Category: environment

Dead Zones and Development

Mickey Glantz has a new post on the Fragileecologies Blog comparing our societal response to the gulf oil spill and the near total lack of response to a much more serious, long-term threat to the gulf, the ever-growing “dead zone” that spills out from the mouth of the Mississippi.  This despite the fact the dead zone has been a known issue for some time:

“Back in 1974, Dr. R. Eugene Turner, Director of Coastal Ecology Institute at Louisiana State University, discovered a “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. The dead zone is the result of runoff from cities, farmlands, feedlots and factories into the mighty Mississippi River. This River basin drains about 40% of the continental United States. Herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers among other chemicals are released on a routine basis throughout the basin. In the springtime they accumulate of the Gulf Coast forming an 8000+ square mile region, which adversely affects all living marine resources.”

Mickey has an interesting comparison chart for the two problems that begins to point toward why we responded so quickly to an oil spill, while largely ignoring a much larger ecological disaster that compromises the Gulf economy and the health of the population that lives along the lower reaches of the Mississippi and along the Gulf coast.

What do you think of Mickey’s list?  Is there anything he’s missed?

Posted on by Ed 4

Environmental Migration and the Immigration Debate

UPDATED 7-28

Scientific American has posted a news and commentary piece on a study, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that links climate change to increased migration from Mexco to the US.  The author, David Biello, sent me an embargoed copy of the study a few days ago and asked for my comments – which he was kind enough to draw from at length in his article.
In a general way, I am very supportive of work that examines the connection between climate change/environmental change and migration – mostly because so little work has been done on the topic, and the assumptions about the connections between migration and environment that drive policy are so often wildly incorrect.  However, I am a bit leery of this study, as I feel like it is making a classic mistake in environment-migration studies: it is trying to identify the portion of the migration decision that is about environmental change.  As I have argued elsewhere, there is little point in trying to isolate environmental factors from all of the factors that contribute to migration.  Biello quoted me quite accurately:

“Migration decisions, like all livelihood decisions, are about much more than material quality of life,” argues geographer Edward Carr of the University of South Carolina, who studies human migration in countries such as Ghana and was not involved in the Mexico emigration research. “What I am seeing in sub-Saharan Africa are very complex patterns in which environmental change is but one of several causal factors.”

What I am worried about here is a sort of intellectual ambulance-chasing, where the research is driven by a sexy topic (the intersection of climate change and Latino migration, which is sure to bring out the crazies on all sides) regardless of whether or not the fundamental research question is all that sound.  The fact that several researchers quoted in the piece (myself included) were able to quickly poke significant holes in the study suggests that this publication falls into this problematic category.  First, the migration pattern examined and emphasized in this project is likely to be very, very small relative to other kinds of movement.

“Most often international migration is not an option and rural residents migrate to urban areas, contributing to urbanization and urban poverty in developing countries,” says sociologist Elizabeth Fussell of Washington State University.

That is certainly the case in Mexico, according to population and migration researcher Haydea Izazola of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco, also not part of Oppenheimer’s team for the new study. “The great majority of the rural population who grow maize—rain-fed agriculture—for their own consumption are the poorest of the poor and lack the means to invest in the very expensive and risky migration venture.”

Further, the very models that predicted the impact of climate change on Mexican agriculture were not applied to the economy of the US, where the migrants are supposed to be headed.

Crop yields in the U.S. will likely suffer as well. “People do not move blindly; they move to greater opportunity,” Carr notes. “So we should probably be using [these economic and climate] models to examine the impact of future climate change on various migrant-employing sectors of the southwestern U.S. economy.”

While the research team that published this study intends to examine this issue, it calls into question even this preliminary study.  I’m honestly surprised this got through peer review . . . except, perhaps that it was too sexy to pass up.
UPDATE: I wrote this late last night, and so was a bit spacey – as a friend of mine reminded me, there is another huge problem with the study – a lot of the “Mexican” migration that people are talking about in the popular media, and indeed in this study, is in fact Latino migration from Central America more broadly.  As these areas were not modeled in this study, we have yet another gaping hole to address.  I repeat: how did this get though peer review?
UPDATE: Well, people are jumping all over this article.  Pielke’s site has a review with a similar take to my own . . .

Posted on by Ed 7

Asbestos and the value of a human life

UPDATED 7-28

PRI ran a story on the global asbestos trade that is worth the read – it is a story that runs parallel to that of DDT, long-banned in the US, but still in common use elsewhere.  The DDT issue is quite contentious today, as there are many who argue that removing it from use would do more harm than good, as the number of people impacted by a rise in the mosquito population might be greater than the number of people impacted by contact with DDT.  What I find interesting about this argument, though, is that practically nobody who makes that argument suggests we should start spraying it here in the US again.  This logical inconsistency, I think, has its roots in the differential valuation of human life that operates under a lot of economic assessments of development policy.

The article on asbestos hints at this logic when it quotes John Hoskins, a scientist with The Crysotile Institute (a pro-asbestos organization).  Hoskins

believes that the health dangers are negligible. In fact, he told the CPI that “the people who would like to ban chrysotile asbestos are actually committing economic damage” especially to people in the developing world.

In other words, the cost of other insulators is so much higher that it offsets the cost in human health and mortality incurred by its use.  This, implicitly, raises the question of what a human life is worth – and implicitly suggests that we can ascribe an economic value to that life.  Of course, we do this all the time here in the US – courts routinely decide how much money to award those who have lost loved ones through negligence or other acts, in part making an assessment of what the lost life was worth.  However, when we start talking about using materials in the developing world that we would not dream of using here in the US (i.e. asbestos and DDT), we are implicitly suggesting that human lives here have greater value – for under the logic that not using these products in the developing world is more costly than using them and paying the human cost, if we are not using them here it must mean that the human cost is higher here, thus making these products unacceptable.  Suddenly, we have an economic argument for valuing the lives of the global poor less than our own . . . and we have done so in a manner that seems apolitical and logical.
Larry Summers laid this logic bare back when he was working as the Chief Economist at the World Bank.  In 1991 he wrote (or one of his staff wrote, depending on who you believe) a memo about the location of polluting industries and the value of human life.  It is worth quoting at length:

DATE: December 12, 1991
TO: Distribution
FR: Lawrence H. Summers
Subject: GEP

‘Dirty’ Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:

1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.

3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate[sic] cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate[sic] cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.

The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.

Now, this memo has been the subject of a lot of controversy, with some arguing that Summers was effectively a sociopath masking his tendencies in the language of economics.  And on first read, way back when I was in grad school, I had a similar thought.  However, many years down the road, and having seen Summers intentionally provoke controversy time and again (such that he managed to get sacked from Harvard), I have little doubt that Summers wrote (or signed) this with any other intent than to provoke the economists at the Bank who were making less obvious, but equally egregious, assessments of the impacts of structural adjustment.  I mean, honestly, do you really think a man like Summers would ever have WRITTEN THIS DOWN if he meant it?  It screams “leak me!”  He’s not that dumb – he wanted to provoke, and he might have wanted the leak so as to publicly embarrass some of these economists.  Sadly, most people seem to have missed the point.
Salient to this post – Summers is making the same argument about pollution and development, via sarcasm, that I am making about asbestos (and DDT).  If someone is going to suggest that people elsewhere should “be allowed” to use materials that we have banned here for reasons of public health, then they should also have to address the implicit valuation of human life that makes such a political statement appear “logical” and apolitical.
Now to see if the folks at Environmental Economics let me have it over this . . . they are, after all, real economists.
UPDATE: They did not let me have it – and I am almost disappointed.  But I think John ended up agreeing with me that we are indeed valuing human lives differentially in the “developed” and “developing” worlds – further demonstrating Nullius in Verba’s point (in the comments below) that we run into problems when we start using “universal” measures like money in realms where the moral is pretty important.

Posted on by Ed 7

Availability isn't validity . . .

So, to clarify one one my points from my previous post, let me use an example to show why building an index of development (or an index of anything, really) on data based on its availability can lead to tremendous problems – and result in a situation where the index is actually so misleading as to be worse than having no index at all.
A few years ago, Nate Kettle, Andrew Hoskins and I wrote a piece examining poverty-environment indicators (link here, or check out chapter 9 of Delivering Development when it comes out in January) where we pointed out that the data used by one study to evaluate the relationship between poverty and the environment in Nigeria did not bear much relationship to the meaningful patterns of environment and livelihood in Nigeria.  For example, one indicator of this relationship was ‘percentage of irrigated area in the total agricultural area’, an index whose interpretation rested on the assumption that a greater percentage of irrigated area will maximize the environment’s agricultural potential and lead to greater income and opportunity for those living in the area.  While this seems like a reasonable interpretation, we argued that there were other, equally plausible interpretations:
“While this may be a relatively safe assumption in places where the irrigated area is a very large percentage of total agricultural area, it may not be as applicable in places where the irrigated area is relatively small and where the benefits of irrigation are not likely to reach the entire population. Indeed, in such settings those with access to irrigation might not only experience greater opportunities in an average year, but also have incomes that are much more resistant to environmental shocks that might drive other farmers to adopt severe measures to preserve their livelihoods, such as selling off household stocks or land to those whose incomes are secured by irrigation. In such situations, a small but rising percentage of area under irrigation is as likely to reflect a consolidation of wealth (and therefore declining incomes and opportunities for many) in a particular area as it does greater income and opportunity for the whole population.” (p.90)
The report we were critiquing made no effort to control for these alternative interpretations, at least in part because it had gathered data at the national scale for Nigeria.  The problem here is that Nigeria contains seven broad agroecological zones (and really many more subzones) in which different crops and combinations of crops will be favored – averaging this across the country just homogenizes important differences in particular places into a general, but meaningless indicator.  When we combined this environmental variability with broad patterns of land tenure (people’s access to land), we found that the country really had to be divided up into at least 13 different zones – in each zone, the interpretation of this poverty-environment indicator was likely to be consistent, but there was no guarantee that it would be consistent from zone to zone.  In some zones, a rising area under irrigation would reflect a positive shift in poverty and environmental quality, while in others it might reflect declining human well-being.
To add to this complexity, we then mapped these zones against the smallest administrative units (states) of Nigeria at which meaningful data on poverty and the environment are most likely to be available.  What resulted was this:

A map contrasting the 13 agroecological zones in which poverty-environment indicators might be consistently interpreted and the boundaries of the smallest administrative units (states) in Nigeria that might have meaningful poverty and environmental data

As you can see, there are several states with multiple zones inside their borders – which means a single indicator cannot be assumed to have the same interpretion across the state (let alone the entire country).  So, while there might be data on poverty and environmental quality available at the state level such that we can identify indicators and build indexes with it, the likelihood is that the interpretation of that data will be, in many cases, incorrect, leading to problematic policies (like promoting irrigation in areas where it leads to land consolidation and the marginalization of the poor) – in other words, making things much worse than if there was no index or indicator at all.
Just because the data is available doesn’t mean that it is useful, or that it should be used.

Posted on by Ed 0

On clean coal and optimism . . .

Mickie Glantz has an interesting musing about clean coal on his FragileEcologies blog today.  What I like about it is his focus on how clean coal is a nice goal – that is, those of us working on issues of global environmental change should not reject coal as an energy source if there ever comes a day where it can be mined and burned in a manner that greatly diminishes, if not completely eliminates the horrible side effects, such as mountaintop removal and massive greenhouse gas emissions.  Current energy regimes and costs are a critical limiting factor in global development today, and anything that might bring us cheap, abundant energy in a manner that does not decimate the environment should be taken seriously.
That said, I have been a harsh critic of the clean coal movement thus far . . . because it is completely disingenuous.  Current marketing suggests that the technology is here, that coal is already clean, and that environmental concerns about coal are merely a mask for some sort of ill-defined, radical agenda.  However, the technology is not here yet and coal remains a remarkably dirty source of energy, from mining to burning.  So I give full support to Mickie’s idea – let’s talk about Clean Coal, where “clean” is not an adjective, but a verb – and a verb in the command tense.  Clean that coal!

Posted on by Ed 2

Finally, a hopeful note on malaria?

Ah, malaria – I’m all too acquainted with this particular issue, having had it several times in the course of my fieldwork.  The first time is pretty miserable . . . but by about the fourth case, it is just a day feeling like you have the flu.  Of course, this presumes that you are relatively young and healthy – if not, malaria can be quite dangerous.
I am one of the “lucky” few who could not go near Mefloquine (brand name Larium to those of you who have taken anti-malarials) back when it was the “best choice” for preventing malaria.  I didn’t get malaria . . . but it did drive me toward a temporary bipolar situation and left me with residual vertigo that even now, 13 years later, I still feel at times.  So, after that experience, I simply stopped taking antimalarials entirely, and tried to deal with bugsprays and long pants as much as possible.  The relatively recent arrival of Malarone has made it possible for me to take effective antimalarials again, and when I am on short trips I do.  For the long term, though, you really shouldn’t be taking anti-malarials . . . they are really not good for you, and at some point they do become more problematic than malaria itself.
Given this situation, I have taken a rather acute interest in the efforts to battle malaria.  I’ve watched vaccines come and go.  I’ve seen the rage for bed nets as panacea consume everyone, even though they are quite compromised in their effectiveness by the fact that the anopheles mosquito likes to fly in the evening, when people are not yet in bed, and tends to fly very low to the ground, and thus below the level of many beds.  Hell, some crazy people have come up with a laser that can shoot mosquitos out of the air, thus preventing bites – the coolest, and most totally impractical solution for malaria I’ve ever seen (click here for a movie – really).  How, precisely, are people meant to power and maintain a LASER WHEN THEY HAVE NO ELECTRICITY?  And as I have watched all of these efforts, I have wished and hoped that someone could figure out a way to deal with this damn disease for the purely selfish reason that I am tired of getting it.
So, I was pretty excited to hear about a new development in this fight – an effort to genetically engineer mosquitos so that they cannot carry the parasite in the first place (LA Times, BBC, Tonic).  Malaria is obscenely difficult to kill, because it goes through a large number of stages in its life cycle, and each stage is vulnerable to treatment in different ways – thus, a treatment that works early in the infection cycle may not work on later stage infections – and worse, if there are parasites going through different stages at the same time (some have been gestating for longer than others), a treatment might only work on a fraction of the parasites in the bloodstream and liver at any given time.  But malaria has one weakness – it must have people to live in.  Without us, eventually there would be no malaria – we are the host, and mosquitos must collect it from our blood, before passing it to other people.  So, if the mosquito cannot act as the carrier, the parasite cannot move between hosts – and eventually the parasite dies out (the only real way to contract malaria is through mosquito bite*).  In other words, this just might work . . .
But there are serious caveats here.  First, we have to genetically modify mosquitos to do this.  Then we have to get the genetically modified versions to mate with unmodified versions, and for the genes that restrict malaria to be the ones that emerge in the offspring.  Since these genes would not convey any adaptive advantage to the mosquitos (the genetic modification actually causes them to die young, which strikes me as a significant genetic disadvantage), there is really no guarantee that this would happen – it could be that the modified mosquitos’ impact on the overall genetic pool is tiny – or huge.  I shudder a little at the proposed solution for this (From LA Times):

“connecting the gene to a piece of DNA that helps it spread by, for example, producing something that kills any mosquitoes that don’t contain the desired gene. Other research groups are working to develop such clever genetic tricks, but they are still years away from implementation.”

Once we start playing with a wider set of genes, I get worried.  As the article goes on to note, the effects of such modification are hard to predict in a single species, and since that species participates in a wider ecosystem, the impact on other species is equally hard to predict.  The last thing anyone wants are supermosquitos (a la superweeds and other superbugs that have resulted from previous genetic modification efforts).  So this is not a magic bullet, just a hopeful volley in what has been, and promises to be, a long battle.
*Funny side story: in 1999, I arrived back in Syracuse, NY just as a pretty bad case of malaria flared up.  Despite my protestations, several of my grad student colleagues bundled me off to the emergency room.  When the admissions person asked me what was wrong, I told her – rather simply – “I have malaria”.  The women stared at me for a second, and then said “should I be wearing a mask or something?”  I was pretty beaten up at that point, with an accordingly short temper, which explains my response: “Honey, unless you have a jar of anopheles mosquitos back there, I think we’re going to be alright.”

Posted on by Ed 4

This, as my father would have said, is "piss poor"

The WWF reports that the upcoming meeting of the REDD+ Partnership issued invitations to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) only a week before the meeting.  The WWF’s Paul Chatterton argues:

“By waiting until the last minute to invite civil society participants to this meeting, the organizers have virtually guaranteed that these invitees will not be able to participate.”

I agree completely – most NGOs operate with very small budgets, and the soaring cost of last-minute international plane tickets will price many NGOs out of the meetings entirely, and greatly curtail the size of the teams other NGOs might otherwise send.  Further, this is not accidental – these meetings are well-orchestrated events, and while it is possible that a single organization, or even a handful, might be accidentally omitted, there is simply no way that the program organizers “forgot” the entire NGO community.  Clearly, someone is trying to minimize the involvement of NGOs, who are the principal voice for the communities who live in and around many of the forest resources likely to be covered under REDD+.
Aside from the underhanded nature of this move, why does this matter?  As I argue in my upcoming book, we are lumbering (no pun intended) slowly toward a global agreement on how to use the protection of threatened forest resources and the reforestation of degraded forest areas as means of offsetting carbon emissions as part of a much larger global carbon market.  This is not a problem, in and of itself.  Cap and trade is not inherently flawed – but its success is completely contingent on its implementation.  And what I am seeing from the private markets (via informal proposals that get passed my way) is a lot of project planning that completely ignores local communities.
Now, think what you will about the rights of communities to the natural resources in and around them – I know that some argue that these rights have to be curtailed for the greater good of humanity.  I happen to disagree, as I feel that this stance makes a small group of people who play little role in the global climate issues that REDD+ is trying to address responsible for bearing the negative impacts of our efforts to deal with these problems – in short, we are outsourcing the pain of mitigation to these communities.  However, whatever your stance might be on this, there is no refuting the fact that people, when forced off of a resource they once could use, have a very high incentive to monkey wrench these projects in an effort to regain access to the resource (there is a large literature on this with regard to how people displaced by protected areas like game reserves respond).  Thus, these proposals, and this odd effort on the part of the REDD+ Partnership, are more or less guaranteeing a high rate of project failure until someone figures out that they will have to take the needs of these local populations quite seriously.

Posted on by Ed 2

Development is not the same thing as adaptation

One of the most interesting and distressing trends in recent development thought has been the convergence of adaptation to global change (I use global change as a catch-all which includes environmental and economic change) and development.  Development agencies increasingly take on the idea of adaptation as a key component of their missions – which they should, if they intend to build projects with enduring value.  However, it is one thing to incorporate the idea of adaptation into development programming.  It is entirely another to collapse the two into the same mission.
Simply put, development and adaptation have two different goals.  In general, development is about improving the conditions of life for the global poor in some form or other.  Adaptation implicitly suggests an effort to maintain what exists without letting it get worse . . . which sounds great until you think about the conditions of life in places like rural sub-Saharan Africa, where things are often very bad right now.  A colleague of mine at USAID, in the context of a conversation about disaster relief and development, said it best: the mandate of disaster relief is to put things back to the way they were before the disaster.  In a place like Haiti, that isn’t much of a mandate.
All of this becomes pretty self-evident after a moment of thought.  Why, then, do we see the collapse of these two efforts into a single program in the world of development practice?  For example, what does it mean when food security projects and programs start to define themselves in terms of adaptation?  It seems to me that the goal shifts for these programs – from improvement to the maintenance of existing situations.  If a development agency was there in the first place, the existing situation is likely unacceptable.  To me, this means that this subtle shift in mission is also unacceptable.
Why am I going on about this?  I am about to take up a job as the Climate Change Adaptation Coordinator for USAID’s Bureau of Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance.  In this job, I will have to negotiate this very convergence at the program level.  How we work out this convergence over the next few years will have tremendous implications for development efforts for decades to come – and therefore huge implications for billions of people around the world.  And I don’t pretend to have all the answers . . . but I will think out loud in this space as we go.

Posted on by Ed 5

Clarification required . . .

Well, it has been an eventful day – the blog has been in existence for something like three days, and I’ve already been blown up by traffic over a post.  Which, of course, is better than complete silence from the blogosphere.  However, I am not one to subscribe to the idea that there is no such thing as bad publicity, so I wanted to clarify a few things.
First, from my perspective the evidence for anthropogenic climate change is very, very clear.  This is NOT to say that all debate about the subject is over – after all, the climate is a tremendously complex system that we cannot know fully under existing methods (unless someone here has the means to locate every molecule in the atmosphere, and record their state, vectors and velocities simultaneously . . . oh, and then do the same for the oceans, land, and all life on earth, as the atmosphere interacts with all of that) – so we work in ever more refined approximations (the models of which, by the way, continue to converge with observed reality as we refine them, a strong sign that our approximations are at least on the right track).  That leaves room for error, and surely we are making some errors now that will have to be corrected over time.  Then again, there is room for error in our understanding of gravity, but I have yet to hear a convincing argument for trying to fly from my roof.  Remember, the scientific method never proves anything – all you can ever do is fail to disprove something so often that it becomes very, very likely that you accurately understand whatever it is you are testing.
That said, I am not a climate scientist.  I do understand the physics of climate change reasonably well, as I have had to pick up quite a bit in the course of my research and teaching.  I also understand modeling reasonably well – I even sat in on a colleague’s graduate seminar on biogeographic modeling to refine my knowledge base.  But again, I am not a climate scientist.  So I am not going to dedicate a lot of blog space to the nuances of climate science, not when far more qualified people run outstanding blogs on the subject (check some of the sites in my sidebar).  Those are the correct fora for such discussions.  This, I hope, will be a forum for the discussion of the intersection of development and global change thought broadly – both economic and environmental change.
Second, the question of why I wrote the post in the first place.  Contrary to Steve Bloom’s comment (whose comments were generally quite good), there was no unintended irony in my posting a complaint about IPCC communication that would become fodder for the climategate crowd.  When I received that letter, I read the first two paragraphs congratulating me on my appointment to the IPCC and though “how nice”, and then my stomach dropped when I read the third paragraph (the focus of my post).  If there is one truism about e-mail, once you hit “send”, it is out there for everyone to see.  I knew immediately that it was only a matter of time until this letter, and its poorly-worded paragraph, was in the hands of people who already mistrusted the IPCC, to be used as yet another attack on the process.  In my mind, it came down to this – should the complaint come from someone with credibility in the global change community, who clearly wants the IPCC to succeed, and who can frame the complaint around the idea of failed communication strategies (which is really what is at issue here), or should I wait until someone with the opposite agenda unloaded on the entire process?  I believe I made the right choice.
Third, I think it is important to note that by the time Mickey Glantz posted my comments on his blog (which is great reading) and forwarded my post to Andy Revkin at Dot Earth, Revkin already had a copy of the letter.  In other words, Mickey and I were not the only ones concerned with this paragraph – we’re just the ones who allowed ourselves to be named.  I believe that by jumping in, Mickey and I helped shape the discussion of this paragraph, and moved it down a productive path toward a discussion of how we interact with the media and the general public.  It is of some interest to note that by mid-day Saturday, all of the IPCC WG II members had been e-mailed a guide to interacting with media (Revkin posted a copy on his site).  The guide is pretty polished – in other words, they had this ready, but had not yet circulated it.  I cannot say that this little firestorm caused the secretariat to send this out, but its existence actually supports my complaint – the organization actually has very reasonable public outreach guidelines in place that do nothing to curtail our freedom to interact with the media or the public.  But the letter made it seem like things were quite the contrary.
Hopefully this is clarifying.  Or entertaining.  Or something in between.  Please resume your regularly scheduled websurfing.

Posted on by Ed 6

Apparently, we have learned nothing . . .

So, as I have mentioned in my first post, I am part of Working Group II of the 5th Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). As some of you might know, Working Group II of the previous Assessment Report (AR4) was the one that caught a lot of flak for problematic conclusions and references regarding Himalayan Glacier melt and whatnot. On one hand, these were stupid errors that should have been corrected in the review process (which will be part of my job in AR5).  On the other, they really did not affect the overall conclusions or quality of the report – they just gave those who continue to have an issue with the idea of climate change an opening to attack the report.
Part of the problem for the IPCC is a perceived lack of openness – that something is going on behind closed doors that cannot be trusted.  This, in the end, was at the heart of the “climategate” circus – a recent report has exonerated all of the scientists implicated, but some people still believe that there is something sinister going on.
There is an easy solution to this – complete openness.  I’ve worked on global assessments before, and the science is sound.  I’ve been quite critical of the way in which one of the reports was framed (download “Applying DPSIR to Sustainable Development” here), but the science is solid and the conclusions are more refined than ever.  Showing people how this process works, and what we do exactly, would go a long way toward getting everyone on the same page with regard to global environmental change, and how we might best address it.
So I was dismayed this morning to receive a letter, quite formally titled “Letter No.7004-10/IPCC/AR5 from Dr Pachauri, Chaiman of the IPCC”, that might set such transparency back.  While the majority of the letter is a very nice congratulations on being selected as part of the IPCC, the third paragraph is completely misguided:
“I would also like to emphasize that enhanced media interest in the work of the IPCC would probably subject you to queries about your work and the IPCC. My sincere advice would be that you keep a distance from the media and should any questions be asked about the Working Group with which you are associated, please direct such media questions to the Co-chairs of your Working Group and for any questions regarding the IPCC to the secretariat of the IPCC.”
This “bunker mentality” will do nothing for the public image of the IPCC.  The members of my working group are among the finest minds in the world.  We are capable of speaking to the press about what we do without the help of minders or gatekeepers. I hope my colleagues feel the same way, and the IPCC sees the light . . .

UPDATE (16 July 2010):

The members of the IPCC AR5 received a letter from Dr. Pachauri today.  In it, he made clear the position of the IPCC with regard to media communications.  I find this letter articulate, clear and eminently reasonable – everything the original letter was not.  To quote Dr. Pachauri

“In my letter, I cautioned you to “keep a distance from the media” if asked about your work for the IPCC. This was a poor choice of words on my part and not reflective of IPCC policy. My only intent was to advise new authors not to speak “on behalf of the IPCC” because we are an inter-governmental body consisting of 194 states.

I want to reassure everyone the IPCC is a transparent organization. At a time when the work of climate scientists is undergoing intense scrutiny, it is essential that we promote clear and open communication with the media and the public.

While the media have at times been critical of the IPCC, I have a profound respect for their responsibility to inform the public about our activities. A free flow of information is a fundamental component of our commitment to transparency.”

I believe this puts to rest the idea that the letter was meant to muzzle the members of AR5.  As I argued, the original letter was poorly worded and thought through, not nefarious.  However, I am still a bit concerned about another part of the letter:

“Last weekend, a guide entitled “Background & Tips for Responding to the Media” was circulated to several hundred Working Group II authors. This document was produced to help scientists communicate effectively with journalists. However, I was unaware of its distribution.”

At some point, you do have to ask who is driving this bus.  The PR situation at IPCC is clearly uncoordinated and still pretty amateurish.  At least they are trying, though.  That gives me hope for the process . . .

Posted on by Ed 68