Max Boykoff is quoted in a Foreign Policy article on climate wars:

Exporting Climate Skepticism
Some of the most advanced countries in the world are increasingly rejecting climate change. But where did they get this idea? America, it seems.
by Kate Galbraith

The language in the climate wars has gone from academic and polite to downright venomous.

In England, Prince Charles has dubbed climate skeptics the “headless chicken brigade.” (Perhaps he was recalling the grim fate of some chickens on his estate a few years back.) In Australia, Maurice Newman, a top business advisor to the prime minister who’s in the skeptic camp, has decried “climate change madness” and proclaimed that “the scientific delusion, the religion behind the climate crusade, is crumbling.” In the United States, a Time magazine writer accused Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer of “unfrozen Caveman lawyer naiveté” for questioning climate science. “The next step is book burning,” Krauthammer fired back at critics.

This is good stuff for headline writers. But what’s more interesting is that these debates are playing out all over the world — more specifically, over much of the English-speaking world. Britain, Australia, and the United States are all grappling with politically powerful voices that question the scientific consensus that humans contribute significantly to climate change. “Is the BBC becoming the U.K. version of Fox News on global warming?” the Guardian recently asked, lamenting the “disproportionate air time” given to climate-skeptic talking heads.

Skepticism — or, more potently, denialism — matters because it stalls action. The United States has virtually abandoned the idea of cap and trade and turned to narrower power plant regulations. Australia, as another example, is backing away from its cap-and-trade and carbon-tax plans in favor of a fuzzier reverse-auction system in which companies will compete to sell emissions-abatement credits back to a government fund. And it leads into some other questions I’ve been mulling for a long time: Did the United States export climate skepticism to its best allies? And can we reel it back in?

The United States, where powerful industries are skilled at downplaying environmental risks, appears to have embraced the skeptic movement first, in the run-up to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Back then, as now, a network of conservative think tanks churned out skeptics to question global warming science in congressional testimony and in news articles, as recounted in this 2003 academic paper, “Defeating Kyoto.” (The term “climate skepticism” is said to have arrived around 1995.) A rightward political shift was also at work as Republicans took control of Congress in 1994. The United States never ratified Kyoto, and the movement has remained entrenched ever since — and spread around the world.

Skepticism, in at least some of its flavors, is obviously a good thing for science.  European researchers sometimes embrace the skeptic label, because that’s what they’re supposed to do — question things. “In the absence of political polarization as it exists in the United States, European scientists are more ready to call themselves skeptics,” Andreas Kraemer, the head of Ecologic Institute in Berlin, told me. Skepticism has refined our understanding of climate change in good ways over the past century, as scientists have better layered water vapor, volcanoes, and other factors onto their greenhouse-gas models. Climate is so complex that there are plenty of things we don’t fully understand yet, as a February 2014 paper by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and Britain’s Royal Society duly noted.

But a scientific consensus does exist that humans are courting catastrophe by changing and warming the climate. The National Academy and the Royal Society are only the latest in a long, long line to say that very clearly.

So why, then, does the belief persist in some of the most advanced countries of the world that this is not the case? Climate skepticism is apparently on the rise in Britain, where a poll last year found that the proportion of people who doubt change is happening has more than quadrupled since 2005, to 19 percent. (Perhaps the recent flooding will change some minds back.) Likewise, a fifth of Australians do not believe climate change is happening.

The originator of all this appears to be the United States, where about 15 percent of respondents have told Gallup that global warming will never produce any effect. “Definitely there’s a lot of common agreement that this kind of brand of [climate] contrarianism emanated from the United States,” said Max Boykoff of the University of Colorado. But Bernd Sommer, a humanities scholar at the University of Flensburg in Germany, argues that a gradual diffusion has taken place. Serious climate skeptics, he said, are “part of an international knowledge community. This does not mean that they are formally or personally connected. However, they visit the same websites and blogs, refer to the same studies, data, and skeptics’ arguments.”

English-language connections and media polarization help spread the trend. James Painter, who heads a journalism fellowship program at Oxford University, surveyed newspapers in Brazil, China, France, India, the United States, and the United Kingdom in a 2011 paper and found that climate skepticism, in its various stripes, appears to be “a predominantly Anglo-Saxon phenomenon.” Partly due to the “climate-gate” scandal, skeptic representation increased between the two three-month periods he surveyed, in 2007, and between 2009 and 2010. (Sommer, the German academic, also notes that the failure of the Copenhagen climate meeting, the economic crisis, and some long, frigid winters in Europe may have fanned skeptic flames.) In a separate study, Painter says that he also found that voices skeptical of climate change “were more present in more articles in Australia, U.S., and U.K. than France, Norway, and India.”

Why? Inevitably, it’s a number of factors. For one thing, British and American newspapers tend to quote politicians more extensively on climate matters than papers in other countries — and politicians, to say the least, don’t always stick to the science. (A contrast is France, where “some people argue that … there is a much stronger respect for science and scientists amongst the political class and the general population,” said Painter.) The opinion pages of British and American papers give ample play to skeptics, and lobby groups are strong and well-financed. Joint transatlantic ownership of the media could play a role. And a shared language, of course, makes it easier to transmit skeptical bloggers’ ideas.

But there’s more to it. It’s hard to pin down, but skepticism appears prevalent in some advanced extraction economies, or nations that value growth above the environment. It is true of the United States, with its get-the-feds-off-my-back Tea Party clamor. It’s also true of Australia, where mining and natural resources have been key drivers of economic growth. Poland, which is hungry for coal and fracking, also has a vein of climate skepticism. Britain seems to fit this model, too, with its relative openness to fracking and ambivalence toward European regulations. Developing countries are different: They seem less skeptical of climate change, perhaps because they are eager to blame weather woes on the rich world. It’s notable that in China, a major extraction economy, skepticism is relatively limited; the Chinese Academy of Sciences recently rebuked the Heartland Institute for thinking it was getting cozy with skeptics.

One of the best climate-change quotes of all time landed this month, from Andrew Mackenzie, chief executive of Australia’s mining giant BHP Billiton. “You can’t argue with a rock,” he told an energy conference in Houston, in citing geologic evidence of climate change. But even if global leaders like Mackenzie come around, my prediction is that skepticism is going to be harder to dislodge in the United States than in the rest of the world. After all, it was made in the U.S.A.

Roger Pielke, Jr. was highlighted in a New York Times blog on climate variability and drought.

A Climate Analyst Clarifies the Science Behind California’s Water Woes
by Andrew C. Revkin
March 6, 2014

Excerpt:  There’s no question that residents of California and much of the West face a collision between high water demands driven by growth and outdated policies and a limited and highly variable water supply.

But that reality hasn’t stopped heated arguments from springing up in recent days over the cause or causes of California’s continuing epic drought. Is one of the drivers the growing human influence on the climate? Or is this drought something we’ve seen before, the result of natural variability?

In the wake of an unusual public debate on this issue between President Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren, and Roger Pielke, Jr., a longtime analyst of climate-related disaster losses at the University of Colorado, I received a helpful note from Martin Hoerling, who studies climate extremes for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Hoerling’s conclusions echo those of another longtime student of western drought, Richard Seager of Columbia University, as reported in Justin Gillis’s recent news report on the issue. “I’m pretty sure the severity of this thing is due to natural variability,” Seager told Gillis.

Here’s Hoerling’s note:

The California drought and its relation to climate change seems to be an issue deserving more discussion. You may have read some of the exchange between Roger Pielke, Jr., and John Holdren regarding the issue of the California drought, and the possible role of climate change. You may have also have read the Joe Romm post [on Climate Progress].

To say that there is interest to know if the California drought is appreciably related to human induced climate change is an understatement just from reading these rather acidic exchanges.

It is surprising to me when the government’s chief scientist feels compelled to respond…to the remarks of a single university professor, Roger Pielke, Jr., on that subject [as cited by a Senate subcommittee].

Andy, Ive been engaged in understanding this drought event, having just returned from Sacramento where I briefed a group of water managers and emergency responders on the drought. [The event: “California Drought Outlook Forum: What’s Ahead and What We Can Do.”]

This drought has many of the attributes of past historical droughts over the region — widespread lack of storms and rainfall that would normally enter the region from the Pacific with considerable frequency. It resembles the 1975-76 and 1976-77 California droughts, when two consecutive years were at least as dry as the last two years have been for the state as a whole.

The bottom line is that this type of drought has been observed before. And, to state the obvious, this drought has occurred principally due to a lack of rains, not principally due to warmer temperatures.

This may seem pretty obvious (and trivial) from simple inspection of historical observations, and indeed this drought is quite familiar to anyone who lived in California during the mid-1970s, as I did.

But the obligations for water have greatly increased in the state, and it may very well be that the stress created by the current failed rains is more severe than for similar rainfall deficits 40 years earlier. Without making a strong claim, it is at least intuitive that sociological and economic changes in California could be reducing resiliency to natural hazards, like drought. Such points have been made in many contexts regarding natural hazards and changes in human society — quite clearly and defensibly by Roger Pielke, Jr. — and this California situation may be in that same spirit.

Read more …

CSTPR’s Xi Wang was recently featured in CIRES’ Spheres science magazine on the work she did on renewable energy curtailment with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The 2014 edition focuses on Energy and the Environment.

Spheres, Edition 08
Energy and Environment 2014
The story “Waste Not” is at the top of page 8.

In the world of electricity, generators must provide the exact amount of energy, second by second, that users demand. But some conventional power plants, fueled by coal or nuclear, cannot be turned on and off like a light switch. So when demand drops very low, instead of reducing nuclear or coal production, which can’t easily drop below a certain base load, the power grid reduces production of renewable energy—below the amount these sources potentially could provide.Such reductions, called curtailment, allow energy production to equal energy demand, but also permit potential energy to drift away in the wind. Xi Wang, a CIRES graduate student with the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, and her colleagues at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, recently reported on curtailment practices worldwide.

They found that countries interested in bolstering the re-newables industry are attempting to mitigate curtailment, because high curtailment levels discourage investors: No one wants to produce energy they can’t sell.

Mitigation strategies vary from changes in energy markets to government incentives. “In many areas, for example, renewable energy generators now can offer bids into a wholesale electric-ity market,” Wang says. “If their bid is accepted, their energy is dispatched. When renewables can bid into the market like other generation sources, they know they’re competing based on market demands.” In other regions, especially Europe, energy providers compensate renewable-energy producers for curtailed energy. Curtailment takes another form too: Construction of transmission lines is expensive and can lag behind construction of wind and solar farms, so at times, not all the energy from a wind or solar farm can be transported to cities. So, completing transmission projects would also help maximize renewables’ potential. “We hope other regions encountering increasing curtailment can better plan by incorporating some of these successful mitigation strategies,” Wang says.