Sorry for the lack of posts, folks. I’m in orientation for the new position, which just swallows whole days – useful, but a bit exhausting.
So, a quick post following up on my previous comments about food prices. The Guardian has a good piece on this issue at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/05/mozambique-food-riots-patel
This piece is much better than reporting from US sources, but it does have a significant flaw driven by the political goal of the author – highlighting the failures of economic/development policy and practice, and how this led to our current situation. While I agree that these are major issues, I am concerned with the way the author downplays the fact that there has been simmering discontent with the government in Mozambique for some time. The riots are locally-specific: tied to food markets, development policy and other geopolitical processes, but crystallized into action through a local lens. This is why we have riots in some places, but not others. It’s just too hard to generalize . . . and we don’t learn much when we do, I fear.
Category: Adaptation
Like I said . . .
Yep, the InterAcademy Council more or less stated that the overall findings of the IPCC are not in question. However, they did raise some interesting issues with regard to structure and leadership that should be taken seriously. Admittedly, I have selfish reasons for this – as the review editor for one of the chapters of AR5, how the IPCC chooses to deal with comments and suggestions during the review process will have a very large impact on my life and workload starting in the summer of 2012 . . .
Why food security analyses fail . . .
Case 1: when you fail to define your basic terms correctly.
Laurie A. Garrett, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, tried to write an interesting piece about climate change and food security recently. Her case is compelling, though she draws far too heavily on a few high profile examples of possible climate impacts on food supply without providing appropriate caveats about the difference between climate change (a trend over time) and climate variability (which can be one-off events, or the byproduct of a larger trend). This is somewhat standard fare in the popular media, as such caveats really don’t make for good reading.
What got my attention was Garrett’s complete failure to properly define food security. She argues “The overwrought phrase “food security” connotes literally obtaining sufficient calories and nutrients to stay alive.” Well, maybe in 1980. Since then, a tremendous amount of work (to which I have made a very small contribution) has expanded this definition dramatically – food security is about access and entitlement to food and other livelihoods resources – in other words, food security is more than enough calories on hand – you also have to have rights of access to those calories, or you are out of luck.
Why is this a problem in her article? Well, Garrett is trying to draw a link between climate change a food prices . . . which are presumed to hit the global poor the hardest. However, rising prices are only a part of the food security story. If we don’t know people’s rights of entitlement to the calories they need, then it becomes hard to say if we have enough or not enough food available.
For example, let’s assume that a Ghanaian husband and wife have three children – one girl and two boys. The household needs, at a basal level around 6000 calories a day to meet basic needs. We can go to their farm, and measure the food they eat, and get a caloric figure. Perhaps that figure comes back at 6500 calories per day. This is not enough to say that this household, and all its members are food secure. Does the wife and her girl child, have the same rights to food as the husband and boys, or must the females wait for the men to eat their fill, before eating whatever remains? If the females do not have the same rights of access, it may be that the husband and boys are more than food secure, while the wife and her girls are not.
Certainly, it is useful to know where there simply isn’t any food around – but even this is tricky. Most people forget that Ethiopia was actually increasing its agricultural exports across its famous mid-1980s famines. It’s just that the food was sold overseas for foreign currency, which was then used to pay off their national debt . . . as the Ethiopian population starved.
This article addresses but one part of the global food security equation – not enough to make sweeping claims of what is to come.
Oh, for the love of God . . .
I’m from New Hampshire, and most of the time I’m proud of it. And then there are the other times, such as when I find out that every Republican candidate for Judd Gregg’s senate seat says that human-induced global warming has not been proven. Really?
What offends me here is not that some people might want to debate the human component of climate change – there has been quite a bit of that in the comments section of this blog. I think that intelligent, reasoned debate on this subject that is grounded in evidence is completely fair game for discussion, etc. Further, this sort of debate serves to push research forward, and refine what we know and do not know about climate change and its human impacts.
What bothers me here is that none of these candidates is grounding this stance in evidence in any way – this is pure politics, pandering to a lowest-common-denominator fear of change crowd. And New Hampshire has a hell of a lot to lose from this – climate change is increasing climate variability (hence the 100 year floods referenced in the link above) which presents challenges not only to people’s property and safety, but also to the economy of the state. New Hampshire is heavily driven by tourist dollars, and tourism is heavily driven by skiing. Skiing relies on sub-freezing weather and adequate precipitation (even I know that snowmakers do not make desirable snow), both of which are becoming less predictable. By failing to have a reasoned discussion about this issue, based on facts about what we do and do not know – and the likely outcomes for New Hampshire, all of these candidates have staked out an irresponsible position that calls into question their fitness to represent the state at the national level.
The new job looms . . .
and I know it, because news stories like this one about the flooding in Niger hit me a completely different way now – previously, I would have thought about how this could be teachable, and even how it might relate to some research ideas . . . now, I recall interviews from April with people in my new Bureau at USAID where we discussed the looming food crisis in Niger. In mid-September, this won’t be a teachable moment – this will be a fire drill for which I have some degree of responsibility. Sobering.
Incidentally, this is another example of the challenges that face those of us working at the intersection of environment and development. The long-term (last four-five decades) signal for precipitation is in steady decline. It is hard to say if this is a visible outcome of climate change, mostly because we have a lot of trouble understanding the mechanics of the West African climate (for those so inclined, there are some issues with the teleconnections from ENSO and the influence of the NAO).
This figure (from my upcoming book) illustrates the real problem, though – the long-term decline is clear at this weather station (the closest one to my research area that is not parked right on the beach), but more striking is the variability around the centerline. While this station is not showing any real trend toward greater variability, many other places in West Africa are – hence the massive, surprising flooding we are seeing in Niger, despite a long-term trend toward less precipitation in the region. People forget that there are two key variables that shape precipitation outcomes – amount and timing.
This is probably the hardest part of the job – thinking about how to plan for increasing unpredictability and variability. Trends are easy, assuming their mechanics are understood and therefore somewhat predictable. If I know there will be 10% less rainfall in a particular place by a particular year, I can go about figuring out what the biophysical, economic and social impacts of that change might be. However, it is a hell of a lot harder to plan for 10% more variability by a given year (assuming we could even quantify rising variability in such a manner). Well, if it was easy, it wouldn’t be interesting . . . and someone else would have solved it already.
The Death of the Energy Bill: Who cares? Basically, everyone.
There is much flutter around Senate Democrats’ recent decision to give up on the Energy Bill that might have brought about a cap-and-trade system here in the US.
From the NYTimes:
Senate Democrats on Tuesday abandoned all hopes of passing even a slimmed-down energy bill before they adjourn for the summer recess, saying that they did not have sufficient votes even for legislation tailored narrowly to respond to the Gulf oil spill.
Although the majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, sought to blame Republicans for sinking the energy measure, the reality is that Democrats are also divided over how to proceed on the issue and had long ago given up hope of a comprehensive bill to address climate change.
There will be a lot of analysis of the biophysical impact of our continuing inability to act on the twinned issues of climate change and energy in the coming days, I am sure. But, early in the morning, I want to quickly point out the cascading disaster this will cause in the environment and development policy world. What most people don’t understand about the Copenhagen meetings, which ended in such confusion without a clear agreement, is that most of the key actors decided that it would be best to wait and see what the US managed to pass for its own internal purposes, and then try to work to that to ensure that the US joined the next major global climate agreement (remember, we never did sign Kyoto). Copenhagen wasn’t really a failure the way many people thought – indeed, had they plowed ahead with an agreement in absence of American climate and energy legislation, they would have set the stage for Kyoto II – where the US, once again, refused to sign on to standards that it had not already agreed to.
I have found exactly one piece of good coverage of this issue, via Lisa Friedman of ClimateWire: “Overseas Frustration Grows Over U.S. Domestic Impasse on Climate Policy”. The article nicely captures what is truly at stake here:
“Why is it that for the last 20 years the United States is unable to have a bill on climate change? What’s happening? What’s going on? It’s very complicated to understand,” said Brice Lalonde, France’s top negotiator.
“For a lot of us, we cannot wait for the United States. We have to go on. It’s like Kyoto,; we just go on” Lalonde said, referring to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol treaty that the U.S. joined but never ratified, leaving European countries to largely carry the weight of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Added Pa Ousman Jarju, lead negotiator for the small West African nation of Gambia, “We cannot rely on the U.S., because everything the U.S. is supposed to do depends on domestic policy. So we’re not going to get anything from the U.S. in terms of tangible commitment.”
He charged that the international community is “no longer hopeful” that America, the world’s biggest historic emitter of global warming pollution, will ever pass a bill to cut emissions. That, he said, leaves the global community with two options: “Either the rest of the world continues to do what they were doing before, or the whole multilateral system will collapse.”
What we were doing before was not good enough. I am not all that sure that the net outcome of business as usual is all that different from a complete collapse of the environmental component of the multilateral system as we understand it. The US simply has to be on board, or this is all for naught. UN Climate Chief Christiana Figueres put it this way:
“Whether the United States meets the pledge that it put on the Copenhagen Accord via legislation or whether it meets it via regulation is an internal domestic affair of the United States and one that they need to solve,” she said. “What is clear is that at an international level the United States needs to participate in a a meaningful way, and in a way that is commensurate with its responsibility.”
Credit to her for saying this clearly, and for suggesting that content (getting some sort of formal controls on emissions in place, whether through regulation or legislation) is a lot more important than form (insisting that everyone pass legislation to somehow bolster the legitimacy of these efforts). Now, let’s see if the Obama Administration is willing to really use the newly-empowered EPA as a blunt object in the fight to control greenhouse gas emissions – at this point, I see no other way forward for the US. Which means no other meaningful way forward for the rest of the world.
How to have a conversation?
Over the years, a number of people have hassled me for trying to find the good in reasonable, if doubtful, voices in the climate change debate. This was my motivation in writing the op-ed about Douthat’s column (link here, link to blog post here). Part of my motivation is that I am a person who inherently tries to build connections between disparate points of view to see what interesting and new things emerge from the conversation. The other part is the vitriol which I and those I work with who choose to have a public profile get to endure. I don’t mind the vitriol, actually, but it is really hard to build a conversation with someone who is screaming at you – so I try to build connections to people that preclude shouting and lead to something productive. This is a serious challenge.
To illustrate, let me excerpt two e-mails I received this morning, not long after the publication of my op-ed. In doing so, I have no intention of personally humiliating anyone or personally attacking anyone (though the messages were, as you will see, a bit personal). So, I have removed the addresses and names – though the subject lines are intact. The point here is to demonstrate what sorts of things are said to people like me on a pretty routine basis. I’m not sure if these count as Over the Cliff moments or not, but here they are:
Subject: Pseudo Intellectualism
Scanned your comments in the State. It is amazing to me how academia has changed over the years, but then, again, there was Ehrlic in the 70s. He has never been right about anything but is still revered by the leftist academia. He must be brilliant. This is not about conservatives and liberals (NYT conservative comments?????). It is not about green gasses, despite your beliefs. Imagine, the whole concern is about changes of a degree over a period of a hundred years when the error of any group of instruments is not accurate to a degree and the instruments have never been standardized. I highly recommend going to Dr. Roy Spencer’s web site. It is about water vapor and the temperature of the oceans. How can I recommend to you, the great specialist of humanistic global warming, while I am only a peon on the subject? I have watched this for a number of years. There is a much higher authority than man. While man can cause pollution and really screw up localities, the great academics (you) have not figured out this global warming thing. You have spent countless years on suppositions, aberrant computer models, and criticizing the political movement that you feel superior to. Yep, you are simply a pseudointellectual democrat. Remember, Al Gore is the intellectual leader of the left. Bow down often. Get a massage. The very intellectual morons on your side are against the very technology to reduce the use of hydrocarbons–nuclear energy and the use of Yucca mountain to store the waste. Even the French and Russians and Chinese have figured this out. Science is science.
[Name Redacted]
[Address Redacted]
Darlington, SC
To this individual’s credit, he actually signed his e-mail with a name, address and phone number. So he is certainly no coward. But I am completely unsure how to address this, as it is all over the map. More or less, this message ties a political stance (liberalism, however it is conceived here) with climate change and an implicit questioning of my religious beliefs. But this says a lot – the assumption here is that I am anti-nuclear power (not really – it may be our best medium-term option), worship Al Gore (I’ve complained about a number of things he has said), I have no religious faith, and that I live in a world of suppositions instead of a world of evidence. The fact is that I have not discussed any of this in the op-ed, or anywhere else – the author is resting on a lot of suppositions, some of which are a bit offensive, to say the least.
But there is something else important here – the tone of the writer when addressing me as “the great specialist of humanistic global warming, while I am only a peon on the subject” and “great academics (you)” belies a deep-seated insecurity that, to some extent, I think those of us working on this issue must acknowledge and take some responsibility for creating. Scientists and policy-makers must take seriously the complaint that we can sound elitist and arrogant in our pronunciations – especially because this is relatively easy to address. We need to do more community engagement, make ourselves more available, in person, to talk to people about what we do and what we know. It’s easy to shout at a caricature of someone, as this writer did at me, than it is to shout at a real person who wants to have a real conversation with you.
Then there was this. Even as this person was agreeing with some of my points, he gets in a rather personal shot about me being motivated by a “paycheck-pension drive”.
Subject: “DOUTHAT” — 2 ATTACHMENTS
I tried this on you several years ago. I can see that you have not progressed.
I probably agree more with you than Douthat, but in the end I do not fully agree with either of you. You both stay on the surface, within the range of the tips of your noses, and do not address the underlying cause and effect, including for this issue. Remember, you cannot fix a leaky faucet unless you first turn off the water.
The thought has occurred to me that a fundamental reason for this is that y’all are virtually completely captives of what I call the “paycheck-pension drive.”
This will take much more than nice words. It will take action.
Don’t pout — forward this up your flagpole and to some problem-solvers.
A key point here – I was not pouting. I was trying to make my colleagues and myself accountable for our failures of communication, and to encourage my colleagues to redouble their efforts as they are, in fact, starting to work.
This writer sent me two attachments promoting his ideas on population reduction, which he sees as the fundamental problem here (he is right to identify population size and growth as a major challenge). What bothers me here is the idea that his solution is the “right” one, and mine (or anyone else’s) is therefore “wrong”. It seems to me that these are linked challenges that could be addressed and discussed in concert – we go nowhere when we get absolutist in our thinking. I fear that those of us in the global change community come off as absolutist ourselves, contributing to this sort of problem.
In any case, the vitriol to which my intellectual community is exposed all the time is very real, and not some made-up fantasy created to demonize the right/anti-global warming crowd/whatever. It is something we deal with that most of our academic colleagues do not, and something we have to learn to address productively if we are to make positive change in the world.
Douthat Misses His Own Point
Sometimes I show up in the old media, too:
An op-ed via The State (Columbia, SC)
Douthat misses his own point on climate change
Ross Douthat’s Tuesday column “The right and the climate,” reveals just how far the global environmental change community has come in its efforts to educate the public on the real challenges posed by climate change — and how far we still have to go. After arguing that climate change is real and a problem (“Conservatives who dismiss climate change as a hoax are making a spectacle of their ignorance.”), the conservative New York Times columnist says we are probably better off doing nothing for now, and instead fostering economic growth that generates enough wealth to address the problem in the future.
Douthat has been pilloried for trotting out conservative talking points about climate change, but perhaps the problem lies with those of us whose job it is to connect the scientific evidence for climate change with its human impacts. Doing so quickly lays his argument to rest, and points to some of the real questions we must answer.
First, to argue that greater wealth will allow us to address climate change and its associated impacts fails to account for the fact that economic growth is one of the principal drivers of climate change. Even in the United States, where we are becoming more efficient in our use of fossil fuels and therefore in the amount of greenhouse gasses we emit as we grow, our absolute production continues to rise. Douthat’s so-called solution forces us into an ever-escalating race to grow wealth and the economy faster than the rate of climate change.
Several economic assessments of climate change suggest that we will lose this race. Logically, then, the real question about his proposal is how to generate economic growth and wealth without increasing greenhouse gas emissions.
Second, the idea that one day we will have enough wealth to address the impacts of climate change misunderstands a great deal of the environmental science that Douthat himself argues is too convincing to ignore. Simply put, people will not be impacted directly through warming temperatures — a few degrees Celsius is well within our tolerance as human beings. However, these temperature changes do have vast, complex effects on the ecosystems we rely on for food, our atmosphere, and amenities such as hiking, fishing and hunting. An extinct species is gone forever, and the loss of that species in an ecosystem will be felt forever in complex, unpredictable ways. No amount of money can fix that. It is willfully optimistic to assume that future wealth will allow us to address these permanent changes when we don’t even know what they will be. So here the real question is how we as a society should proceed into this era of uncertainty. What risks are we willing to take with our future?
Douthat’s column shows that we are halfway to a productive conversation about climate change, its impacts and how to address them. Now we must turn to serious, evidence-based discussions to identify productive, meaningful paths forward.
Edward R. Carr
Associate professor, USC Department of Geography
Columbia
This got a bit edited down from the original (to be expected), so I am a bit concerned that the central point here got muddy – Douthat fully acknowledges that climate change is a problem, and acknowledges the scientific basis on which we have established this. But he is still ignoring half of the equation – that the science, and a lot of research built on it, makes clear the fact that the costs of climate change will greatly outweigh any economic benefit from ignoring it now.
We are getting closer on our conversation, but we are not quite there – and it falls to those of us who work on this issue to do more to communicate these issues clearly.
The soft bigotry of low expectations, development-style
PRI’s The World ran a story today about the boom in renewable energy in the developing world. The story itself is fine – but I’m tired of reading stories that hang their angle on how amazing/interesting it is that the global poor can be so innovative, and so capable to taking up new technologies – this angle is misguided and condescending, and does a lot to keep us trapped in the development echo chamber that tells us how the global poor would be lost without our help.
The World, like all media, has to draw the reader/listener in with unusual and topical stories. But this story is not all that unusual – it runs parallel to the explosive growth of mobile phones in the developing world. When I first started working in Ghana, back in 1997, barely anyone had cell phones. Landlines were also rare, and nearly impossible to get because the switchboards in places like Cape Coast were maxed out – basically, you had to wait for someone to move or die, which would free up a land line. The waits for land lines ranged into years. I could make outbound calls from the Ghana Telecom building in Cape Coast, but I had no means of receiving phone calls. When I went out to a village to do fieldwork, I effectively disappeared – there was no means of reaching me except word-of-mouth messages passed by people going to and from the village on various errands (though that method was surprisingly effective – I could get a message in well under a day in that manner).
Fast forward to 2004 -when I arrived in Ghana, I borrowed a cell phone from a colleague of mine at the University of Ghana, went out and bought a SIM and some minutes for around $15, and had a phone number within a few hours of touching down in the country. People could call me, and I could call out, nearly all the time. Coverage did not extend into the villages in which I was working, but if I climbed a very tall hill behind my house, I could get a wobbly signal. In 2005, the signal was much stronger. Since 2006, it has been possible to make and receive calls from the village itself, without having to climb the hill. And people have adopted the phone as these advances have taken place, to the extent that while these villages do not have electrical service, I have heard a farmer take a call on a mobile phone in his field (the phones are charged on car batteries).
Why the rapid advances in mobile phone technology? People wanted the service (badly), but the dominant technology of the late 1990s (land lines) was too expensive to extend to everyone who wanted it. Mobile phones filled the gap . . . and now we see all kinds of innovation in mobile technology starting to emerge from Africa – such as the unique talent pool of low-bandwidth phone app programmers in Kenya.
Given all of this, I am forced to ask why anyone would find the adoption of alternative energy sources by those living in the developing world surprising. People want and need power, but the infrastructure to bring it to them is very expensive. Dominase and Ponkrum, the two villages in which I have focused much of my research in Ghana, are less than five kilometers from huge high tension lines carrying electricity from the Akosombo Dam to coastal cities like Takoradi to the West. Yet they have no electricity themselves, and little hope of seeing the grid extended to them any time soon. As the story notes:
“One reason why renewable energy is expanding is because of the inadequacy of the power supply in much of the world. Conventional power grids simply don’t reach many people. And when the price of oil goes up, people who use diesel generators start searching for other ways to get power.”
I agree that situations like this one drive innovation (the villagers can run almost anything off of a car battery), but the emergence of alternative energy as one set of innovations is therefore completely unsurprising.
The real story here, as I see it, is the rate of change. What we are seeing is a remarkable rate of innovation in the developing world around emerging technologies. Further, this is not all the result of development projects, education, or other capacity-building efforts supplied by advanced economies. Instead, such as in the case of the Kenyan programmers, these innovations are local phenomenon that illustrate just how capable the people living in the Global South really are.
Perhaps we need to stop writing stories that express surprise and interest in the emergence of new technologies among the global poor, and refocus to carefully explore why some technologies emerge and others do not. Any time we see a useful, innovative technology hit the Global South without making a major impact, or without people picking it up, we need to explore what is preventing this sort of innovation and impact. The only reason we don’t, I fear, is because we assume that the global poor are generally incapable of such innovation without outside help. This is a bad assumption that empowers development projects that are probably not needed or misguided – efforts that could be better spent identifying and removing the barriers to adoption so that these local innovations can flourish.
So I guess it's for real now:
What does it say that it took the appearance of my forthcoming book on Amazon’s website to make the whole thing seem real?