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Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Government Folly in the Face of Climate Change (the re-post)

The following was published March 19, 2015, on the WWF ClimatePrep blog (climateprep.org) -- which now appears to have gone defunct. You can still see the original on Archive.org. See my blog post about the writing of this article here.

Also: I followed up this piece for WWF with  posts here in March and April 2015 about some new instances of  folly -- governments constraining their own climate/environmental scientists in Florida and Wisconsin.
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The great historian Barbara Tuchman took a hard look at governmental policy missteps in her 1984 book The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. As someone studying modern climate change policy, it is hard not to draw parallels to her definition of folly: The pursuit of policy contrary to the self-interest of the constituency or state involved.

She uses these criteria to zero in on the most serious instances of government folly:
  1. The policy must have been perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not just in hindsight.
  2. A feasible alternative course of action must have been available.
  3. The policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual ruler, and persist beyond any one political lifetime (“collective government” folly is the more significant problem).

How is hiding climate change science “folly”?

Many governments are acknowledging climate change, even creating new positions to work on the problem. Governments taking slow and measured steps—perhaps too slow and measured—can be viewed as insufficient action, but it is not folly; governments ordering their scientists to study climate change and then burying the results? I call that a classic example of Tuchmanesque folly, and the U.S. federal government and three U.S. states— Nebraska, South Carolina, and North Carolina—have all done it. The press and science-friendly politicians have widely called out the counter-productivity of governments burying climate science. Incorporating the science into planning is (to some degree or another) feasible, since other governments are doing it. The subterfuge is not being done by one person, but government decision-making bodies. Governments burying their own climate science is the definition of folly.

When did the U.S. government bury climate science that it itself ordered?

The details about three states’ climate follies were recently published by the Business Insider’s science desk (read: These States Have Reportedly Tried to Hide Scary Climate Data from the Public [Oct. 30, 2014] and This Is the Climate Report South Carolina Spent Years Hiding [Dec. 29, 2014]). The author points out that “good climate reports were ultimately made public in the above three states, even if the reports are not currently being utilized to their full potential.” While that is true, North Carolina’s infamous official denial of sea level rise data will hamper planning for at least another year.

North Carolina’s House Bill 819, passed in June 2012, prevents the state from basing coastal policy on anything but historical data, ignoring any emerging climate change science through 2016. The governor failed to veto the bill, and it became law in August 2012. Almost simultaneously, in June 2012, a scientific article by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) placed North Carolina’s coast within a 600-mile “hotspot” for sea level rise. North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue, a Democrat, had the input of the legislature and the USGS put in front of her at the same time, and she let the political current pull state policy away from where science was pointing. Meanwhile, in 2013 she was replaced by a Republican, Pat McCrory, who installed an oil developer as head of the state’s Coastal Resources Commission and believes in responding to climate change by “cleaning up the environment in a cost-effective way.” Besides this, coastal Carolinians might also worry about the lagging constraints on public safety planning caused by the May 2014 vote by the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission to ignore sea level rise impacts projected too far out. Adaptation to sea level rise will—by collective government vote—only prepare for the next 30 years of impacts.

What about the U.S. federal government? Didn’t official climate science denial get voted out in 2008?

There are many ways government can delay or bury the release of inconvenient scientific findings. Many are familiar with the second Bush administration’s direct censorship of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on the topic of climate change. The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) was also censored, leading to its senior official Rick Piltz turning whistleblower in 2005. He founded and directed the Government Accountability Project’s Climate Science Watch initiative from 2005 until his death in October 2014 (read his obituary from the NYT). In March 2013 Mr. Piltz told students during a speaking tour that:
[T]he chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, a former energy lobbyist, would hand-edit reports, deleting references to the ecological impact of climate change and adding passages that exaggerated the uncertainty of climate-related findings.
In January 2009, Barack Obama promised in his inaugural speech, “We’ll restore science to its rightful place,” and two months later issued a memorandum to agency heads to improve scientific integrity. Under his administration, the direct White House interference with the EPA and USGCRP may have stopped, but Congress has found ways to delay action on EPA findings about dangerous chemicals, and in the same manner may be playing shell games to delay action on rational, climate change science-based adaptation planning.

Case in point: according to a Center for Public Integrity 2014 report, the EPA has been prepared since 2008 to assert that arsenic is 17 times more potent as a carcinogen than it now reports. However, its arsenic report was delayed procedurally at the Office of Management and Budget for two years. Then, in 2011, Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho, with arsenic-laden pesticide companies among his campaign donors, ordered the EPA to have its findings reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences within a House Appropriations Committee report. In 2015 the review is still ongoing, and nothing has changed in federal regulations regarding arsenic in drinking water.

Eventually the “safe” levels of arsenic may be adjusted and avoidable cases of cancer duly avoided. But evidence is mounting that there is no way to be adequately conservative in our emissions of greenhouse gases or adequately liberal in preparing for climate change hazards. According to a Princeton study published in 2013, even if we halted all greenhouse gas emissions today climate change would proceed unabated for centuries—not decades, as previously thought— because of the ocean’s decreasing ability to absorb heat. And this is not accounting for intersecting hazards and feedback loops causing exponential worsening of conditions, difficult to project with today’s climate models.

The EPA’s arsenic case is awful, but the burial of scientific findings about climate change is potentially catastrophic.

Are there any cases of the U.S. government actually adapting to climate change, despite political pressure to delay?

The U.S. Navy has been at the forefront of actually adapting to climate change since before Obama’s restoration of “science to its rightful place.” A Feb. 12, 2015, article by Jeff Goodell in Rolling Stone describes how the military has long seen the security threat represented by climate change and taken measures—as long ago as 2003, when the report “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security” (by Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, downloadable here) was published by the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld, then President George W. Bush’s defense secretary. The home of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, Norfolk, VA, is within the sea level rise “hotspot” called out by the USGS in 2012 (running from Cape Hatteras, NC to north of Boston, MA). So the Navy has been busy planning for climate change, despite occasional Obama-era interference from Congressional climate denialists. The Navy started with replacing critical piers that were becoming submerged in the late 1990’s. Goodell asks the officer in charge of mid-Atlantic Navy facilities, Capt. J. Pat Rios, about the rationale for replacing them:
“We didn’t raise the piers because of climate change” […]. He doesn’t quite wink, but almost.
“Then why did you raise them?” I ask.
“Because we needed new piers. And as long as we were building them, it didn’t cost much more to build them higher.”
Thus, the Navy’s climate change adaption planners find their ways to work around a government bent on folly.


Photo: Capitol Building, Washington, D.C. © U.S. Government

Friday, October 9, 2015

Red-Letter Day for California Adaptation Planning: SB 379 is Law (and Some Other Good Legislation, Too)

Yesterday (Oct. 8, 2015) California's Governor Jerry Brown signed into law Senate Bill 379, requiring cities and counties to include planning for climate change impacts in their general plans starting in 2017.
SB 379 was proposed by Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson of the 19th Senate District (including all of Santa Barbara County and western Ventura County).

The title of the bill reads like a strange little haiku:
SB-379
Land use: general plan: 
safety element.
Last night I attended a sea level rise planning discussion (part of the Here. Now. Us. project) in Marin County, a county where you could say the default political persuasion was left of "Hippie," and found myself sitting next to not one but TWO climate change denialists. These people spent every minute of airtime they were allowed expressing concern that people are concerned about climate change (because of its illegitimate science, it is too expensive, we are already doing enough to respond to flooding, etc.). So I think this bill takes a bold stride forward. It explicitly uses the words "climate change" and "climate adaptation" -- phrases that provoked loud scoffs from the vocal duo I met last night. Let me offer the strangely titled-with-a-haiku SB 379 my own haiku in thanks:
With a clear task list
you ask us for foresight so
our children are safer.
The Governor also signed two other bills by the same senator yesterday, both concerning oil spill protections: SB 295 Pipeline safety: inspections  and SB 414 Oil spill response.

These other two good bills were also signed over the last two days, upping the ante on the state's GHG reduction goals and inaugurating representation of vulnerable populations on the board that oversees the state's main GHG reduction measures:
So now in the article of California's Health and Safety Code that deals with the make-up of the Air Resources Board, Section 39510 (e) reads:
"The Senate Committee on Rules and the Speaker of the Assembly shall each appoint one member to the state board who shall be a person who works directly with communities in the state that are most significantly burdened by, and vulnerable to, high levels of pollution, including, but not limited to, communities with diverse racial and ethnic populations and communities with low-income populations."
That is indeed another step in the right direction. Part of my 2009 Master's thesis was devoted to the "lessons learned" from the failed Environmental Justice Advisory Committee (EJAC) mandated by AB 32, the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. That committee's participation in the initial roll-out of AB 32 resulted (as of 2009) in a lot of anger on both the EJAC and the ARB. A lot of the roll-out process was already determined by the time the EJAC was formed, setting the committee up for failure. Having actual front-line community representation on the ARB should improve trust, and hopefully the health outcomes of our state's most vulnerable populations.

Other legislation of note signed this week:
Also noteworthy in state adaptation news-- today the California Natural Resources Agency released the 199-page draft document "Safeguarding California: Implementation Action Plans" for which it is holding public comment sessions in Oakland, Sacramento, and Los Angeles.

Mon. Oct. 12: Bay Area Listening Session on Climate Adaptation
6-8 PM, MetroCenter Auditorium, 101 Eighth Street, Oakland (right above the Lake Merritt BART Station). 

Mon. Oct. 26: Sacramento Public Workshop on Safeguarding California Implementation Plans
10 AM- 12 PM, Rosenfeld Hearing Room, California Energy Commission, 1516 9th Street, Sacramento, CA 95814

Tues. Oct. 27: Los Angeles Public Workshop on Safeguarding California Implementation Plans
1:30 - 3:30 PM, Carmel Room, Junipero Serra Building, 320 W. 4th Street,, Los Angeles, CA 90013

Monday, October 5, 2015

In the Heat of the Moment (the re-post)

The following was published Dec. 2, 2014, on the WWF ClimatePrep blog (climateprep.org) -- which now appears to have gone defunct. You can still see the original on Archive.orgSee my blog post about the writing of this article here.
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Photo by Kim Seng © Creative Commons

Many of us are versed in the primary hazards of climate change – from the cost of disasters in lives and resources to the disappearance of low-lying island nations. Something we hear about less often is the direct influence of climate on human behavior, and the implications for the future under climate change.

Climate change and civil conflict

Academics have only been putting the climate change-conflict link to close examination for about five years. Solomon Hsiang (UC Berkeley), Marshall Burke (Stanford), and Edward (Ted) Miguel (UC Berkeley) are pioneers in this field. Last year they unveiled the results of an analysis of 60 studies using 45 data sets from all regions of the world showing a correlation between heat, rain, and conflict. Last month they released a refinement of this study. In their working paper “Climate and Conflict” (summary here) they show significant increases in both interpersonal and intergroup conflicts (e.g., fist fights and wars) with greater heat and more extreme rainfall.

Some of the background studies cited by these researchers include a 2011 study that shows major league baseball pitchers are more likely to retaliate for their teammates being hit by the rival pitcher when it’s hotter. In their talk “Quantifying the Impact of Climate on Human Conflict” at UC Berkeley in April 2013, Miguel and Burke described fascinating experimental psychology studies showing that police are more likely to shoot at a simulated intruder in higher temperature rooms, and people are faster to lean on their horns behind a car stopped at a green light on hotter days.

Climate change and crime

In February of this year a journal article by Matthew Ranson described a correlation between crime and weather and speculated on the potential impact of climate change on crime. The author looked at 2,997 U.S. counties’ monthly crime and weather data over 30 years. He looked at FBI statistics for murder, manslaughter, rape, aggravated and simple assault, robbery, burglary, larceny, and vehicle theft. He states bluntly, “[a]cross a variety of offenses, higher temperatures cause more crime.” His rich data set appears to have established a strong link between heat and violent crime. Specifically, he shows a linear relationship between heat and violent crime and a nonlinear relationship with non-violent crime (property crime, e.g., burglary): he doesn’t see heat affecting property crime in any consistent way. Heat specifically exacerbates violence.

Measuring vulnerability to climate-related violence

Some analysts are trying to map out the world’s general vulnerability to climate-related violence. On Oct. 29, 2014, the 2015 “Climate Change and Environmental Risk Atlas” was released, naming 32 “extreme risk” countries where climate change might increase violence. Bangladesh was named most at risk. The author of the report, UK-based Maplecroft Global Risk Analytics, has produced this atlas annually since 2008. In 2011, its report included results of an analysis of 42 factors using the Climate Change Vulnerability Index (CCVI), intended to help corporations and governments identify vulnerabilities in their operations, supply chains, and investments. (Note: it is not to be confused with the tool of the same name launched by the Nature Conservancy in 2009 to evaluate wild species’ vulnerability.) Maplecroft’s tool incorporates social, economic, and environmental factors to assess vulnerability both at a national level and down to a resolution of 22km², looking 30 years out (as described in the 2014 Risk Atlas).

Over recent years other indices of vulnerability have been created (check out an annotated list of indices of climate change vulnerability from WeAdapt.org). Other institutions have taken other approaches to identifying climate-driven violence risks.

The Pentagon and the Institute of Peace agree: climate change is bad for peace

As reported by James West in Mother Jones, the U.S. Department of Defense (in its 20-page Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap released Oct. 13, 2014) and the U.S. Institute of Peace (in a 2011 report on Nigeria) are both worrying about weak governments, already fostering terrorism, being further weakened by impacts from climate change. While lacking adaptation policy recommendations, both institutions clearly and concisely describe the “threat-multiplier” facet of climate change.

What can we do?

People developing climate impact response plans in the security, defense, and risk management fields should take into account the results of recent studies linking climate change and conflict. Extreme climate events can be tracked and direct and immediate security fallout projected. Also, the still under-researched indirect and long-term impacts of climate on conflict—such as a heat wave destroying a farming community’s livelihood, driving the community’s young men to migrate, potentially inflaming territorial and sectarian violence— can also be projected and anticipated by security and defense forces.

A very readable 2007 journal article by Barnett and Adger discusses the underlying causes of conflict and how climate change could drive conflict. They propose a basic 3-prong research regime of identifying livelihoods vulnerable to climate hazards, examining the consequences of damage to these livelihoods, and understanding the role of institutions in managing climate hazards so that they do not become security problems (e.g., by protecting livelihoods).

Who else should pay attention to climate’s link to conflict?

Those working on economic, social and international development policy, human rights organizations, and those working in the capacity of a negotiator should anticipate the impact of extreme heat and other climate stressors on their constituents, both individuals and communities. People working in the field of restorative justice and other disciplines focused on reducing violence and criminalization of historically disadvantaged communities should also track the effect of climate stressors on their project outcomes, and adapt programs accordingly. Those working for non-violent solutions within urban conflict zones might ramp up their mediation efforts in particularly hot summers.

You also can watch your own behavior in response to climate-induced stress. On the next hot day you might take a second to breathe before honking at a car stopped at a green light… you might just be behind an experimental psychologist with a stopwatch.