You Ought to Have a Look: Ontario’s Energy Plan, Evidence‐based Policy and a New Climate Sensitivity Estimate
You Ought to Have a Look is a feature from the Center for the Study of Science posted by Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. (“Chip”) Knappenberger. While this section will feature all of the areas of interest that we are emphasizing, the prominence of the climate issue is driving a tremendous amount of web traffic. Here we post a few of the best in recent days, along with our color commentary.
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First up in this week’s edition of You Ought to Have a Look is an op-ed by Ross McKitrick (one-time Cato Adjunct who is now Chair of Energy, Ecology & Prosperity at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and Economic Professor at the University of Guelph) who shreds the energy policy being forwarded by Kathleen Wynne, the Liberal Party Premier of Ontario. Wynne’s proposed plan—aimed to combat climate change—includes, among other things, a requirement that all homes eventually be heated by electricity (i.e., no natural gas, etc.).
McKitrick describes up the plan,
Around the time that today’s high-school students are readying to buy their first home, it will be illegal for builders to install heating systems that use fossil fuels, in particular natural gas. Having already tripled the price of power, Queen’s Park will make it all but mandatory to rely on electricity for heating.
There will be new mandates and subsidies for biofuels, electric buses for schools, extensive new bike lanes to accommodate all those bicycles Ontario commuters will be riding all winter, mandatory electric recharging stations on all new buildings, and many other Soviet-style command-and-control directives.
distills what’s wrong with it,
[E]ven if the…plan were to stop global warming in its tracks, the policies would do more economic harm than the averted climate change.
and, in inimitable Ross fashion, throws in this zinger,
The scheme is called the Climate Change Action Plan, or CCAP, but it would be more appropriately called the Climate Change Coercion Plan: the CCCP.
The entire op-ed appearing in the Financial Post is a must read.
Next up is a post at the blog IPKat (a U.K.-based Intellectual Property news blog) by Nicola Searle that provides an interesting review of a new book by Paul Cairney titled The Politics of Evidence-Based Policy Making.
Evidenced-based policy making (EBPM) is the idea that, well, policy should be based on some sort of evidence. But as Searle (and Cairney) point out, this is a lot more complicated than it seems. Searle eloquently describes the situation as: “Policymaking isn’t a Mondrian, it’s a Monet.”
Rather than the (utopian) linear view that “evidence” clearly informs the best “policy,” the situation is much more complex and involves uncertainties, interpretations, personal beliefs, outside pressures, policy goals, etc.
Searle provides this analogy:
As Cairney puts it, "in the real world, the evidence is contested, the policy process contains a large number of influential actors, and scientific evidence is one of many sources of information." I'd described policy making in general as akin to an extended family choosing which film to watch. Uncle Alex campaigns for Barbarella, cousin Vic, holding the remote, decides you’re all watching Hulk until your sister Pat throws a tantrum unless you watch Frozen. You might consult the Rotten Tomatoes rating, but you're convinced that critic from the New York Post is on the payroll of a major studios and the popular rating seems to have been spammed by bots... In the end you watch a Jude Law rom-com. And that’s the simplified version.
For more insight, check out Searle’s full post, or perhaps even Cairney’s book. This is a topic that is quite relevant to the subject of climate change policy (as well as a litany of policy that is rooted in U.S. Environmental ProtectionAgency “evidence”).
And finally, we’d be remiss if we didn’t draw attention to a new study appearing in the AGU journal Earth and Space Science by University College Dublin’s J. Ray Bates that finds that the equilibrium climate sensitivity—that is, the earth’s total surface temperature rise that results from a doubling of the atmospheric effective concentration of carbon dioxide—is “~1°C.”
Bates’ work is an update and extension of the methods and findings of (Cato Center for the Study of Science's Distinguished Senior Fellow) Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi and represents another estimate of the climate sensitivity that falls well below the average of the climate models (3.2°C) used in the most recent IPCC report. The lower the climate sensitivity to greenhouse gas increases, the lower the overall impacts when measured over comparative time-scales.
We’ve added the new Bates results to our lower-than-model climate sensitivity compilation (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) estimates from new research beginning in 2011 (colored), compared with the assessed range given in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) and the collection of climate models used in the IPCC AR5. The “likely” (greater than a 66% likelihood of occurrence) range in the IPCC Assessment is indicated by the gray bar. The arrows indicate the 5 to 95 percent confidence bounds for each estimate along with the best estimate (median of each probability density function; or the mean of multiple estimates; colored vertical line). The right-hand side of the IPCC AR5 range is actually the 90% upper bound (the IPCC does not actually state the value for the upper 95% confidence bound of their estimate). Ring et al. (2012) present four estimates of the climate sensitivity and the red box encompasses those estimates. Likewise, Bates (2016) presents eight estimates and the green box encompasses them. Spencer and Braswell (2013) produce a single ECS value best-matched to ocean heat content observations and internal radiative forcing.
As the Bates results are just-released, we await to see how they stand up to scrutiny (and the test of time).
The journal Earth and Space Science is open access, so everyone can go and have a look for themselves (although, fair warning, the article is very technical).
