Where do Jobs Come From?

The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation has just issued a report on anemic U.S. job growth in which it provides a concise overview of various diagnoses for persistently high unemployment.  The report outlines seven different explanations:

1. A classic Keynesian contraction (implication: government stimulus)
2. Financial crises are different (implication: wait it out)
3. Regulatory uncertainty (implication: finalize legislation, lighten regulatory burden)
4. Unskilled workforce (implication: train workers, streamline immigration)
5. Not enough innovation (implication: invest in R&D, innovation-friendly policies)
6. Too much innovation (implication: put brakes on productivity growth)
7. Weakened U.S. competitiveness (implication: strengthen manufacturing, invest in skills, R&D)

Number 7 is the favored diagnosis of ITIF. But, what if all seven are in some way correct? That is how it looks to me.

This debate is not unique to the present crisis or the United States. Consider that every year for the next decade India is expected to add to its workforce a number of workers equivalent to the entire population of Sweden. Over the next decade the global economy will have to add jobs at the rate of the total German population every two years (based on the rate of job growth of the last 20 years). Job growth is an important and shared global priority.

Where do jobs come from? How do we get more? These are questions that I'll be exploring in the near term, starting from some very basics, mainly to sort out some of these issues in my own mind. Assistance welcomed.

Walter Lippmann and "Genuine Debate"

Walter Lippmann was one of the greatest American political writers of the last century. Here are a few excerpts from his 1955 book The Public Philosophy that remind us that the politicization of information is far from a new concern. He also emphasizes not just the importance of open debate in response, but that there is no viable alternative in democratic systems.

I've posted this up before and will surely do so again sometime.

On the transformation of the complex to the simple in public discourse:

. . . when the decision is critical and urgent, the public will not be told the whole truth. What can be told to the great public it will not hear in the complicated and qualified concreteness that is needed for a practical decision. When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into the absolute. Even when there is no deliberate distortion by censorship and propaganda, which is unlikely in time of war, the public opinion of masses cannot be counted upon to apprehend regularly and promptly the reality of things. There is an inherent tendency in opinion to feed upon rumors excited by our own wishes and fears. [p. 27]

On balance in the media and in public debates Lippmann is quite clear about maintaining conditions that foster debate and the exchange of perspectives.

. . . when the chaff of silliness, baseness, and deception is so voluminous that it submerges the kernels of truth, freedom of speech may produce such frivolity, or such mischief, that it cannot be preserved against the demand for a restoration of order or of decency. If there is a dividing line between liberty and license, it is where freedom of speech is no longer respected as a procedure of the truth and becomes the unrestricted right to exploit the ignorance, and incite the passions, of the people. The freedom is such a hullabaloo of sophistry, propaganda, special pleading, lobbying, and salesmanship that it is difficult to remember why freedom of speech is worth the pain and trouble of defending it.

What has been lost in the tumult is the meaning of the obligation which is involved in the right to speak freely. It is the obligation to subject the utterance to criticism and debate. Because the dialectical debate is a procedure for attaining moral and political truth, the right to speak is protected by a willingness to debate. . . .

And because the purpose of the confrontation is to discern truth, there are rules of evidence and of parliamentary procedure, there are codes of fair dealing and fair comment, by which a loyal man will consider himself bound when he exercises the right to publish opinions. For the right to freedom of speech is no license to deceive, and willful misrepresentation is a violation of its principles. It is sophistry to pretend that in a free country a man has some sort of inalienable or constitutional right to deceive his fellow men. There is no more right to deceive that there is a right to swindle, to cheat, or to pick pockets. It may be inexpedient to arraign every public liar, as we try to arraign other swindlers. It may be a poor policy to have too many laws which encourage litigation about matters of opinion. But, in principle, there can be no immunity for lying in any of its protean forms.

In our time the application of these fundamental principles poses many unsolved practical problems. For the modern media of mass communication do not lend themselves easily to a confrontation of opinions. The dialectical process for finding truth works best when the same audience hears all the sides of a disputation. . . Rarely, and on very few public issues, does the mass audience have the benefit of the process by which truth is sifted from error – the dialectic of debate in which there is immediate challenge, reply, cross-examination, and rebuttal.

Yet when genuine debate is lacking, freedom of speech does not work as it is meant to work. It has lost the principle which regulates and justifies it – that is to say, dialectic conducted according to logic and the rules of evidence. If there is not effective debate, the unrestricted right to speak will unloose so many propagandists, procurers, and panders upon the public that sooner or later in self-defense the people will turn to censors to protect them. An unrestricted and unregulated right to speak cannot be maintained. It will be curtailed for all manner of reasons and pretexts, and to serve all kinds of good, foolish, or sinister ends.

For in the absence of debate unrestricted utterance leads to the degradation of opinion. By a kind of Gresham’s law the more rational is overcome by the less rational, and the opinions that will prevail will be those which are held most ardently by those with the most passionate will. For that reason the freedom to speak can never be maintained merely by objecting to interference with the liberty of the press, of printing, of broadcasting, of the screen. It can be maintained only by promoting debate.

In the end what men will most ardently desire is to suppress those who disagree with them and, therefore, stand in the way of the realization of their desires. Thus, once confrontation in debate is no longer necessary, the toleration of all opinions leads to intolerance. Freedom of speech, separated from its essential principle, leads through a short transitional chaos to the destruction of freedom of speech. [pp. 96-101]

The antidote to concerns about "frivolity" and "mischief" in public debates is not to try to silence or demagogue one's opponents, but rather to invite them to participate in a "genuine debate."  Today, on many topics genuine debate seems to be more often avoided than engaged.

About Those Skeptics

In last weekend's FT, Simon Kuper had a provocative and on-target column about the role of so-called skeptics in the climate debate.  Kuper writes;

It’s tempting to blame “climate sceptics” for the world’s inaction on man-made climate change. (The United Nations’ latest summit, starting in Durban on Monday, won’t save the planet either.) Greens often talk as if the enemy were not climate change itself, but a self-taught band of freelance sceptics. No wonder, because fighting culture wars is the fun bit of politics. However, this fight is pointless. The sceptics aren’t the block to action on climate change. They just wish they were. Instead, they are an irrelevant sideshow.

Sceptics and believers quarrel about the science because they both start from a mistaken premise: that science will determine what we do about climate change. The idea is that once we agree what the science says, policy will automatically follow. That’s why the Nobel committee gave Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change a peace prize.

Mysteriously, though, the policy still hasn’t followed the science.

I would go even further than Kuper to argue that the demonization of skeptics is a key strategy in elevating the importance of science in the political debate. If it wasn't for the alleged risks that skeptics pose to our future, we'd have to instead be arguing about things like values, goals and priorities, which are messy and carry with them none of the imputed authority of science. It is in the interests of both skeptics and their opponents to argue about science, because it suggests that their debate is somehow directly relevant to policy action. It is not.

The debate over climate science is over and has been won by those who assert a human influence on the climate system. This then is what victory looks like. (For supporting evidence on the science and opinion, see chapters 1 and 2 of TCF). The larger reality of course is that global climate policy is no longer about science, if it ever was, and is today about far more practical topics.

Kuper concludes:

The sceptics and the apathetic will always be with us. There’ll never be full consensus on climate change. But if governments could only act when there was unanimity, no law on anything would ever be passed. The US invaded Iraq, bailed out banks and passed universal healthcare with much less consensus than exists over climate change. In short, the sceptics are not the block to action.

Rather, the block is that the believers – including virtually all governments on earth – aren’t sufficiently willing to act. We could do something. But shouting at sceptics is easier.

He is right.

I am often asked why I don't spent more time bashing skeptics (the answer is obvious). For those who wish to engage that topic or bash skeptics themselves, this post is for you.  Have at it!

A Journalist Fights Back and Wins

In Germany, there is news today (here) about a prominent climate scientist who earlier this year was convicted of defaming a journalist, Irene Meichsner.

The case (described in detail in English here) has to do with Meichsner's reporting of errors in the IPCC 2007 report in early 2010 in the Frankfurter Rundschau. The scientist, Stefan Rahmstorf (known in the US as a blogger at Real Climate and whom I've occasionally sparred with) is a German government advisor who strongly attacked Meichsner for her coverage of the IPCC. His attacks prompted the Frankfurter Rundschau to subsequently correct Meichsner's reporting, apparently based solely on Rahmstorf's say so, such was his authority.

Meichsnner, believing that she had done no wrong, sued. The Cologne court then decided in her favor, concluding that Rahmstorf's attacks were unsupported by evidence and even libelous.

Interestingly, in the US, Rahmstorf's efforts to take down the journalist were uncritically celebrated by no less than the New York Times, which helps to illustrate both a bandwagon effect in coverage of climate by journalists who see themselves on the "same side" as the scientists and also the extensive deference than scientists are granted by the media. Given the court outcome, I wonder if the NYT will be correcting its earlier coverage?

A German magazine on science journalism provides a detailed discussion of the case and its significance (translated from German) and summarizes this episode as follows:

This particular case deserves special attention first of all because a freelance journalist has successfully defended herself against the malice a renowned scientist poured on her. It may motivate other journalists not to put up with absolutely everything in disputes over the quality of their work but to defend themselves, even if this involves an enormous effort. . .

[T]he malice, which Rahmstorf shows for the author of the article, seems like personal defamation that has no place in public disputes. Not even – or, should I say, especially not - when it comes to a subject as important as climate change. Much of Rahmstorf's way of behaving in this case is reminiscent of what he has always argued against so eloquently: the facts are polished until they support a predetermined interpretation. This case is only superficially about facts that may be true or false. Rather, it is about the importance which is assigned to specific facts in the reporting on climate change. These interpretations are not sacrosanct. There is no one who can or would want to deny Stefan Rahmstorf and other climate scientists the right to criticise interpretations they consider inappropriate and to counter them with others. But anyone who, like Rahmstorf, fails to distinguish carefully between facts and interpretation and applies the one-dimensional criterion of right and wrong to both, enters the arena of a public battle of opinions. Disguised as a scientific expert, he is really a political agitator. He does not fight against false factual claims, but against unpopular interpretations, and in this case he also employs unfair means, as the verdict of the Cologne court documented. The fact that Rahmstorf has now changed or entirely removed certain passages from his blog post of 26 April 2010 without informing his readers about it, all fits into the picture.

The moral of the story is not very encouraging - because Rahmstorf has had considerable success. The move that led to the article being withdrawn by the FR made it onto the front page of the New York Times, as Rahmstorf, obviously rather gratified, tells his readers in his blog of 25 May. His initiative is mentioned in the New York Times as one of several successful attempts by climate researchers to publicly correct grossly distorted or false reports. In some cases this may be justified. In this particular case, it is nothing less than a demonstration of how to try and suppress unwelcome interpretations using an authoritarian concept of truth and with the help of a media conspiracy theory based solely on isolated cases and thus basically void of empirical substance.

I have seen from the inside many efforts by a small set of prominent climate scientists to bully and suppress -- behaviors which continue even after the release of the UEA emails. Such behavior is seemingly emboldened by the protective shield that many in the media hold up to protect climate scientists from criticism, no matter how legitimate.

If nothing else, the German court case should be taken as a warning by scientists in any field that efforts to slander opponents sometimes backfires. Perhaps some journalists might see virtue in one of their own protecting her reputation from an illegitimate attack.

What of Irene Meichsner?

Irene Meichsner – who had to fight her legal battle for her reputation on her own - has had enough of climate issues for the time being. She no longer writes about this subject.

I know exactly how she feels.

Australia's Political Litmus Test for Policy Research

Long-time readers may recall an Australian government researcher who in 2009 was prohibited from publishing a critique of cap-and-trade in a leading economics journal.  Here is how it was recounted at the time:

A MESSY public quarrel between the CSIRO [note that CSIRO is Australia's national science agency and a world leader in research] and one of its employees came to a dramatic conclusion yesterday, with the ecological economist Clive Spash resigning and calling for a Senate inquiry to examine claims of censorship at the science body.

Dr Spash yesterday lashed out at his former employer, saying it had treated him ''extremely poorly''. He said the organisation had gagged his views on emissions trading schemes.

The spat centres on a paper Dr Spash wrote, The Brave New World of Carbon Trading, which criticised cap and trade schemes, such as that proposed by the Rudd Government.

The CSIRO refused permission for the paper to be published in the journal New Political Economy because it deemed it in breach of the CSIRO charter, which prevents staff from publicly debating the merits of government or opposition policies.

The CSIRO's chief executive, Megan Clark, later agreed to publish the paper, subject to amendments she would negotiate with Dr Spash. But last week - under pressure from Coalition and Greens senators - the Science Minister, Kim Carr, tabled in the Senate an unamended version of the paper, which Dr Spash, 47, had released in his private capacity, in breach of CSIRO policy.

This week a member of the Australian Senate, Richard Colbeck (Liberal from Tasmania) in a series of questions asked the government to clarify its more recent advocacy efforts involving government experts in the context of its seemingly different behavior in the case of Clive Spash (here in PDF):

Why do the approval processes that were followed in this case differ so markedly from those that were followed when Dr Spash wanted to make public comments that put him at odds with
Government policy?

The government responded as follows (emphasis added):

Dr Spash sought to publish a paper that did not meet CSIRO’s scientific standards without the
approval of CSIRO, which is required under CSIRO’s publication policy. The issues related to
Dr Spash were not about the content of his paper, nor were they related to any public comments regarding his paper. The issues that CSIRO sought to resolve with Dr Spash focused on ensuring that his paper met the standards required of a scientific paper from CSIRO as well as the requirements set out under the Public Research Agency Charter, which they did not.

CSIRO’s internal review concluded that the original paper did not report new research or present empirical evidence to support all of the authors’ conclusions. The paper was also viewed as offering opinion on matters of government policy by applying a critique of neoclassical economic theory to the ETS. . .

In a nutshell, the Australian government's position would effectively prohibit policy-relevant research by CSIRO that offers an "opinion on matters of government policy" -- which is certainly a form of policy research potentially most useful to decision makers.

Such a position on policy research, even consistently applied, amounts to donning intellectual blinders. But in this case the policy against policy research is not even consistently applied, as shown by a quick search of the CSIRO website and a quick visit to its in-house publisher which is putting out this book (by a non-CSIRO scholar):

The Australian government's inconsistent approach to policy research is related to similar issues in the US, such as with respect to NASA under the Bush Administration and HHS under the Obama Administration. In all of these cases, effective policy making and the integrity of scientific institutions are best served by openness and tolerance of diverse points of view.

CSIRO (and NASA and HHS) should let the scientific community decide via peer-review (imperfect no doubt) what research is worth publishing. Any political litmus test of acceptability should be eschewed.

The Climate Fix Now Available in Paperback

The Climate Fix is out in paperback.  Don't be the last person to understand why climate policy is in collapse ... run, don't walk, to your local bookstore or online retailer and get your copy today ;-)

A New US Hurricane Record

On December 4, 2011 it will have been 2,232 days since Hurricane Wilma made landfall along the Gulf coast as a category 3 storm back in 2005. That number of days will break the existing record of days between major US hurricane landfalls, which previously was between 8 Sept 1900 (the great Galveston Hurricane) and 19 Oct 1906. Since there won't be any intense hurricanes before next summer, the record will be shattered, with the days between intense hurricane landfalls likely to exceed 2,500 days.

If you are in the insurance or reinsurance business and want to stir up a little constructive mischief, you should ask your favorite catastrophe modeling firm or ratings agency to show you the mathematics behind their estimate of the probability of zero intense hurricane landfalls from 2006 to present (both made at the time and what they'd say today). (Hint: Zero. Zip. Nada.).

This remarkable streak has to end sometime, and likely won't be repeated anytime soon.

Universities and Big Time Athletics

As you sit down to enjoy a fun weekend of college football, here is a short piece of mine in the New York Times Room for Debate on the significance of the realignment scramble underway among college football conferences.  I'll bet that you didn't know that college football is a 100% government creation;-)

Enjoy!

Ignorance is Bliss

[UPDATE 2 11/30: Here are several remarkable statements from climate scientists, one from the emails showing Kevin Trenberth calling for Chris Landsea to be fired for holding the wrong views and and a comment today from Gavin Schmidt justifying gatekeeping in climate science on political grounds. With comments like that, who needs emails?;-)]

[UPDATE: Ross McKitrick has a timely op-ed and report (PDF) out on IPCC reform. McKitrick's report, as with the concerns I've raised, are not about the substance of the science, but rather, with the institutions.  He writes:

[I]t is not about science. It is about the policies, procedures and administrative structures in the IPCC.

This is a distinction that appears lost by much of the media and science community alike.]

I don't expect to spend much further time on the latest batch of UEA emails, though from what I've seen there is plenty to keep interested parties busy for a while (and further serious problems for individual climate scientists). I cannot understand how anyone can still think that the IPCC does not need major reform, beginning with a comprehensive and immediate implementation of the recommendations of the IAC. Yet, there are apparently plenty of people in the media, in science and of course on blogs who argue (unconvincingly) that there are absolutely no problems whatsoever in institutions of climate science. Ignorance is indeed bliss.

I'll leave this issue with the following vignette from the emails. In May 2005, I gave an invited lecture at the University of East Anglia on the need for the IPCC to be reformed. This is when I was working on my book, The Honest Broker, and it was also just about a month before Kevin Trenberth and Phil Jones decided in ad hoc fashion to keep out of the IPCC's assessment of extreme events a peer-reviewed paper I had led on hurricane and climate change.

Here is the abstract of my May 2005 talk given at UEA:

~~~~ All Welcome~~~~
3 May 2005
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - honest broker or political
advocate? Understanding the difference and why it matters

Roger A. Pielke, Jr
Centre for Science & Technology Policy Research
University of Colorado, USA
4-5pm, Zuckerman Institute Seminar Room, UEA

The IPCC was created in the late 1980s to provide guidance to policy makers on climate change. Roger argues that since that time, the IPCC has seen its mandate and behaviour change from providing a guide to policy options to a much more narrow focus in support of a particular option at the center of intense political debate. This process has been accompanied by some in the IPCC leadership taking a more prominent role as participants in climate politics. All indications suggest that the fourth assessment will continue in this trend of narrowing it focus to advocate a particular approach to climate policy over other possible responses. This talk will explain the important differences between the IPCC serving as an "honest broker" and serving as a "political advocate." Roger will also explore the consequences for climate policy of these various alternatives, arguing that the IPCC is an important institution and that its role as an honest broker is worth preserving.

The new emails show Phil Jones' reaction to the announcement of my upcoming talk:

subject: Pielke !!!

This is all I need ! Must try and be somewhere else !

Jones was somewhere else during my talk, as were most all of the IPCC WG I folks at UEA. There is of course nothing wrong with scholars who don't like other scholars, or choose to close themselves off to hearing different or challenging perspectives.  Academics are like that sometimes ;-) This vignette is only meaningful in the context of the subsequent and arbitrary decision to keep our work out of the part of the IPCC overseen by Jones/Trenberth. That decision was not based on a careful assessment of the science, much less a rigorous process of review, but based on somewhat more pedestrian criteria.

The issue here of course is not whether or not our paper was included, but the process that was employed to make that decision. It is hard to reconcile the much touted IPCC review process with the arbitrary and even petty process that, in this case at least, was actually employed.

So if one wishes to understand the dynamics behind where the IPCC went off course, my advice is to look a bit less in the direction of big-time climate politics (though there is that), and more in the direction of petty academic politics.  How petty academic politics came to play a notable role in big-time climate politics through institutions of science is an overlooked aspect of the institutional failure of the IPCC, and a key part of the story revealed by the emails.

FOIA2011 on The Shameful Paper

[UPDATE: Andy Revkin started an email discussion with relevant parties on this post and the following response from Kevin Trenberth and my rejoinder are part of that exchange. Posted here with Revkin's permission.

Trenberth:

Andy

I am just back from travel and I have not seen any of the new batch of emails yet.  Whatever is there is highly selective.

The full story wrt the hurricanes is given on this web page and all the related links:

http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/landsea.affair/

The paper by Pielke et al was not pertinent to the material in Chapter 3 and neither it nor the Anthes et al paper were included.  It did not deal with physical science topics included in chapter 3 and was countered by Anthes et al.   There is a huge trail of emails between the Anthes et al authors and the editors of BAMS related to all this and the difficulties we had even getting a comment published.

Far more shameful is the fact that of the 5 papers listed at the bottom of the page given above, not one was included in SREX!
SREX is a sham. 

Kevin

My reply to Trenberth:

 Hi Kevin-

The webpage that you link to does not discuss Pielke et al. 2005.

The section of IPCC Chapter 3 (3.8.3) that is relevant deals with hurricanes and climate change.  Pielke et al. 2005 is a peer-reviewed literature review of ... hurricanes and climate change. I have no problem with your objections to the paper, however I find the decision making process employed to exclude it from your chapter a bit lacking.

Given that you were a co-author of Anthes et al. 2005 critical of Pielke et al. 2005 at the time you were deciding what literature to include in the IPCC, did you ever think that it may have been good sense to recuse yourself on this topic?  Lest one get the impression that you were waging a bit of a personal or academic vendetta against others?

Your comments on SREX help to underscore this.

Perhaps the IPCC should have better procedures in place under such circumstances.

All best,

Roger

SREX was a sham!?! Whoa.]

[Note: This post has been updated to link to the Chapter 3 of the IPCC AR4 WG I which was responsible for reviewing the science of hurricanes and climate change.]

Long time readers will recall that  in 2004 and 2005 (before Katrina), I led an interdisciplinary effort to review the literature on hurricanes and global warming. The effort resulted in a peer-reviewed article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (here in PDF).

That paper, despite being peer-reviewed and standing the test of time (as we now know), was ignored by the relevant part of the IPCC 2007 that dealt with extreme events. Thanks to the newly released emails from UEA (hacked, stolen, donated, or whatever) we can say with certainty why that paper was excluded from the IPCC 2007 report Chapter 3 which discussed hurricanes and climate change. Those various reviews associated with the release of the UEA emails that concluded that no papers were purposely kept out of the IPCC may want to revisit that particular conclusion.

First though, a bit of backstory ...

Upon our paper's acceptance for publication by BAMS in 2005 Kevin Trenberth, a scientist at NCAR here in Boulder and the person (along with Phil Jones) in charge of the 2007 IPCC AR4 chapter that reviewed extreme events including hurricanes, said this in the Boulder Daily Camera (emphasis added) about our article:

I think the role of the changing climate is greatly underestimated by Roger Pielke Jr. I think he should withdraw this article. This is a shameful article.

Trenberth personally disagreed with the paper, which is fine and appropriate -- academics disagree about the most trivial stuff all the time.  To get a sense of this issue, here is what we concluded in the "shameful article"and Trenberth disagreed with (more on Trenberth's views below):

To summarize, claims of linkages between global warming and hurricane impacts are premature for three reasons. First, no connection has been established between greenhouse gas emissions and the observed behavior of hurricanes . . . Second, the peer-reviewed literature reflects that a scientific consensus exists that any future changes in hurricane intensities will likely be small in the context of observed variability . . . And third, under the assumptions of the IPCC, expected future damages to society of its projected changes in the behavior of hurricanes are dwarfed by the influence of its own projections of growing wealth and population . . . While future research or experience may yet overturn these conclusions, the state of the peer-reviewed knowledge today is such that there are good reasons to expect that any conclusive connection between global warming and hurricanes or their impacts will not be made in the near term.

In the newly released emails there is a 2005 exchange between Trenberth and Phil Jones about this paper which shows them deciding together to exclude the paper from the IPCC for "political" reasons, and it was indeed excluded.

Jones to Trenberth on 22 June 2005:

Kevin,

I'll read the Pielke et al piece for BAMS that came over the skeptic email today. Presumably we'll get forced to refer to it [in the 2007 IPCC report].

Trenberth replies:

Don't see why we should refer to the Pielke piece. It is [n]ot yet published. It is very political and an opinion.

Jones soon comes around, despite noting its peer-reviewed status:

Kevin,

Read the article on the new patio at home with a glass of wine. I thoroughly agree that we don't need to refer to it. Wrote that on it last night. It is very political. Several sentences and references shouldn't be there. I don't know who was supposed to have reviewed it - maybe Linda [Mearns] will know, as she used to or still does have something to do with BAMS. The inference in the email (from whence it came) is that it has been accepted !

Cheers
Phil

The gatekeeping of the IPCC process is abundantly clear, and the shadowy suggestion that they can find out who the reviewers are from another colleague is a bit unsettling as well.

Here is some further background on the "shameful paper," which despite being ignored by the the IPCC, has been cited 179 times according to Google Scholar and appears to be consistent with the most recent IPCC report on the subject.

Even though the IPCC in 2007 didn't see the paper as worth discussing, a high-profile team of scientists saw fit to write up a commentary in response to our article in BAMS (here in PDF). One of those high-profile scientists was Trenberth.

Trenberth and his colleagues argued that our article was flawed in three respects, it was they said,

. . . incomplete and misleading because it 1) omits any mention of several of the most important aspects of the potential relationships between hurricanes and global warming, including rainfall, sea level, and storm surge; 2) leaves the impression that there is no significant connection between recent climate change caused by human activities and hurricane characteristics and impacts; and 3) does not take full account of the significance of recently identified trends and variations in tropical storms in causing impacts as compared to increasing societal vulnerability.

Our response to their comment (here in PDF) focused on the three points that they raised:

Anthes et al. (2006) present three criticisms of our paper. One criticism is that Pielke et al. (2005) “leaves the impression that there is no significant connection between recent climate change caused by human activities and hurricane characteristics and impacts.” If by “significant” they mean either (a) presence in the peer-reviewed literature or (b) discernible in the observed economic impacts, then this is indeed an accurate reading. Anthes et al. (2006) provide no data, analyses, or references that directly connect observed hurricane characteristics and impacts to anthropogenic climate change. . .

In a second criticism, Anthes et al. (2006) point out (quite accurately) that Pielke et al. (2005) failed to discuss the relationship between global warming and rainfall, sea level, and storm surge as related to tropical cyclones. The explanation for this neglect is simple—there is no documented relationship between global warming and the observed behavior of tropical cyclones (or TC impacts) related to rainfall, sea level, or storm surge. . .

A final criticism by Anthes et al. (2006) is that Pielke et al. (2005) “does not take full account of the significance of recently identified trends and variations in tropical storms in causing impacts as compared to increasing societal vulnerability.” Anthes et al. (2006) make no reference to the literature that seeks to distinguish the relative role of climate factors versus societal factors in causing impacts (e.g., Pielke et al. 2000; Pielke 2005), so their point is unclear. There is simply no evidence, data, or references provided by Anthes et al. (2006) to counter the analysis in Pielke et al. (2000) that calculates the relative sensitivity of future global tropical cyclone impacts to the independent effects of projected climate change and various scenarios of growing societal vulnerability under the assumptions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

This series of exchanges was not acknowledged by the IPCC even though it was all peer-reviewed and appeared in the leading journal of the American Meteorological Society. As we have seen before with the IPCC, its review of the literature somehow missed key articles that one of its authors (in this case Trenberth, the lead for the relevant chapter) found to be in conflict with his personal opinions, or in this case "shameful." Of course, there is a deeper backstory here involving a conflict between my co-author Chris Landsea and Trenberth in early 2005, prompting Landsea to resign from the IPCC.

So almost seven years after we first submitted our paper how does it hold up? Pretty well I think, on all counts. I would not change any of the conclusions above, nor would I change the reply to Anthes et al. Science changes and moves ahead, so any review will eventually become outdated, but ours was an accurate reflection of the state of science as of 2005.

Papers and links

Pielke, Jr., R. A., C. Landsea, M. Mayfield, J. Laver and R. Pasch, 2005. Hurricanes and global warming, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 86:1571-1575.

Anthes et al. 2006, Hurricanes and global warming: Potential linkage and consequences, BAMS, Vol. 87, pp. 623-628.

Pielke, Jr., R. A., C.W. Landsea, M. Mayfield, J. Laver, R. Pasch, 2006. Reply to Hurricanes and Global Warming Potential Linkages and Consequences, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Vol. 87, pp. 628-631, May.