The Rightful Place of Science

by Roger Pielke

  The explicit connection of climate change to extreme weather to putting a price on carbon has the effect of fusing these issues together in the political debate. In such a context it is consequently easy to conflate (a) belief in the connection of climate change and extremes with (b) support for a specific political prescription—in this case, a price on carbon in order to reduce the impacts of extremes. This is a great example of how science can become deeply and irrevocably politicized.

  Having written a book calling for a price on carbon and for greater scientific integrity with respect to the science of extreme events, I knew that the issue of disasters and climate change did not have to be fused together in political debate.

  Climate change and disasters have not always been so central to the politics of the issue.

  In 2006 my work on disasters and climate change was viewed to be sufficiently notable that I was invited by the Ocean Sciences Board of the National Academy of Sciences to give its Roger Revelle commemorative lecture at the Natural History Museum of the Smithsonian Institution.[8] Revelle was the scientist who first captured Al Gore’s attention on the issue of human-caused climate change.

  Following a delightful dinner among the dinosaurs in the museum,[9] I gave a talk in which I explained:

  To emphasize, humans have an effect on the global climate system and reducing greenhouse gas emissions makes good sense. But reducing emissions will not discernibly affect the trend of escalating disaster losses because the cause of that increase lies in ever-growing societal vulnerability.[10]

  In early 2006, the science of the role of climate change in extreme weather and disasters was not widely viewed as central to the broader political debate over climate policies.

  In just a few years, however, extreme weather would move to the center of the entire debate over climate change. Figure 1.1 illustrates the increasing presence of the phrase “extreme weather” on the pages of the New York Times. From 2006 to 2013 the use of the phrase increased by a factor of 10. As the politics heated up surrounding this issue, any suggestion that human-caused climate change was not driving the rapid increase in disaster costs came to be viewed by some participants in the debate as illegitimate, even heretical. I’ve had a front row seat to that transformation.

  Figure 1.1: Number of Articles Mentioning “Extreme Weather” in the New York Times (1965-2014)

  Source: Data from the Chronicle search tool of the New York Times, accessed 20 July 2014, available at: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com

  My views on what role I should play in the public debate over climate and extreme events have been shaped by my experiences. Back in 2001, soon after George W. Bush was elected president, I was invited by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences to join a small group of experts to brief several senators and the new Secretary of Treasury, Paul O’Neill, on various aspects of climate science. Soon after the event was announced publicly, much to my surprise, I found myself being lobbied by some of my scientific colleagues about what I should say to the policy makers.

  My surprise was not that I was being lobbied, as this was a pretty influential forum for any academic. My surprise was that my colleagues were asking me to downplay and to even misrepresent my own research because it was viewed as being inconvenient in the advocacy effort on climate change. My work had found no evidence of a signal of human-caused climate change in the growing toll of losses from floods, hurricanes, and other extremes. While I had concluded that actions to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases made good sense, I also believed that pointing to the latest disasters in advocacy for action went beyond what the science could support, and thus should be avoided.

  At the time I likened the pressure from a few of my peers to the following hypothetical:

  Imagine that as policy makers are debating intervening militarily in a foreign country, the media report that 1,000 women and children were brutally murdered in that country. This report inflames passions and provides a very compelling justification for the military intervention. A journalist discovers that, contrary to the earlier reports, only 10 soldiers died. What is the journalist's obligation to report the “truth” knowing full well that it might affect political sentiments that were shaped by the earlier erroneous report? When science is used (and misused) in political advocacy, there are frequent opportunities for such situations to arise.[11]

  Of course, September 11, 2001 occurred just a few months after my meeting with Secretary O’Neill, and a version of this hypothetical became very real with Vice President Dick Cheney, among others, linking that terrorist attack to Saddam Hussein, and using this linkage in public statements as a reason why the public should support an invasion of Iraq.[12]

  Cheney later admitted that those claims of attribution were wrong, but waved them away as irrelevant because they supported the important goal of removing Hussein from power. The ends, he seemed to imply, justified the means. From the standpoint of military intelligence, in the United Kingdom, Robin Cook, a member of Tony Blair’s cabinet who resigned his position in March 2003 in protest over Iraq, explained: “Instead of using intelligence as evidence on which to base a decision about policy, we used intelligence as the basis on which to justify a policy on which we had already settled.”[13]

  Irrespective of the merits of the policy, using information in this way undermines scientific integrity. My own experience with being pressured to downplay the conclusions of my research, along with misuse of evidence in the run-up to the Iraq war, shaped my views and my commitment to speak out on topics where I have research expertise. To avoid science serving as a proxy for debates over politics, it is important when speaking out to be able to place science into a policy context.

  To help explain to the scientific community the dangers of ends-justify-means uses of expertise, I included a case study of the pathologies of the role of intelligence in the Iraq War decision in my 2007 book on science and politics, The Honest Broker (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

  What I experienced in 2001 and what we saw in the build-up to the Iraq War have been described by political scientist Aynsley Kellow as ”noble cause” corruptions of science. Kellow explains:

  The good cause—one that most of us support—can all too readily corrupt the conduct of science, especially science informing public policy, because we prefer answers that support our political preferences, and find science that challenges them less comfortable.[14]

  The issue of disasters and climate change is a canonical example of “noble cause” corruption in science. Such corruption even found its way into the authoritative reports of the IPCC back in 2007.

  Noble Cause Corruption in IPCC 2007

  In 2007 the IPCC found itself embroiled in a bit of controversy. This controversy had nothing to do with the core findings of climate research related to the physical science, impacts, or economics of climate change. Rather it had to do with a few claims in the report which had been exaggerated or were mistaken, as well as the panel’s excessive reliance on non-peer reviewed sources, and its public stance of arrogant resistance to owning up to clear errors.

  While many people have heard about the erroneous projection in the report that Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035, there was a far more egregious error in my area of expertise.

  When the 2007 IPCC report came out I was surprised to see that it had included in its assessment a graph (reproduced in Figure 1.2) which showed increasing disaster losses plotted alongside increasing global temperatures, with the vertical scale jiggered to make them appear to increase in lockstep. I was surprised because I had never seen any such graph in the scientific literature. How had I missed something this important?

  Figure 1.2: The "Mystery Graph"

  Source: M.L. Parry, O.F. Canziani, J.P. Palutikof, P.J. van der Linden, and C.E. Hanson, eds., Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

  My surprise quickly doubled when
I saw that the graph was referenced to a non-peer-reviewed white paper that I had commissioned for a 2006 workshop on climate change and disasters, which I had organized in collaboration with Peter Höppe of Munich Reinsurance.[15] I knew that paper had no such graph or analysis. So where it actually came from was a complete mystery.

  Despite my sleuthing efforts, chronicled in public on my blog, the origins of that “mystery graph” persisted for almost three years. Then in February, 2010 on a cold, damp evening at the historical Royal Institution in London, I participated in a “debate” on disasters and climate change. (I put “debate” in scare quotes because it did not wind up being much of a debate, with all three participants essentially in complete agreement on the state of the science in his area.)

  One participant that evening was Robert Muir-Wood, an employee of the catastrophe modeling firm RMS and also a lead author of the 2007 IPCC report.[16]

  At the debate Muir-Wood made a remarkable admission. He had been the one who created that graph—“informally” in his words. With the advantage of hindsight he said, “Personally, I think that it should not have been there.”[17] A few days later his company, RMS, issued a press release amplifying the point: “RMS believes that the graph could be misinterpreted and should not have been included in these materials.”[18]

  What about the reference to the workshop white paper that was cited in the IPCC report, in error, as being the source of the graph?

  It turns out that Muir-Wood had cited his white paper to our workshop as a placeholder, because he had not yet completed the analysis which he wanted to have displayed in the IPCC report. RMS explained in its press release that a paper based on Muir-Wood’s informal analysis was completed after the IPCC’s deadline for inclusion in the report, and thus the IPCC had intentionally mis-cited the graph to the workshop paper to get around the IPCC’s publication deadline for inclusion of material in the report. RMS wrote in its press release: “Despite not being able to reference it, the IPCC was aware of the full report.”[19]

  There is more. When that “full report” was eventually published as a book chapter in 2008, the graph did not appear there either. Instead, that chapter concluded, “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and normalized catastrophe losses.”[20] The paper which the IPCC wanted to but couldn’t cite to suggest that increasing temperatures were causing increasing damage from extremes actually did not find evidence to support that claim, once it was published.

  The IPCC, despite its vaunted peer-review process, had published a claim with no scientific support—either before or since.[21]

  For my efforts to hold the IPCC to its own standards of scientific integrity, in the days after our London debate I found myself approached by numerous journalists to comment on issues related to the IPCC. Among them was a reporter named Christina Larson from Foreign Policy magazine who sent me an email explaining that FP was doing “a sort of guide to what readers should know about the various concerns/criticisms of climate science recently in the news.” She asked if she could ask me a few questions about my work. As I typically did with media queries I agreed and answered what seemed to be reasonable, fair questions.

  Much to my surprise, the piece published by Foreign Policy was not a guide to “concerns/criticisms” but instead a tabloid-like list of the world’s “top climate skeptics.” They had placed me alongside people like Senator James Inhofe and Christopher Monckton. Larson and the FP explained in their piece what had qualified me for the list: “for his work questioning certain graphs presented in the IPCC reports, Pielke has been accused by some of being a climate change ‘denier.’”[22]

  For me it was a lesson in the dirty politics of the climate debate. As social commentator and New York Times columnist David Brooks has explained, political discourse “is not really a debate about issues; it is a verbal contest to deny your opponents of standing, or as we would say, legitimacy.”[23] Who knew that the path from the Roger Revelle lecturer of the National Academy of Sciences to accused climate denier was so short?

  The climate kitchen was heating up, but I wasn’t going anywhere.

  The IPCC Gets Back on Course

  In response to various concerns about the integrity of the IPCC and the fidelity of its processes, the United Nations and IPCC asked the InterAcademy Council, comprising the world’s leading national science academies, to conduct a review of the organization.[24] The resulting report, published in 2010, recommended a large number of steps to the IPCC to improve its management, treatment of uncertainties, and assessment process. While the IPCC did not accept or implement all of the IAC recommendations, it did take on board many of them.

  The result of these reforms in how the IPCC reported on the science of extreme weather and disasters became clear in a series of reports issued in 2012, 2013, and 2014.

  · In 2012 the IPCC issued a report titled Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX).[25] This report included a focus specifically on disasters and climate change.

  · In 2013 the IPCC issued the first volume of its Fifth Assessment Report focused on The Physical Science Basis for climate change.[26] This report included a summary of literature related to the frequency and intensity of specific types of extreme events.

  · In 2014 the IPCC issued the second volume of its Fifth Assessment Report focused on Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability.[27] This report largely reviewed the results of the recent SREX report, but added a few additional details.

  One important function of the IPCC is to provide an assessment of the scientific literature, which might contain hundreds or more papers on a particular topic. Its assessment, when the organization is at its best, helps us to understand the balance of evidence across a large number of studies, not all of which come to the exact same conclusions. The IPCC can be used to help identify and to avoid the cherry picking of scientific results by providing a broad context for understanding evolving knowledge.

  Unlike the 2007 report, the IPCC in 2012, 2013, and 2014 played it straight on climate change and disasters. There were no “mystery graphs” to be found. Instead of alleging a scientifically unsupportable connection between rising temperatures and disaster losses, in these recent reports the IPCC faithfully represented the academic literature.

  Here are a few examples of IPCC conclusions from these reports (and these are just examples—subsequent sections will get into much more detail):

  · “Economic growth, including greater concentrations of people and wealth in periled areas and rising insurance penetration, is the most important driver of increasing losses.”

  · “Loss trends have not been conclusively attributed to anthropogenic climate change.”

  · “Most studies of long-term disaster loss records attribute these increases in losses to increasing exposure of people and assets in at-risk areas (Miller et al., 2008; Bouwer, 2011), and to underlying societal trends—demographic, economic, political, and social—that shape vulnerability to impacts (Pielke Jr. et al., 2005; Bouwer et al., 2007).“[28]

  · “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.”

  · “There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change.”

  Given the strength of these findings, one might think that the issue of climate change and disasters would have become less politicized. However, political battles are often impervious to information, no matter where it originates. It is a lesson I have well understood, but I often have the opportunity for refresher courses.

  A “Furious Campaign”

  In early 2014 I agreed to join up with Nate Silver’s rebranded FiveThirtyEight. Silver had moved to ESPN from the New
York Times following his impressive success tracking polls and integrating them into forecasts of the 2012 U.S. presidential election. I agreed to join up with Silver and his excellent staff in order to write about a range of topics, including sports governance, a topic that has come to occupy an increasing share of my research and writing interests.

  However, after discussing options for what to lead off with as the site rolled out, the editors and I decided that my first piece for FiveThirtyEight would be on disasters and climate change, summarizing the key findings of the recently-released IPCC reports.[29] There was nothing in that first piece that I had not written on before, including in the peer reviewed literature. Nonetheless, the reaction to it was remarkable, and made the 2010 sneak attack on me by Foreign Policy look like the minor leagues of the delegitimization wars.

  The online magazine Salon explained that I was “the target of a furious campaign of criticism from other journalists in the field, many of whom say he presents data in a manipulative and misleading way.”[30] Slate called for me to be fired, and labeled me a “climate change denialist.”[31] Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, labeled me a “known irresponsible skeptic.”[32] The American Geophysical Union, one of the nation’s leading scientific associations, published a blog post recommending that Nate Silver should “find an expert on the subject who has many published papers in the top scientific journals (and there are plenty out there), but instead he chose Roger Pielke.”[33]

  These critics were creating their own reality in order to engage in outright character assassination. On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart discussed the campaign with Silver and observed, “You are taking a rash of shit in a week and a half like no one I've seen in a long time.”[34] That about sums up the tenor and substance of the organized campaign.