To hear some politicians speak these days, you'd think climate change could be solved as a happy side effect to creating jobs and reducing oil imports. Of course, the problem is much bigger than that. Just ask Robert Socolow, a professor at Princeton University and creator of the oft-cited "wedge" approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

In 2004, Socolow published an article in the journal Science that said greenhouse gases could be reduced substantially by combining several existing technologies with conservation measures, each technology or strategy forming a wedge. No single approach would be enough, but taken together, these wedges could make a big difference. The Science paper began with the provocative statement that "humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical, and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problem for the next half-century." The profound optimism of that remark has been used far and wide by those arguing for action on climate change.

But now, according to a report in National Geographic, Socolow says people should have read his paper more carefully.

He originally wrote that a combination of seven wedges, including reducing automobile travel and installing huge numbers of wind turbines, would make it possible to stabilize carbon dioxide concentrations at 500 parts per million. But he notes than none of these wedges would be particularly easy. The fuel economy of vehicles would have to double, 2 million wind turbines would have to be installed, and the amount of energy supplied by solar power would have to increase 700 times. Even then, he says, all the wedges would have done is keep annual emissions at about what they are now, which would likely still allow the world to warm by 3 degrees—hardly eliminating climate change. In comparison, global climate talks have focused on trying to limit temperature increases to just 2 degrees.

Socolow also says climate activists took his theory and extrapolated from it, suggesting, for example, that adding more wedges would make it possible to to decrease emissions more than he predicted. As a result, climate change began to seem like an easy problem to solve, which he thinks contributed to the lack of action since 2004. From National Geographic:

"With some help from wedges, the world decided that dealing with global warming wasn't impossible, so it must be easy," Socolow says. "There was a whole lot of simplification, that this is no big deal."

He said his theory was intended to show the progress that could be made if people took steps such as halving our automobile travel, burying carbon emissions, or installing a million windmills. But instead of providing motivation, the wedges theory let people relax in the face of enormous challenges, he now says.

"The job went from impossible to easy" in part because of the wedges theory. "I was part of that."

And from there, he says, a disturbing portion of the population moved to doubt that the problem is even real.

"I know no one who predicted that the climate change message would be rejected on a scale that it is now," Socolow said at a recent seminar at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "Scientists and environmentalists interested in getting climate taken seriously have failed beyond their wildest imaginations.

"This is a time for self-assessment," he said.

The article goes on to quote Henry Lee, who directs the environment program at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

"I think we were victimized more by the advocacy community than by science," Lee said. Using Socolow's wedges theory and similar arguments, advocates suggested "you could get all of this and pay nothing. I think people feel angry now, that it's going to cost them."

Here's an alternative explanation. A concerted effort to dispute the reality of climate change paired with economic hardship made Americans care less about the issue. It seems unlikely that telling people that climate change is difficult to solve will make people more likely to support climate change policy.

On the other hand, if such a policy is ever to become law--and stay law for the decades it will take to address the problem--people will certainly need to be convinced that climate change is a problem worth doing something about, and they'll need to have a realistic idea of what sacrifices will be necessary to solve the problem. Trying to convince them that forcing utilities to use more expensive sources of electricity will help the economy, as some politicians and policy experts are doing, doesn't seem to be working.

Tornadoes have killed more people this year than they have since 1953. This has some wondering whether higher global temperatures might be contributing. The answer: there isn't a statistical correlation between the number of tornadoes and rising temperatures. Yet scientists predict that climate change will bring increasingly harsh weather, and that's got some commentators wondering whether this year's tornadoes, record floods, and droughts, might be connected.

From AFP:

"This year is an extraordinary outlier," said Harold Brooks, research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma. . . . But when scientists examine the most complete records available and adjust for changes in how tornadoes were reported over time, "we see no correlation between global or US national temperature and tornado occurrence," Brooks said.

From New York Times:

Over all, the number of violent tornadoes has been declining in the United States, even as temperatures have increased, making it likely that this year's twister outbreak is simply a remarkable and terrifying — but natural — event.

Climate science has long predicted that global warming will cause more weather extremes, however, and statistics suggest this has started to happen. In most areas of the world where good weather data is available, instances of heavy precipitation are rising, often leading to flash flooding. And the same thing is true of heat waves; in the United States, new high-temperature records for a given date now occur twice as often as record lows.

That said, scientists are reluctant to attribute any specific weather event to global warming.

From Time:

Warmer temperatures and more moisture will give storm systems that much more energy to play with, like adding nitroglycerin to the atmosphere. This month's possibly record-breaking tornadoes are due in part to an unusually warm Gulf of Mexico, where as Freedman reports, water surface temperatures are 1 to 2.5 C above the norm. The Gulf feeds moisture northward to storm systems as they move across the country, and that warm moist air from the south meeting cool, dry air from the Plains often results in some powerful weather. But at the same time, other studies have forecast that warmer temperatures will reduce the wind shear necessary to turn a routine thunderstorm into a powerful system that can give birth to tornadoes. So in a hotter world we could see more frequent destructive thunderstorms, but fewer tornadoes—although some researchers think we could still end up with both.

Then there's this sarcastic editorial from climate activist Bill McKibben:

Caution: It is vitally important not to make connections. When you see pictures of rubble like this week's shots from Joplin, Mo., you should not wonder: Is this somehow related to the tornado outbreak three weeks ago in Tuscaloosa, Ala., or the enormous outbreak a couple of weeks before that (which, together, comprised the most active April for tornadoes in U.S. history). No, that doesn't mean a thing.

It is far better to think of these as isolated, unpredictable, discrete events. It is not advisable to try to connect them in your mind with, say, the fires burning across Texas — fires that have burned more of America at this point this year than any wildfires have in previous years. Texas, and adjoining parts of Oklahoma and New Mexico, are drier than they've ever been — the drought is worse than that of the Dust Bowl. But do not wonder if they're somehow connected . . .

It's far smarter to repeat to yourself the comforting mantra that no single weather event can ever be directly tied to climate change. There have been tornadoes before, and floods — that's the important thing. Just be careful to make sure you don't let yourself wonder why all these record-breaking events are happening in such proximity — that is, why there have been unprecedented megafloods in Australia, New Zealand and Pakistan in the past year. Why it's just now that the Arctic has melted for the first time in thousands of years.

Efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in China may be backfiring--at least in the short term.

Next month the country faces a self-imposed deadline to reduce its carbon intensity (a measure of the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of GDP) by 20 percent compared to 2005 levels. In a last minute dash to meet these targets, some local governments have started imposing planned blackouts.

While the blackouts are cutting emissions from power plants, they're having unintended consequences. Factories, which have to keep running to meet production requirements or face fines for missing deadlines, are getting their power instead from backup diesel generators. These emit carbon dioxide and running them has led to a diesel shortage. Thousands of fueling stations have reportedly shut down or refused to sell drivers more than half a tank of diesel fuel. To make up that gap, Chinese refineries are producing more diesel--a strain in a country that has to import most of its oil.

Of course, unintended consequences from efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions aren't limited to China. In the United States and Brazil, the use of food crops for biofuels can drive up food prices and lead to the destruction of forests as new land is cleared to make up for lost food production. Clearing that land also results in more carbon dioxide emissions, undoing much of the benefit of biofuels.

Ethanol made from sugar cane rather than corn (the main source of ethanol in the U.S.) results in far less carbon dioxide emissions. But Dan Sperling, director of the Institute for Transportation Studies at the University of California at Davis, estimates that when you figure in the impact of cleared rainforests, that benefit could disappear.