The Descent of Dissent

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Debating Climate Change

Debate Skills? Advantage: Climate Contrarians

Last night at the Asia Society and Museum, a panel of notables debated the merits of the proposition "global warming is not a crisis." Arguing for the motion were the folksy (and tall) Michael Crichton, the soft-spoken Richard Lindzen and the passionate Philip Stott. Arrayed against were the moderate Brenda Ekwurzel, the skeptical Gavin Schmidt and the perplexed Richard Somerville. (Note: all the adjectives are mine.)

The hosts--the Rosenkranz Foundation and Intelligence Squared U.S.--asked the audience to vote both prior to and after the event. Early voting skewed heavily against the motion: 57 percent in the audience favored dismissing it while only 30 percent supported it. But that was before anybody opened their mouths.

[More:]

Robert Rosenkranz, chairman of the eponymous foundation, brought up the first bugaboo of the night in his introduction: "I am old enough to remember the consensus on global cooling." And the second: how can we know what the future climate will be when we can't even predict the weather a year in advance, something that would be worth billions of dollars?

1. As Somerville later pointed out, any consensus over global cooling was more in the media hype surrounding it than anything else.
2. Climate and weather are two separate things, climate being the average of weather over a given time period. We cannot say that it will be 76 degrees F next March 15 but we can say, based on atmospheric physics, that 20 years from now the month of March will, on average, be warmer than it is now.

As Lindzen noted in his opening remarks, the climate is always changing. The question is whether the warming we are currently experiencing--and every panelist agreed that warming was happening--is worrisome and/or manmade. For example, Lindzen argued that in a warming world we might expect less severe weather as a result of the decreased temperature difference between the poles and the equator. And he noted that India has warmed in recent decades yet its agricultural yield has increased. (Perhaps Prof. Lindzen is not familiar with the Green Revolution?)

But Lindzen shared a dry, dispassionate presentation of potentially confusing science with all of his colleagues on the opposite side. They came to debate the physics of climate change but ended up in a debate about the morality of it. For example, Somerville, a distinguished IPCC author, called the global warming crisis a "decisive change for better or worse." Scientifically reasonable perhaps, but hardly inspiring. "Science can inform these decisions but it cannot determine them," Schmidt added (though he did slightly better by likening climate science to CSI), before noting the lawyerly tactics of his opponents and urging the audience to "spot the fallacy." And Ekwurzel struggled to make the metaphor of a doctor diagnosing a disease without knowing all the particulars of how the patient's body works: "choosing not to fight global warming is as foolish as not treating fever in a child."

All fine and good except that they were faced with the folksy anecdotes of Crichton and the oratorical fire of Stott. As the novelist mused, the weather is changing, no one is arguing that, but "all anybody wants to do is talk about it, no one wants to do anything about it." Adding "if they're not willing to do it why should anyone else?" And, by the way, shouldn't we be focusing on poverty today rather than the weather 100 years from now?

When Stott took the microphone he chastised everyone for their hypocrisy. Humans have been changing climate by land clearing and farming since they evolved; scientific consensus is not infallible (remember eugenics?); and Tony Blair (Stott is British, though he also noted Al Gore's extravagant energy budget) refuses to curtail his flying. As fellow Schmidt later noted, if we could just harness the energy of the old style Marxist debater Stott, a switch away from fossil fuels would be easy.

The proponents of climate change crisis had nothing to offer other than the science. Where was the anti-Crichton? Maybe Bill McKibben? Al Gore may have had a personality facelift and started calling climate change a moral crisis but he probably would have looked wooden next to Stott, perhaps Jon Stewart? The proponents seemed underarmed for the debate and, not surprisingly, it swung against them, particularly when Schmidt made the fatal debating error of dismissing the ability of the audience to judge the scientific nuances.

Despite presentations riddled with suspect science--cosmic rays featured prominently, though they show no trend that matches the observed warming--the audience responded to Crichton's satirical call for a ban on private jets more than Ekwurzel's vague we need to throw "everything we can at the climate crisis." By the final vote, 46 percent of the audience had been convinced that global warming was indeed not a crisis, while just 42 percent persisted in their opinion that it was. The whole debate, for better or worse, can be heard on WNYC AM 820 on March 23 at 2 PM EDT (podcast and webstream will be available via that link as well). And check out Gavin Schmidt's take on the event here.

Listen closely. Obscured by the rhetoric was significant common ground: global warming is real, it is a problem (though how big remains debatable) and it is primarily an energy problem. Lindzen does not buy the global cooling red herring; Crichton thinks humanity will "de-carbonize" its energy sources anyway; and Stott just wants us to focus on poverty and human misery as the key crisis to be addressed. There is no doubt that the billions of people living without access to clean water, suffering from curable diseases, and unable to escape penury because of a lack of cheap energy is an absolute crisis. What he may have overlooked is that these problems may be worsened by climate change (shrinking glaciers in the Tibetan plateau do not bode well for thirsty Indians and Chinese) or solved by implementing solutions to it (photovoltaic cells for those in sunny climes unconnected to any grid). No one is suggesting an end to foreign aid in favor of concentrating exclusively on climate change. In fact, foreign aid and technology transfer must be part of any global effort to combat the problem.

And there are other changes the developed world can make to ease the burden of climate change on those not rich enough to adapt: yes, Michael Crichton, changing a lightbulb is important. Switching one 75-watt incandescent light bulb for the equivalent compact fluorescent will save 55 pounds of CO₂ every year. Those pounds add up and there are a host of similarly easy and cheap changes to make. Modern technology offers us a range of cleaner, better, faster products; a car from 1972 cannot compare to a car from 2007, nor can similarly aged coal-fired power plants. Why wouldn't we want to buy a modern one? Does anybody detect a consensus on that?

Corrective Goggles for Our Conceptual Myopia

Reposted from: http://edge.org/q2007/q07_15.html
my highlights in blue

COREY S. POWELL
Senior Editor, Discover Magazine; Adjunct Professor, Science Journalism, NYU; Author: God in the Equation: How Einstein Transformed Religion

Corrective Goggles for Our Conceptual Myopia

Broadly speaking, I am optimistic that the world's current crises look terrifyingly large mainly because of our conceptual myopia. It is practically a truism to say that every era tends to regard its troubles as uniquely daunting, but I think that accelerating news cycles make the current generation particularly prone to this error of judgment. Making my best attempt to put on corrective goggles and take the longer view, I see a half-dozen areas where we are on the verge of major advances in our ability to expand our control over our environment and ourselves, in way that will be largely or entirely beneficial.

• I am optimistic that technology will soon show practical ways to eradicate the twin problems of carbon emissions and fossil-fuel scarcity. In the nearer term, carbon dioxide will follow the path of CFCs, acid-rain-causing sulfur oxides, and nearly all automobile tailpipe emissions. Nay-sayers warned that all of these would be difficult and economically disruptive to tackle; in every case, the nay-sayers were roundly proven wrong. Carbon sequestration is the most obvious technology for offsetting carbon emissions. Here's a firm prediction: If the world's leading economies set tough emissions standards for CO2, or establish a serious carbon tax, industry will find astonishingly inexpensive ways to comply within a few years.

• Farther ahead, new energy sources will begin to make serious contributions to the world economy long before fossil fuels run out. My bet is still on fusion energy, despite its perfect, five-decade record of never fulfilling any of its promises. I seriously doubt, though, that commercially viable fusion energy will look anything like the huge and hideously expensive magnetic-confinement test machines (like ITER) now being built or planned. More likely it will take the shape of a compact, laser- or radio-driven linear accelerator using exotic nuclear reactions that spit out protons, not neutrons; send the protons flying through a copper coil and you have direct electricity conversion, with no boiler, no steam, no turbine, no dynamo.

• I am optimistic that we are on the verge of developing the tools to program biological systems as effortlessly as we program digital ones. Synthetic biology, a field spearheaded by George Church, Drew Endy, and Jay Keasling, will be key to attaining this goal—and it is now in transition from theory to reality. Rather than snipping genes from one creature and clumsily inserting them into another, future biotechnicians will consult a master database of DNA sequences and specify the traits they want, whether to insert into an existing organism or to create in a brand-new one designed from the ground up. (A corollary is that these tools will finally allow effective stem-cell therapy, which leads to a related prediction: Thirty years from now, the current agonies over the ethics of stem-cell therapy will look as quaint as the hand-wringing over "test tube babies" in the 1970s.) Synthetic biology in its fully realized form will also be a dangerous weapon. A related part of my optimism is that it—like electricity, like radio, like all genetic research so far—will prove far more useful for positive applications than for negative ones.

• I am optimistic that young adults today will, on average, live to 120 and will remain healthy and vigorous until their final years. Researchers like Leonard Guarente, David Sinclair, and Cynthia Kenyon are zeroing in on the chemical and genetic basis of aging. Immortality is a long way off, but drugs and genetic therapies that hold back age-related diseases are coming soon. Treatments that slow the aging process as a whole will follow closely behind. Ultimately these will lead to a wholesale reordering of the pace of life and the social structures based around certain biological milestones.The child-bearing years may extend into the 60s; people may routinely continue working into their 80s or beyond. With this expanded timeline will come all kinds of new possibilities, including vastly expanded periods of intellectual creativity and a softening of the irrational behaviors that arise from the universal fear of death.

• I am optimistic that the longer life of the body will be accompanied by enhanced powers of the brain. We already live in world where it is getting harder and harder to forget. A simple Google search often revives long-lost trivia, historical experiences, even the names of long-dead relatives. What we have today is but a tiny taste of what lies ahead. Computing power is now so cheap, and wireless communication so effortless, that a person could easily wear a microphone (or even a low-res video camera) at all times and compile a digital database of every word he or she uttered.

In the future, many people will choose to do so; we will all have personalized, searchable databases at our commands. Rapid advances in brain prostheses mean that soon we will be able to access those databases simply by the power of thought. Within a couple decades, the information will be beamed back in a form the brain can interpret—we will be able to hear the playback in much the manner that deaf people can now hear the world with cochlear implants. Vision is slightly more difficult but it too will be reverse engineered. That will undoubtedly give space exploration a tremendous boost. Earthbound scientists will be able to "inhabit" robotic explorers on other worlds, and any interested participant will be able to log on passively to experience the adventure. Humans will venture into space physically as well but at first that will happen primarily for sport, I expect.

• I am optimistic that researchers, aided by longer careers and computer assistance, will crack the great twin mysteries of physics: the nature of gravity and the possibility of other dimensions. Here I'm talking not just about theoretical advances, as may occur at the Large Hadron Collider after it revs up in late '07, that could bolster the theory that gravity, unlike the other forces, has the ability to transmit out of the three dimensions of human experience. I am also talking about a kookier optimism that our discoveries will have practical consequences. It may be possible to build instruments that can sense universes lying outside of our dimensions. It may be possible to manipulate gravity, turning it down where convenient (to launch a rocket, for instance) and cranking it up where desired. It may even be possible to create a new universe as a laboratory experiment—the ultimate empirical investigation of the Big Bang that started our universe.

• Finally, I am optimistic that with all of these intellectual and material achievements will come a science-based spiritual awakening. Back in the 1930s Albert Einstein spoke of a "cosmic religious feeling" and tried to convince the public (with painfully little success) that scientists are every bit as spiritual as are the world's religious leaders. It may not look that way now, but I think Einstein will soon be vindicated. Longer, more connected lives will eat away at the religion of fear, the rudimentary form of faith rooted in anxiety about loneliness and the apparent absoluteness of death.

More important, the next round of scientific discoveries promise a powerful new sense of our connection to the rest of the universe, and even to universes beyond our own. One of the most potent knocks on science is that it, unlike religion, offers no sense of purpose. That has never been true—what greater purpose is there than intellectual exploration, the key trait distinguishing us from the other animals—but now more than ever science has a chance to make its case. It needs to develop more of a communal structure. It needs to develop a humane language, expressing its findings explicitly as triumphs of human achievement. It needs to celebrate our ever-expanding dominion over nature while articulating a humble appreciation that nature is, indeed, where we all came from.

Above all, science needs a face, a representative (or representatives) as charismatic as Pope Benedict XVI or, er, Tom Cruise, who can get rid of all those "it"s in the pervious sentences. Right now, the faces of science are selected by book sales, television specials, and pure self-promotion; its elected leaders, like the heads of scientific societies, rarely function as public figures. Surely there is a better way. Any suggestions?

The Energy Challenge

Reposted from: http://edge.org/q2007/q07_15.html
my highlights in blue

LORD (MARTIN) REES
President, The Royal Society; Professor of Cosmology & Astrophysics; Master, Trinity College, University of Cambridge; Author, Our Final Century: The 50/50 Threat to Humanity's Survival

The Energy Challenge

A few years ago, I wrote a short book entitled Our Final Century? I guessed that, taking all risks into account, there was only a 50 percent chance that civilisation would get through to 2100 without a disastrous setback. This seemed to me a far from cheerful conclusion. However, I was surprised by the way my colleagues reacted to the book: many thought a catastrophe was even more likely than I did, and regarded me as an optimist. I stand by this optimism.

There are indeed powerful grounds for being a techno-optimist. For most people in most nations, there's never been a better time to be alive. The innovations that will drive economic advance —information technology, biotech and nanotech—can boost the developing as well as the developed world. We're becoming embedded in a cyberspace that can link anyone, anywhere, to all the world's information and culture—and to every other person on the planet. Creativity in science and the arts is open to hugely more than in the past. 21st century technologies will offer lifestyles that are environmentally benign—involving lower demands on energy or resources than what we'd consider a good life today. And we could readily raise the funds - were there the political will—to lift the world's two billion most deprived people from their extreme poverty.

Later in this century, mind-enhancing drugs, genetics, and 'cyborg' techniques may change human beings themselves. That's something qualitatively new in recorded history—and it will pose novel ethical conundrums. Our species could be transformed and diversified (here on Earth and perhaps beyond) within just a few centuries.

The benefits of earlier technology weren't achieved without taking risks—we owe modern aviation, and modern surgery, to many martyrs. But, though plane crashes, boiler explosions and the like were horrible, there was a limit to just how horrible —a limit to their scale. In our ever more interconnected world, where technology empowers us more than ever, we're vulnerable to scary new risks—events of such catastrophic global consequences that it's imprudent to ignore them even if their probabililty seems low.

One set of risks stems from humanity's collective impact. Our actions are transforming, even ravaging, the entire biosphere —perhaps irreversibly—through global warming and loss of biodiversity. Remedial action may come too late to prevent 'runaway' climatic or environmental devastation.

But we also face vulnerabilities of a quite different kind, stemming from unintended consequences (or intended misuse) of ever more empowering bio and cyber technology. The global village will have its village idiots.

The risks are real. But, by making the right collective choices we can alleviate all these hazards.

Among such choices, my number-one priority would be much-expanded R and D into a whole raft of techniques for storing energy and generating it by 'clean' or low-carbon methods. The stakes are high—the world spends nearly 3 trillion dollars per year on energy and its infrastructure. This effort can engage not just those in privileged technical envonments in advanced countries, but a far wider talent pool Even if we discount climate change completely, the quest for clean energy is worthwhile on grounds of energy security, diversity and efficiency.

This goal deserve a priority and commitment from governments akin to that accorded to the Manhattan project or the Apollo moon landing. It should appeal to the idealistic young—indeed I can't think of anything that could do more to attract the brightest and best of them into science than a strongly proclaimed commitment, from all technologically-developed nations, to take a lead in providing clean and sustainable energy for the developing and the developed world.

We Will Overcome Agnotology (The Cultural Production Of Ignorance)

Reposted from: http://edge.org/q2007/q07_6.html
my highlights in blue

ANDRIAN KREYE
Feuilleton (Arts & Ideas) Editor, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Munich

We Will Overcome Agnotology (The Cultural Production Of Ignorance)

Have you heard this one by Conan O'Brien: Yesterday, a group of scientists warned that because of global warming, sea levels will rise so much that parts of New Jersey will be under water. The bad news? Parts of New Jersey won't be under water. Or this one by Jay Leno: Heating bills this winter are the highest they've been in five years, but the government has a plan to combat rising bills. It's called global warming. Not their best jokes, but this year global warming became one of the staple topics of late night monologues.

This makes me very optimistic, because jokes are hard evidence of sociological currents. A joke can only work on national TV, if the majority of viewers is able to understand the cultural reference in a split-second and if a general consensus allows the joke to take sides. If Leno makes fun of global warming—great. It's now part of the collective subconscious. It means the general public made up its mind on the subject.

This is quite a change from just two and a half years ago. In the summer of 2004 Hollywood director Roland Emmerich released his disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow. He openly said he wanted to use his film to combat the widespread ignorance about climate change in the US. To emphasize how serious he thought the subject, he invited numerous scientists and activists to make the point that very ignorance about global warming might be one of the greatest obstacles for a solution.

His film was written accordingly. To bring the audience up to speed, large parts of the first act were spent on Dennis Quaid as a paleoclimatologist, who did a lot of reciting of scientific facts and fictions, not unlike the endless science dialogues between Spock and Kirk, which had to set up the outer worldly realities in Star Trek.

Emmerich’s disaster might have bombed at the box office, but it did trigger a chain reaction. Media attention to climate change rose. TV features about endangered polar bears created emotional impact. Sales of hybrid cars went up. Seven Northeastern states have signed the Kyoto protocol, an initiative followed by more than 300 cities. Several Hollywood stars like Brad Pitt, Keanu Reeves and Leonardo di Caprio currently work on documentaries about global warming, which will raise the topic's profile for an audience normally not interested in scientific matters even further. Now even notoriously fatalistic Christian fundamentalists see earth as a gift from God mankind has to protect.

This is of course not just about the power of pop culture. It's not even just about climate change. This is about a society's choice between listening to science and falling prey to what Stanford science historian Robert N. Proctor calls agnotology (the cultural production of ignorance), Production has been booming. The editing of NASA reports about climate change. The political sanctification of coma patient Terri Schiavo. The introduction of intelligent design into curriculae. All those efforts have all just served the purpose of creating a widespread will to ignore facts and reason.

If a nation purposely kept in the dark about an imminent danger for so long manages to overcome public inertia and become acutely aware of a complex issue like global warming in the span of two years, it means that the power of reason is ultimately able to overcome the forces of ignorance driven by economic interests and religious dogma. This is a universally optimistic outlook on history. And not to forget that this ability to swiftly react as a collective is still most important in the US. The number of leading research facilities, the economic power, the pioneering spirit and entrepreneurial verve put the US in a leadership position that can affect not just global affairs, but down the line maybe even the weather.

BMW Series 7 car runs on Hydrogen

1. Fuel tank, holds approx 8kg of liquid hydrogen at -253C

2. Petrol tank, with 74 litre capacity

3. Pressure control valve

4. Internal combustion engine, uses petrol or liquid hydrogen

Source: BMW

BMW's hydrogen car: Beauty or beast? from BBC News (edited by Chris Street)

As one of the first journalists to drive the world's first series-produced car powered by zero-emission hydrogen, BBC News business reporter Jorn Madslien assesses whether it is a truly green initiative or merely a cynical marketing ploy.

Racing to save the world?

Heading north out of Berlin, towards miles and miles of German autobahn, the roaring six-litre engine belies the top-of-the-range BMW's true potential: to save the world.

Powered by liquid hydrogen that is stored in a vacuum-sealed tank, the engine delivers a whopping 300bhp, yet the emission escaping through the exhaust pipe is mainly pure water vapour.

Unlike rival hydrogen models in the making, which use fuel cells, the BMW Hydrogen 7 is kitted out with a conventional combustion engine that can also run on petrol.

This makes it possible to use it as an everyday car, which is why BMW has announced plans to put hydrogen powered cars into production, months or years ahead of its competitors.

Having stolen a march on its rivals, BMW is far from shy about milking it for all it is worth.

Finding a place to refuel remains a major problem

Wealthy endorsement

BMW has already received plenty of offers from politicians and executives, scientists and athletes, rock stars and TV personalities, all eager to help "create visibility for hydrogen".

Madonna, David Suzuki, Al Gore and Arnold Schwarzenegger are said to be among a long line of celebrities queuing up to endorse the car, and perhaps further enhance their own green images in the process.

But they will have to pay for the privilege.

The H2 button switches between green and gas guzzler mode

The risk of explosion if the car is parked inside a garage and the lack of luggage space caused by the massive hydrogen tank taking up half the boot.

With no more than five hydrogen fuelling stations in the world supporting BMW's technology, early adopters will have to rely on mobile fuelling vehicles that are set to arrive, complete with support crews.

Or they can press a little button on the steering wheel that switches to petrol and extends the car's range by a further 500 gas-guzzling km.

BMW says it wants to lead the way to encourage governments and investors to provide a regulatory framework and an infrastructure that can make a hydrogen economy a reality.

Even more important than getting the fuelling stations up and running is the need to find ways to create enough cheap and clean hydrogen.

"Hydrogen is an energy carrier," points out Wolfgang Leder of Total Deutschland's new energy team.

"There are several ways to produce it. Wind power would be the best, or solar."

The problem is that currently most hydrogen is generated from fossil fuels, since the cost of generating it from, say, solar energy can be up to four times higher.

And when hydrogen is produced this way, well-to-tank and tank-to-wheel analysis shows the overall carbon dioxide emissions from hydrogen powered cars can be higher than that from petrol or diesel powered vehicles.

What is required is large scale investment in technology, BMW insists, and the carmaker - along with many of its rivals - is prepared to do its bit.

"One day, even petrol and diesel will have to compete with hydrogen," predicts BMW's marketing and brand manager, Torsten Muller-Otvos.

The company declines to divulge exactly how much money it has sunk into the project, though it says 300 of its 7,500 engineers work on it full time.