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Mar

2012

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: A Handy Bullshit Button on Disasters and Climate Change

The full IPCC Special Report on Extremes is out today, and I have just gone through the sections in Chapter 4 that deal with disasters and climate change. Kudos to the IPCC -- they have gotten the issue just about right, where "right" means that the report accurately reflects the academic literature on this topic. Over time good science will win out over the rest

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...t-button-on-disasters-and.html

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IPCC Climate Science Disaster Economy

"Some authors suggest that a (natural or anthropogenic) climate change signal can be found in the records of disaster losses (e.g., Mills, 2005; Höppe and Grimm, 2009), but their work is in the nature of reviews and commentary rather than empirical research."

Nov

2011

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: FOIA2011 on The Shameful Paper

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 Science changes and moves ahead, so any review will eventually become outdated, but ours was an accurate reflection of the state of science as of 2005.

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...oia2011-on-shameful-paper.html

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Climate Science IPCC Publication Selection Data

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.

Aug

2011

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: How Many Findings of the IPCC AR4 WG I are Incorrect? Answer: 28%

Jonassen, R. and R. Pielke, Jr., 2011. Improving conveyance of uncertainties in the findings of the IPCC, Climatic Change, 9 August, 0165-0009:1-9, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10584-011-0185-7.

Abstract Authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) received guidance on reporting understanding, certainty and/or confidence in findings using a common language, to better communicate with decision makers. However, a review of the IPCC conducted by the InterAcademy Council (2010) found that "the guidance was not consistently followed in AR4, leading to unnecessary errors . . . the guidance was often applied to statements that are so vague they cannot be falsified. In these cases the impression was often left, quite incorrectly, that a substantive finding was being presented." Our comprehensive and quantitative analysis of findings and associated uncertainty in the AR4 supports the IAC findings and suggests opportunities for improvement in future assessments.

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...ings-of-ipcc-ar4-wg-i-are.html

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Climate Change Climate Science Policy Probability Prediction Projection IPCC

If we confine our attention to those findings that refer to the future, one can ask how many IPCC findings can be expected to become verified ultimately as being accurate? For example, if we consider findings that refer to future events with likelihood in the ‘likely’ class (i.e., >66% likelihood) then if these judgments are well calibrated then it would be appropriate to conclude that as many as a third can be expected to not occur. More generally, of the 360 findings reported in the full text of WG1 across all likelihood categories and presented with associated measures of likelihood (i.e., those summarized in Table 2 below), then based on the judgments of likelihood associated with each statement we should logically expect that about 100 of these findings (~28%) will at some point be overturned.
ur paper concludes:

Although the IPCC has made enormous contributions and set an important example for global assessment of a vexing problem of immense ramifications, there remain clear opportunities for improvement in documenting findings and specifying uncertainties. We recommend more care in the definition and determination of uncertainty, more clarity in identifying and presenting findings and a more systematic approach in the entire process, especially from assessment to assessment. We also suggest an independent, dedicated group to monitor the process, evaluate findings as they are presented and track their fate. This would include tracking the relationship of findings and attendant uncertainties that pass up the hierarchy of documents within AR5. Strict rules for expressing uncertainty in findings that are derived from (possibly multiple) other findings are needed (see, e.g., the second example in the Supplementary Material).

It is not the purpose of this note to discuss other, related scientific assessments of climate change knowledge; but, we do note that our preliminary analysis of the U.S. Global Change Research Program Synthesis and Assessment Products suggests a far less systematic application of the guidance supplied to authors of those documents and far less consistent application of the defined terms. We believe that the concerns we have expressed here, and the resulting recommendations, apply more broadly than the IPCC process.
12 more annotation(s)...
- Your headline is of course utter nonsense.
  
  If I say (correctly) that a single roll of a fair die is "likely" (83%) to turn up 1-5, then throwing a 6 does not make my statement "incorrect". If I repeat the statement (and experiment) 100 times, then 16% of my statements will not have been incorrect either.
- -1-James Annan
  
  Thanks for the comment. If the IPCC statements were in reference to die rolls you'd be correct. But they are not.
  
  A finding of the IPCC such as the following will either be right (it will verify) or it will be wrong (it will not), the IPCC handicaps it at 90% certain:
  
  "It is very likely that hot extremes, heat waves and heavy precipitation events will continue to become more frequent."
  
  There is a 10% chance, according to the IPCC, that the statement will not verify.
  
  There are not 100 die rolls here, just one future.
- Why does your analysis not apply to a roll of a die? If it helps you, assume that after the first throw, a magpie swoops down and steals it. The throw is not repeatable. Would you claim I had been incorrect if I had thrown a 6?
  
  The statements you analyse are still probabilistic statements irrespective of repeatability, and as such can be neither absolutely verified nor refuted in isolation by the future. If 10% of their very likely statements turn out to not occur, this would simply mean their assessment was well calibrated.
  
  Therefore your usage of "incorrect" (which interesting does not appear in the paper, only the blog post) is nonsensical.
  
  I think you know this and are playing at rabble-rousing. My eyebrows are raised, but only a little, at this behaviour.
- -4-James Annan
  
  If I ask you to predict the next roll of a die and you predict that it will be in the range 1-5, an it turns up 6, then you would be wrong.
  
  You could hem and haw about 100 rolls and such, but I would explain that I was not asking for a discourse on probabilities but a simple prediction of the next roll.
- we may both wish that the IPCC was more sophisticated in its discussion of probabilities and futures, and that is a subject of our paper.
  
  Operational weather forecasters will no doubt understand this situation quite well. To suggest that there is no such thing as being incorrect, probably does not help the credibility of climate science.
- But if, rather than making a definitive prediction that it *will* be in the range 1-5, I merely state that this is "likely" to occur, will you still say I was wrong if it comes up a 6?
  
  It seems to me that the IPCC was rather more sophisticated in its usage of probability, than you are in understanding it.
- The probabilities themselves are basically untestable, as far as whether they reflect reality, vis a vis the "real" PDF, unless there is a 1 or a 0 in there somewhere.
  
  The typical probabilistic statement is probably too vague to really be able to pin it down and decide what it really means. As always, the real sticking point comes down to the assumptions behind the probabilities.
  
  Of course, there's also the fact that (from what I've seen) many of the probabilities are about parameters, not actual data, so the predictions probably don't mean what most people will think they mean.
- with respect to the IPCC PDFs are not known, and the report is written about the climate future, of which we will have only one.
  
  Following your logic the IPCC can never be evaluated empirically about anything expressed probabilistically. This is silly. Probabilistic statements are made to add information to decision making, not to subtract from accountability.
  
  If a weather forecaster offers an 80% chance of rain the next day and does so for 360 days, then I can evaluate that forecast by converting it into a deterministic prediction that should verify 80% of the time, if it is well calibrated. Similarly, if the IPCC offers up 360 statements expressed with various certainties, then (if its judgments are well-calibrated) we can expect that the scientific community will collectively judge 28% of those statements to be incorrect in the future.
- Actually, the IPCC offers PROJECTIONS, not predictions. Projections are the result of running models based on a certain scenario, or "storyline", up to a certain point in the future: if the storyline turns up to be correct, AND the model actually embodies the climatic implications of the storyline, then the projection would agree with observation. Logically this does not imply that the storyline is correct, and that's the reason why several such storylines (scenarios) are used. To the uncertain storyline one has to add the uncertainties in the models themselves: they could be structurally wrong, or some parameter of the model may have been wrongly quantified (e.g. climate sensitivity).
- Probabilities refer always to collections of events, not to specific events. They make statements about the relative frequency of an outcome among the various possible outcomes, over a large number of observations. They can be falsified by collection of events, not by individual events. The 1/6 probability of getting a six in one throw of a die is not falsified by the next throw not showing a six, or even by several throws failing to show a six. Twenty or fifty (or more) throws without a six are definitely possible. It will not be confirmed by getting a six in the next throw. But a large number of throws (by the Law of Large Numbers) will show 1/6 of the cases were sixes. This hardly applies to climate projections, because only ONE future would be actually observable, and that will happen in the future and is thus no help to evaluate the projections in the present.
- Most of the "likely" or "very likely" assessments in the IPCC reports are based on ensembles of models, each with its particular quirks and peculiar quantification of parameters. If 66% of those model runs show a certain result (e.g. average temperature rise above 2°) this is not translatable into 66% probability of such warming to occur: other scenarios and models, or other quantifications of the models, would yield different results.
  
  One must also distinguish probability and strength of belief, though in some context (especially those using Bayesian approaches) the two are often not distinguished. If a die fails to show a six after fifty throws, our belief in the fairness of the die starts to falter, but perhaps the die is fair after all, and we are also facing a long succession of no-sixes which is entirely compatible with the die being fair.
  
  The likelihood attributed to future events in IPCC reports are more akin to strength of belief (among IPCC authors) than to probabilities.
- I thought the exchange between Annan and Pielke Jr was amusing, because Pielke’s headline – 28% of the WG1 findings are wrong – was tongue in cheek. He doesn’t really believe that (as his text itself reveals), but was just being provocative. In a broader sense, the argument reminds us that “probability” is not an inherent property of a system but a measurement of our ignorance about the system. In the case of climate, as we learn more about particular phenomena, the probability of their occurrence will change, even though our learning process hasn’t had any impact on how the natural world behaves. A future event that is 72% probable now may become 99% probable in the future (or 1% probable) even if we have done nothing to change its behavior.

Jul

2011

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Why the IPCC Has Lost Trust

The IPCC is now one train wreck after another. After being embarrassed by the spectacle of a Greenpeace energy scenario being elevated to top level prominence in a recent report on renewable energy by an IPCC author from Greenpeace, the IPCC compounds that error by trying to explain it away with information that is at best misleading if not just untrue.

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...why-ipcc-has-lost-trust.html

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IPCC Bias Politics Climate Science Activism

In a letter to the Economist this week Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chair of IPCC Working Group III (which produced the recent report on renewables) dresses down the magazine for not recognizing that the IPCC has procedures in place to deal with the possibility that authors might impose their biases:

The IPCC has now approved a formal policy on conflicts of interest as recommended by the InterAcademy Council, a network of national science councils. This is an already endorsed increment in a pervasive system and is not a first step in a whole new area. Our new special report on renewables continues the tradition of balanced, thorough assessments at the IPCC.
What Edenhofer does not mention is that the IPCC conflict of interest policy is not being implemented until some time after 2014, after the current (fifth) assessment report is done (of course, nor did it apply to the recent renewables report). The yet-to-be-implemented COI policy is completely irrelevant to any discussion of the renewables report.
The IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri explained the reason for the delayed implementation recently to the Economist:

Of course if you look at conflict of interest with respect to authors who are there in the 5th Assessment Report we’ve already selected them and therefore it wouldn’t be fair to impose anything that sort of applies retrospectively.
If you think about it, fairness to IPCC authors who have conflicts of interest (most notably Pachauri himself) is an interesting concept. One might argue that the legitimacy of the organization outweighs a need for such fairness to conflicted authors, but I digress.
1 more annotation(s)...
- The IPCC involves many sincere people who put forth a lot of effort. It is a shame to see that effort repeatedly scuppered on the inability of the IPCC leadership to recognize that trust and legitimacy are essential to its job. When will the climate science community stand up and demand more effective leadership?

Jun

2011

Major reform for climate body : Nature News

A new conflict-of-interest policy will require all IPCC officials and authors to disclose financial and other interests relevant to their work (Pachauri had been harshly criticized in 2009 for alleged conflicts of interest.) The meeting also adopted a detailed protocol for addressing errors in existing and future IPCC reports, along with guidelines to ensure that descriptions of scientific uncertainties remain consistent across reports. "This is a heartening and encouraging outcome of the review we started one year ago," Pachauri told Nature. "It will strengthen the IPCC and help restore public trust in the climate sciences."

www.nature.com/...473261a.html

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Climate Science IPCC Error Conflict Bias Politics

The first major test of these changes will be towards the end of this year, with the release of a report assessing whether climate change is increasing the likelihood of extreme weather events. Despite much speculation, there is scant scientific evidence for such a link — particularly between climate warming, storm frequency and economic losses — and the report is expected to spark renewed controversy. "It'll be interesting to see how the IPCC will handle this hot potato where stakes are high but solid peer-reviewed results are few," says Silke Beck, a policy expert at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany.

Mar

2011

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Getting Facts Right

One of the news sites in my blogroll is EurActiv.com, which I have come to trust as a reliable source of information about goings on in Brussels and Europe. Yesterday, I relied on a news story from EurActiv related to the IPCC. It turns out that just about everything in that news story was incorrect, and that news story remains posted with incorrect information.

While it is true that bloggers are often at the mercy of conventional news outlets, we can also help to quickly identify errors and help to set them straight.

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...getting-facts-right.html

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Climate Science Interest Conflict IPCC

Mar

2011

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: IPCC and Conflicts of Interest

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...and-conflicts-of-interest.html

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Climate Science Interest Conflict IPCC

Last year the InterAcademy Council recommended that

The IPCC should develop and adopt a rigorous conflict of interest policy that applies to all individuals directly involved in the preparation of IPCC reports
UPDATE: I AM INFORMED THAT THE MATERIAL REPORTED BY EURACTIV AND REPRODUCED BELOW IS COMPREHENSIVELY WRONG. APPARENTLY MR. SAWYER IS NOT A CONTRIBUTOR TO THE IPCC AND THE REPORT DOES NOT DISCUSS NUCLEAR POWER. I HAVE UPDATED THIS POST ACCORDINGLY. THE EURACTIV NEWS STORY POSTED UP YESTERDAY REMAINS IN ERROR.
2 more annotation(s)...
- Now we get treated to sights like the following:
  
  . . . Steve Sawyer, who contributed a chapter to an upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report on managing climate disasters, which will be published in May. . .
  
  According to Sawyer, the forthcoming IPCC report will reveal that carbon emissions from nuclear power facilities clock up between 100 and 200 grams of carbon emissions per kilowatt hour (kWh). 'Clean' gas emits around 350 grams of carbon per kilowatt hour.
  
  But wind turbines emit no carbon when producing electricity.
  
  One life-cycle assessment of the Vestas V90-3.0MW onshore turbine – which includes the manufacture of components – found that even here, only 4.64 grams of CO2 per kWh were created.
  
  "Nuclear power is generally the most expensive, complicated and dangerous means ever devised by human beings to boil water," Sawyer said, summing up the anti-nuclear argument.
  
  "Why anyone would want to use it to generate electricity is beyond me, unless they were interested - as most European states were in the early days of nuclear history - in what comes out the other end, which is fissionable material for nuclear weapons," he added.
  Who is this IPCC author Steve Sawyer you might wonder? He is the Secretary General of the Global Wind Energy Council, an advocacy group for wind energy with a strong anti-nuclear stance, as Sawyer's comments indicate. He also spent 30 years as a top official for Greenpeace.
- the spectacle of an IPCC author with a clear conflict of interest writing part of the report and then using that same report in his political advocacy just does not look good. If the IPCC were recommending drug safety standards and an author happened to be a top official at a company benefitting from the recommendations, the issues here would be obvious and unacceptable. The IPCC however plays by different rules.