Two scathing reviews by scholars working with the IPCC show why the organization is hopelessly corrupted by politics

Two scathing letters critical of the IPCC process were published on Friday April 25th; one from Dr. Robert Stavins, an IPCC chapter Co-Coordinating Lead Author, and a five year veteran of the process, plus another by Dr. Richard Tol, who asked his name to be removed from work he was contributing to because it was “too alarmist”. Tol said in his letter:

First, from Dr. Robert Stavins:

Is the IPCC Government Approval Process Broken?

Over the past 5 years, I have dedicated an immense amount of time and effort to serving as the Co-Coordinating Lead Author (CLA) of Chapter 13, “International Cooperation:  Agreements and Instruments,” of Working Group III (Mitigation) of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  It has been an intense and exceptionally time-consuming process, which recently culminated in a grueling week spent in Berlin, Germany, April 5-13, 2014, at the government approval sessions, in which some 195 country delegations discussed, revised, and ultimately approved (line-by-line) the “Summary for Policymakers” (SPM), which condenses more than 2,000 pages of text from 15 chapters into an SPM document of 33 pages.  Several of the CLAs present with me in Berlin commented that given the nature and outcome of the week, the resulting document should probably be called the Summary by Policymakers, rather than the Summary for Policymakers.

Before returning to the topic of today’s blog entry — the SPM process and outcome — I want to emphasize that the IPCC’s Working Group III “Technical Summary” and the underlying Working Group III report of 15 chapters were completely untouched by the government approval process of the Summary for Policymakers.   So, the crucial IPCC products – the Technical Summary and the 15 chapters of WG 3 – retain their full scientific integrity, and they merit serious public attention.  Now, back to the SPM process and outcome …

The process of the government approval sessions was exceptionally frustrating, and the outcome of that process – the final SPM – was in some regards disappointing.  Two weeks ago, immediately after returning from Berlin, I sent a letter to the Co-Chairs of Working Group III — Ottmar Edenhofer, Ramon Pichs-Madruga, and Youba Sokona — expressing my disappointment with the government approval process and its outcome in regard to the part of the assessment for which I had primary responsibility, SPM.5.2, International Cooperation.  At the time, I did not release my letter publically, because I did not want to get in the way of the important messages that remained in the SPM and were receiving public attention through the Working Group III release.

With two weeks having passed, it is now unlikely that the broader release of my letter will obscure the news surrounding the Working Group III release, and – importantly — it could be constructive to the process going forward, as the IPCC leadership and others think about the path ahead for future climate assessments.  Rather than summarizing or annotating my letter, I believe it makes most sense simply to reproduce it, and let it stand – or fall – as originally written.  It follows below.

Click to see the letter: http://www.robertstavinsblog.org/2014/04/25/is-the-ipcc-government-approval-process-broken-2/

Of interest is this paragraph:

Over the course of the two hours of the contact group deliberations, it became clear that the only way the assembled government representatives would approve text for SPM.5.2 was essentially to remove all “controversial” text (that is, text that was uncomfortable for any one individual government), which meant deleting almost 75% of the text, including nearly all explications and examples under the bolded headings. In more than one instance, specific examples or sentences were removed at the will of only one or two countries, because under IPCC rules, the dissent of one country is sufficient to grind the entire approval process to a halt unless and until that country can be appeased.

There is also a Daily Mail article by David Rose: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2614097/Top-climate-experts-sensational-claim-government-meddling-crucial-UN-report.html

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Now Dr. Richard Tol’s essay:

In September 2013, I stepped down from the team that prepared the draft of the Summary for Policy Makers to the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This attracted worldwide media attention in April 2014. Regrettably, the story of AR5 became the story of a man.

I have been involved with the IPCC since 1994, fulfilling a variety of roles in all three working groups. After the debacle of AR4 – where the Himalayan glacier melt really was the least of the errors – I had criticized the IPCC for faulty quality control. Noblesse oblige – I am the 20th most-cited climate scholar in the world – so I volunteered for AR5.

The Irish government put my name forward only to withdraw its financial commitment when I was indeed elected. The necessary funding could have easily been freed up if the Irish delegation to the international climate negotiations and the IPCC would trim its luxurious travel arrangements.

As a Convening Lead Author of one of the chapters, I was automatically on the team to draft the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM). AR5 is a literature review of 2,600 pages long. It assesses a large body of scholarly publication. In some places, the chapters are so condensed that there are a few words per article in the learned literature. The SPM then distills the key messages into 44 pages – but everyone knows that policy and media will only pick up a few sentences. This leads to a contest between chapters – my impact is worst, so I will get the headlines.

In the earlier drafts of the SPM, there was a key message that was new, snappy and relevant: Many of the more worrying impacts of climate change really are symptoms of mismanagement and underdevelopment.

This message does not support the political agenda for greenhouse gas emission reduction. Later drafts put more and more emphasis on the reasons for concern about climate change, a concept I had helped to develop for AR3. Raising the alarm about climate change has been tried before, many times in fact, but it has not had an appreciable effect on greenhouse gas emissions.

I reckoned that putting my name on such a document would not be credible – my opinions are well-known – and I withdrew.

The SPM, drafted by the scholars of the IPCC, is rewritten by delegates of the governments of the world, in this case in a week-long session in Yokohama. Some of these delegates are scholars, others are not. The Irish delegate, for instance, thinks that unmitigated climate change would put us on a highway to hell, referring, I believe, to an AC/DC song rather than a learned paper.

Other delegations have a political agenda too. The international climate negotiations of 2013 in Warsaw concluded that poor countries might be entitled to compensation for the impacts of climate change. It stands to reason that the IPCC would be asked to assess the size of those impacts and hence the compensation package. This led to an undignified bidding war among delegations – my country is more vulnerable than yours – that descended into farce when landlocked countries vigorously protested that they too would suffer from sea level rise.

Many countries send a single person delegation. Some countries can afford to send many delegates. They work in shifts, exhausting the other delegations with endless discussions about trivia, so that all important decisions are made in the final night with only a few delegations left standing. The IPCC authors, who technically have the right to veto text that contradicts their chapter, suffer from tiredness too.

This shows. The SPM omits that better cultivars and improved irrigation increase crop yields. It shows the impact of sea level rise on the most vulnerable country, but does not mention the average. It emphasize the impacts of increased heat stress but downplays reduced cold stress. It warns about poverty traps, violent conflict and mass migration without much support in the literature. The media, of course, exaggerated further.

Alarmism feeds polarization. Climate zealots want to burn heretics of global warming on a stick. Others only see incompetence and conspiracy in climate research, and nepotism in climate policy. A polarized debate is not conducive to enlightened policy in an area as complex as climate change – although we only need a carbon tax, and a carbon tax only, that applies to all emissions and gradually and predictably rises over time. The IPCC missed an opportunity to restore itself as a sober authority, accepted (perhaps only grudgingly) by most.

The IPCC does not guard itself against selection bias and group think. Academics who worry about climate change are more likely to publish about it, and more likely to get into the IPCC. Groups of like-minded people reinforce their beliefs. The environment agencies that comment on the draft IPCC report will not argue that their department is obsolete. The IPCC should therefore be taken out of the hands of the climate bureaucracy and transferred to the academic authorities.

Source: http://richardtol.blogspot.nl/2014/04/ipcc-again.html

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This statement by Tol pretty well sums up the IPCC:

Many of the more worrying impacts of climate change really are symptoms of mismanagement and underdevelopment.

That’s systemic culture in the U.N. so it is no surprise to me.

23 October 2008

Blocking supply

485 Comments

David Long

Those of us who were around in 1975 would have felt a sense of deja vu when they heard the Opposition Senators say that they intended to reject the Rudd government’s budget. Not that Fraser’s Opposition rejected supply; they merely refused to consider the Bills which meant that no vote was ever taken.

The wording of the Australian Constitution on their actions is interesting. The Chief Justice, Sir Garfield Barwick, thought that the Senate had the power to do what it did; but as a former Liberal Minister, he was unlikely to criticise the very tool chosen by the Liberal Opposition to bring about the crisis that would move Kerr to dismiss Whitlam when, at the same time, he was also advising Kerr.

But the wording of the Constitution on this point is very interesting. Section 53 which deals with this supposed power does say, expressly, that the Senate may not amend any proposed taxation or appropriation bills. As was his way, Barwick read this to mean that the Senate could do everything else but it could not amend the legislation.

Barwick’s reading of the Constitution is therefore at odds with what the Constitution actually says. Why would a Constitution remove a particular power from the Senate but, according to Barwick, provide it with as many practical alternatives of achieving the same end as malicious minds can invent? Who needs the power to amend if an Opposition controlled Senate can hold an elected government penniless until they agree to its amendments?

Barwick may not be around to answer these questions, but his legacy of reading the Constitution is at home in the hands of Opposition members who have a vested interest in finding obscure powers that might never have been intended by the founding fathers.

If we look at what the founding fathers intended, we find that section 53 incorporates, quite succinctly, the traditional understanding of the relationship between the House of Commons and the House of Lords in respect of appropriations and taxation bills. The following passage from Wikipedia states the practice accurately:

Even before the passage of the Parliament Acts, the Commons possessed pre-eminence in cases of financial matters. By ancient custom, the House of Lords may not introduce a bill relating to taxation or supply, nor amend a bill so as to insert a provision relating to taxation or Supply, nor amend a Supply Bill in any way.

This convention, which vests the power of the purse in the popularly elected chamber, was, like the convention that the monarch only acts on the advice of the Prime Minister, incorporated implicitly into the Australian Constitution by our Founding Fathers. Both conventions had been long recognised and adhered to in the United Kingdom at the time of our Constitution’s drafting. We may suppose that the conventions were so well known at the time, that it was not considered necessary by those men, that anything more than a general statement of principle was needed. It was, after all, such a reasonable and practical way of acknowledging the source of the government’s power in the people. Barwick and the Liberal Opposition thought differently.

However, as one learned commentator said, once it is accepted that a Senate can block or reject supply, everything after the first sentence of section 53 is redundant.

We are experiencing again the vision of a party, defeated at the polls, its government unceremoniously dumped from office by the people, unable to accept its proper role as an Opposition. Instead it has imagined a power into existence that it can use to bend a government to its will: government by Opposition. This is the power to reject supply that it has appropriated to itself.

It is not too late for our newly appointed Governor General to put the situation right. She should advise the Senate that it does not possess the power that it claims to have and that she has the power to sign taxation and appropriation bills into law without the consent of the Senate.

Dr

A battle is looming over renewable energy, and fossil fuel interests are losing

Charlie Riedel/AP – Wind turbines are silhouetted by the setting sun near Beaumont, Kan. Kansas ranks sixth in the country in wind output, which jumped by a third last year and equalled 19 percent of the state’s electricity.

But the campaign — despite its backing from powerful groups such as Americans for Prosperity — has run into a surprising roadblock: the growing political clout of renewable-energy interests, even in rock-ribbed Republican states such as Kansas.

The stage has been set for what one lobbyist called “trench warfare” as moneyed interests on both sides wrestle over some of the strongest regulations for promoting renewable energy. And the issues are likely to surface this fall in the midterm elections, as well, with California billionaire Tom Steyer pouring money into various gubernatorial and state and federal legislative races to back candidates who support tough rules curbing pollution.

The multi-pronged conservative effort to roll back regulations, begun more than a year ago, is supported by a loose, well-funded confederation that includes the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and conservative activist groups such as Americans for Prosperity, a politically active nonprofit organization founded in part by brothers David and Charles Koch. These groups argue that existing government rules violate free-market principles and will ultimately drive up costs for consumers.

The proposed measures are similar from state to state. In some cases, the legislative language matches or closely resembles model bills and resolutions offered by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a free-market-oriented group of state lawmakers underwritten in part by Exxon Mobil, Koch Industries, Duke Energy and Peabody Energy.

“Now more than ever is the time for states to lead the way,” ALEC’s top officials told its members at a meeting in December.

The coalition campaigns have achieved only symbolic victories in a few states. Nonbinding resolutions critical of the EPA power plant proposals have been approved in Alabama, Georgia, Nebraska, West Virginia and Wyoming. Three other states — Louisiana, Missouri and Ohio — are weighing legislation similar to the ALEC model.

Only one of the 18state legislatures has approved a more substantive measure that would preempt the EPA’s power plant rules. And even that bill, in Kentucky, could backfire by giving up a chance for the state to design its own program and forcing it to accept a federal compliance program.

“Clean energy is beginning to become mainstream,” said Gabe Elsner, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a clean-energy think tank in Washington. “Renewable energy is popular and has increased political power now,” but, he added, “that power is still eclipsed by the resources of the fossil fuel industry.”

A surprisingly tough fight

Kansas might be the best place to see how these dynamics are unfolding.

The state was a promising choice for a foray against rules known as renewable-energy standards, which set minimum levels of renewable-energy use by electric utilities. Variations of these rules have been adopted in about 30 states, even though Congress did not pass a federal version of the requirement. In Kansas, a law passed in 2009 requires utilities to use wind and solar power to generate at least 15 percent of their electricity by 2016 and 20 percent by 2020.

The coalition seeking the repeal of the renewable mandate had all the ingredients for success.

Financial muscle came from the Kansas Chamber of Commerce, which lobbied heavily for repeal. In addition, the state is home to Koch Industries, the Koch brothers’ Wichita-based energy conglomerate. The state representative for Wichita, Republican Dennis Hedke, has called the company “one of the greatest success stories in the world” and said “they are making very positive contributions.” Hedke chairs the state House’s Energy and Environment Committee.

Koch Industries, along with the utility industry’s Edison Electric Institute and the nation’s biggest coal company, Peabody Energy, have supported ALEC, which advised state lawmakers on repeal strategy.

“Koch has consistently opposed all subsidies and mandates across the board, especially as it relates to energy policy,” Philip Ellender, president and chief operating officer of Koch Companies Public Sector, said in a statement, citing the company’s opposition to the renewable fuel standard, wind production tax credit and ethanol mandate. “Government should not mandate the allocation or use of natural resources and raw materials in the production of goods.”

The ideological case was buttressed by conservative think tanks. Kansans for Liberty supported repeal, and the state branch of Americans for Prosperity told supporters that “green energy mandates replace the free-market with bureaucratic government oversight, driving up costs for hard-working Kansas families.” The national group has spent $300,000 in the state pushing for the rollback of renewable standards.

Connections to key Kansas politicians also were strong. Both the Kansas state Senate’s president, Susan Wagle (R), and the speaker of the state House, Ray Merrick (R), are members of the ALEC board and backed repeal.

“The repeal of the RPS [renewable portfolio standards] fits in line with the goals of the organization,” said Wagle, who said she joined ALEC in the 1990s in connection with her opposition to health-care reform led by Hillary Rodham Clinton, then the first lady.

Moreover, the Kansas economy relies heavily on fossil fuels. The state is the nation’s 10th-largest producer of crude oil and 12th-largest of natural gas, according to the federal Energy Information Administration. In 2013, coal-fired power plants provided 61 percent of the state’s electricity, well above the national average.

But the strong winds that blow across Kansas have carried new interest groups into the state. Kansas ranks sixth in the country in wind output, which jumped by a third last year and equaled 19 percent of the state’s electricity, the EIA says.

The growing number of wind farms not only generate power but royalties for landowners. Dorothy Barnett, executive director of the Climate and Energy Project, said that Kansas landowners receive more than $13 million a year. “This issue is an issue that touches rural Kansans, and we have a lot of rural Kansas legislators,” she said.

Wind proponents cite manufacturing jobs, too. At a plant in the state, Siemens is making nacelles, the automobile-size units that contain wind-turbine gearboxes and electronic control equipment, for the biggest turbine order ever for wind farms in Iowa.

Supporters of repeal had trouble making the argument that the renewable-energy mandate had raised electricity rates by 40 percent, as ALEC asserted. The Kansas Corporation Commission reported that the rate impact of renewable-energy standards was about 0.16 cents of the 9.2-cent retail cost of electricity per kilowatt hour. It said that meeting the requirement “requires less than 2 percent of the revenue requirement of the utilities while supplying more than 10 percent of the generation capacity in the state.”

Hedke said the commission overlooked certain costs, such as repair and retirement. He wants the commission to “drill down deeper.”

Conspicuously silent during the entire debate has been Gov. Sam Brownback (R), a leading conservative politician who as a U.S. senator vigorously supported federal production tax credits for wind developers. The state legislature’s Republican leaders met with him.

“I do not believe he will veto a bill, but he also is not likely to come out in support of the bill,” Hedke said when the repeal debates were intense. “He’s stayed on a particular path, and people in leadership disagree with him.”

Eventually, the Kansas Senate passed two bills, one postponing the renewable targets and one repealing them. Both failed in the state House, although the bill’s backers have vowed to bring them back.

The campaign continues

Meanwhile, similar coalitions are trying to thwart regulations in other states.

In Ohio, which relied on coal for 69 percent of electricity generation in 2013, the push to reverse the renewable-energy standards is very much alive, with the Akron-based utility company FirstEnergy leading the charge.

Environmental groups who are fighting to protect Ohio’s renewable-energy standards fear that the heavily Republican legislature will vote in favor of the reversal, so they are placing their faith in Gov. John Kasich (R). He has given qualified support to renewables in the past, saying in his 2012 State of the State address that, although the state should avoid anything that drives up costs for residents, “we need to embrace renewables.”

This year, he hasn’t taken a position on the reversal bill. Opinion polls in Ohio show widespread support for expanding renewable-energy use, and Kasich is running for reelection this year. But the governor, who won by a slim margin in 2010, is thought to harbor ambitions for national office, and it isn’t clear how the issue cuts for him politically.

The battle also has stretched to West Virginia, where a bill designed to preempt EPA regulations was amended with language that basically “defanged” it and made it symbolic, said Aliya Haq, who monitors state efforts for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Months ago, ALEC had distributed a report called “The EPA’s Assault on State Sovereignty,” suggesting constitutional and economic arguments against the new power-plant and other environmental rules.

“I’m not going to let the EPA have an unabated run at the American economy,” said Hedke, the Kansas legislator

High-voltage transmission lines to act as antenna in first-of-its-kind NASA space-weather project

Scientist Antti Pulkkinen is using high-voltage power transmission lines as a very large antenna to measure a space weather-related phenomenon.

Credit: NASA Goddard/Bill Hrybyk

[Click to enlarge image]

A NASA scientist is launching a one-to-two-year pilot project this summer that takes advantage of U.S. high-voltage power transmission lines to measure a phenomenon that has caused widespread power outages in the past.

Heliophysicist Antti Pulkkinen of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. and his team are installing scientific substations beneath high-voltage power transmission lines operated by Virginia’s Dominion Virginia Power this summer to measure in real-time a phenomenon known as geomagnetically induced currents (GICs). “This is the first time we have used the U.S. high-voltage power transmission system as a science tool to map large-scale GICs,” Pulkkinen said. “This application will allow unprecedented, game-changing data gathering over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales.”

In addition to gathering data important to the power industry — especially if it’s expanded nationwide as currently planned — the project will allow heliophysicists to “reverse engineer” the data to learn more about the conditions in Earth’s upper atmosphere that lead to the generation of GICs during severe space weather events, Pulkkinen said, adding he is now developing computer algorithms to extract that data for scientific research. “Not only will this benefit the utility industry, it also benefits science,” he said.

Solar Storms the Culprit

GICs typically occur one-to-three days after the sun unleashes a coronal mass ejection, or CME, a gigantic bubble of charged particles that can carry up to 10 billion tons of matter. CMEs can accelerate to several million miles per hour as they race across space. If a CME slams into Earth’s magnetosphere, the impact causes electromagnetic fluctuations, which result in geomagnetic storms at Earth. These storms increase electric currents that in turn, drive the fluctuations in Earth’s magnetic field near the ground. These surface currents can flow through any large-scale conductive structure, including power lines, oil and gas pipelines, undersea communications cables, telephone and telegraph networks, and railways.

An extreme example of a GIC occurrence was the great magnetic storm of March 1989 — one of the largest disturbances of the 20^th century. Rapid variations in the geomagnetic field led to intensely induced electric fields at the Earth’s surface. This electric field caused electrical currents to flow through conducting structures — in this case, the Canadian Hydro-Quebec power grid. The excess current collapsed the transmission system, causing the loss of electric power to more than six million people.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, had the blackout occurred in the Northeastern U.S., the economic impact could have exceeded $10 billion, to say nothing of the deleterious impact on emergency services and reduction in public safety.

Space weather events can have a range of effects including disrupting communications and navigation systems, damaging satellite instrumentation, and even potentially corroding pipeline steel. The impact on the nation’s electric grid is perhaps the highest concern at the moment, Pulkkinen said. “It’s the hottest topic out there right now,” he said, adding that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is now developing standards to mitigate the GIC threat. “We need to better understand how these events affect the U.S. power grid,” he added.

His pilot program is designed to help find out, Pulkkinen said.

Funded by R&D Programs

Funded by NASA’s Center Innovation Fund and Goddard’s Internal Research and Development (IRAD) program, the team is creating three substations, all equipped with commercially available magnetometers capable of precisely measuring the variable magnetic fields associated with GICs. Once inserted inside a protective, watertight housing unit, designed by Goddard engineer Todd Bonalsky, the team will bury the gear four feet into the ground — two directly below Dominion Virginia Power’s high-voltage lines and the third one-to-two miles away. The latter will provide reference measurements.

“In essence, we’re tapping into a very large antenna, Pulkkinen said. “The high-voltage lines are the antennae. During solar storms, violent changes in the electric current occur in near space, which then are sensed by the transmission lines.”

Ubiquitous iPad Finds Scientific Application

To command and control the magnetometers, Pulkkinen’s team is using another IRAD-developed technology, LabNotes. This iPad application, developed by Goddard engineers Carl Hostetter and Troy Adams, will time tag and geo-locate the magnetometers’ data, and then deliver the information to a server via a cellular data network, Hostetter explained. In addition to sending one sample per second, the LabNotes-equipped iPad-Mini also could monitor the data and send a text message should an event warrant attention.

“Now that everyone is walking around with this type of computer, which is more powerful than some supercomputers of 15 years ago, we thought we may as well use it for scientific purposes,” Hostetter said, adding that its relatively small size and low-power consumption make it ideal for science gathering. Although Pulkkinen’s team is the first to actually use the application, Hostetter said the technology has interested a number of other projects, including one involving agricultural needs in Africa.

The Goal: Nationwide Coverage

The project’s objective, Pulkkinen added, is making the equipment as inexpensive and versatile as possible. Although the pilot project begins with only three substations, Pulkkinen wants to ultimately deploy hundreds across the nation. “We envision that after a one-to-two-year pilot phase, long-term funding from a multi-agency collaboration and public-private partnerships will make this happen.”

“Impacts to the nation’s power grid are currently the highest space-weather concern in the U.S.,” he added. With federal regulations on the horizon, Pulkkinen said the measurements would help define the most effective techniques for mitigating GIC threats.

For more Goddard technology news, visit: http://gsfctechnology.gsfc.nasa.gov/newsletter/Current.pdf

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The above story is based on materials provided by NASA. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

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Climate change: Don’t wait until you can feel it

Despite overwhelming scientific evidence for the impending dangers of human-made climate change, policy decisions leading to substantial emissions reduction have been slow. New work from Carnegie’s Katharine Ricke and Ken Caldeira focuses on the intersection between personal and global impacts. They find that even as extreme weather events influence those who experience them to support policy to address climate change, waiting for the majority of people to live through such conditions firsthand could delay meaningful action by decades. Their findings are published by Nature Climate Change.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Carnegie Institution. Note: