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Interview with Roger Pielke, Jr. Part 2
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This is part 2 of an interview with Roger Pielke, Jr. Part 1 of the interview can be found here. Pielke is professor of environmental studies at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is also a senior fellow at The Breakthrough Institute, something we hope to discuss later.
I'm taking the questions a bit out of order here, as I find it remarkable that a government report would so blatantly distort the findings of science:
9. The government report has, you say, mischaracterised your research. How would you rephrase their comments so that it would accord with your published work?
It was not just a single government report, but multiple reports by the US government and the IPCC. The misrepresentation has been systematic. The US National Science Foundation, along with government's of Germany and the UK, as well as Munich Re, supported a 2006 workshop in Hohenkammer, Germany to develop a consensus, scientific perspective on the factor leading to the dramataic increase in disaster costs around the world. We reached a consensus and it still holds. I don't see any reason for a major assessment report to ignore the Hohenkammer conesensus or present conclusions counter to it without a justification. Here are our 20 consensus statements (full report here):
The focus of the workshop was on two central questions:
• What factors account for increasing costs of weather related disasters in recent decades?
• What are the implications of these understandings, for both research and policy?
To be clear about terminology, we adopted the IPCC definition of climate change. According to the IPCC (2001) climate change is
“Climate change refers to a statistically significant variation in either the mean state of the climate or in its variability, persisting for an extended period (typically decades or longer). Climate change may be due to natural internal processes or external forcings, or to persistent anthropogenic changes in the composition of the atmosphere or in land use.”
The IPCC also defines climate variability to be
“Climate variability refers to variations in the mean state and other statistics (such as standard deviations, the occurrence of extremes, etc.) of the climate on all temporal and spatial scales beyond that of individual weather events. Variability may be due to natural internal processes within the climate system (internal variability), or to variations in natural or anthropogenic external forcing (external variability).”
We use the phrase anthropogenic climate change to refer to human-caused effects on climate.
Consensus (unanimous) statements of the workshop participants:
1. Climate change is real, and has a significant human component related to greenhouse gases.
2. Direct economic losses of global disasters have increased in recent decades with particularly large increases since the 1980s.
3. The increases in disaster losses primarily result from weather related events, in particular storms and floods.
4. Climate change and variability are factors which influence trends in disasters.
5. Although there are peer reviewed papers indicating trends in storms and floods there is still scientific debate over the attribution to anthropogenic climate change or natural climate variability. There is also concern overgeophysical data quality.
6. IPCC (2001) did not achieve detection and attribution of trends in extreme events at the global level.
7. High quality long-term disaster loss records exist, some of which are suitable for research purposes, such as to identify the effects of climate and/or climate change on the loss records.
8. Analyses of long-term records of disaster losses indicate that societal change and economic development are the principal factors responsible for the documented increasing losses to date.
9. The vulnerability of communities to natural disasters is determined by their economic development and other social characteristics.
10. There is evidence that changing patterns of extreme events are drivers for recent increases in global losses.
11. Because of issues related to data quality, the stochastic nature of extreme event impacts, length of time series, and various societal factors present in the disaster loss record, it is still not possible to determine the portion of the increase in damages that might be attributed to climate change due to GHG emissions
12. For future decades the IPCC (2001) expects increases in the occurrence and/or intensity of some extreme events as a result of anthropogenic climate change. Such increases will further increase losses in the absence of disaster reduction measures.
13. In the near future the quantitative link (attribution) of trends in storm and flood losses to climate changes
related to GHG emissions is unlikely to be answered unequivocally.
Policy implications identified by the workshop participants
14. Adaptation to extreme weather events should play a central role in reducing societal vulnerabilities to climate and climate change.
15. Mitigation of GHG emissions should also play a central role in response to anthropogenic climate change,
though it does not have an effect for several decades on the hazard risk.
16. We recommend further research on different combinations of adaptation and mitigation policies.
17. We recommend the creation of an open-source disaster database according to agreed upon standards.
18. In addition to fundamental research on climate, research priorities should consider needs of decision makers in areas related to both adaptation and mitigation.
19. For improved understanding of loss trends, there is a need to continue to collect and improve long-term and homogenous datasets related to both climate parameters and disaster losses.
20. The community needs to agree upon peer reviewed procedures for normalizing economic loss data.
7. Has the actual number of tropical storms increased or decreased over the past 30 years? Are there regular cycles to tropical storm numbers, and how does this affect your answer?
The answer depends on what basin you look at, what time period and on judgments about data quality. Here are a few peer-reviewed papers that try to address this question: here and here and here in PDF. But if it is landfalls that you are interested in, then there have been no long-term trends documented, anywhere.
8. What prescriptions would you offer to zoning regulations, building permits, architectural standards and community siting to make American communities more resilient to the impacts of large scale weather-related events?
This is a huge question with many answers that I cannot begin to do justice to here (though if you are interested I have written much on flood and hurricane policies). The most important general answer is for communities (where most of these decisions are made) to understand the risks they face and the uncertainties in that risk, and to ensure that their policies match up. Too often this sort of evaluative question gets hung up on questions of risk and leaves out the questions of policy. In general, U.S. disaster policy is based on the idea that risks should be subsidized by the public with predictable consequences. I recommend Rud Platt's book, Paying for Disasters, which I reviewed here.
10. On a scale from 1-10, where 1 is not at all important and 10 is of the highest importance, where would you rank global climate change in terms of its likely impact on human development? Please feel free to explain.
Climate change is a very important topic, and one that I have devoted a good part of my career to working on over almost two decades. So I would fairly obviously and self-servingly give it a high ranking on your scale, probably a 10. But there are also many other issues that are 10s as well, such as health and disease, wars and famine, nuclear proliferation, energy security, economic stability and growth and so on. The challenge of policy is not to identify one issue that is more important than all others, but to craft policy responses that are effective and efficient, given that we have to do many things at the same time. So yes climate change is important, but we have to move beyond exhortation to actual development of effective policy options, and my view is that far more time is spent on the former than the latter.
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