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Game Theory: Climate Talks Destined to Fail
Nathanial Gronewold and Climatewire, Scientific American
… Last year, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a New York University professor and partner in a Manhattan consultancy, famously predicted the flat outcome at Copenhagen in an article he penned for Foreign Policy magazine, one month before that conference began.
Confidence in the computer model he designed that led to that conclusion informs his views on where the talks are headed next: Namely, multilateral negotiations will not fix the climate change problem, regardless of what U.N. officials and others claim.
“It’s depressing, it is what it is, but unfortunately it was right,” Bueno de Mesquita said in an interview. “We got nothing out of Copenhagen.”
Bueno de Mesquita makes a living by calculating the likely outcomes to various scenarios under the lens of game theory, a mathematical tool political scientists use to better understand how power relationships inform various strategies in negotiations. By applying numerical values to the influence and attitudes of actors, he has used his proprietary software to accurately predict the outcome of elections, foreign aid spending decisions and the Copenhagen talks.
His main argument: Governments probably won’t conclude a major international treaty to reduce atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, ever. And even if they do, any such treaty won’t actually work.
“Universal treaties have one of two qualities,” Bueno de Mesquita said in explaining the modeling. “They don’t ask people to change what they’re doing, and so they’re happy to sign on … or it asks for fundamental changes in behavior and it lacks monitoring and sanctioning provisions that are credible.”
(20 December 2010)
A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning
Justin Gillis, New York Times
… The first machine of this type was installed on Mauna Loa in the 1950s at the behest of Charles David Keeling, a scientist from San Diego. His resulting discovery, of the increasing level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, transformed the scientific understanding of humanity’s relationship with the earth. A graph of his findings is inscribed on a wall in Washington as one of the great achievements of modern science.
Yet, five years after Dr. Keeling’s death, his discovery is a focus not of celebration but of conflict. It has become the touchstone of a worldwide political debate over global warming.
When Dr. Keeling, as a young researcher, became the first person in the world to develop an accurate technique for measuring carbon dioxide in the air, the amount he discovered was 310 parts per million. That means every million pints of air, for example, contained 310 pints of carbon dioxide.
By 2005, the year he died, the number had risen to 380 parts per million. Sometime in the next few years it is expected to pass 400. Without stronger action to limit emissions, the number could pass 560 before the end of the century, double what it was before the Industrial Revolution.
The greatest question in climate science is: What will that do to the temperature of the earth?
… “Nature doesn’t care how hard we tried,” Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Columbia University economist, said at a recent seminar. “Nature cares how high the parts per million mount. This is running away.”
Perhaps the biggest reason the world learned of the risk of global warming was the unusual personality of a single American scientist.
(21 December 2010)
Long article. -BA
James Hansen’s conversation with Bill McKibben
James Hansen, Grist
The paperback version of my book Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our last Chance to Save Humanity is now available. It includes, as an added section, a conversation between organizer Bill McKibben and me. Much of that Q&A is below. As was (and is) the case with the hardback and other formats of the book, all royalties go to 350.org. As I mention in the book, 350.org has demonstrated the most effective and responsible leadership in the public struggle for climate justice.
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Bill McKibben: Jim, more than a dozen nations have set new high-temperature records this year, and we’ve seen the all-time marks set for Asia (Pakistan at 129 degrees Fahrenheit) and Southeast Asia. Given that the global temperature has “only” gone up about a degree, can you explain how this kind of heat is possible?
James Hansen: Sure. What we see happening with new record temperatures, both warm and cold, is in good agreement with what we predicted in the 1980s when I testified to Congress about the expected effect of global warming. I used colored dice then to emphasize that global warming would cause the climate dice to be “loaded.” Record local daily high temperatures now occur more than twice as often as record daily cold temperatures. The predominance of new record highs over record lows will continue to increase over the next few decades, so the perceptive person should recognize that climate is changing.
Yes, global average warming is “only” about a degree, but that is actually a lot.
(22 December 2010)
