On Global Warming, At CBO Uncertainty RULES!

Definitively Uncertain. Today, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a report, Potential Impacts of Climate Change in the United States, and adopted a analytical methodology that will likely satisfy few. At times it’s reminiscent of Ron Suskind’s description of Vice President Dick Cheney’s “one percent doctrine” that asserted that if “a one percent chance” that a threat is real exists “we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. . . It’s not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence.” The CBO report finds it way through troubled waters of climate change using this risk management theory, but not in the ways that will make climate change activists particularly happy, or Dick Cheney but for perhaps different reasons. In a sense, CBO’s 33 pages are hamstrung so much by its risk management methodology – as worthy as it might be – that the report seems to reach no conclusions. It’s almost vapid, without even a trace of urgency, like a vacuum where no air or carbon dioxide can exist. But, perhaps, that framework is all that is truly available at present.

It’s Certain About Uncertainty. One thing the CBO report is sure of is that it’s sure of nothing. Realistically, let’s be clear, though: they have an important point to make here. The complexity of the interactions of millions upon millions of variables in climate stability or instability are quite real. Modeling of systems with huge numbers of variables is in its infancy, although so-called “supercomputers” are emerging that can handle millions of computations a second. We’re still a long way from “certainty.” And will certainty ever be possible using even the best of mathematical tools that can be imagined. Questions of certainty at some points – perhaps at the very beginning – become questions not of methodology but of philosophy. Go find a quantum physicist at your local hang out and ask her some time. Go ahead.

So, CBO is, in many ways, not merely being judicious, it’s being, shall we say, “epistemologically correct.” Go ahead, say it. They’re admitting what many want to avoid – the actual outcomes of complex phenomena are unknowable, and therefore, have dicey policy implications. The CBO makes no recommendations, by the way, but does set out the way that policymakers might evaluate relative risks as they craft climate change policies. In effect, as always, it’s a human problem of fear versus the probability of harm; of the economics of overreaction versus underreaction.

We’re seeing this now with our world’s reaction to the H1N1 influenza pandemic. There, it’s as clear as a bell: are we overreacting? Has -to some, counter intuitively – what many called our overreaction actually caused the early corralling of the virus? Or, if the virus spreads due to an unsavory mutation and becomes more lethal, will we say we underreacted? Yes to all the above; and No to all the above. We simply have no ability – mathematical, statistical, medical, epistemological, epidemiological – to predict the future of this strain of influenza. WHO and others, as is their responsibility, treat all viruses like H1N1 as potentially lethal on a large scale. They, in effect, at least appear to approach, if not embrace, Cheney’s “one percent doctrine” – if H1N1 has even a tiny chance of becoming quite lethal on a worldwide basis, then we must spend what we must spend and not look back. In the end, there really will be no honest way to determine whether we overreacted or underreacted. Think about it. If the virus recedes in the days ahead, we’ll hear media experts and cranks alike maintain we overreacted. Yet, it’s impossible to determine. If it does recede, we cannot separate the reactions of WHO and CDC from the demonstrated outcome that the influenza receded. Things, as they say, do not occur in a vacuum (although, he asks dumbly, stuff is always happening in outer space, isn’t it?).

CBO Vacuum Cleaner. So, let’s look at CBO’s report in the way we probably ought, withholding an initial tendency to dismiss it as an attempt, through its mantra of “uncertainty,” to avoid stepping on too many skeptics’ toes. Their explication of “uncertainty” is well done, especially in its memorable endnote no. 2:

Much of the research presented in the [Bush administration] Fourth Assessment Report [2007] and other recent studies is concerned with documenting uncertainties in an increasingly standardized framework. For example, events that are considered to have a greater than 99 percent probability are referred to as “virtually certain”; “very likely” events are more than 90 percent probable; “likely” ones are greater than 66 percent probable; events that are “about as likely as not” have a probability of 33 percent to 66 percent; “unlikely” events have less than a 33 percent likelihood; “very unlikely” ones have less than a 10 percent probability; and “exceptionally unlikely” outcomes have less than 1 percent probability. This paper applies that framework where appropriate. [Emphasis added]

And it’s “appropriate” throughout the report. All potential outcomes as outlined by the sources referenced in the report are examined in this risk management light.

Uncertainty does not imply that nothing is known about future developments, but rather that projections of future changes in climate and of the resulting impacts should be considered in terms of ranges or probability distributions. (Endnote 2) For example, some recent research suggests that the median increase in average global temperature during the 21st century will be in the vicinity of 9° Fahrenheit (F) if no actions are taken to reduce the growth of greenhouse-gas emissions. However, warming could be much less or much greater than that median level, depending on the growth of emissions and the response of the climate system to those emissions.

Uncertainty Has A Certain Place. Admittedly, such wording does sound namby pamby, it does appear to be a bald-faced attempt to avoid saying anything at all. But, as I avert above, “all they are saying is give uncertainty a chance.” Also, admittedly, unfortunately, this will satisfy those critics of taking swift and bold action, so uncertainty in this case has certain results (in both senses of “certain”; have I just written my first valid zeugma?) Yet, the policy implications may be forthrightly and validly driven by the risk management model reported and set forth in the CBO report. Here’s one of their examples:

policies that target emissions or concentrations of greenhouse gases cannot guarantee specific climate outcomes; they can only shift the odds of those outcomes. Keeping concentrations to less than twice their preindustrial level—a commonly discussed target— would leave a more than 50 percent chance of ultimately exceeding a 5°F increase in average global temperature and a small chance even of exceeding 8°F.118 Limiting concentrations further would reduce the chance of exceeding 5°F, but concentrations would have to be kept under about 420 parts per million of CO2 equivalent to nearly eliminate that chance altogether. . . Given those uncertainties, crafting a policy response to climate change involves balancing two types of risks: the risks of limiting emissions to reach a temperature target and experiencing much more warming and much greater impacts than expected versus the risks of incurring costs to limit emissions when warming and its impacts would, in any event, have been less severe than anticipated. Climate policies thus have a strong element of risk management: Depending on the costs of doing so, society may find it economically sensible to invest in reducing the risk of the most severe possible impacts from climate change even if their likelihood is relatively remote.

Now, here comes the “one percent doctrine”:

In particular, the potential for unexpectedly severe and even catastrophic outcomes, even if unlikely, would justify more stringent policies than would result from simply balancing the costs of reducing emissions against the benefits associated with the expected or most likely resulting degree of warming.

Those insights have spurred some researchers who are particularly worried about low-probability but high impact outcomes to call for limiting long-term warming to no more than 3°F to 5°F with a high degree of certainty. However, since about 1.4°F of warming has already occurred, and past emissions have made a substantial amount of further warming inevitable, limiting long-term warming to such levels with a substantial degree of certainty would probably require very dramatic and potentially very expensive curtailment of expected future emissions. There is a large difference in costs between a policy that leaves a 50 percent risk of warming exceeding 5°F and a policy that virtually eliminates that risk. In moving along the continuum of risk from the former to the latter, each increment of risk reduction is likely to come at an increasing price. [Emphasis added]

One’s head does want to explode. However, keep the lid on; the analysis is arguably sound, if eminently unsatisfying. We really want a simpler methodology. One that yields answers. Actually, we want “an” answer, and CBO cannot provide it, and it’s not merely trying to dodge a bullet. In fact, I think it threw itself right in front of the bullet. CBO’s emphasis on the economics of policymaking in a “climate” of uncertainty is apt, although I do fear that those Luddites among us will seize upon its reasoning to make even sensible policies more difficult to enact, although Congressional Democrats seem more inclined to use the powerful tools at their disposal. And on that I’m unanimously certain. . . but wait, what about those Blue Dog Dems, House and Senate?

P.S. Thank You, Something IS Certain. One thing we do know with certainty, however, is that Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) is the undisputed dumbest member of the Luddite Coalition. On April 22nd, during a House debate about the cap-and-trade legislation, she opened the vault that prevents anything intelligent from entering her brain and expounded for the world to be thereby edified, including “the fowls that fly in the air”:

But people talk about cap-and-tax and they aren’t sure exactly what we’re talking about. Let’s get back to step one: What is the problem? Why did we have to have this tax in the first place?

It’s about carbon dioxide. Well, what is carbon dioxide?

Let us just go to a fundamental question. Carbon dioxide, Mr. Speaker, is a natural byproduct of nature. Carbon dioxide is natural. It occurs in Earth. It is a part of the regular life cycle of Earth . In fact, life on planet Earth can’t even exist without carbon dioxide. So necessary is it to human life , to animal life , to plant life , to the oceans, to the vegetation that’s on the Earth, to the fowls that fly in the air, we need to have carbon dioxide as a part of the fundamental life cycle of Earth.

As a matter of fact, carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful, but there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas. There isn’t one such study because carbon dioxide is not a harmful gas. It is a harmless gas. Carbon dioxide is natural. It is not harmful. It is a part of Earth’s life cycle. And yet we’re being told that we have to reduce this natural substance and reduce the American standard of living to create an arbitrary reduction in something that is naturally occurring in the Earth .

Yes, it seems to be a Harvard Lampoon productions, but it’s real! Watch:

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