Understanding weather, then climate

This is fun to post, as it is an update on Kristen Byrnes and a recent exchange which demonstrates just how much common sense and understanding she possesses, and, by inference, how both common sense and real understanding may be absent from the IPCC's politically motivated reports on climate change.

As an aside, I just wonder how many parents read this post and then (in love) look at their 15 or 16 year old and think...if only!

Tags: Kristen Byrnes, climate, weather, Australia, drought, IPCC

Economics, science and blogs

An interesting post by Hendrickson that open with this quote from Hayek:

• It is an approach which has come to be described as the 'scientistic' attitude - an attitude which, as I defined it some thirty years ago, 'is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed.'

Hayek realised that many attempts to blindly use numbers as a sheen for "science" were in fact obscuring a profoundly non-scientific approach to a subject. Hayek was discussing the state of economics but his comments are equally valid today to a whole range of subjects from climate change to species extinction.

Hendrickson goes on to discuss the emergence of a new trend within economics:

• While Levitt's arguments certainly have merit, his thesis is not what struck me as important. Levitt's musings were not published in a leading economic journal, but rather on his blog. Further, the comments were not accompanied by an econometric model that attempted to explain quality. In fact, especially poignant was that his writing was purely philosophical and based on simple economic principles.

What is causing economics to be revitalised and re-focused as a discipline is the increased and emergent use of blogs as a media for intellectual exchange.

This trend is likely to continue, as blogs allow for both a more immediate exchange of ideas and an interaction that is trans disciplinary: both features of contemporary issues in a globalized economy with a surfeit of information from disparate sources.

Tags: Hayek, economics, science, blogs

Same topics: new voices

Wanted to post some different sites, new to me but with a consistent theme: contemporary environmentalism and its message.

• a retired professor questioning the oft-cited sustainable population advocated by environmentalists
• a conservative blog pointing out environmental hypocrisy, and
• one of the most controversial right-wing commentators on climate change

For those who think spiked and Tech Central are extreme, recognize that the ideological spectrum extends a long ways, both left and right. On a spectrum from dynamist to stasist, dynamism covers a lot of diverse ideas about libertarianism, rational anarchy and individual empowerment -- just as stasism includes all manner of authoritarianisms, command and control advocates, technocrats, environmental idealists and social democrats.

Labels are useful descriptors but should not be used to pre-define content, acceptability nor our openness to read, understand and appreciate perspective.

update: and some stuff you just can't make up, see here and here

Tags: environmentalism, ideology, hypocrisy

Trust, Elections and Leadership

It has long been a contention of mine that the only commodity for which there is a real shortage is leadership. In all domains, world-wide, the most pressing constraint on dynamic change is effective leadership. Now there is no shortage of people who want to be in charge, give orders and manage or administer things: but they are not empowering change in others, inspiring people to be their best nor facilitating development and growth. The former want to exercise power: leadership is about exercising character.

The most important aspect of leadership is resonance: setting the basis by which others are most effective. This post highlights one of the defining characteristics for effective leadership in politics: trust.

Trust and how it is communicated greatly affects the ability of leaders to change dominant mind sets. It also is a pervasive characteristic of leadership in all domains, whether it is the effectiveness of a coach (such as the Raptors Sam Mitchell or Liverpool's Rafa Benitez) or the ability of an individual player to inspire a team (like Steven Gerrard) or epitomise a team ethos (like Jamie Carragher).

• basketball and the Raptors are one passion, a lifelong support for Liverpool continues especially with today's Championship Final (soccer).
• why the sports metaphor? Because good coaching is all about leadership. Because individual talent doesn't win championships and titles: teams do. Groups are not teams. Teams require an understanding of people skills and mostly, they require leadership.

There is no sustainability without teams; no teams without leadership, and; no leadership without trust.

see: Fullan and Doppelt.

Tags: trust, resonance, mind changing, leadership, empowerment, sustainability

Debunking myths

Three excellent posts today, each deconstructing a dominant ecomyth but with different media and approaches.

• The first comes from the Editor-at-Large of the Tribune papers, David Morgan. Adopting a conventional approach to journalism, Morgan examines the arguments, does his research and writes his assessment on global warming under the heading since when, and says who?
• The second, fights fire with fire and is a film to counter a film: an inconvenient truth...or convenient fiction? It presents a counter argument to the Gore film and does so in a similar, personalized narrative.
• The third uses a new media, blogging, to deconstruct the myth surrounding Rachel Carson's Silent Spring -- a book many environmentalists revere, but few actually have read. A book long on assertion and influence, but woefully short on scientific, empirical data.

Not much to add, other than to say there will be those who view all three and will instantly agree with what they say; there will be those who will instantly reject all that the sites suggest as falsehood, conspiratorial and/or seditious, and; there will be a third group for whom the attack on conventional ideas and icons will be new and challenging, causing them to think for themselves.

In the immortal words of Meatloaf: two out of three ain't bad.

update: submitted the above post before I finished all my reading for the day. Two additional reports fit the theme of myth debunking:

• this post on the supposed absence of any moderate Islamic response terrorism (its there but just ignored by the mainstream media who prefer to frame the issue in their ideological straightjacket rather than learn anything new), and
• this post on the decline of peer review to fear review: the fact that peer review is no longer a guarantee of good scholarship, objectivity and/or scientific evidence.

Tags: debunking, ecomyths, climate change, convenient fiction, Silent Spring, Islamic moderates, cancer studies, science, peer review

blogging, the internet and education

In response to a post by Jackie Danicki, who asked "what is your degree worth?", Brian Micklethwait has this short but thought-provoking commentary. He writes:

• I have long suspected that the main purpose of higher education is that you are proving that you are clever, rather than getting any cleverer. It's a signalling system, to enable you to communicate, very laboriously, with the world. So, the internet, the classic machine for enabling the individual to signal to and to communicate with the world, should be pretty good at replacing higher education. At any rate insofar as its signalling function is concerned.

The aspect of the internet mostly changing people's perception of traditional education? -- blogging. In particular, there is growing recognition and discussion of the role of blogs , both as a mass media, and as a replacement for both conventional education and conventional journalism, as a media for communicating and moulding public opinion.

So:

• what is the purpose of higher education in today's internet generation?
• is information and more research necessary for improved policy making in most areas?
• or is there an abundance of information, but a shortage of knowledge: knowing when and how to best apply that information?
• does higher education teach the judgement and inter-personal skills necessary to assist in the transformation of information into knowledge?
• are refereed journal articles the best benchmark of knowledge?
• what role can alternate media such as blogs play in the development and application of knowledge?

These questions will be recurrent themes within this blog as they appear to be foundational to tackling ecomyths in a positive and creative fashion.

Tags: blogging, education, knowledge, information, media, opinion

Understanding the global warming narrative

It is not often that a writer manages to approach a familiar subject and imbue in it a new meaning, an understanding that informs and provides guidance on how it should be analyzed and understood in the future. Josie Appleton has performed such a contribution with her review of a new book on global warming. It is easily the most original and provocative framing of the global warming narrative since Phillip Stott' summaries on Envirospin.

Appleton suggests that ..global warming is now not so much a problem to solve, as an issue around which to reorganise society.

She correctly identifies that the less self-reflective the science, and the more it is founded on political and moral campaigns, the less reliable it is likely to be. And...we see how global warming science has become a foil for a whole series of political and moral agendas, a way of discussing everything from the sins of consumerism to human arrogance.

Moreover, it is perhaps political rather than scientific analysis that can help us to understand the bias that underlies today's climate science. The notion of nature as fragile and subject to collapse is a relatively recent one, which is likely to owe more to the anxious zeitgeist than to climate realities.

Pivotal to this political framing is the positing of environmentalism as a moral choice. Appleton highlights a quote from Al Gore who stated:

• The climate crisis also offers us the chance to experience what very few generations in history have had the privilege of knowing: a generational mission; the exhilaration of a compelling moral purpose; a shared and unifying cause; the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside pettiness and conflict that so often stifle the restless human need for transcendence….'

She then explores the ramifications of climate as a moral mission:

• Here's the rub: when an environmental problem becomes a generational mission, nobody wants very much to solve it.
• Carbon dioxide becomes the nexus between individuals, the thing that connects us to other people and to the future of the planet. This infuses the most banal acts with a deep moral meaning.
• The campaign against global warming provides answers so that we no longer have to think about the questions. In Gore's words, this is 'the thrill of being forced by circumstances'. The certainty of planetary emergency seems to provide a cause that is solid, a cause that is not chosen and therefore beyond dispute and doubt. It is this relief of finding a point of ideological certainty that explains the grip of global warming on the contemporary imagination.
• The notion of teleology that appeared first in Christianity (Christ's birth, death and return), then liberalism (progress towards a state of perfect liberty), and then certain brands of Marxism (the development of productive forces, leading towards revolution), appears now in the form of climatology. The progress of civilisation is re-read in terms of the accumulation of carbon dioxide, which will eventually – and as a result of feedback that occurs independently of human will – lead to a dramatic transformation in the planet's climate. Apocalypse and final judgement are replaced by the 'tipping point', with the downward spiral into the circles of global warming hell.

In contrast, climate change could be viewed as just another environmental issue to be resolved. How? The same way humans have resolved all real problems: by adaptation through the application of ingenuity and technological advancement.

• Techno-fixes are not some airy-fairy notion, some leap of faith. This is otherwise known as innovation, the only way that environmental problems have ever been solved or new energy systems produced. I am not aware of a major environmental problem successfully tackled by the mass of people consciously and systematically abstaining from some or other desirable activity. The lesson of history is that techno-fixes happen, and they happen fast in societies that are looking for solutions.

Appleton concludes:

• We need a new school of thought in the global warming debate, which is founded not on scientific facts but on political critique. It is only this that can explain the way in which the issue is framed, or its hold over social life and public debate.

It's not often I read something that causes me to pause and reflect as profoundly as did this article by Appleton. I have quoted from it extensively as it is both well written and well worth reading in its entirety. My only fear is that in the compartmentalized world of academia, many climate scientists will either fail to read it and/or fail to understand its import for the meaning of what they do and how it is their science is used in the real world politics of contemporary ecomyths.

Ponder the Maunder:update

Kristen Byrnes has this update to her website, Ponder the Maunder. It is an essay she wrote in response to the many emails she received from parents and students who had been shown Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" at school. Kristen's essay is, as usual, thorough in its research, well written and cogent. It is also a lesson in the difference between what education is and what it should be.

My question is: how many teachers who have presented Inconvenient Truth to their classes, also took the time to research item by item its veracity? Who is the student here and who is the teacher?

I expect Kristen will have her choice of university: I certainly hope so, as she is just the type of student every program needs: bright, articulate and most of all, an independent thinker.

And for those who still choke on receiving an education from a high-schooler, here is the latest post discussing the increasing level of skepticism on AGW and why it is increasing.

Tags: Kristen Byrnes, Inconvenient Truth, skepticism, climate, AGW, education

Zimbabwe and sustainable development

Sometimes its hard to think of an obvious oxymoron. However, the decision by the UN to appoint Zimbabwe to chair its Commission on Sustainable Development makes the task of ready contradiction much simpler. Despite clear, well-founded opposition, common sense and any sense of program integrity, the UN bureaucracy has again shown itself to be impervious to any logic or principle other than that of its own, arcane politics.

Zimbabwe: sustainable development.

Now I really do agree it is time to re-think, re-define and re-conceptualize the foundational construct for environmental policy and resource management.

update: good commentary here and here

Thoughts from Reid Bryson

A wonderful interview is reported here with the Dean of North American meteorology, Reid Bryson. Emeritus Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Bryson is now 86 and appears to have lost none of his intellectual insight. He gives this pithy and graphic metaphor for putting contemporary climate change in context:

• We ask Bryson what could be making the key difference:
• Q: Could you rank the things that have the most significant impact and where would you put carbon dioxide on the list?
• A: Well let me give you one fact first. In the first 30 feet of the atmosphere, on the average, outward radiation from the Earth, which is what CO2 is supposed to affect, how much [of the reflected energy] is absorbed by water vapor? In the first 30 feet, 80 percent, okay?
• Q: Eighty percent of the heat radiated back from the surface is absorbed in the first 30 feet by water vapor…
• A: And how much is absorbed by carbon dioxide? Eight hundredths of one percent. One one-thousandth as important as water vapor. You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.

Wonder if Al Gore realizes this: maybe all we need is new UN agency devoted to stamping out spitting and our dilemma with climate change will all be resolved.

update: short post here, but a wonderful series of comments to follow on the news that Neptune has now joined Mars in warming at the same time as good old Terra: perhaps it is the sun??

Tags: climate change, water vapor, Bryson