Third time’s not the charm for the IPCC

The first two working groups of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have produced two extraordinarily useful reports.

The first examined the science behind climate change, reconciling the various models to show what, on a global scale, is likely to happen under different possible concentrations of gases in the atmosphere. (The “summary for policymakers” — link goes to a PDF — is what got all the attention, though some skeptics insisted we needed to wait for the full document before taking it seriously. It’s now out, and I look forward to hearing the skeptics’ comments on it, in all its stupefying detail.)

The second examined specific effects that can be expected in different parts of the world (PDF), from rising sea levels to screwed-up agriculture to animal die-offs. It’s still in the summary-for-policymakers stage.

These groups’ reports are so worthwhile because they represent a consensus, a baseline on stuff that everyone involved in the climate-change issue ought to be able to agree on. Vast panels of scientists have reviewed the work that goes into the final documents, along with vast panels of diplomats from every country in the world, including skeptical governments like those in Canada, China, and the United States. These constitute a sort of agreed-upon statement of facts among parties who might not agree on much else. The governments have signed off on a process in which they agreed to participate; they can’t legitimately say the results are full of it.

You’re free to differ with them yourself, of course, but doing so means challenging the closest thing you’ll ever find to a scientific and international diplomatic consensus. Science isn’t done by consensus, it’s true, but claiming that all these professionals simply have it wrong means challenging the very idea of expertise as the rest of us understand it. We’re not talking here about whether the designated-hitter rule is good for baseball, but the twin edifices of modern science and education.

The third working group is due to report this Friday, on mitigation measures and things we might do to prevent human-induced climate change from getting too bad. An outline of the thing is here (PDF), though it’s not very informative.

It appears, according to the Associated Press’s Michael Casey who’s on the scene in Bangkok, that the scientists are battling very seriously with the diplomats and might not be able to find a consensus.

The report being debated this week in Bangkok stresses the world must quickly embrace a basket of technological options – already available and being developed – to limit the temperature rise to two degrees C. More than 200 delegates will examine the IPCC report and recommend changes before it is finalized.

The U.S. wants clauses inserted saying the cost of current available technologies to reduce emissions “could be unacceptably high,” and calling for a greater emphasis on “advanced technologies,” many of which are aimed at extending the use of coal.

But maybe they shouldn’t really be trying to find a consensus. What they’re doing, in the third IPCC working group, is trying to make policy recommendations — or, if the IPCC’s mandate is to be strictly interpreted, policy decisions, where the first two groups were just making statements of fact. How much warming is too much to bear? What’s a reasonable cost to incur in arresting it? What complex social effects, and unintended consequences, might particular technologies have?

Maybe if the politicians and diplomats got to shove their oars into discussions of the facts, the climatologists and algae biologists should get to shove theirs into discussions of the policy prescriptions, but even if that’s fair, it’s not necessarily helpful. Defining what’s real is the province of science, and if you can get politicians to formally agree with what a thousand scientists come up with, that should form the basis of good policy. Defining what’s good is the province of politics, and there’s no reason to think any scientist has any more to say about that than anybody else does.

Photo credit: Flickr/Steve Deger

Devising a middle-class transit system

Despite the Santa Clara County bus system’s having lost about 30 per cent of its riders in the past few years, most local governments would still be pretty pleased to have a transit system on the financial footing of the Valley Transit Authority. According to the San Jose Mercury News (free registration required), the VTA has “nearly broken even” for several years despite the pounding taken by Silicon Valley’s economy and a plunge in ridership from about 150,000 a day to 100,000.

Still, in the interests of attracting more riders again, the VTA is hoping for political support for a plan to cut its prices.

Among the lost riders: a 25 percent drop in the number of youths taking the bus and a 35 percent drop in elderly and disabled passengers.

That decline led to a task force of transit advocates, elected officials and riders that concluded lowering fares would be the best way to attract people back on buses.

“We questioned how much ridership would drop off when fares were hiked,” said Dolly Sandoval, a VTA board member from Cupertino, recalling the decision to raise rates. “Unfortunately, we did not expect such a large number of riders would drop off.

“If we want people to ride our system, we not only need to make it more convenient, we need to make it economically feasible.”

Comparisons of this sort of thing are difficult because populations and geography don’t match, but for reference, Santa Clara County has a population of about 1.6 million; Ottawa’s transit system (which is mostly buses) carries about 350,000 people a day on a population of about 800,000; and Edmonton’s ETS carries about 120,000 out of 1 million or so in greater Edmonton, so despite its almost breaking even, the VTA is not an enormous transportation success.

The price cut is not what you’d call significant: a day pass for an adult will go from $5.25 to $5, and a monthly pass for an elderly or disabled person from $26 to $20. Twelve-and-a-half cents per commute seems an incentive unlikely to get them flocking onto the VTA’s buses like they did in the old days.

Here in Ottawa, the city is financially strapped thanks to Ontario’s messed-up system of putting social programs on municipalities’ tabs and a public unwillingness to pay any higher taxes (Mayor Larry O’Brien was elected partly on the strength of one slogan: “Zero means zero”), and the transit system is in the midst of a five-year program to hike fares by something approaching 50 per cent. The theory, according to the city manager, is that the system’s biggest problem isn’t price, it’s quality of service.

As a bus-rider myself, I’ve whiled away many minutes waiting at bus stops in the bitter cold and grinding my teeth while the noise bleeding from some guy’s earphones half-deafens me, calculating just how much cheaper this single ride is compared to what it would cost if I were driving myself. Roughly speaking, I spend $900 a year on tickets, maybe an eighth of the typical cost of ownership of the Mazda 3 I test-drove a few summers ago. There’s really no comparison, and it’d get worse if drivers paid any significant fraction of the cost of the public roads they use. Price is pretty definitely not the issue, especially for the middle-class riders who get to and from work in private cars in droves. They’re happy to pay a hell of a lot more for the convenience and comfort of their own vehicles.

If the reader comments on the Merc story are anything to by, Santa Clara County has much the same challenge. I suspect they’d be a lot better off if they stuffed the fare cut and invested the money they kept in improved service. The objection to that, of course, is that public transit isn’t just a means of saving on the public cost of roads, but also of helping people with less money get around the sprawling municipalities that are the result of cheap oil, free road travel, and loose zoning codes.

My solution, assuming that tightening up density requirements and charging private drivers for the convenience of using public roads aren’t options, is a two-tier transit service. It’s virtually impossible to turn a profit on a transit line except in the densest development (and even then, only at limited times of the day), but let private companies have those concessions, and let them operate intra-city transit the way they do inter-city motor coaches: let them charge whatever they can get away with, but provide comfortable middle-class-level service in exchange.

A candidate in Ottawa’s municipal election proposed almost exactly this last fall and a disappointing number of people found the idea laughable. Even if transit exists partly to serve those too poor and/or young to buy cars, if you run a system as though they’re the target market, they’re the only riders you’re going to get.

(Via Planetizen.)