Trust, but Verify
Trust, but Verify (AMS-2):
(This article is about climate science, but you have to make it through the beginning.)
In the previous blog I wrote about the talk at the American Meteorological Society (AMS) Annual Meeting by Jim Rogers the CEO of of Duke Energy. I stated that often when I talk positively about the roles of corporations in addressing climate change, mistrust is one of the first things I hear about. (I am perpetually naïve.)
The United States is a culture of business and markets. There is a shared belief that markets provide a way to exchange goods and services that defines a “right” value for the exchange. Our economy is based on markets, which are believed to be resilient, or, perhaps, more resilient than government-controlled economies.
In a piece that I wrote with Gabriel Thoumi we talked about carbon markets, and we described some of the basic attributes of a market -- A market is a system that allows for exchange of quantities of expected risk and expected return, using various forms of capital within a regulated, contractually determined time frame. A well functioning market provides liquidity, assurance of completion, and transparency. Liquidity is the ability for market participants to convert an asset into capital in a timely fashion. Transparency refers to the ability for market information to be accurate, timely, and available to all participants. Finally, all markets must have assurance of completion, which is the guarantee that the intended transaction can be carried out, lessening systematic market risk. Non-systematic risk may occur if a counterparty defaults before the completion of a transaction, but this is not the responsibility of the market. An environmental market must also have a way to verify that the required environmental impact is achieved.
There is in this definition of a market the idea of regulation, and that regulation represents rules of behavior. It is obvious that at least a subset of those rules of behavior arise because of the need to generate trust. That trust translates into attributes like “expected risk and expected return.” Transparency is often listed as a market attribute, because transparency allows participants and observers to see into the market, to know the rules, and to have a chance of knowing how to play. The existence of formal practices to assure trust suggests that in their absence the market can’t be trusted. There is a natural tendency for mistrust when we are exchanging money, and most of us look to manage our money in some sort of regulated environment.
These ideas of transparency, regulations that support checks and balances, risk and return have come up again and again in every thing that I do. Turning this to science and the scientific investigation of climate, the notion of transparency in climate science came to the front with the release of private email exchanges that were either stolen or leaked from the Climate Research Unit.
In talking with my colleagues at both the Copenhagen meeting and the AMS meeting, they say that if there is anything of true substance to come out of the released emails it is a need to shore up transparency into our investigations and to assure the robustness of the peer review process. (see Judy Curry’s post at climateaudit.org) Yesterday, I was talking with a student at Michigan about observations of carbon dioxide and how those observations might provide a data set that is used by people interested in making climate policy. We reached a conclusion that there was a type of validation that was needed for the climate scientist, and that there was a whole different set of attributes that would be needed to make the data set usable for the policymaker. For example, can you imagine the United States “believing” the observations taken by a satellite from another country in a regulatory environment? Or framing it more positively, what sort of process and participation is needed by all parties to assure that the knowledge in the data set is accurate and accepted?
It is reasonable to assert that scientific investigation is held to a different standard than the average stock market. This is because scientific investigation in its ideal is directed at measurable, quantified results that can be validated by objective methods. This is a simple, yet high, standard. If you look in more detail at the “scientific process,” then there are some other attributes worth noting. There is the general notion that the results that a scientist gets have to be reproducible. Not only does it have to be reproducible, but it has to be reproducible by independent investigators. Then there is the value that the results have to be able to pass peer review.
Comparing scientific investigation with the market, independent reproduction of results and peer reviews are values that lead to practices that regulate the practice of science. They provide a formal method of checks and balances. These are practices that have arisen because of many reasons, including that scientists are self-interested humans that are all, I repeat all, influenced by their perceptions of a problem. They are motivated by being right. Peer review strives to provide an objective check, and it follows from years of experience that scientists have a perspective that they project onto their work.
I do not know a publishing scientist who has not had an issue with peer review. One of my most influential papers took more than two years of reviews and revisions before it was published? What are issues? Sometimes there is the prejudice of an editor. Sometimes there is pure competitiveness to be first or right. Sometimes it is a simple matter of presentation and style. Plus, peer review is potentially a very painful experience. You work, you place an idea out there, and people are supposed to challenge that idea, beat it up, and find its weaknesses. I have seen many young scientists shrink away, even when they have very good ideas.
So when you submit a paper, you pick a journal, maybe pick the editor, you list those who you think are prejudiced, and those who are your friends and collaborators are eliminated. It’s a messy process, which in my experience, works far more often than it fails.
It is true that it is difficult to introduce radical new ideas, and it is true that it is hard to challenge a massive body of knowledge.
There are so many places to go …. (have you noticed that this is now an “article,” not a “blog?”) OK … back to the email messages from the Climate Research Unit. In these emails you see discussions of finding favorable journals and discussions of the motivations of competing scientists. But in the end, is there evidence of a massive failure of peer review? Didn’t the points of view of scientists get objectified as they moved to actual publication? Didn’t the papers of those who were challenging the body of knowledge not only make it to journals, but also make it into the IPCC reports? Isn’t this evidence that the regulations in the science “market” worked rather than it did not work?
A paper that I frequently reference is by the law professor Daniel Farber. At some level he reviewed the process of review, and especially the process that is used to generate the IPCC reports. It was his conclusion that the process of review of the scientific investigation of climate change raised the conclusions to a higher level than normal. Why would this be true? Ultimately, the IPCC process is by most any standard transparent; it is known and published. The reports are reviewed, re-reviewed, and subjected to open review. There is controversy amongst scientists that this leads to muted and conservative conclusions; it is a process that reduces extremes, some of which are correct conclusions (muting), and some of which are incorrect conclusions(improving accuracy). This reflects the principle of reproducibility. Within the body of knowledge, from across the world, virtually every result in the the IPCC reports has been independently verified. By virtue of a long history of research, ideas have been visited and revisited.
I have been trying to imagine a more open field of research. Off the top of my head I go, for no particular reason - what if I wanted to probe the details and nuances of diabetes research. Here, I fall into proprietary drugs and papers influenced by industrial funding. Plus, I have been knowledgeable of medical research where I was told not to reveal the tests I had seen to the next group down the hall because they all thought they were on the path to the Nobel Prize. I and my students have tried to break into new fields and our work has not been sent out for review because we are not already expert.
This is not meant to contend that our process, our transparency could not be better. In fact, it is an obligation for us to improve access to data, documentation of validation, and objectiveness of review. This is an ethical obligation as well as an obligation that arises because of the consequences that follow from research of the Earth’s climate. We are faced with the problem that I suggested to my student above. We live in a world where our research does not only meet the standards of the scientist, but also that must be accessible and verifiable to, for example, policy makers, resource managers, and market regulators. The IPCC process is clearly developed with this in mind, but the requirements become more stringent as the consequences become more important. And the cultures that determine transparency, regulations that support checks and balances, risk and return are different for different communities.
In my mind, this blog was motivated by recent conversations with a couple of engineers and a taxi driver. I was told by the engineers that climate scientists needed to make sure the whole message got out, and that there was access to the literature so that anyone could check. That the climategate emails reminded them of groups in their organizations that presented data to support the desires of their group. If it is your goal to check for yourself, the information is there. It is a daunting task to address in your spare time, but it is far easier to access than any body of knowledge that I am aware of. Start with the IPCC report and work backwards. Look at those thousands of pages and follow the threads back to the original references. Data from models and observations is, more often than not, available and free. Look for those items that you think climate scientists ignore or dismiss, and if you find that they are truly ignored and dismissed then we want to know. Write to your favorite blogger.
By the way, the taxi driver told me it was pretty obvious that we were consuming the world in an unsustainable way. He invited me over for ribs, and I hope he calls me some day.
r
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Figure 1: A ton of carbon dioxide in Copenhagen.
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Updated: 4:44 AM GMT on March 10, 2010
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Duke of Climate (AMS-1)
Duke of Climate (AMS-1)
Did those storms hit California? The ones that those models predicted last week? Haven’t had time to watch the weather, but people tell me there are rain delays in Phoenix.
I’ve been at the American Meteorological Society (AMS) Annual Meeting in Atlanta. It’s been a while since I have been to a “science” meeting, and this meeting was excellent. It had a far more vital feeling than the last AMS meeting I was at. The next few blogs will be about a few of the more than interesting presentations.
The theme of this year’s meeting was “Weather, Climate, and Society: New Demands on Science and Services.” In the Presidential Forum on Monday morning there was a session with three speakers talking about information needs of commercial air companies, public health, and energy production. Jim Rogers the CEO of Duke Energy gave the presentation on energy.
Back in September of 2007, I wrote about business and climate change, and I mentioned the US-Climate Action Partnership (US-CAP) . The principles of US-CAP are
1) Global problem, global response, US needs to lead
2) Technology is required, hence real price of carbon
3) Has to be effective, limit CO2 to 450-550 ppm
4) Create opportunity
5) Fair, economy wise
6) Encourage early action
US-CAP is a big advocate of cap and trade as the policy vehicle to address climate change.
When I talk about US-CAP amongst my friends and students there is always a sense of mistrust. They look at the corporations that are behind the activity and conclude that addressing climate change is not the primary motive at hand. What would be the motives of corporations? A big one is the development of uniform and stable policy. That is, if you imagine the U.S. full of municipal, state, and regional policies, then a uniform federal policy makes a lot of business sense. It also might help to smooth out international trade as well. To go beyond the call for policy to the call to a particular type of policy, cap and trade, suggests that these companies have determined that a cap and trade policy is to their benefit. (We ALL act in our best interests, even the altruist.) The companies might also be thinking of branding themselves as “green,” or trying to position themselves relative to future liability. All of these motivations might be present, as well as a commitment to wanting to address the climate change problem and to support sustainability.
So Rogers directly and unwaveringly set out his point of view. He stated early in his talk that he was convinced by the observations that the planet was warming and that he believed the basic scientific result that carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels was the primary cause. To me, it is important to hear these words spoken by those out side of the community of scientists. To me, it is important to hear these words spoken by people in positions who impact the paths to solutions.
Mr. Rogers made a brief mention to the emails of climategate, and quickly moved to a risk assessment, that is, what if the science of global warming was completely wrong, what would he do different? His answer was, fundamentally, he would do nothing different. He stated a business and moral imperative to reduce the environmental footprint of energy production, hence, a reduction of reliance on coal. He stated a need for economic stability, economic security, hence a need for a diversified portfolio of energy sources that are not constantly subject to the wars of international trade and the wars of international territory. (What did Vladimir Putin write his thesis on? (hmmmm) Rogers stated a business and moral imperative for efficiency, because we need energy to grow the economy, and there was not energy to waste; hence, efficiency fuels economic growth.
After the talk the question was posed to Rogers that his company is fundamentally in the business of selling energy, and that there was a spirit of being less than sincere about efficiency. This is a question that often comes to mind – the kind I could imagine fueling a decent discussion in blog comments. The answer was interesting, and I am not sure I state it accurately – first, in the way the electrical generation industry is run, read regulated, the costs of increased efficiency and the potential of reduced sales of kilowatt-hours is revenue neutral. And second, dollars spent by the utility on efficiency are far more effective dollars, with far less risk, than building new power plants.
Rogers ended his talk calling for a reframing of the climate problem as the revitalization and growth of the U.S. economy. That this is what he tells Congress at the many opportunities he has to talk to Congress.
A lesson that I think I learned from business professor Andy Hoffman is that when environmental causes align with the bottom line, then business is an accelerant of change. (this is, still, a good doc (2.27MB) to me.) Therefore, while the other motivations that I mentioned above may all be true, the fact that they come together with goals of climate change is important. That is what we want – something that matters. The goals of US-Climate Action Partnership (US-CAP) are better laid out and more effective than most I have seen. Yes, there is likely a lot of wiggle-room in it all, but at this point to continue to argue over long-term issues at the expense of the short-term simply let’s the carbon dioxide waste get deeper and deeper.
As the talks at the meeting wore on over the week, I started to think more and more about how do we move forward after Copenhagen. In Copenhagen it proved impossible to bring to the front the important things that we can do today that would make a difference to climate change. We argue over the long-term reduction goal at the expense of the near-term solution paths. The same is true over policy, we argue over cap and trade and taxes at the expense of doing what matters (me too!). In the next year it is my job to figure out a way to do what matters in the short term. How do we scale up what we can do now?
r
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Figure 1: A car load of us went to see Martin Luther King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church one night after dinner.
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Updated: 10:58 AM GMT on January 23, 2010
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Warm Cold Warm Cold
Warm Cold Warm Cold
You may remember that early last winter it was cold in the eastern half of the United States. There was a lot of press about what the cold weather implied about global warming. I wrote a series of blogs last year that are:
Cold in a Warm World
Cold in the East
Last Year and This Year
Last Year and This Year – and the Next Big Story?
I have started teaching again. One of things we do in the beginning of the class we talk about what people already know about global warming. Two of the students raised the issue of “what’s in name?” That is, if it is called “global warming,” then people are confused when it is not, always, uniformly warmer all the time. (Might remember this discussion as well.)
As I stand in front of these students prattling on, I am always thinking of ways to explore, challenge, and expose ideas. Early on, we talk about the role of greenhouse gases in the natural climate of the Earth. We have known since, at least, 1800 that water vapor and carbon dioxide are greenhouse gases that make the Earth “warm.” That is, if you take away these gases which act like blankets and hold the Sun’s energy near the surface of the Earth for a while, then the Earth would be MUCH colder – say, about zero degrees Fahrenheit. Restating this, without the atmosphere the surface of the Earth would be cold. (Spencer Weart’s great history) Water is about two thirds of the greenhouse warming.
One could take from this fact, and it is not often I use the word “fact,” – one could take from this fact, that there is a strong physical reason that works to take the Earth towards this “equilibrium” temperature. Think of it this way, suppose you have a pot of boiling fresh organic chicken broth on the stove. Once you get the pot boiling, if you want to keep it boiling then you have to keep adding a little heat to the bottom of the pot. If you turn off the heat, then the pot stops boiling. This loss of energy which works to stop the boiling is always occurring, and you are always adding energy through the burner to counter this loss. For the Earth, the Sun is the burner, the source of energy, and the Earth is always cooling to get rid of this energy. It’s a little like a spring trying to pull the Earth’s temperature to, on the average, about zero degrees Fahrenheit. (A question for the reader: what is the impact of putting a top on the pot?)
If you were to turn off the Sun, then the Earth would get cold fast. That is what happens when winter comes to the poles. In the north, throughout October and November, the North Pole starts to cool. The Earth emits radiation to space. Since the heating from the Sun is totally absent at this time, it can get far colder than that equilibrium temperature of zero degrees Fahrenheit. The atmosphere and the oceans continue to transport heat to the north, but they can’t keep up. This process of cooling at the poles in the winter is a fact of the planet that will continue even as greenhouse gases build up.
This is where weather comes into play. We have this cold air up towards the North Pole. The atmosphere and the ocean have many different types of - I will call them features - features that have characteristic types of motion associated with them. An example of such a feature is a hurricane, which has closed circulation around an eye. The hurricane then moves around, but pretty much no matter how it bounces around for a week or two, after a while the hurricane heads out to the north. Really they head off to the pole, and north or south depends on which hemisphere. What the hurricane does is transport heat from the tropics to the pole, and that is what the atmosphere and oceans do all the time. They are trying to reduce the contrast between warm and cold.
The hurricane is an example of a dynamical feature. There are many more dynamical features and many of them behave like waves. A hurricane behaves more like a spinning top; it’s a vortex. The atmosphere is full of waves, and professors like me torment students of meteorology with mathematical descriptions of these waves. There are many ways that waves come into being, but one way is because of air flowing over mountain ranges. You can imagine, more intuitively, a stream of water flowing over a rock. I have tried to convey this idea of a wave in the figure below.
Figure 1: A schematic picture that represents a wave in temperature. There are hot and cold parts of the wave. Do other climate bloggers draw such compelling figures?
What I have drawn with the dashed line is a “small” wave, perhaps a wave that would form in October. Then I draw, with the solid line, a bigger wave, perhaps a wave of December or January. These waves are always growing and decaying, sometimes moving a little bit to the east and the west. If we label the graph so that the bottom is the south, the top is the north, the left hand side is west and the right hand side is east, then we can imagine North America siting under this wave. If the left hand side is the Pacific Ocean and the right hand side is the Atlantic Ocean, then it sets up the story. If the wave grows in the west, the warm air pushes up to the north towards the pole, and the cold air is displaced south into the United States. This is not some random, made up thing, because 1) there are the Rocky Mountains that help make the wave, 2) the way the Earth rotates makes the air flow from west to east, 3) northern part of North America, we call it Canada here in the South, gets cold because the Sun is down, and 4) the Pacific Ocean starts to look warm as the continent starts to get cold.
If I hear people talking about how cold it is in the east of the U.S., I ask them to, using Wunderground.com of course, to look at what is going on in California and Alaska. If it is cold in the East, then usually it is warm in the West. And if this wave gets big enough, then it pushes up towards to pole, and it looks warm in the north, and the air that is displaced to the South, off the pole, looks cold. And to weak-kneed academics from Florida State University, it might look VERY cold. (What’s going on at Florida State? Must be all of that money that goes to cushy climate scientists.)
Even if there is a lot of carbon dioxide it still gets cold when the Sun goes down at the poles, and that cold air can get pushed down away from the pole, and there is still winter. In fact, if that push of air towards the pole is especially vigorous, then the cold air can get pushed to new places, and we have a record cold. If you are going to play the “record game,” look for new highs that might be paired with the new lows. (Jerry Meehl and colleagues did this recently, many, many more new highs. They concluded that it’s getting warmer.)
OK …. Let’s look at last December. It’s from the usual place the National Climatic Data Center.
Figure 2: Observations of temperature in December of 2009. The temperatures are represented as a difference (anomaly) from a 30 year average.
I recall Boulder, Colorado being really cold in December, as well as a blizzard in Baltimore. The map shows two cold centers over North America and Siberia. It’s pretty warm in Greenland and Alaska, and you can study the map more. Here is a link to the excellent discussion at the National Climatic Data Center. In the northern hemisphere this map shows a distinctive wave pattern. (There are good reasons that these waves appear as 1, 2, or 3 , but I will make you take dynamics on your own.)
I deliberately did this without referring to the Arctic Oscillation. I was driving around this afternoon thinking about that. If the pole has spent the last few years with its cold phase at the pole, and that cold phase was, by historical standards, not so cold, does that mean something? Just thinking on the way to Sprayberry's.
I posed the question at the end of a recent blog about what a record December blizzard in Baltimore might or might not say about climate change. Since then there have been record snow storms all over the northern hemisphere. At a very real level, a set of storms in one winter says NOTHING about global warming. Nothing. It surely does not say that global warming is abated, or of no concern. In fact, as a couple of comments pointed out, if the atmosphere is warmer, and the air is moister, if it is cold enough to snow, then there is a lot of snow. Others say that cold is cold.
There is still cold weather. Fact is, when the entire surface of the globe is considered, December 2009 was a warm month, in a warm year, of the warmest decade we have measured. (see this write up) Prepare in the next week for a bunch of storms to hit California. (Of course, that’s just a model prediction.) I wonder how many people will attribute those storms to El Nino, based on the science, but at the same time dismiss the far more certain science of global warming. I’ll be at the American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting in Atlanta. Our group has eight talks, so there is student stress and faculty worry. More and more climate at the meeting as we start to think about a National Climate Service.
r
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Updated: 6:25 PM GMT on March 22, 2013
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Already Old News: Copenhagen
Already Old News: Copenhagen
Something of an unexpected blogging hiatus started with that blizzard. This is my comeback.
This is my look back at the Conference of Parties (COP15) in Copenhagen. Having written a whole bunch of blogs before and during the meeting, fortunately or unfortunately, I have stuff to look back on. I can even cherry pick my own words. So I made a political prediction – “well, I imagine that the machinations of legislation and lobbying will push climate change legislation close enough to the mid-term election that it will languish next to health care and Afghanistan and the economy. I think that there will be climate legislation, but I bet that it will be early in year 4 of the Obama administration, with it’s passage dependent on what Obama’s re-election looks like.”
We have had the Copenhagen Bubble. There was all of the press and political buildup and, now, about a month later, it’s hard to find much about Copenhagen and climate change in the news. The conference has been declared both a success and a failure. In fact, the same outcome, a nonbinding “accord,” might be a success or a failure depending on your point of view. If you are an advocacy group looking to somehow limit the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to, say, 350 ppm, the meeting started and ended as abject failure. If you are China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, then the meeting is a success.
I am personally disappointed in the tangible results of the meeting. In one big way, I feel there was a step backwards, and that is with regard to trees - more on trees later. The political lay of the land is that the European Union and Japan have been aggressively trying to address climate change. The United States, an essential player, has on the Presidential level been from one extreme to the other, and the political realities are such that my statement above looks rosy. China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, large, important, and economically growing countries, see global warming is less of a priority than economic growth. (The same can be said about the United States as well, perhaps, in reality, also, the European Union and Japan.) All will address climate change through technological development, as well as grow with the use of fossil fuels. There is a set of islands nations, which as one of my colleagues is prone to say at all possible moments, “the islands are sinking.” (OK, they’re not really sinking, they are flooding.) But these island nations and much of the rest of the world are poor, and they are not very powerful.
I don’t see that the U.S. will make changes to start on a path of significant reduction of carbon dioxide emissions. I do think that the U.S. will elevate climate change to a role that is more important in the Federal Agencies, but as far as strategies that reach across the economy to lead to actual reductions, there is no visible path towards reduction. Without the U.S., it will be difficult for the European Union and Japan to maintain their positions – the global economics are just too strong. Hence, the prospect of an effective, global approach to address greenhouse gas emissions and global warming in the next 5, maybe, 10 years is close to zero probability.
In the U.S., there will be continued pressure from local governments and advocacy groups to address climate change and energy security. I expect that some of the local initiatives will flourish and some will fade away. As is, perhaps, traditional in the U.S. these local initiatives will create an environment of heterogeneous regulation and commerce, and there will be demand for the level playing field of federal policy. If there is to be growing concern in the U.S. about global warming, then it will drop to “the people.” If companies and advocacy groups, which brand themselves with climate change, are rewarded with our dollars then that will make a big difference. If people who “believe” that we need to address climate change vote and buy with that belief as a priority, then that will make a big difference.
Global warming steps back to a problem of the greater good, which is, in our world, a relatively weak position.
Pundits, politicians, and even dumb scientists like me figured out that nothing big was going to come out of Copenhagen. The success that can be counted is that there really was very little disagreement about whether or not the Earth was warming due to the increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases. There were a couple of countries here and there on the science, for a day or two, but they were so marginalized that they were irrelevant. This success is carried a small step forward because with the acceptance of global warming as a reality, everyone agrees that something needs to be done. And there is a lot being done – but it remains voluntary and, largely, at the vagaries of economic and business viability.
My disappointment is that more was not brought forward about doing the smart things that matter in the short term. A still outstanding example of those smart things are summarized in Pacala and Socolow’s (see here) body of work that talk about a portfolio of paths that, using existing technology, can substantively reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. Again, there is not a policy effort to promote these short-term, smart paths towards stabilizing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and sustainability in general.
The only presence of nuclear power that I saw in Copenhagen, were statements that nuclear power was a bad thing. I think there is copious evidence to the contrary, and I recognize a whole set of ancillary issues. Most surprising to me was what seemed to be the collapse of efforts to provide valuation of the carbon dioxide in standing forests. Prior to the conference, the effort called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) was one of the most lively and exciting parts of the solution space being discussed (see here). While I think that the role of trees to remove carbon dioxide is limited, if all of the carbon that is in trees is released it will greatly increase emissions. Avoided deforestation is important. The position that seemed to have evolved from the meeting almost invited people to cut down the forests before there is regulation. (Did I read this wrong?)
So what is there going forward? The United Nations approach to develop something that looks like consensus policy is not a fast track forward. There is a subset of about 20 nations that account for the vast majority of emissions. It is possible that these nations can come to some sort of agreement that will matter. To me, there looks like some room for these countries to move forward, but I don’t see anyway to avoid 500 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide. ("Pre-industrial" carbon dioxide about 280 ppm, currently about 390 ppm.) The accord called to set a 2 degree maximum of the global average warming of the surface, which is a very fuzzy target, and again, I don’t see how we can possibly avoid 2 degrees.
I expect that we will see continued warming of the planet. As there are record storms and record insurance claims, the need to address global warming will become more and more demanded. With or without global warming, there will be societal disruptions; they are a fact of life. Inattention to global warming will increase the disruptions. Some will adapt, some will not. We stand to waste the opportunities offered to us by our ability to observe, simulate, and project the physical climate system. The success or failure of Copenhagen will depend on what really happens in the next 12 months; the jury is not, yet, in. It is always after the bubble bursts that the real work starts – when the cause has lost its fashion.
r
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Updated: 9:13 PM GMT on January 11, 2010
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