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

Education and the revolution

All democracies in the developed world are facing a common set of policy challenges, including health care and education. While health policy appears to change very slowly (if at all) and debate is rarely about fundamental policy choices, education policy seems to be constantly changing as new ideas are in vogue and as soon as the next great innovation supplants yesterday's shining new ideas. It is in this policy milieu, that Emily Hill ponders the possibilities for educational reform in Britain in the wake of Tony Blair's departure. As she explains, under Blair British schools changed from being knowledge centres into social-engineering labs:

• ...schools have become one of the principal instruments for manipulating a new generation into new thought patterns...This imposition of new rules and methods distances children from their own education.
• In the school I visited, the early years teacher seemed to have lost confidence in her own ability to teach, following a negative Ofsted inspection. Her paperwork had been found wanting...Teachers, like every other public sector worker under New Labour, now drown in paperwork. There is an incessant flood of forms that need filling.
• It is now all about the paperwork. Like a Soviet Five-Year Plan, if it's down on paper, it happened – if it's not, it didn't. So this school was hauled up for a 'culture of bullying' – not because it had a bullying problem (it didn't), but because it did not have a government-advised system of 'playground angels' and 'buddy benches' to deal with any potential bullying that might arise or have already arisen without the teachers noticing.
• The targets obsession also masks a central problem with Blair's education revolution. New Labour is unable to articulate what a good education should consist of, and thus it simply draws up lists of things that children ought to be able to do or say or write by a certain age.
• Children have been set on the conveyor belt of education. They have become, as the former employee of a government quango said last week, 'widgets on an assembly line'. Yet they're on an assembly line to nowhere; they will be equipped with a clutch of awards and grades and they will be able to articulate their feelings in a government-endorsed manner, but will the new generation really understand things and be able to think critically and independently?

There are many excellent new educational ideas extant, including teaching initiatives based around instructional intelligence, the increased use of emotional intelligence to inform teaching practices and the development of new software for classroom use. The problem does not lie with these innovations but, rather, with their imposition within a state-mandated, state-enforced and ideologically driven agenda for the purpose of education -- as the primary form of stasis social engineering and not as a means for individuals to learn self-responsibility, awareness, citizenship and life skills.

Sadly, what Hill describes as the wreckage wrought by Blair's Orwellian approach to society is a pattern other jurisdictions and sectors of education have emulated. At all levels of education, forms, grades and paperwork are in danger of supplanting real learning.

Teachers are either good or bad: no inbetweeens.

Good teachers are, first and foremost, enthusiastic and passionate -- they are genuinely interested in those they are teaching and they work to improve their craft on an ongoing basis. These are the teachers who will adopt best professional practices and have little or nothing to gain from persistent, intrusive and bureaucratic oversight.

Bad teachers are those will little to no enthusiasm for those they are teaching, little or no innate teaching craft, little passion to invest time and energy in developing their craft and minimal engagement in learning objectives. For these "teachers", bureaucracy is a wonderful shield behind which they can obscure their failings, lack of desire for learning and/or their pompous, self-righteousness.

Little wonder then that the Blair years have been so detrimental to the British school system despite their avowed goal of the opposite effect.

update:

• and then, of course, there's always the situation where bad teaching and bad administration become synonymous: no education is better than bad education
  

Tags: education, Blair, reform. stasis, social engineering

The 21st Century's dividing lines

Its nice to be at the vanguard of new intellectualism. This post underscores the need for new defining constructs in understanding the world and advocates Virginia Postrel's use of dynamism and statsis. The organizing construct for this blog is dynamism and its application to dismissing the ecomyths employed to justify stasis controls: indeed, the inaugural post on this blog was similar in vein to that posted today on the Globalization Institute.

update:
found this image from a link on QandO today and couldn't resist the literal mind map:

Tags: dynamism, stasis, Postrel, constructs

Peer Reviews and Scientific Consensus

Within academia the gold standard for publication remains peer reviewed journals. Indeed, for many academics, it is the sole standard: so much so in some disciplines, that books (especially textbooks) and any other forms of publication (especially blogs), are discounted relative to peer-reviewed journal articles when decisions are made with respect to tenure, promotion and merit pay. Despite numerous examples of peer-review bias, failings and inaccuracy, the system often appears to be sacrosanct. It is within this context that this post is significant, especially as it profiles comments made by an eminent and well-seasoned academic.

As the review points out:

• Personal vendettas, ideological conflicts, professional jealousies, methodological disagreements, sheer self-promotion and a great deal of plain incompetence and irresponsibility are no strangers to the scientific world; indeed, that world is rife with these all-too-human attributes. In no event can peer review ensure that research is correct in its procedures or its conclusions.
• Peer review, on which lay people place great weight, varies from important, where the editors and the referees are competent and responsible, to a complete farce, where they are not.

This does not mean that peer-reviewed journals should be abandoned, nor should they be disregarded. However, it does mean we should not place them on an unwarranted not uncritical pedestal, nor should we ignore the value that new media, such as blogs and on-line journals, have as alternative venues for intellectual discourse.

Tags: peer review, bias, blogs, academia

Statistics, climate statistics and a lack of clarity

The title to this post is a little play on words and the familiar aphorism of 'lies, damn lies and statistics'. Part of the problem with climate is the lack of transparency and the selective framing of data to fit pre-determined ideological positions. So, one group will complain about mis-interpreted data, while themselves practising mis-interpretation. Meanwhile, others are staking their territory within the sociology of the science whilst conveniently excluding others, who's views are often mis-represented. Finally, data are released to the public with great alarmism without any caveats that might otherwise temper there utility.

As the follow up posts on each of these posts indicate, there are some observers who feel that overall, the exchange between science and policy is steadily improving: at the same time, there are those who see it the exact opposite way, with academia becoming even more exclusionary.

My own hope is that the blogosphere will continue to flourish, open-source journals and on-line publishing will increase and that knowledge will become more democratic and free: but it is a hope, not a prediction.

Tags: climate, data, hockey stick, Swindle, Arctic, ideology

Ideology and framing political debate

Although this post is primarily concerned with US Federal politics it is relevant to any area of public policy and environmentalism in particular. It makes the point that many activists embrace

...the strange belief that politics is all about noise' and narratives'; whoever makes the most noise or gets the most Google hits is going to win, regardless of objective reality.

In this view of public policy, the prevailing sentiment is

... a belief that political discourse ought to be judged solely by its real-world effects...the notion of pursuing truth for its own sake nonsensical. Their interest in ideas, and facts, is purely instrumental.

and the relevant metric is no longer true versus untrue:

To an activist, the relevant metric is politically helpful versus politically unhelpful....A war of ideas, though, is not an intellectual process; it is a political process. As...Leon Wieseltier has written if you are chiefly interested in the consequences, then you are not chiefly interested in the ideas.

Again, apply these constructs to any contemporary ecomyth: the truth is incidental. Science is incidental. The only reality is the idealized "green", and whatever it takes to move people to that reality is justified.

That this is then framed as social justice is perhaps the biggest deceit.

Environmentalism uses science selectively to advocate its political ideology. It is not about intellectual scientific discourse: it is about compelling people to comply with a set of ideological constructs and dogma that are intellectually deficient.

Tags: ideology, Netroots, ecomyths, framing, politics, science

Mouthwash for a smokestack

Forget replacing lightbulbs (a symbolic gesture to bring the "problem" to light, so to speak) if reducing carbon dioxide emissions is ever to be achieved it will be through technological change in areas were emissions are large. This technology is progressing beyond the development stage and offers intriguing possibilities, especially for retro-fitting old generating stations and for the likely addition of new power: how does the efficient provision of new technology alter the public perception of various power generating options such as coal, natural gas and nuclear versus more expensive, less efficient but green-advocated options such as wind, tidal, solar etc.?

Meanwhile, the public relations framing on climate continues, with a release from the UK Met Office cashing in on higher than seasonable temperatures in Britain to proclaim April 2007 as the warmest on record. To which the JunkScience site responds:

• What didn't make the release:
• "Mean Central England Temperature ranked coldest to warmest from 1659 to 2007", www.hadobs.org
  
  Warmest January to date is 1916, second warmest, 1796
  Warmest February to date is 1779, second warmest, 1869
  Warmest March to date is 1957, second warmest, 1938
  
• This is the warmest April at 11.1, (provisional), beating the previous warmest, 10.6, in 1865, 143 years ago. Half a degree in 143 years, 0.035 degrees per decade. Wow, that's hot. CO2 really piles on the heat

Tags: technolgical change, climate, scrubbers, temperature, framing

correlation and causation

This comment was originally posted as a response to a discussion point on ClimateAudit.
The thread focused on the alleged discrepancy in the Great Global Warming Swindle documentary. The producer acknowledges the error and will correct it prior to the release of Swindle on DVD. Meanwhile, many, many proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) have jumped on this error as "proof" of the program's entire irrelevancy. The discussion at ClimateAudit lauds the scrutiny aimed at Swindle but queries why those self-same guardians of scientific integrity do not similarly deconstruct the IPCC report or Gore's Inconvenient Truth, or acknowledge the errors both have when others do establish them.

It is within this thread and discussion that Francois Ouelette posted this comment:

• Francois Ouellette says:

• May 1st, 2007 at 7:33 am

• I urge everyone to pay attention to Friis-Christensen’s statement:

• For a physicist a break down of a correlation where you would expect one is just as – or sometimes even more - informative as a good correlation when it comes to the ultimate goal, which is to understand the physics. Climatologists are more concerned whether the observations fit their preconceived model and prefer to describe solar activity by one single parameter.

• The breakdown of the correlation between sunspots and temperature is used ad nauseam as an argument against a larger solar role in 20th century warming. Read RealClimate for example. Yet, as Steve points out, the same argument does not seem to hold for the divergence problem, or for the simple fact that CO2 and temperature do not correlate during the period. Thomoas Kuhn has described how, when faced with “anomalies”, scientists tend to refer to ad-hoc hypothesis to salvage a theory. In this case it’s either aerosols, or CO2 fertilization, or what else. But the anomalies are real, and they may indicate a more serious flaw in the theory. The same applies to any solar theory. There is a breakdown in correlation after the late 1980’s. Which just goes to show that, as Friis-Christensen aptly points out, correlations are but a clue to an underlying physical mechanism. One must then elucidate such mechanism before proceeding further, and, for example, including the mechanism in climate models.

• There could be many physical reasons why the global temperature stops correlating well with the solar cycle at the end of the 80’s. GHG’s are one of them. Other human influences on climate are possible, as repeatedly pointed out by Roger Pielke Sr. It could also be that the mechanism linking the sun and the climate is just not linear, and past a certain level of solar activity (which is what happened lately), we enter a different regime. There could be a feedback or threshold effect that we’re not aware of. I have a paper somewhere (too lazy to look for it this morning) that has analyzed the correlation between the sun and the climate using wavelets, and they do see a change in the pattern at the end of the 20th century. There is still a correlation, but it seems to change phase or something. Phase changes have been noted by others whenever there was a big volcano eruption, like the Pinatubo in 1991.

• So there is plenty of “juice” left in the solar-climate link research program. Whether that program will be allowed to proceed or will be censored by the pontiffs of AGW is an important question. Do we let scientific progress be conditional on political and ideological rectitude? Many argue that we are in a “post-normal” science era, where anything goes, as long as it suits a particular point of view. That would indeed lead us to disaster.

• OT (but not quite): I’ve just seen the movie “The lives of others”, a German movie about how everybody was spied on in east Germany. All in the name of the good socialist state. Having known many former east-Germans (especially scientists), I know that this was just too real. Is that what we want?

Every so often, you read something so concise and accurate in its tone that it would be an injustice to paraphrase or selectively quote its meaning. That's how I feel about the above comment.

Scrutiny in science is good. Data disclosure and archiving should be the norm. Errors are something to learn from not hide from. False allegiance to dubious hypothetical constructs and post-normal science are a recipe for totalitarianism.

As another post states:

• Grosverson says: May 1st, 2007 at 9:14 am

• Let’s see, where have I seen this type of double standard before? Oh yes, in religion and politics. If catastrophic AGW is a religion or political movement, this double standard would all make sense.

• This type of double standard in criticizing the faithful vs. criticizing heretics is common in religious hierarchies or political autocracies. It’s certainly not science.

Tags: Swindle, Inconvenient Truth, IPCC, integrity, errors, science, climate, correlation, causation

Daily Show Slams Green Celebs

Here is a link to the Daily Show take on Green Day. 

 

However,  I suspect that anyone reading this blog either has already seen the clip (live, on YouTube or Google) or will have no idea who or what the Daily Show.  Or you could be like me in that you know what the Daily Show is, don't watch it regularly but do appreciate humour on pretentious topics. 

 

Either way its a good reminder for one of my favourite Ed Foreman mantras: life is about laughter, loving and living...not worry whining or work!