by Roger Pielke
The Rightful Place of Science:
Disasters & Climate Change
The Rightful Place of Science:
Disasters & Climate Change
Roger Pielke, Jr.
Foreword by
Daniel Sarewitz
Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes
Tempe, AZ and Washington, DC
THE RIGHTFUL PLACE OF SCIENCE:
Disasters & Climate Change
Copyright © 2014
Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes
Arizona State University
All rights reserved. Printed in Charleston, South Carolina.
For information on the Rightful Place of Science series,
write to: Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes
PO Box 875603, Tempe, AZ 85287-5603
Model citation for this volume:
Pielke, Jr., R. 2014. The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters & Climate Change. Tempe, AZ: Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes.
The Rightful Place of Science series explores the complex interactions among science, technology, politics and the human condition.
Other volumes in this series:
Sarewitz, D., ed. 2014. The Rightful Place of Science: Government & Energy Innovation. Tempe, AZ: Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes.
Alic, John A. 2013. The Rightful Place of Science: Biofuels. Tempe, AZ: Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes.
Zachary, G.P., ed. 2013. The Rightful Place of Science: Politics. Tempe, AZ: Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes.
ISBN: 0692297510
ISBN-13: 978-0692297513
LCCN: 2014917724
First Edition, November 2014
CONTENTS
Foreword
Daniel Sarewitz
i
Introduction
1
1
Climate’s Legitimacy Wars
5
2
The Scientific Question Addressed Here
25
3
The IPCC Framework for Detection and Attribution
39
4
A Global Perspective on Disasters and Climate Change
49
5
Heat, Rain, Hurricanes, Floods, Tornadoes, Drought, Oh My!
59
6
What About Climate Policy and Politics?
87
About the Author
111
Acknowledgements
113
Foreword
Daniel Sarewitz[*]
Effective action in the world—getting done what we want to get done—depends on three fundamental things: a coherent, shared vision of what we want to accomplish; an accurate understanding of the current conditions for taking action; and, consistent with that understanding, a practical approach to pursuing our goals. In the real world this is often much easier said than done, especially when a problem is complicated.
Consider for a moment the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The goals of the invasion were clear enough—to remove Saddam Hussein from power, eliminate Iraq’s supposed capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, and create the conditions for a democratic regime to emerge. But the situation in Iraq was greatly misunderstood by the Bush Administration and the U.S. intelligence agencies, and the approach to action was thus entirely inappropriate to the real complexity of the situation. We continue to pay the consequences of this bad decision.
The situation with disasters and climate change would appear to be much the opposite. The costs of disasters are rising. This is a moral and economic challenge for all societies. Almost everyone would agree that the goal of reducing societal vulnerability to disasters caused by hurricanes, floods, droughts, and other climate-related hazards is worth pursuing. As well, the relevant facts about disasters and climate change are actually quite clear and scientifically uncontroversial.
In this book, Roger Pielke, Jr. summarizes those facts to answer the question, “Have disasters become more costly because of human-caused climate change?” Many people do worry that climate change is causing disasters to get worse, but Pielke presents a wealth of data, including the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to show why such concerns are not supported by the available science. Unlike the conditions in Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion, the reasons for rising disaster losses are well understood and unlikely to change significantly with new revelations or data.
Why, then, are disaster costs rising? The reasons are apparent: populations continue to grow, the economy and the built environment continue to expand, people migrate to and concentrate on coastal and flood plains. There are simply more people, and more of the things that people depend on in their lives, in harm’s way. Moreover, these demographic trends feed continued environmental degradation of highly populated coastal, riverine, and mountainous regions, which in turn exacerbate the consequences of disasters. Most of these trends are further amplified in developing countries. Climate isn’t the only thing that’s changing in our world, and it’s these other changes that are causing disaster losses to increase.
The only politically and practically feasible way to slow this increase, let alone stabilize or even reverse it, is to improve societal preparedness. When floods devastated the Netherlands in 1953, the nation came together to devise institutions, policies, and projects that would prevent such a catastrophe from happening again. Back then no one worried about whether climate change contributed to the disaster; much of the nation was already built below sea level. Proven policy tools for reducing disaster vulnerability include public education, better (and better-enforced) building codes and land-use practices, improved infrastructure, sensible insurance programs, enhanced warning, emergency planning and response capabilities, and so on. By deploying such tools, many places in the world, including poor countries, have made great progress on reducing their vulnerability to disasters.
Disasters are a serious problem, as are human-caused changes to our climate. Taking them both seriously, and addressing them effectively, requires the recognition that they are not serious for the same reasons, and that the pathways for addressing them are different, and must respond to different information, arguments, motives, and policies. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions remains an urgent policy imperative, but one that will have no capacity to reduce disaster losses in the foreseeable future, and will never be rigorously justifiable in terms of measurable reductions in disaster vulnerability. Another way to think about this problem is that even if climate change wasn’t happening, or suddenly ceased, all of the factors that are causing disaster loss increases would still be as powerful as ever.
Decades hence, climate change may well play a discernible role in making disasters worse, but even then, the moral and practical imperative is to reduce losses, regardless of their cause, by directly acting to improve disaster preparedness in all societies. This book shows that the moral and practical perspectives are also backed by another powerful motivator of effective action: the science. Rarely is the case for effective action so clear.
introduction
This short volume is for those interested in understanding the science of disasters and climate change.
I have three motivations for writing it.
First, while the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has done excellent work in recent years to summarize a vast literature on this subject, the resulting assessments of the current state of science span thousands of pages across dozens of chapters in multiple volumes. Few people will have the time or expertise to sort through the work of the IPCC and arrive at a concise summary of the state of science on disasters and climate ch
ange. This short volume provides such a synthesis of the current state of the science.
The science presented in this volume is my own synthesis of the state of the science, and it is fully consistent with the work of the IPCC, but is somewhat more detailed and focused. To underscore the degree of congruence between my synthesis and the views of the IPCC, in several sections you will find extended quotes from the IPCC, rather than reinterpretations. This is to facilitate accurate representation of the IPCC’s conclusions. Of course, for those who want more depth, I encourage you to dive into the IPCC reports and especially the primary literature which it draws on, and also those new studies which have been published more recently. One of the wonderful things about science is that it constantly evolves. Any assessment is just a snapshot in time. That goes for the work of the IPCC as well as this short book.
Second, as an academic who has studied and written about disasters and climate change since my days as a post-doc at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in the early 1990s, I am often called on—by governments, industry, the media—to share my views on this subject. But because climate change is a deeply politicized issue, and disasters are at the forefront of the debate, regrettably at times my views have been misrepresented by those seeking to delegitimize them.
Part of this may be my own fault as my work is more sprawling than the IPCC’s, appearing in various books, academic journals, blog posts, tweets, and commentaries over a period of almost 20 years. This book provides my views on disasters and climate change between two covers. The final chapter offers some of my views on the policy and politics of the climate debate, but a better source for that information is my book, The Climate Fix (Basic Books, 2011).
The third motivation for this book is the degree to which the science of disasters and climate change has become so politicized. I decided that this book was necessary when in the spring of 2014 I saw on the website of the White House a claim that in the United States floods and drought have become more common. Actually, the scientific assessment which the White House produced and then relied on to make these claims says that they have not.[2]
While political spin doctors often find ways to parse language and statistics to say things plausibly defensible, but which are ultimately misleading or just wrong, for me this went too far in an area where I have some considerable expertise. The willingness of some in the media and the scientific community to let such claims stand uncorrected for reasons of political expediency does not offer a route to scientific integrity. As you’ll see in the pages below, at some point in my career I decided that on topics where I have expertise, I have an obligation to participate in public debates.
So while I may continue to write scientific papers, blog posts, tweets, and commentaries on the subject as I have in the past, I’ve now also written this short volume. It represents my contribution to upholding scientific integrity in the climate debate. By reading it, you’ll have a better sense of the state of the science on disasters and climate change as it stands in 2014, and be in a better position to assess some of the claims being made in the ongoing debate about the societal impacts of human-caused climate change.
Roger Pielke, Jr.
Boulder, Colorado
October, 2014
1
Climate’s Legitimacy Wars
The earth’s climate system is the basis for all life on the planet. It creates the conditions which allow humans and the ecosystems on which we all depend to flourish. Hence it is not surprising that how we are changing that climate system, as a by-product of energy consumption and other factors, attracts considerable interests and passions. People have strong views as to what others should think and do about climate change. Consequently, climate change is hotly contested and vigorously debated in the political arena.
The fact that the issue of climate change is political is not a problem. Politics is how we manage the business of living together. We bargain, negotiate, and compromise, and oftentimes that process is not very pretty. Climate change politics are of course no different. Anyone who wants to participate in the very public and very intense debate over climate change should be ready for some sharp elbows. As Harry S. Truman once said, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”
I’ve been cooking in the climate kitchen for a long time. One subject, which has mostly been on the back burner but for which the heat has been turned up in recent years, is the relationship of human-caused climate change and disasters.
In recent years, advocates for action on climate change have enlisted disasters as a leading theme of advocacy campaigns, ultimately focused on motivating political action on energy policy. A turn to this strategy has occurred despite a broad consensus in the scientific literature that the evidence for connections between climate change and disasters is incredibly weak, as reflected in the 2012, 2013, and 2014 reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations (UN) body formed in 1988 to periodically assess the state of climate science.
More specifically, disasters have become both more costly and less deadly over the past century. But there is precious little evidence to suggest that the blame for the increasing tally of disaster costs can be placed on more frequent or extreme weather events attributable to human-caused climate change.
This is an important conclusion because it tells us that the disasters that we experience are largely a consequence of decisions that we make—where we locate our communities, how we build them, how we prepare for the future, and so on. As Gilbert White, the great geographer and disasters expert, wrote in 1945, “Floods are ‘acts of God,’ but flood losses are largely acts of man.”[3] But in an era of climate change, disasters, including floods, may be more than just “acts of God.” It is not unreasonable to surmise that we may indeed be influencing the frequency and intensity of extreme events.
Science is useful because it allows us to do more than just surmise. We can look at evidence, compare it with theory, and make a judgment as to whether we can detect any influence of changes in climate on the disasters that we experience. So far at least, the data don’t support claims that we can identify that influence with respect to those extremes which cause the most damage to property.
In fact, based on the current expectations of the climate science community—specifically that humans are impacting the climate and that these impacts will become more significant in the future as projected by the IPCC—there is presently very little basis for expecting that changes in climate will lead to a demonstrable increase in the costs of disasters any time soon. It will likely be many decades before such a signal can be detected in disaster losses based on current scientific understandings.
In this context, it is surprising that many champions of action on climate change are basing their campaigns on strong claims that are at odds with the current state of scientific knowledge. That’s just not smart politics. And it’s not just the more aggressive environmental groups that have jumped on the bandwagon linking disasters to climate change.
For instance, in a June, 2013 radio address President Barack Obama explicitly linked disasters and climate change:[4]
[W]hile we know no single weather event is caused solely by climate change, we also know that in a world that’s getting warmer than it used to be, all weather events are affected by it—more extreme droughts, floods, wildfires, and hurricanes.
Those who already feel the effects of a changing climate don’t have time to deny it—they’re busy dealing with it. The firefighters who brave longer wildfire seasons. The farmers who see crops wilted one year, and washed away the next. Western families worried about water that’s drying up.
The cost of these events can be measured in lost lives and livelihoods, lost homes and businesses, and hundreds of billions of dollars in emergency services and disaster relief. And Americans across the country are already paying the price of inaction in higher food costs, insurance premiums, and the tab for rebuilding.”[5]
H
aving studied disasters and climate change for 20 years and having published dozens of papers on the subject, when I heard the president make these remarks I knew that several (but not all) of the claims he made were just plain wrong—they were not supported by the state of the research. In fact, some were contradicted by that research.[6]
When a prominent public official makes claims that are wrong on a subject that an academic has considerable expertise in does one speak out and try to expose the official’s mistakes, but risk becoming embroiled in a political debate? Should one just stay silent, maintaining a dignified academic distance, but also maintaining irrelevance? Context matters, of course, and different people will have different views on this subject. There are appropriate and legitimate reasons for those different views. Of course, partisans in a political debate whose agendas are affected by the public claims being advanced also have strong views as to whether academics should speak out, usually determined as a matter of political expediency.
Speaking in 2013, former Vice President Al Gore explained the political importance of tying extreme events to climate change in the campaign for action, as reported by The Hill:
Gore said there’s a political interest in determining climate change causes extreme weather. He said lawmakers cannot address the root of disasters without first making a connection between emissions, climate change and extreme weather.
Failing to acknowledge that connection will imperil future relief efforts as disasters grow more frequent and expensive, Gore said… Gore advocated putting a price on carbon to limit emissions as a way to subdue those incidents.[7]
