Photo: Craig Miller

While Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown debate the pros and cons of the state’s global warming law (AB 32) and the ballot initiative that would suspend it (Proposition 23), two of the four “alternative” candidates interviewed this morning on KQED’s Forum program, attacked the science behind California’s climate change policy.

“I’ve become convinced that the whole thing is an exaggeration at best, and a scam at worst,” said Dale Odgen, the Libertarian Party candidate.  “The science has been fudged in order to get grants for people.  People like Al Gore have used it to become even more wealthy at the expense of the rest of us.”

Expressing a similar sentiment, Chelene Nightingale, the American Independent candidate, appeared to focus on the cause, telling host Michael Krasny that “We’re gonna have climate change. We’ve had it since the beginning of time ’til the end of time,” but that the prevailing opinion of climate scientists is,”based on junk science.”

Their views are in stark contrast to those of the majority of Californians, according to a July survey by the Public Policy Institute of California. In it, 73% of respondents said global warming is a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” threat to the economy and quality of life in the state.  The survey also found that 54% of Californians believe the effects of climate change have already begun.

Their comments came on the same day that a group of scientists and policymakers delivered a new report to the desk of Obama Administration science and technology advisor John Holdren, concluding that the United States must adapt to a changing climate now and prepare for increasing impacts on urban infrastructure, food, water, human health, and ecosystems in the coming decades.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has compiled a list of documents and statements that attest to the consensus on climate change in the scientific community.

Neither Whitman nor Brown have said much about the science of climate change, choosing instead to focus on their plans regarding AB 32 and the role global warming legislation plays in the state’s economy (Brown says it’s good for the economy. Whitman says it hurts).  Both candidates say they oppose Prop 23, but Whitman has said that as governor, she would suspend AB 32 herself, under a provision written into the law.

The other two candidates for governor interviewed on Forum — Carlos Alvarez of the Peace and Freedom party and Laura Wells of the Green Party — did not discuss their views on climate science during the program.  Wells did express her support for AB 32.

There were moments during Monday’s Forum program on KQED when I thought I’d stepped through the Looking Glass.

The two principal guests were, by design, on opposite sides of the campaign for Proposition 23, the upcoming ballot measure to suspend California’s 2006 greenhouse gas law. So I didn’t expect the “Yes” campaign’s Anita Mangels and Solaria VP David Hochschild to agree on much.  But I never expected a dust-up over California’s historical unemployment rate. I mean, that’s a pretty easy one to settle — a matter of public record, right? Nevertheless, the two duked it out over just that.

Passage of Prop 23 would trigger an automatic suspension of regulations under AB 32 until the “unemployment rate in California” fell to 5.5% or less and stayed there for four consecutive quarters, which is to say twelve months. Several studies have concurred that this condition is relatively rare, occurring roughly once per decade. An analysis by the state’s non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) concluded that:

“…since 1970, the state has had three periods (each about ten quarters long) when the unemployment rate was at or below 5.5 percent for four consecutive
quarters or more.”

And last week, an analysis of Prop 23′s likely impacts from UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment agreed that:

“That level has been reached three times since the state began compiling these statistics in 1976.”

Mangels begs to differ. In an off-air discussion after the program, she reiterated what she said on the air, that “the California EDD figures are very clear that the threshold has been met many times in recent decades, including 10 times in the current decade alone.”

Wait. Ten times? In ten years? Mangels produced a pocket hard drive with a table of data to prove her point, then we plunged into the website of the state Employment Development Department (EDD), where, well buried in a PDF file, are the actual numbers. Just looking at the past decade, the downloadable spreadsheet of “seasonally adjusted” rates shows the last spate of unemployment at or below 5.5% stretching from April of 2005 through September of 2007 (the period during which AB 32 was passed into law).

But how you do the counting makes a big difference. Over that 30-month stretch, one could argue that the 12-month condition in which Prop 23 was satisfied occurred once (since it’s an unbroken string), twice (since 12 goes into 30 not quite three times), or 18 times, once for each month beyond the minimum twelve, moving the 12-month bracket forward each month.

And what you’re counting matters, too. If you look at another EDD data set that hasn’t been adjusted for “seasonality” (the normal month-to-month ups and downs that vary according to the time of year), that period of unemployment at 5.5% or less lasts only three months.

While the language in Prop 23 doesn’t offer any guidance as to which data to use, it also doesn’t appear to let us start and stop counting months at will. Section 3 of the measure requires a freeze on the state’s global warming law:

“…until such time as the unemployment rate in California is 5.5% or less for four consecutive calendar quarters.”

Mangels did concede that “The definition of a calendar quarter might be subject to interpretation” (she initially used the word “murky”). But to most people, the term “calendar” quarter implies three-month periods beginning in January, April, July and October.

This may seem like nit-picking but it’s an important point. It’s what would determine how long AB 32 could be suspended under Prop 23. At this point, it’s pretty unclear how this section would be applied when or if it comes down to it. “I didn’t write it,” said Mangels.

Photo: US Fish & Wildlife Service

Because our charter at Climate Watch is to examine climate change from the California perspective, you don’t see a lot here about melting ice caps and imperiled polar bears. But Michael Krasny’s interview with Richard Ellis on KQED’s Forum program is well worth an hour of your time.

Ellis is the author of On Thin Ice: The Changing World of the Polar Bear (Random House, 2009) and it’s fair to say that he managed to stun Krasny with a declaration that the species is “doomed,” no matter what we might try to do to save it at this point. Ellis says there is already too much warming in the pipeline (what scientists call “committed” warming) to reverse the disintegration of the bears’ arctic habitat.

Polar bear populations have been a topic of persistent confusion, recently amplified in an op-ed piece written by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin for The Washington Post.

According to the advocacy group Polar Bears International, there is little room for doubt about the animal’s decline. The organization’s website breaks down the numbers, which point to a “scientifically documented decline in the best-studied population, Western Hudson Bay, and predictions of decline in the second best-studied population, the Southern Beaufort Sea.”

The PBI analysis goes on to explain that:

The Western Hudson Bay population has dropped by 22% since 1987. The Southern Beaufort Sea bears are showing the same signs of stress the Western Hudson Bay bears did before they crashed, including smaller adults and fewer yearling bears.

At the most recent meeting of the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (Copenhagen, 2009), scientists reported that of the 19 sub-populations of polar bears, eight are declining, three are stable, one is increasing, and seven have insufficient data on which to base a decision. (The number of declining populations has increased from five at the group’s 2005 meeting.)

Regardless of whether you share the conclusions of Ellis and PBI about the future of the “poster child for global warming,” the Forum interview is a fascinating hour.

In case you missed it amid the flurry of climate-related news last week: On September 30, Amory Lovins, founder and chief scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute, and an honest-to-goodness energy guru to many, spent an hour in conversation with Michael Krasny and callers to KQED’s Forum program. You can listen to the entire archived broadcast or scan some of the highlights here, compiled by Climate Watch intern David Ferry.

On China:

“We can count on China to lead the world out of the climate mess…Even though the U.S. has led the world in wind installations the past three years, this year China’s going to pass us so fast we won’t even hear them go by. China’s doubled its wind installation each of the past four years, and there’s a new paper in Science from Harvard and Tsinghua in September saying that China can meet all its electric needs–not the growth but the total–till at least 2030, cost effectively, from its wind resources.”

On Nuclear Power:

“Basically nuclear and coal plants are getting walloped in the global marketplace by efficiency and renewables and cogeneration because they’re a lot cheaper and they have less financial risk so they can attract private investment.”

Grading the Obama Administration on Renewables:

“Greatly improved and I think on the whole doing very well.”

On the Upcoming UN Climate Talks in Copenhagen:

“I’m cautiously optimistic…But remember that governments are usually the last to figure these things out. Most governments still think climate protection is costly. They haven’t figured out yet that economic theorists got the sign wrong and actually climate protection is profitable. Once you change the conversation from cost, burden and sacrifice to profit, jobs and competitive advantage it makes the politics a whole lot easier.”

On Energy Efficiency & Steve Chu’s “Low-Hanging Fruit” metaphor:

“The technologies keep improving faster than we use them, so efficiency is an ever bigger and cheaper source–it’s as if the ‘low hanging fruit’ had fallen on the ground; it’s mushing up around the ankles, it’s spilling in over the tops of our boots and the efficiency tree keeps dumping more fruit on our heads.”

On Large-Scale Solar Farms v. “Distributed” Power Generation:

“The sun is distributed for free. Why gather it in one place and then pay to spread it out again? The National Renewable Energy Lab says if we put solar cells on seven percent of the structures in this country it would run all our electric needs without using any land. And for that matter, the wind potential on available windy land in this country is several times our total electric need and the footprint is actually very small.”

On Whether Climate Change is Irreversible:

“There are a half-dozen known mechanisms of rapid climate change. Several of them show like they may be starting up, so it’s urgent to reverse that…we have plenty of technology already available to stabilize climate to the extent that irreversible changes have not already started. We don’t know what that extent is, so we ought to go full bore on best buys first and hope that we’re in time.”

You can also take a virtual tour of Lovins’ home in Colorado, which doubles as a laboratory for energy innovation.