oceans

MIT and NBER (and Tol and Nordhaus) — right wing deniers love your work. Ask yourselves 'why?'

"Study Shows Global Warming Will Not Hurt U.S. Economy" -- That's the Heritage Foundation touting a new study by economists from MIT and the National Bureau of Economic Review.

This study, "Climate Shocks and Economic Growth: Evidence from the Last Half Century" [PDF] -- wildly mistitled and deeply flawed, as we will see -- is yet another value-subtracting contribution by the economics profession to climate policy.

What makes the paper especially noteworthy, however, is not merely the credentials of the authors, but that they thank such climate economist luminaries as William Nordhaus and Richard Tol for "helpful comments and suggestions." The only helpful comment and suggestion I can think of for this paper is, "Burn the damn thing and start over from scratch."

Heritage quotes the study:

Our main results show large, negative effects of higher temperatures on growth, but only in poor countries. In poorer countries, we estimate that a 1?C rise [sic -- the Heritage folks haven't mastered the ° symbol] in temperature in a given year reduced economic growth in that year by about 1.1 percentage points. In rich countries, changes in temperature had no discernable effect on growth. Changes in precipitation had no substantial effects on growth in either poor or rich countries. We find broadly consistent results across a wide range of alternative specifications.

Heritage then quotes a commentary on the study by right-wing blogger for U.S. News & World Report James Pethokoukis, "Sorry, Climate Change Wouldn't Hurt America's Economy." Pethokoukis also quotes from the study:

Despite these large, negative effects for poor countries, we find very little impact of long-run climate change on world GDP. This result follows from (a) the absence of estimated temperature effects in rich countries and (b) the fact that rich countries make up the bulk of world GDP. Moreover, if rich countries continue to grow at historical rates, their share of world GDP becomes more pronounced by 2099, so even a total collapse of output in poor countries has a relatively small impact on total world output.

(If these excerpts suggest to you that the study authors and the economist commenters are victims of some sort of collective mass hysteria, then you are a getting (a little) ahead of me ... but the fact that thoroughly-debunked denier Ross McKitrick is a commenter on this paper certainly suggests this entire effort is indefensible.)

Pethokoukis himself then offers a conclusion that, though amazing, is not utterly ridiculous given a narrow misreading of this absurdly narrow, easily-misread study:

Fishermen who play by the rules deserve some help

Taking up Tom Philpott's food stimulus challenge, I suggest bailing out the fisherman. Of course, fish stocks internationally are still in serious decline -- you need look no father than the Atlantic bluefin tuna to see that. But according to a report on NPR, we're having some serious fisheries-management success stories on the West Coast. Now it's the local fishing fleets rather than the fisheries that threaten to collapse. At first, the government thought they had engineered a "soft landing" for fishermen when:

... five years ago many fishermen who trolled for groundfish agreed to give up their boats for a lump sum of cash. That dramatically reduced the size of the fleet. There are only about 160 bottom trawlers left in California, Oregon and Washington.

As a result, nets are full and quotas are easily met. But now regulators are converting fishing quotas into a cap-and-trade system. There's no question that this is an important development. Since fishermen will be able to buy and sell portions of their quotas, they'll throw less of their catch overboard (dumping fish being the only legal way to dispose of excess catch). Under the new system, they'll just hop on the radio and buy some of the fishing rights from a fellow fisherman who has room to spare in his hold.

Everything looks peachy so far, but all industries need a certain scale. As the fleets continue to shrink and more fishermen sell their quotas and their boats, fishing ports, which include processing plants and other supporting services, will shut down entirely. These are businesses that, unlike the meat industry's now defunct network of local abattoirs and butchers, have so far resisted centralization.

So how about some incentives to keep these folks afloat? Fishermen should be encouraged to stay on the water, not to become fish stock brokers. If a little of the stimulus money can help us manage the fishermen along with the fisheries, it would be a boon to struggling coastal communities and would preserve fishing as an environmentally and economically sustainable tradition. Aside from the fact that any job lost is a crisis in this economy, it would be a shame that our success with the fish should lead to disaster for the people.

Bush's last marine protection area isn't so much with the protection

On Tuesday the Bush administration announced plans to create the world's largest marine protection area in the Pacific Ocean.

It's a big deal. Huge even. Progressives like Jonathan Stein are rightly shocked and excited.

Remember though, an attitude of utter cynicism toward the Bush administration has served as an unfailingly accurate guide for eight years now. Let's not be too quick to give it up.

After all, there's this:

Two years ago with fanfare, President Bush declared a remote chain of Hawaiian islands the biggest, most environmentally protected area of ocean in the world.

It hasn't worked out that way.

Cleanup efforts have slowed, garbage is still piling up and Bush has cut his budget request by 80%.

And one wonders just how a cash-strapped federal government plans to police this brand new marine sanctuary. Turns out, Jim Connaughton, Chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, was asked just that earlier this week during a press briefing:

Q: Two questions. One, you mentioned monitoring. You also mentioned how remote this area is -- and I have actually fished this area quite a bit. And my question to you is, monitoring is one thing, but enforcement is an entirely different issue. And I don't honestly see how you can enforce any of this out there with the amount of government-based traffic that you have in the area. How do you plan to enforce these laws?

CHAIRMAN CONNAUGHTON: Well, let's begin -- first, this is our experience -- these are challenging areas to get to, so there's an embedded enforcement of just the difficulty of getting to these areas. Two, we operate from the presumption that most people who care about the resource, including your constituency, are law-abiding citizens, and so we expect that there will be a fair amount of increased awareness of the importance of the resource, and certainly that the boating community is very good about staying up to date on charts, especially the adventurous boating community, and staying up to date on -- just for safety purposes -- the conditions with respect to these remote areas.

Now, is there the potential for some Chinese commercial fishing fleet to come in and intrude the area? The answer to that is yes. And so one of our goals is through the management planning, and through several years of building out capacity, to also build out our capability to enforce.

So, the president's plan is to someday get around to have better enforcement. As to monitoring, Connaughton had this to say:

A legacy-making move for the outgoing prez

President George W. Bush deserves praise from ocean lovers for his creation of three new marine national monuments in the Pacific Ocean. This action protects some of the few remaining pristine coral reefs in the world by prohibiting all forms of commercial fishing and severely restricting recreational fishing.

These are among the last places on the planet where you can still see sharks and other top predators in something like a healthy state. President Bush -- and the Pew Environment Group, Marine Conservation Biology Institute and Environmental Defense Fund, who worked so hard for these monuments -- can be justifiably proud of the results.

It's easy to point out that the protected areas around the 10 islands could have been 16-times larger if Bush had included the full 200-mile exclusive economic zone in the monuments. As National Geographic scientist Enric Sala points out, there's no magic scientific line at 50 miles. It looks more like a political line to me.

Obama taps oceans advocate Leon Panetta to head CIA

Obama is poised to nominate Leon Panetta to head the CIA, according to news reports today. Panetta is a long-time advocate for ocean protection, though he's not likely to get much sway in this area as CIA chief.

Panetta has been the chair and commissioner of the Pew Oceans Commission since 2003. In 2005, Pew joined with the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy to create the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative, which Panetta now co-chairs. He is also a board member of the Monterey Bay Aquarium. While in Congress, Panetta was active on efforts to protect the California coast, and sponsored legislation to create the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. He continues to be active with the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation.

Panetta represented California's 16th district in the House from 1977 to 1993, and was Bill Clinton's chief of staff from 1994 to 1997. Since then, he and his wife have founded the Leon & Sylvia Panetta Institute for Public Policy at California State University at Monterey Bay. He is also the Distinguished Scholar to the Chancellor of the California State University system, and teaches political science at Santa Clara University.

New NOAA head will have plenty of work to do

President-elect Barack Obama’s appointment of Jane Lubchenco, an Oregon State University marine biologist, to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration could be a major positive step for protecting America’s fisheries. In recent years, NOAA has ignored scientists’ advice when it comes to setting quotas for some of our most vulnerable fish species, favoring commercial […]

For NOAA head, Obama appoints yet another scientist who gets climate

PEBO has picked Jane Lubchenco, a prominent marine biologist at Oregon State University, to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science between 1997-98. A video of her talk on “Climate Change and its Implications for Oregon” can be found here. In “Obama […]

WMO: ‘Overall [Arctic] ice volume was less than that in any other year’

“Arctic Ice Volume Lowest Ever as Globe Warms: UN,” is how Reuters reported it today. Sorry I missed that in my earlier post on the 2008 report from the World Meteorological Organization, but it was buried deep in the press release (see below). Note that the WMO is making a stronger statement than the National […]

Southwest faces ‘permanent drying’ by 2050

A major new report warns that on our current emissions path, we face the severe risk of abrupt climate change impacts. The basic conclusions themselves are nothing new. But what is stunning is that these warnings come from the United States Geological Survey — the Bush Administration (!). This new science-based report, Abrupt Climate Change, […]