'Byron checking the position of the moon with his laptop, Flaming Gorge, Wyoming' -- picture by Mark Klett
Photography is
the desire to see what the world looks like in our absence
— Jean Baudrillard, quoted by Stephen Poole.
“Are you going to move our stuff?”
“No, that’s the view. We’re in the picture”
— William Fox and Mark Klett, quoted in Fox’s Viewfinder, a book about Klett’s rephotography project
It struck me reading Poole’s review that an awful lot of the concerns in my writing, most recently in “Globe and Sphere, Cycles and Flows: How to See the World”, which is my essay in the Royal Society collection, Seeing Further, sit firmly in the space defined by those two quotations, the second one of which is the epigraph for Mapping Mars.
The ability to see the Earth as an astronomer would another planet marked a fundamental shift, the long-term effects of which we still cannot gauge. It has provided valuable new perspectives and treasure troves of data. But no image can reveal everything; and every revelation obscures something. For all that it is an image of the whole, the vision of the Earth from space is necessarily partial. By leaving things out, it makes the Earth too easy to objectify, too easy to hold at a distance, too easy to idealise. It needs to be offset by a deeper sense of the world as it is felt from the inside, and as it extends out of view into past and future. Because of the changes we are putting the planet through, we need as many ways of looking at and thinking about it as we can find. We need ways to see it as a history, a system, and a set of choices, not just a thing of beauty – one which, from our astronomical perspective, we seem already to have left. There are other ways to see the beauty of the world than in the rear-view mirror of progress.
…
How better, though, can people see the world than as a fragile blue marble separated from their own experience, cut off from any cosmic continuity by a sharp 360º horizon? And why, given the objective truth of the world as revealed by Apollo, should we even try? To the second question, the answer is that there is more than one way of seeing, just as there is more than one way of speaking. There are times when seeing the Earth as a discrete object, a thing in a picture, is peculiarly helpful; there are times when something else is called for.
Not to be a tease, but if you want to get an answer to the first question you better get your hands on a copy of the book (Amazon UK), though it must be said that some of the ideas were worked through in a rather different way in my Earthrise piece a couple of years back.
Image from Mark Klett, permission sought used with kind permission, all rights reserved
Filed under: Media
On the subject of the glacier claims in the Asia chapter of Working Group II’s contribution to the fourth assessment, here’s what was said in the review process (relevant pdfs here) about the passage with the 2035 disappearance figure and the 500,000 km^2 to 100,000 km^2 area reductions. The nearest thing I can see to a direct criticism comes from the Japanese government. It concentrates on confidence rather than on source but obviously the two are linked.
This seems to be a very important statement, possibly should be in the SPM [summary for policy makers], but is buried in the middle of this chapter. What is the confidence level/certainty? (i.e.“likelihood of the glaciers disappearing is very high” is at which level of likelihood? (ref. to Box TS-1, “Description of Likelihood” [this is where qualitative descriptions of likelihood are equated to quantitative statements of probability, with “very likely” meaning >90% probability). Also in this paragraph, the use of “will” is ambiguous and should be replaced with appropriate likelihood/confidence level terminology.
The response to this was “Appropriate revisions and editing made”.
Wong Poh Poh, of the National University of Singapore, asked for some more detail
Table 10.10. Provide examples of rates of retreat of glaciers outside Asia (e.g. Alpine, Arctic) to show that Himalayan glaciers are indeed receeding faster.
Response: “Revised the section”.
Two points on the sentence “Its total area will shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 km2 by the year 2035.” from David Saltz of the Desert Research Institute, Ben Gurion University
What does ‘its’ refer to?
100,000? You just said it will disappear.
Answers “glaciers” and “Missed to clarify this one”
There are also a number of review comments from Hayley Fowler of Newcastle University, drawing on her own research on water availability and teh broader literature, such as this one.
I am not sure that this is true for the very large Karakoram glaciers in the western Himalaya. Hewitt (2005) suggests from measurements that these are expanding – and this would certainly be explained by climatic change in preciptiation and temperature trends seen in the Karakoram region (Fowler and Archer, J Climate in press; Archer and Fowler, 2004) You need to quote Barnett et al.’s 2005 Nature paper here – this seems very similar to what they said. “
Response “Was unable to get hold of the suggested references: will consider in the final version”: In the finished product, as far as I can see, Archer and Fowler are quoted (as they were in the second order draft), Hewitt, Fowler and Archer and Barnett et al are not.
Clair Hanson, who was at the time part of the technical support unit for WGII, raises the lack of references in various sections of the Asia chapter (Dr Wong raises a similar point, as does Mick Kelly of UEA). The response was “more references added”.
This last bit may be crucial. Up until the second order draft, there was no reference at all for the problematic paragraph on glaciers; the reference to the WWF report was added later, and thus rather at the last minute. This fits pretty well with the idea that the original source was the Down to Earth article, which contains things that are there in the IPCC report but not in the WWF article. Apart from the addition of that reference, the only other changes to the passage during the editing process, as far as I can see, are cosmetic, and do not really correspond to the replies made to the people who commented during the review. “About 15,000 Himalayan glaciers form a unique reservoir which supports perennial rivers such as the Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra which, in turn, are the lifeline of millions of people,” in the first draft becomes rather more exactly “About 15,000 Himalayan glaciers form a unique reservoir which supports perennial rivers such as the Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra which, in turn, are the lifeline of millions of people in South Asian Countries (Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, India and Bangladesh)”. “The earth keeps getting warmer” becomes “The earth keeps warming”. And a sentence that adds drama but not information, ” The glaciers will be decaying at rapid, catastrophic rates,” is dropped.
So no one specifically said the claims about the glaciers are wrong. But they did raise some other points to which, apparently, little heed was paid.
There’s a piece in The Economist this week on the mistakes about glaciers in one part of one volume of the fourth assessment report of the IPCC. An extract, with source links:
The [IPCC] WG-II case study cites a report by the WWF [pdf][see note below], an environmental group, as the source of the date 2035. The WWF in turn cites a study presented in 1999 to the International Commission on Snow and Ice (ICSI) [pdf] by Syed Hasnain, chair of ICSI’s working group on Himalayan glaciers.
But the passage about 2035 that the WWF report quotes comes not from that ICSI report (which was unpublished) but from an article that appeared around the same time in Down to Earth, an Indian magazine. This article was based in part on an interview with Dr Hasnain, who was also quoted by New Scientist as saying it was possible the glaciers would be gone in 40 years. The article in Down to Earth claims that the area covered by glaciers would drop from 500,000km2 to 100,000km2 by 2035, a claim found in the IPCC report but not in the WWF report. This suggests the Down to Earth article was itself a source for the IPCC, though Murari Lal, a retired Indian academic, now a consultant, who was one of the four co-ordinating lead authors of the chapter, says this was not the case.
There are two further problems with the area figure. One is that the research in question ["Variations of snow and ice in the past and present on a global and regional scale" UNESCO, ed V M Kotlyakov, 1996 pdf] was looking at all the world’s glaciers, not just the Himalaya’s. The other is that the research was looking at the prospects for 2350, not 2035.
Since that piece was written, it has been pointed out to me that the error in the WWF report was apparently corrected by the WWF in 2005.
Image from flickr user Bernt Rostad, used under a Creative Commons licence
My dear cousin Stephen was chiding me the other day for insufficient self publicity, which leads me to point to Seeing Further (Amazon UK, currently half price), a book of essays celebrating the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society which is edited by Bill Bryson and the excellent Jon Turney. Like many far worthier people, I have an essay in this handsome volume. The worthier in question include Bryson himself (excerpted here in the Times), Neal Stephenson, Simon Schaffer, the Margarets Atwood, Wertheim and Gee, Paul Davies, Ian Stewart, John Barrow, James Gleick, Greg Benford, the Richards Holmes, Fortey and Dawkins, Steve Jones, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Phil Ball, Georgina Ferry and Henry Petroski. Bayes, balloons, bridges, lightning, logarithms, monads, maths, museums, X-rays, extraterrestrials and the end of the world…
Various reviews:
The Independent (by PD Smith)
This superb collection of essays, extensively illustrated, is a fitting tribute [to the Society, which] has had 8,200 members, including Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Darwin, Ernest Rutherford and Francis Crick: people who radically transformed the way we see the world. As Bill Bryson rightly says, “this isn’t just the most venerable learned society in the world, it is the finest club.”
Mr Bryson or, more plausibly, Jon Turney, who is the contributing editor of the book, did not confine his selection of authors to those known for their scientific writing. Margaret Atwood, an award-winning Canadian novelist, offers her thoughts on the origin of the figure of the mad scientist, and Neal Stephenson, who writes science fiction, explores the point at which physics abuts metaphysics through the work of two great intellectuals, Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz.
The Telegraph (by Helen Brown)
As the essays build up we deepen our appreciation of the tensions between experimentation and mathematics, function and abstraction, creation and destruction, simplicity and complexity, harmony and chaos, individual genius and collective endeavour, and scientists and laymen.
The Guardian (by Tim Radford)
All contributors in their different ways also remind us that the show goes on. Do we see more clearly than Hooke and Newton did three and a half centuries ago? Oliver Morton argues that we may have traded one picture of the Earth for another, but our understanding of the globe remains incomplete; Ian Stewart reminds us that for all Galileo’s astuteness, even scientists can be oblivious to the subtle mathematics that underpin their research; John Barrow considers the apparent simplicity of cosmological physics and points out that we do not observe the laws of nature, we see only the outcomes of those laws. “Outcomes are much more complicated than the laws that govern them.”
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With many other people, we gathered in the Meeting House at the University of Sussex yesterday to mourn the loss and celebrate the life of Sheila Schaffer, mayor, activist, mother, grandmother, mother in law, socialist, friend, cricket enthusiast, environmentalist, walker, art lover, cyclist, sometime potter and inspiration.
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The Economist has a weekly online environment column called Green.view. Here’s a taster of what’s been up there in the past month.
This week, there’s a piece about the current cold weather, what it means, and what it doesn’t mean
One possible implication is a change in the prospects of the current poster child for climate change—Arctic sea ice. The extent of summer ice in the Arctic Ocean has been decreasing at a rate of about 8% per decade. In 2007, as the result of prior losses, peculiar sunniness in some areas and a particular disposition of winds, the ice levels fell spectacularly. That particular alignment of circumstances did not hold sway over the following years, which accordingly saw the ice bounce back somewhat. The current cold in mid latitudes might, counterintuitively, reverse that trend and reduce the ice cover further.
The atmosphere cannot make heat, or even hold that much of it. There is more heat stored in the top four metres of the oceans than in all the Earth’s atmosphere. So when the atmosphere cools down one part of the globe, it is a good rule of thumb that it is warming some other part. In the case of the current mid-latitude chill, it is the high latitudes that are seeing the warming. In Greenland and the Arctic Ocean, December was comparatively balmy. The air above Baffin Bay and the Davis Strait was 7ºC warmer than usual (though that still left it pretty cold).
Last week, we saw in the new year (and sort-of-decade) with a piece about a proposal to add some more time to the beginning of earth history
Rocks from 3.8 billion years ago to 2.5 billion years ago are assigned to the Earth’s earliest geological eon, the Archaean. Anything earlier—a few lumps of Greenland and Canada, and rock-residues preserved now only as inclusions in larger, later, rocks—are referred to as belonging to the Hadean, an informal and ill-defined but useful and evocative term.
The new proposal suggests not just that the Hadean should be formalised, but also that a new aeon, the Chaotian, should be recognised as extending extend further back in time than the Earth itself. The Chaotian would begin with the beginning of the cloud’s collapse, be punctuated in the middle with the ignition of the sun and come to an end with the collision that created the Earth-moon doublet in its sort of modern form. In a fit of further distinctions, the authors—Colin Goldblatt, a young researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Centre, and three older colleagues with considerable previous form in the framing of provocative hypotheses—suggest the Nephelean and Erebrean for the periods before the sun’s ignition, the Hyperitian and Titanomachean for those after.
And back in 2009, a look at the gap between the emissions that are reported and the levels of greenhouse gas that are measured.
ONE of the many sets of initials being bandied about at the climate conference in Copenhagen is MRV—monitoring, reporting and verification. In theory, it seems fairly straightforward: if countries commit themselves to limiting the production of particular greenhouse gases, they need to be able to keep track of what they are doing and to tell the rest of the world, which must in turn be able to verify the claims. In practice, there are any number of problems, one of which is that when you start to look at what is actually happening in the atmosphere, it does not necessarily resemble anything that is being reported. Countries therefore commit themselves to actions without any real idea of the current state of play. As Ray Weiss of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography put it at one of the many side events surrounding the negotiations on the Kyoto protocol and its eventual successor, it is like going on a diet without weighing yourself.
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In a Polish field
There’s something peculiarly wonderful about reading and enjoying a book that you would never have found for yourself. My friend John gave me Robert Kee’s A Crowd is Not Company (Amazon UK|US) for Christmas, a memoir of time spent as a POW in the Second World War. It’s a moving and fascinating read, and in its insights into how the world looks when you are separated from it it contains a passage which would have made a wonderful epigraph for Eating the Sun
Suddenly I awoke to the fact that I was staring at a tree on the other side of the road and that this tree was green and delicate. For a few moments I was intensely conscious of the tree and saw nothing else. Then I thought of all the trees I had taken for granted in the past — beside the Cherwell at Oxford or on the pavements of a Surrey suburb. Always I had regarded them as only incidental to the main theme, the real great things that were to happen to me. At the time I had wondered why this main theme somehow always eluded me, why the great events never materializes. Now as I looked at the tree I saw that the great things had been there all the time but I had mistaken them for the background.
A happy new year to you all
Images from Flickr user Hampshiregirl, used under a creative commons licence
Catch-up blogging part 3: While I was in Copenhagen Prospect published a longish piece on geoengineering which I wrote shortly before rejoining The Economist. A taster:
To understand geoengineering better, concentrate not on what it isn’t, or what you don’t want it to be; look instead at what it is, and what it could become. Geoengineering is not an alternative, but it can be an addition. This neglected set of ways in which people can alter climate should be part of mainstream debate on climate change, studied and assessed as a part of the whole. And that is going to require a far greater level of research. Despite all the public discussion there are only a few dozen people in the world contributing to the scientific literature.
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Catch-up blogging, part 2: Copenhagen, or Cop15, if you prefer, was a wild introduction to the diplomatic (I use the term loosely) side of climate politics. Here’s a brief note on the outcome from The Economist, which also ran a correspondent’s diary. What it all means is still sinking in, but I think the most helpful two pieces for a real understanding to date are Mark Lynas’s behind-the-scenes blame China piece in The Guardian and Sam Hummel’s 5 common misconceptions piece in Grist.
Update: Here’s a longer, fuller take from The Economist, and also a leader
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Catch-up blogging, part 1: As of a few weeks ago, I have become Energy and Environment Editor at The Economist. This means I have a new email address — first and last name, unpunctuated, at economist.com — which everyone is free to use for business relevant communications. What it means for my blogging here it is too early to say.
