The Cozycene

Rockstrom's talk emphasizes what an unusual climatological period civilization emerged within. Robert Nagle has spotted an excellent graphic, but doesn't identify a source. Google finds it in a dozen PowerPoints, (search for the title phrase in quotes) many referring to an old pet peeve of mine, "anthropomorphic climate change", which would be mostly climate change caused by Disney and Warner Brothers.

Anyway. This version lacks the misfired buzz word, and otherwise, it makes the point nicely. Note the varying time scale; the anticipated warming is very rapid indeed, and may not abate in 2100 at that.

I'd much appreciate knowing the original source of the diagram.

Trick or Treatment

Excellent piece on Wired: Robert Capps interviews Simon Singh. Singh wrote an article in the Guardian about unfounded claims for chiropractic treatment. The British Chiropractic Association sued Singh, hoping to use Britain’s draconian libel laws to force him to withdraw his statements and issue an apology. Excerpt:

Simon Singh: What shocks me is people who have no expertise championing a view that runs counter to the mainstream scientific consensus. For example, we have a consensus amongst the best medical researchers in the world—the leading authorities and the World Health Organization—that vaccines are a good thing, and that MMR, the triple vaccine, is a really good thing. And yet there are people who are quite willing to challenge that consensus—film stars, celebrities, columnists—all of whom rely solely on the tiny little bit of science that seems to back up their view.

Wired: Yet the celebrities sometimes seem to be winning.

Simon Singh: Part of the problem is that if anybody has a gut reaction about an issue, they can go online and have it backed up. That said, they can also find support for their ideas in the mainstream media—because when the mainstream media gives a so-called balanced view, it’s often misleading. The media thinks that because one side says climate change is real and dangerous, the other view is that it’s not real and not dangerous. That doesn’t reflect the fact that something like 98 percent of climate scientists agree that global warming is real and dangerous. And this happens with everything from genetically modified foods to evolution. But, at the end of the day, all that this misinformation does is slow progress—it doesn’t stop it. Antiscientific and pseudoscientific attitudes will get corrected; it’s just a question of how painful that process is going to be.

Wired: Should scientists do more to get real science out there?

Simon Singh: Scientists aren’t necessarily good communicators, because they aren’t trained to be good communicators. A researcher could be doing really important work on global warming, and then somebody writes a column in a national newspaper that completely undermines what they’re saying. But the scientist doesn’t think the column is important—it’s just some nincompoop writing a column—so they don’t take that writer to task in the way they should. It’s a case of saying, “How do we make a difference?” We certainly don’t make a difference by just moaning over coffee the next day.

h/t Scott Mandia

Emergency Procedures

Rockstrom on Planetary Boundaries

Johan Rockstrom:

We live on a human-dominated planet, putting unprecedented pressure on the systems on Earth. This is bad news, but perhaps surprising to you, it's also part of the good news. We're the first generation, thanks to science, to be informed that we may be undermining the stability and the ability of planet Earth to support human development as we know it. It's also good news, because the planetary risks we're facing are so large, that business as usual is not an option. In fact, we're in a phase where transformative change is necessary, which opens the window for innovation, for new ideas and new paradigms. This is a scientific journey on the challenges facing humanity in the global phase of sustainability.

On this journey, I'd like to bring, apart from yourselves, a good friend, a stakeholder, who's always absent when we deal with the negotiations on environmental issues, a stakeholder who refuses to compromise -- planet Earth. So I thought I'd bring her with me today, on stage, to have her as a witness of a remarkable journey, which humbly reminds us of the period of grace we've had over the past 10,000 years. This is the living conditions on the planet over the last 100,000 years. It's a very important period. It's roughly half the period when we've been fully modern humans on the planet. We've had the same, roughly, abilities that developed civilizations as we know it. This is the environmental conditions on the planet.

Here, used as a proxy, temperature variability. It was a jumpy ride. 80,000 years back in a crisis, we leave Africa, we colonize Australia in another crisis, 60,000 years back, we leave Asia for Europe in another crisis, 40,000 years back, and then we enter the remarkably stable Holocene phase, the only period in the whole history of the planet, that we know of, that can support human development. A thousand years into this period, we abandon our hunting and gathering patterns. We go from a couple of million people to the seven billion people we are today, The Mesopotamian culture: we invent agriculture, we domesticate animals and plants. You have the Roman, the Greek and the story as you know it. The only place, as we know it, that can support humanity.

The trouble is we're putting a quadruple sqeeze on this poor planet, a quadruple sqeeze, which, as its first squeeze, has population growth, of course. Now, this is not only about numbers. This is not only about the fact that we're seven billion people committed to nine billion people, it's an equity issue as well. The majority of the environmental impacts on the planet have been caused by the rich minority, the 20 percent that jumped onto the industrial bandwagon in the mid-18th century. The majority of the planet, aspiring for development, having the right for development, are in large aspiring for an unsustainable lifestyle, a momentous pressure.

The second pressure on the planet is, of course, the climate agenda, the big issue, where the policy interpretation of science is that it would be enough to stabilize greenhouse gases at 450 ppm to avoid average temperatures exceeding two degrees, to avoid the risk that we may be destabilizing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, holding 6 meters -- level rising, the risk of destabilizing the Greenland Ice Sheet, holding another seven meters -- sea level rising. Now, you would have wished the climate pressure to hit a strong planet, a resilient planet, but unfortunately, the third pressure is the ecosystem decline. Never have we seen, in the past 50 years, such a sharp decline of ecosystem functions and services on the planet, one of them being the ability to regulate climate on the long term, in our forests, land and biodiversity.

The forth pressure is surprise, the notion and the evidence that we need to abandon our old paradigm, that ecosystems behave linearly, predictably, controllably in our, so to say, linear systems, and that, in fact, surprise is universal, as systems tip over very rapidly, abruptly and often irreversibly. This, dear friends, poses a human pressure on the planet of momentous scale. We may, in fact, have entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene, where humans are the predominant driver of change at a planetary level.

Now, as a scientist, what's the evidence for this? Well, the evidence is, unfortunately, ample. It's not only carbon dioxide that has this hockey stick pattern of accelerated change. You can take virtually any parameter that matters for human well-being -- nitrous oxide, methane, deforestation, overfishing land degredation, loss of species -- they all show the same pattern over the past 200 years. Simultaneously, they branch off in the mid-50s, 10 years after the second world war, showing very clearly that the great acceleration of the human enterprise starts in the mid-50s. You see, for the first time, an imprint on the global level. And I can tell you, you enter the disciplinary research in each of these, you find something remarkably important, the conclusion that we may have come to the point where we have to bend the curves, that we may have entered the most challenging and exciting decade in the history humanity on the planet, the decade when we have to bend the curves.

Now, as if this was not enough -- to just bend the curves and understanding the accelerated pressure on the planet -- we also have to recognize the fact that systems do have multiple stable states, separated by thresholds -- illustrated here by this ball and cup diagram, where the depth of the cup is the resilience of the system. Now, the system may gradually -- under pressure of climate change, erosion, biodiversity loss -- lose the depth of the cup, the resilience, but appear to be healthy and appear to suddenly, under a threshold, be tipping over. [...] Changing state and literally ending up in an undesired situation, where new biophysical logic takes over, new species take over, and the system gets locked.

Do we have evidence of this? Yes, coral reef systems. Biodiverse, low-nutrient, hard coral systems under multiple pressures of overfishing, unsustainable tourism, climate change. A trigger and the system tips over, loses its resilience, soft corals take over, and we get undesired systems that cannot support economic and social development. The Arctic, a beautiful system, a regulating biome at the planetary level, taking the knock after knock on climate change, appearing to be in a good state. No scientist could predict that in 2007, suddenly, what could be crossing a threshold. The system suddenly, very surprisingly, loses 30 to 40 percent of its summer ice cover. And the drama is, of course, that, when the system does this, the logic may change. It may get locked in an undesired state, because it changes color, absorbs more energy, and the system may get stuck. In my mind, the largest red flag warning for humanity that we are in a precarious situation. As a sideline, you know that the only red flag that popped up here was a submarine from an unnamed country that planted a red flag at the bottom of the Arctic to be able to control the oil resources.

Now, if we have evidence, which we now have, that wetlands, forests, [...] the rainforests, behave in this nonlinear way. 30 or so scientists around the world gathered and asked a question for the first time, "Do we have to put the planet into the the pot?" So we have to ask ourselves: are we threatening this extraordinarily stable Holocene state? Are we in fact putting ourselves in a situation where we're coming too close to thresholds that could lead to deleterious and very undesired, if now catastrophic, change for human development? You know, you don't want to stand there. In fact, you're not even allowed to stand where this gentleman is standing, at the foaming, slippery waters at the threshold. In fact, there's a fence quite upstream of this threshold, beyond which you are in a danger zone. And this is the new paradigm, which we gathered two, three years back, recognizing that our old paradigm of just analyzing and pushing and predicting parameters into the future, aiming at minimalizing environmental impacts, is of the past.

Now we to ask ourselves: which are the large environmental processes that we have to be stewards of to keep ourselves safe in the Holocene? And could we even, thanks to major advancements in Earth systems science, identify the thresholds, the points where we may expect nonlinear change? And could we even define a planetary boundary, a fence, within which we then have a safe operating space for humanity? This work, which was published in "Nature," late 2009, after a number of years of analysis, led to the final proposition, that we can only find nine planetary boundaries with which, under active stewardship, would allow ourselves to have a safe operating space. These include, of course, climate. It may surprise you that it's not only climate. But it shows that we are interconnected, among many systems on the planet, with the three big systems, climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion and ocean acidification being the three big systems, where the scientific evidence of large-scale thresholds in the paleo-record of the history of the planet.

But we also include, what we call, the slow variables, the systems that, under the hood, regulate and buffer the capacity of the resilience of the planet -- the interference of the big nitrogen and phosphorus cycles on the planet, land use change, rate of biodiversity loss, freshwater use, functions which regulate biomass on the planet, carbon sequestration, diversity. And then we have two parameters which we were not able to quantify -- air pollution, including warming gases and air-polluting sulfates and nitrates, but also chemical pollution. Together, these form an integrated whole for guiding human development in the Anthropocene, understanding that the planet is a complex self-regulating system. In fact, most evidence indicates that these nine may behave as three Musketeers -- "One for all. All for one." You degrade forests, you go beyond the boundary on land, you undermine the ability of the climate system to stay stable. The drama here is, in fact, that it may show that the climate challenge is the easy one, if you consider the whole challenge of sustainable development.

Now this is the Big Bang equivalent then of human development within the safe operating space of the planetary boundaries. What you see here in black line is the safe operating space, the quantified boundaries, as suggested by this analysis. The yellow dot in the middle here is our starting point, the pre-industrial point, where we're very safely in the safe operating space. In the 50s, we start branching out. In the 60s already, through the green revolution and the Haber-Bosch process of fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere -- you know, human's today take out more nitrogen from the atmosphere than the whole biosphere does naturally as a whole. We don't transgress the climate boundary until the early '90s, actually, right after Rio. And today, we are in a situation where we estimate that we've transgressed three boundaries, the rate of biodiversity loss, which is the sixth extinction period in the history of humanity -- one of them being the extinctions of the dinosaurs -- nitrogen and climate change. But we still have some degrees of freedom on the others, but we are approaching fast on land, water, phosphorus and oceans. But this gives a new paradigm to guide humanity, to put the light on our, so far, overpowered industrial vehicle, which operates as if we're only on a dark, straight highway.

Now the question then is: how gloomy is this? Is then sustainable development utopia? Well, there's no science to suggest. In fact there is ample science to indicate that we can do this transformative change, that we have the ability to now move into a new innovative, a transformative gear, across scales. The drama is, of course, is that 200 countries on this planet have to simultaneously start moving in the same direction. But it changes fundamentally our governance and management paradigm, from the current linear, command and control thinking, looking at efficiencies and optimization towards a much more flexible, a much more adaptive approach, where we recognize that redundancy, both in social and environmental systems, is key to be able to deal with a turbulent era of global change. We have to invest in persistence, in the ability of social systems and ecological systems to withstand shocks and still remain in that desired cup. We have to invest in transformations capability, moving from crisis into innovation, and the ability to rise after a crisis, and, of course, to adapt to unavoidable change. This is a new paradigm. We're not doing that at any scale on governance.

But is it happening anywhere? Do we have any examples of success on this mindshift being applied at the local level? Well, yes, in fact we do, and the list can start becoming longer and longer. There's good news here, for example, from Latin America, where plow-based farming systems of the '50s and '60s led farming basically to a dead-end, with lower and lower yields, degrading the organic matter and fundamental problems at the livelihood levels in Paraguay, Uruguay, and a number of countries, Brazil, leading to innovation and entrepreneurship among farmers in partnership with scientists into an agricultural revolution of zero tillage systems combined with mulch farming with locally adapted technologies, which today, for example, in some countries, have led to a tremendous increase in area under mulch, zero till farming, which, not only produces more food, but also sequesters carbon.

The Australian Great Barrier Reef is another success story. Under the realization from tourist operators, fishermen, the Australian Great Barrier Reef Authority and scientists that the Great Barrier Reef is doomed under the current governance regime. Global change, [...], overfishing and unsustainable tourism, all together placing this system in the realization of crisis. But the window of opportunity was innovation and new mindset, which today has led to a completely new governance strategy to build resilience, acknowledge redundancy and invest in the whole system as an integrated whole, and then allow for much more redundancy in the system.

Sweden, the country I come from, has other examples, where wetlands in southern Sweden were seen as -- as in many countries -- as flood-prone polluted nuisance in the peri-urban regions. But again, a crisis, new partnerships, actors locally, transforming these into a key component of sustainable urban planning. So crisis leading into opportunities.

Now, what about the future? Well, the future, of course, has one massive challenge, which is feeding a world of nine billion people. We need nothing less than a new green revolution, and the planet boundaries shows that agriculture has to go from a source of greenhouse gases to a sink. It has to basically do this on current land. We cannot expand anymore, because it erodes the planetary boundaries. We cannot continue consuming water as we do today, with 25 percent of world rivers not even reaching the ocean. And we need a transformation. Well, interestingly, and based on my work and others in Africa, for example, we've shown that even the most vulnerable small-scale rainfall farming systems, with innovations and supplementary irrigation to bridge dry spells and droughts, sustainable sanitation systems to close the loop on nutrients from toilets back to farmers' fields, and innovations in tillage systems, we can triple, quadruple, yield levels on current land.

Elinor Ostrom, the latest Nobel laureate of economics, clearly shows empirically across the world that we can govern the commons if we invest in trust, local, action-based partnerships and cross-scale institutional innovations, where local actors, together, can deal with the global commons at a large scale. But even on the hard policy area we have innovations. We know that we have to move from our fossil dependence very quickly into a low-carbon economy in record time. And what shall we do? Everybody talks about carbon taxes -- it wont work -- emission schemes, but for example, one policy measure, feed-in tariffs on the energy system, which is already applied, from China doing it on offshore wind systems, all the way to the U.S., where you give the guaranteed price for investment in renewable energy, but you can subsidize electricity to poor people. You get people out of poverty. You solve the climate issue with regards to the energy sector, while at the same time, stimulating innovation -- examples of things that can be out scaled quickly at the planetary level.

So there is, no doubt, opportunity here, and we can list many, many examples of transformative opportunities around the planet. The key though in all of these, the red thread, is the shift in mindset, moving away from a situation where we are simply are pushing ourselves into a dark future, where [...] we say, "What is the playing field on the planet? What are the planetary boundaries within which we can safely operate?" and then backtrack innovations within that. But of course, the drama is, it clearly shows that incremental change is not an option.

So, there is scientific evidence. They sort of say the harsh news, that we are facing the largest transformative development since the industrialization. In fact, what we have to do over the next 40 years is much more dramatic and more exciting than what we did when we moved into the situation we're in today. Now, science indicates that, yes, we can achieve a prosperous future within the safe operating space, if we move simultaneously, collaborating on a global level, from local to global scale, in transformative options, which build resilience on a finite planet.

Thank you.

(c) (cc) (by-nc-nd-3.0) TED Conferences LLC

Demographic Transition: Cause and Effect

The egregious Dellingpole suggests that "as GDP per capita increases, so people decide to have fewer children and that therefore the solution to Africa’s problems is for everyone to be made richer, faster through the institution of property rights, free trade and incentives for local people to benefit from the safari industry and keep those reserves in the pristine state".

A few months ago James A pointed me to this remarkable graph, which I had since lost track of. It isn't actually linked at Wikipedia; it's, for some reason, an orphan graphic. All the more reason to feature it here, as it's a stunning infographic, despite the plain color scheme and the lack of little Bob the Builder icons crawling all over it and gratuitous lines running every which way.

If this is real, it should be widely known. No whole-system analysis of the future can ignore the astonishingly strong correlation between fertility and income.

But that doesn't tell us what to make of it. It is commonly claimed that rich countries stop making babies. But it makes at least as much sense to consider that countries that stop making babies become rich. I don't want to get too deeply into the fraught ethnic tensions of the Southwest, but I will say that the latter theory is certainly the folk wisdom among white southwesterners when considering Mexican and hispano-American culture. Certainly the individual who has children before attaining marketable skills will have a harder time developing them later. That stands to reason.

Now, as with temperature and CO2 on the interglacial time scale, the causation could easily run both ways. Indeed, when the correlation is so tight, we should suspect a positive feedback. But which comes first? Which is the trigger? Which causality direction dominates? Could it be that a decrease in fertility sometimes or often precedes the increase in the wealth?

Compare, for example, the recent history of China vs. that of India.

I am not sure what the implications of this alternative are. I'd like to know if it has been considered anywhere.

Fifteen Years Ago

When I first started thinking and writing about anthropogenic climate change in the early nineties, I would have said things not dissimilar from what Tom Fuller said today at Watts':

The IPCC’s AR4, published in 2007, painted a future with global warming as a serious, multinational problem that we should face together. You may agree or disagree with their findings–I agree with most of it, not all.

But nowhere does the work of thousands of scientists in peer-reviewed literature say that we are doomed, that civilization is at risk, that there is no future for us.

...

Sea levels are not going to rise by 20 feet. Or 10. Or five. There is not going to be a climatic tipping point that pushes our planet into a spiral of ever-increasing temperatures. Global warming is not going to cause the extinction of half the species on this planet, or even 1%.

And it is long past time that respected members of the scientific community publicly acknowledge those facts and helped bring this debate back within the realm of reality.

I would have thought such a claim was reasonable then. After all, the problems are and were well within our technical capacity to solve, and surely now that the problems were demonstrated, with substantially accurate predictions and few misses, one might presume people would take vigorous action to avoid consequences of the type Fuller describes as "not going to" occur.

But fifteen years later, the matter looks very different. While the runaway greenhouse spiral still doesn't appear to be in the cards, sea level looks much more delicate than it did. Anthropogenic climate change is certainly already contributing to an extinction crisis. Severe events are increasing the extent of crop failures and human dislocation. How bad this gets depends primarily on whether and when we take the problem seriously. If we fail to take the problem seriously, there is no real ceiling on how bad it will get.

Now, I would have said that 15 years ago as well. Perhaps Fuller doesn't understand that there is no ceiling, no worst case. I would have thought people would not be as foolish as they have been of late. Maybe in fifteen more years Fuller will come around.

Oddly, in a way I hope he doesn't. I hope things really are not as bad as they look, but failing that, I hope we get a grip soon enough that the evidence remains, to the less expert, somewhat equivocal.

The best way to prove that a cataclysm is possible is to have one.
I'd rather not risk that sort of vindication.

Of course it's true that "nowhere does the work of thousands of scientists in peer-reviewed literature say that we are doomed, that civilization is at risk, that there is no future for us" and that nothing like that is explicitly in the IPCC. What journal would publish such a claim?

But when you look at the world with a 5 C different mean surface temperature in the past record, you see changes far more dramatic than those that have brought down civilizations and biomes in the past. Indeed, the shift is far greater than historical humanity has ever seen, except perhaps at a few exceptional isolated locations, which generally did not fare well in the process.

Oh, yeah, and five feet of sea level in this century looks like a not unreasonable bet; twenty feet in 400 years is something I'd give odds on if there were some way to collect. Again, I'd rather lose, though.

In any case, the important thing to understand is this:

We are not predicting what will happen.
We are deciding what will happen.

What is or isn't in the cards depends on what we decide to do or not to do, and on nothing else. It's not a scientific question, so IPCC can't take a position on it. The fact that they don't doesn't mean we are off the hook. It's a decision.

Do you want to risk the entire future rather than taking a small hit on your present comfort?

Apparently most people do. Or else they don't understand the situation very well.

Broken Telephone

As children, we played a game we called "broken telephone" in which one person would come up with a "secret" which we'd then take turns whispering in one another's ears. The last child would repeat the "secret" and then the secret's originator would announce the original. Everyone would laugh.

In comments, Kooiti Masuda provides the following example of a sequence of headlines describing the same research:

The original paper: M. Ogi, K. Yamazaki, and J.M. Wallace, 2010: Influence of winter and summer surface wind anomalies on summer Arctic sea ice extent. Geophysical Research Letters, 37, L07701. (No. 13 as listed here).

Nature (research highlights, 18 March 2010): Geoscience: Wind-blown ice. (Nature's short headlines are like riddles, and I do not want to comment on this. I just include it for its content which the journalists probably read.)

Guardian (David Adam, 22 March): Wind contributing to Arctic sea ice loss, study finds. (Fair headline.)

Telegraph (Geoffrey Lean): Good news as research suggests global warming does not directly cause all the melting of Arctic ice. (This is a commentary in a blog, and the headline shows what the commentator thought rather than what the paper said.)

Daily Mail: Arctic winds and not global warming 'responsible for much of record loss of sea ice'. (Misleading.)

Fox News: Winds, Not Warming, Leading to Arctic Ice Melt. (False.)

See also this famous PhD comic whence the image snip.

Under the Top

It's pathetic. Economic activity has slowed down a little, but we're still an insanely wealthy civilzation by historical standards.

We're so addicted to our shallow toys that the slightest disruption in the ever-increasing plethora of production causes us to fall into a state of woe, paranoia, and disruption. Things continue to get more disgustingly out of control every day. Our prospects of solving ever more complex and intricate problems with ever more clumsy and unreliable tools of study, discourse, and decision making look grimmer every day, even though solutions are technically within reach.

For evidence of the decline, look at the amount of over-the-top rhetoric we see. Here's Patrick Appel on Daily Dish:

After wading though political opinion online for a couple years, I've come to the conclusion that you can't ever really "win" an argument online. No matter how sound your logic or forceful your writing someone, somewhere will continue to disagree. But you can arm your fellow travelers and opponents with better or worse argumentative ammunition. When Mark Levin calls all progressives "statists" or Kos labels conservatives "Taliban" they not merely pummeling straw-men, they are doing their readers and listeners a disservice. If someone wants to actually engage with the opposing side and try to change minds, blunt, hyperbolic labels are the among the flimsiest of rhetorical weapon.

And our corner of the world of discourse has similar blow-ups. I have one in mind but I guess I'm better off not even mentioning it. Tremendous amounts of ill-will are habitually revealed in these blow-ups, as if they had heretofore been hidden away.

Appel makes an excellent case for avoiding such language as much as possible.

I understand the financial incentives that cause authors and publishing houses to choose these kinds of titles. But I don't know why anyone thinking strategically about political impact cheers them. It's a marketing strategy that basically guarantees a book will never be read by anyone who disagrees with it. The emotional satisfaction some people get from extreme vitriol is an astonishingly powerful driver of counterproductive political behavior.

In short, going over the top is easy and fun, and it energises the troops, and it's generally a losing proposition. Remember that your most important reader is the most reasonable person who disagrees with you.

In particular, if something shouldn't be dignified with a response, it should also not be dignified with a "that shouldn't be dignified with a response" until absolutely necessary. We need to step back from over-the-top rhetoric, not because our most fanatical opponents deserve it, but because the casual reader does.

But what does all this lunacy under the modest provocations we have seen so far have to say for our resilience once real problems come our way? I'm afraid that somehow we have gotten ourselves into a cultural state that is ill-prepared for the real problems that are lurking in the wings and the scale of the various things that will happen in response to them.

More for the Misleading Headline FIle

OK, here's a random article in a random magazine, journal, newspaper, blog, what have you. What do you read first? The title. The title helps you decide whether to look at the abstract or the leading paragraph, then perhaps glance at the conclusion, then perhaps skim the article, then maybe to blog about it or refer to it, and finally maybe even in some rare eventuality actually read it carefully and attentively.

So the title is the most important thing. In science, and in blogging, we control the title of our work. In writing for conventional press, we don't. Irene and I didn't even choose the title for our first book, whose title is in fact misleading! (It's flawed for a number of reasons but not without value, and is now available in a Kindle edition! Recommended for academics, especially tenure track.) (Maybe I shouldn't flog the Kindle edition; I probably get not a red cent from it. Buy the paperback new!)

But most editors cannot realistically read every article they edit carefully and attentively. So they title them wrong. This is a common problem:

• "No Rise of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Fraction, New Research Finds"


• "Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995"

• India Withdraws from IPCC
  
  
• Climate scientists who play fast and loose with the facts are imperiling not just their profession but the planet.
  

• Climate-Change Debate Is Heating Up in Deep Freeze.


• Earth's climate future may be etched in Greenland bedrock
  

So now Steve Easterbrook has run into this buzz-saw, with a not-too-bad article on the Guardian accompanied by a totally off-base headline: “Climate scientists should not write their own software, says researcher". Steve naturally is inclined to criticize the author, Danny Bradbury.

Different institutions have different madnesses. It is almost impossible for an academic to even suspect, never mind believe, that the title of an article is written by somebody who not only didn't write the article but in practice hasn't really read it. That's normal!

We needn't attribute sinister motivations. Headlines reveal the mindset of the editor, but are not intended to mislead. They are revealing the extent to which the editor is already informed or confused. That is, they reveal the extent to which the publication is competent on the issue at hand, or the extent to which the obfuscators have already succeeded in their obfuscations there. The intent, though, is to rush product out the door with limited resources, not deliberately to confuse.

We needn't cure all the ills that ail journalism to fix this. The cure is mind-bogglingly straightforward.

Let the person who wrote the piece write the headline!

Duh.

Update: Anna in comments provides this amazing link on headline writing.

Both their Houses

I'm definitely a David Brin fan now. (not that Sergey is a slouch; are they related?)

This article violates the one idea per posting constraint pretty badly, but it has a lot of interesting things to say, most notably this:

humanity is now experiencing unprecedentedly-low levels of violence, per capita, compared to any time in (or before) history. Likewise increasing levels of education, freedom and (yes) ethical behavior. The foolish leftist notion - that we can only continue this progress by chiding people, while frantically ignoring the fact that progress has been made - is certainly insane. It deserves rigorous criticism.

Nevertheless, the right is far worse. Take the way their fizzy “optimism” arm-wavings start off by reciting truths - (e.g that ideas do breed and evolve among free/educated people... and civilization has thereby moved forward). Only then, insidiously, they razzle that basic truth into rationalizations for indolence!

Problems will solve themselves, as if by magic! Ignoring Adam Smith’s cautiously pro-government and anti-oligarchy reasoning, they mis-apply his teachings in order to praise the kind of laissez-faire faith in an “invisible hand” that plays right into the hands of entrenched and conniving oligarchy.

The crux: this fizzing, percolation of ideas and solutions does happen - it can lead to all the great synergies that the optimists proclaim... even the miracle of the runaway positive sum game... the suppsed justification of capitalism. On the other hand this semi-random idea-churn works best when it then feeds into a process called the modern-western, mixed society, wherein smart men and women in business, the arts and government compare notes, deliberate, negotiate, plan and bring about solutions to problems!

Funny he leaves out academia altogether, but you get the idea.

h/t Moe