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Interview with Roger Pielke Jr. Part 1
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Roger Pielke Jr. is a professor of environmental studies at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I also have appointments as an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at Oxford University's Said Business School and as a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University. Since 2008 I have also been a Senior Fellow of The Breakthrough Institute, a progressive think tank.
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If his name is familiar to regular readers, it is because we interviewed his father, also an environmental scientist, recently.
This interview was conducted using the comments section of his weblog, found at www.rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com, and can be viewed there--and it might look better on his site, for that matter. But please read it here first.
1. Could you summarise your view of global climate change for us?
I provided such a summary in testimony I gave before the U.S. Congress in 2006, and it remains pretty much my current view. Here are my take-home points from that testimony:
1. Human-caused climate change is real and requires attention by policy makers to both mitigation and adaptation – but there is no quick fix; the issue will be with us for decades and longer.
2. Any conceivable emissions reductions policies, even if successful, cannot have a perceptible impact on the climate for many decades.
3. Consequently, costs (whatever they may be) are borne in the near term and benefits related to influencing the climate system are achieved in the distant future.
4. However, many policies that result in a reduction in emissions also provide benefits in the short term unrelated to climate change.
5. Similarly adaptation policies can provide immediate benefits.
6. But climate policy, particularly international climate policy under the Framework Convention on Climate Change, has been structured to keep policy related to long-term climate change distinct from policies related to shorter-term issues of energy policy and adaptation.
7. Following the political organization of international climate change policy, research agendas have emphasized the long-term, meaning that relatively very little attention is paid to developing specific policy options or near-term technologies that might be put into place with both short-term and long-term benefits.
8. The climate debate may have begun to slowly reflect these realities, but the research and development community has not yet focused much attention on developing policy and technological options that might be politically viable, cost effective, and practically feasible.
You can read about these points in more depth at this PDF.
2. If you were a member of Congress, would you vote for the current cap and trade legislation?
The legislation that passed the House last week (Waxman-Markey) is, to paraphrase, Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), a stinker. Even many of those who supported it did so while holding their noses. As a matter of policy it deserves no one’s vote. As a matter of politics, if I were a Democratic member of the House I would likely have voted for the bill to please my party and the president, unless I were from a closely held district with agriculture, fossil fuel, or other similar interests. In that case I would have asked the president and the party for permission to vote against it. So long as the bill passed the president would understand. If I were a Republican member I would almost certainly vote against the bill, unless of course my district were to be the beneficiary of oodles of cap-and-trade pork from the bill.
It is of course easy to play the “how would I have voted” game when you don’t represent anyone and don’t have to run for re-election in 2010;-)
3. Who in the debate is playing fairly and who is not? (I have not yet gotten a complete answer to this question from your father, Stephen Schneider or Bjorn Lomborg--maybe you'll be the first...)
I’m not sure I understand this question, but I'll give it a go.
Many people, on all sides of the climate debate are very sincere in their views and work hard to express them as best they can. But among many, especially in the blogosphere where differences in perspectives are magnified and common courtesies seem to be forgotten, there is too often little willingness to accept the fact that different people have legitimately different views. People often forget that it is OK to agree to disagree. At the same time there are of course people on all sides of the debate who misrepresent information deliberately, attack people’s character, and worse. Having been on the receiving end of some of these tactics I guess I’d say if you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen. But we should all try to elevate the quality of debate.
As far as playing “fair” in my experience in the blogosphere there are (remarkably) only two websites that have refused to allow me to comment on their site, even when they are discussing my work, and those sites are run by Joe Romm (Climate Progress) and Gavin Schmidt (Real Climate). They can run their sites as they wish, of course, but their actions speak loudly. Why are these guys afraid of open discussion?
More broadly and significantly, I have little sympathy for those who use legitimate processes such as journal peer review and government advisory reports to advance personal or political agendas. This is a failure of process and those in leadership positions who oversee those processes. The systematic misrepresentation of my research in climate science reports provides a troubling example of this sort of failure.
4. Is climate science such an elite field that experts in other domains cannot offer qualified commentary? I'm thinking of Freeman Dyson and Ivar Giaever, specifically.
Of course not, (but I did have to Google Ivar Giaever before answering;-). If it were then no one could comment on the subject as no one is an expert is all aspects of climate change, which involves expertise ranging from demographics to economics to energy technologies to clouds to oceans to ecosystems to cryospheric dynamics and on and on. No one has this comprehensive expertise, though many are very qualified on important parts of the issue. Balancing authority and inclusion is a central challenge of democracies, and I tend to favor inclusion over authoritarianism, but many others will disagree (especailly on the climate issue).
Dan Sarewitz of ASU documented a public dispute between John Holdren and Tom Wigley from a few years back on this question in an excellent paper. Wigley was arguing for a narrow definition of expertise, Holdren for a broader concept. My views on this are similar to Holdren's. Of course, the credential card is often played as an appeal to authority in public debates to discredit someone or their views, without having to actually engage the substance.
5. As a citizen, do you believe that President Obama's energy program takes the right direction, commits the correct level of resources, and is likely to be beneficial for this country?
I think that President Obama has a powerful vision for where he wants the country to go and I admire and support his energy policy ambitions. However, thus far the main vehicle for achieving those ambitions is, as I mentioned above, a stinker. Getting policy to match political ambitions can be a tough task. In this case the policy is nowhere close.
6. Has the energy of tropical storms increased or decreased over the past 30 years? Are there regular cycles to tropical storm strength, and how does this affect your answer?
You can see data on tropical cyclone energy (measured over a 24-month period using a metric called ACE) from Ryan Maue's website. You can see from the graph below that, in Maue's words, "the recent downturn in global TC energy is nearing record low levels of inactivity."
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