Three Shades of Deniers

Posted on September 3, 2012 by climatechangefork

I wish I had a better name for deniers of climate change.

I don’t like the association with deniers of the Holocaust for reasons that I have mentioned before (May 14 blog) where I have tried to make the case that the analogy exists with the pre-1933 period but not with the post-1945 period. I also don’t like the designation of “skeptics” (August 20 blog) for the reason that the refutability requirement of the Popperian description of the scientific method makes most of us skeptics (that’s probably the reason that most climate change deniers prefer this designation).

I will try to develop something different here and hopefully can do so without unnecessarily offending anybody.

From my own limited experience, I can divide climate change deniers to three different groups that mostly do not communicate with each other:

(1) Deniers of the science. This group basically states that the science is wrong, so there is no need to do anything to counter the impact that scientists predict. Their general tactic is to disagree with some specific piece of the data and then use that as “proof” that the science is wrong in its entirety.

(2) The fatalists. This group fully agrees with both the science and its predicted impact, but believes that since the task of preventing it is so enormous as to be practically undoable, they might as well enjoy life for as long as it lasts. Unfortunately, many in this group are good scientists.

(3) The NIMBY group. I discussed the NIMBY and BANANA phenomena in my last blog. Again, this group believes the science and the predicted impact, but does not want to take responsibility for the steps necessary to mitigate the problem, preferring to pass the task off onto others.

The common denominator in all three groups is the unwillingness to do anything to reduce the likelihood of the predicted impact. In that regard, I suggest we refer to the group using the term DNN, which stands for “Do Nothing Now” (my invention). This is, of course, not to be confused with the “Know Nothing” party of 1850, which doesn’t enjoy a stellar reputation. My only hope is that the term DNNers will not be associated with anything else, so I can use the term until something better comes along.

Among all the DNNers that I am familiar with, the emphasis is not on the science but on the action necessary in order to mitigate the consequences, and the time frame in which that must happen (ie, never, it’s already too late, or now, as long as someone else does it).

One of my favorite exam questions for my courses on climate change reads as follows:

The argument has been made (Dissenting voice in http://climatedebatedaily.com/) that since the projections say that future generations will be much richer than ours, they should pay for the future impacts of climate change. Argue for and against this position.

I don’t ask students to demonstrate any preference, requiring only that they present detailed argument for and against both positions; however, most students show preference against postponing action. The main reason that students provide is that most of the actions possible are time dependent, and the feasibility of remediation quickly decreases the longer we wait.

One of the most famous DNNers, who managed to make a career out of skepticism, is Bjorn Lomborg, author of the The Skeptical Environmentalist. When the book, Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Environmental Issues poses the question “Is Global Warming a Catastrophe That Warrants Immediate Action?” Lomborg’s answer is a definite no. He agrees that climate change is a problem, but adds that he does not see it as the end of the world. He argues that the impact, such as sea level rise, will not be as severe as some have projected and that society can deal with that impact as it comes (I will discuss adaptation in future blogs). He further argues that:

Neither a tax nor Kyoto nor draconian proposals for future cuts move us closer toward finding better options for the future… Instead, we need to find a way that allows us to ‘develop the science and technology in a beneficial way,’ a way that enables us to provide alternative energy technologies at reasonable prices.

In future blogs, I will try to comment on the concept of “energy at reasonable prices,” with the understanding that the concept of “reasonable” in the US is very different from that of “reasonable” in India and other developing countries.

One of the best analogies that I have read about prioritizing remedies came from an address by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the former (2003-2010) president of Brazil, in a reported comment on the European fiscal crisis: “Let’s be frank: if Germany had resolved the Greek problem years ago, it wouldn’t have worsened like this. I’ve seen people die of gangrene because they didn’t care for a problematic toenail.”

In my upcoming blogs, I plan to discuss how we can care for our “problematic toenails” through the development of alternative energy sources, so that we can prevent the spread of gangrene in the form of uncontrolled global climate change.

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Learning From the Olympics: Changing the Competition from NIMBYism to Doing Our Best

Posted on August 27, 2012 by climatechangefork

The last obstacle to the democratization of decision making on climate change (June 18 blog) is NIMBYism. I have already expanded on the first three obstacles (climate change and the nature of science, science “hatred,” and we are not prophets) in my previous blogs, so I will discuss NIMBYism here. NIMBYism is derived from NIMBY, which stands for “Not In My Backyard.” The essence of the phenomenon is local opposition to proposed new developments, in spite of agreement that they would benefit society at large. In the context of climate change, the most famous examples are wind farms that would replace sources fed by fossil fuels with sustainable power sources. NIMBYism can delay installation for many years and dramatically reduce incentives to implement remedies to a common threat such as climate change. A close “relative” to NIMBY, which goes by the acronym of BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything), basically claims that any additional development is an affront to current residents. In the case of wind farms the most common objection, especially if the project is an off-shore installation, such as the one proposed for the Nantucket Sound in Massachusetts, is based on the belief that the large wind turbines will spoil the pristine view. NIMBY, by definition (unlike BANANA), includes a general recognition that the construction is needed by society at large, so an effective way to combat NIMBYism is to appeal to the individual conscience. By promoting and explaining the presumed societal benefits while at the same time trying to refute specific objections (in the case of wind farms: subjectivity of aesthetics, noise, killing birds, etc…), the goal is to emphasize that the overall project will have more positive than negative effects.

Here is what Garrett Hardin wrote as part of his seminal paper “The Tragedy of the Commons” [Hardin, G. Science 162, 3859 (1968)] (see also my July 2 blog in a similar context):

 The long-term disadvantage of an appeal to conscience should be enough to condemn it; but has serious short-term disadvantages as well. If we ask a man who is exploiting a commons to desist “in the name of conscience,” what are we saying to him? What does he hear?- not only at the moment but also in the wee small hours of the night when, half asleep, he remembers not merely the words we used but also the nonverbal communication cues we gave him unaware? Sooner or later, consciously or subconsciously, he senses that he has received two communications, and that they are contradictory: (1) (intended communication) “if you don’t do as we ask, we will openly condemn you for not acting like a reasonable citizen”; (II) (the unintended communication) “if you do behave as we ask, we will secretly condemn you for a simpleton who can be shamed into standing aside while the rest of us exploit the commons.”

The issue goes well beyond local objections to necessary remedies. Climate change is a global issue, and the heat-trapping gases which cause it are emitted by energy sources that constitute 85% of the global energy supply. Any remedy will require a global shift in energy sources, and will have massive economic and socio-economic ramifications. Such a shift requires global implementation to be based on binding agreements between sovereign states. NIMBYism here means “not in my state”. As last year’s Copenhagen attempt showed, the international community is not yet up to the task.

Recently, an unexpected source may have presented new insight into this issue. The xxx Olympiad finished and the Paralympics is about to start, both taking place in London, England.

The Olympic motto is Citius, Altius, Fortius, which is Latin for “Faster, Higher, Stronger”. It was a spectacular show that more than 200 million people watched in the US, in addition to probably more than a billion viewers worldwide.

After the August 12th closing, Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, was reported as saying this:

For many years, our financial sector sustained the illusion that it was possible to become a millionaire overnight by buying and selling pieces of paper, but we have seen how paper fortunes in financial markets can disappear overnight. Things need to change.

As recent scandals have shown, banks could learn a thing or two about fair play from the Olympic movement. First, and most important, we have been reminded that an objective that is worth attaining, like a gold medal, requires years of hard work. Success does not come overnight.

What he didn’t explicitly say was that most gold medals don’t come with large monetary or publicity rewards. Instead, the athletes get to satisfy the healthy competitive spirit that was immortalized in the song, “Anything you can do, I can do better.”

The NIMBY and BANANA phenomena are competitions for doing nothing. It would be nice to find a substitute and create an Olympics in how best to contribute to the general good. We need countries to compete for finding and implementing solutions, instead of trying to shunt off responsibility to others. If we can get the excitement about scientific breakthroughs to come close to matching that surrounding the Olympics, we will be off to a tremendous start.

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We Are Not Prophets II – Back to Deniers and Skeptics and Forward to Insurance.

Posted on August 20, 2012 by climatechangefork

The issue is not so much the accuracy of the prediction as the magnitude of the impact when the predictions are coming to roost. Our difficulties in predicting the future do not guarantee that the future will be better, there is probably equal chance that the future will come out worse than predicted (from the August 13 blog).

Up to now, the most intense reactions to my blog came in response to my comparisons between climate change deniers and Holocaust deniers. Climate change deniers have expressed resentment toward this analogy, wanting to be labeled skeptics instead. I sympathize with this sentiment, and over the last few blogs I have tried to stop using the term. Here I am returning to this issue – the main reason is that over the last blog I have tried to make the case that we are not prophets and nobody is certain about trying to predict the future. In a sense – we are all skeptics.

Let me frame this as a global insurance issue, by directly quoting a few paragraphs from the last chapter of my book [“Climate Change: The Fork at the End of Now”; Momentum Press – 2011].

Can we insure the survival of the planet as a habitable environment? If the answer is yes, then who will pay the premium?  If climate-change is just a big catastrophic event, then the mechanism of financial preparation should not be much different than the insurance of present catastrophic events. The trouble is that we are not very good at insuring catastrophic events. The present situation of flood insurance is a good example. In the United Kingdom, flood insurance is provided by private insurance, but in the United States it comes through a federally backed insurance system. In France and Spain flood insurance is bundled with other natural perils into a national pooling arrangement, and in Holland it is completely unavailable. The insurance industry is heavily involved in the debate on climate change. “Climate Change is a clear business opportunity for the insurance industry,” declared Shinzo Abe, former Prime Minister of Japan, at the Geneva Association meeting in Kyoto on 29 May 2009 [The Geneva Reports, www.genevaassociation.org, “The Insurance Industry and Climate     Change – Contributions to the Global Debate”, No. 2, July 2009].

The main reason is defensive – the worst thing that can happen to the insurance industry is to grossly underestimate risk. If the planet is becoming progressively more risky after the policy is drafted, then the industry will lose. The objective of insurers is to form a community of the insured where premium payments are sufficient to cover the cost of repairing the damage. The profitability of the insurance industry critically depends on its ability to assess risk, defined as

                        loss potential x occurrence frequency.

To illustrate the risk-premium dynamics of the insurance business, famous Swiss reinsurance company Swiss Re [Peter Zimmerli; Natural Catastrophe and Reinsurance”, Swiss Re Documents (2003)] uses a dice game analogy. The number on the die is the severity of the loss; the frequency is how often the number is rolled.  “Catastrophe” is defined as the point at which 6 is rolled 10 consecutive times or more. We can calculate the probability exactly for such an event to take place, but are we willing to pay against such a low probability event? Insurance is against future losses, not past losses. For past losses we rely on sympathy.

Natural catastrophes such as major floods or earthquakes remain unpredictable in spite of huge technical and scientific advances. According to Swiss Re there is a tendency to underestimate risks relating to natural hazards when a catastrophic event has not occurred for a long time (Just World Hypothesis again).

The loss potential (i.e., direct human loss not planetary loss) of climate change is a direct function of population growth and GDP growth and thus predictable (Special Report on Emission Scenarios [SRES] scenarios). The issue, however, is the frequency of the occurrence. One prediction of the climate change model is the increased intensity of extreme events. Is this prediction solid enough to put our money on (or rather strong enough for the insurance and Re-Insurance companies to put our money on?). Local catastrophic losses can be put in a pool along with a large number of  separate geographical locations with the assumption that the frequency of occurrence in these locations is independent. They must include willingness to pay by policy holders in the pool formation.  If there is a tendency to underestimate risks relating to natural hazards when a catastrophic event has not occurred for a long time, then it is difficult to find payers. One possible solution is differentiated-premium pricing even on a global scale. With sovereign states in control, how this will work within the confines of a regulated insurance environment remains an issue.

The insurance premium is being paid here to take the appropriate steps to minimize the odds for the catastrophic event to take place (in climate change lingo we call this remediation) and not to collect the insurance after the event. It is an insurance we transfer to our grandchildren.

 

 

 

 

 

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We Are Not Prophets

Posted on August 13, 2012 by climatechangefork

We are not prophets. None of us are, but like biblical prophets, we stand on the top of the hill and warn about a coming Armageddon (remember the “self-inflicted genocide” in my first blog post). The tools that we use to try to predict the future are different: the biblical prophets used divine inspiration while we use computer simulations. One attribute that we have in common is that the prophecies are for a relatively distant future beyond the lifetime of the prophets.

In a sense, the Poperian interpretation of the scientific method is about prophecies (see the June 18 blog). It is based on refutability. We develop hypotheses and theories based on everything that we know, then we test these theories. If the tests fail, we change the theory. This amounts to prediction of future results.

One of the best demonstrations of the scientific method came spectacularly to light only recently. On July 4th, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced the experimental observation of the decay of a new particle that resembles the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson was predicted to be the evidence for the existence of the Higgs field, a precursor to today’s elementary particles. The particle and the field are named after Peter Higgs, who predicted the mechanism and the existence of the particle in 1964. At about at the same time, two other teams published papers predicting similar mechanisms. For almost 50 years, experimentalists tried to find such a particle until CERN announced that they found what “looks to be” the long sought particle. The results are still being analyzed to determine the particle’s properties.

Throughout the 50-year wait, many well known physicists made bets about the existence of these particles. A recent article in the New York Times reports on the settlement of some of the debts: Stephen Hawking admits that he lost his $100 bet with Gordon Kane. Guido Tonelli, a CERN physicist that was in charge of one of the groups that did the experiment, said that if he were to collect on all the bets that he made, he would be a rich man. Janet Conrad, a physicist at MIT, admitted to losing her own bet with Frank Wilczek from the same institute. The bet was for 10 chocolate Nobel coins that you can buy in the Nobel store in Stockholm, Sweden.

These are all cute bets on future results, but the stakes are very low. If the Higgs boson had not been found, eventually a new theory would have developed, with different predictions, to occupy the productive time of more physicists. Peter Higgs would probably not have gotten his well deserved Nobel Prize (my “safe” prediction for next year’s prize) but some other well deserving physicist would have been the beneficiary.

I already mentioned another kind of payout in a previous blog (May 7) that describes a letter that was published in the on-line publication Business Insider on April 11, 2012, and signed by 49 former NASA employees. This list included seven Apollo astronauts and two former directors of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, all of whom called NASA to move away from climate model predictions and to limit its stance to that which can be empirically proven. The letter states that, “We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated.”  The writers cite reasons for this doubt:

NASA is relying too heavily on complex climate models that have proven scientifically inadequate in predicting climate only one or two decades in advance…There’s a concern that if it turns out that CO2 is not a major cause of climate change, NASA will have put the reputation of NASA, NASA’s current and former employees, and even the very reputation of science itself at risk of public ridicule and distrust.

The emphasis here is the last sentence. If the predictions turn out wrong – we lose face.

In my opinion, the only way to address future uncertainty of the impact of global climate change is through the “purchase” of a global insurance policy that will put resources in mitigation and adaptation. This is not so different from insuring ourselves against fire, theft, or flood. The difference is mainly in scope and the singularity of the threat. I will try to discuss it in future blogs.

The issue is not so much the accuracy of the prediction as the magnitude of the impact when the predictions come to roost. Our difficulties in predicting the future do not guarantee that the future will be better; there is probably an equal chance that the future will come out worse than predicted. This does not relieve us of responsibility, however – in fact, it makes it all the more important that we take steps to minimize possible negative impact – the same as we do with any other insurance policy that we purchase.

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Is Algebra Necessary? – Yes It Is!!!

Posted on August 6, 2012 by climatechangefork

I’ve been living with this question for a long time – starting with my own son when he attended Middle School (he is now 45, a Managing Director in Greenwich Capital, with his own Middle School aged children).

On Sunday, July 29, the question got a renewed focus with an article titled “Is Algebra Necessary?” in the cover Op-Ed of the New York Times, written by Prof. Andrew Hacker, a colleague of mine from the City University of New York.

I am spending my time trying to democratize the issue of Climate Change by writing a book that I have designated as a textbook for the general public; writing this weekly blog; teaching General Education courses on the topic and founding an undergraduate program designed to lower the communication barriers between the Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences.

The common thread in all these activities is an attempt to democratize the necessary decision making process required to address these climate issues that are so essential to continued human existence. I make the point that the main stumbling block we face is the need to expand science education to the general public, so that decisions that are based on interactions between humans and the physical environment will adhere to a common set of principles.

Suddenly, Professor Hacker tells me in his opinion piece that I must do this without algebra. Here are his arguments:

My question extends beyond algebra and applies more broadly to the usual mathematics sequence, from geometry through calculus. State regents and legislators — and much of the public — take it as self-evident that every young person should be made to master polynomial functions and parametric equations.

This debate matters. Making mathematics mandatory prevents us from discovering and developing young talent. In the interest of maintaining rigor, we’re actually depleting our pool of brainpower. I say this as a writer and social scientist whose work relies heavily on the use of numbers. My aim is not to spare students from a difficult subject, but to call attention to the real problems we are causing by misdirecting precious resources.

According to the data in the article, one quarter of ninth graders fail to finish high school. In South Carolina, it is 34% and in Nevada 45%. Algebra, according to this account (based on chats with educators) is the main culprit. Furthermore, he states:

Another dropout statistic should cause equal chagrin. Of all who embark on higher education, only 58 percent end up with bachelor’s degrees. The main impediment to graduation: freshman math. The City University of New York, where I have taught since 1971, found that 57 percent of its students didn’t pass its mandated algebra course. The depressing conclusion of a faculty report: ‘failing math at all levels affects retention more than any other academic factor.’ A national sample of transcripts found mathematics had twice as many F’s and D’s compared as other subjects.

The article makes an argument that not teaching algebra to everybody does not mean not teaching quantitative reasoning:

Quantitative literacy clearly is useful in weighing all manner of public policies, from the Affordable Care Act, to the costs and benefits of environmental regulation, to the impact of climate change. Being able to detect and identify ideology at work behind the numbers is of obvious use. Ours is fast becoming a statistical age, which raises the bar for informed citizenship. What is needed is not textbook formulas but greater understanding of where various numbers come from, and what they actually convey.

He suggests that we replace algebra with “citizen statistics” that will include topics such as personal finance and how to compute the “Consumer Price Index.”   The notion is that we should teach skills to students that will be useful in the job market and should not teach difficult abstract concepts that make them want to drop out of school.

Hacker is talking about the heart of elementary algebra: variables that represent numbers and the rules that apply to these variables. To use a relevant example – any estimate of environmental impact requires an estimate of future growth of quantities such as population and economic activities. With a constant growth rate, this is calculated as exponential growth, and involves calculation with exponential functions related to logarithmic functions. These functions are usually taught in schools in pre-calculus, a level that is more advanced than elementary algebra and only selectively required, depending on the track that students are taking. Many students that take environmental courses have never taken pre-calculus. One can teach exponential growth without relying on exponential functions by instead using the concept of doubling time. However, one needs to manipulate simple one variable equations in order to be able to estimate the needed information. The simplest graphing requires ability to work with slopes, intercept and scale – you cannot do that without elementary algebra.

Even simple things such as unit conversion and percentage calculations need elementary algebra.

Political decisions will need to be made based on interactions with the physical environment. These will require a kind of literacy test for the ability to understand the data on which the decisions are being made. To exclude anybody from mastery of these skills means to give up on them. We don’t want to go in this direction.

There is no question that the teaching of mathematics, perhaps more than any other subject, can be improved. But the “improvement” cannot be done by excluding students that have difficulties. No, we have to redouble our efforts so as to reach these students.

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Climate Change as a Bridge Maker

Posted on July 31, 2012 by climatechangefork

For many years, I made my living by teaching Physics and focusing my research activities on alternative (to fossil fuels) energy sources. My primary focus was on solar energy, occasionally straying into nuclear waste disposal, energy storage and related topics. When I went to parties or other activities that involved random close encounters with strangers, conversations often started with the typical prompt of, “What do you do?” I used to respond that I taught Physics. The usual responses were: “Oh! You must be very smart…” or “I always had difficulties with Physics…” These responses almost always had the effect of shifting the chats to safer (less science-y) grounds.

In 1998, the year that marked a large heat wave in Europe and massive death of the Great Barrier Reef corals, I completely shifted my research and most of my teaching to focus on climate change.

Now, the casual conversations start with the same question but they proceed on different tracks. Everybody has an opinion on climate change. The topic is in the news and in the political debate, with deniers, skeptics and action advocates speaking with almost equal, what I call, “messianic fervor.”  It’s a great opportunity to bridge the “two cultures”.

Two weeks ago I returned from a scientific conference on Climate Change in Seattle.  I published the main themes of this conference here, in order to emphasize the interdisciplinary aspects of the field. At that conference I presented two papers.

One of them I am going to briefly describe here: For about five years I have collaborated with Lori Scarlatos, a Professor at Stony Brook University that specializes in game design with educational objectives. Our “game” was initially called “Intelligent Energy Choices”, a name that morphed several times over the project’s various iterations. In this “game” the world is represented by the 25 most populated countries and players take the roles of said countries’ “Heads of State.”  Their job is to advance the well being of their countries without endangering the planet in the process. They do this job mainly through the purchase of energy to support their GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth. The initial conditions of this “world” are derived from real data taken mainly from the World Bank in a fixed reference year. The reference year we used was 2003 so as to give students the opportunity to compare the world of their design with the evolution of the real world through comparison of their countries’ data with the World Bank data after 2003.

In academic settings (as opposed to commercial settings), we generally present the work in various conferences as we go along, so as to benefit from feedback. We presented aspects of this work in an Energy Conference that took place at Stony Brook. A comment from a conference participant was very revealing and rewarding. He said, “This approach can be used in any field that involves complex societal issues that are anchored on science.”  His particular interest was health care policy.

The Seattle conference on Climate Change was obviously not the only scientific conference on Climate Change that is being held in 2012. Googling “Climate Change conferences 2012” produces 115,000,000 results. I obviously didn’t check for repetitions and relevance, but going through the first 20 entries clearly showed the wide scope of the field, with many entries advertizing themselves as “working at the intersection of environment and human needs”.

The Seattle meeting was organized by an organization called “Common Ground Publishing.”  Common Ground takes:

Some of the pivotal ideas and challenges of our time and builds knowledge communities which cut horizontally across legacy knowledge structures. Sustainability, diversity, learning, the future of the humanities, the nature of interdisciplinarity, the place of the arts in society, technology’s connections with knowledge, the changing role of the university—these are deeply important questions of our time which require interdisciplinary thinking, global conversations, and cross-institutional intellectual collaborations. (From the Program of the conference)

The conference itself was, by the standard of such conferences, rather “intimate.”  It included 250 registered participants from 35 different countries. There were no “skeptics” or “deniers.”  There were no policy makers and there was no press of any sort. There were only “like minded” participants that came from different directions and backgrounds. There was a lawyer from Berkeley who was trying to sue the US for contributing to the drowning of a Pacific island; there were speakers who were trying to map vulnerable locations inhabited by Native Americans in Alaska and the Northwest. There were Intermediate and High School teachers that described efforts to use Climate Change to teach STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) topics in the corresponding schools, etc…

There were no loud voices or “messianic fervor” – but it was a great time and a good opportunity for extensive networking.

 

 

 

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Dislike of Science – Who Is To Blame and What Is Being Done About It?

Posted on July 23, 2012 by climatechangefork

As was mentioned in previous blogs (see for example the June 18 blog), one of the main challenges to democratization of the climate change issue is the public dislike of science. As a result, public ignorance of the driving forces of climate change and the consequences of inaction constitute a serious threat. Our contributions to chemical changes in the atmosphere alter the energy balance with the sun, and hence, the climate (see July 9 blog); it is dangerous that people cannot recognize this.

To democratize complex issues such as climate change, the global voting public needs to be educated in the fundamentals of science and be comfortable dealing with data and numbers. The alternative is to hire epistemological lawyers that make decisions for us. Many scientists would like to serve in this role (see May 21 blog) – but we can do better.

This is a big job that will take a long time. It can be done through the educational system but we have to remember that climate is global so it has to include everybody. But we also have to remember that the global illiteracy rate is more than 10% (2011). This includes overly populated countries such as India (24%) and Bangladesh (44%). We saw (July 9 blog) that even in developed countries such as the US (14% lack Basic Prose Literary Skills), close to 50% of the population do not believe in evolution or climate change, but 77% do believe in the possibility that extraterrestrials have visited earth. In my (optimistic?) estimate it will take a few generations to accomplish the educational objectives that will allow informed, individualized, decision making that will formulate collective policies such as efforts for mitigation and adaptation to climate change. We cannot give up and we have to start now.

Given the sorry state of science education and the general failure of many education models, we simply have to do better, and we have to engage more people in this effort, We have to start to build bridges. Fortunately, the need for this is getting some recognition. This blog, and others like it, are a manifestation that technology is a big help.

My audience here is the World and I am getting feedback in form of comments, emails and tweets from all over the world. A few years ago, the only “audience” that I could approach was my students and my family. I am paid to enable my students to learn, but with my family I have to be careful- I cannot cross the line into preaching. I cannot even attempt to give them the skills necessary to make the judgment by themselves; I can only hope that the school system will do the job. With students, it’s a bit easier because they are paying me to provide them with the skills.

In this respect, teaching science is more difficult than teaching any other subject because it’s more vertical. One set of skills is being supported by a different set of skills that need to be mastered first. In academic lingo we call these prerequisites.

Here is how bridges can be built:

  • Professionals will have to learn how to be “bilingual” – in other words, scientists will have to learn how to talk to non-scientists without scientific jargon. An AP report by Karl Ritter quotes US climate scientist Robert Corell speaking to his fellow scientists at a meeting in Copenhagen on the melting of the Arctic ice: “Stop speaking in code. Rather than ‘anthropogenic,’ you could say ‘human caused”.

“There’s a kind of frustration on the part of many scientists about not being able to get points across to the public,” said NAS president Ralph Cicerone; as examples, he pointed to Earth’s age, biological evolution, the teaching of evolution, and climate change. Arthur Lupia, a political science professor at the University of Michigan, said scientists must revise their approach to communication in order to compete for the attention of their audience. “Failure is common in attempts to communicate on science with the public. Attention is scarce, and working memory is very limited in capacity,” he said. “We don’t get a free pass because we are experts.” His advice to educators is to appeal to the core values, fears, and aspirations of the listener, “not by dumbing things down, but by smartening up how we convey what we know.” Doing that requires using concrete examples that the audience cares about, not abstractions.

  • Colleges, universities, and even high schools, will have to learn how to be both thematic and disciplinary, covering topics like climate change, evolution, cosmology, the history of the atomic bomb, etc. in addition to traditional physics, chemistry, political science, history, etc. Many colleges and universities, including my own, include general education requirements for the entire student population. The general education includes science requirements. In the discussion about what kinds of courses to include, there is often tension between disciplinary and interdisciplinary topics. One of the arguments against interdisciplinary courses is that students need to master the disciplines before they can approach the interdisciplinary topics. On the other hand, there is an opportunity to use these general education courses as a recruiting ground for the disciplines that constitute the basic departments of all of our schools. I will expand on this issue in future blogs.
  • Public communication tools such as newspapers, TV, radio, books, internet, blogs, etc. will have to learn how to avoid sentences such as “many scientists say….” and will instead hire people that can explain issues from first principles without the use of code words.

In a recent opinion page in the New York Times, David Leonhardt writes about the difficulty of relying on either carbon tax or cap-and-trade policies to promote a switch to different energy sources. He speaks of the necessity of combining methods- raising the price of “dirty” energy, while fostering new solutions. Maybe there is an alternative way to achieve the objective:

Those others things, in the simplest terms, are policies intended to help find a breakthrough technology that can power the economy without heating the planet. “Our best hope,” says Benjamin H. Strauss, a scientist who is the chief operating officer of Climate Central, a research group, “is some kind of disruptive technology that takes off on its own, the way the Internet and the fax took off.”

It might just be that the “disruptive technology” could be educating the general public to accept higher energy prices if they are needed to prevent irreversible atmospheric chemical changes that might lead to catastrophic climate consequences. There is no law that I know about that says energy prices must remain as low as they are now in the US. They are already much higher in most of the world.

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Fourth International Conference on Climate Change July 12 &13

Posted on July 16, 2012 by climatechangefork

I have just returned from a climate change conference in Seattle, Washington where I have presented some of our group’s work. I would like to share with you a list of the main themes of the conference to illustrate the broad scope and cross-disciplinary nature of this topic.  I will have more to add on the matter next week.

Theme 1: Scientific Evidence

What is evidence is there of climate change?

  • Paleoclimatology: the earth’s climate in a long view
  • Climate change today: examining the data
  • Ice cap reduction and glacial melt
  • Sea level change
  • Floods, drought, forest fires, hurricanes and other sporadic events
  • Albedo or measuring the earth’s reflectiveness
  • Meteorology and climate informatics
  • Equilibria and disequilbria: change processes and countervailing tendencies
  • Climate measurement processes, methodologies and technologies
  • Reading complex, dynamic and unstable systems
  • Developing local and global climate models
  • Change scenarios: slow, rapid, abrupt or episodic

Theme 2: Assessing Impacts in Divergent Ecosystems

What are the impacts of climate change on natural environments?

  • Ocean currents and el Niño
  • Riverine ecosystem impacts
  • Mountain ecosystem impacts
  • Coastal ecosystem impacts
  • Marine ecosystem impacts
  • Forest and grassland ecosystem impacts
  • Impacts on wilderness and protected areas
  • Impacts on specific biomes
  • Impacts on biodiversity, potential extinctions
  • Hardiness zone migration
  • Regional variations: temperature and rainfall

Theme 3: Human Impacts and Impacts on Humans

What evidence is there that human activity has contributed to climate change, and what are the impacts of climate change on human life?

  • Anthropogenic factors in climate change: determining the relative contribution of natural and human causes
  • Impacts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases
  • Land use patterns, agriculture and livestock husbandry and deforestation as factors in climate change
  • Impacts on humans: agriculture, fish stocks, food supply, health
  • Human settlements and sea level rise
  • Impacts on humans: water supply, desertification
  • Impacts on humans of intense weather events, natural disasters and ecological surprises
  • Impacts of climate change in the developing world

Theme 4: Technical, Political and Social Responses

How do scientists, technologies, policy makers and community members respond to climate change?

  • Environmental policies in response to climate change
  • Controversy and denial: politics, the media and scientists with dissenting views
  • The international politics of climate change
  • The past, present and future of international agreements
  • Education and awareness for management of global climate change
  • Protected areas and preservation of biodiversity: ‘corridoring’ and other strategies
  • Strategies for sustainability
  • Human adaptive strategies
  • Technologies of mitigation: carbon dioxide sequestration, solar shades and other processes
  • Alternative and renewable energy sources: technologies, policies and strategies
  • Carbon taxes, offsets and trading
  • Emission standards
  • Climate ethics and the precautionary principle
  • Eco-development, eco-efficiency

 

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We Need to Do Some Serious Work if We Want to Democratize Climate Change Decisions.

Posted on July 9, 2012 by climatechangefork

A survey that was published in a recent OECD report has found that only 5% of American students expect to pursue a career in the sciences by age 30.

We are in good company – countries such as Brazil, UK, Canada and the Netherlands have similar statistics. Estonia is the highest (among the countries that were surveyed – at around 30%). Unfortunately, the survey probably never questioned the students on their understanding of what science entails. If they have similar attitudes to students that I know, science for them is associated with disciplines such as Physics, Chemistry and Biology that require a lot of math – many of them have decided that they hate math and don’t want to be associated with it any longer than they absolutely must. Presumably, nobody told them that they are now part of the physical world and if they want to participate in the decision-making process of governing the place that they and their families live in – they had better change their attitude about science. The “Two Cultures” (C.P. Snow – see the previous blog) cannot stay separated.

One of the questions that was surveyed by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to probe factual knowledge among the American public was, “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals – true or false?” 47% of Americans surveyed had the correct answer (true). For comparison, they also provide the score for international respondents: South Korea (64%), EU (70%), Japan (78%), India (56%), China (69%) and Russia (44%).

Recent reports by Yale University on American Global Warming Beliefs and Attitude found that Americans can be divided into six “distinct” groups in terms of their attitudes to climate change. The groups are shown in the figure below, together with the relative proportion of responses in each group (2009).

In the “Alarmed” group, 88% of the respondents believe that humans are the main culprits. In the “Concerned” group, that belief in mostly human culpability is reduced to 79%.

Interestingly, but not surprisingly, a similar survey that was conducted among frequent visitors to Science and Technology museums found that 45% of the frequent visitors are in the “Alarmed” category and 29% in the “Concerned” category. In total, 66% of the frequent museum visitors understand that global warming is mostly caused by humans.

The Christian-Science Monitor has recently reported on a survey that asked whether the respondents believe aliens have visited Earth – 36% of those who were surveyed responded that they do, 48% aren’t sure, and 17% said they don’t believe so. This means that more than three in four Americans (77%) think there are signs that suggest aliens have visited the Earth, whether or not they’ve made up their minds about the question.

With some margin of error, the percentage of ignorance in all three questions is about the same. However, the consequences are very different. As long as we keep people who don’t believe in evolution and people who believe in visits from extraterrestrials away from teaching (not an easy task) the damage is mostly personal. Nobody is asked to “vote” on these issues.

The climate change issue requires real remedies in the form of changes to the way that we and our children and grandchildren conduct our individual and collective lives. It also requires spending large sums of money that otherwise would go to address different needs. In democratic societies, these actions require public support.  The public is repeatedly required to make informed choices. If the public cannot make informed choices based on first principles, it will search for “epistemological lawyers”. Climate scientists would like to serve in this role (see my May 21 blog) but they are not the only ones – it becomes a hotly debated political issue that in most cases leads to inaction. Even many “skeptics” admit that in the near future (“end of now”) we will need to change our energy choices to ones that do not result in human-induced climate change because of irreversible changes in the chemistry of the atmosphere. They just question the timing (not now – later). We are starting to find out that the necessary changes are so fundamental that to accomplish them we require basic changes in our educational system.

Some movements in this direction will be discussed in the next blog.

 

 

 

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Climate Change and the Tragedy of the Commons.

Posted on July 2, 2012 by climatechangefork

Garrett Hardin was a professor of Biology in Santa Barbara, California. In June 1968 he delivered a presidential address before the Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The lecture was on the future of nuclear war – drawing the conclusion that: “It is our considered professional judgment that this dilemma has no technical solution. If the great powers continue to look for solutions in the area of science and technology only, the result will be to worsen the situation.” A few months later, he  expanded on this topic in an article in Science titled, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” It became an almost instantaneous hit and an effective lasting teaching material. Googling the title today produces more than 400,000 hits. Combining it with “Climate Change” results in 85,000 hits. I use it regularly in classes on environmental issues and in talks on Climate Change.

Two paragraphs from the paper are sufficient to demonstrate the connection:

The class of “no technical solution problems” has members. My thesis is that the “population problem,” as conventionally conceived, is a member of this class. How it is conventionally conceived needs some comment. It is fair to say that most people who anguish over the population problem are trying to find a way to avoid the evils of overpopulation without relinquishing any of the privileges they now enjoy. They think that farming the seas or developing new strains of wheat will solve the problem-­technologically. I try to show here that the solution they seek cannot be found. The population problem cannot be solved in a technical way, any more than can the problem of winning the game of tick-tack-toe. In reaching this conclusion, I have made the usual assumption that it is the acquisition of energy that is the problem. The appearance of atomic energy has led some to question this assumption. However, given an infinite source of energy, population growth still produces an inescapable problem. The problem of the acquisition of energy is replaced by the problem of its dissipation… The arithmetic signs in the analysis are, as it were, reversed; but Bentham’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy. The goal is still unobtainable.

The National Parks present another instance of the working out of the tragedy of the commons. At present, they are open to all, without limit. The parks themselves are limited in extent–there is only one Yosemite Valley–whereas population seems to grow without limit. The values that visitors seek in the parks are steadily eroded. Plainly, we must soon cease to treat the parks as commons or they will be of no value anyone. (Hardin, G.  Science 162, 3859 (1968))

It doesn’t take a fertile imagination to extend the concept of the National Parks to the Planet as a whole. It is a bit more complicated to show that the “common pasture” issue,  so central now in game theory to debate a winning strategy that will benefit all the owners without harming the individual players, is equivalent to the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) phenomena that is a major challenge in addressing all environmental issues, including climate change. The NIMBY challenge, in the context of climate change will be addressed in future blogs.

Hardin’s world was different than ours. The world’s population was approximately half the present population (7 billion in October 2011) and systematic measurements of man’s contributions to changes in the chemistry of the atmosphere and the resulting changes in the energy balance with the Sun, were just begining. We were in the middle of the Cold War, less than one generation removed from Hiroshima and Nagasaki with MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) as the dominant theory to prevent global suicide.

Science was connected to all of this only through attempts to design better destruction tools- not to solve any problems. This was the time that followed C.P. Snow’s  1959 publication of “The Two Cultures” (C.P.Snow,  The Two Cultures. London: Cambridge University Press (2001)). This small book that has recently emerged as one of the most influential books since WWII has made the point that one of the “cultures” is scientists and the other one is everybody else and that they don’t know how to talk to each other. This small book, like Hardin’s paper, came out also of a lecture (in Cambridge University).

What I understand in Hardin’s “no technical solution” is something that science can not solve. Both Hardin and Snow were scientists, although with broader interests, that have tried to build some bridges. Snow was advocating developing a common language. Hardin, in my view, was desperate and believed that if there are no “technical solutions” there are no solutions. Natural Science and Social Science in their time were separate. They are still separate in most universities, but as I have tried to show in the previous blog, Climate Change is forcing us to recognize that they are not separate any more. Building bridges now is not only the right thing to do but it is essential.

More about this – next week.

 

 

 

 

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