On Saturday, I discussed Lewindowsky’s No Lew. We don’t need that level of flood defenses. In that post, I presented a qualitative discussion of a Lewandowsky claim; today, I’m going to show some “math”. The purpose is to explain why the italicized claim in Pancost and Lewandowsky below is exaggerated to the point of being wrong:
Second, the uncertainty in our projections makes adaptation to climate change more expensive and challenging. Suppose we need to build flood defences for a coastal English town. If we could forecast a 1m sea level rise by 2100 without any uncertainty, the town could confidently build flood barriers 1m higher than they are today. However, although sea levels are most likely to rise by about 1m, we’re really looking at a range between 0.3m and 1.7m. Therefore, flood defences must be at least 1.7m higher than today – 70cm higher than they could be in the absence of uncertainty.
And as uncertainty increases, so does the required height of flood defences for non-negotiable mathematical reasons.
(In their blog post, the claim about ‘non-negotiable mathematical reasons’ was linked to a paywall verion their paper. I’ve replaced the link to send you to a free copy.)
Getting mathematical, I will also show that while the final claim “And as uncertainty increases, so does the required height of flood defences for non-negotiable mathematical reasons”, is true, the uncertainty increase can be so small as to be lost when one rounds the required height to the number of significant figures in the estimated sea level change or its stated uncertainty. This makes that claim rather less impressive than it might sound.
Friday, my comment about this was
The idea that “flood defences must be at least 1.7m higher than today†is utter nonsense. The more correct claim is “we need to consider the possibility that flood defenses in 2100 may need to be 1.7 m higher than todayâ€.
Note in the previous discussion, 1.7 m is the upper range of of the previously discussed uncertainty window for sea level rise (1.7m). The general point would appear to be one ‘must’ build to protect to the ‘upper range’– that’s bunk.
Today, I’m going to use a simple “Toy” model to show that, in fact, ‘uncertainty’ does not require anyone to build a wall to math the upper range of projections now or ever. One only needs to build to that range if that sea level rise materializes?
Why don’t we need to do this: Because we can wait.
Of course, I already said this, but today, I’m going to do math. The math will be similar to that done by Lewindowsky and co-authors in the paper he linked. Unlike Lewindowsky and Pancost, I’m not going to suggest that my results are based on ‘non-negotiable’ math. They are based on
- A decision making algorithm policy makers could chose to follow if they wished.
- Some simple “toy” assumption permitting a mathematical function to ‘project’ the expected value of sea level rise (slr) and its uncertainty as a function of time. This model will require specifying two parameters.
- A mathematical model to predict inundation risk. This model will require specifying a parameter. λ
- Mathematical manipulations themselves.
Though it might not be obvious based on Lew’s verbiage in his recent blog post, Lew did three of the four in his paper. I’ll discuss his assumptions and my extention below. :
- In his peer reviewed paper, Lew ‘analysis’ is based on the assumption that decision makers build defenses one time and one time only and they act based on current, or at least reasonably current, projections for sea level height in 2100. That is: they don’t get to build a little now and then re-visit needs later.
In contrast, I will assume that a board deciding on implementing engineered protections that might be required 86 years from now (2014-2100), can elect to build protections in increments. So, for example, they can chose to build in 2 increments, starting by building protections they anticipate will protect through the first 43 years and deferring the decision for further building to the future.
Note: this assumption is not ‘math’; it will turn out to make a very large difference to our estimate of the height of engineered protections ‘required’ in light of uncertainty in projections.
- Because of the assumption the board only acts once, Lew didn’t need a toy model to project sea level rise. This simplifies his “math”. You get to decide if it simplified it a bit too much.
Since I am permitting the board to make prudent decisions, I will assume
(a) The expected value of sea level rise $latex E[SLR] $ varies quadratically with time and the board will continue to believe this is the functional form. The current level is 0 m; the value in 2100 is 0.5m. It’s currently 2014, they currently believe the SLR varies quadratically with time measured from 2014 reaching 0.5m in 2100. $latex E[SLR]= (0.5m ) (t/86)^{2} $ where time is measured from 2014. (Note: I introduced a parameter here. It’s the exponent of ‘2’.)
The expected value of sea level rise is illustrated with the black squares in the figure below which shows the current sea level and projections at the end of each build time if we assume 5 build periods:
Note the final expected value for sea level rise is 0.5 m and matches that used by Lewandowsky. His analysis didn’t need additional detail because the board was assumed to lack any critical thinking skills and could act only once.Those with critical thinking skills know the entire point of deferring decisions is to permit the current and future boards to use future events to guide their future decisions. The current board can’t know the future value of $latex SLR $, nor can they know the future projections. For the purpose of decision making, they need a model. I’ll suggest this simple one:
The current board will assume that when some future year Y arrives (e.g. Y=2050), scientists will observe the sea level rise, which we will call “Observed”, $latex O[SLR](Y) $. At that future time, the current board assumes the future board will continue to believe the sea level rise varies quadratically), passing through the pairs $latex (2014, 0) $ and $latex (2050,O(SLR)(Y) $ with minimum at 2014. That future board will be assumed use the same risk methodology the current board likes, but base flood risk calculations for events further into the future on new projections which have been updated based on new observations.
Note that under this “delayed action” plan, if the observed rate of rising exceeds the current best estimate of the rate of rise, the future board will expect the sea level rate to rise at a faster rate than currently projected; at that point they can build the wall higher than the current board’s best estimate of the build height in the future year. The converse is also true.
(b) The current board will also assume uncertainty in projected sea level rise also varies quadratically with time measured from the date on which they are making decisions. The current level is 0m. The value in 2100 is 0.36 m. So, in 2014, the uncertainty in projected sea level rise varies as $latex \sigma = (0.36 m) (dt/86)^{2} $ where $latex dt = t-2014 $; note $latex T=2100-2014 = 86 $ in the denominator is the full time period the board is considering when developing their response. (Note: I’ve introduced my second prameter, it’s 2.) The current uncertainty intervals are illustrated by the range bars in the figure above.
When the future arrives, the current board assumes scientists ability ability to predict sea level rise has not have improved, and that $latex (0.36 m) (dt/86)^{2} $ where dt is now computed using the current year, i.e. dt = t-Year_{current} $; . So, for example, when making decision in 2050, they assume the future board will use the equation indicated above substituting $latex dt = t-2050 $ (Note: if scientists uncertainty model improves, that will make the case for waiting better than presented here.)
(c) With respect to decision to build in the start year (i.e. 2014) the current board will assume they will build $latex N_{build} $ times between now and 2100, each time building at the beginning of the period. So, the first build period begins in 2014. If there are two build periods, the second one begins 43 years from now in 2057. At each time, the board will apply the exact same method Lew used to estimate the proper wall height to build, except that rather than building to protect through 2100, they will build to protect up to the next scheduled build time. That is: in 2014, they will build to protect to 2057. Moreover, Lew actually provided three methods of estimating the added protection height required to permit flood risk in the final year match current flood risk , each using a different probability distribution function (pdf) for the uncertainty. Out of caution, the board will assume this pdf is gaussian which maximizes the predicted height of protections.
Also, in it’s wish to use the exact same method as Lew, the current board will sift through his papers to find any parameters he used, and match those. They will notice he cites “Hunter” who uses a formula that includes a parameter $latex \lambda $ which is assumed constant with time. The board will read Lew’s paper, and discover this bit of text that contains numbers that permits them to back out the value of $latex \lambda $ used by Lew:
When uncertaintySLR is non-zero, then irrespective of what assumptions are made about the distribution of SLR, the required protective response increases and deviates rapidly and
in an accelerating manner from the anticipated mean SLR. For example, under a Gaussian assumption, if uncertaintySLR is around 0.36 m, this raises the required protective response to around 1m. That is, an expected SLR of 0.5m requires that dikes and levees be raised by twice that amount in order to keep the risk of flooding constant in light of uncertaintySLR. If other distributional assumptions are made, the values change but the in-principle conclusion remains the same:(Note: consultation with Hunter, suggests Hunter used the (5%-95%) uncertainty range and the 0.36 m may be a typo; Hunter shows 0.26m. I’ll be using the 0.36 m as my goal is to make a qualitative rather than quantitative point. )
Note: text corresponds to a discussion of the point highlighted in the figure below:
My future figures will use this value of $latex \lambda $ which is held constant, as Lew suggests.
At future build times, the current board assumes the future board will act as follows: if based on the observations available at that future time the height of the wall is estimated to be sufficient to protect the village at the end of the next build time, the future board will skip that build but will not demolish it, otherwise, they will build to protect using the updated risk model that incorporated knowledge of the current observed sea level.
Results! (Otherwise known as the fun part!)
First: My results represent a detailed discussion of the height of the protections for the case represented by the highlighted point in “Lew’s” figure above. Recall the fundamental reason my results will differ from Lew’s is I permit the board to build in increments and in particular, they may build more than once. I will call the number of planned builds $latex N_{build} $. Since I am using Lew’s method of risk analysis, my results will reproduce his when the number of builds is $latex N_{build} =1 $ as that is the case his analysis represents. (Note however, I didn’t spend much time matching. I had to back a parameter out form the text comparison of two papers suggests a typo on one of the other. The results are somewhat sensitive to that parameter.)
To obtain results, I coded in the decision algorithm describe above in “R”. I did this because as far as the current board is concerned, the future observed values of sea level rise, $latex O[SLR](Y) $, are random. So, I made $latex O[SLR](Y) $ in build periods after the initial one to be a random variable with standard deviation equal to that estimated for the projected time between builds and mean equal to the updated projection for $latex E[SLR](Y) $. Recall that updated projection in future years is based on $latex O[SLR](Y) $ for the most recent observation. I also coded to implement the boards decision to only build if the expected value of the protections at the end of the current build period exceed that of the current wall. Results below are based on 10,000 iterations.
Expected Height of Protections
First, recall, in Lew’s analysis, there was 1 build. For the case I picked out, the “required” height of protections was 1-m with no variability in the height the board might build. Essentially, the board figures out the level they ‘need’ to build given current information, and build it. They are done. That result is represented by the black square above ‘1’ build below. Meanwhile, the blue circle represents the expected value of sea level rise $latex E[SLR] $.
Note that in the $latex N_{build} case, on average, the protection will exceed the amount that is actually required to meet acceptable flood risk by 0.5 meters in order to protect 2100 citizens adequately. This was the horrible idea that Lew’s text suggest is somehow “required”.
Next look at the figure, allowing your eyes to travel to the right. Suppose the board decides to build twice, $latex N_{build}=2 $, with an initial build now, and a second one 43 years from now. In this case, we can’t know the level of protections the board will judge proper 43 years from now. That magnitude will depend on the observed sea level rise. However, what we can examine is the expected value of the protections they will build, and its standard deviation. In this case, the expected value for the wall they will ultimately build 0.53m; this is substantially smaller than the 1-m they would build if they planned protecting citizens of 2100 using a protections built in 2014. Morever, it’s only a smidge above the expected sea level rise of 0.5m.
Looking further to the right, you can see the expected value of the protections declines as the number of build increments increases approaching 0.5 m as the number of builds increases to infinity. At this point, it is worth noting that qualitatively this result is fairly general: The expected value of the wall height required to match flood risk in the beginning and end periods will tend to diminish. However, the quantitative results are affected by functional form the board assumes for projections and its uncertainty.
Next: it’s worth admitting that the future boards may build protection levels that are either higher or lower that the best estimate for the future protection height. The ±90% spread is illustrated with the blue uncertainty bars. Generally speaking, under the multiple build scenario, boards will build for higher protection if sea level actually rises at a higher rate than anticipated currently and lower if lower if it rises at a lower rate. Interestingly, under the current set of assumptions for the parameters (both creating quadratics), the height of protections ‘required’ if the board builds only once lies outside the ±90% spread of heights they will build if they defer part of their decision for 43 years. So: the ‘build full barriers now‘ tends to result in over building, which is unnecessarily costly. (Necessary funds might need to be taken from lunch subsidies for low income children, or for medical care for the elderly. Who knows?)
But some might think: We’ll at least the public will get ‘better’ protection. Sort of. Recall that even if the height of the wall built becomes deterministic under Lew’s “1 build” scenario, the future sea level is a random variable. So the height of protection actually required in 2100 is a random variable whose mean is 0.5m and ±90% variability is 0.36m The following graph compares the height built to the height of protection actually required in 2100.
Notice that in the figure, the height of the wall and it’s ±90% uncertainty intervals are well away from 0m. This means that in more than 95% of future outcomes, the public has much more protection that required to maintain adequate flood risk. In fact, they would have obtained the level of protection the board thinks is adequate building a wall that is more than 0.14 m lower.
In the other cases, there is a possibility that when 2100 comes along, the wall is a bit too short. With two builds, when the final protection height is too short relative to the height required for adequate flood risk in 2100, the short fall is based on the sea level rising faster during the final period than anticipated based on the previously observed periods. In the case computed, there is 5 % chance the wall is 0.06m too short to give whatever level of protection the board deems adequate.
This too-short wall be seen as a big “disadvantage”, but fear not. The future board can schedule another build. If they believe the sea has stopped rising, they can add 6 cm to the wall elevation. If the 2100 board believes the sea is continuing to rise, and they believe the area continues to need protection, the future can base their decision on new, updated, hopefully improved projections of uncertainty.
Summary
- There is no mathematical reason a current, 2014, board needs to build a protections to levels required to protect citizens in 2100.
- There is no mathematical reason a current, 2014, board needs to build to protect to the upper uncertainty bound for sea level rise in 2100.
- If the board opts to schedule several many periods, the best estimate for the required protected height approaches the mean value for the projected sea level rise.
- If the board opts to build as required, they can come close to building “just the right” height protections.
- Other factors not discussed here become very important to the boards decision. These include: the discount rate which makes current expenditures more costly than future ones, incremental added cost of maintaining unnecessarily tall protections for 100 years, risk of unnecessary excess loss if the unnecessarily tall protections are destroyed by an earthquake sometime between 2014 and the time when the flood protection of that height might be needed and added costs when engineering projects start and stop. Most of these will tend to argue in favor of many builds; the final one argues in favor of a smaller number of builds. Careful calculations would be required to determine the optimum number of builds; it is unlikely to be 1.
- It is true that uncertainty results in higher costs. However, note for the case considered, the “Lew” method suggested the uncertainty meant one needed to build 1-m protections when the best estimate for required protections under certainty was 0.5 m. But by responding with sanity the expected value of build heights were (0.53 0.51 0.50 0.50)m for (2,3,4,5) builds respectively, with the additional height above the 0.5m required under certainty falling within rounding error. Admittedly, rounding down was required, but I think few boards would be impressed by the thought that ‘climate uncertainty’ adds horrific costs when the difference in cost is less than 0.5% of the expected costs, represents less than 1mm in height of a protection and this uncertainty is dwarfed by other uncertainties that affect board decisions.
Anyway, I thought some of you might enjoy this “toy math” post. I did.
Links to papers
Readers might want these handy links:
A simple technique for estimating an allowance for uncertain sea-level rise. John Hunter y analysis is an application of equation (6).
“There is no mathematical reason a current, 2014, board needs to build a protections to levels required to protect citizens in 2010.”
2010 should be 2100.
Thanks Kenneth. I tried to find all the 2010s!
Lucia,
Your summary point 1, and the general theme of this post regarding current vs. future uncertainty, brings to mind the Myles Allen (and Frame, 2007) Science paper on climate sensitivity:
I don’t think believe anyone would label those authors “lukewarmers”, but their point about adapting future targets based on updated knowledge is salient and echoes yours here.
Interesting post. An alternative argument that could perhaps be made by an individual is that building structures without location specific projections of SLR could lead to over/under engineering. As an example we know that sea level rise is not globally synchronous and depends on mass contributions from the ice sheets significantly – not only in terms of their actual contributions but also their gravity contributions.
Without better constraints on the AIS and GIS contributions to SLR it will be hard to regional partition SLR. Alternatively, its fairly certain that globally averaged SLR will be more than 0.5 m regardless of whether you put TCR as 1.3 or 1.6 because of ice sheet dynamics.
I agree that adjusting your future predictions over time and with a model is giant step ahead of what I believe the Lew paper/article? approach was. A broader issue here in my view is what governing bodies will do in reality and not in some idealistic Civics 101 sense. One needs to look no further than pension liabilities for state and local governments and retirement and health benefits for national governments. Probably the same people who want to make immediate AGW mitigation a crisis issue will give little or no thought to these problems I mentioned above. The main difference is that the calculations for these liability problems are much better understood and evidence based than that for AGW and its effects.
In case you are wondering why the different levels of concern expressed for these separate issues, I will give you a clue. One is glaring problem with areas that have already been handed over to government control and the other is one that requires a crises to become an area of much greater government involvement.
On an even deeper philosophical level and as a libertarian I would not agree that problems created today and yesterday should await future generations for making the payments or adjustments or suffering the pain. Whoever is found responsible for the problem in some legal system should pay for the damages that can be shown to be caused to the victim. The problem with AGW in my view is that the jury is still out and thus I like Lucia’s incremental approach. I would, however, want to know more about the initial costs versus the uncertain risk of the detrimental effects, if any, that are involved and versus alternative approaches to the problem. Surely the government being a last resort insurer (or worst the payer of damages where no insurance exists) where climate change and weather can create an otherwise uninsurable risk of damage is wrong in the present and will be in the future. In effect these current government subsidies are putting people who live in these “dangerous” areas and the future taxpayer who will be required to pay the damages at risk.
Kenneth Fritsch,
“Probably the same people who want to make immediate AGW mitigation a crisis issue will give little or no thought to these problems I mentioned above. The main difference is that the calculations for these liability problems are much better understood and evidence based than that for AGW and its effects. ”
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Ya well, if you bother to point this out they will insist the solution is confiscation of whatever fraction of personal income above the median required to “support” the unfunded liabilities. See, simple to fix.
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They are at least consistent: no wealth, whether accumulated in the past or currently being earned is the legitimate property of who earns it; all wealth in fact belongs 100% to the public (channeling Karl Marx!), and only the fraction ‘not really needed’ by the public can be retained by those who generate the wealth. It’s pure Obamanomics 101 (“You didn’t create that..”); infantile, moronic, and economically destructive.
Kenneth
What they do will depend on the governing body. In the US, some civil engineering projects are done at village/ city level. Some at county, some at state, some at federal. If my village was implementing something, the board would likely not have the money to implement a “fix” using projections through 2100, and if they spent the all of tax revenues on that, they would not be re-elected.
On the other hand: At federal level? Who knows.
Another approach for analyzing the optimal strategy, from the finance and corporate strategy fields, would be Real Options (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_options_valuation)
Robert Way,
This is true. But also: the optimal way to deal with that is likely to be incremental adaptation as that can reduce both the over and under response. ( Optimization requires more assumptions that I can make for a ‘toy’ problem. But the ‘toy’ shows what sorts of things you might need to know.)
Sure. This is likely true– but moving away from the point Lew was trying to make. It’s focusing on the fact that someresponse is likely required not because of any uncertainty but rather because some things are know with near certainty.
Note in the decision framework I had the board implement, they were making some decisions. Exactly which would depends on their specific situations, but it’s certainly true that if the minimum projection says “do something now”, one ought to seriously consider doing that. At a minimum, one does some cost projections to figure out if the cost of “no engineered solution” is lower than the cost of “some engineered solution”. Often the answer will be “some engineered solution”.
But one of my points in this article: Don’t do the analysis the way Lewandowsky’s article at least seems to be ‘suggesting’ it be done. When faced deciding to build an engineered mitigation system (i.e. sea wall, barrier etd.) and dealing with uncertainty, one should at least consider reacting slowly and deliberately, and implementing solutions in multiple steps. It will often save money. Decreeing– as Lew seems to do– that one “must” engineer solutions by assuming boards decisions to build an engineer solution is a one time thing tends to be wasteful and overstates the degree to which uncertainty contributes to cost.
Robert Way,
“its fairly certain that globally averaged SLR will be more than 0.5 m regardless of whether you put TCR as 1.3 or 1.6 because of ice sheet dynamics.”
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Humm.. 500 mm in 86 years is an average of ~6 mm per year against a geologically stable shoreline. Since the current rate of rise against that stable shoreline is ~2.8 mm per year, averaging 6 mm between now and 2100 means the rate in 2100 has to be near 10 mm per year or more. Considering that there has been zero acceleration in rate of rise since ~1992 (satellite altimetry), where does the support for your claim of “fairly certain” 500 mm rise come from?
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Come on Robert, that 500 mm is a lot less than “fairly certain”. You would be wise to be a bit more circumspect about such claims.
Historically, governments discover that flood protection is inadequate when it fails. Small failures (some water over the top) are not catastrophic and provide information for future building.
Under hysterical assumptions, we have hilarity like the Gov of California claiming that an airport would soon be under water (LA or San Fran, can’t remember) when this airport is 120 feet above sea level and Cali coasts are not really flooding anyway (due to tectonic activity).
Ultimately it is not so much whether it is a “good idea” to build a 1.7m sea wall, it is whether there are other better ideas for that scarce commodity called tax revenue.
Better schools. Public pensions. National debt. Fire and police. National defense. Social Security. Welfare. More windmills and solar panels. Increased academic funding for brilliant psychology assessments of climate change science. Better fireworks. Security theater at the local airport.
If you examine the public priorities, that wall won’t likely be built to 1.7m by someone who wants to be reelected.
Tom Scharf,
But what the analysis shows is that it shouldn’t be built that tall unless and until evidence accumulates to demonstrate that height is likely to be needed soon. Building it would be irrational. It’s not an issue of a good idea competing with some other good idea. It’s an issue of building the wall being bad investment even if the alternative is to spend money on something “silly”.
“Security theater at the local airport.”
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Arguably the best description of the TSA, EVAH!
Craig,
SF airport is at 4 meters; LA airport is at 38 meters.
I have been reviewing multiple federal documents from EPA, Fish & Wildlife, etc in which they talk about adaptation strategies. But the changes they want to adapt to, such as changing species ranges, are currently happening so slowly (or can’t be detected, in the case of flood risk) that there is plenty of time to take action AFTER you can detect a change. Lew’s math is completely misleading in such a case.
SteveF (Comment #132298)
“Ya well, if you bother to point this out they will insist the solution is confiscation of whatever fraction of personal income above the median required to “support†the unfunded liabilities. See, simple to fix.”
These people are inconsistent in wanting to attempt to fix AGW now without knowing the extent of the problem while not bothered by inaction on the unfunded liabilities where we know the extent of the problem and further know that inaction will make the problem worse.
Kenneth,
What government gives, government can take away. Benefits will be cut as needed, but not by today’s politicians, who will be long gone when unfunded liabilities come due.
How does this critique of Lew’s work hold up in context of Fukushima? The sea wall was too short by one or two meters as I recall.
@hunter. Are you taking the piss?
Honshu (the largest/main island of Japan) is about 1,500 km north to south by the shortest (western) route. Call it 2,000 km along the east (Pacific) tsunami-prone coast.
Lets get this right. The tsunami maxed at about 40 metres ASL (from memory). You have some idea that Japan has built 2,000km of 38 metre high sea wall which failed by “one or two meters [sic]”? Really?
The sea defences here are built to withstand normal storm conditions. Bye-and-large they work well. They are not built to withstand tsunamis. The strategy to deal with tsunamis is to evacuate and abandon everything, or to build specific structures which are tsunami-proof. The Fukushima nuclear power plant withstood the tsunami. The backup power plant which was housed in a tin shed on the beach did not. Had the emergency generators (and their fuel supply) been housed in reinforced concrete building(s), the entire disaster could have been avoided.
TEPCO management (especially their senior engineers) presided over a gross management failure to anticipate and build for entirely predictable events. In contrast, the closest nuclear power plant the to earthquake and tsunami is at Onagawa.
“According to Reuters the Onagawa nuclear power plant was the closest nuclear power plant to the March 2011 earthquake epicenter. All three reactors at the power plant successfully withstood the 2011 TÅhoku earthquake and tsunami, demonstrating the ability of a well designed nuclear facility to withstand even one of most powerful of megathrust earthquakes and tsunamis ever recorded and to shut down safely, as designed, without incident.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant
@hunter. Quoting myself.
“Honshu (the largest/main island of Japan) is about 1,500 km north to south by the shortest (western) route. Call it 2,000 km along the east (Pacific) tsunami-prone coast.”
I get a distance of around 1,300km from Seattle to San Francisco. How is the US going with its construction of a 40m high sea wall along the entire (tsunami-prone) west coast?
hunter,
How it holds up depends on what you mean. In Lew’s paper when discussing effect of uncertainty in SLR on innundation risk, he discusses uncertainties in otherthings with these words
He really doesn’t say much more about the other types of events. But if you examine Hunter (2012), you will find those other extreme events are characterized by a parameter λ You would also find Lew’s text claiming “extra allowance for extreme events is a function of the uncertainty in the estimated mean SLR, called uncertaintySLR ($latex \sigma_{slr} $)from here on.” would be more informative if it said that the extra allowance is a function of uncertainty in SLR and λ .”
In fact: the height of the protected wall to deal with uncertainty in SLR is proportional to $latex \frac{ \sigma_{slr}^{2} } {\lambda } $
Note: $latex \sigma_{slr}^{2} $ is in the numerator. That means the height required to protect rises as the square of the uncertainty in projected sea level rise. But $latex \lambda $ is in the denominator. That means if means the current uncertainty of maximum sea level is very large you will not need to elevate current protections much to deal with sea level rise. To take an example: If the standard deviation for projected SLR $latex \sigma_{slr} $ is (0.36m/1.6)~ 0.22 m, and $latex \lambda $ is 1000 m, you will only need to raise the wall and amount on the order of 10^-5 meters. On the other hand, if $latex \lambda $ is 1 cm, you’ll need to raise the protection height an amount on the other of 5 meters. So. The magnitude of $latex \lambda $ — which engineers already use affects whether climate uncertainty ‘matters’ at all.
Now you might wonder “why does this magical $latex \lambda $” matter so much? (And haven’t we gotten off the beaten track on Fukushima?)
I’m going to post, proof read the latex and continue.
The tenders for the flood barriers to protect Venice were first issued in 1975. Apparently lots of haggling followed. They spent between 1988 and 1992 building prototypes. In 1989 a conceptual design was drawn up. 2002 the final design. Construction started 2003. Due for completion in 2016. If you have seen the design, it is hard to imagine how the height could be raised without major rework.
42 years from initial conception to completion. The Thames flood barrier took about 30 years I believe. Therein lies the problem with your reasoning.
“So, the first build period begins in 2014. If there are two build periods, the second one begins 43 years from now in 2057. At each time, the board will apply the exact same method Lew used to estimate the proper wall height to build, except that rather than building to protect through 2100, they will build to protect up to the next scheduled build time. That is: in 2014, they will build to protect to 2057. ”
If in 2014 they were building to protect to 2057, the flood barrier would be not very useful by the time it was completed in 2056 at least based on the experience of Venice.
They need to build to protect up to the next scheduled build time + length of construction project time. That reduces the number of builds.
Lewandowsky et al’s argument is not as unrealistic as you claim.
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Governor Brown, Governor Kitzhaber, and Governor Inslee are now studying the synergistic benefits of placing an interstate high speed rail system atop the proposed sea wall, with its southern terminus connecting with California’s proposed Los Angeles to San Francisco high speed rail link.
Ok… so why does this magical $latex \lambda $ matter so much to Lew’s method of estimating the wall height. One reason is that it’s already used to figure out how high above SLR a protection must be to provide ‘adequate’ protection (with adequate defined by some now number of expected flooding events per year– say 1 in 200 or some such. This number is assumed to have been decided on and kept constant in Lew’s analysis. The actual value doesn’t matter provided it is selected and — because eq. (6) in Hunter is used, and we are talking flood rise, N needs to be ‘not big’. )
The way it’s currentlyused is when $latex \lambda $ is large, the protections are already high relative to sea level, and they are protecting against something unusual happening. Like. Say. A Tsunami.
What’s $latex \lambda $ ? In an SLR problem it would be the standard deviation annual maximum in surface height of the sea at the location being protected. It has dimensions length, so you expect it to be reported in meters. How do you figure it out: If sea level isn’t rising, you measure the maximum every year for many years and take the standard deviation. If you have enough years, and tsunami’s happen from time to time, you catch that in your measurement. So the string of numbers maxs might look like this:
c(4, 10, 8, 3, 2….,190603, …. .)cm. The ‘190603’ happens to be a tsnumai you find the standard deviation and you have an estimate of λ
If you don’t have enough years, or you suspect the very rare catastrophe’s might matter… you might create a model for the height due to tsunami’s and add that variability. When you add that in, your estimate of $latex \lambda $ will be a bigger number than that estimated from sea level only. When you use it to calculate risk, you will conclude you need higher protection levels now compared to what you thought when you didn’t consider the variability due to tsunamis. But note: This is now— not the future.
As for now: According to Wikipedia “A 2008 in-house study identified an immediate need to better protect the facility from flooding by seawater. This study mentioned the possibility of tsunami-waves up to 10.2 metres (33 ft). Headquarters officials insisted that such a risk was unrealistic and did not take the prediction seriously”
In terminology of Lew: if they used the equation in Hunter 2012, not taking that wave height seriously translates into “too low $latex \lambda $ used to engineer things for the present. Note: this has nothing to do with uncertainty in sea level rise. (But we’ll get there.)
But basically: had they engineered to protect against 10.2 meter Tsunami along with its waves, then the wall would have been tall enough now.
Now: moving on to Lew’s extrapolation:
In the methodology of the Lew paper, including variability of surface level means larger $latex \lambda $ relative to ignoring it. The nuclear plant board not taking the results of the study saying tsunami’s can be 10.2 meters tall is the equivalent of their saying $latex \lambda $ is smaller that it really is.
For today they built the wall too short. Let’s say it’s currently $latex H=10 m $
So, the think they are protecting against $latex N_{actual} = N_{crit} <<1 $, but actually $latex N_{actual} > N_{crit} $ because their wall is too short (because the refused to consider realistic tsunami risks).
Next step: when presented with the issue of sea level risk, using the “Lew” method, they would– presumably– use the same wrong (too low) value of $latex \lambda $ to predict the extra height needed to protect due to uncertainty in they will predict too much extra height to protect against climate uncertainty. So: their estimate of the extra height to protect against climate change is larger than the extra height actually required for climate change.
But remember: had the tsunami not occurred, they would be adding this extra height to a wall that is already too short! The most likely outcome is that even with the extra height added to protect against climate change it would still be too short to protect against tsunami’s that arrive after climate change occurs. So: their wall is probably still too short. Because it has failed to account for tsunami risk.
Meanwhile, if they are spouting rhetoric, they will decree some huge value was due to “climate change”.
Ok… but what if the tsunami hits before climate change (as it has)? Then the engineers and board may realize $latex \lambda $ is much larger than they previously thought. If– even with no thought of climate change–they can use this new more correct value of $latex \lambda $ and the retrofit their wall to protect against tsunamis the wall will now be quite a bit higher. (To give a number, we need to know a bunch of other details about the Fukushima’s previous estiamte of $latex \lambda $, the reasonable value after the tsunami and a value of a ‘location parameter’ $latex \mu $. )
Regardeless of details, once the engineers incorporate the more realistic values for variability due to tsunamis, they can now use the same correct value of $latex \lambda $ to estimate the extra protection required to protect against climate change. Because extra protection value is inversely proportional to $latex \lambda $, the extra protection height required specifically for “climate change” is less than previously thought. This would be added to the height of wall currently needed– which must already be tall enough to protect against the tsunami.
Without quantifying we know:
1) The wall needs to be taller now to protect against current tsunamis’, call this height $latex H_{ needednow, tsunami} $ we can say $latex H_{ needednow, tsunami} >H_{ needednow, no tsunami} $ .
2) If we want to maintain tsunami protection, we must raise the wall some height $latex \Delta H_{ climate, tsunami} $ computed using the same value of $latex \lambda_{tsunami} $ we used to compute $latex H_{ needednow, tsunami} $. Recall, we might have previously estimated a height the incorrect lambda to get $latex H_{ needednow, no tsunami} $ and gotten $latex \Delta H_{ climate, no tsunami} $. Because of the properties of the math:
$latex \Delta H_{ climate, tsunami} < \Delta H_{ climate, no tsunami} $ 3) If we neglected the tsunami, $latex \Delta H_{ climate, no tsunami} + \Delta H_{ climate, no tsunami} $. would likely end up too small. But the "too small" nature would come from forgetting the uncertainty in tsunamis which made the wall too short in the first place. Oddly: while the "math" was intended to keep inundation risk constant, we would actually end up with lower inundation risk -- because the estimate of the 'extra' for climate change ($latex \Delta H_{ climate, no tsunami} $) is too large . However, the inundation risk would still be higher than intended. 4) The correct height of the new wall should be based on the correct height for the current wall. The new wall height is $latex H_{ needednow, tsunami} + \Delta H_{ climate, tsunami} $ this will be taller than the wall in (3) but the extra height comes from protecting against the tsunami. The amount due to climate change becomes a fraction of the total improvement required and is less than we would have thought when we were making a mistake about current variability of surface level of the water!
Mike,
Inflating times it took for things to be built in the past isn’t a good strategy. People can check.
No. The thames barrier took 8 years to build. See wikipedia. Or the quote on the other thread where Eli tried to suggest the correct time to date the construction is from the time of the 1953 flood. That’s not the correct time even if that flood motivated a later boards decision to act. The correct time to estimate how long it took to build is when building began.
As for venice: even 42 years permits “2 builds” if that’s what the board decided at the outset. In contrast, if the board locks themselves in– because they are lead to believe that “on build and one build only” makes sense (as implied in Lew’s ‘math’) then that’s a mistake. But that doesn’t mean boards are required to make this mistake. Nor does it mean they should be kept ignorant of the fact that it is a mistake.
Also: You frequently can’t estimate the minimum time required to act from time people do take to act when the time frame is not especially urgent.
Democratically elected boards will start and stop projects or create slow processes with periods for review for comment when urgency is not great. The same democratically elected board will act more quickly if urgency is greater. One of the things boards do when protection is urgent is cut down the time period for haggling.
In the case of urgency and non-urgency, boards are acting correctly to move quickly or slowly respectively. But you can’t gauge how long it really takes to act when a board acts in situations that are not urgent.
Beyond that, notice that the “two build” case gives boards 43 years to build. So 30 years does not represent “a problem” for the reasoning. It merely means that 10 builds is precluded in the instances where 30 years is required. It’s worth noting that 30 years– were it true– permits three builds if that’s what the board choses.
Obviously, local boards need to consider how long it might take to build the modification they need that meets their criteria; that will be different in different locations. But absurd claims that the “math” says they “must” build ones are absurd. The board can and should consider all factors– and that includes the possibility of incremental adaptation which will often be possible and often be the best case even if occassionally it is not.
I should also note wikipedia points out that Venice has been protecting against floods since 1604
“In 1604, to defray the cost of flood relief, Venice introduced what could be considered the first example of a ‘stamp tax’. When the revenue fell short of expectations in 1608, Venice introduced paper with the superscription ‘AQ’ and imprinted instructions”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venice
They’ve pretty much never ‘solved’ the problem which is increasing because Venice has been subsiding rather briskly. Surely no one would estimate the time to put current flood controls in place from 1604. It’s really no more reasonable to estimate times actually required from the 70s when a ‘new idea’ was sent out and people began haggling.
lucia,
Sorry I was not clear. I don’t give a rat’s ass about Lewindowsky’s faux analysis. What I meant was how does the ‘toy model’ you put together handle things like Fukushima? I *think* I have a possible answer, but wanted to hear what you and others might think.
Hecotr Pascal,
Woh, buddy. We agree in almost everyway….I think. I was talking about the sad reality that Fukushima was built:
A) very close to the ocean
B) In a location that had, within historical records less than 200 years old shown itself to be vulnerable to tsunamis
C) with a sea wall known to be lower than the last recorded tsunami at that same location.
D) a backup system vulnerable to inundation by surges from tsunamis and earthquakes
In no way would I promote some Brobdingnagian ridiculous idea like a national sea wall for a coastline defense. I leave that for science fiction super powers.
My point is that TEPCO and the Japanese government knew that this site was vulnerable and did nothing about it.
In other words, the real issue is that governments worldwide are taking climate alarmism as an excuse to not do the normal prudent things that can be done with the excuse that CO2 is causing an unstoppable apocalyhpse so why try?
Fukushima was as avoidable as it has been in many ways over blown.
It is Lew & gang who are coming up with bizarre-o world rationalizations that would lead to entire coastlines being “protected” by huge sea walls. The very idea reminds me of some of the sets in the LOTR movies, with huge abandoned structures built to futility serving as backdrops for fighting the Orcs.
hunter
I think I answered that. (1) The toy model is based on a risk analysis model that contains a parameter λ. (2) Engineers would need to account for the fact that tsunami’s occur when computing λ (3) If they don’t or do so inadequately, the current walls will be too low.
If there is something ‘else’ you are trying to ask, clarify. I’ll try to answer tomorrow.
lucia,
Hi, thanks. I think you have answered my question well. Sorry to get so off topic.
Hector,
Please accept my apology for the typo on your name. I did see it and try to edit a fix, but the edit request did not go through.
one of my favorite examples
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1386978/The-Japanese-mayor-laughed-building-huge-sea-wall–village-left-untouched-tsunami.html
lucia,
I guess my point was that simple economics and other higher priorities drive policy to do the minimal necessary most of the time. Over-protecting anything is bound to get a very careful analysis. The union pension plans in Detroit, Chicago, etc. weren’t exactly set up to worst case analysis.
We all know this is an exercise in “climate change is gonna cost zillions so we need to change policy now”. It’s irrelevant that it is inaccurate and implausible because the goal is to produce a talking point for propaganda purposes.
.
TEPCO’s senior managers gambled that a tsunami wouldn’t happen within the expected operational life of the plant. They lost that gamble, but big. Taking even modest actions to reduce the near-term risk of a tsunami was something they never considered.
.
For example, doing nothing more than having a provision for recharging the backup batteries in the reactor valve control systems could have allowed the operators at Fukushima to maintain control of the reactors until the cooling pumps could be restarted. Some small Honda generators bought from Home Depot and stored in a tsunami-proof location would have done the job.
I am surprised no one has mentioned the cost of the sea wall. If the cost (let us say for a 30m high wall) is more than the value of the houses, or more than any possible funds to build it, then the rational thing is to not build it. If the risk is tsunami, then the town should be moved maybe. If the risk is hurricane (so you get warning to get out) then maybe just don’t modernize.
Craig,
You describe the real world, rational approach well.
There is no point in defending what either does not defending or is not worth defending.
Even on Galveston Island, the sea wall only protects a limited portion of the island. Much of the island is unprotected and people build, or don’t build, accordingly. Since Galveston enforces building codes strongly, very few structures were swept away during the 2008 storm called Ike. Just across the channel in the next county, called Chambers county, there is a community called Bolivar. No codes were enforced.
The difference in destruction was breath taking. Glaveston- largely OK. Bolivar, nearly wiped out.
http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Ike-changed-Bolivar-Peninsula-forever-4285143.php
This situation can be explained more simply to those less mathematically inclined. If you believe the IPCC, sea level is rising a little more than 1 inch per decade and we can’t tell how fast this rate is accelerating. One can get “catastrophic” SLR by postulating an acceleration of 1″/decade/decade: 2″, 3″, 4″ and 5″/decade by mid-century for a total rise of 15″ (0.38 m). If the same acceleration continues for nine decades, the total rise will be 54″ (1.37 m). If the rate of SLR reaches 2″/decade (twice the current rate) in the next decade, SLR could exceed the IPCC’s likely range. If “catastrophic” SLR (>1 m) is coming, we should know in about a decade. Then we can think about building massive sea walls.
As will be shown below, the IPCC’s likely ranges hide 5-fold differences in acceleration in the rate of SLR. The alarmists are proposing 5-fold more acceleration than the IPCC’s central estimate! Upper limits for the actual rate of acceleration will become much clearer over the next few decades, leaving us plenty of time to adapt – but not mitigate.
Assuming the current rate of SLR 1.25″/decade (3.2 mm/year = 1.25 inches/decade) continued for 9 decades, SLR would be 11″. Therefore 43″ of the above 54″ of SLR comes from the acceleration term. If it takes two decades for the rate of SLR to reach 2″/decade, SLR at the end of the century will be about 11″ + 21.5″ = 32.5″ (0.83 m), which is the top of the IPCC’s likely range for RCP8.5. If it takes three decades to reach 2″/decade, SLR at the end of the century will be 11″+14″ = 25″ (0.66 m) which is the top of the likely range for the other RCPs. If it takes 5(!) decades for the rate of SLR to reach 2″/decade, SLR will be 11″+9″ = 20″ (0.5 m), which is the IPCC’s central estimate for most scenarios. At the low end of the IPCC’s likely range (0.4 m = 16 inches), acceleration contributes only 5″ to total SLR by the end of the century and the rate of SLR barely reaches 2″/decade at the end of the century.
It is not much of a surprise that anti-aircraft missiles have a detection system, a computers and the ability to change course. Instead of building a massive computer on the ground, calculating all the possible locations an aircraft could be, the system operates in real time.
Above Mosher provided a link about Fudai, the Japanese town that built a sea wall and avoided destruction during the recent tsunami. The cost was “only” US$30M in today’s dollars and 3,000 people lived in the town. That’s $10,000 per person. If the sea wall lasted for 100 years, that would be $100/person/year for insurance against tsunamis. Factoring in maintenance, operations and the cost of borrowing money raises the real cost to several hundred dollars per year. How does this cost compare with what we often pay for insurance against other disasters? How likely are the disasters we normally insure ourselves against? Did the mayor who built this seawall make a sensible decision or did he get lucky? (The town was already lucky because its location allowed the sea wall to be built fairly cheaply.) And dozens of other Japanese cities and towns built smaller sea walls. $30B was spent on a sea wall to protect Kamaishi City, but it failed. Paying for insurance doesn’t always protect against disaster. And the site that most needed insurance – the Fukushima nuclear power plants – didn’t have enough.
The decision to build such a sea wall becomes much easier to justify if taxes from outside the town pay at least part of the project.
Steve: What did you learn from Fudai?
Tom+Scharf (Comment #132328)
Agreed. Moreover, it’s often the right decision. If a community doesn’t need an expensive thing now time value of money generally means they should wait and buy it when you need it.
There may sometimes be good reasons to build flood protections for climate change before sea level rises or rain fall increases, but mostly… no. Anyway, Lew’s analysis doesn’t demonstrate any need to do so– nor does it show that decision is the most cost effective, nor required to maintain a constant risk of innundation. Certainly, the decision isn’t a consequence of “math”– but other factors need to be weighed.
Craig
I agree. But encouraging or forcing people to move might also be called “protection”. Obviously, one should select the cheapest method. With this one, the question is: How many houses do you condemn, and when do you do it?
With respect to beach front property: Lots of people want to live within walking distance of the beach. Does it make sense to condemn a whole bunch of existing houses now which one thinks would be at risk if the sea level rose 1.7 m when the best estimate is 1m and the lower bound is 0.3m? No. It might make sense to create an incentive for people to in the region that will be at risk of flooding if the level rises to 0.3m to move or not modernize (or something) and slowly increase the area called “flood zone” as the sea level rises.
Republishing “flood zone” boundaries, having FEMA offer buy back incentives and so on are what we alreaady do now. What we don’t do is decree the “flood zone” areas based on projections for 2100. We can wait on that.
lucia,
As the madness of so-called climate change takes root- and rots- the bureaucrats, it is a good bet that we will see pre-emptive rezoning of flood risks. The algorithms behind determining BFE (Base Flood Elevation) and Flood Zone Determinations (FZD) are opaque to say the least. All underwriters see is the final determination. All the surveyors do is to measure to the map as provided. Insurance companies have gotten away with using risk pricing based on future models. This has led to very profitable over pricing of storm risk for many years now.
Frank,
But you forgot to factor in the acceleration of the acceleration of SLR…and then there is the acceleration of the acceleration of the acceleration. Let’s just fit that to a 19th order polynomial and…OMG…run for the hills NOW!
There is a lot of babble on “when do we force people to stop building there?” in environmental circles.
The simple answer is to let people build at their own risk. They pay the insurance, they pay for the infrastructure improvements through higher property taxes. If their houses become not insurable, they self insure or move out or assume the threat of a potential total loss. No public subsidization of any coastal risk.
The authoritarian wing of the greens loves to ponder when they can force people to do X, Y, and Z. People need to be punished today for alleged future climate change threats.
The typical reaction you get from this libertarian argument is that this system cannot be constructed or implemented fairly. Of course it can. The public sector could just pull out and provide no support and leave communities to self govern as they do it uncountable private communities already. Of course then you do not get to charge exorbitant property taxes on expensive real estate to stuff the coffers, which is a vital component to income redistribution. So the public sector actively wants to reap the rewards of high end real estate, not constrict it.
SteveF (Comment #132302)
October 22nd, 2014 at 6:13 pm
“Considering that there has been zero acceleration in rate of rise since ~1992 (satellite altimetry), where does the support for your claim of “fairly certain†500 mm rise come from?”
If you look at the latest Jevrejeva data, there’s been a small deceleration since 1900. Houston and Dean found small decelerations over the last 80 years. Also looking at the Jevrejeva data, it appears to me that there’s a 60yr cycle in the GMSL rate which lags the GMST rate by about 20yrs. So in the not too distant future, there might be a debate regarding the “pause” / “slowdown” / “hiatus” in SLR.
Expensive real estate will likely continue to exist. Lots of people like to visit the shore and want to own a shack at the beach. The wealthy (and even non-wealthy) will continue to find the notion of getting up in the morning and taking a short walk to the beach attractive and they will continue to pay for such properties.
The questions are: How close the the shoreline will people be allowed to build. What can they build? And does everyone need to build everything on stilts? Do tax payers who don’t own these properties subsidize the enjoyment of those who build in risky locations with public taxes?
Some people will pay a lot for shoreline property even if they are only permitted to park RV’s on an intermittent basis.
Tom Scharf,
Have you heard of Myers-Briggs Type Indicators? In that theory, there are four dichotomies. One is thinking vs feeling. Feelers outnumber thinkers. There is simply no way that government would stand by when a disaster happened even if they swore up and down beforehand that they would. IMO, it’s why juries award large damages to plaintiffs even when they later admit privately that the defendant didn’t do anything wrong.
I’m not a hardcore libertarian. Certainly coastal building codes are a good idea and benefit everyone. The insurance industry wants to know they are insuring a survivable house. The homeowner wants to have confidence of the same.
I totally agree that the subsidization of hazard insurance for coastal homeowners makes no sense. I can’t really find anyone who support this, except a few coastal homeowners I suppose.
The system as it exists works pretty well.
From the “should they be allowed to live there” perspective, I can’t think of too many reasons to restrict this beyond a house will never survive there. There are issues of the public sector having a defacto agreement to supply electricity, sewers, and water to these exposed houses. Those costs could dramatically increase if worst case scenarios play out. There should always be public beach access for the little people. I suppose occasionally we need to save a 3-horned yellow bellied sea slug and disallow dumping garbage on coral reefs.
As of now, the battle is on building codes which are to 100 year storm surge levels. The battle in NC was over how much predicted SLR to add in. The left wanted worst case climate change estimates, the right wanted historical trend estimates. Compromise wasn’t in the cards.
DeWitt,
You are right as demonstrated by reality. During the financial crisis I was for letting the banks burn to the ground (you made your bed, now lie in it). Of course that didn’t happen and it was probably the right decision, but we will never really know.
The issue of moral hazards comes up, and the best way to change behavior sometimes is to let people face the consequences of their mistakes. What really aggravates the libertarian types are when those who act recklessly are effectively rewarded for their behavior. Stop paying your mortgage in Florida and it takes on average 1 to 2 years to get evicted. Rent free living. Take on too much debt and you are first in line for mortgage write downs.
AJ,
Please provide a link to the data you are talking about.
Your approach to the problem reminded me of this:
http://www.pilotfriend.com/training/flight_training/nav/images/52.jpg
The wind may be strong and we’ll have to point the airplane a lot to the left. We’ll find out if it is strong once we get up there, and make many corrections as the wind will vary in speed. A decision made on the ground and stuck to in the air may miss the destination by a large distance. VOR navigation is when you tune into a specific beacon that is in range, and then a an instrument display needle tells you if you need to adjust the airplane’s nose left or right.
Lucia,
Not sure that you can always just “make the wall higher” by adding to the existing wall although it would be smart if they could use a design that allowed you to do that in the future.
Also, many typos (negotiable spelled wrong, etc) and this seems garbled: Today, I’m going to use a simple “Toy†model to show that, in fact, ‘uncertainty’ does not require anyone to don’t need to build a wall to math the upper range of projections now or ever. One only needs to build to that range if that sea level rise materializes?
Bill,
Thanks for pointing out those typos. I fixed them.
No one thinks you can always do that; no one has suggested that might be the case.
That’s an option the board can decide on. But yes: sometimes it’s best to design in option so one can adapt to uncertainty. What one is not required to do is decide there are no options other than “build once” at the outset and then decree that because there are no other options the cost of response must be very high. The fallacy is: there are other options.
One should not jump to the conclusion that ‘my’ assumptions about what the board could do means they have only two choices: Those Lew’s model assumes and those my model used to ‘do math’. I had to explain the board could behave in a way that resulted in less cost than under the constraints Lew claimed and to “do math” I needed to pick a specific way that happens to be “less insane” than the one Lew’s model seems to assume they “must” behave (i.e. make one build decision and one only.)
In fact, the board can do many other things. What I have them ‘do’ is not intended to be the only thing, nor the ‘optimal’ thing. It is just an obvious thing they could do– and which most boards in the USA do do and which results in lower costs than Lew implies. What it shows is if boards act the way they normally act Lew’s claims about the effect of uncertainty on creating protections are sufficiently exaggerated to be correct for all practical purposes. I only need to show one option is cheaper to show Lew is wrong.
Tom wrote: “But you forgot to factor in the acceleration of the acceleration of SLR…and then there is the acceleration of the acceleration of the acceleration. Let’s just fit that to a 19th order polynomial and…OMG…run for the hills NOW!”
As Lucia might say, a quadratic model is just a toy. However, any sensible model will probably suggest that we will have adequate warning (for adaptation) of a coming radical departure from the current trend – with an acceleration that is difficult to detect. If one decomposes the IPCC’s projections for SLR into a linear component and an “accelerating” component (that is not necessarily quadratic), the large range of acceleration becomes much more apparent. Even this is overly simplistic, given the multiple contributors to 20th century SLR. However, large acceleration in SLR appears to have only one cause – increased flow of ice caps into the ocean.
You have to weight the probability of a sea level rise with the expected cost of that rise. Moreover the sea is not flat.
Eli
Eli,
Of course one does that. No one here has ever said otherwise, and that point is rather orthogonal to this one.
The fact that one has to weigh costs — and may want to just do nothing if responding is too costly– doesn’t mean those who chose to mitigate are required to escalate costs by insisting boards make stupid choices that drive the costs of mitigation higher than they need to be. So: boards don’t have to act stupidly just because Lew did some calculations that show mitigation will be very high if they follow an strategy where they make stupid decisions. They can chose to mitigate in sane ways that cost less and give equal or greater protection than the “Lew” method.
Existential Threats Increase Response Rate
Great common sense post Lucia.
Extending your argument, where there is an existential threat, rational persons and countries respond in an appropriately increased rate of expenditure and effort.
e.g., during World War, airplane became a strategic necessity. Bomber production was geared up to make one per hour at one plant.
So while Lewandowski’s 86 years can easily be reduced to 43 years, under existential threats it could be reduced to 4 years!
Use conservative ForecastingArmstrong, Green and Graefe propose the Golden Rule of Forecasting: Be Conservative
Lewandowski’s “forecast” is ultra alarmist. To a first order, a conservative forecast will be that over the next century, the ocean will raise as the last century. i.e. not much!
Before WWII it took a huge effort to get anybunny to prepare for the coming disasters. The huge effort only ramped up AFTER the war started. It was, a close thing, with a huge number of deaths and much destruction. Which is the point
Eli, referring to David L. Hagen’s point that adaptation can proceed at high speed under duress as in WWII: “It was, a close thing, with a huge number of deaths and much destruction. Which is the point”
And it might be a valuable point if we were talking about sea level suddenly jumping by 1m — we’d have some disasters before adaptation was robust. But it’s not particularly relevant when what we’ll see is a slow acceleration, perhaps 1 mm/yr/decade.
Eli
Thank you for providing an example that proves the point I was explaining to you. When a matter is urgent and certain the time required to respond is much lower. You can’t estimate the minimum time required to respond by bringing up examples where people took a long time to respond because there was no need for urgency and/or no certainty.
If London had been facing a threat of 1 flood every 50 years in 1960 or 1970, they likely would have responded to that. But they didn’t. But they knew the existing threat was sufficient to warrant some response. Given the level of threat, they their time to plan and design a nice system and implemented at a pace that balanced needs and resources — likley without diverting resources from other more urgent needs. This doesn’t mean they protections couldn’t be built faster than the 8 years they actually took. It means London decided not to accelerate the project.
Similar things could be said of Venice or The Netherlands.
HaroldW,
1 mm per year per decade would be a huge rate of acceleration, and would for sure motivate a more rapid response. Of course, 1mm per year per decade is exactly the kind of acceleration that would be needed to reach ‘alarming’ sea level increases of over 500 mm by 2100. There has been zero acceleration since 1992, so 1mm per year per decade acceleration starting today… well…. strains credulity just a bit.
Of course no rational analysis based on actual observation ever influences the opinion of a silly rabbett, nor it seems the opinion of most of the ‘climate concerned’.
.
There is plenty of time to observe the rate of sea level increase, and take appropriate future action based on those observations. A reasonable starting point estimate is ~250 -300 mm through 2100, which can be revised based on observations.
SteveF: “1 mm per year per decade would be a huge rate of acceleration…”
I agree, but that’s what AR5 WG1 came up with for the warmest (RCP8.5) scenario. {Cf. Figure 13.11.] I wanted to concentrate attention on the point that SLR will be gradual rather than sudden, and didn’t want to distract by arguing over the magnitude of the acceleration.
The same figure projects an acceleration only half as large for the RCP6.0 scenario. Even within the consensus tent, there is a wide range of predictions.
I wrote a comment to clarify some issues in the previous post. Feel free to read it.
Not too long ago I had a discussion with some neighbors about thus topic (we live in a very expensive set of condominiums a few hundred meters from high tide on a very nice looking beach, so we want to preserve property values).
I suggested to the group we should approach the city government to suggest they require new buildings to be able to handle the current storm surge requirement plus one 1.5 meters. As an alternative they can have the design specify the lower areas will be gardens or parking areas. In our case my building is about 8 meters high so we should be fine.
But as you can see we don’t usually design to protect a whole town. The storm surge is free to overtop the beach and cross the sea side avenue. Tpright now the front row building owners are free to either build high to avoid the storm surge or to put in a wall. It’s up to them to deal with the insurance issue.
On a nation wide basis now they require building away from the coast to beautify and bring more tourists, but old buildings are given some slack so they can be used for another 20 to 30 years before they are demolished.
Exceptions are given for very old towns with historical value. So as you can see the issue isn’t as mathematical and the storm surge projection as well as tourism and practical use become the dominant factor.
Urgent and certain as WWII was, it resulted in a lot of dead bodies at least some of whom could have been saved by being better prepared. Your urge to end up as roadkill is both fascinating and indicative.
Actually, rabbits end up as road kill more often than people. Has something to do with how they react to potential danger…. all emotion, no rational thinking. Quick decisions that turn out badly. Yours is indeed an apropos handle.
Re: Eli+Rabett (Oct 26 18:49),
Eli,
There are so many what if’s about WWII that it’s not really a good example for this sort of thing. It was, for one thing, far from inevitable so as to require massive mobilization even as late as the occupation of the Rhineland in 1936.
WWI, OTOH, was different. The arms race before the war was probably a contributing factor.
Back when I was working and we had quality management courses, we learned about motivation. Motivation was maximum if the rewards were positive, immediate and certain. Motivation was least when the outcome was negative, future and uncertain. Three guesses into which category sea level rise falls.
eli,
urge? whose?
huh….
‘Roadkill’ seems just a bit hyperbolic. It’s not like those of us living in our ‘golden’ years in fly over country at several hundred feet above sea level have anything to worry about for the rest of our expected life spans. Our children are fully capable of taking care of themselves.
It’s onvious Eli doesn’t know his history. The French spent millions of francs building the Maginot Line which proved to be useless. The French also had a larger tank force yet spread them out amongst the infantry. Wrong strategy.
The pre-WWII period was one where most of the elites dismissed the real threats emerging in Germany and focused on other things.
WWII was only clear when it broke out. America had very strong neutrality movements. Britain’s Universities were proudly non-interventionist.
If we are going to compare, let’s not forget that the elites of our day are totally focused on the climate obsession, and ignoring the skeptics, as far as policy is concerned.
But alos let’s compare:
We have the climate obsessed, who claim there are terrible and dramatic changes taking place in the climate, and that those changes are getting worse.
Then we have reality.
But the climate obsessed ignore reality and belittle the skeptics who rely on reality.
In the pre-WWII period, the pro-neutrality elites ignored the reality of a rearming Germany, ignored the reality of a massively corrupt Nazi party carting people off, stealing property, running huge propaganda machines, dismissed Hitler. The French squandered their resources on the wrong response to a risk they failed to truly take seriously.
The only decent comparison seems to come in if one considers how the elites get it so wrong.
A few thoughts:
“I get a distance of around 1,300km from Seattle to San Francisco. How is the US going with its construction of a 40m high sea wall along the entire (tsunami-prone) west coast?”
Forty meters is not nearly enough when the the next major hawaiian flank collapse occurs, more like 100 m is needed. N.B. this is a definitely known hazard with a recurrence time on the order of 100 kyr.
And as for sea defences in Venice, they are of doomed in a long perspective. The whole Po valley is subsiding. Coastal deposits from the last interglacial when sea-levels were actually a few meters higher than now are found 100-200 meters below sea level in this area. So the whole area is sinking 1-2 mm/year long-term.
HaroldW,
RPC8.5 is not a plausible trajectory. The total quantity of fossil fuels available is not sufficient. Somewhere under RPC6.5 is more realistic.
I made a couple of comments over at RealClimate (pointing out an error of fact Rahmstorf had made about thermal expansion coefficient of very deep cold ocean water). But while there I read some of the comments. Looks to me like many there are a) not technically trained, and b) frightened to death about warming. They really believe that every bad weather event is caused by increases in GHG, that millions currently die each year due to climate change, that climate change currently costs hundreds of billions of dollars (or more!) in damages each year, and that humanity is doomed if we don’t stop using fossil fuels NOW! Most appear to share Eli’s freighted-rabbit-seeing-the-approaching-car take. Its all emotion, no thinking, and they are fairly well ‘dying’ to make rabbit quality policy choices. Road kill indeed.
.
You can’t reason with fear, so it appears pointless offering a reasoned analysis. I find it all rather astounding. And discouraging.
.
Lucia, sorry about the off-topic comment.
Pre WWII is the equivalent to the current threat of SLR? I wonder why the public thinks the threat of AGW is exaggerated? If there was ever a great example of why arguing by analogy can be a poor debating tactic, this would be it.
Just think of the 50 to 80 million people who are going to die from SLR over the next decade. I suppose they are all buried to within 0.1 inches of drowning right now. How could we possibly save them? Oooooohhh the humanity! We….must….act…now….sniff….sniff.
REF: Tom Scharff comment 132381:
That is why I believe the term “climate obsessed” is appropriate for the hardcore believers. They see the CO2 devil under every bed, behind every bush. They hear climate doom in every rustle of the wind. They see portents of the climate apocalypse in every weather event. No matter the lack of evidence, the climate obsessed knows that the ocean will rise, under the control of the CO2 devil that man unleashed, and sweep them away any moment now.
Well, I have seen CO2 described as an “existential threat” to humanity. No science behind that, just rhetoric and speculation piled upon hand-waving upon supposition. Then again, Ehrlich used much the same language 50 years ago, and it hasn’t done him any harm.
So Eli’s talk of “roadkill” — as SteveF wrote, a rabbit should know about that topic — is just more of the same.
http://nepis.epa.gov/Adobe/PDF/91012RLB.PDF
http://papers.risingsea.net/Holding/NRJ.html
“The FEMA study also found that a 90-centimeter rise would greatly increase the amount of the east coast floodplain that is vulnerable to storm damage-from 5.1 million to 7 million hectares. Over much of the floodplain, the frequency of storm damage would increase radically. A 1-meter rise, for example, would cause areas that are currently inundated only by the once-in-a-century “monster storm” to see such flooding every 15 years. The likely effect would be to push insurance costs beyond the reach of many or most people-depending, of course, on the extent of government subsidies. Overall, according to the EPA study, a 1-meter rise could cost the U.S. economy anywhere from $40 billion to $475 billion.”
http://papers.risingsea.net/downloads/cost_of_holding.pdf
Steven,
If you read the quote it is inconsistent and misleading. The use of the terms “once-in-a-century” and “monster storms” are both misleading terms. The quote starts with 90cm and then goes straight to 1 meter damage without any transition or explanation.
Additionally, no time frame is quoted.
One meter in 50 years is a tough time. One meter over 300 years, which is on the fast end of the current slr, is another thing altogether.
The range of $40B to $475B is so wide as to make the estimate useless.
Thanks for sharing just how effed up our EPA is.
But then since the guy who pushed most EPA regs on climate turned out to be a complete and utter fraud, is this low class performance art by the EPA any surprise?
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/16/epa-climate-change-expert-cia-fraud
The EPA has not, to my knowledge, repudiated anything their fraudster did.
90cm =0.9m Not exactly a stretch to say 1m instead.
Steve Mosher,
Not sure I understand the thrust of your comment. Sure, a 1 meter rise by 2100 would be disruptive, but much lesser rises, which are far more likely, such as 30 -50 cm over 80 to 150 years, is a whole other issue. The insistence on extreme and rapid sea level increases as an existential type threat which can ‘inform’ public policy is rubbish: there will be no rapid sea level increase issues.
Mosher,
Nuisance flooding of already low lying areas, is that all you got? Is that the WWII level threat? Is that why we need a carbon tax?
1m is the worst case model estimate of the worst case emissions scenario, and it is 85 years away. And that model is already running 15% high TODAY. And guess what? They don’t know why yet. Sound familiar?
2 feet is the median estimate of the worst case emission scenario. 18 inches is the median estimate for medium emissions. Of course those numbers will never be quoted, only the very worst case estimates of 90 cm and 1m, and of course you, like every alarmist before and after you, didn’t bother mentioning that. We didn’t even get the ubiquitous “up to”. 1m, 90 cm, stated as fact.
Next time you go to the beach, take a look at how much infrastructure is actually within 2 to 3 feet of high tide. I can spare you the trip and tell you almost zero. Coastal communities that can be affected by storm surge have current building codes to the 100 year storm surge level. Want to guess if that is >3 feet? Almost all low lying areas here in Florida are already uninhabited. A huge swath of this is called the Everglades.
Most of the areas that will be most affected by sea level “rise” are areas such MD/VA/LA that have land subsidence issues that are actually moving faster down than sea level up in many cases. Shall we tax our citizens to prevent this subsidence from happening?
There are actually vulnerable residences and buildings that were built 50 to 100 years ago, but these buildings cannot be updated. The bulk of them will be bulldozed (they are already old) by 2100.
The only thing I trust less than climate models is economic models on climate impacts.
De Witt,
10 cms in a world where slr is moving up at ~3mm per year is huge.
10 cms at current slr is about 30 years difference.
Who knows how much the EPA con-artist pushed through? Who knows how much of the regs and projections and fear mongering the EPA relies on are just artifacts of their sociopath’s distractions?
And the idea that taxing carbon is going to control slr is not really that different than sacrificing small animals or children to appease some god. If the climate obsessed do get their holy grail of carbon tax it will do nothing to prevent 1cm. of slr.
My comment is a quote.
the other day someone asked for my 1990 EPA study..
hmm there was an 89 study and 1990 study.
Anyway.. the up shot is this.
back in 1990 the EPA estimated the cost at ( worse case ) 400-500B
My first impression when I read this back in 2007 was this.
1. I hear that the most damage of climate change comes from sea level rise.
2. In the US that amounts to 500B
3. it sounds cheaper to adapt than mitigate
4. the first adaptation would be to stop building on land that is 1 meter above sea level… at least until we understand better.
5. the next steps would be gradual retreats.. and hopefully we learn more.. predict better
6. Maybe insurance reform would be a good idea.
Then I remembered that coastal land was dominated by rich democrats..
Steven,
It was clearly a quote. I was critiquing the quote. You are correct about adaptation. But no need to abandon.
To stop building at <1 meter is not needed.
In Galveston, which beyond the seawall is msl.
No big deal. And since the wind can blow hard when a hurricane hits you build the structure to withstand wind. Most people build higher than 13′ on new structures because it is not incrementally that much more expensive.
Allowing alarmists to set the agenda on energy and climate has been a huge waste of resources and time.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Galveston+building+code+hurricane&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&channel=nts
Hunter,
If the sea level rise were to reach 90 cm by 2100, it would have to be increasing by a whole lot more than 3 mm/year by the end of the century. In fact, it would have to be increasing by more than 1 cm/year so it wouldn’t be thirty years for the additional 10 cm to reach 1 m, it would be less than ten years. Again, not a stretch to round 90 cm to 1m. Which is not to say that it will do that. I consider the probability of that scenario to be vanishingly small.
hunter,
For some spots, it’s better, cheaper, wiser to retreat. For others it’s better to protect. It all depends on the area.
DeWitt Payne
When the response is ‘build something’, predicted acceleration actually makes the case for responding gradually better not worse. Notice in the toy problem, the expected value of rise is parabolic. That means if you make two build, the first build is for a wall less than (1/2)2 as tall as if you planned only one build to get it high enough to prepare for the final build. (And the (1/2)2 is in the limit of that $sigma;/$lambda ->0 wish is the ‘low uncertainty’ limit. In the high uncertainty limit, you do even better by building in increments.
More generally (as in not to a specific comment) building gradually also resolves many issues — like people arguing about whether predictions 100 years off are really going to happen. One would hope that someone like Lew (or ELI) could be satisfied with a plan where people are take out of a flood plain 10 years before the potential for flooding occurs rather than insisting that we try to get them 100 years ahead of time when it isn’t even a flood plain yet. Even if you are sure it will be flood plain 100 years from now, that’s no reason to do things now.
IPCC AR5: For high emissions RCP8.5, median estimates
Year 2200 = 0.85m
Year 2300 = 1.34m
For medium emissions RCP4.5, median estimates
Year 2200 = 0.39m
Year 2300 = 0.54m
If you examine what it would take to stay on the accelerating emissions trajectory of RCP8.5 for 300 years (12B people by 2100, Coal use at 700% of year 2000 levels, etc.) it is very, very unlikely that RCP8.5 will be sustained that long. There literally isn’t enough coal on earth to maintain that rate.
This specmanship of a study dialing up a worst case scenario (to almost any number really…) and knowing it will be quote mined and abused by activists is one of the reasons trust has fallen in this sector of science, specifically in how it is reported. I roll my eyes now every time I see “up to”, especially when the best estimates are never, ever, never, ever, never, ever, mentioned. At. All. Never. Ever. The reporting of this type of data by environmental journalists has become laughably corrupt. While the scientists have plausible deniability because their “real” data is available buried deep in a study, I fault them for failing to correct these worst case = fact reports that are so common.
Oops…sorry. Those number above are just for the thermal expansion component of SLR. From table 13.7.
The combined estimates are shown in Table 13.8. They only show model spread, no median given.
Medium emissions:
2100 = 0.19m to 0.66m
2200 = 0.26m to 1.09m
2300 = 0.27m to 1.51m
High emissions:
2100 = 0.21m to 0.83m
2200 = 0.58m to 2.03m
2300 = 0.92m to 3.59m
An important note is that these estimates are for global mean sea level GMSL (i.e. the entire ocean) versus RSL (relative sea level) which is coastal level which is what matters to society and urban planners.
For whatever reason the IPCC makes no attempt to relate the expected correlation between modeled GMSL and RSL, only stating that RSL may be a lot different and is driven by subsidence, trade winds and ocean circulation. What is curious is that the rate of change of RSL via tide gauges has been largely linear for the last 100 years on almost every tide gauge reported by the NOAA and the GMSL has varied dramatically on a decadal time scale according to models (ugh…) over the past century.
The JASON satellite altimeter shows a current GMSL rise of ~3.2mm/year, but the RSL average of tide gauges is only ~2mm/year. And JASON is calibrated with tide gauges. Where is the missing 1mm/year in RSL?
Most of the observed GMSL is out in the middle of nowhere, as shown in AR5 FAQ 13.1.
http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/figures/WGI_AR5_FigFAQ13.1-1.jpg
@ lucia (Comment #132394)
October 28th, 2014 at 6:44 am
“For some spots, it’s better, cheaper, wiser to retreat. For others it’s better to protect. It all depends on the area.”
100% agreement.
And the decision making process will include taking into account the costs of ownership and the technological solutions available to builders.
Venice has been sinking away for literally centuries. New structures will withstand these periodic inundations better than the old ones.
The Dutch have been building to the risk for centuries as well.
Both have done just fine.
The more one considers the hysterical childish excuses for analytical reviews of the so-called climate change, the clearer it is the climate obsessed like Lewandowsky are not offering rational, much less useful, solutions.
De Witt,
I think we are largely in agreement, especially regarding the conclusion.
tty
The case is similar in New Orleans. The Delta subsidize. On average, the level is maintained by silt deposited by the river. Due to human intervention, the river water does not periodically wash over New Orleans, and so its surface level is– and has been– subsiding. It will continue to subside. Portions are below sealevel– a fact that has nothing to do with sea level rise due to anything, much less climate change.
I suspect that if the Americas were just being discovered now, New Orleans would never have come to exist. The main port city on the Mississippi would have been elsewhere.
lucia,
If not for human intervention the mouth of the Mississippi would have shifted west to the Atchafalaya basin and Morgan City, La. would be at the mouth of the river.
“During the mid 19th century channel alterations including the removal of a large log jam and dredging permanently connected the Atchafalaya River to the Mississippi River. From then till the completion of the Old River Control Structure in 1963 the Mississippi was increasingly diverting flow into the shorter and steeper path of the Atchafalaya channel. By law, a regulated 30 percent of the latitudinal flow water from the Mississippi, Red and Black Rivers is diverted into the Atchafalaya at the Old River Control Structure. This flow diverts on average 25 percent of the Mississippi River flow down the Atchafalaya. In times of extreme flooding, the US Army Corps of Engineers may open the Morganza Spillway and other spillways to relieve pressure on levees and control structures along the Mississippi. On May 13, 2011, in the face of a rising Mississippi River that threatened to flood New Orleans and other heavily populated parts of Louisiana, the USACE ordered the Morganza Spillway opened for the first time since 1973. This water floods the Atchafalaya Basin between the levees along the western and eastern limits of the Morganza and Atchafalaya basin floodways.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin
Your comment about about deltas and subsidence is very insightful and makes a lot of sense.
Hunter
“Steven,
It was clearly a quote. I was critiquing the quote. You are correct about adaptation. But no need to abandon.
To stop building at <1 meter is not needed."
Nothing is NEEDED.
However, it would be entirely rational for local communities to decide that a temporary ban on building below 1m was ok, an of course they could revisit this decision.
There isnt any science that is going to tell you an exact figure.
They could also look at a situation where 1 meter rise was certain and decided to do nothing.
everytime I eat bacon and calculate the health risk I say..
yup.. gunna die… bacon is worth it though
@Mosher
You can make that choice for yourself. You are ignoring
a) Everyone else in that situation.
b) The effect on the local environment.
c) The future generations. By the time it is one meter or two, I imagine most of us posting here will be long gone. We are creating a mess, and leaving it for them to clean up. The notion of leaving a government debt for future generations to pay off would be offensive to many here, but coastal flooding is OK.
bugs,
Try thinking a bit.
Look at Venice, look at the Netherlands. Look at New Orleans.
They adapt. that is what non-obsessed people do.
You climate obsessed think only of static situations.
Troy was a port, the shoreline moved. People adapted.
When they build on shores and in flood areas now, they build to take account of the flood or surge.
Not cheap but doable.
Like that other famous climate doom failed prediction, about drowning coral atolls: The corals can adjust themselves to their environment.
But unless you are denying the science, ~3mms slr per year is really pretty boring.
bugs,
The ‘future generations’ argument is not so simple as you (and many others) suggest. The parallel to public debt is inaccurate. Were public debt being accumulated mainly for building sensible infrastructure, rather than supporting retirees for the final 25 years of their lives, public debt would not be bad, since sensible infrastructure has long term economic benefits which will repay their initial costs. But public debt most certainly is NOT being incurred for building sensible infrastructure. So it really is creating future obligations to support public funding of individuals today.
.
Fossil fuel use allows societal wealth to be created, and that wealth will not disappear overnight, so future generations will be born into a world that is far wealthier and healthier than when you and I were born. Yes, there is some ‘externality’ from the use of fossil fuels, since warming will cause sea level rise, and that will have to be dealt with. So yes, our ‘frivolous consumption’ of fossil fuels incurs some long term ‘public debt’ of future warming. We have to carefully look at costs and benefits, both short and long term, to figure a sensible path for energy use. But fossil fuel use improves people’s lives, and not just people who are alive today.
.
The long term societal costs depend on climate sensitivity, which is why defining that sensitivity accurately is so important. Seems to me the many billions of dollars spent on climate science, with no narrowing of the 1.5C to 4.5C sensitivity range (same today as in the Charney Report!) represents a huge waste of public money…. Climate scientists are not doing their job, and IMO, it is time to defund them… and help reduce the debt on future generations. 😉
@SteveF,
Excellent points.
Your comment,”Seems to me the many billions of dollars spent on climate science, with no narrowing of the 1.5C to 4.5C sensitivity range (same today as in the Charney Report!) represents a huge waste of public money…. Climate scientists are not doing their job”- it depends on what their job goal is, I believe. If the goal is to increase funding for climate science as much as possible for as long as possible, they are wildly successful. If the purpose was to increase accurate, useful knowledge to inform workable policies, then they are abject failures.
It is pretty unlikely that anyone is going to “discover” something that narrows the sensitivity range substantially anytime soon. What is needed is better and longer term observations. Where climate science investment furthers these improved observation goals at a reasonable expense, it is worth it. ARGOS ocean temperature monitoring as an example.
Spending a crapload of money now on the hope that incremental improvements in climate models will somehow produce breakthroughs is not very wise IMO. These improvements cannot be validated without long term observations and you might as well wait 10 years when computing costs drop by a factor of 10.
The budget for observation improvements should probably be an order of magnitude greater than modeling at this point.
Tom Scharf,
There are multiple peer reviewed papers showing that climate sensitivity is in fact much lower than the apocalyptic consensus, and there are papers showing that CO2 has not been *the* driver of temperatures over the ~50 years. The work is being done. Those profting from the vast amount of tax payer money being spent on climate science seem to be ignoring those papers.
In a way similar to the faux slr crisis, those whose careers are built on climate crisis reject the reality that there is not a crisis nor likely to be one.
Mosher isn’t ‘mak[ing] that decision for himself’. He is saying it’s ok by him if a town board prohibits building in regions that might later become flood risk– and revisit that decision later. I would have thought you were agreement with him on this. But I guess not . . .
For what it’s worth: I too think in many cases it’s ok for town boards to extend the reach of “no new construction” areas as a way of dealing with uncertainty. This sort of decision falls in the ‘no regrets’ region.
Others might not: they might prefer town-board continue to permit building and let individuals who own property decide whether they want to assume the financial risk of building on property that might be considered a flood risk in the future. Some wealthy 50 individuals might decide that they are willing to build a modest shack on the beach because they want to spend their golden years sauntering to the beach and playing in the sand with their grandkids. Others might not want to risk the lose of $$ value if that property ends up in a ‘flood area’ when they are 80. In which case, their kids and grandkids would inherit less valuable property (but in the meantime might have enjoyed frolicking at their own beach.)
If the ocean rises, there is no reason to think that it is a “mess” or that we caused that “mess” in the first place.
SLR has moved tens of meters in the geological past without any human fault. The link of CO2 to SLR is not one based on actual evidence of sea levels actually rising in an unusual or worrisome manner.
The entire paradigm of doom that the climate concerned have framed into the discussion is failed, if evidence has any meaning.
Rejecting the climate apocalypse is as justified today as was rejecting the Millerite apocalypse in the early 19th century.
Tom Scharf,
“It is pretty unlikely that anyone is going to “discover†something that narrows the sensitivity range substantially anytime soon.”
.
Nothing needs discovering, especially not in the world of climate models… which are, IMO, little more than vehicles used to justify preconceived notions of high sensitivity (full of kludges and adjustable ‘parameters’). I am quite sure a few tweaks could turn most any alarming CGCM into one that lines up well with reality. But that is not going to happen.
.
We need good measurements of aerosols, like would have come from the failed Glory satellite mission had it not crashed. A replacement for Glory (about $500 million?) is probably worth it to better constrain climate sensitivity. Good data to support accurate empirical estimates of sensitivity will help end the GCM driven ‘catastrophe’ nightmare and lead to better public energy policies.
As far as I can see no “discovery” is required. The only thing required is incorporating empirical data as it is observed and recomputing the range consistent with the data. That’s being done. Judy Curry and Nick Lewis recently published a paper; others have too. Those analyses are placing the best estimate in the lower range of the bounds estimated perviously.
Lucia,
Great minds, you know… 😉
Bugs
“You can make that choice for yourself. You are ignoring
a) Everyone else in that situation.
b) The effect on the local environment.
c) The future generations. By the time it is one meter or two, I imagine most of us posting here will be long gone. We are creating a mess, and leaving it for them to clean up. The notion of leaving a government debt for future generations to pay off would be offensive to many here, but coastal flooding is OK.”
################
lucia already pointed out part of what you get wrong.
Let me make it simple.
It is rational, justifiable, and common sense for a local government to decide the limit building and any way they damn well please to.
they can decide to allow people to build on earthquake faults or in tornado alleys, or on the beach.. for very good reason.
Likewise they can prevent these very same things for very good reason.
You and others persist in thinking that if you show something is a risk or not a risk that some decision flows from that.It doesnt
Steven,
Especially when the risk presented is as contrived and ad/post hoc as the climate obsessed claims.
Copenhagen Consensus is preparing papers on Climate Change & Energy such as Fix The Climate: Researching Green Energy
In arguendo of climate change needing mitigation, it finds that panicky politically driven mitigation like Pancost & Leweandowsky’s: “flood defences must be at least 1.7m higher than today†are ineffective and inadequate.
Politically forcing such an expensive rate 1333% increase is extremely unlikely!
Instead,
Historic Energy RD&D is less than 10% of commercial averages.
We need real engineering with major RD&D funding to make sustainable energy cost effective, not political/climate fuzziness/mandates.
It just seems sensitivity is in an infinite speculative estimate phase. GCM speculative estimates versus empirical speculative estimates. Then the two sides lob speculative grenades at each other to little effect. I see no resolution to this until another couple decades of observation are in the book.
If the pause doesn’t make modelers rethink the probability of high end sensitivity numbers, I don’t think anything will. I have never even heard a warmist admit that lower observations makes higher sensitivity estimates less probable. It’s as if the observations are irrelevant to sensitivity. Ask what would make them lower sensitivity estimates and it is as if they have never even pondered that question before. They construct a strawman that the pause doesn’t disprove global warming, when the implications are that it makes lower sensitivity estimates more likely.
I suggest that if the observations were running hot, they would be updating their probabilities frequently.
Tom Scharf,
You state, “I have never even heard a warmist admit that lower observations makes higher sensitivity estimates less probable.”
Lewandowsky’s latest bit of paper is an excellent example of that. The recent silly EU agreement on carbon is another excellent demonstration of your observation in action.
The warmists in the face of the fantastic news that their apocalypse is *less* likely to happen are calling for *more* drastic questionable action and claiming things are less well known, not more well known.
Morrissey sang about one possible solution to the problem of the coastal town they forgot to close down.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0LeL9BUPtA
Regarding Mosher’s comment about the local authorities making a decision seemingly in utter disregard of science…
I refer to a lawyer writing a book about such laws and court decisions. See http://www.loweringthebar.net/the-emergency-sasquatch-ordinance/ and the pertinent example:
“[John] Stossel (perhaps understandably) started off with the view that a law making it a felony to kill a Sasquatch is necessarily an example of stupid legislation. It certainly could be, but it isn’t entirely clear what the motivation was when this law was passed in 1969 (and amended in 1984).
There are at least three possibilities:
(1) Sasquatch protection,
(2) protection of humans from negligent Sasquatch hunters, or
(3) publicity/tourism purposes.
Only the first of those would necessarily require a belief on the part of the legislators that Sasquatch is real or could be real, and I have no evidence that was the real motive (personally I think #3 is much more likely).”
Allowing local and private authorities to decide among competing needs,theories, and pressures is called “business as usual” and is the sort of thing James Hansen hates. Allowing a small group of self-appointed experts to determine (and prioritize) the collective risks and collective responses we (collectively) face and MUST ACT UPON — is called tyranny by those that oppose it and “science” by those who don’t actually practice the discipline of Gallileo.
Tom Scharf: “I have never even heard a warmist admit that lower observations makes higher sensitivity estimates less probable. It’s as if the observations are irrelevant to sensitivity.”
.
Well, how about James Annan:
“As I said to Andy Revkin (and he published on his blog), the additional decade of temperature data from 2000 onwards (even the AR4 estimates typically ignored the post-2000 years) can only work to reduce estimates of sensitivity, and that’s before we even consider the reduction in estimates of negative aerosol forcing, and additional forcing from black carbon (the latter being very new, is not included in any calculations AIUI). It’s increasingly difficult to reconcile a high climate sensitivity (say over 4C) with the observational evidence for the planetary energy balance over the industrial era.”
Niels A Nielsen,
Perhaps ways can be found, if Dr. Annan can be persuaded, to help his observation be heard more clearly against the roaring noise of the climate apocalyptics.
hunter,
The only thing that will persuade people to change their mind in either direction is more data. For now: either the temperatures will continue to rise slowly, or the ‘hiatus’ will finally be busted with a dramatic up run in temperatures.
The ‘hiatus’ has gone on long enough that people can’t just ignore the either (a) stall or (b) slower run-up in temperatures.
The most anyone can do is argue that it’s not really a complete stall (which it isn’t.) But the ‘n-years’ isn’t long enough is getting tired in light of the fact that previous statements that global warming was doing things like ‘accelerating’ were based on little more than “it warmed rapidly during the nineties” (and you say this based on computing a decadal trend and forgetting that there is a fairly early “dip” due to a volcanic eruption.)
I myself think global warming will continue– but not at the rates AOGCM’s are projecting.
lucia,
I would point out that those who believe in the consensus of climate doom have done an extraordinary job of ignoring new data for nearly 20 years.
And that the latest marketing document from the IPCC, the so-called synthesis report, is amazingly disconnected from the data the IPCC itself has compiled in its latest work.
Niels A Nielsen,
You would think I would be smart enough to stop using “never”, but I never have been.
I’m not sure I’d put Annan in the loosely defined warmist category in my mind, but I do find him to be one of the better voices around with respect to an unbiased look at the data. There, that is my “No True Scotsman” response, ha ha.
If you examine RC’s take on warming, they find it just as likely AGW is actually 75% greater than observations now show as it being a 50/50 split between natural and AGW. And they find no reason that the pause should change this estimate. The message that non-AGW forcings are so powerful they can suppress warming during the pause and then confidently assert they had zero opposite effect on the run up in the 80’s and 90’s is a bit of hand waving IMO. The phrase painting yourself into a corner seems appropriate here.
Excellent way to show up the “precautionary principle” as nonsense. Thanks!