Book Review by Kip Hansen

The Rightful Place of Science:  CLIMATE PRAGMATISM
Edited by: Jason Lloyd, Daniel Sarewitz, Ted Nordhaus, Alex Trembath
129 pp.  Paperback. CSPO  $10.

“[T]he idea of climate pragmatism is kind of obvious:  let’s do the things that provide broad benefits regardless of one’s particular set of commitments in the climate debate.”

The Climate Pragmatism project is a partnership between the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes (CSPO) at Arizona State University and the Breakthrough Institute in Oakland, California.  Together they organized a series of three workshops over three years bringing together diverse experts to explore new approaches to the climate change challenge.  The workshops resulted in three reports (links here=[i]) that have been adapted to produce this volume which represents both a broad synopsis and an in-depth analysis of the prescriptions developed by the Climate Pragmatism project.   This review presents some of these ideas with a few illustrative quotes.

“The power of the Climate Pragmatism vision lies in its ability to abandon long-held dogmatic views about the relationship between energy and climate change in favor of a well-founded faith in human ingenuity.”

“It offers a way forward that helps policymakers, researchers, and practitioners escape the false and stultifying dichotomies between economic growth and sustainability, between energy consumption and climate change, and between climate mitigation and adaptation.”

Our High Energy Planet

The starting point for Climate Pragmatism is the understanding that it is entirely wrong-headed to attempt to force civilization to transition from societies with high-energy access — cheap, plentiful, ubiquitous electricity and liquid fuels — to societies with reduced access and consumption.  In the still-developing world, the key to successful and rapid human development is energy access — real energy access, not the nonsensical goals set by current UN and NGO programs that consider that “a household has achieved access to modern energy when consuming 50 to 100 kWh per person annually – less than the [consumption of] the average American’s cable television box”.

“Achieving negligible access thresholds with technologies like rooftop solar panels or cleaner cookstoves — rather than, for example, reliable grid connections — leaves other human development goals far out of reach.”  In part because these technologies “have little capacity for scaling up and meeting the expanding needs of economically productive, non-household activities like manufacturing, transportation, or commercial agriculture”.

The argument is put forward that the starting place for achieving basic human development goals is “an explicit commitment to the kind of energy equity that enables an escape from subsistence living and fosters the capacity to prosper, adapt, and innovate.”   The Climate Pragmatism spoken of in this slim volume “combines a commitment to pragmatism — a clear-eyed focus on what works in practice, rather than what’s ideologically acceptable — with an insistence that all humans deserve access to sufficient energy services to achieve the quality of life enjoyed by people in economically developed regions of the world.  A high-energy planet with universal access to affordable, cleaner and plentiful energy is the most practical way to secure this socioeconomic development while ensuring environmental protection.”

Innovation and Adaptation

Readers will find themselves well-informed regarding the reasoning behind the call for Climate Pragmatism as it relates to the relationships between energy and societal innovation, meeting human development goals, and adaptation and resilience to existing weather and climate hazards — how improved energy access leads to local innovation and helps regions to adapt not only to future potential risks from changing weather and climatic conditions, but to innovating ways of adapting and bringing about a  deep resilience to existing conditions that already adversely affect human development, health, agriculture, and industry.

A Way Forward

Those looking to explore alternative paths to real world solutions to the troubling questions of dealing with local, regional, national and global effects of ever-changing weather — and potential future changes to climates — and how we can collectively shape international policy efforts to bring about a better future, without waiting for the uncertainties of global climate science to be resolved, should start with this well-organized, well-written presentation of a possible route to a better future for all.

Highly Recommended

This book is a terrific read for those with interests in international development policy and its intersection with climate change policy.  Even those with differing, contrary opinions will find it informative and enlightening, opening new vistas of potential.

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[1] Our High-Energy Planet,   High-Energy Innovation,  and  Adaptation for a High-Energy Planet .  The Breakthrough Institute published the related paper:  Climate Pragmatism: Innovation, Resilience and No Regrets

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Author’s Comment Policy:

Always happy to answer your questions if I can, address your comment to me personally if you expect a response.  The purpose of this review is to inform readers here that the book is available and encourage those interested to read it, as I have.

This is a Book Review and the opinions and policy proposals contained in the quotes provided are those of the individual authors and editors of the book reviewed — not necessarily mine. If you have disagreements with quoted portions of the book, I strongly suggest obtaining a copy of the book (purchase or via your local library) and reading it in its entirety before taking a public stance — I have,  out of necessity, quoted only very short sections which may be missing important context and further explanation and justification.

Immediately above are links to full and free .pdf copies of the three underlying publications on which the book is based, and one further related publication from the Breakthrough Institute.  Enjoy.

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Guest essay by David Archibald

The people of Canberra are the richest in Australia so they voted in a provincial government that proved how virtuous they were by increasing the proportion of their power supply that came from wind and solar sources. As a consequence, the cost of power went up and the people of Canberra have responded by seeking out warm public buildings in the current southern winter. Respiratory disease load increases in winter and so no doubt there will be some deaths caused by the government’s virtue signalling.

Hundreds of thousands of people in first-world-country Germany have gone off grid because they can’t afford power any more. Of course heat kills too and the biggest heat-related, first-world die-off in recent years was in Europe in 2003. As Dave Rutledge wrote in 2015, “During the great European Heat Wave of 2003, 70,000 people died, most of them indoors. This is a horrible way to die. The people who were indoors could have been saved by a $140 Frigidaire window unit, but only if they could afford to pay for the electricity.”

All the energy that drives the Earth’s climate system comes from the Sun. So could there have been a solar component to the 2003 event? A number of solar parameters suggest there might have been:

Figure 1: Solar Wind Plasma Temperature 2000 – 2017

Figure 2: Solar Wind Plasma Speed 2000 – 2017

Figures 1 and 2 show a big excursion in 2003, the year of the killer European heatwave. Supporting evidence comes from the F10.7 flux plotted against sunspot area:

Figure 3: Hemispheric Sunspot Area and F10.7 Flux 1985 – 2016

The F10.7 flux closely follows sunspot area except for an excursion in 2003 during which the F10.7 flux peaks much higher. What could have caused Europe to have had its own heat wave and not affect most of the rest of the planet? Climate does respond to higher levels of solar UV as described by this paper by Haigh et.al, in 2005 which states:

The results clearly show a weakening and poleward shift of the jets when the sun is more active, again, as predicted by the model studies. The GCMs also predicted a response to higher levels of solar UV in the tropospheric mean meridional circulation. This consisted of a weakening and expansion of the Hadley cells and a poleward shift of the Ferrel cells. It is interesting to note that precisely these features, which are highly correlated with solar activity, have now been detected in NCEP–NCAR vertical velocity data (Gleisner and Thejll 2003).

Now it seems the opposite is happening with EUV dropping rapidly over the last two years as shown by the Lyman Alpha solar index:

Figure 4: Lyman Alpha Solar Index solar cycles 22, 23 and 24 aligned on minima

The Lyman-alpha line is a spectral line of hydrogn emitted when the electron fall from the n=2 orbital to the n=1 orbital, where n I s the principal quantum number. It is in the vacuum ultraviolet part of the electromagnetic spectrum and thus measurement of solar Lyman-alpha emissions are made by orbiting instruments. Sunlight in space at the top of Earth’s atmosphere is composed of about 50 percent infrared light, 40 percent visible light, and 10 percent ultraviolet light, for a total intensity of about 1,400 W/m2 in vacuum. At ground level sunlight is 44 percent visible light, 3% ultraviolet and the remainder infrared. The atmosphere blocks about 77 percent of the Sun’s UV, almost entirely in the shorter UV wavelengths.

The significance of Figure 4 is that it shows that EUV has fallen to levels of solar minima. Generally, weak solar cycles, such as Solar Cycle 24, are long cycles. If Solar Cycle 24 ends up being 12 years long, which would take it to the edge of the graph, then it has another three years to go. Therefore, it is most likely that the solar minimum is going to be long, deep and relatively spotless. The Hadley cells will contract and strengthen, according to theory. It is also possible, though unlikely, that Solar Cycle 24 will be weak and short, as predicted by Ed Fix’s solar model. Either way, we have the promise of interesting developments.

David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare