Asking the wrong question - biofuels

I don't want to do a full scale critique of biofuels - not least because that would be to enter an already crowded field [see Biofuelwatch and Global Subsidies Initiative, for example]. But it's worth looking at how narrowly-focussed, bottom-up policy-making now means we have somehow put the most financial support into the worst ideas...

Instead of asking how to reduce transport emissions from road fuel substitution, we should be asking how to make use of land to tackle climate change in the most effective way possible. In coming up with the biofuels targets, policy-makers have asked, and answered, the wrong question. It's not hard to see why... transport policy-makers have to find transport policies. The results: waste, damage and lost opportunities to do better...
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Don't ditch the Kyoto Protocol

My otherwise peaceful morning slumber was disturbed by a radio interview announcing that social scientists Steve Rayner and Gwin Prins want to 'ditch the Kyoto Protocol'. In a Nature commentary, Time to ditch the Kyoto Protocol, they have a go at the Kyoto Protocol and claim that 'political correctness' is inhibiting proper criticism and unnamed Kyoto supporters insist that Kyoto must remain the only game in town, sternly admonishing any dissenters to this orthodoxy. Luckily for us these fearless academics are ready to speak out. The trouble is, they have nothing much to say!

Yes, it is true that current efforts to control greenhouse gases are inadequate and that emissions are still rising and accelerating when they need to be slowing and falling - see chart [data from CAIT] - see also BBC item. So we do have prima facie evidence of failure. Or more optimistically, it's too early to see success in a multi-decade effort. But any failure so far is a reflection of insufficient political will and its wicked uncle, human short-termism, rather than the design of the Kyoto Protocol.
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Useless scientific advice

I lifted the box to the left from the Wall Street Journal, a newspaper that has to be clear, concise and to the point in its communications or its busy and clever readers buy the Financial Times instead. If only the European Commission could choose where it gets its scientific advice, and the scientists involved felt some pressure to be clear, concise and to the point. Alas, I came to read the preliminary report of the European Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks on the subject of smokeless tobacco [PDF]. This will inform European public health policy, and if it was barely competent, it would lead to the lifting of the absurd policy of banning 'oral tobacco' (smokeless tobacco) in the EU outside Sweden. However, despite hundreds of citations and pages of data, the report doggedly conceals, obfuscates and evades the most obvious and important conclusions.

My response to the Committee: Suffice to say, I have been driven to pen a response. This required two components: an on-line response to constrained questions set by the Committee (see here), and a fuller response (see here) covering the broader failings of the work.

Not stating the obvious, focussing on the obscure. Because smokeless tobacco is many times less hazardous than smoking and can substitute for smoking, there are potential large public health gains to be had (or more likely lost, if the stuff continues to be banned). Sweden has the highest rates of smokeless tobacco use and lowest rates of tobacco-related cancer, respiratory and cardiovascular disease. Instead we ban the product and prevent other countries benefiting in this way. You would have expected these insights to form the core of the assessment. I really don't know why they are avoiding this: I can only assume someone involved thinks they are duty-bound to ensure these tobacco products stay banned on the ultra-naive basis that banning something harmful must be progress. But how does distortion and evasion help protect anyone? Apparently, several of the external experts are fed up, perhaps to the point of a walk-out, with the clear bias and manipulation in the drafting of the report's conclusions. The most important part of any scientific assessment is the framing of the issues - my initial memo to the Committee in January 2006 addressed this. As I had expected, it was roundly ignored but I think this now accounts for the problems.

The report actually does quite a good job of surveying the literature, but it is marred by misinterpretation and inappropriate conclusions drawn from the evidence. Glaring and important truths are ignored or sidelined (er, the very low levels of disease in Sweden hardly features) and great effort is expended on trivial detail - others more expert than me will no doubt tear its flawed inferences apart. But I'll highlight three major failings here that I think transcend the tobacco / public health issues:

1. Communicating risk. The report discusses at great length whether the use of smokeless tobacco is hazardous and addictive. It is. Everyone knows it is. But risk is only interesting if quantified in some way and set in context. Bacon is hazardous to health and coffee addictive. What is missing in this report is some sort of spectrum of risk - with common consumer risks at one end (eating meat), medicinal nicotine, smokeless tobacco - in all its various forms, smoking, drinking hemlock etc. That way, we would know how much to worry about a few extra people using smokeless tobacco that would otherwise have remained tobacco-free, compared to how much we might hope to gain if other people used smokeless tobacco instead of smoking. In fact, the risks of smokeless tobacco use vary markedly between products - but this range is compressed into one end of the spectrum that has combustible tobacco products clustered at the other end.

2. Communicating knowledge in conditions of uncertainty. Whether lazy or manipulative, scientists are often very poor at dealing with uncertainty - saying what is known, even if it is not known beyond reasonable doubt. There is a tendency to say 'no evidence' when what they really mean is that there are no randomised controlled trials showing significant results at greater than 95% confidence. But this is just an arbitrary, if widely used, convention in medical literature. In policy work, insights based on the balance of probabilities are often more important and a good scientific assessment will help policy makers through the difficulties of understanding knowledge where there is not high certainty. In trying to find a way of putting this to the Committee I came across the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Guidance notes to lead authors on addressing uncertainties, which I think is an excellent guide and should be required reading for anyone working at the science-policy interface.

3. Burden of proof. Who should be doing the proving and what are the hypotheses? I think there is an in-built bias in so-called evidence-based policy making that favours the status quo. The problem is that high evidential hurdles are set as a pre-condition to justifying doing something new, but the case for carrying on with the current approach may not even be scrutinised and most probably questions never asked. The right way is to assess all the options including staying with the status quo taking a balance of probabilities approach. The ban on smokeless tobacco is an extreme case, but amazingly no-one seems to think it is important to justify the partial ban on smokeless tobacco in the EU - a bizarre intervention, and utterly without precedent, to ban a much less hazardous product variant than the market leader, in this case cigarettes.

One more small reason to despair at the European Union - to me, a completely vital institution in a globalising world. But it does too much of the wrong things, does too many things incompetently that it should do well, and does not do enough of what it really needs to do. A subject I'll be returning to....! ... continues. Read full post.

Land use and food security

One of the big questions for me is whether we devote too much land to farming and not enough to land use for wildlife, wilderness, woodland, places to walk and places to live etc. that is land for its 'amenity' value or for development. About 70% of England is given over to farming and only about 10% to development (see my earlier posting), yet surveys show most people think that much more land (>50%) is developed than really is (see Q1 in this survey for the Barker Review). The survey also shows that people have strong preferences for land for its wildlife and landscape value (Q3).

So, why don't we have more national parks, reforest large areas of rural England, get most of the sheep off the uplands, switch to extensive low impact agriculture producing high-quality and high-value foods, open up access to land, fill the countryside with helpful signposts and paths and let people enjoy living in England? I was out walking in the Thames Valley this weekend - very nice, but I did wonder why there was so much sheep farming going on what must be some of the most highly prized real estate in the land. An occasional sortie out of the city reveals just how much space there is given over to low value agriculture, even in crowded South East England.

The argument that usually comes back is some variation on 'we need domestic farming for food security' or worries about the loss of self-sufficiency in food production. We might become more dependent on food imports, and that would be A Bad Thing. So how credible is the food security argument? Indeed, what exactly is the argument? I think it takes us to the heart of the great debate about land use that there ought to be. In summary, I think the food security argument is entirely bogus, but a key question for land use policy becomes 'how much should we consider the international impacts of what we do domestically?' ...

What is food security?
Most definitions [here][Wikipedia] are based on people having access an adequately nutritious diet. But the concept spans a range from having sufficient calories to remain alive to maintaining affordable choice in the diet - kumquats in January and affordable Piedmont white truffles at all times. Although often expressed in terms of access, food security is really an economic concept - about having the means to buy food, and about being near enough people with the means to create a market. Even the worst famines rarely arise from absolute food shortages, but loss of purchasing power and market failures (See Economist on Niger famine, Amartya Sen, Poverty & Famines) and few people actually starve in a famine - rather they die through infectious diseases. The symptoms of food insecurity are high or volatile prices. We should be clear, food security is first and foremost a problem for the poorest developing countries and for poor people everywhere.

Promoting self sufficiency - but why?
Much is made of self-sufficiency in food production - for some the declining 'self-sufficiency ratio' (see chart above [Defra data Table 7.4]) is a crisis. The National Farmers Union (unsurprisingly) sees it as vital.

In 1996 we produced more of our own food, and for a higher population, than at any time since the mid-nineteenth century. But that level of self-sufficiency has been falling. In the last 10 years, overall self-sufficiency has fallen by 18% and self-sufficiency in indigenous foods by 15%, as a result of lower UK production, reduced exports and increased imports. The figures look stark... [From first page of the NFU's case for farming: Why farming matters - December 2006].

Actually, our self sufficiency depends on how you look at it. The lower chart is derived from the FAO Food Balances' (see here), but presented as calories per head per day rather than in prices. The food balance looks at production, exports, imports and consumption of food and as inputs, such as feed and seed. The self sufficiency ratio is domestic production divided by production + net imports. On this basis, we are 83% self-sufficient in calories. See my Google spreadsheet [XLS], which sets out the food balances for the UK and a few other countries extracted from FAO. The lower chart above summarises the spreadsheet for the UK - it breaks down self-sufficiency into different food groups.

We are self-sufficient in the most important food group in energy terms, cereals. Where we are a net importer, it is primarily for meat (New Zealand lamb, Danish bacon etc) where others have advantages in production, or for things we like but don't grow here (fruit, olive oil). We tend to import higher value foods - but these are to some extent the excitement and choice in our diet, not the raw energy content.

But so what if we do import food?
What would higher self-sufficiency actually do for us? Not much actually. Domestically produced food still gets more expensive when world prices go up - so it doesn't somehow protect our people. In fact we end up at greater risk that pest, drought or some other rural plague will strike down domestic supply. It would matter for the economy if we were a huge importer or exporter and the agricultural sector was a substantial part of the economy - in which case we might worry about terms of trade shocks or other bad things that world markets might do to us. But we aren't, it isn't and we don't need to.

Agriculture accounts for only 0.9% of UK GVA, about £9.6 billion, and it is the small player in the £80 billion UK food industry - food manufacturing accounts for £21 billion and distribution and services, such as restaurants, £49 billion. The agriculture net negative trade balance is £4.9 billion (ie more imports), but this is less than the £6.1 billion net imports of office machinery and computers. We are 22.5% important dependent in agriculture, but 52% import dependent in computers and office equipment. [Source: ONS Input-Output Analysis, 2006]

So should we be more worried about importing food or computers? Answer: neither.

Trade is the basis of food security
Trade enables us to buy more food, more cheaply and with greater choice. A very good report by a team in Defra makes this case extremely well [Food Security in the UK: an evidence and analysis paper]. Strangely this seems to have popped out just before Xmas 2006 - usually a sign that something is to be buried! Maybe it was that it came a few days after the NFU report on Why farming matters.

As the authors say: The conscious or unconscious identification of food security with self-sufficiency has often obscured the real issues... and ... a discourse centred on ‘UK self-sufficiency’ is fundamentally misplaced and unbalanced.

The importance of markets in securing food supplies is well illustrated in charts included in the report (left). For vegetables, countries within the EU have varying self-sufficiency. But the EU is overall almost self sufficient. For fruit, some countries barely grow it all, but the EU meets most needs (but can't grow much tropical fruit). Over time, the EU has become more dependent - but that probably reflects an increasing taste for fruit, lowering tariffs that allow access to lower cost producers, taste for more exotic fruits not grown in the EU.

The point is that markets and trade deliver food security, diversity and resilience in the supply system. The report concludes:

International trade has long been a central feature of UK food supply, and has remained critical even during times of emergency. There is no reason to suggest this will be less in future. At the very least, UK food security is tied up with the EU single market and, ultimately, the efficiency of the world trading system.

I think the big question about land use in England is how much we care about the international impacts of decisions we make about UK self-interest... there are two in particular: the international environmental footprint and the impact of our land choices on the food security of others.

Exporting environmental footprint...
I hope you might be convinced that 'self-sufficiency' in food isn't a worthwhile objective in its own right, and may even be harmful - it certainly has little to do with food security. But what about the argument that we are simply exporting the environmental footprint associated with food production? We could turn England into a pristine green and pleasant national park with all industrial farming removed. But food production, fertilisers, water pollution, biodiversity impacts and all the rest would go abroad.

The first thing to note is that this is absolutely the norm - we do this for manufacturing, mining and other high impact activities. Much of our polluting is done elsewhere. At the heart of this is the theory of comparative advantage and our preferences. Rich English people have a high and increasing preference for good environments (articulated collectively through numerous laws, codes, the planning system). Other countries may relatively favour more aggressive and polluting activities and prefer money raised through production of goods to sell to us. We have traditionally respected this as a matter of 'national sovereignty' and resisted what some would call 'environmental imperialism'.

I think this reluctance to impose extra-territorial standards will and should continue, with an expectation that food standards and costs will rise globally and that more countries will emulate the EU and set high environmental standards as they become more prosperous. But I think there should be one exception to pure national sovereignty - where the impact is on a 'global public good' ie. something we should all bear responsibility for protecting because it's value is global and it has characteristics of a public good. If the system behaved in such a way that for every hectare of land taken out of agriculture in England a hectare was felled in the Amazon or Borneo, I'd be troubled. I'm not sure it would behave in that way, but the challenge there is to develop global collective action to provide global public goods.

PS. we should be very sceptical about 'food miles' arguments (see my earlier posting: Food miles... wrong idea, stop using it!)

Impact on the poorest...
If we use UK land for producing 'non-marketed' goods that we have high demand for (like leisure, views, woodland walks and biodiversity), then we are adding to the pressure on available productive land to meet food and energy needs globally. That doesn't hurt us too much, as we simply buy access to the necessary land through international trade. But does it hit those who are the poorest? To be honest, I don't know...

How it could make things worse...
Pressures on land may grow - fuelled by population growth, economic growth, a tendency to consume more protein with increasing wealth, demand for biofuels and climate change and other pressures degrading the available land. This would be globally serious if agricultural productivity growth (increasing yields per hectare) did not keep pace with these pressures. Land prices and agricultural commodity prices would increase and the poor may be unable to afford sufficient food. In fact, the productive capacity of the land may be globally insufficient to support the world population. The poor would be the inevitable losers.

Why it might easy to overstate the problem...
If land and food became scarce, we might expect those poor countries with agricultural economies to benefit from rising prices - just as oil producers (in theory at least) benefit from rising oil prices. A new green revolution might boost productivity and food production might shift, with perhaps Ukraine and Russia becoming bread-baskets of Europe, for example. As prices rise, there may be reconfiguration of the diet - perhaps with less resource-hungry protein consumption. Famine is rarely caused by absolute food shortages - and there is unlikely to be a global food shortage in absolute terms. Richer poor countries would have a better grip on their food security.

The international consequence are a critical question for land-use strategy
As I suspect is apparent, I'm not really sure how the international consequences of domestic land use choices would or should really play out. But what I am sure about is that these are critical questions for a future land use strategy. At the moment we generally do not act on these consequential impacts (in fact we usually wilfully ignore obvious damage caused by key farming policies like the CAP). But is this hard-headed and basically right, or does it belong to a pre-globalisation era of narrowly defined national interest?
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Saying stupid things with fake sophistication

If you want to say something absolutely jaw-dropping in its idiocy, then you need to cloak it in lots of fake sophistication. And this is what ASH Scotland has done with its new position paper on smokeless tobacco.

No less than 266 references are used to support the truly stupid idea that smokeless tobacco, which can substitute for cigarettes and is far less hazardous, should be banned. Smokeless tobacco is far less dangerous because there is no, er, smoke to draw into the lungs. The red hot particles, volatile gases and thousands or organic products of combustion ingested deep into the body do the harm.

If you put that idea to any normal person they look at you as if you've lost your mind. Only in the insular world of 'tobacco control' do these ideas survive for longer than it takes to express them. In fact, there is a wealth of evidence that it is, as you would expect, a truly stupid thing to do - not least because the place where it is most widely used (Sweden - see chart) has much lower rates of smoking related deaths....

The chart shows male lung cancer mortality rates in some major countries [Source: IARC / WHO Cancer Mortality Database CANCERMondial]. One country stands out: Sweden. And Sweden also has lower rates of oral cancer and other smoking-related diseases. The difference between Sweden and the others is that a high proportion of its tobacco use in Sweden is in smokeless form [view]. One of Europe's especially ludicrous policies is to ban most forms of 'oral tobacco' [Directive 2001/37/EC Art 8], though not in Sweden.

So the main ASH Scotland policy idea is that other countries should be prevented by law from reaching a position where more of the tobacco use is through far less harmful forms of tobacco consumption and that addicted individuals should be prevented by law from having access to lower risk products. What next? A ban on anti-lock brakes? Cycle helmets? Ropes while rock climbing? Any risk reduction measures at all while engaging in inherently risky behaviour? There's the warped logic of the overweening health planner behind all this... if you make a risky activity much safer, then people might not stop doing it altogether.

Confused about burden of proof
Apart from the unsettling coerciveness of such positions, there are simplistic errors in the analysis - concerned with the handling of scientific uncertainty when making policy. Science can (and should) reserve judgement indefinitely or use 'beyond reasonable doubt' tests of evidence. But policy making requires decisions whatever the available evidence - and a decision includes "maintaining the status quo". This requires the policy-maker not to demand perfect knowledge but a 'balance of probabilities' assessment of available evidence. Throughout the document, the authors draw conclusions of the form: "there is not enough evidence [for doing something sensible]" and so decide to stick with doing something stupid, as if there is conclusive evidence to support the stupid ban. Which there isn't and they don't pretend there is, or even seem to recognise that there ought to be. All they've done is set a high or impossible evidential hurdle for the thing they don't like and not applied any evidential challenge whatsoever to maintaining the ban, which they do like. But what if the ban, by denying people less hazardous alternatives, is actually killing more people? It's at least plausible. And given the position in Sweden, where it isn't banned and many fewer people die, you might think that was a good starting point and expect some evidence to show that bans aren't just making everything worse. For me, the burden of proof is on those supporting the utterly insane idea of banning much less hazardous substitutes for very deadly products. Look through the ASH Scotland paper and you'll find no evidence to support a ban or give any confidence that it isn't doing more harm than good.

Confused about individual rights
But I think the thing I find most troubling about this sort of posturing is what it means at an individual level. In effect, these remote health planners are saying to a person who smokes cigarettes that they should not have access to a much less risky alternative. Where did the acquire the authority and the bare-faced arrogance to do that? How did they become so sure of themselves that they feel qualified to restrict the harm reduction options available to someone struggling with addiction? So on those estates in Glasgow, where smoking prevalence can be as high as 70%, ASH Scotland says 'no' to lower risk alternatives. You must quit. And if you don't quit - well, you might as well die.

Wrong questions
ASH Scotland solemnly poses questions like should smokeless tobacco be given a "legal designation as a harm reduction product in the UK? Eh? There's no such thing. It's a tobacco product - just much less dangerous than the norm. Or they state a preference for use of NRT for harm reduction or stopping smoking - but what if others find smokeless tobacco more effective or don't want or wont use a medicalised approach? What is the case for reducing the available options for quitting or reducing smoking? They prefer other interventions such as smoke-free places legislation and bans on advertising. All good ideas, but they don't explain explain why these are mutually exclusive with policies that reduce the harmfulness of the tobacco that is sold or why removing smoke would have a beneficial supportive 'denormalising' effect. Or why there wouldn't be additional benefits from reducing passive smoking exposure, role modelling and fire risk.

With top epidemiologists predicting 1 billion premature deaths from tobacco in the 21st Century, one might think that all options would be in play- especially as the smokeless products have done so much to keep the carnage down in the one place where they are widely used.

So for the next edition of this position statement:

1. please provide evidence that the ban you favour maintaining isn't doing more harm than good at population level by denying smokers access to much less hazardous products and opportunities to manage nicotine addiction, in the way it appears to work in Sweden. We know that even if a few extra people used it that were never going to be tobacco users or would have quit anyway, the extra harm would be small.

2. please outline your ethical basis for denying a person access to an alternative product that is much less dangerous than the one they may be addicted to. You might think it will save the lives of others (I don't, and you can't show it will), but what about that person's individual rights? Do they count for nothing in the face of your bossy prescription?

3. please explain why it would be good policy to provide legal protection to the cigarette makers in the market for tobacco and a barrier to entry to potential competitors offering much lower risk products. This is an especially stupid idea now being aggressively pioneered by health campaigners in the United States through their seedy and desperate deal with tobacco giant Philip Morris to support a Bill to pass regulation of tobacco to the FDA. Expect many dead.

Read this instead...
For a decent review of the evidence, don't spend too long watching ASH Scotland struggle with basic epistemology. See Brad Rodu and Bill Godshall in Harm Reduction Journal 2006, 3:37; and the collection of 50 best papers on the International Harm Reduction Association tobacco section. Even tobacco companies provide better and more balanced analysis than this effort by ASH Scotland: see this account of Experience from Sweden by Swedish Match - or this literature review by United States Smokeless Tobacco.
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Is the UK flooding down to climate change?

As an employee of the Environment Agency, I am increasingly asked "what an earth is going on with all this flooding?".

Is climate change to blame?
Maybe, but only maybe - and maybe not. There has been highest rainfall in parts of England since records began in 1766 (Met Office stats), but many have leapt in with rather more certainty than is justified to attributing this to climate change - citing the usual formula (to paraphrase) that "no single event can be attributed to climate change, but this is consistent with the predictions".

Actually the picture is far less clear than even this. Whilst the global picture on climate change is ever clearer, characterising climate change impacts at small geographical scale (ie. English regions or cities) is very difficult. This is done by the UK Climate Change Impacts Programme (UKCIP). In the most recent (2002) UKCIP assessment, Climate Change Scenarios for the United Kingdom, the modelling finds more intense rain in the winter, but that:

Intense rainfall events become rather less frequent in summer just about everywhere. (p. 55)
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IPCC ends the adaptation = defeat argument

There has been a kind of omertà over talking too much about adapting to climate change - to do so would surely be an act of resignation, a distraction from reducing emissions and effectively a 'gated community' mentality by rich countries that would look after themselves and build walls to keep out the poor.

That argument cannot stand any longer. The IPCC 4th Assessment Report on impacts of climate change: Summary for Policymakers makes very uncomfortable reading... documenting climate change already underway and painting a picture of a slow burning apocalypse over the 21st century. One of many impacts it points to is the loss of glaciers: (see chart from WG1 presentation - the units are cumulative contribution to sea level rise in millimetres). The impacts group follows this up with the consequences for water security:

In the course of the century, water supplies stored in glaciers and snow cover are projected to decline, reducing water availability in regions supplied by meltwater from major mountain ranges, where more than one-sixth of the world population currently lives.

A neat statement, but it means drought risk for 2 billion people and rising. For Africa, there are dire warnings - with serious consequences stated for 2020.
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Climate scientists in epistemological lather

I awoke today to the depressing sound of an eminent climate scientist arguing that other eminent climate scientists were going too far in making alarming statements about climate change. The self-styled purist was gathering at a Sense about Science meeting and was heroically guarding the pristine truths of science from the barbarians of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and their climate change statement. He said he was doing this in order to preserve the trust of the public in the pronouncements of scientists - fat chance. Well he's made a mess of that..! All blown wildly out of proportion in a BBC story and interview in which, Prof Paul Hardacre, the scientist with the gripe, completely failed to explain what he was concerned about. All involved professed support for the findings of the IPCC and Prof Hardacre even said he "agrees with everything in the [AAAS] statement", but didn't like the way it was phrased.
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Climate change - what the IPCC tells us (and doesn't)

In many ways the IPCC 4th Assessment Report (known by aficionados as 'AR4') from the physical science working group confirms much we had already taken to be established beyond reasonable doubt (see summary). A huge impulse (greenhouse gas increases) is being applied to a complex physical system (atmosphere, oceans and carbon cycle) and modellers are struggling through the task of working out how it will respond... (see charts to the left). To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld's famous saying, the exercise involves narrowing quantitative uncertainties in the known-knowns, giving qualitative warnings about the known-unknowns and admitting we should still be worried the unknown-unknowns. And worth remembering, Rumsfeld also concluded, albeit in a different context: "it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones."

Suggestions that sea level rise might be lower than previously thought were met with glee in traditionally sceptical quarters... (see: UN downgrades man's impact on the climate in the Telegraph) but these interpretations are confused with a narrowing of the range of uncertainty around a central estimate that is close to the Third Assessment Report in 2001. There are better graphics, clearer communications, new insights, finer resolutions etc - but basically not much different from a policy point of view. I think that may be because the emphasis has been on nailing the so-called sceptics - and therefore on delivering a 'shock and awe' response to tiresomely self-interested sceptics' challenges to conclusions already drawn and largely accepted for policymaking purposes. But I think this might be a bad thing and the IPCC is letting us down...

Does the IPCC do a disservice by being this cautious?
The IPCC provides a gold standard and very high level of assurance - it also has to negotiate text between scientist delegations from countries that may be hostile to a completely truthful exposition. But is there a danger of fighting the last war, and failing to really convey threats? Does this give an implicit victory to the sceptics - who are paid to slow down progress and sow confusion and doubt? Could all this caution and risk-aversion seem like 'good science' but actually have the perverse effect of raising the real risks because they find it harder to include coverage of the known-unknowns and unknown-unknowns? New Scientist magazine suggested this is the case:

The peer review process was so rigorous that research deemed controversial, not fully quantified or not yet incorporated into climate models was excluded. The benefit - that there is now little room left for the sceptics - comes at what many see as a dangerous cost: many legitimate findings have been frozen out. [See: What the IPCC didn't tell us]

The New Scientist article, which is subtitled "If the official verdict on climate change seems bad enough, the real story looks far worse", argues that concern about sceptics and its own status has biased the IPCC in favour of what can be modelled with confidence, or as I would put it, measuring Rumsfeld's 'known-knowns'. In contrast, an excellent conference held in Exeter in 2005 was titled "Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change" and had leading scientists investigate what 'Dangerous Climate Change' would mean and what it would take to cause it. That gives a far more worrying picture - yet much of its substance is ignored or only alluded to in AR4 summary... the modelling has primacy. My concern is that excessive hedging and gold-plating in scientific advice is a form of 'reckless caution' because it leaves decision-makers with an overly sanguine prognosis.

There are nevertheless some very troubling passages in the IPCC summary.

1. All of it
Even just taking the science as established and summarised in AR4 and assuming that is all that is known and all that will ever happen, the prognosis is still very bleak.

2. Sea level rise
AR4 points out that much higher sea levels have been associated with warmer temperatures in the past...

Global average sea level in the last interglacial period (about 125,000 years ago) was likely 4 to 6 m higher than during the 20th century, mainly due to the retreat of polar ice. Ice core data indicate that average polar temperatures at that time were 3 to 5°C higher than present, because of differences in the Earth’s orbit. The Greenland ice sheet and other Arctic ice fields likely contributed no more than 4 m of the observed sea level rise. There may also have been a contribution from Antarctica.

But the range of global average temperature increases projected for the 21st Century is up to 6.4 degrees (for the most fossil fuel intensive) emissions and many highly plausible business as usual scenarios would increase temperatures by 3-5 degrees (see Table SPM3 in the summary p.13) view table

But note that projections for polar warming are higher (especially for the north ) than for the global average - for example, scenario A2 gives a global average warming of 3.4 degrees C by the end of the century, but more than 6 degrees in the polar north. See map (left) from Figure SPM-6 in the summary)
This probably means that temperature rises in the 21st Century will cause a large commitment to sea-level rise - and what remains uncertain is how fast that will occur. The IPCC concedes that this isn't properly understood or included in current models:

Dynamical processes related to ice flow not included in current models but suggested by recent observations could increase the vulnerability of the ice sheets to warming, increasing future sea level rise. Understanding of these processes is limited and there is no consensus on their magnitude.

What if the processes are more rapid and the ice-sheets more vulnerable as suggested by recent observations? There is increasing evidence that the physical disintegration of ice sheets will happen more rapidly than thermal melting.

3. Temperature increases and carbon cycle feedback
Another area that was troubling to me was the discussion of the 'carbon cycle feedback' - that more carbon is retained in the atmosphere as it warms - and this isn't factored into models yet because of uncertainties. The report says this about it:

Climate carbon cycle coupling is expected to add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as the climate system warms, but the magnitude of this feedback is uncertain. This increases the uncertainty in the trajectory of carbon dioxide emissions required to achieve a particular stabilisation level of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. Based on current understanding of climate carbon cycle feedback, model studies suggest that to stabilise at 450 ppm carbon dioxide, could require that cumulative emissions over the 21st century be reduced from an average of approximately 670 GtC to approximately 490 GtC (Summary report p.17 edited here to remove ranges for ease of reading) 1 GtC is a billion tonnes of carbon world carbon emissions including land use changes were 8.6 GtC in 2000 or 11.2GtCe including all other greenhouse gases)

Yikes! that means 490 GtC is very low. And this is troubling, because 450ppm is a figure often used as a threshold for avoiding dangerous climate change (associated with a temperature rise of 2C). And achieving a 490 GtC (billion tonnes of carbon) budget for the 21st Century will be incredibly difficult. This is way below the minimum if the emissions scenarios used for modelling, and supposed to represent the range of plausible emissions trajectories.

The charts to the left are from the IPCC special report on emissions scenarios (with my annotations) - these give a range of emissions from 770 GtC to 2,540 GtC. They aren't predictions, but scenarios to help model possible future worlds. The B1 scenarios offer the lowest emissions pathways, and these are built on a 'storyline' of strong sustainable development and localism. The world economy is currently nothing like B1-world, nor is it heading there. So to get to 770 GtC would mean an emissions trajectory following the lower bound of the B2 scenarios as indicated in the bottom of the two charts above. To get to 490 GtC would require the area under the curve to be reduced by more than one quarter.

4. It is only "very likely" that humans are causing global warming - a win for the sceptics
Even if, as I suggested above, the aim of the report is to see off the sceptics, I fear the enterprise may have been lost in the drafting. The report uses a range of terms expressing confidence in its findings. The summary report p.4 footnote 6 says that 'very likely' means more than 90% confidence and 'extremely likely' means more than 95% confidence. The BBC set this out well in its overview of the summary report. The report states that

"Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations" (original emphasis)

If I was a climate sceptic I think that getting the IPCC to say that there is between a 1 in 10 and 1 in 20 chance that the entire intellectual edifice of man-made climate change is wrong is not a bad effort. That's a degree of uncertainty that cannot be found ANYWHERE in the scientific literature. It is plainly wrong and misleading, but because it is misleading on the side of doubt, they have somehow got away with it.

I gather the Chinese scientific delegation fought alongside the predictable Saudis to keep the 'likelihood' as low as possible. It's easy to see why the Saudis might do this, but much less obviously in even the short term interests of China, which would be hit hard by the impacts and has a good claim to demand action from developed countries with many times the emissions per capita.

5. Decoupling of science and politics
The scenarios modelled by the IPCC are very different to those under discussion in the politics and economics. A footnote (14) on page 10 of the summary report points out that the concentrations of carbon dioxide equivalent could be very high by the end of the 21st century:

14 [...] Approximate CO2 equivalent concentrations corresponding to the computed radiative forcing due to anthropogenic greenhouse gases and aerosols in 2100 ... for the SRES B1, A1T, B2, A1B, A2 and A1FI illustrative marker scenarios are about 600, 700, 800, 850, 1250 and 1550 ppm respectively.

So 600ppm CO2e is the minimum in the IPCC scenarios. This is not new news (and nor are the scenarios forecasts), but it does suggest that the debate on economics and policy may have become detached from the scientific modelling in some important respects - given that the SRES scenarios are supposed to cover the full range of plausible emissions trajectories.

The Stern Review debated at length about whether concentrations need to be stabilised at 450 ppm or 550 ppm CO2e - see Chapter 8 - The Challenge of Stabilisation Stern bases his estimate of the social cost of carbon ($US85/tonne CO2) on 550ppm - it would be higher if the expected concentration was higher.

The European Union's 10 January 2007 initiatives on climate change and energy have restated a goal of limiting warming to 2C over pre-industrial temperatures.

The EU's objective is to limit global average temperature increase to less than 2°C compared to pre-industrial levels. This will limit the impacts of climate change and the likelihood of massive and irreversible disruptions of the global ecosystem. The Council has noted that this will require atmospheric concentrations of GHG to remain well below 550 ppmv CO2 eq. By stabilising long-term concentrations at around 450 ppmv CO2 eq. there is a 50 % chance of doing so [European Commission, Limiting global climate change to 2 degrees Celsius - COM(2007)2].

But the IPPC showed that warming since pre-industrial times has been 0.76C and its projections for the lowest emissions scenario (B1) are a further 1.8C by 2090-2099 compared to today - with a range of 1.1 to 2.9 [view table].So it would only be possible to achieve the EU objective if the future warming was at the very low end of the possible ranges, for the lowest emissions scenario. But even this is not right... the atmosphere will continue to warm after the emissions stabilise or fall well into the 22nd century because of inertia in the system. In other words, it is extremely unlikely that warming will be kept to 2C, even if, in a triumph of hope over experience, we take measures that vastly exceed expectations.

Conclusions

• The AR4 reads to me too much like a rebuttal of the sceptics and attempt at language that cannot be challenged. That is not the same as the best scientific advice to governments. If the IPCC can do only the former (and I wouldn't want it to stop doing that), I think there is more scope for advice that is really intended to be the best possible account of the known-unknowns and best possible speculation on the unknown-unknowns - done if necessary outside the IPCC. Like the 'Dangerous Climate Change' conference, I mentioned earlier.
  
• I'm glad the world is waking up to climate change and the EU is pushing hard for target that matches the objective of the UNFCCC (see article 2) to "achieve stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system" - I'm also glad that Stern took this approach too. But I wonder if these are at all realistic, even if we are hyper-optimistic?
  
• I think we need IPCC developing and modelling emissions scenarios that fit interpretations of this objective - such as those produced by Stern and the EU. In some ways the modelling process needs inverting, so that an emissions budget or trajectory is the output of a model in which the impacts on the climate system are constrained to values that would be consistent with the UNFCCC objective.
  
• The EU could commission its own scientific advice on the required emissions trajectories to meet the environmental constraints (and probably constraints in the maximum rate of adjustment) that it has established in its flagship policy - the EU has a budget of €50.5 for science for 2007-13.
• I think the EU should also commission advice on the harder-to-quantify and difficult-to-model risks (like the Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change publication) and add an additional scientific voice to the IPCC. This would help to create some diversity in the sources and risk aversion of the scientific advice.
  
• We need to be more pessimistic in thinking about adaptation than the IPCC AR4 modelling would lead us to believe - to take account of those unknowns that don't make it into the models because they can't be quantified - though they may be very real and dangerous.
  
• I think we should separate our objectives for stabilisation (say 450-550ppm) from our reference scenario for planning for the impacts and adaptation & resilience (probably at least 750ppm). The latter should reflect the path we are actually on and be adjusted when and if we actually move to a lower emissions path.

PS. Worth a look: Caspar Henderson's Grains of Sand blog on all this - and his comments on this post. ... continues. Read full post.

R&D sometimes necessary, but never sufficient, for innovation

A couple of interesting reports on R&D... firstly the DTI's R&D Scoreboard 2006, where clearly more is better - at least one assumes that's the purpose of creating lists and league tables ordered by the sums spent (see chart from the report showing the world's biggest R&D spenders). Note the big spenders are not necessarily who you would regard as the great innovators.

The second report is from the management consultants Booz Allen Hamilton... Its arresting title is: A Select Set of Companies Sustain Superior Financial Performance While Spending Less on R&D Than Their Competitors [release/report]... What it comes down to is that innovation drives business, but that R&D spend is only loosely correlated with innovation. Booz Allen reckons that 94 out of the 1,000 companies it surveyed are 'high leverage innovators' (ie. Google not Microsoft, Toyota not General Motors)- they have an innovation system rather than R&D spend.

All of this should give pause for thought... For example, the EU plans to spend €50.5 billion on R&D between 2007 and 2013. Will this be spent in a way that generates innovation? Almost certainly not - the dominant concern will be making sure each country gets its 'fair' share. We also know that high tech parts of the economy are quite small - Big Pharma is our biggest R&D spender, but accounts for just 0.62% of the economy compared to banking at 5.85% or retail at 5.73% [ONS- see table 1.51]... what does innovation mean for service industries? And why do we pay so much attention to counting how much is spent on R&D, and 'input' measure, when it poorly predicts for innovation and doesn't really tell us much about innovation in the service firms that form the basis of the so-called knowledge economy? Look at London - by far the highest economic activity in the country, but the second lowest level of R&D:GDP ratio after the North East [see Regional Trends]. London is powered by financial services, business services and creative industries - all competitive internationally and all innovating like mad... but how many of these declare an R&D budget on their accounts.
... continues. Read full post.

Soft paternalism - changing behaviour for the common good without giving orders

Several interesting meetings last week... including with:

• the Sustainable Development Commission and National Consumer Council on their I will if you will report on sustainable consumption and production;
• the government's new Office of Climate Change on reducing carbon emissions from the housing stock [see interesting 40 percent house concept];
• stimulating brainstorming session on the future of regulation with the Environment Agency's 'modern regulation' team.

And it turns out they all had a common theme, namely 'behaviour change' - ie. recognising that people have considerable behavioural autonomy and governments can't simply legislate to achieve many of the key sustainable development outcomes, so more subtle persuasive models are needed. This is sometimes seen as a branch of paternalism known as 'soft paternalism'. The Economist [leader/article] recently highlighted its rise - partly to disparage (it in that annoying way they have), but also approvingly to distinguish the soft from the 'hard' variety. I think it's an apt description of the role of the modern state in securing collectively-valued outcomes from an aggregation of individual behaviours.

While at the PM's Strategy Unit, I co-authored a swotty piece of work on Personal responsibility and behaviour change, and there has been good work done by Tim Jackson and others. Best of all, however, is the simple elegant model established in the UK Sustainable Development Strategy at Chapter 2 - the essence is pictured above and widely known as the 'Rutter Diamond' after its creator, Jill Rutter of DEFRA (whose birthday the Bacon Butty is celebrating today).

What, then, are ingredients of a strategy designed to change the behaviour of individuals or businesses? Here's my list built on the Sustainable Development Strategy:

• Seeking big changes secured over a long time - because "governments overestimate their power to achieve change in the short term, and underestimate it in the long term" (see Geoff Mulgan's Prospect article for the coining of this particular wisdom)
  
• Consistency & credibility of government action - the long, loud and legal approach to policy, building trust and confidence sending clear signals of what is and expected to become normal, so creating markets, steering investment and influencing R&D. (see earlier Bacon Butty post on credibility and consistency)
  
• Strong but bearable incentives that grab the attention - because people vote down unbearable incentives, and will only tolerate a certain rate of change in their circumstances before they refuse to participate. Businesses can leave the country, countries can refuse to sign agreements. Many NGOs overlook the importance of 'participation' in designing policies. For really strong measures, time is the answer, not draconian policies introduced on day 1.
  
• Enabling measures to make it easy to respond, based on insights into how people do change how they act - because incentives that you can't respond to are just deadweight charges. London's Congestion charge was backed by an expansion of bus services. Adair Turner's Pension Commission proposals have an opt-in default for a good scheme, with an option to opt-out [Final report- p16].
  
• Communications and engagement - because it is important to draw the incentives and enabling measures together to create an attractive overall package, promoting the idea of a common enterprise and to implicitly disparage free-riding and 'deviant' behaviour.
• Carefully focussed on a 'target group' - because it needs to be insights into their behaviour that shapes any programme or it might work better to start with a particular 'first-mover' group or because the aim is to target particular groups for whom other approaches fail.
  
• Walking the talk - because trust is a key ingredient in securing change, so for example government procurement and the behaviour of politicians and the public sector must be consistent with the ask made of the public and business.
  
• Regulation where it is the best approach - because rehabilitation of regulation from the 'deregulators' is long overdue - reduces information & transaction costs, free-riding, and provides 'choice editing' to set quality floors. See interesting observations on Regulatory reform, capture and the regulatory burden by Dieter Helm. The recent rapid rise in UK recycling is driven by a little-known EU landfill directive, which has pressured local authorities to set up green box recycling schemes and caused much greater public participation.
• Achieving normalisation of the positive behaviour - because a programme to change behaviour needs to become self-sustaining, widely embedded in attitudes and everyday life - not least so that programme spending can be reduced to a top-up level or targeted.
  
• Avoiding over-reliance on individual action and altruism - because too much has been made of the green consumer, and people are rightly sceptical of personal sacrifice in a world of free-riders. It shouldn't really be tried except where people should expect an individual benefit from individual action (and there are many examples of this, for example cycling to work). But it's not so convincing to offer a collective benefit from aggregated individual sacrifice.
  
• R&D shift into behavioural sciences (behavioural psychology, sociology, economics) - because understanding why people do what they do is more use than designing new things they don't do or won't use.
  

I think very little real-world policy comes close to matching this framework - is that right?... Possibly some public health campaigns - smoking, drink driving... maybe. ... continues. Read full post.

England 1 - Paraguay 0... setback for England

How to interpret England's 1-0 victory against Paraguay? On the one hand it was a win. On the other hand, it was only just a win, a poor performance marred by defensive tactics and bad subsititutions that allowed the Paraguay into the game. This might have revealed England's deeper weaknesses. One guide is betting markets, like Betfair. Its market in an England World Cup win showed deterioration in the market's view of England's chances in the period after the game (see chart), meaning the money says it was a setback.
... continues. Read full post.

Nuclear fusion

Another solemn cheque-signing [BBC report] and confirmation that, at €10 billion, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter) will be the second most expensive experiment of all time. Fusion scientists are pulling a fast one playing on gullibility and vanity of politicians... in return for hugely expensive and enjoyable research spend they are offering the empty promise of endless energy, allowing us to fill that mental void marked "answer to world's energy problems" with something looking suitably futuristic.

There's a (lame) joke about fusion and its constantly shifting promise of jam tomorrow: "did you hear that the fusion research programme has discovered a new fundamental physical constant - and it is equal to 40? As in "40 years from now".
... continues. Read full post.

Alternative medicine - you're on your own

Should the NHS fund complementary medicine? Some top medics say 'no'. Scientists are often too quick to dismiss treatments that work outside their own paradigm - and we need to stay open-minded about this stuff. But the question is, as always with the NHS, should someone else pay? The NHS is based on an implicit 'contract' between net beneficiaries (typically the old, sick and poor) and those that are net payers (young, healthy and rich). Those paying in are entitled to expect that NHS treatments have been shown to effective and cost-effective, and that they are not funding New Age fads. The NHS already has NIHCE to tell it what interventions are good value for money. I suspect that we will find that there are valuable therapeutic benefits from some of these treatments - but unless there is evidence, people wanting unproven alternative treatments should expect to go it alone. ... continues. Read full post.

Professor Sir Roy Meadow

It's hard to dislike anyone more than Professor Sir Roy Meadow - the 'expert' witness that consigned Angela Canning to gaol and her family to utter misery on the basis of completely incompetent statistical assertions designed to shore up his idiosyncratic theories about sudden infant death syndrome. And he has never even apologised.

So good news today to hear that the General Medical Council is to appeal against the High Court ruling denying its right to stike him off. And the GMC will be supported by the Attorney General. [BBC item]. The High Court's ruling was a disgrace, effectively protecting experts from the professional consequences of outrageous failure with extreme consequences for others.

The most famous claim with which Meadow mislead a jury was that there was a 73 million to one chance of two 'cot deaths' in an affluent family. There are two childish flaws in this statistical claim:

1. Widely reported: the events may not be independent - a common environmental or genetic factor may apply to the both the first and second deaths.

2. Less well appreciated: remember there are 1.5 million UK families that have 2 or more young children [data from ONS]. So if it was actually 73 million to one for a specific family, you'd be expect about a 1 in 50 chance that it would happen somewhere in that population. It's a bit like rounding up all previous lottery winners and accusing them of fraud because there's only a 1 in 14 million chance of winning and its very unlikely they would have won by chance. Add both these effects and it is hardly surprising these tragedies happen from time to time.

The best we can hope for is the Roy Meadow's reputation is utterly destroyed. personally, I think he should be behind bars - his negligence and incompetence caused far more agony than any assault or robbery could ever.
... continues. Read full post.