Flawed study on impact of climate change on damages from Atlantic hurricanes ignores one of its own references and many key factors

Anthropogenic climate change will almost certainly increase the number of the most destructive hurricanes (see “Nature: Hurricanes ARE getting fiercer “” and it’s going to get much worse” and NOAA here, the source of the figure).

Also, while this has not been modeled much, warming will put more water in the air above the ocean for hurricanes to sweep up and deluge down, as Kevin Trenberth, head of NCAR’s Climate Analysis Section, explains here.

A trickier question is how that will translate into an increase in landfilling hurricane and, even trickier, how much that will translate into increased damage, when you have to correct for non-climatic factors that would increase damage (population and GDP growth) and those that would decrease damage (better hurricane warning and building codes).  Hurricanes are uniquely difficult to do this kind of analysis for because, as Judith Curry has pointed out, “It’s the strongest storms that matter most.”

“More than half the total hurricane damage in the U.S. (normalized for inflation and populations trends) was caused by just five events,” explained MIT hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel in an email to me a while back. Storms that are Category 4 and 5 at landfall (or just before) are what destroy major cities like New Orleans and Galveston with devastating winds, rains, and storm surges.  One extra Cat 4 or 5 hitting Miami and you’ve obliterated the damage records.

So one thing you can safely say about a hurricane damage analysis study:  Its conclusions should not be generalized into broader conclusions about the impact of climate change on extreme weather.

Into this mix comes a new study, “Emergence time scales for detection of anthropogenic climate change in US tropical cyclone loss data,” by Crompton, Pielke and McAneney (PDF here via the NYT/ClimateWire article).  Yes, it’s that Pielke (see Foreign Policy’s “Guide to Climate Skeptics” includes Roger Pielke, Jr.), who just can’t avoid making an outrageous and baseless attack on the integrity of those whose real-world data happen to disagree with his widely-criticized modeling:

The study concludes, unjustifiably, as we’ll see:

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Money can buy you weaker regulations, an unlivable climate, extremists running Congress, and bad science (see “New Yorker exposes Koch brothers along with their greenwashing and whitewashing Smithsonian exhibit“).  But it can’t buy you love.

Lee Fang of ThinkProgress has the story of greenwashing gone awry:

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Jack Gerard applauds Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI).

In a high-powered rollout at the glossy Newseum, the head of the big oil lobby argued that America today needs to reduce taxes and expand drilling for oil companies. Like a broken clock, American Petroleum Institute President and CEO Jack Gerard repeated his annual call for lower oil taxes and expanded drilling, arguing it would increase jobs and even government revenue, based on a new study from oil consultancy Wood Mackenzie.

Before he made his remarks, Gerard heralded the appearance of Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), the new chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee who now rejects limits on oil pollution. Gerard’s speech, and his answers to the questions from the audience, emphasized thousands of jobs tied to “access” to trillions of dollars of oil and natural gas, but also touched on other topics:

On the BP Gulf of Mexico disaster: “I’m proud of the way the industry responded.”

On the oil industry’s safety record: “There is always room for improvement.”

On the future: “Policymakers face two choices: one takes us forward, one takes us backward.”

On global warming pollution: “The Clean Air Act was never thought of to regulate greenhouse gases.”

Gerard’s central argument, that what’s good for Big Oil is good for America, depends on several key fallacies. The most important fact Gerard ignores is true cost of oil — more drilling means more disasters, more pollution, more risk, more global warming, more sickness and death. Even ignoring the existential threat of global warming, oil consumption in the United States causes the premature death of at least 10,000 Americans a year. API’s projection of increasing demand for oil and natural gas for the next several decades would make catastrophic global warming — including mass species extinction, crop devastation, and rapid sea level rise — unavoidable.

The other key fact Gerard ignores is that the oil industry is extremely inefficient at creating jobs — you could even call it a job killer. In fact, you get four times as many clean energy jobs as oil jobs from the same investment. If the federal government raised taxes on the oil industry by $5 billion per year, and invested the revenues into clean energy, that would create a net job gain of 75,000 jobs. Even API’s chief economist John Felmy has admitted that this analysis is accurate. “I have no doubts you can get a lot more jobs,” he said, when asked what would happen if the government invested in clean energy instead of the oil and natural gas sector.

Finally, Gerard’s claim that the Clean Air Act was not meant to regulate greenhouse gases is nonsensical. The U.S. Supreme Court — whose job it is to interpret laws — found that greenhouse emissions are pollutants under the Clean Air Act. This is no surprise, since the law as written includes effects on “climate” and “weather” in the definition of pollution:

All language referring to effects on welfare includes, but is not limited to, effects on soils, water, crops, vegetation, manmade materials, animals, wildlife, weather, visibility, and climate, damage to and deterioration of property, and hazards to transportation, as well as effects on economic values and on personal comfort and well-being, whether caused by transformation, conversion, or combination with other air pollutants.

Policymakers do indeed face two choices — going back towards the 19th-century world of dirty energy and robber barons, or forward to a clean, healthy, prosperous future.

This guest post by Miloslav Nic was first published on Skeptical Science.

This is a post about my website Zvon.org where I’ve created a resource for the IPCC 4th Assessment Report (AR4). I’ve created a searchable database of almost every peer-reviewed paper referenced in the AR4, with links to each paper’s abstract and lists of all the authors. This provides a powerful tool that lets you search the AR4 by author, subject, title and journal.

I used to be an organic chemist in the last millennium who reached a tipping point in 2000 and was irreversibly transformed to a computer specialist. The primary forcing behind my change was the foundation of site Zvon.org which became quite well known among XML programmers.

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The incoming Republican chairs of the House of Representatives plan to send the United States back to the Stone Age with respect to climate policy. All of them opposed the climate legislation supported by President Barack Obama, and now oppose limits on global warming pollution under the Clean Air Act. Several have accused climate scientists of doctoring data and suppressing dissent; the others merely claim climate policy is actually a conspiracy to destroy the American economy.

Brad Johnson has the line-up of climate zombies who will be in charge of developing all federal legislation for the next two years:

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Pracht: “Where would Ohio be today if it opted out of the interstate highway system?”

John Kasich, the newly tea-party governor of Ohio doesn’t just deny climate science.  He is apparently unaware that everyone from the German military to the once staid International Energy Agency is warning of a looming peak oil crisis (see World’s top energy economist warns: “We have to leave oil before oil leaves us”).

And so the Tea Party crowd is declaring unilateral disarmament in our effort to stop the nearly $1 billion day outflow of money from Americans to foreign oil producer (see “Passenger rail is not in Ohio’s future”: New GOP governors kill $1.2 Billion in high-speed rail jobs).

Kasich can stop passenger rail for now, but he can’t stop the inexorable march of gasoline prices past $3 a gallon to $4 and then $5, which will ultimately reveal how inane his decision was.  The CEO of an Ohio-based railroad-car manufacturer severely criticized Kasich’s myopia, as ThinkProgress reports:

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The incoming Republican chairs of the House of Representatives plan to send the United States back to the Stone Age with respect to climate policy. All of them opposed the climate legislation supported by President Barack Obama, and now oppose limits on global warming pollution under the Clean Air Act. Several have accused climate scientists of doctoring data and suppressing dissent; the others merely claim climate policy is actually a conspiracy to destroy the American economy. Meet the climate zombies who will be in charge of developing all federal legislation for the next two years:

Financial Services: Spencer Bachus (AL). Bachus introduced legislation that accused climate scientists of fraud: “Whereas recent events have uncovered extensive evidence from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England (in this resolution referred to as the ‘CRU’) which involved many researchers across the globe discussing the destruction, altering, and hiding of data that did not support global warming claims.” [H.R. 954]

Ways and Means: Dave Camp (MI). “What is the science of climate change? What can it definitively tell us? Can it say who is responsible for it? Can it tell us what impact we can have on it, and if we can, what are the results, both positive and negative? From what I have read, there remains a great deal of uncertainty with regard to the scientific evidence about climate change.” [Camp, 2/25/09]

Budget: Paul Ryan (WI). “Unilateral economic restraint in the name of fighting global warming has been a tough sell in our communities, where much of the state is buried under snow.” [Racine Journal Times, 12/11/09]

Natural Resources: Doc Hastings (WA). “Over the last few weeks an international summit on climate change took place in Copenhagen, Denmark. It centered around developing a binding international climate change mandate. Unfortunately for the United States, this is likely to do much more harm than good. Instead of allowing all scientific opinions to be heard, this conference was devoid of an honest, comprehensive debate.” [Hastings, 12/18/09]

Oversight and Government Reform: Darrell Issa (CA). “One of the difficulties in examining the issue of the climate change and greenhouse gases is that there is a wide range of scientific opinion on this issue and the science community does not agree to the extent of the problem or the critical threshold of when this problem is truly catastrophic.” [Issa 9/11/09]

Judiciary: Lamar Smith (TX). “We now know that prominent scientists were so determined to advance the idea of human-made global warming that they worked together to hide contradictory temperature data. But for two weeks, none of the networks gave the scandal any coverage on their evening news programs. And when they finally did cover it, their reporting was largely slanted in favor of global warming alarmists.” [Smith, 12/8/09]

Science and Technology: Ralph Hall (TX). “There is growing concern and evidence that scientific data, from which global warming theories emerged, has been manipulated, enhanced or deleted.” [Hall]

Energy and Commerce: Fred Upton (MI). Upton joined the head of Koch’s Americans For Prosperity to question the threat of carbon pollution. “Moreover, the principal argument for a two-year delay is that it will allow Congress time to create its own plan for regulating carbon. This presumes that carbon is a problem in need of regulation. We are not convinced.” [WSJ 12/29/10]

Appropriations: Hal Rogers (KY). “This administration is trying to shut down coal and fire all of you,” claimed Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky., adding that the EPA was practicing “strangulation by regulation.” [AP 9/15/10]

Armed Services: Buck McKeon (CA). “We must put a stop to the radical agenda that is rapidly making its way through Washington in the form of a Cap & Tax climate change bill, federal free-market takeovers, and government run health care systems.” [McKeon, 7/2/09]

Education and Labor: John Kline (MN). Kline attacked the House passage of the Waxman-Markey climate bill. “Created to raise federal revenue and reduce greenhouse emissions, this proposal will, in reality, drive up the price of everyday goods, strain the economy, reduce jobs, and impose a significant cost increase on every American who dares turns on a light.” [Kline, 7/10/09]

Small Business: Sam Graves (MO) and Agriculture: Frank Lucas (OK) In a joint op-ed with Doc Hastings, Lucas and Graves claimed climate legislation and carbon regulation would threaten the fabric of America. “Democrats in Congress have been arrogantly pursuing an ill-conceived cap and trade program that will slam rural families and businesses with a national energy tax. As a result, electricity prices would skyrocket, gas prices would balloon and thousands of jobs in rural America could be lost forever. In a two-pronged attack, President Obama is also instructing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to impose harmful new regulations and mandates on carbon emissions and energy consumption. This government power grab would give the EPA unprecedented authority to regulate anything that emits carbon—including semi-trucks, tractors, lawnmowers and even weed-whackers.” [St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 6/3/10]

Transportation and Infrastructure: John Mica (FL). “Earlier in the 111th Congress, the House of Representatives considered H.R. 2454, the energy tax bill also reffered [sic] to as the Cap and trade bill. I voted against this energy tax bill when it was passed by the House of Representatives by only a margin of seven votes: 219 to 212. The Cap and Tax legislation would impose an energy fee on almost all forms of energy.” [Mica]

A few of the committee chairmen, like Upton, Mica and Kline, have taken the moderate position of being willing to support climate policy, so long as it doesn’t involve any regulation, tax, government spending, or mandate of any kind that would actually reduce pollution. There is support among the Republican caucus for policy to accelerate global warming through new oil and coal subsidies, however.

EU will surpass 20% green energy goal

The European Union will exceed its target of meeting 20 percent of its energy needs from renewable sources by 2020, a report by the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) said on Tuesday.

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