Gavin Schmidt, NASA scientist and a RealClimate proprietor, and I have occasionally engaged in a bit of back-and-forth on issues of science and politics. I respect Gavin, and we have always enjoyed cordial relations, but as regular readers here will know, I have frequently criticized RealClimate for hiding an implicit political agenda behind the fig leaf of putative concern about scientific truth. A recent exchange between Gavin and I related to a recent post of mine provides a look behind the fig leaf, and more importantly illustrates how hiding behind science contributes to sustaining gridlock on climate policy.


My post made the case the statements of some climate scientists about the state of climate science are likely shaped by the overriding objective of the Framework Convention which is to prevent “dangerous anthropogenic interference” in the climate system. Gavin and I both seem to agree that the ultimate of the Convention is not grounded in an accurate reading of how the world works. I’ll let Gavin explain the fundamental weakness in the Convention’s overriding objective:

”This post is based on a kind of false dichotomy, that there are two separates states of ‘climate’ – One which is benign and one which is ‘dangerous’ and that the sole scientific and political task is to ascertain when the switch is and presumably avoid it. Does it really need me to point out how over-simplisitic this is? The fact is that there will not be a global tipping point that pitches us into ‘dangerous’ terrrority, more like countless local tipping points (for ecosystems, climate, argiculture) that will come at varying points in the trajectory. The further along we go, the more damage will be done – it may not be a smooth increase but it is certainly not a binary system.”

But Gavin makes an interesting leap in a further entry when he says “there are no binary states ‘benign’ vs ‘dangerous’. This is a completely separate question from whether it is practically useful for a policy to set an arbitrary limit as if there were.”

So what he is saying here is that in some situations it is OK for policy makers to mischaracterize how the world actually works if they find such mischaracterizations to be “practically useful.” My response to this was to ask a question:

“But I am curious why is it then that you folks at Real Climate focus so much on “getting the science right” in the climate debate but you draw the line when it comes to the implementation of the FCCC? Maybe as a practical matter it is useful for Senator Inhofe (from his perspectives) to mischaracterize the science? It is OK for the FCCC to mischaracterize how the world works but not Inhofe? Seems like you are saying that policies out of step with scientific understandings are OK if the goals are in one direction but not others. . . In a number of publications I (and others) have pointed to the impracticality of the current policy framework, in part because it does not reflect how the world actually works.”

Let’s take a look at some of the effects of the Framework Convention’s mischaracterization of how the world works for real-world outcomes:

Astonishingly, developing countries face barriers to getting resources to deal with climate disasters because they can’t prove that the climate-related impacts, such as disasters, that they have experienced have actually crossed the “dangerous interference” threshold. Consider this report of the International Institute for Sustainable Development,

”. . . if a country seeks funding for a project on flood prevention, the GEF would only be able to finance a portion proportional to the additional harm that floods have caused or will cause as a result of climate change, and the rest would have to be co-financed by some other body. The plea from LDCs [Least Developed Countries], particularly the SIDS [small island developing states], lies precisely on this paradox, in that even if funds are available in the LDC Fund, their difficulty of finding adequate co-financing, and the costly and cumbersome calculation of the additional costs, renders the financial resources in the LDC Fund, in practice, almost inaccessible.”

Obviously, it is practically impossible to distinguish any climate change signal in disasters. The Framework Convention does not appear to be grounded in economic reality either, as suggested by Nordhouas and Boyer (2000, PDF):

“. . . it appears that the strategy behind the Kyoto Protocol has no grounding in economics or environmental policy. The approach of freezing emissions at a given level for a group of countries is not related to a particular goal for concentrations, temperature, or damages. Nor does it bear any relation to an economically oriented strategy that would balance the costs and benefits of greenhouse-gas reductions.”

Stanford’s David Victor agrees,

“Diplomats have been trying to build an overly ambitious system for controlling greenhouse gases that is based on a fundamentally flawed architecture. . . Governments need to start thinking about the alternatives to the Kyoto Protocol approach.”

One of the great ironies of this situation is that from the perspective of the stated political objectives of the Bush Administration, it would have been far more “practically useful” for them to have signed on to Kyoto rather than flipping the bird to the rest of the world when they unilaterally pulled out of the Protocol. I made this case in a post here a while back. This up-is-down perspective can cause dissonance I know. I am in fact saying that the best way to stymie progress on the climate issue is to support the Framework Convention and its Kyoto Protocol and the best way to facilitate action is to argue the case for new and innovative options to the policy strategy outlined under the Framework Convention. Because everyone is pretty wedded to their positions, it is not surprising that this argument finds few supporters on either side of the current debate.

So to return to where we started on this post, when scientists overlook, excuse, or otherwise defend the inescapable reality that the Framework Convention is grounded in a vision of the world that does not square with how the world actually works, not only are they showing their political colors, but more importantly, they are contributing to the sustainability of the current gridlock on climate change. When leading scientists point out the inconsistency of the Article 2 of the Climate Convention with reality, then we might have an opportunity to discuss new and innovative policy options. And that is something that really would be practically useful.