My 1st Congressional Testimony
Whoa! and why I did not include anything about sea level rise in my written testimony
I gave my very first Congressional testimony yesterday! It was a great honor and I am thankful for the opportunity. I can check it off my bucket list.
I had the chance to speak with the Senate Committee on the Budget.
You can find a recording of the hearing and my written testimony here.
My opening remarks are here.
In my testimony I focused on the social factors giving rise to economic losses along the coasts particularly the hurricane prone east and gulf shores. I acknowledged that climate change is real (it really is) and it is important (as I have long known).
I argued that practical policy to address economic losses from extreme weather would also go far in reducing risk and building resilience to climate change. And I pointed to problems with the emissions scenarios commonly used to estimate climate change economic risk.
And then… I turned focus on what I find to be a dynamic system of conflicts of interests that is widespread in the climate change research community.
I received three questions that I’d like to address further.
#1
Well… I don’t know if it was really a question. It was a set up to imply that the only conflicts of interest that should matter are those coming from the fossil fuel industry.
I don’t agree. At. All.
Frankly, that’s absurd.
In fact, when people argue that the only conflicts of interest that matter are those held by their opponents they are saying that the rules of the game don’t apply to themselves or those that support them.
Conflicts of interest are a concern for scientific integrity no matter where the money is coming from.
Further, it was implied in the hearing that only the fossil fuel industry hides what they are doing by donating to non profit groups that then do research. No.
It is not at all unusual for money to come into universities for research positions, initiatives, programs, and entire schools and for those entities to effectively ‘pass through’ the money for research that is of interest to special interests. It is often not at all clear what research products that money funds and what kinds of strings are attached (if any).
There is A LOT of money coming from environmental advocacy organizations to advance their preferred energy policy. By some estimates, like the one below, environmental groups outspend fossil fuel interests 4:1.
#2
Why did I not include anything about SLR in my written testimony?
I thought it was a good question and answered honestly.
But I should have included something. Live and learn.
In fact, in an early draft of my testimony I did include something on SLR. But I had taken it out at the last minute.
This is what I had drafted:
Discussion about sea level rise (SLR) is complex and nuanced. A simple view is that global mean sea level is increasing and expected to continue to increase. However, regional and local sea level change has far greater variation. It is regional and local scales of sea level change that are meaningful for managing risk to coastal communities.
The IPCC defines the global mean sea level (GMSL) change is the increase or decrease in the volume of the ocean divided by the ocean surface area. The rate of GMSL change varies depending on the time period used (Table x) adapted from IPCC table 9.5, p.1289.
While the IPCC expresses high confidence in an attribution of anthropogenic forcings as the dominant cause of GMSL since 1970, it expresses far greater uncertainty about regional changes.
Specifically, the IPCC states,
“detection of forced regional changes for some ocean areas in recent decades is possible (medium confidence), but attribution of regional sea level change to forcings over longer periods (20th century) and for all ocean basins is not yet possible” (p.1291).
So, why did I take it out?
I know enough about SLR and the IPCC to know what I don’t know.
Providing a professional opinion about SLR requires more technical knowledge than I currently have about the underlying data and paleoclimate.
While it takes a certain amount of expertise (or maybe just stick-to-it-ness) to wade through the IPCC 2,000+ page reports in the first place, reading between the lines and deciphering the social value judgements required to come up with “confidence” statements requires very specific knowledge. It requires knowledge about the data and what matters about the different models and statistical approaches.
And perhaps most significantly, to really read an IPCC report well, one needs to know as much about what was left out of the assessment as what was put into it. Knowing that requires familiarity with the broader scientific discussion in niche areas to understand who the players are, what perspectives they hold, and where bottlenecks or monopolies on data exist.
The US SLR literature has long appeared- to me, at least- to be dominated by a select few researchers and even fewer select publications.
In particular, Kopp et al 2014, appears to be a heavy influence. Or perhaps that publication just stands out to me because it is a collaboration between work from The Risky Business Project (which I talk about in my testimony) and Climate Central and both are explicitly advocacy oriented.
The IPCC’s most recent assessment of the physical science (AR6) used much of the findings on SLR that were developed in the IPCC’s Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC) released in 2019.
There are non-obvious reasons why the IPCC writes “special reports.” Sometimes there is something going on in the scientific community that needs sorting. Sometimes there are political reasons.
Finally, the lead author of the SROCC chapter on SLR is on the record as viewing science advice for policymakers on climate change as an opportunity to “provide official auspices for a more activist group of experts.” The quote is specifically in regard to a predecessor of the IPCC.
I can say what the IPCC says but I couldn’t say why they said it.
So, I left it all out.
#3
The question was something like:
Are you challenging the expertise of the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission Science Panel who wrote the Sea Level Rise Report from 10 years ago?
Um, no. Those are very smart people. I trust their expertise.
However, that report “from 10 years ago” I know a bit about because I’ve been working with some colleagues on an analysis of NC science advice.
That report is an interesting example of how much variation there is in sea level rise rates at regional and local levels.
The report from 10 years ago… so say 2012 which was actually a legislative requested addendum to the highly controversial report of 2010.
One of the reasons the 2010 report was so controversial (there were several) is that the most reliable SLR record happened to be from an area of North Carolina that had the greatest rate of SLR, Duck, NC .
The Science Panel used the Duck tide gauge to recommend a “rise of 1 meter (39 inches) be adopted as the amount of anticipated rise by 2100, for policy development and planning purposes.”
State legislators challenged the reasonableness of applying the Duck Key SLR rate to the whole of the shoreline given the range of rates available. They were also miffed that in making this recommendation the Science Panel did not consider anything else but their analysis of SLR.
Technical analysis and policy decisions require different sets of considerations. Evidently, back in 2010, no one thought to consider the economic or political feasibility of adopting a 1 meter SLR policy for planning purposes.
It turns out the feasibility of that policy was nil.
As well, and what I mentioned in my testimony, there is good reason to question the wisdom of the science panel’s decisions on the emission scenarios they (implicitly) ended up using to derive their SLR estimates in 2010.
But maybe 10 years ago was just a good round number and the senator really meant to reference the Science Panel’s 2015 report where the panel explicitly compared RCP2.6 to RCP8.5. (This very method of comparison was an important part of my testimony.)
Should state legislators, in their uproar, have challenged the science panel’s expertise? No. That was pretty low and no one came out of the mess looking good. There were a number of other ways everyone involved could have handled the situation better.
But, that discussion gets into the weeds.
So… I left it out.
I am critical of the approach used by North Carolina’s Coastal Resource Commission’s Science Panel to their reports and recognize they are in a tough spot in producing their next update.
It’s not at all that they lack technical know-how. It’s that I think the Panel and the CRC and it’s home office, are poorly approaching the science advisory process as a whole.
I have that written up somewhere and will post soon.
SLR is more complicated than global warming by GHGs. Post-glacial rebound, land subsidence, land use practices....
The CRC Science Panel's 2010 Report was a mess. I critiqued it here:
https://burtonsys.com/climate/Critique_of_NC_2010_SLR_AR.pdf
The critique is 29 pages long, but here's the summary:
--- BEGIN EXCERPT ---
Unfortunately, the Report is riddled with errors. It is strikingly unscientific in its approach, and its conclusion is wildly wrong:
• It began by cherry-picking a single, outlier NC tide station as representative of the State, obviously chosen for its atypically large rate of recorded sea level rise.
• It used just 24 years of sea level data from that tide station, despite the fact that 32 years of data were available, and other NC tide stations had over 75 years of data available.
• It conflated sea level measurements from coastal tide gauges with mid-ocean sea level measurements from satellites, creating the illusion of an increase in rate of sea level rise.
• Then it applied a discredited methodology from a fringe alarmist researcher, to justify predicting a wildly accelerated rate of sea level rise, far beyond even the IPCC’s alarmist predictions.
• Then it exaggerated even his implausible projections.
• Worst of all, it never even mentioned the fact that the actual historical record of sea level has shown no sustained acceleration in rate of rise for over 80 years, neither globally, nor here in North Carolina. That is the single most important thing to know about sea level rise, but you can’t learn it from this Report.
The Report recommends planning for one meter (39 inches) of sea level rise by 2100, for all of North Carolina.
That is absurd. The best science indicates that most of the NC coast will see only 3-14 inches of sea level rise by 2100, though in northeastern NC 12-20 inches is likely due to land subsidence.
--- END EXCERPT ---
Arguably, the best sea-level measurement record in the world is the 117⅚-year record from Honolulu. It's not the longest measurement record in the world, but:
● Unlike the U.S. east coast, Hawaii is not affected by variations in the Gulf Stream.
● Honolulu has 117⅚ years of continuous, top-quality measurements, from the same location, with no gaps.
● Honolulu’s location near the middle of the Pacific is nearly ideal. The Pacific Ocean “sloshes east” during El Niños, and “sloshes west” during La Niñas, but Hawaii is near the “teeter-totter pivot point,” so, unlike the other long Pacific measurement records, Honolulu is scarcely affected by it.
● Oahu experiences only small tides, and almost no vertical land motion (though it does move horizontally, about 3″ to the northwest, each year). Oahu is an old, tectonically stable island (several million years old, which is about 4× the age of the Big Island), and the volcanoes on Oahu are believed to have been inactive for well over a million years. So Honolulu’s sea-level trend is typical (about the same as the global average, i.e., about +1½ mm/year = 6 inches/century), and it is not appreciably distorted by vertical land motion.
https://www.nps.gov/havo/learn/nature/volcanoes.htm#:~:text=As%20it%20moves%20an%20estimated%202-4%20inches%20per%20year,%20it%20carries%20with%20it%20any%20land
● Unlike the north Atlantic and Baltic, Hawaii is not appreciably affected by Greenland’s slowly changing gravity field.
https://sealevel.info/resources.html#icegravity
There are other sites with measurements going back even further than Honolulu’s, but all of them either have gaps in the records, or they are sited at less-than-ideal locations.
Here's Honolulu's sea-level measurement record, juxtaposed with atmospheric CO2 concentration:
https://sealevel.info/MSL_graph.php?id=Honolulu
https://sealevel.info/1612340_Honolulu_thru_2022-10_vs_CO2_annot1.png