Futurismic

Most of my recent columns have been about change, from climate change to twitter. Well, this is a start-of-the-year post, and it seems appropriate to take on change in a big way as the year changes. Continue reading “Out of Destruction, Transformation?”

I’ve been talking a lot about media in this column lately. We’re seeing a lot of fast change in the amount of media available, the way we consume that media, and also in what that media says. One of the new media books I’ve been reading is Al Gore’s iPad app version of “Our Choice” about Climate Change. As I write this, it’s pouring rain and hail outside my window and ten degrees colder than normal. The city of Joplin has been almost leveled by a tornado, and at this very moment there is a tornado warning in effect in Northern California (which is not historically a place where many tornadoes touch down). So I decided to write about climate change. Continue reading “Staying with the big things that matter most: Climate”

Ars Technica takes on a climate change denial shibboleth which I’ve always felt was more than adequately dealt with by Occam’s Razor. You know, the one that goes “of course the climate scientists are going to say things are getting worse; how else are they going to ride the government-money gravy train?” Perhaps I’m just lucky to have known enough scientists to make me aware of the fact that climate science – or indeed any science career – isn’t a route to fame, fortune and power (you’d be better off looking in the corridor labelled “politics” for those fringe benefits, AMIRITEZ?), but for everyone else, here’s the skinny:

Since it doesn’t have a lot of commercial appeal, most of the people working in the area, and the vast majority of those publishing the scientific literature, work in academic departments or at government agencies. Penn State, home of noted climatologists Richard Alley and Michael Mann, has a strong geosciences department and, conveniently, makes the department’s salary information available. It’s easy to check, and find that the average tenured professor earned about $120,000 last year, and a new hire a bit less than $70,000.

That’s a pretty healthy salary by many standards, but it’s hardly a racket. Penn State appears to be on the low end of similar institutions, and is outdone by two other institutions in its own state (based on this report). But, more significantly for the question at hand, we can see that Earth Sciences faculty aren’t paid especially well. Sure, they do much better than the Arts faculty, but they’re somewhere in the middle of the pack, and get stomped on by professors in the Business and IT departments.

This is all, of course, ignoring what someone who can do the sort of data analysis or modeling of complex systems that climatologists perform might make if they went to Wall Street.

“Ah, but what about the grant money, huh?”

Funding has gone up a bit over the last couple of years, and some stimulus money went into related programs. But, in general, the trend has been a downward one for 15 years; it’s not an area you’d want to go into if you were looking for a rich source of grant money. If you were, you would target medical research, for which the NIH had a $31 billion budget plus another $10 billion in stimulus money.

There’s more details there for them as wants ‘em. Of course, if you’re already convinced that climate science is a liberal plot to make oil barons feel bad, you’ll probably not struggle to conclude that someone slipped Ars an envelope full of grubby grant dollars for their part in propping up the conspiracy… in which case I can only hope that believing so makes it easier for you to sleep at night, because that’s about the greatest utility that such a belief could possibly have.

Speaking of propaganda, here’s a site all about analysing and understanding the messages with which we are bombarded by governments, corporations and special interest groups [via BoingBoing]. Watch for the fnords, folks.

Speaking as we just were – however tangentially – of climate change, I think that the new decade will provide a lot more stories about deliberate climate change – the first tentative attempts at geoengineering. Here’s your starter for ten: a secret cloud-seeding project in the United Arab Emirates [via TechnOcculT]

As part of a secret program to control the weather in the Middle East, scientists working for the United Arab Emirates government artificially created rain where rain is generally nowhere to be found. The $11 million project, which began in July, put steel lampshade-looking ionizers in the desert to produce charged particles. The negatively charged ions rose with the hot air, attracting dust. Moisture then condensed around the dust and eventually produced a rain cloud. A bunch of rain clouds.

On the 52 days it rained in the region throughout July and August, forecasters did not predict rain once.

At the first glimpse, this looks like a triumph of technology over the caprice of climate: imagine miles and miles of inhospitable desert turned into rolling farmland! But short-term localised benefits are unlikely to be the whole story in a system so complex as our planet’s biosphere. You can’t isolate one part of the world from the rest of it; everything has consequences for everyone. Whatever your political alignment or ideological stake in this interminable debate, you can’t escape the self-evident truth that climate is a system, no matter what you think are the root causes of the changes that system is going through.

Look at it this way: if you were living up on the ISS, how good would you feel about the crew members in the module at the far end fiddling with the life-support systems so they got a little more heat or oxygen than everyone else? Now imagine that said crew members have only the most rudimentary understanding of how the life-support systems actually work, and of the potential repercussions of their fiddling on the rest of the station. Now, which is the more sensible response: do you start your own retaliatory program of fiddling in your end of the station, or do you all get together and figure out how the system works before poking at it with screwdrivers and soldering irons?

The thing with Planet Earth is this: we ain’t got nowhere else to go. Over the long term, your short-term local advantage has pretty good odds of coming back to haunt you as a global disadvantage once it has finished screwing over some other part of the planet. If you’re willing to concede that your views on climate change mitigation are based on securing the best advantage for yourself in your own lifetime, then by all means feel free to try convincing me of the merits of that philosophy; that is a honest debate, and I’ll respect your position while doing my best to counter it. But if you want to dress that philosophy up in a cloak of mealy-mouthed sophistry about the duty of scepticism and the absence of absolute certainty in the scientific method, take it somewhere else.

Yeah, I have a “liberal” agenda; I’d like future generations of every nation to have a world that can support their lives. In my worldview, every living human being – and their future progeny – is a stakeholder of equal status in this planet and its future.

What’s your agenda?

Via Tobias Buckell, a reiteration of a question we’ve asked here before – if a tiny nation-state’s territories are wiped out by climate change, such as the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, what becomes of that nation-state as a political and social entity?

What happens if the 61,000 Marshallese must abandon their low-lying atolls? Would they still be a nation? With a U.N. seat? With control of their old fisheries and their undersea minerals? Where would they live, and how would they make a living? Who, precisely, would they and their children become?

[...]

“We’re facing a set of issues unique in the history of the system of nation-states,” Dean Bialek, a New York-based adviser to the Republic of the Marshall Islands who is also in Cancun, told The Associated Press. “We’re confronting existential issues associated with climate impacts that are not adequately addressed in the international legal framework.”

This is probably the very thinnest thin end of the wedge, too. Sadly for the Marshallese and others like them, it won’t be until similar issues start hitting bigger nations that the legal framework will be looked at; until then, the transition from citizen to unrepresented and unprotected climate refugee will become increasingly ubiquitous, and noticed only by the majority – by us – as a steady increase of blank and desperate faces in the internment camps at the border.

We’ve made our bed, but we’re making the servants lie in it first.