Climate Coverage: A Cheap Media Case Study

Science magazine has two very interesting papers in Friday’s issue related to climate and energy. One looks at a potentially significant climate change problem, and the second looks at a potentially significant energy system solution.

The first, by Natalia Shakova and colleagues, looks at the possibility that methane is venting faster than expected from the Arctic seafloor, which could be a big deal with regard to global climate change. How big? From Martin Heimann’s accompanying Perspectives piece:

How important are these fluxes in the global methane cycle? Considering the global emissions of ~440 Tg C as methane per year (1), the Siberian Arctic Ocean emissions and the changes in northern wetland emissions are negligible. This is good news, implying that current climate change does not affect the natural methane cycle in a globally important way. But will this persist into the future under sustained warming trends? We do not know.

The second paper, by Hunt Allcott and Sendhil Mullainathan, discusses the importance of the application of behavioral science, rather than simply technology, to the problem of energy efficiency:

Just as we use R&D to develop “hard science” into useful technological solutions, a similar process can be used to develop basic behavioral science into large-scale business and policy innovations. Cost-effectiveness can be rigorously measured using scientific field-testing. Recent examples of scaling behaviorally informed R&D into large energy conservation programs suggest that this could have very high returns.

The methane story got a ton of media coverage. I could find no coverage of the energy efficiency paper.

The problem space gets more attention than the solution space.

update: John Timmer at Ars Technica explores the solution space.

5 Comments

  1. The behavioral part is interesting. Humanity’s high discount rate for future events — anything that happens more than a year from now doesn’t matter — seems to be strongly at odds with dealing with problems that are predictable, very negative, and occur farther in the future.

    Careful behavior changing seems to be critical. The trick appears to be to make the problem real and immediate. It is hard to do this especially in the adrenaline rush of current events.

  2. This may have to do with the fact that the methane story is huge, for those who have been researching the dangers of permafrost methane, undersea methane hydrates and methane calthrates before this shocker, this is some of the worst news since the hockey stick graph.

  3. I am sorry John but it’s all been Allcott’s and Mullainathan’s fault. This is what they should have written:

    “It might be one of the most ominous bits of evidence yet that global warming could run out of control. Unless we use R&D to develop basic behavioral science into large-scale business and policy innovations, the most-feared potential self-reinforcing effects of climate change may be starting to get under way. Recent examples of scaling behaviorally informed R&D into large energy conservation programs suggest that this could have very high returns. Otherwise, the effects of climate change will persist becoming evident faster than anyone predicted.”

    (original alarmism: http://bit.ly/dp4Eok )

  4. John, I think David’s point is that the increasing CO2 levels are already a disaster in the making, and that while methane could make things worse it’s only one of several feedbacks that could do so.

    A driver who’s already decided that a broken brake pedal isn’t a problem at freeway speeds is probably not in the right frame of mind to respond differently to acceleration from a stuck gas pedal.

    Certainly solutions don’t get enough attention, but it’s not as if the problems get enough either.

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