Sea Level in the Daily Press

Finally a sign of realism in the daily press. The Miami Herald has a story on sea level rise, in which they take a meter's rise as "conservative", which strikes me as a modest estimate. I note the peculiar use of the word "conservative"; a truly conservative estimate would be a worst case, no, perhaps 3 meters?

The usual noise (blaming it on Al Gore, e.g.) appears in the reader comments. Lots of idiotic blithering about your inland house gaining value because it's beachfront property. Ha. Ha.

Here's a particularly interesting one:

This is crap. "Under a conservative three foot rise" . That is not very conservative is very catastrophic, no scientific evidence that it will ever happen. Where they did get this number, why not 4 ft or 2 ft. Whoever lives on the ocean right now, I will trade my house in Hialeah, and save them from the rising tides. Of course I will start working on the ark right away. Even if it is true there is nothing we can do to stop it, until we get the dialethean crystal from the Klingons to run our cars.

I think he (interestingly, I am sure it's a male) means "dilithium"... Anyway, notice how it's all about cars (a common misconception on all sides) and especially notice how our modern way of life is considered a force completely out of our control.

Seriously, it is going to be very hard for people owning property in South Florida (or other comparable places, especially on the vast and recently built up southeastern beach and coastal plain) to face up to this threat to their wealth. Should we help them out? If so, how much?

 

Should it depend on whether they take mitigation seriously? It will be very psychologically difficult for them, and a bad economic move too, to acknowledge sea level rise. ("Here, buy my house, it should stay above sea level for at least half the duration of your mortgage...")

Happy Earth Day y'all...

Questions, Questions

Too many questions, not enough answers.

Andrew Revkin asks: what is the energy demand of vat-grown meat?

It's an example of a good question that ties into the future that is hard to answer. Who knows? How can we get such information? How much can we rely on such information if we get it?

The "collaboratorium" group at MIT proposes a mechanism for collaborative thinking. I see some flaws. It seems pretty labor-intensive and not very fun and not very scalable. For some things it it might work if enough people get in the right spirit. I have a feeling they are taking on too much too soon with, you know, the everything (a.k.a. climate) question. Of course, everything is intertwingled ultimately...

(By the way, weren't people talking about collaboratories in a somewhat different sense quite some time ago? I guess science doesn't get to register trademarks.)

Nicholas Stern Admits to Error

Sir Nicholas Stern, lead author of the Stern report has reconsidered his position and has concluded that his previous report, indicating a modest net benefit to sustained modest cuts in greenhouse gas emissions was wrong!

So is it time to tell Inhofe to add another name to the list? no...

The [original Stern] report argued that emissions would need to be cut to at least 25 per cent below current levels if a dangerous temperature rise of over two degrees is to be avoided – a scenario the report argued would trigger an economic crisis on the scale of the Great Depression. Such a reduction would require a cut in emissions from developed economies in the region of 60 per cent, a target the government subsequently adopted as part of its climate change bill.

But speaking in an interview with Reuters yesterday, Lord Stern admitted the report underestimated the scale and pace of climate change and urged politicians to step up action to curb emissions.

He said that the latest climate science showed that not only were emissions rising faster than thought, the ability of the earth to absorb carbon dioxide in so-called carbon sinks was deteriorating faster than expected.

"Emissions are growing much faster than we'd thought, the absorptive capacity of the planet is less than we'd thought, the risks of greenhouse gases are potentially bigger than more cautious estimates, and the speed of climate change seems to be faster," he said.

Stern added that to minimise the risks of dangerous climate change, the original target for global emissions would have to be doubled to a 50 per cent cut by 2050. He said that such a target would require the US to cut its emissions by up to 90 per cent by then.

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The US needs to cut its net emissions by 90 per cent by 2050! eep!

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I still don't buy into Stern's methodology, but at least he seems to be getting the idea that this isn't just a minor annoyance we are talking about.

CCS had better work and we had better get on with deploying it.

Agnotology, Left and Right

To go along with my discovery of the wonderful word "agnotology" (the study of ignorance) in Naomi Orekes' publication record, Deltoid points to a very well written and well organized article on Slate about it, called The Paranoid Style In American Science.

Author Daniel Engber advises moderation in skepticism.

You will see that people tend to deploy vast amounts of skepticism selectively toward things they wish were untrue. Engber sees this in the "Precautionary Principle" every bit as much as in, say, Global Warming do-nothingism. I think he has a very good point.

In the other hand, at least the precautionary types, though muddled, are sincere. Some of the "no such thing as global warming" crowd have jumped over to unstoppablism without pausing to consider the possibility of responsible behavior. At this point I exercise my skepticism that such people ever meant a word of what they said.

I'm just meandering here. Read the article.

Pielke Jr vs Romm

Somewhat marred by garbled punctuation, there is a very interesting take on the Romm vs Pielke Jr. (and Wigley and Green) fracas on Scitizen.

I think Pielke et al. can be accused of taking an unstoppablist position, and that is behind Romm's objections. This is all kicked off by the Raupach, Canadell work that I, too, have been citing.

The commenter may be unaware of Pielke Jr.'s odd intellectual history.

We need to come to grips with the fact that matters are getting worse, not better, though.

Top Ten List

Top ten climate change selections on Amazon (US site) today:

1. denialist (#120 in sales)
2. economist quasi-denialist (#834)
3. denialist turned unstoppablist (#1180)
4. competent (#6226)
5. scientist (#8979 )
6. denialist
7. alarmist
8. denialist
9. not very competent
10. unstoppablist

5 denialists/unstoppablists plus Lomborg in the top ten; nothing remotely sensible in the top three. Ranking vs sales is roughly logarithmic base 10 so Spencer is selling ten to a hundred times as many books as Broecker.

I wonder if there are people who have denialist book collections, though. I figure one global warming book every five years or so is good enough for most people who don't thrive on conspiracies. Interesting. If you buy only one global warming book every five years your most recent one should probably be Field Notes from a Catastrophe (#9504) by Elizabeth Kolbert, which for some reason didn't show up on the top ten list.

WSJ Op-Ed Laments: No Science Debate

Nobelists David Baltimore and Ahmed Zewail lament the candidates' refusal to consider a discussion about science. A good article about a bad situation, and in the Wall Street Journal of all places!

Also it's nice to see this sentence snuck in on the WSJ Op-Ed page:

Our government needs to treat science honestly. When the world's scientists flag global warming as a threat to our way of life, it is a warning that should be taken seriously. Stewardship of the planet is our responsibility. No one else is going to do it for us.

Is the Journal finally coming around?

Still No Progress

Only 12% of Republicans believe "global warming" (sigh) should be a high priority.

We can't address this as a substantive debate outside of formal science using the methods we use within science; the denialists have saved up plenty of pretend science and plenty of debating mojo. It's a proven loser. 

So, as I asked a bit over a year ago when I first started this blog, what should we do instead?

I think I fell into the "framing" frame a little too heavily. There are issues with framing science so as to alienate religious people. I think many biology bloggers are damaging the social fabric with their head-on approach. I also find it notable that the country which explicitly enshrines separation of church and state in the constitution is the one having the most difficulty managing it in practice. This again seems to be indicative of unintended consequences.

Even when Pielke Jr. makes little sense, it seems that what he does is about keeping the social fabric intact. It's an interesting approach. In the end I wonder if it isn't a more positive contribution than it might appear.

The wonderful documentary film The Unforeseen tells the story of the City of Austin attempting to assert environmental stewardship beyond its borders. When Governor Ann Richards supported the city against the legislature, the movie intimates that this may have been overreaching with a direct unintended role in the emergence of Karl Rove and he who shall not be named.

There's no doubt in my mind, or those of the good people of Austin (who are both Texan and not-Texan; it's hard to explain) that the Spring should be as permanent as the gods would allow.

There's also no doubt in my mind that the people of Texas are like people everywhere only perhaps a bit more so. Wise and clever, foolish and vain, kind in intent and vicious in impulse, suspicious and canny yet vulnerable to trickery. The management of Texas has to include the people of Texas, and it's best not to go directly against their closely held beliefs except when absolutely necessary.

I think what's crucial is bridging the gap and repairing the divide. Surely we still all agree on more than what we disagree about. Maybe it's best to focus on points of agreement and avoid head-to-head confrontation when we can.

Unfortunately there are clever people who promote the confrontation for their own gain. It's a problem.

It's necessary to allow people to see how they have been fooled. A direct attack on their beliefs will only harden those beliefs. We need to tell the whole story of how they have been manipulated.

In email conversation, Anna H has convinced me that Oreskes' work is a crucial component of the right approach. We need to take that work out of the cloisters of the academy and into the popular press.

Al Gore also has it right in his book "Assault on Reason". We have a problem in that democracy is not working. There are a number of reasons for that, some of which he discusses. It may be more to the point to address how our society has been damaged by manipulative and vicious trickery, that to go after the problem directly and fall into trap after trap after trap that has been set to foil us.

Defense of Kestenbaum

Science functions in a social context. Emergence of an educated class is as disastrous as emergence of a wealthy class. Without a social fabric in which it is securely enmeshed, science is worthless. The reason we are seeing persistent and dangerous pseudoscience is that the fabric has been torn. We will not repair it by physics lectures. I am so very tired of people missing this point, and recently many of us appear to have missed it badly.

Everybody's up in arms about the NPR story about Kristen Byrnes. David Appell says he's lost all respect for David Kestenbaum, the NPR reporter. I have to say I'm baffled. I seem to be a severe outlier on this one. I think Kestenbaum's story was excellent.

Not that Kristen isn't a problem, obviously. In fact Kristen's website was a motivation for me starting this blog a year ago. I think she has confused herself in a prefectly sincere way, and that indicates the deeper problem that Kestenbaum gets to.

The problem isn't that just one person gets it wrong; the problem is that it is easier to get it wrong than to get it right. Intermediate level (advanced high school, early college level) material on the denialist side is vastly more copious and more accessible to that on the side of science (with the severe alarmists like Mr Turner holding their own).

The truth will lose out to the lies more often than not when an intelligent person without much connection to academia openmindedly takes on a study of climate change. The ease with which we on the inside are perceived to be driven into arrogant huffing (as a consequence of being baited into it) doesn't help.

But that's just to establish my bona fides. I'm not here to discuss that today.

I'm here to stick my neck out and defend David Kestenbaum. What, after all, was his point?

And the truth is, for people who want to get down into the details, climate change science can get very hairy. There are oceans to consider, which can absorb heat, water vapor and cloud cover to account for.

Much of the evidence comes from detailed computer models. Scientists disagree on some of the details. A handful do not think the case has been made. But the overwhelming consensus is that humans are causing global warming, and the consequences could be serious.

Despite Kristen's online celebrity, she doesn't talk about climate change much with her friends.

During lunch at a local chowder house with her friend Chrissy Flanders, they talked about food and friends and clothes.

So it came as somewhat of a surprise when Chrissy piped up to say she disagreed with Kristen on climate change.

"I think it's partly because of humans," she says. Asked why she believes that she says she doesn't know. Kristen chimes in: "She just believes what everyone else is making her believe."

It's probably fair to say that most people — even those who have strong opinions about global warming — couldn't make a strong scientific argument for why they believe what they believe.

Most of us delegate, decide to believe someone we trust. We don't actively seek out the other side. We probably wouldn't know what to make of it, or how to reconcile the two. Who has time? Or the expertise?

Yes! Exactly!

I don't see why all the recriminations against Kestenbaum. He has identified the problem exactly. Science is about collective knowledge, and collective knowledge is about trust. Whether Kirsten is a little more sophisticated than her friend who happens to be right is secondary. The question is about whom each of these girls has decided to trust.

When you get deep enough into something a certain coherence emerges, but it's not easy to get that deep. I am trying to think about global food security for instance but I'm having a heck of a time identifying the authoritative sources. Of course, I am also asking the wrong questions: where does nitrogen come from, where does it go? These are questions that the experts don't spend a lot of time talking about because they know all about it. So who addresses the person who has come to the point of asking about nitrogen?

How do networks of trust operate when they work? How do they fail? How are they subverted by zealots? (Dare we hope that the press will get the gumption to take this on, finally?) These are the right questions, the crucial questions, and Kestenbaum has got to the root of them.

Update: Also, isn't Kristen chimes in: "She just believes what everyone else is making her believe" just deliciously ironic? I am really shocked and dismayed at how superficially the climo-blogo-spheroid is looking at this report. It's really very clever.

Update: Ponder the Maunder seems dramatically inferior in quality to what I saw a year ago, which presumably was the school project. Accroding to my recollection, anyway. Earthlink is unwilling to serve that up at present. Anyway, the page David Appell links to makes absolutely no sense, for instance. This doesn't bode well for young Kristen. If she wanders here in her ponderings, I hope she'll check my article on Wired Science about youthful hubris, in which, alas, she figures prominently.

Crazed Swedish Bicyclist Reaches Ifni, Morocco

Andreas Narfstrom may still be mad but he still takes great pictures.

Ifni is a former Spanish enclave within Morocco about which the internet knows frighteningly little. Apparently it was the site of a relatively recent but forgotten war. Wikipedia has the population in excess of 50,000 in the 1960s, and this untouched by human hands and likely previously unseen page has it as under 2000 now.

Go Andy! Everyone else, if you have it to spare, consider dropping something in his tip jar.