The Launch of fivethirtyeight.com and Climate Change Disaster Weblogging: (Trying to Be) The Honest Broker for the Week of March 29, 2014
I confess that I had forgotten about the existence of Roger Pielke, Jr., when Google sent me off to:
http://fabiusmaximus.com/2014/03/25/nate-silver-climate-pielke-66723/
and I read:
Nate Silver goes from hero to goat, convicted by the Left of apostasy: Pity Nate Silver. Hero of the Left for his successful take-down of GOP’s election forecasts, shooting down their delusions about Romney’s chances of victory. Good Leftists like Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman heaped praises on Silver, catapulting him into a sweet gig at ESPN. The poor guy thought the applause was for his use of numbers in pursuit in truth, when it was purely tribal. Their applause were just tribal grunts — we good, they bad — in effect chanting: “Two legs good. Four legs bad.” Right out of the box at his new venture, ESPN’s FiveThirtyEight, Silver committed apostasy, and the Left reacted with the fury true believers mete out to their betrayers. He posted “Disasters Cost More Than Ever — But Not Because of Climate Change” by Roger Pielke, Jr….
Since, as I said, I had forgotten about the existence of Roger Pielke, Jr., I was somewhat annoyed at being told that my applause for Silver had just been a “tribal grunt”. So I asked:
Ummm… Re: “Pity Nate Silver. Hero of the Left for his successful take-down of GOP’s election forecasts, shooting down their delusions about Romney’s chances of victory. Good Leftists like Brad DeLong… heaped praises on Silver, catapulting him into a sweet gig at ESPN. The poor guy thought the applause was for his use of numbers in pursuit in truth, when it was purely tribal. Their applause were just tribal grunts — we good, they bad — in effect chanting…” Are you referring to anything I have written, or are you just being a bullshit artist again?
To which Fabius Maximus responded by claiming that he was the real victim here!:
Thank you for posting a comment. Especially since you flag an error in this post, which is always appreciated. I said: “Good Leftists like Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman heaped praises on Silver … Their applause were just tribal grunt.” This clearly implies both you and Krugman (“their”), which is incorrect (I don’t believe you stepped into this debate, and by “their” referred to “Leftists”). Sloppy writing, which I will correct, and for which I apologize. As a side note, do you find that opening correspondence with unsupported personal insults (“bullshit artist”) improves communication? What does it accomplish? Is it in an update to the MLA style guide?…
[You ask] “Now may I please ask you what was the train of thought that made you make the claim in the first place?” I did explain that in my original reply to you. I’ll repeat, re-phrasing slightly. In the post I said… ”Good Leftists like Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman heaped praises on Silver, catapulting him into a sweet gig at ESPN. The poor guy thought the applause was for his use of numbers in pursuit in truth, when it was purely tribal. Their applause were just tribal grunts.” My intent was that “their” referred to “Leftists”. But it is easy to read “their” as referring to both you and Krugman. It was sloppy writing,
“my {sic} I ask you if you find that opening discussion with unsupported false claims for which you can adduce no evidence ”
A difference between us is that I don’t say things like that without giving an example as evidence, with a citation and/or a link. If I had intended to say that about you, I would have given an example.
“or are you just being a bullshit artist again?”
Lots of fun things to be said about someone (no matter how brilliant or knowledgeable) who considers that a rational opening comment. I think I’ll just leave it there. Readers can draw their own conclusions about your judgement.
I see from Michael Calderone this morning that a bunch of things are going on:
Michael Calderone: FiveThirtyEight Relaunch Dogged By Climate Change Dispute: “Two prominent climate scientists say Roger Pielke Jr….
sent emails threatening possible legal action in response to their criticism of his findings for the data-driven news site. Pielke says it’s “ridiculous” to characterize the emails as threats against Michael Mann… and Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished senior climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. FiveThirtyEight, however, apologized to both men.
“Roger is a freelance contributor and his private communications do not represent FiveThirtyEight,” Silver said in a statement to HuffPost:
We had candid conversations with Michael Mann and Kevin Trenberth. We made clear that Roger’s conversations with them did not reflect FiveThirtyEight’s editorial values….
Pielke’s claim that the cost from natural disasters has risen because of increased wealth, and not because climate change is making weather events more extreme, was quickly challenged by several scientists and experts, including Professor John P. Abraham on The Huffington Post…. Pielke’s piece was published on day three of the FiveThirtyEight relaunch, and media watchers had been anxiously waiting to see if Silver’s revamped site… would live up to the hype….
On March 19, Mann and Trenberth challenged Pielke’s claims in interviews with ThinkProgress. Mann told ThinkProgress that Pielke’s article was “deeply misleading, confirming some of my worst fears that Nate Silver’s new venture may become yet another outlet for misinformation when it comes to the issue of human-caused climate change.” “This is the same old wrong Roger,” Trenberth told ThinkProgress. “He is demonstrably wrong and misleads.”
In an email to HuffPost, Mann said Pielke sent him “a threatening email in response to my fair criticism of his piece.” Mann added that a representative from FiveThirtyEight contacted him and offered “an apology for what they characterized as unacceptable behavior by Pielke.” Mann declined to make Pielke’s email public, but told HuffPost that he viewed it as a “thinly veiled” threat of legal action. In an email to HuffPost, Trenberth said Pielke contacted him and his bosses following the ThinkProgress report. Trenberth said he also received an apology from FiveThirtyEight. Trenberth said he considered Pielke’s email “a threat to me.” “He was very accusatory and threatened me if I did not respond,” Trenberth told HuffPost.
Trenberth forwarded the text of the email to HuffPost. Pielke wrote that Trenberth had “made some pretty coarse and perhaps even libelous comments” in the ThinkProgress article. Pielke requested that Trenberth correct his public claims and noted that “an apology would be nice also.” “Once again, I am formally asking you for a public correction and apology,” Pielke wrote to Trenberth and his bosses. “If that is not forthcoming I will be pursuing this further. More generally, in the future how about we agree to disagree over scientific topics like gentlemen?”…
ThinkProgress editor Judd Legum told HuffPost that he contacted Silver and FiveThirtyEight managing editor Mike Wilson regarding Pielke’s emails, which he considered to be threats “to pursue legal action against” against the two climate scientists…. Pielke has also taken issue with a Tuesday Guardian post — “FiveThirtyEight undermines its brand by misrepresenting climate research” -– by environmental scientist Dana Nuccitelli. In an email to environment web editor Adam Vaughan, Pielke requested “that The Guardian correct multiple errors of fact in its piece on my work.” The Guardian looked into the matter, but did not make any changes to the piece….
On Friday, Silver addressed the climate change controversy in a lengthy “Note To Our Readers” on FiveThirtyEight… [and’ wrote that the past two weeks have “been a heck of a learning experience.” Silver said FiveThirtyEight is looking for a rebuttal from someone who has not weighed in yet on the dispute and “has very strong credentials.” “We appreciate your patience in the meantime,” Silver wrote. “Climate change is not going away as an issue, and we want to get this right. All journalism relies on trust — between reporters and sources, between editors and writers, between a publication and its readers. Any time that trust is undermined, it’s a huge concern for us. We thank you for your continued feedback. We’re listening and learning.”
So I guess I have a duty to weigh on on global warming and Roger Pielke, Jr. And I will try to be an honest broker:
The first place to start is with the historical record, from ice cores:
And atmospheric CO2 concentrations are currently 100ppmv above their pre-industrial concentrations, and growing at 1.8ppmv per year:
But do not think that the world is about to jump to a state 12C–22F–above normal. The big swings in temperature in the first graph above from ice age to interglacial and back again are driven by changes in sunlight hitting the earth, and the changes in carbon dioxide we see over the past 400,000 years are primarily the result of a warming and a cooling earth rather than its cause. The increase we have seen so far as a result of the Industrial Revolution from 280 to 380ppmv in CO2 would drive a much smaller increase in global temperatures.
How much smaller? Well, look at the more recent historical record:
The increase since 1960 of 70ppmv has been associated with a global temperature increase of about 0.6C (1.1F). The models tend to say that this temperature increase so far is about half of the long-run increase–CO2 acts like a blanket; when you put on a blanket it doesn’t fully warm you up instantly; instead, it takes a while to have its full effect; and for the world, “a while” means “about a century”. So figure that the CO2 we have so far pumped into the atmosphere would warm the world by about 1.2C (2.1F). That’s much less than 12C (21F). But we also have to recognize that there is enormous uncertainty both on the upside and on the downside in that estimate, and recognize that we–especially China and India–are going to pump a lot more CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere over the course of the next century and so set in train a much larger increase.
The world was warmer in 1998 than it was in 2013. Can we hope that all the models are wrong and that global warming is not happening, or not happening any more? No. An El Nino year–like 1998–sees temperatures temporarily well above trend, and a La Nina year–like 2013, and we have had a bunch of them recently–sees temperatures temporarily well below trend. Fit honest trends to the data, and you find that over the past fifteen years global warming has been at a pace of about 0.013C/year, not as fast as 1993-2003 (when it warmed at a pace of about 0.03C/year) but about as fast as average since 1960.
What should we be doing about this? Well, we do not want to keep China, India, and the rest of the world poor by restricting their economic development. And we do not want to impoverish ourselves unnecessarily. But we do want to stop the process of global warming at some point and to guard against the losses and disasters that global warming will produce. So we should be (a) encouraging conservation and providing an incentive for less use of open-carbon-cycle fossil fuel by imposing a $0.50/gallon tax on gasoline and its equivalent for other open-carbon-cycle energy sources, (b) spending a lot more money offering prizes and conducting government research into closed-carbon and non-carbon energy systems, and (c) doing research and development to try to think about whether there are large-scale “geoengineering” projects that would make sense. (My favorite is the giant sun umbrella at Lagrange-1.)
Is it possible that global warming is not really a threat at all? It is possible. Many things are possible. It is possible that we are all virtual beings living inside a giant (from our perspective) supercomputer that is some alien being’s fourth-grade science project, after all. It is possible that the Last Judgment is scheduled for April 1, 2050, and that God will be pissed at us if we haven’t mined every atom of copper and burned every molecule of petroleum by that date.
It is possible. Is it likely, or is it worth taking account of in any benefit-cost calculation? No. An argument that global warming is about to end would go roughly as follows: Over the past 500,000 years, there are lots of times when the world is a lot colder than it is now, but no times when the world was noticeably warmer than it is now. Therefore there is something in the earth’s climate as a dynamical system that shuttles additional energy input into the system when it is as warm as it is now into some storage depot where it does not affect surface temperatures. The problem with this argument is that there is no proposed mechanism for what this storage depot might be.
So what about Pielke?
OK. Time to read through the piece:
Disasters Cost More Than Ever — But Not Because of Climate Change
Pielke starts with a “debunking” headline, telling us: this is not a piece about natural disasters; this is a piece about how climate change is not a source of expense…
In the 1980s, the average annual cost of natural disasters worldwide was $50 billion. In 2012, Superstorm Sandy met that mark in two days. As it tore through New York and New Jersey on its journey up the east coast, Sandy became the second-most expensive hurricane in American history, causing in a few hours what just a generation ago would have been a year’s worth of disaster damage. Sandy’s huge price tag fit a trend: Natural disasters are costing more and more money. See the graph below, which shows the global tally of disaster expenses for the past 24 years. It’s courtesy of Munich Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurance companies, which maintains a widely used global loss data set. (All costs are adjusted for inflation.)
Ummm… I look at this graph, and I say: wait a minute–if it weren’t for 2011, I wouldn’t think that there was much (if any) of an upward trend at all. In fact, even with 2011, there is not a great deal of upward slope. So I pull out my iPhone, and after five minutes I find…
…that the line of best least-squares linear regression fit through those points is indeed the red line, and has a year-1990 value of 101.75 and a year-2013 value of 185, but that the slope of 3.65 has a standard error of 2.32: that you would not take this data to the bank as strong evidence of an upward trend in losses, and because the process is clearly not from a normal distribution you would not even be willing to say that a frequentist would reject the null hypothesis that the slope was equal to zero against a two-tailed null hypothesis at the 12.7% level. And I think: There is not enough statistical meat here to reach any strong conclusions about anything from such a small time-series dataset with such large and non-normal residuals.
And I look back at the paragraph above and “the average annual cost of natural disasters worldwide was $50 billion”. And I look at the graph that tells me the annual cost of natural disasters worldwide in 1990 was $100 billion. And I ask: where are the data from the 1980s? And I think: Roger Pielke, Jr., has no control over his data or his model, does he?
Continuing:
In the last two decades, natural disaster costs worldwide went from about $100 billion per year to almost twice that amount. That’s a huge problem, right? Indicative of more frequent disasters punishing communities worldwide? Perhaps the effects of climate change? Those are the questions that Congress, the World Bank and, of course, the media are asking. But all those questions have the same answer: no.
And I think: natural disasters are a huge problem whether they are $50 billion or $100 billion or $185.7 billion a year.
Continuing:
When you read that the cost of disasters is increasing, it’s tempting to think that it must be because more storms are happening. They’re not. All the apocalyptic “climate porn” in your Facebook feed is solely a function of perception. In reality, the numbers reflect more damage from catastrophes because the world is getting wealthier. We’re seeing ever-larger losses simply because we have more to lose — when an earthquake or flood occurs, more stuff gets damaged.
And I think: World real GDP today is something like $70 trillion/year. World real GDP back in 1985 was something like half that–$35 trillion/year. We’ve had disaster losses nearly quadruple since 1985 while world real GDP has only doubled. WTF?!
And no matter what President Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron say, recent costly disasters are not part of a trend driven by climate change. The data available so far strongly shows they’re just evidence of human vulnerability in the face of periodic extremes.
Still at “WTF?!”
To identify changes in extreme weather, it’s best to look at the statistics of extreme weather. Fortunately, scientists have invested a lot of effort into looking at data on extreme weather events, and recently summarized their findings in a major United Nations climate report, the fifth in a series dating back to 1990. That report concluded that there’s little evidence of a spike in the frequency or intensity of floods, droughts, hurricanes and tornadoes. There have been more heat waves and intense precipitation, but these phenomena are not significant drivers of disaster costs. In fact, today’s climate models suggest that future changes in extremes that cause the most damage won’t be detectable in the statistics of weather (or damage) for many decades.
And my friends at the Center for American Progress tell me that the climatologists they talk to say this last is just wrong: Jon Abraham:
You should know that we have already detected significant increases in Atlantic hurricane intensity, in extreme heat waves, large precipitation events and regional droughts. It’s ludicrous to say that extremes have not increased, and they have certainly increased in ways that are completely consistent with expectations based on atmospheric physics and climate model projections in response to increasing greenhouse gases…. If [“spike”] means a statistically significant increase, then [Pielke] is wrong. The report has identified changes to extreme weather including the intensity of Atlantic hurricanes, regional droughts and floods…
Continuing:
On Earth, extreme events don’t happen in a vacuum. Their costs are rising, sure, but so is overall wealth. When we take that graph above and measure disaster cost relative to global GDP, it changes quite a bit. Occasionally, big disasters bring outsize costs — especially the Kobe earthquake in 1995, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Honshu earthquake in 2011 — but the overall trend in disaster costs proportional to GDP since 1990 has stayed fairly level. Of course, wealthy countries hold all of the sway in worldwide cost estimates, which tips the scales when we’re looking for a “global” perspective on extreme events. U.S. hurricanes, for example, are responsible for 58 percent of the increase in the property losses in the Munich Re global dataset.
But the first words of Pielke’s article were “In the 1980s, the average annual cost of natural disasters worldwide was $50 billion…” Now all of a sudden we are starting with “the overall trend in disaster costs proportional to GDP since 1990 has stayed fairly level”. What happened to the 1980s? Wouldn’t including a bunch of 1980s years around their average of $50 billion get us a positive slope again?
Indeed they would. Crudely adding in 10 more data points at (1985, 50) and dividing by the global GDP trend produces a slope scaled to Pielke’s original graph of 1.85–there’s an 18.5% increase per decade in costs of natural disasters since the 1980s, even assuming that damage should scale by global wealth.
And is there any reason to assume that damage should scale by global wealth? We build more stuff, yes, and more stuff gets put in places where it can get harmed by natural disasters, true. But we also get better at building stuff, and so can buy insurance against natural disasters more cheaply. Moreover, we also get better at transportation and distribution, and so there is less need to locate stuff where natural disasters can get at it. The port of Texas used to be Galveston, perhaps the most hurricane-vulnerable spot on the planet. The port of Texas is now Houston, far up the Houston Ship Channel. Both improvements in building and improvements in transportation technology would strongly suggest, to me at least, that damage should scale less than proportionally to wealth.
Does Pielke discuss any of these issues?
Continuing:
That’s just the property bill. There’s a human toll, too, and the data show an inverse relationship between lives lost and property damage: Modern disasters bring the greatest loss of life in places with the lowest property damage, and the most property damage where there’s the lowest loss of life. Consider that since 1940 in the United States 3,322 people have died in 118 hurricanes that made landfall. Last year in a poor region of the Philippines, a single storm, Typhoon Hayain, killed twice as many people.
We can start to estimate how countries may weather crises differently thanks to a 2005 analysis of historical data on global disasters. That study estimated that a nation with a $2,000 per capita average GDP — about that of Honduras – should expect more than five times the number of disaster deaths as a country like Russia, with a $14,000 per capita average GDP. (For comparison, the U.S. has a per capita GDP of about $52,000.)
In the 20th century, the human toll of disasters decreased dramatically, with a 92 percent reduction in deaths from the 1930s to the 2000s worldwide. Yet when the Boxing Day Tsunami struck Southeast Asia in 2004, more than 225,000 people died.
So how does this relate to climate change? What is the point here? I start clicking on links, and I find that Pielke’s [92 percent reduction in deaths from the 1930s to the 2000s worldwide] comes from a database that claims that there were only 3 “extreme weather events” in each of the 1900s and 1910s, 4 events in the 1920s, and 224 such events in the 1990s, with 33,000 deaths per year from disaster in the 1990s, 485,000 per year in the 1920s, 25,000[!] per year in the 1910s, and 128,000 per year in the 1900s. And I think: did Pielke read this paper? What is his story for why it is that deaths from natural disasters leaped upward so much when the roaring twenties came around?
Once again: Pielke seems not to have control of the data he is using, or of the model he is using to process them.
So the frequency of disasters still matters, and especially in countries that are ill-prepared for them. After 41 people died in two volcanic eruptions in Indonesia last month, a government official explained the high stakes: “We have 100 million people living in places that are prone to disasters, including volcanoes, earthquakes and floods. It’s a big challenge for the local and central governments.”
I think he is nerving himself up to make the argument that we should not be worrying about global warming, but instead divert the money and attention we would otherwise spend trying to pass a carbon tax into other forms of natural-disaster preparedness…
Continuing:
When you next hear someone tell you that worthy and useful efforts to mitigate climate change will lead to fewer natural disasters, remember these numbers and instead focus on what we can control. There is some good news to be found in the ever-mounting toll of disaster losses. As countries become richer, they are better able to deal with disasters — meaning more people are protected and fewer lose their lives. Increased property losses, it turns out, are a price worth paying.
But he doesn’t go there.
Instead, he makes a very (weak) argument that we shouldn’t worry about global warming and losses from its natural disasters because increased disaster losses are a byproduct of a good thing: economic growth.
Having come to the end, I grok where Noah Smith is coming from, and feel his pain:
Noah Smith: Noahpinion: “Data” the buzzword vs. data the actual thing: “I’m a big Nate Silver fan,
but let me join the chorus of people looking at his new “data-driven” blog site and saying “WTF?”. As far as I can tell, it’s barely data-driven at all!… The blogger, Roger Pielke, notes that natural disaster losses have slightly decreased since 1989 as a percentage of world GDP, and concludes that climate change is not causing (and will never cause!) increased losses. The post has been much maligned by professional climate scientists for having crappy and misleading data, but put that aside for now. Let’s focus on the idea that this post represents “data-driven” journalism at all. It doesn’t. The “data” in the post consists of one annual time series with a sample size of 23. That’s too small to do any sort of statistical analysis on, but then again, the post doesn’t do any statistical analysis. It shows a trendline, and from that trendline it draws broad, sweeping conclusions about the effects of climate change. How is that any more “data-driven” than what any blog does? Every newbie blogger and his dog draws a trendline and extrapolates it – and if the blogger is worth his salt, he’ll at least have the common decency to qualify his extrapolation with “if this trend continues”, which Pielke does not.
Furthermore, Pielke’s analysis is just sloppy…. And the economic theory behind the conclusion is even sloppier…. OK, the Pielke post sucks, but that’s just one post. Let’s look at a few others…. Ben Casselman? This one has barely more data in it than the Pielke post!… This is less sophisticated than the average econ blog post. Well, at least Casselman used the word “may”. And how does this post extract any information from the data? Where is the data analysis connecting quits to dynamism, or to wages? There is none. Instead, Casselman links to a bunch of Wall Street Journal articles, and one speech about “dynamism” by Dennis Lockhart of the Atlanta Fed. The linked articles are all taken to support Casselman’s central thesis. This is pure hedgehoggery, not foxiness.
Or take this Casselman post on long-term unemployment…. Or take this post by Andrew Flowers on whether the labor market is slack or tight. Compare this to the average econ blog post on the topic, in terms of data quantity, data quality, data analysis, and data interpretation. Again, no contest…. his so-called “data-driven” website is significantly less data-driven (and less sophisticated) than Business Insider or Bloomberg View or The Atlantic. It consists nearly entirely of hedgehoggy posts supporting simplistic theories with sparse data and zero statistical analysis…. The problem with the new FiveThirtyEight is not one of data vs. theory. It is one of “data” the buzzword vs. data the actual thing. Nate Silver is a hero of mine, but this site is not living up to its billing at all.
Extra:
Emily Atkin: First Climate Article On Nate Silver’s Data Website Uses ‘Deeply Misleading’ Data, Top Climatologists Say:
Michael Mann:
Pielke’s piece is deeply misleading, confirming some of my worst fears that Nate Silver’s new venture may become yet another outlet for misinformation when it comes to the issue of human-caused climate change. Pielke uses a very misleading normalization procedure that likely serves to remove the very climate change-related damage signal that he claims to not be able to find…. That procedure assumes that damages increase with population but it completely ignores technological innovations (sturdier buildings, hurricane-resistant structures, better weather forecasting, etc.) that have served to reduce societal vulnerability, thus likely masking some of the aggravating impacts of climate change…
John Abraham:
You should know that we have already detected significant increases in Atlantic hurricane intensity, in extreme heat waves, large precipitation events and regional droughts. It’s ludicrous to say that extremes have not increased, and they have certainly increased in ways that are completely consistent with expectations based on atmospheric physics and climate model projections in response to increasing greenhouse gases…. If [“spike”] means a statistically significant increase, then [Pielke] is wrong. The report has identified changes to extreme weather including the intensity of Atlantic hurricanes, regional droughts and floods…
Kevin E. Trenberth:
This is the same old wrong Roger. He is demonstrably wrong and misleads….
He completely ignores the benefits from improvements in hurricane warning times, changes in building codes, and other factors that have been important in reducing losses.
Pielke:
Please realize that you are using untruths to attack the reputation of someone who you know nothing about. If you actually did some real reporting you might be surprised at what you find….
Seriously, there are lots of important issues to debate about climate change. You guys really want to make a big deal out of this?…
Emily Atkin:
Pielke… has actually been making his argument about increased disaster costs for years. His story in FiveThirtyEight is one that he has written before, in Chapter 7 of his 2011 book “The Climate Fix.”… The chapter argues that increased wealth and development is the principal cause of increased monetary losses from extreme weather events–not more extreme weather from climate change…. Some have pointed out that Pielke’s own study does not support the claim that he makes from it — that the most damaging extremes won’t be detectable in weather statistics for many decades. The 3-year-old research involves only rare, land-falling tropical cyclones, and looks only at the damage data from those cyclones. The study also explicitly ignores future rising sea-levels from climate change…
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