Global Science Report is a weekly feature from the Center for the Study of Science, where we highlight one or two important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media. For broader and more technical perspectives, consult our monthly “Current Wisdom.

From the authors of a new paper just-published in the journal Nature Geoscience comes this surprising finding:

Tropical forests are less likely to lose biomass – plants and plant material – in response to greenhouse gas emissions over the twenty-first century than may previously have been thought.

A rare “not as bad as we thought” admission about the impacts of manmade global warming!

Not only that, but based on recent findings that the true climate sensitivity is much lower than climate models emulate—findings not incorporated in new study—the results are probably still even more “not as bad as they thought” than they thought!

Chris Huntingford from the U.K’s Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and colleagues coupled climate model projections to a land surface/​vegetation model to see how the tropical forests in the Americas, Africa, and Asia respond to changes in atmospheric conditions. Their vegetation model includes interactions between terrestrial plants and influences such as temperature, precipitation, and the carbon dioxide concentration of the atmosphere (a plant fertilizer).

Unlike other studies which used a very limited selection of climate models and less sophisticated vegetation models, the Huntingford team found that in virtually all future simulations that the biomass of tropical forests increases over the course of the 21^st century. This is a significantly different result than many previous which suggested that anthropogenic climate change would lead to, as Huntingford et al. put it, “catastrophic losses of forest cover and biomass.”

Perhaps most interestingly, the major driver for the biomass increase is the projected growth in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration (thanks to our use of fossil fuels). The model projected changes in precipitation had little impact on the biomass predictions and the projected increase in temperature acted to decrease the biomass (although not as much as additional carbon dioxide acted to increase it).

Which is why the results probably get even better if there is less warming associated with carbon dioxide emissions than current generation climate models predict (new research suggest that climate models together produce about 50% more warming than they should).

The authors are quick to mention that uncertainty abounds, as our level of understanding of forest response to changing environmental conditions is not all that high. But even given these uncertainties, the authors are confident that their results of increasing biomass are robust. Here is how Huntingford described the situation in a press release:

The big surprise in our analysis is that uncertainties in ecological models of the rainforest are significantly larger than uncertainties from differences in climate projections. Despite this we conclude that based on current knowledge of expected climate change and ecological response, there is evidence of forest resilience for the Americas (Amazonia and Central America), Africa and Asia.

Resilience. A refreshingly honest assessment of an ecosystem response to climate change. And one that is probably a much more apt descriptor of natural systems than “delicate,” “sensitive,” or “fragile.”

Now if only the folks in charge of assembling national and international climate impact assessments would realize (or probably more accurately, admit to) this.

We are hard at work trying to focus their attention as we are vigorously reviewing the latest draft “National Assessment” of climate change. We will leak out particularly juicy snippets in these pages when the time seems right.

Reference:

Huntingford, C. et al., 2013. Simulated resilience of tropical rainforests to CO2-induced climate change, Nature Geoscience, 10.1038/NGEO1741.

Yesterday we hosted a very interesting event with Google Ideas about the use of new media and technology information in Mexico’s war on drugs. You can watch the whole thing in the video below.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest casualties from the bloodshed that besets Mexico is freedom of the press. Drug cartels have targeted traditional media outlets such as TV stations and newspapers for their coverage of the violence. Mexico is now the most dangerous country to be a journalist. However, a blackout of information about the extent of violence has been avoided because of activity on Facebook pages, blogs, Twitter accounts, and YouTube channels.

Our event highlighted the work of two Mexican researchers on this topic. Andrés Monroy-Hernández from Microsoft Research presented the findings of his paper “The New War Correspondents: The Rise of Civic Media Curation in Urban Warfare” which shows how Twitter has replaced traditional media in several Mexican cities as the primary source of information about drug violence. Also, we had Javier Osorio, a Ph.D. candidate from Notre Dame University, who has built original software that tracks the patterns of drug violence in Mexico using computerized textual annotation and geospatial analysis.

Our third panelist was Karla Zabludovsky, a reporter from the New York Times’ Mexico City Bureau, who talked about the increasing dangers faced by journalists in Mexico and the challenges that new media represent in covering the war on drugs in that country.

Even though Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico’s new president, has focused the narrative of his presidency on economic reform, the war on drugs continues to wreak havoc in Mexico. Just in the first two months of the year over 2,000 people have been killed by organized crime. 

At the Cato Institute we closely keep track of developments in Mexico and we have published plenty of material on the issue, including:

• The Fire Next Door: Mexico’s Drug Violence and the Danger to America, by Ted Galen Carpenter
• “Time for an Alternative to Mexico’s Drug War,” Jorge Castañeda
• “Mexico Is Still Bleeding,” by Ted Galen Carpenter
• “Undermining Mexico’s Dangerous Drug Cartels,” by Ted Galen Carpenter

Watch the full event:

And for those who speak the language of Cervantes, here’s a ten minute interview that Karla Zabludovsky and I did on CNN en Español about the Cato event.

The now annual release of House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan’s (R‑WI) budget proposal has replaced the release of the president’s budget proposal as my least favorite policy event of the year. The president promises big government and Ryan promises smaller big government. What makes the Ryan proposal more aggravating is that it’s hardly a vision of limited government, but the left (and many on the right) treats it like it is. 

According to his numbers, Ryan’s budget ideas would reduce federal spending as a percentage of GDP from 22.2 percent this year to 19.1 percent in 2023. According to Democrats and liberals, such a savage reduction in the federal footprint would inflict unfathomable pain on various groups of Americans. 

Here’s Rep. Steny Hoyer (D‑MD) with the standard Democratic scare-mongering that we can expect to hear over and over again in the coming months: 

Instead of insisting on a balanced approach to deficit reduction, Ryan’s budget will demand that our middle class, seniors, veterans, women, children, federal employees, low-income families, and those nearing retirement pick up the tab. 

Other than perhaps Oompa Loompas, I believe Rep. Hoyer got’em all (rich males aren’t included because they don’t pay their “fair share”). 

Instead of delving any further into Ryan’s numbers, I’m just going to get to my point. Proposing that the federal government borrow and spend less than what is currently projected is certainly better than the alternative. But if your goal is limited government then there has to actually be limits on what all the government is involved in. 

I don’t see anything in Ryan’s proposal that would end the federal government’s involvement in education, job training, energy, transportation, etc., etc. Yes, Ryan calls for ending Obamacare, but that wouldn’t end the federal government’s involvement in health care. Yes, Ryan says that higher education subsidies should be capped, but that wouldn’t end the federal government’s involvement in education. And so on. How the federal government delivers the goods would change (e.g., block-granting Medicaid and premium support for Medicare), but more efficient government isn’t the same as limited government.

My new op-ed at the Daily Caller is their “most shared” this morning. Excerpt:

On Monday, Judge Tingling struck down the soda ban in a sweeping opinion that does everything but hand Mayor Poppins his umbrella and carpetbag. This wasn’t just a temporary restraining order putting the regulation on hold for a few weeks. The judge struck down the ban permanently both on the merits (“fraught with arbitrary and capricious consequences”) and as overstepping the rightful legal powers of the New York City Department of Health…

[For] the mayor and his public health crew… the biggest reproach in the decision isn’t in being found to have gotten the facts wrong, it’s being found to have violated the law.

And if anyone is expected to know and play by the rules, it’s a nanny.

Michael Grynbaum, New York Times: 

[Bloomberg’s] administration seemed caught off guard by the decision. Before the judge ruled, the mayor had called for the soda limits to be adopted by cities around the globe; he now faces the possibility that one of his most cherished endeavors will not come to fruition before he leaves office, if ever. …

The measure was already broadly unpopular: In a New York Times poll conducted last August, 60 percent of city residents said it was a bad idea for the Bloomberg administration to pass the limits. 

The Times also profiles Judge Tingling and reports on reactions by the New Yorker in the street (not favorable toward the ban). Coverage from yesterday, including my podcast with Cato’s Caleb Brown, here. [cross-posted and slightly condensed from Overlawyered]

There has been more buzz about the prospects for trade liberalization this year than at any time since the first term of the second president Bush. It appears that some may be mistaking the chatter for actual accomplishment.

For example, trade policy made the front page of Saturday’s Washington Post in a story that is much less about the substantive issues, or the obstacle-strewn path to meaningful liberalization, or the political leadership that will be required to surmount those obstacles than it is a paean to President Obama’s alleged metamorphosis into a champion of free trade.

But before anyone awards the president the Nobel Trade Prize for a job yet done, consider this: in four-plus years, this administration has concluded zero trade agreements, while launching 13 WTO cases against various trade partners. For 50 months, enforcement and domestic protectionism—not liberalization—have dominated the trade agenda.

Yet, the absence of evidence that this administration can deliver meaningful new trade agreements doesn’t seem to curb the enthusiasm of Bruce Stokes, a long-time trade policy observer, whose comment serves as the emphatic final sentence of the Washington Post tribute: “They appear to have moved from a risk-averse first term to creating a legacy in international economic and trade policy.” A legacy? Really? Shouldn’t the bar be raised just a smidge before we coronate President Obama this generation’s Cordell Hull?

For starters, wouldn’t the president have delegated someone capable and experienced to take ownership of the trade agenda if he were really committed to leaving a trade policy legacy? U.S. trade representative Ron Kirk announced more than one year ago that he would be leaving his post early in a second Obama administration. Yet there is nobody vetted and ready to take the reins of trade policy. Kirk’s official resignation came at the end of last month—though he has been hanging around to help out on account of … “sequestration.”

The most prominent name floated for U.S. Trade Representative has been the OMB’s Jeff Zients, the person most closely associated with President Obama’s proposal to subsume the USTR under the enforcement-centric Commerce Department—again, not exactly the substance of trade legacy-building. Members from both parties in Congress have demanded a better candidate if the president expects his trade agenda to be taken seriously.

Accomplishments, not rhetorical intentions, should serve as the basis for our judgments. Anyone can announce initiatives. President Obama is quite proficient at reciting litanies of initiatives. But it remains to be seen how he handles the situation when the deals require his confronting allied interests and dismantling their protectionist perches. In fairness, the administration’s trade negotiators have been working hard toward a Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement with 10 Pacific-rim nations. But let’s see where this goes before we start writing history. There’s still a lot of ham left on that bone.

The administration has verbally committed to completing the TPP negotiations by the end of this year and the just-announced Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations with Europe by the end of next year—both virtual impossibilities given where things stand in those negotiations and between the White House and Congress. So we already have a credibility problem.

Both sets of agreements are likely to include provisions that penetrate deeper than usual into the domestic regulatory space of all countries involved. Understandably, this is generating resistance—particularly to U.S. demands for extra investor and intellectual property protections. Some of the groups that were instrumental in defeating SOPA and PIPA legislation last Congress are beginning to mobilize in response to concerns that the TTIF could be a backdoor to IP-based restrictions that affect internet use and data sharing, among other issues. U.S. negotiators are making serious demands on matters they claim to be central to 21st century trade, yet they appear unwilling to give ground on the 18th century protectionism still afforded U.S. textile and footwear producers.

I bring attention to these details not to pick a fight about Obama’s trade record, but to emphasize that facts matter. So do characterizations. Readers should know about growing resistance to U.S. demands that threaten to prolong or derail the TPP and TTIP negotiations. Readers should know that if the talks break down or produce less ambitious outcomes, that there is probably more to the story than the official U.S. account, which will pin the blame on foreign intransigence. Readers should know that the U.S. government engages in all sorts of protectionist policies and then relies on media to characterize trade as a zero-sum contest between U.S. producers and foreign producers. Under this rubric, U.S. protectionism is presented as a necessary response and it becomes patriotic to support our own trade barriers—the very protectionism that hurts us the most.

Consider this quote from the Washington Post story above about the administration’s decisions to pursue these trade agreements:

To the Obama administration, it’s the logical response to sluggish job growth, the failure of the Doha round of global trade talks and the fear that trade restrictions incubated in places such as China and India could become the global norm unless countered.

Yes, local content rules and preferences granted indigenously created technologies are emerging threats to the trading system, but this would be a good place in the story to point out that “Buy American” provisions were incubated in the United States well before the founding of either the Republic of India or the People’s Republic of China, and they have been emulated around the world. What about the massive subsidies bestowed upon U.S. green industries and farmers? This tendency to portray the United States as wearing the cape or the white hat in a world full of trade scofflaws infantilizes readers, making it harder to dismantle our own barriers.

Furthermore, the administration has barely begun to do anything substantive with respect to securing Fast Track negotiating authority from the Congress, which it will need to get any trade agreements approved by the legislature. Congress is largely in the dark about what the administration has been negotiating in the TPP. The administration’s cavalier attitude toward this potentially arduous process betrays either a lack of understanding or concern that Congress, if it grants that authority, will attach all sorts of conditions that may render moot the past couple years of negotiations on the TPP.

Not until the penultimate paragraph of the Washington Post story is the depth of President Obama’s embrace of trade revealed:

The lackluster pace of job creation here and among allies in Europe created a try-anything attitude on both sides of the Atlantic. China’s rise has led to a broader U.S. effort to deepen relationships with Asian nations that share many of the same anxieties about their behemoth neighbor.

Alas, President Obama has not found religion on trade after all. He’s merely run out of options. The TPP was motivated from the outset as a means to regain some of the influence—on policy and institution-building in the Asia-Pacific—presumed to have been lost to China, as America toiled in Iraq and Afghanistan. Persistently high unemployment, despite four years of stimulus, subsidies, and bloated federal spending, had finally led the administration to its last resort: trade liberalization.

So there you have it. A president who has settled on trade agreements as a last resort to spur investment and create jobs shouldn’t inspire too much confidence that he’s in it for the long haul and that he’ll be willing to make the tough political decisions ahead, particularly if the economy starts to improve and his affection for trade agreements proves fleeting.

Who knows, maybe the Washington Post story convinced the White House that it’s already done enough good on the trade front and the moment for real liberalization has already passed.

Sigh. Even when they’re sort of doing the right thing, Republicans are incapable of using the right argument.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R‑WI), chairman of the House Budget Committee, has unveiled his proposed budget and he and other Republicans are bragging that the plan will balance the budget in 10 years.

That’s all fine and well, but good fiscal policy is achieved by reducing the burden of government spending, and that means restraining the budget so that federal outlays grow slower than the private sector.

It’s good to balance the budget, of course, but that should be a secondary goal.

Now for the good news. The Ryan Budget does satisfy the Golden Rule of fiscal policy. As you can see in the chart, federal spending grows by an average of 3.4 percent annually, and that modest bit of fiscal discipline is enough to reduce the burden of government spending to 19.1 percent of economic output by 2023.

It’s also good news that the Ryan Budget calls for structural reform of entitlement programs, including Medicaid block grants and Medicare premium support. The budget also assumes the repeal of the costly Obamacare program.

And there’s also some good tax policy. Not bold tax reform like a flat tax, but top tax rates would be reduced to 25 percent and many forms of double taxation, like the death tax and capital gains tax, presumably would be reduced or eliminated.

Let’s be clear, though, that this is not a libertarian budget. Federal spending will still be far too high. Indeed, the budget will consume a larger share of the economy than it did when Bill Clinton left office.

And while Republicans do a good job of restraining spending in the first couple of years of the new Ryan Budget, outlays rise far too rapidly beginning around 2016.

Moreover, there’s no Social Security reform.

Equally worrisome, the budget assumes that the federal tax burden should remain at about 19 percent of GDP, higher than the long-run average of 18 percent of GDP and—for all intents and purposes—permanently enshrining Obama’s fiscal cliff victory.

And it’s depressing to see that the Ryan Budget has gotten weaker each year.

• Two years ago, he put forth a budget that limited spending so that it grew 2.8 percent per year.
• Last year, he put forth a budget that limited spending so that it grew 3.1 percent per year.
• Now, spending will climb 3.4 percent per year.

At this rate, it won’t be that long before the GOP budget and Obama budget converge.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration. But the moral of the story is that the Ryan Budget is a step in the right direction, but much more will be needed to restore limited, constitutional government.

We started up Cato’s Center for the Study of Science to investigate how the government’s virtual monopoly funding of many branches of science results in unseemly mixtures of science, scientists, and the political process.

Lest anyone wonder why we do this, here is the “motto” of the U.S. government’s Global Change Research Program (with its annual $2.6 billion budget):

“Thirteen Agencies, One Vision: Empower the Nation with Global Change Science”

Yikes!

We are currently in the midst of reviewing the latest offering from the USGCRP—its assessment of the potential impacts in the U.S. from anthropogenic climate change. Guess what, “it’s worse than we thought!”

Nevermind that this new document has no problems using screeds from the Union of Concerned Scientists, various climate “alliances,” and literature greyer than a Russian Blue cat, in support of some of its more lurid claims. After all, the USGCRP has a “vision.”

Speaking of vision, if you want to look for yourself, download this turkey here. Public comments due by April 12, 2013.