Choices

DeeMack sends us news of the death of Robert McCall, the so-called "Picasso of the Space Age". My fellow space nerds may recognize some of his work:



Last night, I was a proud participant in one of the "Climate Justice Teach-Ins" that are peppering campuses across North America. Thanks to all who came out, and to my fellow professors who represented climate change perspectives in social science and chemical engineering.

I've written about Climate Change issues in this space many times before: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

I laid bare my anti-green lifestyle in my article about mass drivers and power satellites. It's not that I don't believe that ecological responsibility is better and more moral, it's just that I am weak and selfish.

More to the point, there's a common environmentalist attitude that I'd like to take issue with. Very often, the onus is placed on the common citizen to transcend his so-called greed and his innate tendency to make decisions that are immediately and personally beneficial in favour of options that are, presumably, better for society on the whole.

For instance, the choices not to drive, or to turn off more lights, or to eat locally grown foods, are considered ecologically superior choices because they impel lighter carbon footprints. The problem, of course, is that it's hard to walk rather than to drive. It's inconvenient to turn out more lights and to huddle under blankets rather than to turn up the heat. And it's more expensive to buy many local products, rather than to rely on cheaper, foreign-made products. I mean, there's a reason we Ontarians import our salads from California: somehow, they manage to get it to us more cheaply than do the farmers down the road.

The reason they are able to do so cheaper is that many such products and practices are subsidized, eithr directly by government programs, or indirectly through the weirdness of our economic system. For instance, the deleterious ecological impact of the CO2 emissions of the trucks used to transport my salad from California does not show on the price of the actual salad; the so-called "commons" of group environmental ownership absorbs these immense costs which, on most accounting sheets, only shows up as something economists call "externalities".

So environmentalists' call for individuals to make these extraordinary choices is in fact an appeal to the human animal to regularly choose options that are, in the immediate and tangible sense, disadvantageous to said individual. We are not very good at making such decisions. For proof of this, all we have to do is look at the global obesity epidemic. We would rather choose the fatty foods for short term pleasure, than the healthy foods for long term health, even though we all know what we should choose.

I've been trying to think of an historical example of an instance in which a society deliberately chose an option that was immediately economically deleterious because it was more moral to do so. The only one I can think of is Britain's decision to abandon slavery in the 1830s. This was a remarkable moment in world history: the call to dissolve the British slave trade was, to the best of my knowledge, the result of the British people's moral choice to distance themselves from a practice that, while immensely profitable, was nonetheless distasteful. For some decades afterwards, they paid an economic price, as goods such as sugar became harder to produce without paying labourers to replace free slave toil.

So what am I trying to say? I'm saying that environmentalist appeals for voluntary changes in individual behaviour are bound to fail on a large scale, because it is not reasonable to expect the common man to make decisions on a regular basis that are economically disadvatageous to himself and his family.

The solution has to be a governmental one and a macro-economic one. Specifically, governments must decide that products and behaviours must bear the real financial price that they truly represent. My California salad cannot be cheaper than my Ontario salad, because the price of the former must reflect the price of the gas to transport it, and the price of the ecologic damage caused by said gas. In this way, when individuals are compelled to make choices that are not only moral but economically wise, a behavioural change of sufficient magnitude may be effected to result in genuine gains in the battle against Climate Change.

End of sermon.

Munk'd

A few days ago I hunkered into a lecture hall at the University of Ottawa to watch the most recent Munk Debate, this time between the teams of Nigel Lawson & Bjorn Lomborg vs Elizabeth May & George Monbiot, streamed live from Toronto. Had I known the debates could be accessed from the web, I would have stayed home to watch it with several strong glasses of port. But no....

The topic: Be it resolved, Climate Change is Mankind's defining crisis, and demands a commensurate response.

Nigel Lawson came across as a fussy old fuddy-duddy, underinformed and full of ideological bluster.

Elizabeth May I've never really taken a liking to, given her screechy delivery and overly confrontational demeanour. However, she at least said the one thing that needed saying: that these four are the not the experts; the scientists are the experts. This lack of true expertise hindered further substantial debate, I think. She is a lawyer/politician. Lawson is a journalist/politician. Monbiot is a journalist. And Lomborg is a statisition cum self-promoter.

George Monbiot has been a favourite figure of mine for some time. What an eloquent, passionate and well informed speaker. His website's earlier incarnations were actually the model for the direction my own website eventually took, so I admit to having a slight bias for all things Monbiot. Having said that, even the great George came across as slightly unscientific, given his background as a journalist. His famous self-imposed travel ban, meant as a gesture to encourage minimal carbon footprints worldwide, was suspended for this special occasion, allowing him to physically be in Toronto. I always felt this self-restriction to be a bit precious, if you know what I mean.

Bjorn Lomborg, meanwhile, is no stranger to this blog. I have discussed him in the March 5, 2004 post, the Jan 14, 2005 post, the Aug 31, 2007 post, and the Oct 17, 2007 post. In short, I detest everything Bjorn Lomborg stands for. I will not mince words here. The man is insidious and, in my opinion, simply for sale. His landmark book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, was the Climate Change denier's bible for years, effectively used as ammunition to slow down change on the policy front.

In recent months/years, Lomborg has begun to rehab his reputation. He no longer denies that Climate Change exists, is a big deal or is human-caused. This is rather convenient, now that the book has made him insanely wealthy and positioned him as a preferred champion for the anti-Climate Change business sector. There is speculation, implied by May during the debates, that his position earns Lomborg a pretty penny. Instead, Lomborg's new mantra is that:

(a) there are more important things we can be focusing on; and
(b) since we don't seem to be making headway on Climate Change, why not apply these energies and monies to --I dunno-- eliminating poverty or disease?

On the face of it, this is not a bad position to have. Indeed, his position seems to have won over many in the audience. The debate statistics show that public response was thus:



In essence, more people changed their minds in favour of the Lomborg/Lawson position than in favour of the May/Monbiot position.

Apparently, Time Magazine once listed Lomborg as one of the most important 100 intellectuals in the world, according to his intro during the Munk Debate. This surprises me, given his brazen anti-intellectual behaviour during the debate itself. Lomborg's position, as I summarized above, is fundamentally untenable, and I'm afraid May and Monbiot did a poor job of explaining this to the audience. It comes down to this:

It doesn't matter that poverty and disease remain as plagues upon the world. Climate Change exacerbates those things, making them increasingly worse. And it doesn't matter that pro-environmental legislation slows down economic development. What is the point of creating wealthy nations if there's no food or water left to buy with your newly created wealth?

These were the basic aspects of environmental and health science poorly conveyed during the debate. I proudly commented afterward that I'm certain my undergrad students could have debated Lomborg into a corner, given how much I've tried to encourage them to think in terms of interrelated networks and systems.

Let's look at Lomborg's claim that we are better off tackling global health than Climate Change. The world needs to understand that many of the problems in global health are either as a direct result of Climate Change, or will be exacerabted beyond repair as a result of Climate Change. As Stephen Lewis once commented during a live address in Ottawa, "I fear we are looking at an Apocalyptic event."

When Monbiot (or was it May?) commented that Climate Change makes HIV/AIDS worse, Lomborg gave us his theatrical hands-in-the-air disbelief pose. "How is that even possible?" he demanded to know. Sadly, only Monbiot bothered to explain a mechanism, but only told part of the story. The incident, though, causes me to ask whether Lomborg is really so uninformed (causing me to wonder how Time would dare list him among the world's top intellectuals) or is he instead disingenuous. If the latter, then he is insidious and dangerous indeed.

Monbiot's mechanism was basic: Climate Change is causing droughts, which forces men off the land and into the company of prostitutes, hence spreading sexual disease, including HIV. In truth, it's more than this. Drought leads to poor nutrition, which prevents proper uptake of the anti-viral drugs that treat HIV (which need good nutrition to work properly). Environmental collapse causes economic collapse and produces more disease issues, further overwhelming healt care systems and prventing a society from addressing its HIV epidemic.

The ecology of much of the developing world, including sub-Saharan Africa, which has the greatest HIV burden in the world, is already operating at the margins. The crops there already subsist at the very edge of tolerance for temperature and humidity perturbations. With Climate Change comes more dramatic perturbations and thus a certainty of widespread famine in those regions.

No amount of structural adjustments, as Lomborg champions, will give such nations the economic might to overcome such famine, not when most of the region is similarly affected.

In short, unlike crises in the past, Climate Change represents humanitarian challenges that one cannot buy one' s way out of. Again, you can't buy water that does not exist. In response to Lomborg's assertion that human societies will develop adaptations, Monbiot powerfully retorted (and I paraphrase): in these parts of the world, the only adaptation is the AK-47.

There are many other mechanisms by which Climate Change exacerbates health, and thus wealth. Among them:

The changing of vector behaviour. Mosquitos and their like determine their ranges by temperature and humidity. As these factors change, the nature of related diseases will also change.

Water quality. Because rivers are changing paths and rainfalls are misscheduling, the predictability of the safety of drinking water is uncertain. Already, 2 million deaths a year, mostly among young children, are due to diarrhea, directly caused by unsafe water. WHO estimates that today 2.4% of diarrheal deaths are due to climate change. (WHO uses very conservative methods to reach these estimates.)

Changing agriculture. Agriculture is affected by temperature, precipitation and soil quality. According to a 2008 article in Science: southern Africa could lose more than 30% of its main crop, maize, by 2030. In South Asia losses of many regional staples, such as rice, millet and maize could top 10%.

Migration. There is a long established intersection between migration and health. The sudden stress of large numbers of people is ecologically bad. Environmental refugees must be fed, sheltered and cared for, and the world has a poor track record of caring for mass migrants. According to a 2007 article by Christian Aid: "The growing number of disasters and conflicts linked to future climate change will push the numbers far higher unless urgent action is taken. We estimate that between now and 2050 a total of 1 billion people will be displaced from their homes."

Insecurity. Ecological collapse can cause war. According to a 2007 report by The Pentagon:
Global warming constitutes a security threat to the USA, as there will be wars based on diminishing fresh water supplies, refugees, and higher rates of famine and disease.

Economic effects. Less money means less spent on health and poverty reduction. As an example, according to a 2008 article in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Coral bleaching can lead to collapse of the world’s fisheries in a matter of decades.

Air pollution. One US model predicts that by 2050, due to global warming, ozone-related
deaths will increased by 4.5% and there will be 60% more alert days.

Heat waves. According to WHO, heat deaths in California alone will double by 2010.

Natural disasters (floods and storms). According to WHO, flooding will affect 200 million people by 2080.

Here is an interesting little graphic showing deaths due to Climate Change in the year 2000, almost a decade ago. The truth today is much more daunting:



There are a lot more data and many more details. There is no dearth of studying on the topic. I don't know how anyone who's familiar with even a fraction of the data can conclude anything other than Climate Change is indeed the single most important crisis facing humanity now and in the next two centuries. More than the threat of nuclear war, and possibly on par with the threat of direct cometary impact, runaway greenhouse affect might very well drive civilization itself into the dust within our lifetimes.

Shlomberg

I've written in this space many times about the popular anti-scientists of today. Indeed, The Toronto Star had approached me many weeks ago about writing a feature about this very topic. The article still sits here, waiting for The Star to act on it; I'll give them a few more days before I get off my duff and pitch it elsewhere. Unsurprising, but largely unknown to the public, is the fact that many of the loudest "scientific" voices shouting anti-scientific messages --almost entirely from a right-of-centre position-- are in fact non-scientists.

The topic of Climate Change is particular for its attraction of right wing dogmatists eager to battle the environmentalists, regardless of whether the data support their claims or not. Reading the media's portrayal of the debate surrounding the issue, I'm saddened and not a little disgusted, to see the exact same voices modify their positions over the years from "climate change is a hoax" to "climate change is vastly overstated and might even be good" to "climate change is real, but has nothing to do with human activity"... Slow inching toward an evidence-based position, but seemingly pulled away kicking and screaming, ever clinging to their irrational ideology-based viewpoints; to wit, the free market can do no ill.

It's okay, and indeed responsible, to change one's position as more evidence becomes available. But it's also responsible to acknowledge that the vehemence of one's earlier incorrect position was damaging to society's ability to act on the issue, and then to make amends by fighting ever more vigorously for positive change.

In the case of climate change, it has always been non-experts leading the denial army: statisticians, economists, political scientists, business people and politicians. That these people would be so arrogant as to weigh their lack of expertise against the mountains of evidence and years of research put forth by armies of actual, trained, career environmental experimentalists is beyond sad; it's sickening.

The most famous of this ilk is Bjorn Lomberg, whom I've discussed before. Now, as public opinion turns against his viewpoint, Lomberg himself has softened his data-free stance, with, among others, this interview. Another blogger dissects Lomberg's transformation here.

I had mistakenly reported that Lomberg is a statistician, because that's how he portrays himself. In fact, Lomberg's PhD is in political science. His formal training has nothing to do with climate change or even the science surrounding environmentalism; I don't know if it's even about the policies surrounding environmentalism.

All of which is not to say that non-experts are not entitled to get in the game. Not at all. A smart, aware person who takes the time to read the appropriate papers is certainly able to participate in the debate. But to qualify as an expert in the field, with sufficient weight of authority to sway a decision of this magnitude one way or another, requires, I should think, a heft of expertise approaching world expert. Bjorn Lomberg, economist Thomas Sowell and genius-among-chimps George Bush --all of whom are famous for having dismissed climate change research as "not convincing"-- do not bloody qualify.

As one Salon letter writer put it, asking Bjorn Lomberg his "expert" opinion on climate change is no better than asking the same from a lug on the street who has had access to google and the Wall Street Journal. Sure, he may be a smart guy. But he's no expert.

Another letter writer made a further point about Lomberg's political science background which is thought-provoking. He said that cases of Lomberg and Sowell, and indeed of much climate change denial, is a clear case of humanities training being insufficient to engage an issue demanding scientific rigour. In particular, he argued, when a humanities specialist sees an issue being debated by two authorities on either side, he concludes that the issue is in effective dispute. What he fails to see, that a scientist instantly jumps upon, is that no two authorities are equal: in the case of a scientific issue, the authorities in play are competing studies; one must have the training to be able to distinguish a good study from a bad study. And let me say, the so-called studies so far presented on the climate change denial side are barely opinion papers, while the other side has mountains of rigorously collected hard data. So this scientist rates the debate a "no contest", based solely on the quality of competing evidence.

Now, some of you are already grousing that Al Gore is not a scientist or any kind of expert. Correct, he is not. But Gore and his people have been careful never to claim that any analyses were conducted by them. Rather, Gore has always claimed to be the dumbed down mouthpiece of the greater scientific community, with all of his famous slideshow vetted by genuine experts. Lomberg and Sowell have never made this claim, nor have Arthur and Zachary Robinson, whom I discussed in my article linked above.

Sadly, the fact that economists, statisticians, business people and humanities scholars can pose as experts in experimental science is indicative not so much of their arrogance, greed or disingenuous, but of the obvious scientific illiteracy of the masses, touched upon in my last post. That "we" can be so easily swayed is evidence that "we" know little ourselves.

Mass Drivers

Climate Change (specifically global warming) is a scary and mostly destructive reality, as far as human concerns go. The extent to which human activity is involved in climate change is, in some circles, debatable; but the balance of science suggests that human industrial activity, specifically the burning of fossil fuels, produces the so-called greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, which trap solar radiation and geothermal heat that would have otherwise radiated into space, thus on average increasing global temperatures. Ergo, it seems likely that human endeavours play a large part in the changes we are witnessing.

Thus endeth the science recap.

To be honest, I don't live a very green-conscious lifestyle. My experience with most recycling programmes is that the separated items just get recombined later and my work ends up having been wasted. I buy whatever is cheapest, not necessarily whatever is most politically appropriate. And I reason that having ridden bicycles and walked all my life, I am now entitled to a little solitary car driving now that I'm almost middle aged and newly a driver. I believe the only true solutions to the greenhouse crisis will be effected at the industrial and organizational levels, not at the personal level. Am I rationalizing? Most definitely. But there it is.

I support nuclear power as an alternative to coal and oil burning. I thus also support the eventual conversion of most automobiles to electric engines, recharged via electricity produced in nuclear, geothermal and hydroelectric plants. I think calls for conservation as a long term solution are naive; human society will require more energy, not less, regardless of how much conservation we manage to enforce. The increasing electrification of the Third World and an ironically green-friendly global shift from paper-based offices to computer-based information networks indicate a rocketing need for more power in the near future.

And no matter how many gas-burning cars we manage to eliminate, the overall impact on atmospheric carbon production will be negligible so long as we rely upon gas-burning airplanes for international travel. I have no solution for that problem, and I don't think the global economy can survive a loss of air travel. But there is one variable I do wish to address: space flight.

Many people believe that rockets and space shuttles spew more carbon into the air with a single launch than do a thousand cars. The truth is that, for the most part, spacefaring rockets "burn" a combination of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen --the byproduct of which is water. Ironically, releasing so much water high into the atmosphere is proving to have its own negative environmental consequences, having to do with affecting the ozone layer and having nothing to do with greenhouse gases.

Might I suggest, however, that if low orbital space flight can be made cleaner and safer, it may prove to be an effective, economical and environmentally friendlier alternative to basic air travel. Several designs for such vehicles have already been proposed, some employing revolutionary scramjet technology for when such a craft re-enters the thin high atmosphere.

In the long term, cleaner, safer and cheaper alternatives need to be employed for launching payloads into low and high orbits. A while back, the orbital tether --an idea that's been around for 100 years-- was actually discussed in the news. We are nowhere near having the materials or construction technologies necessary to build one.

But we do have the materials needed to build a mass driver. I strongly suspect that some enterprising government or corporation will endeavour to build a mass driver --essentially a rail gun powerful enough to shoot things into space-- sometime in my lifetime. And basic physics suggests that it will be built near the equator, on the side of a mountain with a large body of water immediately to the east. Maybe I should start soliciting geographical guesses now? Any takers?