Today I gave a lecture on the environment and the dilemmas of collective action in my course on Introduction to International Relations. Despite the best efforts of St. Elinor (the patron saint of political science and my alma mater), I’m still a fairly pessimistic adherent to Mancur Olson’s diagnosis of public-goods provision. Consequently, the environmental lecture (“Saving the Sunlit Earth”) is probably my most depressing canned talk. (The “sunlit earth” comes from a speech by Nobel laureate F. Sherwood Rowland, who co-discovered CFCs’ harmful effects.)
Simply put, unlike the Montreal Protocol that reduced CFC emissions and put the ozone layer on track to be healed within a century or so–a smashing success for environmental diplomacy, and no I’m not being sarcastic–the number of countries involved in negotiations on climate change and the distribution fo the costs and benefits of reducing CO2 emissions make me so despondent over the chance for a lasting agreement that I’m pretty glad that I’ll likely be dead before the ice caps are completely melted.
To illustrate my argument, I downloaded the most recent stats on CO2 emissions I could find and cranked them through Stata. As we can see, per-capita emissions in the rich world have been relatively constant or even declining since 1990:
But those modest increases on a per-capita basis in China and South Korea have nevertheless yielded tremendous shocks to total CO2 output.
Astonishingly, China–which produced about as much CO2 in 1950 as Great Britain had in 1750–now produces more CO2 than the United States did in 2000. And, of course, the first and second derivatives on that time series are positive.
I’m glad to see social scientists paying more attention to these issues. Frankly, if the threat of great-power conflict was the animating purpose for international relations theorists to get out of bed in the morning during the post-World War II era, I think it’s fairly clear that issues relating to political economy–and global climate change is, at root, a political-economy problem–should drive us in the post-Cold War era.
Below, a Google n-gram of the relative popularity of the two types of end of the world: “nuclear war” and “global warming.”
I’m going to use this to begin my most optimistic lecture of the semester, which about nuclear weapons.
Your post assumes that there’s a consensus on man-made global warming, or “climate change,” or whatever is the environmental scam of the day.
I wonder, do you have students questioning the very premise of your lecture?
No, my students are pretty smart.
Not really. Perhaps they are smart but haven’t been given a rounded education. So let me rephrase: Do you provide a balanced review of climate science so students can evaluate for themselves?
A balanced view on this issue does not admit skepticism of anthropogenic climate change, but rather discussion of rates, consequences, and the resulting cost-benefit calculus of reducing emissions and/or engaging in harm mitigation.
One of the great tragedies of the last decade — and one our children will suffer for — is that climate change became a partisan issue. I simply do not understand why to be a card-carrying movement conservative requires one to check one’s brain at the door on this issue. It is the same sense of confusion I get over the sudden opposition to mass transit or redressing the energy-market distortions caused by de jure and de facto subsidies for fossil fuel production.
Just because Obama and the Democrats support these things doesn’t mean that Republicans have to oppose them–particularly when it entails abandoning policies (e.g., cap and trade) that they embraced as recently as 2008.
The real problem with the “fair and balanced” mantra is that it rests on shoving everything into a binary logic of is/isn’t. E.g., climate change a) is/is not happening, b) if it is happening it is/is not human caused. By allowing us to debate only the end points of the possibilities, this shrinks our cognitive space. Shrunken cognitive space raises the probability of stalemate and of stinko policy.
PMI did a GOOGLE IMAGE search on “carbon temperature graph” and this is what displayed. (It is from IPCC data and seems consitant with other data I’ve seen. ) This may be why it is a hard sell, there is just enough contrary or at least debatable items out there to make holding one’s judgment seem prudent.Actually, I understand that over geological time frames there is a very strong correlation between carbon in the atmosphere and temperature, changes in temperature preceding changes in carbon by 1500 or so years. The correlation does not break down until modern human emissions are added.This chart has been correctly and severely criticized as a gross simplification of a complicated issue. This is fair, no matter what one thinks about climate change issues the whole carbon/temperature example is a gross simplification.It is an important issue, it deserves better argumentation. With better argumentation it might be able to get the greater prominence you desire.Hank’s Eclectic Meanderings
Hank, you pulled Fielding’s infamous chart off a site that points to it as a cautionary example of how to misuse data visualization. Just because you can find a widely discredited argument on the internet does not mandate a need for “better argumentation,” especially as the scientific community is doing just fine on this one.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/01/uncertainty-noise-and-the-art-of-model-data-comparison/
DanThank you.I guess I did not note ALL the problems with it. To start the vertical axis us to long and it should give another 50 years of so of data to make the point one way or the other.But whatever Fielding’s presentation and extrapolations on that, it is essentially the same data I’ve seen on both carbon and temperature from a number of sources from both sides. PM’s frustration was about the difficulty of convincing people there was a need for action. When “average internet user” decides to do a little study on the issue and goes to Google, it is the second item, and the most readable graph on the first page, and there is no better counter argument than there is an alleged “consensus” and technical methodological points but where is the data showing a strong positive correlation for the short term?, He may not be come a ‘skeptic” but it does become an open issue in his mind. And he goes to more interesting subjects.The popular level argumentation from both sides stinks. To get enough support for the action PM (or the other side) would like to see we need better argumentation. Hank’s Eclectic Meanderings
H,
There are a lot more graphs that I use which I have the rights to use in the classroom (because of textbook adoption) but not on the Internet (since they’re not licensed for that, as I understand it).
One that I do use but didn’t include is this one:
https://antiworldnews.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/globalwarming.jpg
My understanding at this point is that there is, essentially, zero dispute among the climate science community about this. Anthropogenic GCC occupies at this point a level of certainty that I am comfortable calling a “fact,” and the credibility of sources that students would have to use to dispute these data is so poor that granting them time would be like allowing young-earth creationists to speak. (That is to say, I would, but I would challenge them appropriately, and I suspect that my arguments would win the day.)
I think that the argumentation is, in fact, incredibly clear, and it’s astonishing that the anti-GCC crowd tends to keep falling back on more and more implausible arguments as data mount. The most telling point for me is that, to my knowledge, the developing world does not reject the notion of GCC in its position papers at Copenhagen or elsewhere. They believe it, just as Western governments do. Instead, they simply object to the distributional effects of CO2 reduction. Surely, if there were any sensible scrap of evidence or reputable school of scientists to put forward a climate-change denial argument, the Chinese or others would be all over that like the Tobacco Institute on a flawed result.
PMThanks for the link.Well there is one thing we can agree on; there is more evidence for Global Warming than young earth creationism.Hank’s Eclectic Meanderings
The Link
I think Dan is spot on in his response to Douglas. I have two additional points. First
(small plug for a paper I’ve done with my wife) is that it is
interesting how climate change hasn’t become a partisan issue in Europe,
but it is here. Second, I am constantly surprised at how misunderstandings of what science does end up providing fodder for people like Douglas. For example, the idea that there should be a simple feedback response to rising CO2 levels and if we don’t observe it then climate science is bunk amazes me. I think arises out of the cult of prediction. At the core of the issue is this: CO2 does not allow IR wavelength radiation to emit back out into space. Simple mechanism, with a huge range of possible consequences depending on interactions amongst a boggling array of variables (thus making expectations of linear trends unreasonable). But the core mechanism of CO2-trapping-IR-radiation remains, so when you pump a bunch of the stuff into the atmosphere, it defies reason to believe there will be no effect. Coming back to my first point, why Europeans get this and Americans don’t remains a very interesting question I think…
[DHN here: “FV” responds to a careful comment with a single link. The link takes us to a content-less denialist post. We don’t often censor comments at DoM, and we rarely do it for the opinions they contain. HOWEVER, I reserve the right, in the future, to treat responses that consist of nothing other than links as comment spam. That is all]
https://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.it/2012/03/handy-bullshit-button-on-disasters-and.html
Sorry, but I thought my hermetic point was clear.
What I meant is that science is not about certainty, while in media you listen to journalists, politicians, and experts presenting you convenient truths ( mainly cherry-picking).
The discussion about anthropogenic global warming seems like the one about cannabis and their effects, IMHO it’s just ideology. Unfortunately science is not an easy task, especially when you have to deal with so complex events. Unfortunately the human mind process information serially, and so we tend to reduce everything to jus one dimension, and to ‘extremize’ scientific results.
By the way here you can find a useful source of information:
https://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/science-nature/science-other/
There’s a lot of garbage on this site, to be sure. Just because I can google something and find a page presenting an argument does not make the argument true. The mere existence on google proves the impossibility of that form of truth. As PTJ pointed out recently, the community of scholars need an set of procedures to know how to evaluate claims about the world. While existing on a Google search could be a claim in some community of scholars, it seems totally insufficient, and from the way that FV treats the world, unproductive and misinformed. If the existence on Google was sufficient, then there would be no way for PM’s claims to stand within his blog post. Instead, they don’t stand for FV. They must be rebutted by this debate of people arguing over scientific data that lack the credential or ability to interpret it; they must be rebutted by cranks that one can find on Google. How do the cranks stand? Easy, their mere existence proves an ongoing debate in the scientific community, regardless of whether we suspend thinking about whether there’s procedures to evaluate these claims. FV suspends these procedures of evaluating claims, posing some sort of objective ambivalence in order to affirm partisan bickering, to insert himself in a scientific debate with thick consensus. FV would like to suspend his own position — a person who does not believe in global warming — for a less ugly one, a person who just wants science to act fairly and consider all of the facts. Of course, no one’s fooled. More problematically, no one’s moved to a new position.
I agree that the politics of climate change are distressing — both because the inability of industrialized countries to coordinate policies seems to confirm the inherent difficulties of addressing collective action problems like Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons and because an open discussion about the reasons for this failure are so often obscured by a now tired discussion about the reliability of climate change science (perfectly in evidence here).
I wonder, though, if the more apocalyptic scenarios we associate with climate change — melting ice caps, devastation to key crop-growing regions of the world, the end of civilization — will be avoided by new emerging technologies, the most notable of which seems to be the possibility of releasing tiny particulates into the atmosphere to block some sun from reaching the earth. My only knowledge of this comes from a New Yorker article from earlier this year (https://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/05/14/120514fa_fact_specter). As the article makes clear, these technologies are untested and the impact they may have on the global climate is still largely unknown.
It also offers some interesting thoughts on the politics these technologies might involve: as climate change worsens, the chances of using these technologies unilaterally by vulnerable countries increases and this use could create all kinds of undesirable effects for other countries. We could imagine a scenario where coercion is used to deter this kind of activity or counter-measures are developed by some countries to counter-act these technologies.
In short, the political future of climate change may be less about finding ways to overcome the collective action problem (an effort that seems to be failing) and more about the coercive diplomacy and deterrent tactics that the new geoengineering technologies may inaugurate. In this way the future of climate change politics may end up looking a lot like the past politics of nuclear weapons during the Cold War.
Or, alternatively, we may have already reached a tipping point in a very complexly related set of climate systems that will result in unavoidable catastrophe (https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/opinion/the-climate-change-tipping-point.html)