Pat Michaels has a rather astonishing blog called Climate of Fear at Forbes.com. Too bad for Forbes – they are providing a platform for a serious climate crank who I think is far too well-educated and smart to misunderstand the things he misrepresents in his public statements and writing. His recent post on climate change and food security is a classic of the genre – and fits very well into the strategies that Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway so brilliantly lay out in Merchants of Doubt (which, if you want to understand the professional climate change denial camp, you absolutely must read). It requires debunking. Hell, the man’s blog requires debunking, post by post.
So, what does Michaels have to say about climate change and food security? Well, in a nutshell he doesn’t see how climate change is a problem for agriculture – indeed, he seems to suggest that climate change will do good things for agriculture. However, a careful read of the article for what it does and does not actually say, and what evidence it draws on (mostly tangential), demonstrates that this is a piece of misdirection that, in my opinion, is criminal: insofar as it causes anyone to doubt the severity of the challenge in front of us, it will cost lives. Lots of lives.
Michaels begins with a classic of the denial genre – he goes after a New York Times article not on its merits (indeed, he never addresses any of the article’s content), but by lumping it in with every previous warning of what he calls “environmental apocalypse.” Except, of course, that the only call he actually cites is the now legendary “global cooling” fear of the 1970s – a fringe belief that was never embraced by the majority of scientists (no matter how hard the denial crowd wants you to believe it). That concern was based on patterns of natural cycles of heating and cooling that some felt were timed to push us back toward another ice age, but it was not the consensus view of scientists at the time. Michaels knows this. Either that, or he was a very, very bad graduate student, as he claims to have recieved his doctorate on the wings of “global cooling.”
Then Michaels moves to a false correlation (or non-correlation) – temperatures rose by .75 degrees C over the 20th Century (about 1.35 degrees Farenheit), but Michaels argues that since “U.S. corn yields quintupled. Life expectancy doubled. People got fat” clearly there is nothing to worry about. Except, of course, that temperature/CO2 has relatively little to do with these results – biotech and improved farming techniques were much, much more important – and one could argue that these techniques and biotech have persevered in the face of conditions that might have, in many parts of the world, led to declining yields. Hell, it is well known that the increases in per-capita food availability worldwide are not evenly distributed – According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in sub-Saharan Africa there is less food per person than there was thirty years ago. Either Michaels has a distressingly flawed understanding of correlation and no real understanding of agricultural development over the past 100 years, or he is willfully misdirecting the reader. Either case should disqualify him from writing this article.
Besides, temperature is only one concern (it is possible that some parts of the globe will warm several degrees Celsius, pushing some current staple crops out of the temperature bands in which they can germinate) – Michaels makes no mention of precipitation, except to basically trot out the old “CO2 is plant food” argument by saying “greenhouse warming takes place more in the winter, which lengthens growing seasons. With adequate water, plants then fix and yield more carbohydrate.” This is almost hilarious, as one of the biggest problems we face is finding adequate water. Rising atmospheric temperatures have driven changes in wind patterns and atmospheric moisture content which, in turn, have shifted rainfall patterns over the past century or more. Today CO2 is not able to serve as plant food in many parts of the world that most need it because the very injection of more CO2 into the atmosphere is creating declines in the rain needed to make that CO2 useful to plants. Unless Michaels is willing to argue that rainfall patterns have not shifted, and therefore is willing to ignore rain gauge data from around the world, he has just offered the reader another misleading argument.
To address these empirically-documented challenges, farmers have adopted new crops, some biotech and improved irrigation tech has helped (though in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, a region in which most agriculture is rain-fed, farmers are getting hammered by precipitation change) , but we are moving into an era where the vast bulk of work on GMOs is “defensive” – that is, trying to hold the line on yields as environmental conditions deteriorate. This is not a recipe for continued rising yields in the future – which makes a few of his later claims really, really embarrassing – if he had shame, that is. His claim that the continued increase in per capita grain production is going up means that climate change has had no effect is a logical fallacy – he is not factoring in how much production we have lost because of climate effects (and we are losing production – Southern Africa is one example). His claims about rising wheat production in the future, even in a world free of wheat rust, presume either current environmental conditions will hold or that there will be significant technological advances that boost yields – but these are assumptions, not facts that can be stated with certainty.
In short, Michael’s alignment of temperature change and improving human conditions are basically unrelated . . . unless one wants to (rightly) note that many of the things that allowed us to live longer and get fatter required manufacturing processes and transport mechanisms that burned fossil fuels, thus warming the atmosphere – in other words, causality runs the other way. We live longer and better, which is in part causing the warming of the atmosphere. But Michaels can’t even consider that direction of causality . . .
I do agree with Michaels that using food crops for ethanol is and was stupid. Of course, I was saying this (along with a lot of other colleagues) at author meetings of UNEP’s Fourth Global Environment Outlook in 2005. The decision to push biofuels was political, not scientific. Welcome to the party, Pat – we’ve already been here for a while, but there might still be some beer in the keg . . .
So, to summarize – Michaels has created a post that relies on false correlation, logical fallacy and misdirection to create the idea that climate change might not be a problem for agriculture, and that it might even be good for global production. But he does not cite the vast bulk of the science out there – and ignores the empirical literature (not theory, not conjecture – measured changes) to create a very deceptive picture that minimizes the slowly intensifying challenges facing people living in many parts of the Global South. I invite Dr. Michaels to look at the FEWS-NET data – not just contemporary, but historical – on the East African/Horn of Africa climate. Empirical observation (again, measured, verified observations, not projections) tells us it is drying out* . . . and has been, for some time, massively compromising both crops and livestock, the backbone of livelihoods in Southern Ethiopia, Somalia and Northeastern Kenya. As all hell breaks loose in that region, and the US Government considers using the term famine for the first time in a decade to describe the situation on the ground, it seems to me that Michaels’ efforts at misdirection rise beyond nuisance to a real question of ethics that Forbes would do well to consider before publishing such mendacious material again.
*very important note: FEWS-NET is agnostic as to the causes of the drying out – at this time, they do not care what causes it, they need to document it to better organize US Government and multilateral food aid delivery. They would have jobs even if climate change did not exist, as the weather does vary from year to year no matter what, and therefore food insecurity would vary year by year.
Category: Food Security
Oversimplification isn't acceptable: It's not all about the CO2
I like Grist, most of the time . . . and then there are times when it grates a bit. Jess Zimmerman got me with one of the latter today – in a post about the grave condition of our oceans. First, I guess I just like my info delivered straight, not . . . well, this:
Ocean ecosystems are taking a faster nosedive than anyone predicted. Without urgent action, coral reefs and entire fish species could disappear in a generation. Why is this happening? Do you really need to ask? Hint: It rhymes with shmarbon shmioxide.
Shmarbon shmioxide? Really?
CO2 in the atmosphere increases the temperature of ocean water, throwing off the pH and making the oxygen-hogging algae population explode. Result: OCEAN DOOM.
Ocean doom? That is the summary of this report? This does not enhance the readability or accessibility of the report. Hell, I feel like it trivializes the report, which I suspect was the opposite of Zimmerman’s intent.
But here’s the thing: Zimmerman’s summary mischaracterizes the report. The title of the press release is the first hint:
“Multiple ocean stresses threaten ‘globally significant’ marine extinction.”
The second hint is the first bullet point of the press release:
- The combination of stressors on the ocean is creating the conditions associated with every previous major extinction of species in Earth’s history
And finally, just reading down a bit, it becomes clear that climate change is one of three major stressors that combine to cause the challenges we face.
The group reviewed recent research by world ocean experts and found firm evidence that the effects of climate change, coupled with other human-induced impacts such as overfishing and nutrient run-off from farming, have already caused a dramatic decline in ocean health.
Increasing hypoxia (low oxygen levels) and anoxia (absence of oxygen, known as ocean dead zones) combined with warming of the ocean and acidification are the three factors which have been present in every mass extinction event in Earth’s history.
So, to Jess Zimmerman and Grist, please, please take a bit more time reading press releases (God forbid you read the report before reporting on it) and try to get the messages right. The collapse of our oceans is an incredibly important challenge that is vastly underreported and very poorly understood by the general public (earlier post on this here), and addressing the causes of the depletion of the oceans (and some really significant terrestrial impacts as people look for new sources of protein – see chapters 2 and 13 in Delivering Development) will require addressing how we grow our food and dispose of our waste, and how we choose to fish the oceans for generations to come. Climate change and CO2 emissions are part of the problem, no doubt, but without a comprehensive approach, we will collapse our fisheries no matter what we do on climate change.
Oh, so you CAN say it out loud
The AP is running a story on food prices – and it is heavily focused on the problem of commodities speculation. Actually, it is heavily focused on French President Nicholas Sarkozy’s comments on the causes of the food price increases. While Sarkozy acknowledged the importance of issues like climate change, he quickly moved past these causes:
Sarkozy said the difficulties go far beyond the whims of nature. He said financial market specialists — instead of agricultural trading houses — had taken over the global farm market and called for change.
“Take the Chicago market,” said Sarkozy, listing how the derivatives exchange totals 46 times the annual U.S. wheat production and 24 times that of corn. He said 85 percent of the contracts on commodities futures markets are held by purely financial players “with no link to the commodity itself.”
“The example shows to what extent our world has lost a sense of value, a sense of reality, a sense of capitalism to serve the development and happiness of people,” Sarkozy said.
It is worth noting that Sarkozy is no leftist . . . though he will likely be painted as one for that last sentence. Then again, anyone who notes that markets might have negative as well as positive effects will be painted as anti-capitalist/naive/out-of-place ideologue (see the comments on Dot Earth’s mention of my concerns over climate change communication).
Let me note that Sarkozy is not demonizing all speculation – nor do I. As I discussed in an earlier post, speculation plays an important economic role that can distribute the stresses that lead to future price spikes over time, thus ameliorating future crisis. However, this is not to say that speculation should just run unregulated – basic regulation that keeps speculation within productive parameters would likely enhance its value in the food security arena. (See this IFPRI forum for more on the role of speculation in world food markets)
However, more information for these markets would probably help as well. While the USDA and other organizations offer estimates of global and sometimes national-level agricultural production, it would be good to have concrete, sub-national datasets on ag production updated in real time – this would remove some of the uncertainty in commodities markets that can then be leveraged into arbitragable price instability . . . and that alone might start to clean out the more problematic players in agricultural commodities markets.
The British lead . . . and who will follow?
David Cameron gave a speech yesterday at the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation conference. It deserves to be read in full – I don’t agree with every word (and how I disagree with many of Cameron’s stances), but it is one of the clearest statements on why we must continue to deliver aid to the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world.
On the down side, Cameron starts out a bit too market triumphalist for my tastes:
At home we don’t tackle poverty by state hand-outs; we help people get into work, to stand on their own two feet and to take control of their own destiny. The same should be true of development. No country has ever pulled itself out of poverty through aid alone, so this government will take a new approach. The same conditions create prosperity the world over. They include access to markets, property rights, private-sector investment and they make up what I see as the golden thread of successful development. Ultimately it’s the private sector that will be the engine for growth and that’s why this government’s efforts will increasingly focus on helping developing countries achieve that growth with the jobs and opportunities it will bring.
Well, this is a bit muddled. First, last I checked England (and Great Britain more generally) was home to a robust welfare state (well, until various Tory governments from Thatcher to Cameron took a hatchet to it) that provided the safety net that enhanced the quality of life of its citizens. On the other hand (and second), I agree that no country has ever been lifted out of poverty through aid alone – but then, that’s not what aid does. At best, aid catalyzes much larger processes of change – and sometimes those changes play out constructively (I discuss this at length in Delivering Development). Third, the only countries to have really changed their status in the last half century have done so by rejecting things like the open market and behaving in very politically repressive ways to get through a serious of difficult transitions that eventually made them competitive in global markets and able to productively take in foreign investment – so this claim about what works isn’t fully supported by the evidence. Andy Sumner’s work on the New Bottom Billion suggests that this might be changing as a new pile of countries “graduate” from low-income to middle-income status, but this is still unclear as many of the new “graduates” from low to middle income status have just crept above that line, often with no transformation of their economic fundamentals (leaving them vulnerable to slip-back) and still containing huge numbers of very poor people (creating the same problem, and calling into question the very concept of “graduation” to middle income status).
This is not to say that I don’t think markets have any value – I just fear those who place absolute faith in them, especially given that the environment is the site of perhaps the most serious market failure we’ve ever seen. However, as the speech progressed, I became somewhat more comfortable as, at least in the context of development, Cameron takes a somewhat more moderate tack:
We want people in Africa to climb the ladder of prosperity but of course when the bottom rungs of that ladder are broken by disease and preventable death on a massive scale, when countries can’t even get on the bottom rung of the growth ladder because one in seven of their children die before they reach their fifth birthday, we have to take urgent action. We have to save lives and then we can help people to live. So that’s where today’s announcement fits in. Because there cannot really be any effective development – economic or political – while there are still millions of people dying unnecessarily.
Absolutely correct – the “bottom of the pyramid”, as it were, often finds itself left behind when economic growth programs rev up . . . this is well-understood in both academia and the development institutions. Indeed, it is not controversial for my Bureau (DCHA – the folks who deal with disasters and conflict) to argue that its work is fundamental to creating a firm foundation for future development efforts because we address the needs of vulnerable populations who might otherwise be overlooked by Agency programming.
But what I most like is the kicking Cameron hands out to those who argue we don’t have the money for aid in these hard economic times. The kicking comes in two parts – first a moral argument:
When you make a promise to the poorest people in the world you should keep it. I remember where I was during the Gleneagles Summit and the Live 8 concert of 2005 and I remember thinking at the time how right it was that those world leaders should make such pledges so publicly. For me it’s a question of values; this is about saving lives. It was the right thing to promise; it was the right thing for Britain to do and it is the right thing for this government to honour that commitment.
So to those who point to other countries that are breaking their promises and say that makes it okay for us to do the same, I say no, it’s not okay. Our job is to hold those other countries to account, not to use them as an excuse to turn our back on people who are trusting us to help them. And to those who say fine but we should put off seeing through those promises to another day because right now we can’t afford to help, I say we can’t afford to wait. How many minutes do we wait? Three children die every minute from pneumonia alone; waiting is not the right thing to do and I don’t think that 0.7% of our gross national income is too high a price to pay for saving lives.
…
I actually think that most people in our country want Britain to stand for something in the world, to be something in the world. And when I think about what makes me proud of our country, yes, I think of our incredibly brave service men and women that I have the honour to meet and see so often; and yes, I think of our capabilities as an economic and diplomatic power; but I also think of our sense of duty to help others. That says something about this country and I think it’s something we can be proud of.
Where . . . the . . . hell . . . is . . . the . . . American . . . political . . . leadership . . . on . . . this? Dammit, the British just took the “City on a Hill” mantle from us. Most Americans want America to stand for something in the world, last I checked.
Oh, and Cameron addresses the unaddressable (for America, it seems) in his speech: that development, in reducing the need for future wars and humanitarian interventions, actually is cost-effective:
If we really care about Britain’s national interest, about jobs, about growth, about security, we shouldn’t break off our links with the countries that can hold some of the keys to that future. If we invest in Africa, if we open trade corridors, if we remove obstacles to growth, it’s not just Africa that will grow but us too. And if we invest in countries before they get broken we might not end up spending so much on dealing with the problems, whether that’s immigration or threats to our national security.
Take Afghanistan. If we’d put a fraction of our current military spending on Afghanistan into helping Afghanistan 15 or 20 years ago just think what we might have been able to avoid over the last decade. Or take Pakistan. Let another generation of Pakistanis enter adult life without any real opportunities and what are the risks in terms of mass migration, radicalisation, even terrorism? That’s why UK support over the next four years will get four million more children in Pakistan into school. This could be life changing for those children and it can be part of the antidote to the extremism that threatens us all. So it’s not just morally right to invest in aid, it’s actually in our own interests too.
God help us, Ron Paul seems to be the only candidate for anything willing to say that the wars we are in are costing a hell of a lot of money, and might not have been necessary. Of course, Ron Paul doesn’t like aid, either . . . actually, he doesn’t seem to like much of anything. Nobody is really taking his hobgoblin act all that seriously, which means he isn’t going to shift the debate here. Cameron, though, really glues his fiscal conservativism to a rational argument for aid – maybe we just should have worked on the aid side of things, at a fraction of the cost, and averted the whole mess in the first place. Lord help me, the Tories are sounding reasonable . . .
Now, Cameron’s ideas for transforming aid are vague, mostly about focusing on results and enhancing accountability. This is all well and good, but amazingly thorny. There’s been quite a bit of discussion about evaluation in the development community (great summary list here) and this blog (here, here and here) of late, and if nothing else, the reader might come to grips with the huge challenges that we must address before we can get to a realization of Cameron’s otherwise nonoffensive ideas.
I suppose it was asking too much to hope a leader talking about transforming development might mention that the global poor might actually have ideas of their own that we should start learning about before we go barging in . . .
Fisheries . . . this is a development challenge
A while back, I had a blog post on a report for ActionAid, written by Alex Evans, on critical uncertainties for development between the present and 2020. One of the big uncertainties Alex identified were environmental shocks, though in that version of the report he limited these shocks to climate-driven environmental shocks. In my post, I suggested to Alex that he widen his scope, for environmental shocks might also include ecosystem collapse, such as in major global fisheries – such environmental shocks are not really related to climate change, but are still of great importance. The collapse of the Gulf of Guinea large marine ecosystem (largely due to commercial overfishing from places other than Africa) has devastated local fish hauls, lowering the availability of protein in the diets of coastal areas and driving enormous pressure on terrestrial fauna as these populations seek to make up for the lost protein. Alex was quite generous with my comments, and agreed with this observation wholeheartedly.
And then today, I stumbled on this – a simple visualization of Atlantic Fisheries in 1900 and 2000, by fish haul. The image is striking (click to expand):
Now, I have no access to the datasets used to construct this visualization, and therefore I can make no comments on its accuracy (the blog post on the Guardian site is not very illuminating). However, this map could be off by quite a bit in terms of how good hauls were in 1900, and how bad they are now, and the picture would still be very, very chilling. As I keep telling my students, all those new, “exotic” fish showing up in restaurants are not delicacies – they are just all that is left in these fisheries.
This is obviously a development problem, as it compromises livelihoods and food supplies. Yet I don’t see anyone addressing it directly, even aid organizations engaged with countries on the coast of the Gulf of Guinea, where this impact is most pronounced. And how long until even the rich really start to feel the pinch?
Go here to see more visualizations – including one of the reach of the Spanish fishing fleet that makes clear where the pressure on the Gulf of Guinea is coming from.
And now everyone is implicated . . .
Updated 7 June 2011: I can find no evidence that any of my TIAA-CREF funds are holding Glencore. So far, so good . . .
aaannnnddd
No Glencore in my Vanguard 2025 Fund (kid’s college fund). Sadly, though, there is Gazprom. And probably a hell of a lot of other problematic stuff . . . nobody is clean, I tell you.
As a geographer, I spend a lot of time thinking about interconnections – how events and processes in one place influence events and processes in other places. I use these interconnections as a teaching tool in my courses, to help students understand how, for example, our levels of consumption here in the US preclude similar levels of consumption for the rest of the world (not enough resource out there to make that happen). I am always careful to make sure that the students understand that I am as bound up in these linkages as they are – I certainly do not live off the grid, walking/riding a bike everywhere and eating only food I grow (or that is grown locally). But it still hurts every time a find a new way in which I am bound to, and therefore a cause of, some of the processes I find most frustrating in the world. So, this excellent post on FairPensions was a bit tough. Simply put, Glencore, a well-known problem company that trades heavily in the food commodities markets (and appears to be making those markets, as it were, to its own advantage) has been fast-tracked into the FTSE 100, and therefore is now likely part of a lot of the mutual funds and pension plans to which we all make contributions. I’m going to have to check on this, and pray that TIAA-CREF has some sense, but . . . dammit.
For an earlier discussions of food insecurity and the commodities markets, see here, here and here.
On field experience and playing poor
There is a great post up at Good on “Pretending to be Poor” experiments, where participants try to live on tiny sums of money (i.e. $1.50/day) to better understand the plight of the global poor. Cord Jefferson refers to this sort of thing as “playing poor”, at least in part because participants don’t really live on $1.50 a day . . . after all, they are probably not abandoning their secure homes, and probably not working the sort of dangerous, difficult job that pays such a tiny amount. Consuming $1.50/day is one thing. Living on it is entirely another. (h/t to Michael Kirkpatrick at Independent Global Citizen for pointing out the post).
This, for me, brings up another issue – the “authenticity” of the experiences many of us have had while doing fieldwork (or working in field programs), an issue that has been amplified by what seems to be the recent discovery of fieldwork by the RCT trials for development crowd (I still can’t get over the idea that they think living among the poor is a revolutionary idea). The whole point of participant observation is to better understand what people do and why they do it by experiencing, to some extent, their context – I find it inordinately difficult to understand how people even begin to meaningfully parse social data without this sort of grounding. In a concrete way, having malaria while in a village does help one come to grips with the challenges this might pose to making a living via agriculture in a rather visceral way. So too, living in a village during a drought that decimated a portion of the harvest, by putting me in a position where I had to go a couple of (intermittent) days without food, and with inadequate food for quite a few more, helped me to come to grips with both the capacity and the limitations of the livelihoods strategies in the villages I write about in Delivering Development, and at least a limited understanding of the feelings of frustration and inadequacy that can arise when things go wrong in rural Africa, even as livelihoods strategies work to prevent the worst outcomes.
But the key part of that last sentence was “at least a limited understanding.” Being there is not the same thing as sharing the experience of poverty, development, or disaster. When I had malaria, I knew what clinics to go to, and I knew that I could afford the best care available in Cape Coast (and that care was very good) – I was not a happy guy on the morning I woke up with my first case, but I also knew where to go, and that the doctor there would treat me comprehensively and I would be fine. So too with the drought – the villages I was living in were, at most, about 5 miles (8km) from a service station with a food mart attached. Even as I went without food for a day, and went a bit hungry for many more, I knew in the back of my mind that if things turned dire, I could walk that distance and purchase all of the food I needed. In other words, I was not really experiencing life in these villages because I couldn’t, unless I was willing to throw away my credit card, empty my bank account, and renounce all of my upper-class and government colleagues and friends. Only then would I have been thrown back on only what I could earn in a day in the villages and the (mostly appalling) care available in the rural clinic north of Eguafo. I was always critically aware of this fact, both in the moment and when writing and speaking about it since. Without that critical awareness, and a willingness to downplay our own (or other’s) desire to frame our work as a heroic narrative, there is a real risk in creating our own versions of “playing poor” as we conduct fieldwork.
I'm a talking head . . .
Geoff Dabelko, Sean Peoples, Schuyler Null and the rest of the good folks at the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars were kind enough to interview me about some of the themes in Delivering Development. They’ve posted the video on te ECSP’s blog, The New Security Beat (you really should be checking them out regularly). So, if you want to see/hear me (as opposed to read me), you can go over to their blog, or just click below.
Mendacious crap . . .
A letter to the editor in today’s Washington Post (scroll down to the second letter on this page) infuriated me beyond words. People have a right to offer their opinion, however ill-informed, in a democracy. Nobody, however, has a right to basically lie outright. Yet James L. Henry, chairman of USA Maritime managed to get a letter to the editor published that did just that.
Henry was responding to the column “5 Myths About Foreign Aid” in which the author, John Norris, the executive director of the sustainable security program at the Center for American Progress quite rightly noted:
Congress mandates that 75 percent of all U.S. international food aid be shipped aboard U.S. flagged vessels — ships registered in the United States. A study by several researchers at Cornell University concluded that this subsidy of elite U.S. shipping companies cost American taxpayers $140 million in unnecessary transportation costs during 2006 alone.
The Government Accountability Office noted that between 2006 and 2008, U.S. food aid funding increased by nearly 53 percent, but the amount of food delivered actually decreased by 5 percent. Why? Because our food aid policies are swayed by an agribusiness lobby that stresses buying American, not buying cheaply.
Both of these points are well-documented. But Henry, chair of the interest group that protects the US shipping industry from competition in the delivery of food aid, really doesn’t want you to know this. Instead, he argues:
The reality is that cargo preference adds no additional cost to foreign aid programs and should be credited with sustaining an essential national defense sealift capability.
Cargo preference does not divert one dollar away from food aid programs. To the extent that cargo preference increases costs, the difference has been reimbursed by the Transportation Department. For example, reimbursements resulted in a $128 million net increase in available food aid funding in 2006. The Transportation Department reimburses these costs because a reliable U.S.-flag commercial fleet provides essential sealift capacity in times of war or national emergencies.
The language here is very careful – technically, he is not lying. But by no means is his explanation meant to help the reader understand what is going on. In arguing that “cargo preference does not divert one dollar away from food aid programs,” he fails to point out that the cost of cargo preference is built into existing budgets . . . it is part of existing food aid programs, and therefore technically does not divert money from them. But this, of course, is not what Norris meant in his “5 myths” piece, nor is it what most people care about. The simple fact of the matter is that more of the food aid budget could go to procuring food if the cargo preference requirement was dropped. Period.
Second, if we read these two paragraphs carefully, we find that Henry is engaged in one of the more carefully phrased but entertainingly contradictory bits of writing I have ever seen. Pay attention, now: in the first paragraph, he argues that “cargo preference adds no additional cost to foreign aid programs.” In the second, he notes “To the extent that cargo preference increases costs, the difference has been reimbursed by the Transportation Department.” OK, first, let’s note that he just admitted that cargo preference does increase costs. Second, he is technically correct – the burden of those costs is shifted outside foreign aid programs . . . to the Transportation Department. Which is funded by the same tax dollars as foreign aid. Basically, he is arguing that their taxpayer-funded subsidy/reimbursement should not be seen as having any impact on taxpayer-funded foreign relief operations. Even though these are the same tax dollars, in the end.
Technically all true. Clearly intended to deceive. So, WaPo, how do you feel about publishing letters from poverty/disaster profiteers?
Well, this is interesting . . .
It’s been a while since I focused on the environment side of the whole “global change” thing that this blog is supposed to be covering . . . at least directly. Pretty much everything we do in development is connected to the environment – indeed, of late I have been referring to climate change as development’s Kevin Bacon while at work: I can get you from climate change to a development challenge, or vice versa, in three steps or less. But I have not been writing much on the subject directly.
However, thanks to Garry over at Resilience Science, I’ve just read a really interesting article in Science (and a nice counterpoint to the recent bin Laden ambulance chasing in that journal) by Steve Carpenter and a bunch of others on Early Warnings of Regime Shifts in ecosystems. For years, I have been teaching my students about the challenges of global environmental change, and trying to impress upon them that the part of these changes I find most worrying are the parts that are hardest to predict – the thresholds when particular biophysical systems might make sudden, discontinuous transitions to new states. What has worried me, and I think much of the global change community, the most is the fact that we are not sure where these thresholds are, nor are we sure what it looks like when we approach one. Thus, there is a pervasive concern within the community that we won’t know we’ve crossed a threshold or done something irreversible.
Carpenter and his co-authors, however, tested the hypothesis that “catastrophic ecological regime shifts may be announced in advance by statistical early-warning signals such as slowing return rates from perturbation and rising variance” by artifically inducing a regime shift in an aquatic food web (Carpenter is a limnologist – he does lakes, as it were) while monitoring a nearby similar lake as a control. Their finding: they could see statistical warnings of an impending regime shift for more than a year before it occurred, validating their chosen early warning indicators (chosen from previously constructed understandings of the food web in question, and a bit much to synthesize here).
That there might be early warning indicators, or that the variables chosen by Carpenter, et al served as useful early warning indicators for regime change in this particular system are not terribly surprising. What is interesting, though, is that the authors were able to demonstrate in a real-world (experimental) context (as opposed to desk theorization) that the early warning signals of regime shift are in fact detectable and measurable. Granted, this is for a small, bounded food web – but the demonstration is important in a much wider way. If we can find early warning indicators for regime shift in a small food web, there is no reason why we cannot find indicators for other complex systems – we can find a lot more early warning indicators of the discontinuous changes we fear, and in enough time to possibly address those changes before they occur.
But one big caveat here: this study did not reveal the actual mechanisms of regime shift. As the authors note:
The precise mechanism of the nonlinear transitions is not known for our experiment; it could be one of the processes proposed in the literature, or something else. These early warning signals are expected to occur for a wide class of nonlinear transitions (7). Even though the mechanism is not known, manipulation of an apex predator triggered a nonlinear food web transition that was signaled by early warning indicators more than a year before the food web transition was complete. Thus the early warning indicators appear to be useful even in cases where the form of the potential regime shift is not known.
It seems to me that there is a serious risk of conflating correlation and causation here – that the authors got a bit lucky in this experiment, but that in other systems without an adequate understanding of the mechanisms of change, false correlations could cause us to lose the signal of regime shift in the noise of inappropriate data points. I’m not sure how, or if, they intend to address this . . . but I think they will have to, if we are to usefully apply this to our food-producing ecosystems in a manner that allows us to think about sustainable development and food security in a meaningful way . . .