In response to the Climate Science posting entitled Roger A. Pielke Sr.’s Perspective On Adaptation and Mitigation, Peter R. Hartley contacted me with respect to an in-depth assessment of the subject of climate and energy policies and the degree to which they overlap. Professor Hartley is the George and Cynthia Mitchell chair and a professor of economics at Rice University.
He has a James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy Working Paper with colleague Dr. Kenneth B. Medlock III titled
Climate Policy and Energy Security: Two Sides of the Same Coin?
and an excellent powerpoint presentation with the same title, summarizing the key points of their working paper (see).
Climate Science has concluded that the energy and climate issues should be separated, based on the strong scientific evidence that supports the statement below (see) that
- While natural variations are important, the human influence is significant and involves a diverse range of first-order climate forcings (including, but not limited to the human input of CO2).
The powerpoint by Professor Baker and Dr. Medlock is a very effective overview of their major findings, and presents a valuable and much needed framework to address the issue of the consequences to climate and energy policies if they are not “two sides of the same coin”.
For instance, they ask the question
“How much climate change is natural, how much is attributable to anthropogenic non-CO2 sources, and how much results from the accumulation of CO2?”,
with the conclusion that
“The larger the non-CO2 components of climate change, the stronger the case for mitigation or remediation of damages.”
Climate Science, and our research group, have been urging a broader perspective to the role of human climate forcings, and the adoption of a more inclusive set of climate metrics than just the global average surface temperature trend (e.g., see where we propose, as one new metric, a diagnosis of changes in regional climate forcing of atmospheric circulations from human climate forcings). This broader view has also been presented in the 2005 National Research Council report that is discussed frequently on Climate Science.
The recognition by the economic community of the need to assess the degree of actual overlap between energy and climate policies is very much welcome!