Thus, this story takes a bit of work to get into. However, it may reward those readers curious about the early history of the IPCC during the time when it was still engaging with the gathering political forces but not yet overwhelmed by them. The following is a short summary, while more detail can be found here.
Back in the early 1990s our Richard Tol was promoted to a ‘lead author’ of the Working Group III ‘damages’ chapter (Chapter 6) of the 2nd Assessment, mostly in acknowledgement of all his work in preparing it. But this was also, and in turn, because the doctorial dissertation he was simultaneously drafting was one of two draft theses (the other by Fankhauser, also duly promoted) that became the twin capitals supporting the IPCCs first full assessment of global damage costing estimates.
The controversy over Chapter 6 first hit the press as the first Conference of Parties to the climate treaty opened in Berlin (March–April 1995). Just prior to the conference India had called on other poor-country delegations to reject the damages assessment in the recently circulated final draft of Chapter 6. These estimates were ‘absurd and discriminatory’ due to the fact that they valued the death of the world’s poor much less than the death of the rich. And, as the IPCC assessment is supposed to provide ‘the basis for the policy discussion’, the Indians called on other delegations to support them in their efforts to have the ‘misdirection’ of this ‘faulty economics’ ‘purged from the process’.
India continued to make this appeal though COP1 and beyond, with a number of key players, including China, receptive and willing to support their protests. This ruckus in Berlin over the price of life set the scene for a robust confrontation when the intergovernmental plenary convened to finalise the Working Group III Summary for Policymakers three months later in Geneva.
At the Geneva Plenary, left alone to defend the chapter from an orchestrated diplomatic onslaught were our two grad-student lead authors. The more senior chapter authors had stayed away, including their PhD supervisors Vellinga and Pearce, and one Indian author, R. K. Pachauri, who kept his head down during the whole controversy. And so it fell to Tol and Fankhauser to refuse the repeated demands by a bloc of developing-country delegations who insisted they change their assessment. With both sides holding firm, the plenary collapsed in a stalemate. When it was reconvened in Montreal, Tol was left alone to mount the defence. The controversy eventually subsided but it was never fully resolved. Indeed, a truce was brokered in Montreal, but this was apparently against the IPCC rules, for the expert authors explicitly and repeatedly rejected as a distortion of their assessment the published version of the damages section in the policymakers’ summary.
***
This forgotten controversy in many ways stands distinct from the other big controversies that were to follow. By way of contrast, consider the Chapter 8 controversy that blew up the following year when the 2nd Assessment was published and the published version of Chapter 8 was found to have been ‘doctored’ so that a weak attribution claim could to be inserted into the spin machine motoring relentlessly towards Kyoto. In that dispute, as in many that followed, the alarm was raised by sceptics concerned about overstating the case. In contrast, the ‘price of life’ controversy was initiated in the UK by a small radical group of green activists concerned that the case for action was not strong enough. (The campaign was most active and effective in the UK, where it included such direct action as the picketing of Pearce’s research centre, but it was explicitly opposed by the mainstream green NGOs.)
Consider also that while Ben Santer quietly consented to changing the final draft of Chapter 8, the authors of the Chapter 6 publically and angrily resisted increasing pressure to do so. (And they resisted even to the point where both sides were out in the science press embarrassing the IPCC with calls to have the chapter removed entirely from the assessment.) And finally, consider that the version of the Summary for Policymakers agreed to at the Madrid Working Group I inter-governmental plenary ended up by strengthening the Chapter 8 attribution findings. In contrast, in the Working Group III Plenary there was a successful push from among the political delegations to stress the uncertainties and dilute the damages results given in the Chapter.
These differences go some of the way towards explains why this controversy is forgotten, but they do not diminish its significance. Key issues emerge as unheeded omens of the Hockey Stick controversy and the other scandals arising after Climategate. These relate to the treatment of uncertainty, the use of unpublished sources, the abuse of peer-review processes and other signs of virtuous corruption. Moreover, behind the very push to re-constitute Working Group III for the 2nd Assessment – so as to cover the economic and social dimensions of the problem – was an attempt to incorporate the broader sustainable development goals of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit into the IPCC assessment processes. The tensions that developed in this Working Group, and which erupted in this controversy, can only be understood by recognising that this was always more than about the climate. Just as with the Toronto climate conference of 1988, here we find another bold attempt to channel the aspirations of the sustainable development movement towards realisation in policies driven by climate fear.
And this is why, for some activists, the bottom-line result of the Chapter 6 damage assessment was so disappointing when it came out at 1.5–2% of GDP for a doubling of CO2. With only a one or two percent impact on GDP after perhaps one hundred years of business-as-usual emissions, there was no suggestion that we should be racing to the panic button. The mainstream green lobby involved in the treaty talks and in IPCC plenaries seemed less concerned with this mediocre result than they were about losing the cooperation of some very powerful developing nations. But this controversy now drove the (leaked) draft of the chapter into the daylight, where this bottom-line result was found to be unqualified by any confidence interval, and it was soon lampooned in the science press as ‘ridiculously definite’. The social costings, including the costing of human life, were described as ‘the economics of the madhouse’ and ‘a lunatic way to count the cost’.
Such criticism appeared in the news and letters pages of New Scientist and Nature, where it was sometimes even attributed to economic experts in the field. So, while this barrage against the chapter served the interests of those driving the campaign for a more radical and socially equitable result, it also served to bring the IPCC assessment and its process generally into disrepute. Towards the end of the controversy (but long before the Chapter 8 controversy broke) an editorial in Nature, scathing of the IPCC, concluded with the recommendation that Working Group II and III should be suspended while Working Group I got its act together.
***
Forgotten this controversy may be, nonetheless it seems to link various themes in the whole drama. And also various players. While Bert Bolin was, behind the scenes, setting the stage for this re-constituted Working Group III, the current chairman of the IPCC had his first modest walk-on non-speaking role (a role that the audience is left wondering might have been much larger, what with the treaty talks being threatened by his own countrymen over his own chapter). There were also cameo appearances from some other giants of the larger controversy. These include two distinguished British citizens who added their authority to the protest against Chapter 6. The first was the former advisor to Prime Minister Thatcher and founding father of British climate alarmism, Crispin Tickell. The second was Martin Rees, the astronomer who turned eschatologist before his elevation to the British peerage and the presidency of the Royal Society. But the most fascinating figure in the whole controversy is undoubtedly its very instigator, Aubrey Meyer. A violinist and composer, Meyer’s activist career was launched after he experienced a remarkable life-changing epiphany upon hearing of the death of an Amazonian rubber tapper called Chico Mendes.
More on the price of life controversy...
Reader Comments (108)
My compliments to Richard Tol on his choice for dissertation - a very challenging and interesting topic. I suspect his problems arose with the discovery that some of us ARE worth more than the least of us.
to wit: We were navigating the Straits of Florida and heard a MayDay on the radio. A scuba diver had been misplaced and a SAR-HELO (Search and Rescue Helocopter) search was being requested of the Coast Guard. This request was met with polite - official sounding resistance, but a complete description of the diver (including skin pigmentation and eye color) was collected. The dive boat complained that this wasn't getting the job done and that the missing diver was a Naval Aviator. The CG requested his service ID which the dive boat found in his wallet. On receiving this number, and after an interval while it was verified, two helicopters were dispatched from Key West and a Destroyer also in the Florida Straits was diverted to support the search. it should be obvious that had the missing diver not been a government employee, none of this would have happened.
It was because uncle Sam had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in his training and had no intention of losing this value.
But another way of looking at this guy was that the value of his continuation in his chosen career might not have been positive. For example, he could look forward to a carbon footprint the size of China, the consumption of millions of dollars of expensive hardware, his contribution to a standing army whose possession enabled the US to venture into all manner of other insufficiently considered activities all at great cost and with immense carbon footprint.
It could be with this sort of analysis, one could get the aggregate value of human life in the developed world down to a number the Chinese and Indians would be comfortable with.
I don't know how you did it Richard, but this stuff is really hard.
I find all these debates that have been raging ridiculous. I'm reminded of the fact that when people in the late 19th century were asked what they believed would be the most pressing problem facing humanity in the coming century, they said the accumulation of horseshit in the streets.
What we have is people with incomplete knowledge arguing over which predictions for the future will prove most accurate. We already know that most of the predictions on the future of warming that were offered up in the first few years of this century by those experts who would lead us into the age of global warming were well off the mark.
The recent dust-up involving Roger Pielke Jr reported at his blog here, in which he was relieved of his editorial duties at the journal GEC possibly due to a lampooning of a peer-reviewed paper that the journal had just published, is a perfect example. The paper in question was essentially an attack by the ESMD (“erring on the side of most drama”) faction against the ESLD ("erring on the side of the least drama") faction over the question of "expected impacts of anthropogenic climate change."
Arguing over predictions may be science to some people, but is it productive given the woeful lack of knowledge on the chaotic system known as the earth's climate? Or as Roger Pielke, Jr himself says:
Maybe it's time to just sit down, shut up and wait. There are many other problems facing humankind upon which we could concentrate our fire until we are assured we either have a growing climate problem caused by human industrial emissions or we don't.
@Noblesse oblige
Google Anthoff Yohe Tol ERL and you will find an open-source paper that confirms this: You can pick parameters in the impact-valuation space such that the recommended carbon tax spans six orders of magnitude.
The paper then proceeds to argue in favour of particular set of parameters, but you are welcome to disagree.
Aubrey - thanks again for responding but I'm afraid I would like to press you for specific responses to the questions I asked you.
Maybe you do define yourself "as just a musician" and the signatures of support you cite as "meaning nothing" but many people when presented with somebody representing an Institute are likely to think there is something of substance behind them. At the moment it is unclear whether that is the case or not.
Thanks.
Not Banned Yet -
I think what you are asking is: - "is there is something of substance behind GCI?" Is that right?
Good question and who am I to judge. People say what they say. some say yea and some say nay. Mostly I just practise the fiddle these days.
Maybe think on Nathan Milstein who on his 70th birthday said to Zuckerman, "Pinky m'boy, don't be so serious; you'll spoil yourself."
They could both actually play the fiddle, rather well, I hope you'll agree.
To jferguson - Yes and no doubt about it - some fiddle-players are better than others [there is always hope] . . . .
You're fiddling while Great Britain freezes.
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Aubrey - Rather than Nathan, this is the chap who came to mind:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2284189/My-dad-taught-Worlds-best-party-crasher-reveals-learned-Oscars-Emmys-Grammys-AND-Sag-awards.html
But another fiddler all the same.
Nathan [you may not realize] was the "fiddler's fiddler": - we all loved him perhaps even more than the Blessed Perlemann. We all wanted to play like Heifitz, but we all wanted to actually be Milstein.
Peer Pressure Peer Pressure - OMG Oscars; Oscars! a bit glitzy don't you think?
But Ben Afleck's acceptance speech made a good point ["What matters is that you got up again"].
I like that.
Institutes on the other hand . . . I imagine [its only that and I may be wrong] you like the Grantham Institute and the Walker Institute and all the others who have been 'led' by UKMO here . . . second most recent story: -
http://www.gci.org.uk/news_February_2013.html
OK Kim - so are all the London Orchestras; what do you suggest?
Move them to Rome, it's warmer.
You are pretty fluffy, Aubrey. There are good questions about the poor here, and you break out the catgut.
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theduke
Yes, and when Ford was asked what the people would have asked for as an improved form of transport he replied to the effect, "probably, a faster horse."
It's not so much incomplete information as an inability (common to 99% of the human race, I would suggest) to think that far 'outside the box'.
My mother was no intellectual slouch but a fair amount of what we take for granted — electronically — she would have been quite unable to envisage in 1987. In 1992 I was working with a small graphics firm in Edinburgh with a little PC building on the side and there was great celebration when the cost of hard drives to us, never mind the client, came down to £1 a megabyte — and the biggest were around the 800Mb mark. This relatively cheap laptop of mine has a 400Gb drive and the Beast in the workroom has 1Tb which cost me about £60 if I recall.
You're right. Let's just sit down and wait. We are better equipped than we have ever been to cope with the unexpected when it happens, which it will. But not if we try to second-guess it.
Nice to have Richard Tol and Aubrey Meyer along, and let me recommend that if you listen to them you can get some real insights about what was going on at the time (I also recommend Greenpeace’s Jeremy Leggett – The Carbon Wars).
What really struck me while researching this controversy was the importance of the channelling of sustainable development aspirations into the push for action on climate. It is well known that this happened at the climate conference in Toronto '88, but it is not well known that 3 scientists stood up and spoke against the hysteria in its final statement, and that one of those was Houghton. It is well known that this funnelling of aspirations occurred again on the monumental stage of the Rio Earth Summit with the birth of the FCCC, but it is not well known that Bolin and others responded to this by re-constituting Working Group III...and that the Working Group (which the involvement of activists) then defined its own work plan in alignment with the Rio Goals and its Agenda 21.
This latter initiative largely failed, but it does give some idea of the pressure on and within the IPCC for a broader agenda. It explains much better the political alignments: how the large developing countries were emboldened in the treaty talks, how this infuriated the US Right and placed them against the one-love European Union types, and them in turn against the Euro-sceptics.
I mean, I always got the ‘sustainable’ bit. I was part of that. I was a closet sceptic for 2 decades vaguely think that, even though it all looks like a giant puff, the push to renewable energy can only be a good thing... But I never saw how strong was the ‘development’ bit. And I now find myself asking whether this was the main impetus - the main driver that pushed climate science into la la land during 1995 and 1996, those important years before Kyoto.
One of the reasons the re-constituted Working Group III failed was because Tol and his co-authors did not toe the line, and less so the WGIII Plenary. They did not give the alarmist result that could be trumpeted all the way to Kyoto. A max 2% impact on global GDP after 100 years of business as usual ain’t gonna get anyone very excited about closing the power stations, about impacting GDP right now. They practically called off the alarm. And too did SAR Working Group I. Well they nearly did, save for Santer et al and the push at Asheville, and again at Madrid and beyond to remove the sceptical conclusion to make way for a weak attribution finding. And this is what was trumpeted all the way to Kyoto. The damages assessment of Pearce, Tol and Fankhauser -- that even if it is happening it is not such a big deal -- this was almost completely ignored.
I have come across Aubrey Meyer, the GCI and “contraction and convergence” (especially in discussions on this site) and it's good to read his lighthearted comments on this thread. But I was wholly unfamiliar with Bernie Lewin’s fascinating story and am most grateful for it’s being posted here. It may be forgotten today, but I suggest its successor argument continues at the heart of current negotiations aimed at a global treaty to curb emissions; indeed, it looks quite likely to thwart them entirely. I’m referring to the “BRIC” and developing economies’ insistence on the principle of “Common But Differentiated Responsibility” whereby, because of their history, developed countries take primary responsibility for emission cuts while providing financial and technological help to developing countries: see this and this. It’s a persuasive position (if you accept CAGW), but I cannot see how it would ever be accepted by the so-called wealthy nations as the basis for a new treaty, especially with uncertainties increasing and the developed world getting poorer. Therefore such a deal – despite the platitudes of the “Durban Platform” – seems improbable, at least in the foreseeable future.
This reads directly across to two other current BH threads:
1. The green, the crooked and the incompetent – where, like Leo Hickman, I was most interested in points 7, 8 and 9. In particular, I thought it interesting that the SAG (point 7) was worried about the possibility of “continued failure to achieve any meaningful international agreement on carbon emissions reductions” and (point 8) was interested in “the possibility of a new basis for an international agreement (c.f. the Cramton & Stoft 2012 paper)”. For the reasons set out above, they’ve got every reason to be worried about the first (and no treaty puts the futility of the CCA etc. into focus) and, as to the second, any proposal for “a new basis” sounds like a recipe for yet more argument and delay. (In any case I cannot see China, India etc. being very interested in Crampton & Stoft’s proposal.)
2. The “Discussion”, Is this what winning is like? – where I suggested that the way forward – for those opposed to the UK’s climate policies – should be based on a simple “soundbite”: such policies are damaging (increased fuel costs, job losses etc.), potentially disastrous (serious power outages) and, in any case, pointless. The latter’s relevant here: if, as seems increasingly likely, BRIC insistence on “Common But Differentiated Responsibility” means no global treaty, UK cuts are wholly irrelevant. A lot of pain for zero gain.
Richard Tol:
Bernie Lewin has raised some interesting issues that seem to have been buried in the to and fro with Aubrey. What, if anything, would you do differenty now if confronted with the same type of pressure to change the results of your analysis? What is your take on the experience and how does it differ from Bernie Lewin's?
Dang, 'catgut and horsefeathers'.
Thanks BernieL @ 6:04. The picture is clarifying. I've long considered this whole mess an 'Extraordinary Popular Delusion and Madness of the Herd', but it is clear that some were breathing and bellowing together.
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Your imagination misleads you Aubrey - personally I'm not a big one for Institutes.
But my point is that many do set store on the weight of a "title" and never take time to check the credentials behind it. Which is why the success of Mr Weiss came to mind - as he says:
//
You know, there were times throughout this movie where someone should have just stopped me and said, "Wait a minute. Who are you and why are you here?"'
//
bernie,
an additional question of Richard Tol, perhaps in response to the Donna LaFramboise issue of grad students doing the work alleged to be by the "best and finest" might be "Richard, if you hadn't done it, who else might have been "more appropriate" had they been available at that time?"
At the same time, I never bought the idea that it was improbable that a really bright (Tol as an example) couldn't do a superior job to someone longer of tooth in that trade.
kim, this might be an especially good time to leave the horses out of it.
@bernie
What would I do differently now? In 1995, we reacted to events. I hope I can anticipate now. I still think that the IPCC should reflect the academic literature, the whole literature, and nothing but the literature and to hell with political expedience.
@jferguson
Back in AR2, I was simply cannon fodder. David Pearce was in charge.
In my experience, youngsters have a better knowledge of the literature but old hard have a better understanding of the literature.
"The advance of a Russian Army is something that Westerners can't imagine. Behind the tank spearheads rolls on a vast horde, largely mounted on horses. The soldier carries a sack on his back, with dry crusts of bread and raw vegetables collected on the march from the fields and villages. The horses eat the straw from the house roofs--they get very little else. The Russians are accustomed to carry on for as long as three weeks in this primitive way, when advancing. You can't stop them, like an ordinary army, by cutting their communications, for you rarely find any supply columns to strike."
H/t Manteuffel via Liddell Hart.
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Bernie and JFerguson, I will let Richard Tol respond and look forward to it. But let me suggest that we are thinking the wrong way about the so selection of authors...
Firstly, remember that authors are nominated by country delegations. So this selection can be political (although Zillman always tells me it usually was not).
An interesting aside to this is that Meyer claims that Nordhaus was nominated by the USA (for Chapter 6?) and that his group had a successful campaign to have him removed. I have no other evidence to support this claim and Nordhaus himself rejects it.
But anyway, consider that if Nordhaus were to write the damage costings report it would be even more sobering than the published Chapter 6. See the extracts from his book published in 1994 in the final part of my study. He is very skeptical of making any assessment at all, skeptical of assessing social costs, and especially of the costing of damages to future generations.
One way I see it is like this:
1. A call goes out to the economists: 'Can anyone write an assessment on the inter-generational costings for damages caused by predicted global warm?'
2. The overwhelming majority of economists say 'nah it cant be done!'
3. Out of the huge crowd 4 step forward saying that it can be done. They are, from moderate to extreme, Nordhaus, Pearce, Cline and Hohmeyer.
4. And its got to be done, because...well...because the delegations at the treaty talks need something to go by, so a couple of them are selected (Pearce and Cline).
5. Pearce the upper hand on Cline, and, with Vellinga also on side, he uses the work of their PhD students to over-ride the work of others.
This certain leaves little chance for the evidence-base (or lack of it) to be driving the assessment.
It was a triumph for Pearce, but thanks to Meyer his victory like that of Pyrrhus.
I am conscious that Pearce is not here to dispute this understanding, and I am not sure how far I want to push Tol, who I know harbored his own concerns about Pearce's behaviour in the controversy. However, I am interested whether Tol would dispute any of this...again thanking him for his participation.
Hello Bernie
Nice to see/hear/read you . . . See what you've started here . . . you did a very good job with those essays; well done.
Of course Bill Nordhaus would deny that he was removed from IPCC - but he was there and then he wasn't and that's a fact. That said, he obviously wouldn't deny he wrote after that the angry letter reproduced on page 4 here either its got his signature on it: - http://www.gci.org.uk/Documents/sss___+.pdf
He obviously wouldn't deny writing what you quoted here either, and nor would he deny writing this in a paper for an IPIECA conference around 1995,
“Once we open the door to consider catastrophic changes, a whole new debate is engaged. If we do not know how human activities will affect the thin layer of life-supporting activities that gave birth to and nurture human civilization and if we cannot reliably judge how potential geophysical changes will affect civilization or the world around us, can we use the plain vanilla cost-benefit analysis (or even the premium variety in dynamic optimization models). Should we no be ultra-conservative and tilt towards preserving the natural world at the expense of economic growth and development? Do we dare put human betterment before the preservation of natural systems and trust that human ingenuity will bail us out should Nature deal us a nasty hand?” Having asked the questions he asserts a preference for the reasoned judgement of natural and social scientists over the judgement of philosophers and politicians. But he acknowledges the “massive uncertainties” and suggests that “coping with climate change is a worthy challenge for us all.”
As I wrote at the time, this was all a far cry from his suggestion a few years prior when he suggested that climate change was of no consequence to the US as they had air conditioning and shopping malls. Later he suggested that spotted-owl-equivalents would do just as well as money for the numeraire in the global cost benefit analyses of climate change.
In fact it was the one moment of mirth in the period of “stressful learning”; - as no one at the UN could understand how 15 dead Chinamen equaled one dead Englishman if a spotted owl equaled a spotted owl.
As has been suggested variously, "Economics is not that reliable and is sometimes more daft than dismal," but I guess a lot of us are getting older, even pretty old, now . . .
May I ask people to consider this . . . ?
Movement and Rest [Chang Tzu] - What changes and what stays the same? It is interesting [even helpful] to be open to discovering if there is anything, anything at all, that is *Constant* and then in relation that, to ask what changes can occur, or even be made to occur, that can be measured in relation to *that*.
For musicians its very easy; as Pythagoras demonstrated, a stretched string that doubles the frequency when you have the length, demonstrates a perfect octave etc: - http://www.gci.org.uk/animations/vibrating-strings.swf
In honour of "How long is a piece of string?" let's call that 'stringularity': - http://www.gci.org.uk/music.html
Nothing but nothing can change that fundamental; it is even more fundamental than the inverse square law.
So go from there to [a] the Plank Length and to [b] the Speed of Light and ask can [a] be smaller and ask can [b] be faster, and the answer is no to both. Consequently, we can say that the *measurement-problem* is between those extreme and fundamental constants.
We can then ask what is the relationship between those constants and stringularity constant . . . ?
Can we start to meet the measurement challenge from there?
These are not *ideological* questions. Moreover, at this point I think we can safely assume at least that 'money' as the numeraire upon which to base that effort of measurement is probably a little futile.
Indeed, Bill Nordhaus recognized that back in the day saying, "you can have it Spotted-Owl-Equivalents if you prefer." Money [however much we may want it, and despite that fact that personally I agree with Kim's concerns about the poor] is simply a fungible political construction that is endlessly manipulated on top of the more basic reality of those universal constants by which we are governed.
So Kim - Whether the orchestras are in London or in Rome, one thing that is sure is that all the fiddle-players knew that they learned that [i.e.their instruments], because sure-as-hell we/they quickly discovered the fiddles did't learn us/them.
And so to the "I want to be in a band" [Not Banned Yet] nameless contributor: - please rest assured that you will discover and bow to this - not *insitutional* but *constitutional* - truth when and if you make up your mind to work to play to a standard where you might be able to join one of those [or better] . . . or in fact any institution that was worth joining.
In short 'The Battle for the Value of Life" was the measurement challenge all over again, as is the battle now for UNFCCC-compliance. There lies the case for C&C: - www.gci.org.uk
@BernieL
My sources in the USEPA tell me that Nordhaus was invited but declined.
As you know, I think Chapter 6 faithfully reflects the then literature. We did not override the work of others. We did overlook some papers (e.g., Haradan's and Parry's work). This was before search engines. I don't think this introduced a bias of any sort. We ignored gray publications of Azar, Hohmeyer and Kandlikar, but those were and are the rules.
Heh, AM, discordant cacophony to this critic's ear. I'm glad you express concern for the poor. The raising artificially of energy prices, which you seem to endorse, will hurt the poor out of all proportion to the rest. It is a War on the Poor. Now, what uniform are you wearing?
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Bernie Lewin says 'Such cost/benefit analysis should be the ultimate instruction to policy action'
The actuality, as Peter Lilley (the only MP to actually check) discovered, is that all that diligent analytical pontification is first completely ignored by the legislature, then, when embarassingly pointed out that costs (~£16,000-20,000 per household in 2009 terms) far exceed putative benefits, the benefits were magically revised upwards tenfold.
http://iaindale.blogspot.co.uk/2009/04/peter-lilley-challenges-brown-on.html
And to cap it all the (ex-) Minister for Energy and Climate Change, claimed on an official government webpage that 'By 2020, households will, on average, save money (£94 or 7%) on their energy bills compared to what they would have paid in the absence of policies.'
https://www.gov.uk/policy-impacts-on-prices-and-bills
bernieL:
Thanks for acknowledging my comments. I wasn't taking a DL view of the author selection - though I certainly believe many of her points are valid for recent and current reports. I was more interested in the interpersonal issues of representing a more or less objective assessment against a highly charged political argument that reflected a desired outcome. You have alluded to some of those dynamics in your reply. I imagine that it is very difficult to make a sound technical statement on the relative value of first and third world outcomes that can be readily twisted to suggest a broader conclusion that is repugnant. When those discussions involve players who can have an impact on your career - the whole thing gets more difficult. What strikes me most about your retelling of the events is the apparent reluctance to air all the dirty laundry and to keep the discussions open and transparent.
Richard and Aubrey,
Thank you for clarifying this point about Nordhaus. Actually, my recollection was that Richard was dissuading me from this view in his comments on a draft. But that is fine.
Richard,
Firstly, it might help, for the record, if I say that, in my non-expert view, I was persuaded by the critique of Cline and of Hohmeyer & Gartner that is given in Chapter 6. If I hold to certain presumptions of the Chapter, that you all shared (but which I dont) it is apparent to me that your work was much better than theirs. Perhaps 'over-ride' has the wrong connotations. But that is not the point.
What I do find abhorrent is the appeal by Pearce at the time, and now by you Richard: "but those were and are the rules." Pearce used the rules to exclude criticism he did not care for. Your work may have been better than that of Cline or Nordhaus but their work was published, and all we have of your work and that of Fankhauser is two draft PhDs and a working paper. Neither were published in peer review journals until long after the drafting and reviewing was over and Pearce had locked out all critiques.
Pearce locked out Meyer before Meyer even had a chance. And again in my non-expert view I was very persuaded that Meyer's critique of the reliability, the level of uncertainty in your results - this was entirely valid. No sceptics were on the case, so we had to rely on Meyer to show how fabulous was this economics. But he was shut out by the rule to ignore grey publications - a rule that was not so clear-cut either before during or after SAR. Meyer had no time to read the draft assessment and so see how unpublished work was used and then still get a critique into peer review.
Grey and unpublished research was allow and it was use in SAR unchallenged by the IPCC. It was used at the authors discretion (eg, by Santer and Pearce) in clear conflicts of interest, an abuse of their power as assessors.
@Aubrey
Nordhaus' letter does not confirm your version of the story. Nordhaus writes that Douthwaite is an idiot, an accurate observation.
@BernieL
Chapter 6 in no way excluded Cline's or Nordhaus' work. At the time, though, they had only published estimates for the US. Nordhaus' estimate for the rest of the world only appeared in 1996, Cline's in 2009. Sam Fankhauser's work was published in the learned literature in 1994, mine in 1995.
We used a narrow interpretation of the IPCC mandate: Peer-reviewed literature only. I believed then that was the right thing to do (even though that meant that my own work was almost cut out) and I still believe that this is right (even though it means that some of my recent work will not get into AR5).
Pearce too regretted the stringency of this rule, as he was convinced that a draft paper by Christian Azar could have solved all our problems had it been published in time.
Aubrey,
I like your animation of the Venus and Earth orbits. You may be interested in the discussion of solar system dynamics at Tallblokes Talkshop
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2013/02/20/a-remarkable-discovery-all-solar-system-periods-fit-the-fibonacci-series-and-the-golden-ratio/
You should look at the evidence that suggests it is the solar system, especially the sun, that controls our climate.
As you plans depend on trading carbon credits what do think of the present state of the EU Emissions trading System?
For once the comments threads are more enlightening than the original article. This is not due the original article is poor (it is excellent), but because two of the main characters in the story (Richard Tol and Aubrey Meyer) are here engaging in the comments and answering questions. Thank you both.
However, the main article makes a comment on the economics, which cannot be emphasised enough:-
After the climate scientists have had their say, the relative importance of their conclusions is not theirs to assess, nor those of PR consultants, cognitive psychologists or activists. It is economists who, potentially, have the ability to assess the relative magnitude of the catastrophe predicted, the potential efficacy of policies to tackle the issue and the possible adverse consequences of those policies. Search “climateconomics richard tol” for a book that aims to deal with these issues.
But that is not the end of the problem. Even if the climate models give a true projection and there is a theoretical economic solution, there is the further problem of implementation of the prescribed optimal policy. Application of “Public Choice Theory” (The “Economics of Politics”) shows the “COP” gatherings work to create expensive and ineffectual policies, creating greater net harm than doing nothing. At a higher level, the work of Von Neumann and Morgenstern would suggest that that global climate change negotiations are net negative sum games, no matter how great the potential climate catastrophes they aim to ameliorate.
Richard Tol,
I suggest that you are becoming slippery with your terms.
I did not say that Chapter 6 excluded Cline's or Nordhaus' work. Your unpublished work referred to by the Chapter, and the Chapter itself, contain criticism of the methodology of both Cline and Nordhaus. I hope I have the terms right about your controversy with Nordhaus when I say that he rejected non-market valuations and especially of damages in the distant future. Nordhaus's reply to this criticism appeared (could only appear) after SAR was published. That would be fine if your work were already in the public sphere.
Is it correct to say that feedback on SAR WGIII chapter drafts was closed in the summer of 1994 and the final draft was circulated in late 1994? If so, then neither your work nor Fankhauser's was peer review published before the chapters were finalised. Let's be clear on the status of Fankhauser's thesis. Some of its results were circulated in a working paper well before the final draft, and then as a book in 1995. These might be 'learned literature' but neither conform to the 'stringency of this rule' as applied by high-end scientific journals and scientific institutions as ‘peer review literature’ – not even the book. This is slippery.
It would be helpful to compare the goings on here with organisations making similar assessments to inform policy in health and epidemiology – the World Health Organisation. It would also be helpful to consider also the standards of Cochrane reviews. In neither case would novelty have ever been allow to enter via unpublished sources, especially not those of the assessors, and not as the principle basis of the final conclusions. Mostly the IPCC was unprotected by rules (especially on conflict of interest) but where they did have rules these were abused by inconsistent application.
This is all very important because, if the proper process were followed, then an assessment made in 1993-4 would have had a clear outcome:
Question: What will the predicted global warming cost the global economy in the future?
Answer: We don’t know.
We don’t know because there has not been enough reliable data. We don’t know because there has not been any global CBA published. We don’t know because there is no agreement on discount rates, we don’t know…etc.
In Chapter 8 of the First Assessment, Wigley was brave enough to conclude on attribution just this: We don’t know. SAR Chapter 8 nearly did the same. And Pearce should also have said ‘Sorry folks, but I can’t make a call on that one.’ The fact that in the end neither Santer or Pearce delivered such a conclusion, in my view, this has done great damage to the reputation of science.
@BernieL
What matters is date of acceptance, rather than date of publication.
Of course there is discussion in the literature. Later papers always critique earlier papers. That's called progress.
It was not too early for the IPCC to publish an impact estimate in 1995. The first impact estimate was published in 1977. You either assess the literature or let it be assessed by someone less qualified -- and few were more qualified than Pearce.
Roger -
So glad to read that you liked that Venus Earth Sun animation. Thankyou. Phi being at the heart of everything, it was an attempt to demonstrate a 'one truth, many viewpoints' in terms of the three-body problem and . So thanks too for the heads-up to that link on Phi in the solar system. Fascinating stuff and I would like to take some time out to really engage with that. The 'stringularity' audio/visual here: - http://www.gci.org.uk/animations/vibrating-strings.swf is also Fibonaci to the core - and [dare I say it] also at the heart of the 'Carbon Budget Analysis Tool [C-BAT] see below.
Yes you are absolutely right - there is no question that the Sun heats the Earth and not the other way around. The question we are confronted with is the extent to which we, by altering the GHG composition of the atmosphere, are altering the radiative balance of the Earth as a whole. Obviously there is a range of views about this, including those expressed here, but like Phi, the basic physics is immutable - IR excites 3 molecule gases like CO2 and we wouldn't even be here without that.
You mentioned the ETS. Like all the 'emissions-trading' ideas that are current, it isn't working if UNFCCC-compliance is the intent. The price-function alone is a clear enough indication of that.
Contraction & Convergence is certain shaped by UNFCCC-compliance but does not exactly *depend* on ETS; it just doesn't say 'no' to it the way various actors have said 'no' which isn't quite the same as saying an unqualified yes to ETS. We have to get the conceptual framework right and marginal economics of whatever persuasion is exactly that - marginal - so it isn't going to do that.
The fundamental measure of UNFCCC-compliance is getting calculations for 'Contraction and Concentrations' right first and recognising that the 'numeraire' for this is the time-dependent tonne of carbon and not the dollar.
Making 'Contraction and Convergence' negotiations a function of that is what follows. 'Contraction and Conversion' [Green Growth Technology etc] are a function of that combination and all this needs to be organised at rates which show that the overall growth-curve does not trump the climate damages curve.
To this end the C-BAT [Carbon Budget Accounting Tool] is [NB] only work in progress but a draft of Domain One [Contraction and Concentrations] is working at the link embedded here: -
http://www.gci.org.uk/climateact_technical.html
Perhaps not obviously, Phi is actually at the heart of this and this image gives a sense of where this effort is going: - http://www.gci.org.uk/images/C1_C2_C3.pdf [Incidentally I think that now the BoE is talking about negative interest rates, the way has been opened up a little more to thinking through the fundamentals again] . . .
This is the basis of why RIBA and many others adopted C&C as a frame of reference for UNFCCC-compliance - and at the risk of exciting some of the participants on this list, here is a temporary ref: -
http://www.gci.org.uk/endorsements.html
C-BAT certainly doesn't seek to exclude/prevent/or-in-anyway-dis-allow *economics*. It does seek make economics a function of UNFCCC-compliance [rather than continuing with vice versa]. It the problem of enhanced global warming warming [EGW] doesn't exist then this is irrelevant. If it does exist then ovbvioulsy a C-BAT function is vital.
What is certain is that saying EGW doesn't exist because 'I don't like the C-BAT function' - the sort of thing that Lord Christopher Monkton is fond of saying.
In fact some here might be surprised to discover the extent to which well-know contrarians [let's call them 'problem-deniers'] have been very measured and polite about C&C in a way that 'problem-acceptors' have become 'solution-deniers' and often painfully obtuse about C&C: - http://www.gci.org.uk/problem-solution-deniers.html
http://www.gci.org.uk/Ashton_John.html
Folk here may recognize some of these actors [one truth many viewpoints was never so stretched . . . ] . . .
Is it me or despite the fact that the words are all in the dictionary and the verbs and nouns and such all seem to be conventionally distributed the meanings are not clear at all. I may be unduly inclined to scorn, but this precious nonsense does not seem to me to be a basis on which to make policy supposed to protect the future of mankind. Yes, Aubrey, I mean you.
Rhoda - Chris Huhne didn't seek to pass his penalty points on to you did he?
[OMG - Another Minister - or was it economist? - falls].
To say that Phi is prescious is human, but to say that Phi is prescious nonsense is not Divine.
Perhaps let's just say for now that all Rhodas lead to Rome . . . and in time all will become clear.
or a senseless jumble of words
Thanks for providing a further example.
It was just the cadenza, rhoda.
Thanks rhoda. I know I'm not good at this stuff, it's why I prefer to stay in the backroom, tinkering with rocks. I've read this through 3 times and I'm glad I'm not the only one dealing with a serious case of bafflegab.
Manic Bean Counter - thank you for your constructive comment. It is [perhaps even shamefully] very hard to disagree with the thrust of what you are saying here: -
Even if the climate models give a true projection and there is a theoretical economic solution, there is the further problem of implementation of the prescribed optimal policy. Application of “Public Choice Theory” (The “Economics of Politics”) shows the “COP” gatherings work to create expensive and ineffectual policies, creating greater net harm than doing nothing. At a higher level, the work of Von Neumann and Morgenstern would suggest that that global climate change negotiations are net negative sum games, no matter how great the potential climate catastrophes they aim to ameliorate.
COP's mission is to achieve the objective of the UNFCCC - to arrest the rise of atmospheric GHG.
After 20 years that rise is faster than ever. So this does need [however painful it may be to those involved] to be said. The blunt truth is that COPs have a nearly 20-year record of political failure to account for.
And yet, aubrey, the "faster than ever" rise in CO2 does not appear to have brought with it the expected, nay eagerly anticipated, disasters that the UN and its assorted hangers-on were hoping for. You would think by now somebody would have noticed and possibly changed direction if only ever so slightly.
We can't wait much longer for them to be proved right.
It may be necessary to invade China to get them to stop. Is that priced in?
Or alternatively might it be that every premise, every assumption in this debate is merely so economists can have a theory to argue about? Just a responsibility-free trotting out of nonsense which they know will never be implemented and for which they will never be held to account?
Mike to say that evidence of 'disasters' is not there is, I feel, being a little 'de-selective' on your part [and we can trade links if you like].
However, to suggest that anyone anywhere is 'eagerly aniticipating' these disasters is an appalling slur. Who might you be suggesting argues or even expects eagerly that way?
I don't know anyone who does that. So I say to you again, that is a truly appalling thing to say and allege and I hope you or someone other than me will 'moderate' that remark - please.
There is no one I know personally who is suggesting that and nor would I wish to. If anything, on the contrary, I/many hope we can united behind not just the need for but also the path-analysis to the plan for the UNFCCC-compliance that will take us off that path.
That said, there are some who appear to quietly promote the idea that Global-Warming/Climate-Change is happening and will go from mega-death to giga-deaths if we keep on the path we are on and and that this is 'desirable'. But the reasoning here is not remotely the version that you imply.
The reasoning here, it is alleged, is because what better way could there be to get rid of the 'too-many-people' they say the planet now has, than to just [passive-aggressive] discourage efforts at UNFCCC-compliance and go from mega-death to giga-death "with no identifiable finger-prints" visible at all.
I assume your not intending that inference to be drawn from your remarks, but clarification would be welcome.
Rhoda!
"Invade to" . . . . "Get them [the Chinese] to stop."
Stop what?
So the IPCC was never actually about science but rather the IPCC is a long term marketing effort. So there was never a fair, open minded approach to setting CO2 policy. The goal was always known and the work has been to manipulate and deceive to fabricate support for the pre-determined conclusion.
Well, Aubrey's making it plain how he can think he is saving the poor while actually warring on them.
==================
Aubrey, the urge to disaster which you seem so ashamed of is manifest in the meme of climate weirding.
======================
I'm a little late to this party ... well, not really ... actually, I was here earlier and started writing a response as follows ...
Bernie,
You have done us all a great service by compiling and sharing this fascinating history.
From my perspective, the key to the mess in which (to varying degrees depending on our country of residence) we now find ourselves lies in your:
If nothing else, the United Nations has proven to be very adept at engineering "mechanisms" (to use one of the IPCC "parent's" favourite words!) which employ the concept of "let's you and him fight".
If you think about it, has there ever in the history of the UN been a more divisive issue than the purported perils of human-generated carbon dioxide – and its “contribution” to variously-called global warming, climate change and (the latest and greatest scare) “extreme weather events”?
Towards this end, their army of unaccountable (and about as far from transparent as one can possibly get) bureaucrats invariably appear to have an uncanny knack of producing seemingly innocuous - but lengthy and sleep-inducing - documents (thereby almost guaranteeing that few if any will ever read in their entirety) in which are planted the seeds of future disagreements.
No wonder their COPs are such flops! And in the meantime, we’re all distracted by a dispute that centres on the merits (demerits?!) of human-generated C02 – a trojan horse if ever there was one – while the “dark horse” of “sustainable development” gallops towards the finish line.
The "executive summary" of such documents is usually contained in a UN General Assembly (UNGA) "Resulution" percolated via the maze, so that the abbreviated and oh-so-innocuous wording (unanimously adopted "by the nations of the world" of course) does not tell the full story.
And the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and its "flagship" Agenda 21/Sustainable Development (not to mention its ever-increasing stable of acronymic offspring) are a case in point.
But ... as I was building my "case", I realized that I was wandering somewhat o/t (and at far greater length than I thought I would!) So I have modified the above somewhat, and incorporated my additional musings, which can be found at:
Of (CO2 driven) climate fears and the UNEP’s “transformative changes”
Aubrey, the Chinese are burning a lot of coal. They do it in their own interest, and I for one cannot blame them. They are not going to stop. They are not going to let some dim international outfit interfere in their catching up with the West. They are a sovereign nation and will not be pushed around or shamed into doing what makes no sense for their people. Energy is the key.
(Sorry to spoil the pretentious debate with a dose of reality, but there it is.)