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editor resigns over climate sceptic’s paper

Sunday, September 4th, 2011

Wolfgang Wagner,a professor of remote sensing at Vienna University of Technology, resigned last week as editor of the scientific journal Remote Sensing. He blames himself for having approved publication, in July, of a flawed paper. The paper, co-authored by climate sceptic Roy Spencer, was ‘off topic’ for the journal, so managed to pass peer review.

The editor of a science journal has resigned after admitting that a recent paper casting doubt on man-made climate change should not have been published.

The paper, by US scientists Roy Spencer and William Braswell, claimed that computer models of climate inflated projections of temperature increase.

It was seized on by “sceptic” bloggers, but attacked by mainstream scientists.

Wolfgang Wagner, editor of Remote Sensing journal, says he agrees with their criticisms and is stepping down. ….

Roy Spencer, however, told BBC News: “I stand behind the science contained in the paper itself, as well as my comments published on my blog at drroyspencer.com.

“Our university press release necessarily put our scientific results in lay language, and what we believe they mean in the larger context of global warming research. This is commonly done in press statements made by the IPCC and its scientists, too, when reporting on research which advocates the view that climate change is almost entirely caused by humans.

“The very fact that the public has the perception that climate change is man-made, when in fact there is as yet no way to know with any level of scientific certainty how much is man-made versus natural, is evidence of that.”

Dr Spencer is one of the team at the University of Alabama in Huntsville that keeps a record of the Earth’s temperature as determined from satellite readings.

He is also on the board of directors of the George C Marshall Institute, a right-wing think tank critical of mainstream climate science, and an advisor to the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, an evangelical Christian organisation that claims policies to curb climate change “would destroy jobs and impose trillions of dollars in costs” and “could be implemented only by enormous and dangerous expansion of government control over private life”.

Richard Black, “Journal editor resigns over ‘problematic’ climate paper” BBC News, 2 September 2011.

Here is Prof Wagner, in his own words:

[T]he problem I see with the paper by Spencer and Braswell is not that it declared a minority view (which was later unfortunately much exaggerated by the public media) but that it essentially ignored the scientific arguments of its opponents. This latter point was missed in the review process, explaining why I perceive this paper to be fundamentally flawed and therefore wrongly accepted by the journal. This regrettably brought me to the decision to resign as Editor-in-Chief ….

Wolfgang Wagner, “Editorial: Taking Responsibility on Publishing the Controversial Paper “On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance” by Spencer and Braswell, Remote Sens. 2011, 3(8), 1603-1613″, Remote Sensing 3:8 (2 September 2011), pp. 1603-1613.

There is more information (with links) here.

William Braswell, co-author of the controversial paper, is a colleague of Spencer at the Earth System Science Center, University of Alabama.

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more on Easter Island

Thursday, September 1st, 2011

UCLA professor Jared Diamond, in his best-selling book Collapse (Allen Lane, 2005; Penguin, revised edition, 2011), popularised the thesis of British archaeologist Paul Bahn and others that the collapse of Easter Island was caused by deforestation and internal social problems, long before the arrival of Europeans. Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo argue, in The Statues That Walked (Free Press, 2011), that, despite deforestation, the islanders managed to grow sufficient food and live in relative peace until the Europeans brought germs and violence to their shore.

Paul Bahn, reviewing the book of Hunt and Lipo, concedes that the huge stone statues were moved upright for miles, without need for timber. This is an important concession, for it implies that the islanders could have been carving and moving statues up to the time of the arrival of the Europeans.  Bahn complains, however, that “coverage of work by others is incomplete”.

For example, a variety of evidence contradicts their claim of rat predation: numerous palm fruits not gnawed by rats, palm stumps burned and cut, continued germination of palms despite the rats’ presence, and the disappearance of other plant species that coexist with rats elsewhere. Hunt and Lipo’s claim that human skeletal remains show little evidence of lethal trauma is refuted by quotes from anthropologist Douglas Owsley, the author of a 1994 paper that they reference. After examining more than 600 Easter Island skeletons, Owsley stated in a 2003 BBC documentary that the extreme frequency of injuries proved that these were people at war: “They’re slugging it out, there’s no doubt about it.”

Hunt and Lipo present some of the island’s many features entertainingly, but the history of Rapa Nui is more complex than they allow.

Paul Bahn, “Anthropology: Head to head“, Nature 476 (11 August 2011), pp. 150-151.

Whether rats (who accompanied the human colonizers) or humans themselves were directly responsible for the deforestation of Easter Island is a moot point. A crucial fact – which Bahn in his review does not contest – is that the islanders were healthy, well-fed and peaceful in 1722 when the first Europeans arrived. A society that survived on an inhospitable, treeless island was devastated by previously unknown germs introduced by Europeans. A similar fate awaited numerous tribes and civilisations in the Americas following their contact with Europeans. Hunt and Lipo might overstate their case, but their thesis seems to have more merit that the ‘ecocide’ thesis popularised by Jared Diamond.

Paul Bahn is author (with John Flenley) of Easter Island, Earth Island (Thames & Hudson, 1992).

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response to ecological bottlenecks

Saturday, August 27th, 2011

I am an economist who shares [Jared] Diamond’s worries, but I think he has failed to grasp both the way in which information about particular states of affairs gets transmitted (however imperfectly) in modern decentralised economies – via economic signals such as prices, demand, product quality and migration – and the way increases in the scarcity of resources can itself act to spur innovations that ease those scarcities. ….

Here is an example of what I mean. Forests loom large in Diamond’s case studies. As deforestation was the proximate cause of the Easter Islanders’ demise, he offers an extended, contrasting account of the way a deforested Japan succeeded, in the early 18th century, in averting total disaster by regenerating its forests. Now consider another island: England. Deforestation here began under the Romans …. In the mid-18th century what people saw across the landscape in England wasn’t trees, but stone rows separating agricultural fields. The noted economic historian Brinley Thomas argued that … England became the centre of the Industrial Revolution not because it had abundant energy but because it was running out of energy. France, in contrast, didn’t need to find a substitute energy source: it was covered in forests and therefore lost out. I’m not able to judge the plausibility of Thomas’s thesis … but the point remains that scarcities lead individuals and societies to search for ways out, which often means discovering alternatives. Diamond is dismissive of the possibility of our finding such alternatives in the future because, as he would have it, we are about to come up against natural bottlenecks. We should be persuaded by the evidence that has been gathered over the years by environmental scientists that he is right, but simply telling us that we are about to hit bottlenecks won’t do, because environmental sceptics would reply that discovering alternatives is the way to avoid them.

Partha Dasgupta, “Bottlenecks“, London Review of Books, 19 May 2005.

Recycled from 17 May 2005.

Cambridge University Professor Partha Dasgupta is reviewing Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive (2005). Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo, in a new book, argue convincingly that the Easter Islanders managed to survive and thrive despite deforestation, and that their ‘discovery’ by Europeans – not deforestation – was the proximate cause of their demise. The book by Hunt and Lipo is The Statues that Walked: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island (Free Press, New York, 2011).

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Easter Island

Friday, August 26th, 2011

Anthropologist Terry Hunt (University of Hawaii-Manaoa) and Archaeologist Carl Lipo (California State University-Long Beach) have written a very readable book on the history of Easter Island, or Rapa Nui. Their theory that the island was deforested by rats, not humans, is not accepted by all scholars, but how deforestation occurred is less important than the fact that an indigenous population was able to thrive on an inhospitable, treeless island located far from other human populations. Contact with Europeans proved more fatal than deforestation for the inhabitants of Rapa Nui. This fact, often ignored, is not disputed by scholars.

Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen was the first European to sight Rapa Nui. He spotted the island on Easter Sunday in 1722, and gave it the name “Easter Island”.  He and his crew went ashore to find a treeless island, inhabited by about 3,000 healthy individuals. The visit was devastating for the native population, as was a subsequent visit by the Spanish in 1770, the consequences of which were witnessed by the English Captain James Cook in 1774.

Within three days of their visit ashore, the Dutch had sailed over the horizon ignorant of so much of what had transpired. Indeed, they were ignorant of even the possibilities.  …. [H]ordes of new germs were unleashed, posing a far greater and devastating threat than the muskets that had killed a dozen or so of the Rapanui assembled on the shore just days earlier. What happened next was witnessed only by the victims, the Rapanui themselves. (p. 156)

A catastrophic population collapse would have obliterated the social, political, and economic status quo. The devastating epidemics and longer-term effects of venereal disease, for example, would have come as a shock to the Rapanui.

If by 1725 there were only a few hundred survivors left on Rapa Nui, they effectively ofrmed a new founding population – of survivors. The Rapanui people were isolated again from the outside world and its diseases … and this small group would have rebounded relatively quickly, approaching the original population size, probably within three to four generations.

But in 1770 the onslaught began anew …. [with the arrival of] two [Spanish] warships led by Felipe Gonzales de Haedo …. (p. 158)

While no violence erupted during the Spanish visit, something more potent had been unleashed on Rapa Nui. From the six days on the island and the explicit references to sexual encounters, we can be certain that venereal disease gained a foothold. Epidemic disease must also have followed the Spanish visit, and this time unwitting witnesses of the impact would arrive on the scene within four years: the British. (p. 159)

At the time of Cook’s [three-day] visit, just four years after the Spanish had arrived, the Rapanui were almost certainly suffering in the aftermath of disease outbreaks. Indeed, the 600 to 700 people Cook reports for the island’s population must be survivors of whatever pathogens were introduced and epidemics that ensured. And there are venereal diseases; they don’t kill quickly, but linger to inflict long-term maladies, reproductive problems, and sterility.  (pp. 162-163)

The British were unknowing witnesses to an epidemic that had just passed. But what had just transpired was still incomprehensible to them. They were perplexed by the small population size, what the perceived as poverty, and generally by the disheveled state of things; in hindsight, this is precisely what the aftermath of epidemic and a population crash would look like. (p. 163)

Terry Hunt and Karl Lipo, The Statues that Walked: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island (Free Press, New York, 2011).

Amazon.com sells this short book in hardcover for $15.44 and a Kindle (e-book) version for $23.88. There is no paperback yet available.

TdJ reviewed some of Terry Hunt’s earlier writings on Rapa Nui in 2006 and 2009.

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paper recycling and trees

Thursday, August 25th, 2011

Two years ago TdJ posted a statement of University of Toronto philosopher Joseph Heath with the title “Paper recycling can be bad for the planet“. Heath’s argument in essence was:

Why are there so many cows in the world? Because people eat cows. Not only that, but the number of cows in the world is a precise function of the number that are eaten. If people decided to eat less beef, there would be fewer cows. Yet the same is true of trees.

In the current issue of the Canadian Journal of Economics, two economists from the University of Montreal reach the same conclusion, with a sophisticated model that embodies precisely the same reasoning. Here is the abstract of their paper:

Interest in recycling of forest products has grown in recent years, one of the goals being to conserve trees or possibly increase their number to compensate for positive externalities generated by the forest and neglected by the market. This paper explores the issue as to whether recycling is an appropriate measure to attain such a goal. We do this by considering the problem of the private owner of an area of land, who, acting as a price taker, decides how to allocate his land over time between forestry and some other use, and at what age to harvest the forest area chosen. Once the forest is cut, he makes a new land allocation decision and replants. He does so indefinitely, in a Faustmann-like framework. The wood from the harvest is transformed into a final product that is partly recycled into a substitute for the virgin wood, so that past output affects the current price. We show that in such a context, increasing the rate of recycling will result in less area being devoted to forestry. It will also have the effect of increasing the harvest age of the forest, as long as the planting cost is positive. The net effect on the flow of virgin wood being harvested to supply the market will as a result be ambiguous. An important point, however, is that recycling will result in fewer trees in the long run, not more. It would therefore be best to resort to other means if the goal is to conserve the area devoted to forestry.

Didier Tatoutchoup and Gérard Gaudet, “The impact of recycling on the long-run forestry“, Canadian Journal of Economics 44:3 (August 2011), pp. 804-813.

The link is to an earlier version of the paper, which has a slightly different title: “The Impact of Recycling on the Long-Run Stock of Trees”.

For the moment, I continue to toss all old paper into designated recycling bins, but should reconsider this action, given its negative effect on the number of trees, hence positive effect on greenhouse gases.

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government taxes and spending

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

Economics journalist David Leonhardt has posted an interesting interview with British economist Diane Coyle. He asked:

In the context of the huge long-term deficits facing rich countries, you say that recent generations have been living beyond their means. What do you think is the one kind of tax increase that would best help us live within our means? And, similarly, the one kind of spending cut?

[Ms. Coyle answered:]

The current system of taxes and government spending encourages consumption and the over-use of resources today and creates too little incentive to save and invest. The one tax to increase now is a carbon tax. You don’t even have to worry about climate change to accept it has many benefits. In particular, it will encourage innovation in noncarbon-based energy supplies from renewables to nuclear. This is a field in which the U.S. and other Western economies could build on their strong science base to build an area of technological strength for the future, and at the same time reduce dependence on oil and gas imports from overseas. There are multiple good reasons for introducing a carbon tax.

Government spending needs to be redirected away from massive corporate subsidies — including to the financial sector but also big companies in health care and agribusiness — and instead towards infrastructure investment and education (which is infrastructure of a different kind for the digital economy). But the really painful cut in expenditure needs to be in government support for older people. Across the Western economies, retirement ages and the age threshold for benefits from the government will have to increase. If not, healthy and active over-60s benefiting from the taxes of a declining proportion of working people in the population are going to bankrupt the government and undermine the arrangement of mutual benefit that keeps any society stable. And, yes, I’m fully planning on working until I’m 70.

David Leonhardt, “Making Choices ‘as if the Future Matters’“, Economix, 17 June 2011.

I like Ms. Coyle’s response, up to the point where she recommends that government reduce its support for older people. Those who work with their minds can continue to be productive to age 70, or even longer. But those whose jobs require physical effort will find it difficult to delay retirement to such an advanced age.

One of the benefits of economic growth is the possibility of increased leisure time. Just as residents of wealthy countries no longer have to work 12 hours a day, six days a week, they are no longer forced to keep working until they drop dead. Retirement is a luxury, but it is an affordable luxury for those of us fortunate enough to live in advanced economies.

Ms. Coyle would be on firmer ground if she simply stated that governments should not penalize those who continue working beyond the state retirement age. Government support for the elderly, in other words, should not be conditional on retirement, or should at least compensate pensioners fairly for delaying retirement. But this is not what she says.

British economist Diane Coyle (born 1961) is author of The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as If the Future Matters (Princeton University Press, 2011). A copy is on my desk, and I hope to read it soon.

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urban farms and the environment

Saturday, June 18th, 2011

Harvard economist Ed Glaeser explains that the local food movement does more harm than good to the environment.

There are many good reasons to like local food, but any large-scale metropolitan farming will do more harm than good to the environment. Devoting scarce metropolitan land to agriculture means lower density levels, longer drives, and carbon emission increases which easily offset the modest greenhouse gas reductions associated with shipping less food. ….

Shipping food is just far less energy intensive than moving people. If the First Lady [Michelle Obama] wants to help the environment, she should campaign for high rise apartments, rather than plant vegetables.

Edward L. Glaeser. “The locavore’s dilemma“, Boston Globe, 16 June 2011.

Professor Glaeser (born 1967) is author of Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (Penguin Books, 2011). He writes a monthly column for the Boston Globe and blogs at Economix.

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the human body as ecosystem

Saturday, April 2nd, 2011

When invaders to manage to get in, our ecosystem changes. Experiments have shown that when pathogens invade a mouse’s gut, the diversity of its residents drops. The effect is akin to what happened when [fish called] alewives recolonized Connecticut lakes: they sent shock waves through the food webs. Another shock to our inner ecology comes from antibiotics. Antibiotics not only wipe out the pathogens that make us sick, but a lot of the ones that make us healthy. When antibiotics work, only the beneficial bacteria grow back. But the body’s ecosystem is different when it recovers, and it can remain different for months, or even years.

In the September 2010 issue of the journal Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, a team of researchers looked over this sort of research and issued a call to doctors to rethink how they treat their patients. One of the section titles sums up their manifesto: “War No More: Human Medicine in the Age of Ecology.” The authors urge doctors to think like ecologists, and to treat their patients like ecosystems. ….

[O]bese mice have a different microbial ecosystem than regular mice. And if you take the stool from one of these obese mice and transplant it into a mouse that has been raised germ-free, the recipient mouse will gain more weight than recipients of normal gut microbes. The microbes themselves are altering how obese mice are processing energy.

Obesity is just one medical disorder among many that the microbiome can influence. It’s also been linked inflammatory bowel disease, obesity [sic], colon cancer, hypertension, asthma, and vascular disease. If we can manipulate our inner ecosystem, we may be able to treat some of these diseases.

Carl Zimmer, “The Human Lake“, Loom (Discover blogs), 31 March 2011.

Science writer Carl Zimmer (b. 1966) is author of numerous books, including Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life (Pantheon, 2008). In this blog entry, he takes us on a long journey from G. Evelyn Hutchinson (1903-1991), regarded as the father of modern ecology, to biophysicist Max Delbrück (1906-1981), who received a Nobel Prize in 1969, then on to the recent work of University of Minnesota gastroenterologist Dr Alexander Khoruts.

This is a fascinating story, richly illustrated, that all will enjoy.

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energy efficiency and greenhouse gases

Tuesday, March 8th, 2011

Columnist John Tierney reports that increased energy efficiency cannot be relied on to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and are likely to increase emissions. The problem is known as the ‘rebound effect’ or ‘Jevons paradox‘, named after English economist William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882). Improvements in fuel efficiency, Jevons warned, do not reduce total consumption of fuel.

[A] growing number of economists say that the environmental benefits of energy efficiency have been oversold. Paradoxically, there could even be more emissions as a result of some improvements in energy efficiency, these economists say.

The problem is known as the energy rebound effect. While there’s no doubt that fuel-efficient cars burn less gasoline per mile, the lower cost at the pump tends to encourage extra driving. There’s also an indirect rebound effect as drivers use the money they save on gasoline to buy other things that produce greenhouse emissions, like new electronic gadgets or vacation trips on fuel-burning planes. ….

Consider what’s happened with lighting over the past three centuries. As people have switched from candles to oil-powered lamps to incandescent bulbs and beyond, the amount of energy needed to produce a unit of light has plummeted. Yet people have found so many new places to light that today we spend the same proportion of our income on light as our much poorer ancestors did in 1700, according to an analysis published last year in The Journal of Physics by researchers led by Jeff Tsao of Sandia National Laboratories.  ….

But if the benefits of energy efficiency have been oversold, then that’s more reason to consider alternatives like a carbon tax ….

John Tierney, “When Energy Efficiency Sullies the Environment“, New York Times, 8 March 2011.

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the dangers of convergence

Wednesday, January 12th, 2011

Wise words of caution from Martin Wolf.

Now that we have the capacity to destroy civilisation, relations among powerful states have become perilous. After the use of the atomic bomb, Albert Einstein argued that “the only salvation for civilisation and the human race lies in the creation of world government”. Einstein was condemned as naive but his comment might still be true.

The “great convergence” [of living standards] is an epoch-making transformation. It is the spread of the energy-abundant economy to much of humanity. But if we do not manage the consequent pressure on resources, it may end in misery; and if we do not manage the shifts in power, it may end in war.

Martin Wolf, “East and west converge on a problem“, Financial Times, 12 January 2011.

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