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.
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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.
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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)
Sorry, aubrey, not about to backtrack on a single word.
OK... I'll go so far as to say that if they aren't eagerly anticipating disasters then they're giving a damn good imitation.
Look about you, man. The whole global warming/climate change argument has revolved around the idea that mankind is destroying the planet and inviting catastrophe. Every piece of research that suggests otherwise has been — until recently — pooh-poohed and every researcher who breaks ranks has —until recently — been vilified by the "high priests" of this cult.
The Climategate emails are only a small part of the evidence.
Any sane human being faced with the sort of disasters predicted — sorry, projected — by the models would surely be only too pleased to take seriously scientific evidence that things are not "worse than we thought". But no! They line up to debunk such arguments before the ink is even dry on the paper.
And where is the evidence for disasters?
Increase in hurricanes? Activity hasn't been as low for 30 years.
Droughts? No evidence of material change to the long-term pattern.
Record high temperatures? In an acknowledged warming world records are to be expected especially given that reliable records post-date the MWP and we are only talking about a record for this warm spell — previous ones were warmer.
Record low temperatures? Well, that's just weather, isn't it?
Arctic ice cover? Nothing unusual and probably irrelevant anyway.
What have I missed?
To see how the failure of the predicted warming to materialise is regarded as a catastrophe, you need look no further than the rationalisations...
- How the lack of warming over the last decade was predicted all along
- How the missing heat is getting trapped in the ocean
- How the failure of winters to become snow-free is a symptom of AGW
Apart from the point, "What have I missed?"
. . . perhaps eagerly immitating the anticipation of a rebuke that fails to appear on cue?
Mikey - tut, there's a question . . . .
I pardon R. He thought the science was settled. Jury's out on the other case.
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Thank you Aubrey for replying to my to my comment at Feb 27, 2013 at 10:14 AM. With respect, whilst quoting the thrust of what I said, you sidestep the issues raised.
The COP events, which you influenced in the 1990s, failed because of a failure to understand the differing motives. Action is strongly supported by a combination of those leaders who believe in the predicted catastrophe and the alleged greatest victims of that predicted catastrophe who might be compensated (the poorest countries). Then you have a great number of countries who play along, but make little contribution. Knowing the differing motives and expected payoffs from participating can develop an insight into why this could never work. Political incentives can explain why in Britain we are saddled with expensive, regressive, policies, that do very little to constrain CO2 emissions.
Instead Aubrey goes a step further back, to point to the acceleration in GHG emissions growth in the last few years. He should couple this with the failure of global average temperatures to rise. This suggests that the projected climate catastrophe is has been somewhat overstated.
Brought together, the costs of "climate change" have been massively overstated, along the effectiveness of the policies to "treat" for the alleged ailment. In addition, the adverse side effects of the policies have not started to be examined. This is an area worthy of serious study.
I've talked with loads of greenish activists over the past 20 years who exhibit the attitude toward science, economics, and evidence displayed by former US Senator Tim Wirth. Even if most are not so candid this attitude is pervasive among activists (expand govt and international controls, whether or not we really know what we're doing right now):
The core "scandal" is that sacrifice of millions if not billions of lives of the poor is inherent in the Green Mitigation strategy. It is both goal and means, not to mention inevitable consequence.
To Richard Tol,
I read with great disappointment your unprovoked slur on the memory of the late Richard Douthwaite (RIP) in this thread, whom you describe as an "idiot". I had the privilege of knowing Richard during the last 4 years or so of his life and in that time I came to the view that he had a very fine and inquiring mind. His books and articles have been an inspiration to a great many people who question the wisdom of our current social and economic arrangements and his passing was mourned by a great many people around the world. I wonder if the same will be said of you, Richard Tol.
Let me ask you, moreover, one question. What discount rate you would recommend for climate change cost benefit analysis? And we will follow you answer to its logical conclusion to see who is in fact an "idiot".