Kim Stanley Robinson Gets It

Well-known science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson says what I've been saying here, what many of the regulars say, stuff like:

First, we need to trust our science. We do this every time we fly in a jet or rush to the doctor in hope of relief from illness; but now there is some cherry-picking of science going on in the various kinds of resistance to the news about climate change, and this double standard needs to be called out. The so-called climate change skeptics are now simply in denial. All science is skeptical, and the scientific community has looked at this situation and found compelling evidence for anyone with an open mind.

and

We already have good starter technology for lithium-ion batteries in cars; clean, renewable energy generation; cleaner building methods; and so on. The technical solutions are being improved all the time in research labs.

The main problem is making these changes happen more quickly than they can in the false pricing system that we have created and enforced within our hierarchical power structure. There is conflict over how to pay for decarbonizing, which is deemed “too expensive” to execute quickly. There is both a defense of the destructive carbon burning we are engaged in and a resistance to the most obvious solutions among people who remain frightened of the idea of government-led economic programs. But now we simply must have such programs because the market is not capable of taking action.

Am I saying that capitalism is going to have to change or else we will have an environmental catastrophe? Yes, I am.

and

The main reason I believe capitalism is not up to the challenge is that it improperly and systemically undervalues the future. I’ll give two illustrations of this. First, our commodities and our carbon burning are almost universally underpriced, so we charge less for them than they cost. When this is done deliberately to kill off an economic competitor, it’s called predatory dumping; you could say that the victims of our predation are the generations to come, which are at a decided disadvantage in any competition with the present.

Second, the promise of capitalism was always that of class mobility—the idea that a working-class family could bootstrap their children into the middle class. With the right policies, over time, the whole world could do the same. There’s a problem with this, though. For everyone on Earth to live at Western levels of consumption, we would need two or three Earths. Looking at it this way, capitalism has become a kind of multigenerational Ponzi scheme, in which future generations are left holding the empty bag.

You could say we are that moment now. Half of the world’s people live on less than $2 a day, and yet the depletion of resources and environmental degradation mean they can never hope to rise to the level of affluent Westerners, who consume about 30 times as much in resources as they do. So this is now a false promise. The poorest three billion on Earth are being cheated if we pretend that the promise is still possible.

All so nicely said that perhaps I'd feature it anyway, though it's nothing especially new to my readers. What's interesting is where this appears, which is on a McKinsey web site. That's amazing. Even a huge corporate consultancy has the nerve to consider these ideas. Only the press and the politicians seem to miss the scope of the problem, the scale of the transition.

Everything needs to be on the table. Everything.

Sustainable Awesomeness

(Picture: guy in a pink gorilla suit selling some silly thing or other at SXSW;
guy on cellphone at left probably has a more consequential job)

Why am I at SXSWi?



"SXSWi?" regular readers will surely ask. If I tell them it's locally pronounced "Sowfba enneractive" the confusion may well mount.

"South by Southwest" or "SXSW" (locally pronounced "Sowfba" if you have a sufficently mumbly Texas accent, else "Southbye") is an annual conference of "indie media" that has turned into one of the main events on the Austin calendar and definitely the biggest thing at the convention center. Next weekend is the culmination, when the musical portion of the event occurs. It's essentially a meeting of people calling themselves "creatives". And the "interactive" part is about web professionals, most of them, from the looks of it, about 25, and the seasoned veterans pushing 35 by now.

Why, you ask, would I spend $495 on such an event? The answer is twofold. One is that my usual annual dose of optimism, PyCon, is off the table for this year. (Dang. Last I heard they were using my idea for the T-shirt too!)


Creative professionals, like Python programmers, are an intensely optimistic breed. All my time with doomsters and Fortran programmers tends to make me sour. That, and, the end of the world and stuff. These people come up with lines like "care and feeding of your epic shit" and "sustainable awesomeness".

This kind of epic shit tends to cheer me up. The amount of creative and fundamentally decent energy in the world is vast. Our only hope is to channel it, but it's good to remember that it's there. Admittedly, in this crowd there is a lot of posing to slice through. Fortunately, it's pretty shallow posing.

The main reason I ponied up for the ticket (aside from it being a local show I could sneak off to without a plane ride, and remember:



) is that I am trying to think about how to become a freelance writer/web content provider/client side web programmer. The logic is inescapable: newspapers are folding, the need for information is expanding, there has to be some way to monetize the demand.

I'm very tired of the science world where the way you prosper is by an endlessly tedious (and increasingly maladaptive) process of going for a sort of collective approval. Yes it's true, it is still a mostly functioning meritocracy, but my merits don't map onto it all that well.

I feel that I have something to offer not just as a blogger, but as someone who helps find and implement the business model for the new world, where there is less sharp of a distinction between producer and consumer of intellectual property. We should all be spending more and earning more online. Hey, we could even have "growth" if we did that.

Also, I just need to go to a webby meeting every couple of years lest I lose my edge as someone who understands what is actually going on. But I'm serious. I realize both how big an accomplishment my audience here is and how tiny it is compared to what I would need to make a living freelancing. (Consider: if I could get 100 people to pay a dollar a week to listen to me rant, what a great achievement, and what a feeble income stream!)

So once I had managed to wend my way through the hour-long registration process (almost as miserable an experience as an airport) and started flipping through the over-designed and almost illegible program, I was pleased to see that a session on the future of journalism had just started. I rushed to the session, only to find that the huge (300 people?) room was full and latecomers turned away. Yet this was the event I had come to see.

The speaker of the event was a fellow named Steven B Johnson and I noted he was signing books immediately after, so I decided to say hello and complain about my fate. He is the author of "The Invention of Air", a book about the discoverer of oxygen, a fervent supporter of the French Revolution, a tolerant stoic and a rationalist utterly opposed to religious fundamentalism who had a great influence on America's founders. His talk apparently included "MacWorld mag circa '87, old-growth forests, 92 election, Obama's race speech, hyperlocal, and more!" He founded a website called "outside.in" which scrapes the blogs for references to places and aggregates them by locale. All of these imaginative and intelligent achievements are things I can imagine doing. The thing he has done that I can't conceive of is getting 173,000 followers on Twitter. And yet, that is the scale needed to make writing worth doing as a business rather than as a hobby.

Anyway, Johnson (can I call him Steven on the basis of 37 seconds' conversation? hell, yes, that's the way to do it) , Steven I should say, told me he was releasing the talk on the web and I should follow his stream to find out exactly where. Sort of ironic that I paid admission to get that information. And here I am passing it onto you for free.

Update: Here is Steven Johnson's talk.

How the "Climate Debate" Works

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Note, to make matters clear, the horizontal axis above refers to an unconstrained emissions ("business as usual") scenario. The vertical axis is roughly proportional to the probability of finding that an expert's opinion is matched at that point on the horizontal axis.

Since the general public likes to be reasonable, they distribute themselves roughly into the middle of the band proposed by the press.

Joe Romm had this exactly right:

And the MSM remains, well, mainstream. They follow. They don’t lead.

They aren't being deliberately misleading, they are just doing their job as they understand it, representing the positions viewed by the public as reasonable. A sort of vicious circle of inertia results, so that by now there are major oil companies that are actually more in favor of regulation than the general public or the press!

See also "Journalistic Balance as Global Warming Bias" from FAIR (2004).

Update: Also, in response to an offhand comment on RealClimate about how "anyone who starts off about how the lizard overlords of earth have impregnated our women to take over the universe are considered mad", Barton Paul Levenson responds

I consider myself a moderate on the lizard overlord issue. They are, of course, impregnating our women. But this is not done in order to rule the universe. It is simply part of their culture to impregnate females of other intelligent species.

There has been obfuscation and denial on both sides of this issue. It is not only the defenders of the reality orthodoxy who have been reviled and suppressed. Indeed, there has been much censorship and denigration directed at those of us who are skeptical of reality. Truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle.

Update: Revkin turns around and makes a liar out of me. Just this once anyway. Way to go, Andy! Much better. Please cover the whole spectrum from now on.

Update Ides of March 2009: More Jay Rosen, this via the Opinionator on NYTimes:

What is the adjective you have for someone excessively in love with the bipartisan dream? What is the term for the guy who attempts to balance an imbalanced situation? What do you call it when there is regression toward a phony mean? Is there a snippy, snooty, dismissive, reductive adjective–comparable to shrill–for the one who exits from a really tough situation with a “he said, she said” account? Is there one for over-the-top insider-ism? You don’t criticize those people, do you? You don’t even see them as people worth criticizing.

It's the Food, Stupid

It's time we faced the facts:

• The world is overpopulated, near or beyond its long-term carrying capacity for modern humans
• Resources are being depleted and environmental supports weakened
• Energy usage is getting tangled in supplies of water and fair weather
• Economic systems designed for none of the above are misfiring for various reasons including but not limited to the above
  

We are going to have to think carefully and learn how to decide to make difficult decisions together.

I'm sure today's grim news from Gallup (hat tip to no less than Mark Morano, whose mail about the surprising result showed up in my inbox this morning) will be a very prominent climate story for a while, but I hope that a blog item provocatively titled Sea level rise a red herring? by James Hrynshin will not be lost in the shuffle. In today's article, James addresses the very large potential scope of the climate problem.

I've been dimly aware of his Island of Doubt, but I'm adding it to the blogroll forthwith. Discovering this site was one of the silver linings of the recent clouds on my horizon.

James gets into a bit of trouble with Stoat over what the sea level rise estimates are currently looking like, and perhaps he is a bitover the top in this regard. But that really isn't the point of the article at all. The point is that while sea level rise is the sort of thing we can wrap our heads around and have quantitative arguments about, if things go really badly, it likely won't be the worst of it. The really worst cases involve disruptions sufficient to interrupt the food supply.

Do I think these will occur? Actually, no. Or, really, that depends on how stupid we elect to be as well as how unlucky we are. Unfortunately, severe drouught and severe storms are both on the table. (Some places may literally get too hot for habitation, but I think those are marginal already.) As scientists, we should be working to reduce the scope of the impact tails, and as participants in the world we should be working to avoid testing whether we can get there.

The thing I liked most about this article, though, was the reference to "the still ridiculously sparse coverage afforded to matters of climate change". Yes, exactly. This feeds back onto today's above-the-fold question of what the populace thinks. Not only is the coverage ridiculously sparse, but grotesquely avoidant of considering the more severe risks.

On that note, see Revkin's latest, on the Gallup report. I find his concluding paragraph interesting and encouraging in a silver lining sort of way. (Pity about that cloud.) I can hope this paragraph backhandedly acknowledges that he has a position where what he says matters.

The Ballad of Miss Jenny

Does money or wealth correlate to happiness?

An article on the New York Times says yes, albeit weakly. Here is the data for the 50 states of the USA, comparing mean income to an index of well-being. Yes, a trend is detectable, but it's pretty weak, too.



An article by Nate Hagens on Oil Drum entitled How $30,000 can be more than $300,000 argues pretty strongly the opposite. The author claims to be much happier than wealthy people of his acquaintance, and than himself at a much wealthier phase. My own anecdotal evidence is similar. I was much happier as a lower middle class child than as an upper middle class child. My father's abrupt financial success was a terrible blow to my social connectedness and identity.

Hagens also presents this fascinating picture of the great treadmill:



That picture is certainly one that tells a story.

And what are we to make of this story?

The Austin Statesman ran a feature about Jenny Nazak, a woman of my acquaintance who lives very frugally and takes pride in it. Jenny is an interesting character, and her charming wisdom doesn't come through in the article.

It's especially interesting how so many people commenting on the story were so threatened by it. (She is fastidiously clean, by the way; the claims to the contrary are inventions. It's also interesting how certain people feel compelled to make up false evidence when they aren't comfortable with the truth.)

Do I propose we all live like Jenny? I don't know. I don;t think going that far is necessary, and I don't think it's the path for me, now. Ultimately most of us may have to move in that direction, though, and the fate is nowhere near as bad as it's made out. Jenny seems to me one of the calmest and happiest people I have ever encountered. I'll leave you with a couple of Jenny pictures from her Facebook page.






Maybe you would rather have different pleasures, but is a life like that really a fate worse than death? Really?

Inflections

Thomas Friedman has a nice article entitled "The Inflection". I don't know that I've seen anything comparably forthright about our long term predicament in the major press.

It's a bid odd in that the word "inflection" doesn't appear anywhere in the article. 

It happens that I had an article with essentially the same title a few months ago. It goes a bit further toward the implications of the idea of an inflection point in the growth curve. It probably was aimed at a narrower audience, but if you already know what "inflection" means you might find it interesting. 

Tim O'Reilly also said something of the sort last December.

The Dance of Qualification

The following is what I call Mamet's Principle:

"Law, politics and commerce are based on lies. That is, the premises giving rise to opposition are real, but the debate occurs not between these premises but between their proxy, substitute positions. The two parties to a legal dispute (as the opponents in an election) each select an essentially absurd position. "I did not kill my wife and Ron Goldman," "A rising tide raises all boats," "Tobacco does not cause cancer." Should one be able to support this position, such that it prevails over the nonsense of his opponent, he is awarded the decision. ...

"In these fibbing competitions, the party actually wronged, the party with an actual practicable program, or possessing an actually beneficial product, is at a severe disadvantage; he is stuck with a position he cannot abandon, and, thus, cannot engage his talents for elaboration, distraction, drama and subterfuge."

- David Mamet in "Bambi vs Godzilla: Why art loses in Hollywood", Harper's, June 2005.

(I'm sure this is not what David Mamet wants to remembered for, but tough. Go see his movies, he is great, but don't forget this.)

Those of us honest enough to be saddled with the truth as we understand it have to put in qualifiers, ifs, maybes, probablies, indicatives, consistent withs. If you don't put in enough qualifiers, people arguing the dishonest opposition will call you on exagerration and overstatement, which will quickly be rendered in the extremist discussion groups as "lying". If you are unlucky the mainstream press will pick it up, and contrive a false balance piece where your slight flaw in emphasis is presented as the equivalent of your opposition's complete fiction.

The problem is that if you put in too many qualifiers, readers will perceive your prose as turgid and dull. If you genuinely suspect that you are facing disaster, but you phrase your concern in a manner that is considered polite academic prose, you will not have impact on people's behavior commensurate with the risks. "Excuse me, but I do rather have some suspicions about the integrity of the dike. It might behoove us to effectuate some repairs." The problem with this sort of understatement is that it misinforms every bit as much as the overstatement does.

Consequential understatement, as much as consequential overstatement, is a form of dishonesty.

The representative of truth is always involved in a dance. Every single statement, every utterance of any kind, can be second guessed and third guessed ad infinitum; every degree of qualification of every statement is a moral decision as well as a substantive decision. The representative of untruth has no such burden. As proof here's a followup interview with George Will (h/t Eli):

•Q: The big issue was about how much global sea ice there is now compared to 1979.

•A: And that of course was a tiny portion of the column. The critics completely ignored -- as again, understandably -- the evidence I gave of the global cooling hysteria of 30 years ago. [mt: Hmm...]

•Q: They like to pretend that there really wasn't any hysteria back then.

•A: Since I quoted the hysteria, it's a little hard for them to deny it. [mt: Hmm...]

...

•Q: Will you dare to do any more on global warming?

•A: Well of course! It doesn't take daring. Seriously, I don't understand what there is to worry about. In fact, the global warming "caucus," if you will, seems to me singularly toothless. They can't even get the globe to cooperate. It stubbornly refuses to warm at the moment. [mt: Hmmm...]

•Q: Is there any big lesson that you've learned from this encounter with the global-warming people?

•A: This is not a life-changing experience. This is just another encounter with another interest group doing interest-group politics. This strikes me as a very minor event.

•Q: In your career or ... ?

•A: In the week! In the week! This is just not a big deal. I've written 5,000 columns and a lot of them have caused ruckuses bigger than this.

•Q: But Andrew Revkin and The New York Times? They don't usually pick on you, do they?
[mt: "pick on you???" Aaaarrrghhhh!!!! Aaaaaarrrrrrghhhh!!!! ]

•A: No, but they no doubt have their reasons.

•Q: OK, let's switch to baseball.

I am not making this up.

Two Interesting Quotes

Too many interesting quotes today.

Competing for the banner with Bora's comment,

"...the publication of research papers is the true test of a modern scientist." No, no, no!!!!! This is wrong in so many ways! So Ivory Tower thinking that leads to all other science careers being dubbed "alternative careers" and looked down upon - a nasty, vile way of thinking.

- Bora Zivkovic (commenting at Chris & Sheril's)

which is very helpful to my "reinventing mt" theme, I have this.

Heard (on the world's best music radio station bar none, Austin's KUT, and now that you know you can stream it) from musician James McMurtry this morning, something like:

I don't believe in reporting anymore. All I can think about when I hear a reporter is "who bought this and who are they trying to sell it to?"

That quote is also relevant to "reinventing mt".

There's a way out, though. The cure is this:

Reporters must own their content.

OK, it's not the whole cure, but it's the crucial first step. Comic book artists figured this out years ago. Suddenly, the economics is comparable. And this time, guys, please remember where you read it first.

Morano is Out; I'm Still Hanging In

According to Wonk Room, Morano is out. (I don't think I had anything to do with that, but I sure have to wonder what happened.) He will likely continue his career of erm, what it is he did to me (and, apparently, to John Kerry, so I'm in good if unfortunate company) but at least he won't be doing so from a Senate office on public funds.

Also my blog traffic is up.

And I've gotten all kinds of support from all sorts of people.

So it was a very emotionally stressful week but not all bad. Perhaps people are starting to think of the implications of the fact that "mortalities on the order of a billion are not excluded" who hadn't considered the implications of such a possibility before. That would be a worthwhile contribution.

That said, honestly, if I had it to do over I wouldn't.

I would especially like to express my sincere and profound regrets to the University of Texas community for being instrumental in their wholly undeserved public embarrassment. I would have gone to great lengths to have it some other way had I been given the choice.

As I mentioned recently in comments, these events do have me wondering if my biggest prospective contribution to the world is in a conventional scientist role. I am interesting in corresponding with anyone who has ideas for how to structure a career as a writer/content provider, mostly on the internet. I would need to be able to support myself modestly.

I've mentioned this prospect a few times in the past, but I'm inclined to get serious about it.

Why "In It for the Gold"

For the record:

Probably the weakest reason for mistrusting us climate scientists is the idea that we are in it for the money. When I was a starving grad student, I told a dignified lady from rural Mississippi that I was doing climate modeling. She was briefly taken aback. After a beat, she gathered her wits and politely replied "Oh, that must be... lucrative".