That darn wealth distribution is affecting who has money for climate research. “The results show that the supply of climate change knowledge is biased toward richer countries.”. Can the begging be any more transparent? Oh, the pain!
Climate change research is globally skewed
The supply of climate change knowledge is biased towards richer countries – those that pollute the most and are least vulnerable to climate change – and skewed away from the poorer, fragile and more vulnerable regions of the world. That creates a global imbalance between the countries in need of knowledge and those that build it. This could have implications for the quality of the political decisions countries and regions make to prevent and adapt to climate change, warn the researchers behind the study from the University of Copenhagen.
Photo: CIAT International Center for Tropical Agriculture“80 % of all the climate articles we examined were published by researchers from developed countries, although these countries only account for 18 % of the world’s population. That is of concern because the need for climate research is vital in developing countries. It could have political and societal consequences if there are regional shortages of climate scientists and research to support and provide contextually relevant advice for policy makers in developing countries”, says Professor Niels Strange from the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, University of Copenhagen, which is supported by the Danish National Research Foundation.
Click for larger image. Climate change research, shown here by number of publications, primarily concerns countries that are less vulnerable to climate change and have a higher emission of CO2. The countries are also politically stable, less corrupt, and have a higher investment in education and research.Together with PhD student Maya Pasgaard from the Department of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Copenhagen, Niels Strange analysed over 15,000 scientific papers on climate research from 197 countries. The analysis clearly shows that the research is biased towards countries that are wealthier, better educated, more stable and less corrupt, emit the most carbon, and are less vulnerable to climate change.
As an example, the study shows that almost 30 % of the total number of publications concerns the United States of America, Canada and China, while India is the only highly vulnerable country in the top 10 list. However, Greenland and small island states like the Seychelles and the Maldives that are generally considered vulnerable, also find their way into the top 10 list if it is calculated per capita.
The content of climate studies is also skewed
The study shows that not only the authorship, but also the choice of topic in climate research, is geographically skewed:
Articles from Europe and North America are more often biased towards issues of climate change mitigation, such as emission reductions, compared with articles from the southern hemisphere. In contrast, climate research from Africa and South and Latin America deals more with issues of climate change adaptation and impacts such as droughts and diseases compared to Europe.
– The tendency is a geographical bias where climate knowledge is produced mainly in the northern hemisphere, while the most vulnerable countries are found in the southern hemisphere. The challenge for the scientific community is to improve cooperation and knowledge sharing across geographical and cultural barriers, but also between practitioners and academics. Ultimately, it will require financial support and political will, if we as a society are to address this imbalance in the fight against climate change, says Maya Pasgaard. The study was recently published online in the journal Global Environmental Change.
Link to the scientific article.
A quantitative analysis of the causes of the global climate change research distribution
M. Pasgaard, N. Strange
Highlights
• Distribution of climate change knowledge and its causes is investigated.
• The supply of knowledge is biased toward the richer and less vulnerable countries.
• The production of knowledge is likewise biased away from poorer, vulnerable regions.
• Across regions, different knowledge domains within climate change dominate.
• The imbalanced distribution of knowledge affects adaptation and policymaking.
Abstract
During the last decades of growing scientific, political and public attention to global climate change, it has become increasingly clear that the present and projected impacts from climate change, and the ability adapt to the these changes, are not evenly distributed across the globe. This paper investigates whether the need for knowledge on climate changes in the most vulnerable regions of the world is met by the supply of knowledge measured by scientific research publications from the last decade.
A quantitative analysis of more than 15,000 scientific publications from 197 countries investigates the distribution of climate change research and the potential causes of this distribution. More than 13 explanatory variables representing vulnerability, geographical, demographical, economical and institutional indicators are included in the analysis. The results show that the supply of climate change knowledge is biased toward richer countries, which are more stable and less corrupt, have higher school enrolment and expenditures on research and development, emit more carbon and are less vulnerable to climate change. Similarly, the production of knowledge, analyzed by author affiliations, is skewed away from the poorer, fragile and more vulnerable regions of the world.
A quantitative keywords analysis of all publications shows that different knowledge domains and research themes dominate across regions, reflecting the divergent global concerns in relation to climate change. In general, research on climate change in more developed countries tend to focus on mitigation aspects, while in developing countries issues of adaptation and human or social impacts (droughts and diseases) dominate. Based on these findings, this paper discusses the gap between the supply of and need for climate change knowledge, the potential causes and constraints behind the imbalanced distribution of knowledge, and its implications for adaptation and policymaking.
h/t to Matti H. Virtanen
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Let me fix that for ya.
Fixed.
People have been adapting to weather and climate since we started walking upright. What people don’t need is failed projections and ideas that will fail. Here is a reminder.
Then we had changeable weather.
—————————-
Then in August of last year there was concern about the low level of the dams. Then one month later the rains came in force and starting the filling up process again. It’s called the weather (less than 30 years according to the IPCC).
This is a costly lesson as to why you should not listen to their garbage and warnings. I wonder when the windmills are going to be mothballed?
“The results show that the supply of climate change knowledge is biased toward richer countries.”
More breaking news: The results show that the supply of foreign aid is also biased toward richer countries. The only fair solution is for richer countries to give more money to poor countries so they can provide an equal amount of foreign aid. Wait, that would only increase the amount of foreign aid given by richer countries. Never mind.
You’ve missed the correct take on this:
“University of Copenhagen scientists join crusade for open data, open notebooks, and universal scientific data propagation.”
AKA ‘Demand rich countries -give- poor countries access to Jones treelist, the missing ice core, and a variety of data hidden primarily for snark.’
Poorer countries have different priorities … like survival. Only rich countries can afford (just) the parasitic activists who don’t have to worry about their next meal or drink of water.
Countries with more people who can write also do more writing.
I guess the poor countries are just unlucky. I am sure we have some extra CAGW activists we can send them to help them increase taxes and CAGW spending. /sarc
Often I’m skeptical about left wing redistribution schemes, but they’ve won me over. They can have the entire USA AGW movement lock, stock, and barrel. Just send over the banana boat and Pick up Mikey Mann, James Hansen, and all of their XBox 360 climate models. There’s only one condition. Once they are there they can’t be returned.
For the first time, I envy the poorer nations of the world.
Justa Joe
People living in poor countries have enough problems already. They don’t need those idiots dumped on them.
Junk science is one area where the playing field between countries could be leveled fairly quickly.
A rather perfect example of the “quota” system beloved by the politically correct. Its all a formula to them. When they see something work in practice, they bitch that it doesn’t work according to their post-modernist theory.
As an analogy: Canada’s 100th best ice hockey player is better than the UK’s best, even though it has twice the population. An all-star team with someone from the UK would be a bit suspect.
The flip side is that poorer countries don’t have enough cash to blow billions on CS nonsense, so they are spared the waste.
Future NYT headline:
“World to End Next Week: Women and Minorities Hardest Hit”
Tim,
ding ding ding, we have a winner!
I am a humble farmer and farmers are the original adapters. We build farm dams and tanks because we know the streams will stop flowing. We put wide verandahs around houses to keep us cool and store up wood for the winter fire. We chose the crop that suits our climate, the beast that performs best on our grass. We are careful with our money for the next crop might be a dud. Now I suspect third world people are very much the same in the way they view their situation; pragmatic and practical. If Western governments learnt those lessons again, because they once did think like that, we would never have wasted a cent on wind power and climate change. We would have simply lived through it. The problem, in Australia at least, is that our politicians are almost invariably from the city and have lost the connection with the country and the reality of nature. Our Greens have an imagined view of the real world and prognosticate on nature whilst having no connection to it. If farmers were in charge the world would be a peaceful productive place and the focus would be on ensuring a future by using the lessons of yesterday. We haven’t forgotten the last drought or flood or cold spell like the climate fraternity conveniently do. We also recognise bulls**t when we see it.
Sending climate researchers to third world countries? No thanks.
That’s like someone knocking on your door and saying “We’re from the government and we’re here to help.”
No ‘fing thanks.
hahahahahahahahaha to the self centered western a**holes.
meanwhile Thailand figures people have died from the cold huddling over non existent warmth…
http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/local/391073/unusual-3-month-cold-spell-in-thailand-claims-63-lives
I wonder how many billion a scientist would need to take to stop these sorts of death….
and when they burn down the universities when they realise how much money was p*ssed onto the gobal warming experts ego’s…
We could export 75% of our climate scientists and associated hangers-on to third world countries to continue their good work and pay them at the local rates. Saving the planet is all they care about so I am sure they wouldn’t mind.
This is something of a side note.
Both authors thus claim to have capabilities in qualitative methods. The manuscript sure does not reflect this; there is a procedure described, but the specific methodology is not even obliquely referred to with so much as one reference.
Here is the qualitative approach, from the methods section:
“Finally, in order to supplement the quantitative analyses presented above, we did a qualitative screening of titles and abstracts of a randomly selected sub-set of publications to assess certain knowledge domains, which were found relevant to investigate for the study of the supply and need for climate change research. These domains were categorized as primary research focus (mitigation or adaptation), climate change effects (natural or social/human), scale (large or small), dominant scientific approach (natural or social science), and whether an economic perspective was present.”
Here is the qualitative matter in the results:
“A qualitative assessment of all titles and abstracts in a sample of 613 publications and a logistic regression revealed that the probability of a study investigating any social or human impacts of climate change is significantly higher in Africa (p < 0.06) and lower in North America (p < 0.093) compared to Europe."
This just is not adequate. To be minimally sufficient in qualitative methodology, they would only have needed a few more words, and a couple citations.
None of us readers can judge how justified their conclusions/findings are, since we have no idea what their methodology was.
As Deep Throat whispered to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward during the Watergate investigation,
Rich countries, like the UK and USA, have being trying to justify costly policies to inflict on their citizens. Therefore they will fund “research” that proclaim mitigation policies are really sensible.
Many poor countries are projected to suffer the worst effects of global warming. At the annual COP shindigs it has been proposed that a huge fund be set up to help alleviate the worst impacts of climate change. A few million spent on scientific research that “forecasts” local cataclysm resulting from the nasty emissions of the rich countries could result in a few billion for the enlightened national leadership to spend in the best interests of the population.
Yes, and we donate more aid and also to the infamous UN Climate change fund to pay our dept for being developed to others who are not coping too well.
I’m developing a list of “Watt-isms” that I’ve picked up on this blog….”OH, NOES!” being a favorite! Also, “The stupidity, it burns like a …..” and “Nothing to see here, move along!”
In some countries the poorest people have to support an entire family on less than two climate scare stories per day….
I read the opening a little too quickly and got: M. Mann is a garden troll…he would look cute in a pointy red hat.
It maps roughly to the same proportionality as people who speak Klingon and people who have sex with lifelike rubber dolls.
In other words, it is a function of the decadence of rich socieities.