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The FT is doing a lot of climate stuff at the moment, not all of which I have caught up with, and much of which I am sure is excellent, but this para in yesterday’s broadly fine leader on following the science is flat wrong:
Fortunately the science becomes much clearer when we move from predicting the climate itself to assessing how best to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Forget about esoteric “geo-engineering” proposals to cool the earth. Technology that already exists (or is in development) can do the job perfectly well by increasing the efficiency with which we use carbon-based energy.
The point here is not that I disagree with the notion of ignoring geoengineering — reasonable people can and do differ on that, as noted last week. But the idea that the earth can be cooled by using carbon-based energy more efficiently is just not true. Efficiency can slow the rate of warming — but any meaningful cooling will need zero-emissions energy and probably a fair bit of direct air carbon capture too.
Unsuprisingly, the letters in today’s issue do not point out this error, because they are from people objecting instead to following the scientific consensus — including one from a chap who claims that there was once a scientific consensus that the world was flat. Can we get a better class of sceptic please?
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Not by me, not my leg...
This thought from Bruno Latour seems spectacularly apposite to my work:
The dream of going to another world is just that: a dream, and probably also a deep sin.
But to seize, or seize again, this world, this same, one-and-only world — to grasp it otherwise: that’s not a dream, that’s a necessity.
Image from flickr user Enro, used under a creative commons licence
Steven Levitt, at the end of a long post on his freakonomics blog about Superfreakonomics and geoengineering:
For all the blogosphere shouting against our chapter, I have to be honest and say that I just don’t get it. I can’t understand why any environmentalist who really cares about the Earth’s future could say with a straight face that geoengineering doesn’t deserve a seat at the table as the global-warming debate heats up.
This mischaracterises the debate/furore/ritual clubbing/whatever (see previous posts). Quite a lot of the people attacking superfreakonomics — eg Brad Delong — *do* want geoengineering to have a seat at the table. It’s just that they don’t like the superfreaks’ treatment of the subject — and may, as I do, think such treatment is going to make it harder to get that seat, not easier. They, and I, are criticising the chapter not because geoengineering shouldn’t be taken seriously, but because Levitt and Dubner don’t seem to be trying to take it seriously: their handling of the issue is partial and unsatisfactory. It mixes a poorly tempered enthusiasm for geoengineering with some tired tropes of global warming denialism (which serve no clear purpose in the argument), and it frames the idea specifically as an alternative to emissions reductions (“Mt Pinatubo versus Al Gore”, “solve the whole global warming problem”) rather than as an additional strategy should there be a need for prompt cooling.
From the evidence of his post Levitt sort-of-gets some of this: that is why he says that the chapter in question is really about “how could we most efficiently cool the earth fast”, rather than other questions such as “how can we most equitably manage the risk of climate change”. But: a) while it may well be that a close reading provides textual support for the idea that the superfreaks acknowledge the narrow focus of their question, the chapter sure gives the impression that it is about climate change in general; b) asking “how can we most efficiently cool the earth fast” without asking broader questions about climate change is intellectually shallow; c) even in the narrow frame, surely “how could we most efficiently cool the earth fast and keep it cool” is a better question, with a more complex answer.
Generosity dictates, though, that we should also look more generally at the real phenomenon that Levitt points to: people who don’t want geoengineering discussed at all, or only under the strictest of limits. I disagree with these people. But I don’t find it very hard to understand where they are coming from. Here are five components to their arguments, as I see them.
- Geongineering adds to the climate risks unconscionably. Volcanoes, and by implication other stratospheric-veil schemes, screw with hydrology; cloud brightening can change ocean currents; ocean fertilization radically rearranges ecosystems: we don’t know how to do any of these things well, and if we sanction the general idea that geoengineering is plausible we are prohibitively unlikely to retire all these risks before going ahead with a scheme. As applied to geoengineering research this is partly an epistemological argument (the impossibility of getting knowledge of a high enough quality) and partly a slippery slope argument. I think in general slippery slope arguments are overblown, but I can see where this line of reasoning is coming from. (There is also a linked concern about crowding out research money for other aspects of climate, but I think that’s a sceond tier argument)
- It is reasonable to distrust a priori the motives of anyone who tries to argue for any approach to global warming other than emissions reduction. People feel this because they know, from experience and analysis, that that there are extremely powerful lobbies which want to slow or derail emissions reduction, and assume that pretty much anyone saying anything along those lines is doing so as either a dupe or a tool of those lobbies. There is an element of cognitive miserliness in this; but where one person says cognitive miser another might say cognitively prudent, and ask why he or she should bother wasting cognition on a subject when past experience has given them a pretty damn good inductive basis for thinking such an investment of thought will be wasted.
- I think its clearly true that many environmentalists have a pre-existing desire for people to live low-impact, low-consumption lives, often because they sincerely believe that this will make everyone happier. To some extent, and with various levels of awareness that they are behaving in this way, some of these people see concern about global warming as an instrumental way to bring a low-consumption low-impact work of some sort about. This is not to say they are insincere in their concern about global warming: merely that it is overdetermined. I personally would rather people separated out these two strands of their thought, but I can see as a matter of fact that they frequently don’t, and I’m sure if Steve Levitt was really trying to “get” things he could see that to.
- The first moral argument. At an everything-I-need-to-know-I-learned-in-kindergarten level people think that when you make a mess you should clean it up, not paint over it, even if painting over it is much easier. This is not a particularly good argument, and will have little if any traction with people who see the world in terms of costs and benefits — but it is an argument that people can feel easily and clearly, and feelings about the morality of pollution run deep.
- The second moral argument: the purpose of environmental action is to restore nature. This means getting back to a preindustrial sort of a climate, with lower greenhouse gases and no permanent high-altitude smogs. For me, this is a flawed argument, a planet-wide application of the naturalistic fallacy; I think correct environmental action is much more complex, and that increasing the possibilities for human happiness matters more than an idealised concern for nature. But I understand that other people don’t feel this way.
There is doubtless more to geoengineering opposition than this, but these five points seem to me to cover a great deal of it. The important thing is to grasp that geoengineering is at some level just another form of climate change, that there are a great many of ways in which people disagree about climate change, and that it helps to understand them. If Steven Levitt wants to understand all this better, then he ought to buy a copy of Mike Hulme’s “Why we disagree about global warming” (Amazon US|UK), as discussed in the Copenhagen reading list post.
PS: Recent useful contributions to the superfreakonomics debate: an interview with Ken Caldeira by Jeff Goodell, whose book on all this is going to be way better than Superfreakonomics, and Daniel Davies on what contrarians should expect.
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Somewhere along the way...
I do not deny either the charms of high speed rail, nor the economic and social/cultural case for it in a lot of markets. In the UK I am not sure about the routes being proposed — the ideas feel too London-centric and Scotland-tropic — and worried that pricing will be a pitfall. People fly Edinburgh to London not because they want to but because it is for the most part a lot cheaper; TGV works because of TGV pricing. (On the routes, since you ask: make Birmingham the high-speed hub to the greatest extent possible, with direct lines to Stratford and thus Chunnel, Leeds via Manchester, Bristol via Heathrow on an L-shaped line that eventually carries on to Cardiff over the top of the Severn Barrage. Birmingham to Glasgow/Edinburgh via Manchester (or Liverpool) later, maybe after direct Exeter-Bristol-Birmingham line.)
But that is all by the by. What I meant to post to say is that low speed rail has charms too. Last month I went from Denver to San Francisco with Amtrak, a journey that took a 34 hours: 08:00 from Denver and delivered by bus to the Caltrain depot at about 17:30. The train was rerouted North, up the front range and then across the very empty bottom of Wisconsin Wyoming [Doh! Why do I keep doing that? Thanks Kevin] before getting to Ogden and Salt Lake City; then through Utah and over the Donner Pass and down into California. Not as scenic as the route due West from Denver, but not too bad (and means I have the other route to look forward to some other time). I had time to read the best part of two good books (Patricia Nelson Limerick’s wonderful Something in the Soil, picked up at the equally wonderful Tattered Cover and much enjoyed, and Mike Hulme’s very stimulating Why We Disagree About Climate Change, which I should review here sometime), to listen to some podcasts and music, watch a good chunk of the second season of Friday Night Lights (Jesse Plemons, inter alia, is just terrific), get a moderately good night’s sleep and stare out of the window at deserts, bison, mountains, forests, coal trains, the moon, windfarms (a lot of windfarms), emptiness, America, and all that. All in all pretty terrific. Good for a road warrior on a tight schedule? No. Calming and enriching? Yes. Cheap, too.
And yet there is only one train a day and it is more than half empty. I’ve never done a trip of similar distance by road, so can’t say if that really has greater charms, but sort of doubt it. Why do not more people see the charms of this? Is everyone really that rushed? Or do other people find it easy to take time out in the normal run of things, and not have to spend 1000 miles or whatever in a metal can in order to calm down and chill out?
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Paul Davies’s article on one-way Mars missions in the Guardian irritated me this morning, so I posted a response over on MainlyMartian (in among the cobwebs, etc). Check it out if Mars is your thing…
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Time on the enthusiasms of Japan’s new prime minister’s wife:
“I also eat the sun,” Hatoyama said on the program, looking up with her eyes closed, raising her arms high as if she was tearing pieces off an imaginary sun. “Like this, hum, hum, hum. It gives me enormous energy.”
“My husband has recently started doing that too,” said the 66-year-old Hatoyama, who was born to Japanese parents in Shanghai and met her husband in the United States where he was a Ph.D student at Stanford.
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I. M. Pei's wonderful NCAR building
I have the honour of being a media fellow at America’s National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder this week, which is a lot of fun. I and some others (notably Chris Mims) are tweeting some of what’s going on, if you’re interested.
Image from Flickr user trickofthelight under a creative commons licence
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Here’s the first image from GOES 14, currently somewhere over the Galapagos, and due to go into on orbit storage after all its systems are checked out. Pretty impressive to have a satellite system with enough capacity to keep two on orbit spares (14 and 13) backing up the two devoted to the primary mission (11 is acting as GOES West, stationed over a point about 3,000km southeast of Hawaii, 12 as GOES East, stationed over a point close to the northernmost tip of Peru, more or less due south of Philadelphia).
For comparison, here’s the first ever GOES image, from 1975. All told, this has to be a pretty impressive dataset.
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William Carlos Williams, austere but dispositive in Spring and All
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—
John Updike’s faith, and doubt, refusing seasonal metaphor in Seven Stanzas at Easter
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.
Philip Larkin, the weight of last lost years uncharacteristically leavened in The Trees (audio)
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
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The exhibit hall at the Palais des Nations, 1958
As I said, seeing a vast turbine blade in the hall at the Cpenhagen meeting, and three pretty vast blades revolving at a stately pace outside, was quite impressive. Pales a bit compared to the displays available at the Second International Conference on Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy in Geneva in 1958, though. As Dan O’Neill sets the scene in The Firecracker Boys:
A full scale cutaway model of the Shippingport reactor core towered forty feet above conference-goers “in the centre of a rotunda where the story of the U.S. atomic energy program was told with numerous large, color transparencies,” according to an AEC report. Over the first five days of the conference, a team from the AEC’s Argonne National Laboratory assembled, in the full view of visitors, an operating nuclear reactor. In a special ceremony on the sixth day, former AEC chairman [Lewis] Strauss brought the ten-kilowatt reactor to criticality by inserting a radioactive “wand” into a control device.
Now that’s what I call an exhibit… There’s more in the AEC’s press release (pdf)
