Integrated Man

Houston, We have a problem.

 

This blog is inspired by a post from Barry Ritholtz. Mr. Ritholtz, in his usual top-down, holistic approach to issues, attempts to put into context a claim that 49 'NASA scientists'  dispute their agency's position on Climate Change.  He easily infers that the number is insignificant in the context of the total number of NASA employees who are scientists and engineers, and notes that such out-of-context assertions are all too typical of the Climate Change Deniers' cohort.  But that is inference, however correct.

Dueling Dogmas - Clim-Ergy

Two different agendas continue to evolve, but with increasing and disturbing convergence: Climate and Energy, which I have previously dubbed: Clim-Ergy.

Andrew Revkin's blog regarding last week's duel on Climate Change in the Wall Street Journal and a follow-up post discuss the ongoing debate within the scientific community regarding the merits of the Climate Change proposition. Finally, in a muted sense of desperation (I infer) Mr. Revkin added this post at the end of the week, seeking a path to some common ground on which consensus can evolve.

Mr. Revkin is a voice of reason among those who believe that Climate Change is real and serious. He has endeavored to hold true to the facts that he knows, to acknowledge what is not yet known and rightfully open to serious debate, and to respectfully challenge positions that are deficient in fact and logic.  The efforts of Mr. Revkin and like-minded advocates of Climate Change are, however, undermined by efforts by a self appointed truth squad comprised of the League of Conservation Voters, 360.org, and Forecast the Facts to hold meteorologists accountable in declaring their beliefs on climate change and duly reflecting them in their interpretation of weather events and trends.

I can appreciate the frustration of these groups to some small degree.  I've heard more than one 'weather personality' (can't always tell which ones are degreed meteorologists and which ones got their degrees out of a box of Fruit Loops with a magic decoder ring) take some patently stupid positions on climate change, using examples that a seventh grader could challenge. But the notion that meteorologists should submit to a litmus test on Climate Change, like prospective Supreme Court justices on abortion, is utterly absurd. 

There seems to be a turf battle between many in the meteorology and climatology communities that suggests that they are, above all else, humans sharing the same frailties as the rest of us.  Too often, the science seems to take a back seat to ego, or so it seems to this outsider.

I don't expect meteorologists to take a position on climate change, any more than I expect climatologists to predict the weather in Guilford for the next 10 days.  Neither is really capable of the other's work. This seems somewhat ironic because weather is climate on the instalment basis. But it is mere noise in a vastly complex and long cycle system.  While climatologists and meteorologists may share a data set, they look at it from very different perspectives, as appropriate to their specific purposes. 

To use an analogy, I look to Ben Bernanke to give me a sense of where the economy may go over the next ten years as an extrapolation of today's structural dynamics.  But I wouldn't look to him for advice in picking stocks when the exchanges open tomorrow.  That's not his skill set.  Nor would I look to a professional stock trader (the market equivalent of a meteorologist) to tell me what the scenarios for the economy are likely to be for the next ten years. Different skill set; different data set. But they both speak in dollars.

What I do expect of meteorologists, and get too rarely, is factual perspective on weather events to put them in meteorological perspective, not climatic perspective.  And I expect meteorologists to speak to what they know within their professional competence and the facts. Too many have gone off the ranch and deserve to be hit by bolts of lightning in the subject matter of climate.

But some in the Climate Community are no better.  To the East Anglia crowd we can now add the League of Conservation Voters, et al, in their truth squad campaign.  The silliness begins with the title 'Forecast Facts'.  You don't forecast facts.  You don't predict facts, unless you presume to be Nostradamus, which is a whole nother problem.  You forecast POSSIBILITIES and PROBABILITIES based on known historical facts, and inferred dynamics that suggest trends.

I share the frustration of the League of Conservation Voters that there is not a consensus on whether or not the planet is warming among a profession that should at least know that much, but their truth-squad-taking-names strategy is no answer. It is a form of intimidation, no better than the right wing attorney general who has investigated a climate scientist at a state university.

Getting back to Mr. Revkin's third post seeking common ground, I wish him luck.  On a much smaller scale, I have sought this within my own community by urging my government to adopt measurements of climatic factors as they relate specifically to Guilford that can establish a fact base that people can identify with through their own direct observations, and move the subject beyond conjecture on global predictions of little direct correlation to our specific circumstances.  We have only now begun, after seven years, to take tentative steps in that direction.  By the time the process bears fruit, I suspect that events will overtake it. We may arrive at the desired destination, but lost valuable time in the process. And once we have established the premise beyond reasonable doubt, the debate will begin around reasonable response with equal division and ferocity.

But it is Mr. Revkin's first blog that holds the true seed of common ground to Climate Change, except that it's in Energy. The solution to the Climate Change dilemma, as noted in a quote from economist Gary Yohe, is to deal with it through the idiom of the Constrained Energy Dilemma, recognizing energy as an exhaustible resource in the long term, and taxing it accordingly in the short term to accomplish the rationing that the capitalistic market mechanism are unwilling or incapable of doing. (See Clim-Ergy: It's About Time and The False Economics of Fossil Fuels ) Reducing the demand for energy will reduce the carbon footprint, and thus reduce the risk of the worst projections for climate change.  It will also create economic benefits that should be a motivator, unless your dividends are earned and you pay stub is punched in the fossil fuel industries.

And that's where the argument comes full circle, and even Dr. Yohe's perceptive solution hits the opposite side of the same brick wall confronting climate change.  The road to consensus on energy policy is no less strewn with dogmatic debris than the one on climate change.

Clim-Ergy. The two issues are inextricably linked. They must be dealt with as such, dealt with directly, and dealt with now. There are no shortcuts or detours on the road to our destiny.

Onward

20120205

Copyright 2012

 

 

 

 

It's the Environment, Stupid!

First, let me apologize for the lack of creativity in the title. If imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, then Bill deserves his due.  More to the point, though, is that the original hook of the nineties deserves, indeed demands, to be updated to the new century, with its new priorities.

Got Reality? Climate Change, Energy and Public Policy

And so it begins, the unraveling of 'concerted ignorance' by random pulses of reality.

Two interesting articles appeared in the online edition of The Economist last week. The first, Why Don't Americans Believe in Global Warming? sought to understand why the U.S. is persistent in failing to come to grips with the reality of Climate Change. 

The second, Are Economists Erring on Climate Change?  ,explored the discomfort of economists in coming to grips with an issue that defies the logic and comfort of their statistical foxholes.

SOTU: The speech I wish Obama had given

President Obama's State of the Union Speech had many promising elements, but ultimately failed when it desperately needed to succeed. It's primary failure was in obsessing on a future too vague. Its corollary failure was in presenting energy investment as a virtue rather than an existential necessity. He could have done better, because no doubt he knows better.  And in the context of SOTU, Carol Browner's departure seems hardly a surprise.

What follows is the speech I wish he had given:

Got Energy? The State of the Union

Today's Politico carries a piece by Darren Samuelsohn and Darren Goode entitled "President Obama Pressured to keep energy focus in State of the Union Address". I applaud the basic thrust of the recommendation, except that the premises for its propagation grossly understate the urgency of the issue. At the risk of repeating themes of previous blogs, it is worth yet again belaboring a few points.

Specifically, it's not just about creating jobs through a 'clean energy' economy. And it's not just about assuring our energy security against the whims of OPEC. It's about the fact that the very basis of our economy runs on energy resources which, from whatever sources, are depleting faster than our capacity to replace them. Unless we come together on that fundamental understanding, we will all hit the wall together in an energy crisis worse than the one we now face in the collapse of Capitalism's economic calculus.

Climate, Energy, Economics and Policy Entropy

Copenhagen is concluded.

Hamlet's question has been answered with respect to Global Climate Change policy: not to be.

If Kyoto can justly be ridiculed as commitment without accomplishment, Copenhagen must be considered a step back from that.

I do not blame President Obama for this, as many are more than willing to do.  The failure is so large that no one leader or nation can fairly bear it alone.   The question is: where to from here?

Swiftboating Climate Change

The assassins are about.  They're gunning for the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, and their weapon of choice is a 60 megabyte down-loadable file, courtesy of Murdock's Wall Street Journal, of hacked correspondence from the server of the University of East Anglia. Correspondence goes back thirteen years. 

I have not read any of the items, nor do I intend to.  The news stories reveal little of surprise or interest. It's not news that universities have in their midst high-strung personalities whose egos too often overwhelm their intelligence and professionalism, not unlike business and government. Nor is it surprising that researcher's might be tempted to cleanse the data of those pesky little anomalies that introduce niggling little doubts about their pet hypothesis, not unlike business and government.  Nor is it surprising that Climate Change True Believers would want to exclude Deniers from the debate, much as Deniers have wanted squelch advocates.  None of this is news, and none of it required an electronic breaking and entering to reveal known and knowable flaws in the debate. But one senses the fit and feel of another Swift-boat assault on the truth by the forces of ignorance and deceit, with the Birthers, the Tea-Partiers and the Palinista's bringing up the rear.  The timing of this so close to the beginning of the UN Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen is more than suspect.

The Odd Couple

A few weeks ago T. Boone Pickens unveiled his energy plan to deal with our oil addiction.  At the same time, Al Gore put forth his own prescription for the energy crisis, apparently coming to the realization that the energy crisis will drive the climate crisis, because we will respond to the energy crisis by any means necessary, even at the risk of the climate.  Neither readily embraced the other's position, though both are apparently singing from the same hymnal.

Sometimes it's good to be wrong

Sometimes its good to be wrong.

Sometimes it doesn't make a difference.

Or, to borrow a title from one of the skits of the political satirists Fireside Theater: "How Can You Be In Two Places at Once, When You're Really Nowhere At All?"