at the intersection of technology, philosophy, and politics (and some other things).
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dreamhost one-click install; uploaded theme and plugin folders by ftp; exported Dose xml file; imported dose xml file. a couple of tweaks left, and bob, as they say, is your uncle.
for whatever faults wordpress has, it’s a pretty fantastic tool.
welcome to my new and final abode, everybody!
UPDATE: jeeze-bazeeze: opened the doors here 2 hrs ago, and already 81 spam messages caught by Askimet. wtf??? (oh, maybe those were imported from dose? hope so).
WordwebPro is, apparently a good dictionary/thesaurus ap for Windows, and it’s free, which is not all that interesting. What is interesting is this provision in their free license:
WordWeb may be freely used only by people who meet the conditions below.
Global greenhouse gas emissions are currently around 1 tonne per person per year, and need to be greatly reduced to avoid catastrophic warming this century. Most computer users are responsible for far more emissions than is sustainable. For example one medium distance return flight can be warming-equivalent to over 1 tonne of emissions: more than an average person should be emitting in an entire year. A typical SUV causes about twice as much warming per mile as a typical normal European car: 10,000 miles of travel in an SUV is responsible for about 5 tonnes of emissions. Offsetting emissions is no substitute for direct cuts.
You may use the program free of charge indefinitely only if
* You take at most 4 flights (2 return flights) in any 12 month period
* AND you do not own or regularly drive an SUV (sports utility vehicle).
Surely not effective on its own as a way of making a difference, but it is a curious and interesting extension of the copyleft mechanisms developed in the free software movement: to stipulate legal/moral obligations to use a particular piece of code, but extending those obligations beyond the normal provisions of software licenses.
I don’t know how legal such things are, but it’s very very interesting, and very creative.
Jargony text & talk drives me crazy. I wrote previously pleading with you, dear readers, never to use the word “utilize” when all you mean is “use.” This stuff infects the pages and html of techies, marketing people and academics, and unsuspecting citizens as well. It’s contagious and dangerous.
I am going to do my part. I’ve decided to take a no-jargon pledge.
Because I value clear concise prose, I promise never to use the following 10 words or phrases when I write:
This list can be lengthened, please suggest words and phrases to add.
I have a job for a good photographer, easy work (I think), a pretty good sized check (USD) for an hour or two (or less) of work, and in exchange you have to buy me lunch or something.
Let me know if you are interested, or if you know anyone who might be. Send me a link to some photography work too - so I can check it out.
NOTE: I was in a bit of a conundrum about what to do with TextoSolvo vs. dose, and decided to just cross-post TextoSolvo articles (which are mostly about LibriVox) here.
This is a cross-post.
In the rough project outline I gave a long list of some of the reasons I think LibriVox has been successful. I’m going to try to write about each one separately, and in no particular order. This post is about Clarity, in my opinion the most important pragmatic (rather than thematic) reasons for success of LibriVox. Clarity comes in a variety of guises, all of them important and I’ll touch on each of them individually:
Clarity is important in any enterprise (hence the 80s/90s/00s fetish for mission statements etc), but that’s especially true in an open web project. If you want to get volunteers involved in what you are doing you need to immeditately let them know:
a) what you are doing
b) how they can contribute
If someone comes to a website and has to read through long texts explaining who started a project, why it was started, what tools are used (technological, management, back-end etc), what influenced the project, what inspired it, or other extraneous information, you will quickly lose the majority of your potential volunteers. Some will read through, but the majority will not. And once “inside” the project, clarity is no less important.
Clarity of Purpose
This is probably the most important of all. Being clear about your purpose is so important because it helps a new web visitor decide whether what you are doing is interesting or not. By purpose, the focus should be: “What are we trying to do?” Leave the politics, ideals etc. out of it. If your purpose is clear, people can make their own decisions about whether or not they want to join you. Consider the most successful of the non-software open projects, Wikipedia. Here’s their purpose:
Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
Contained in that purpose is everything you need to know about the project:
Note that you can be interested in 1 & 2, without being concerned by 3. And that’s another thing about open projects - they should be useful no matter what your participation level. The wiki reader:editor ration is, I am told, 50:1 … meaning there are 50 people who use Wikipedia as an information source for every one person who edits.
The beauty of that purpose tho is how clear it is.
Clarity of Language
Turning to LibriVox, compare this slightly baffling introduction text I started with on project launch in August 2005:
LibriVox is a hope, an experiment, and a question: can the net harness a bunch of volunteers to help bring books in the public domain to life through podcasting?
LibriVox is an open source audio-literary attempt to harness the power of the many to record and disseminate, in podcast form, books from the public domain. It works like this: a book is chosen, then *you*, the volunteers, read and record one or more chapters. We liberate the audio files through this webblog/podcast every week (?).
Good: It tells you what you need to know.
Bad: It’s wordy, and filled with jargon that only certain tech-heads would understand (podcasting, open source, audio-literary).
Luckily the original “market” for volunteers could decipher those jargony words - in fact it was just that group of sophisticated techies interested in Creative Commons, podcasting, copyright issues, open source that would be able to figure out what LibriVox was all about. But as the project got a bit bigger, the early group of volunteers pared things down and now the “About” text says:
LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project.
Maybe still a bit long compared to Wikipedia, but everything you need to know is there, in plain English. The jargon is at the end, which isn’t great, but it’s still important info.
The tag-line, however is still pretty high-falutin:
accoustical liberation of books in the public domain
Which should probably be changed to:
free public domain audio books
Still, I’m a bit of a sucker for lofty ideals, and the high-falutin one maybe does a better job of articulating the dream behind the project, rather than the nuts-and-bolts.
Clarity of Participation
So now you’ve described what you’re about; your visitor has decided whether or not she is interested in your project. Now you have to tell her what she can do to participate. There is a famous website from the US Department of Agriculture that was developed to help the market for buying and selling hay (Haynet … defunct, but the wayback machine provides the preceding link). The site is so simple, not flashy, and lets users decide what they want to do in clear simple English. Need Hay? click here. Have Hay? click here.
Since LibriVox has two potential “markets” - listeners, and volunteers - we used this model, and split the screen into two options: Read/Listen.
And crucially we provided actions for either one: buttons to press to take you where you want to go. That’s important too - if you want people to participate in something, you have to give them a call to action. Read? Listen? You decide, and by deciding you’re already on your way to doing whatever it is you’d like to do. You can abandon ship if you like, but most people who click through to one or the other option are likely to keep going.
Clarity of Process
You’ve hooked people in this far, and this is where, truth be told, things get more complicated. The LibriVox process is “simple,” in a way, but it does require some thinking. The important thing here is to make sure your volunteers understand the bare essentials of how things work, and that they not be frightened by how complicated it is. In the case of LibriVox, our process doc looks like this:
1. a book coordinator posts a book (with chapter info) in the Readers Wanted Section.
2. volunteers “claim” chapters to read
3. the readers record their chapters in digital format
4. the book coordinator collects all the files of all the chapters
5. the book coordinator sends the collected files to a “metadata coordinator”
6. we check the files for technical problems in the Listeners Wanted section
7. the metadata coordinator uploads and catalogs the files… working their secret magic
8. yet another public domain audiobook is made available for free!
In fact it’s a bit more complicated, but that gives an interested reader a sense of how things happen. The important thing is that they can get a snapshot of what goes on, see that the process is relatively straightforward, and understand that their participation is a manageable chunk. Thats a hugely imporant issue, for another post, that you want your first-time contributors to feel that participating is easy, and small, that they will not get roped into a complicated project they are not prepared for. Some LV contributors record one mp3 for us and that’s it. Others do many. And some get obsessed and end up running the project. You need all three types of contributors to succeed, and you have to make sure you take care of all of them.
Clarity of Policies
This last issue is really important as the project gets bigger. In the early days of LibriVox, we had a small group of dedicated participants who all had a shared understanding of what we were doing and why. But as it gets bigger, more people come, more questions get asked and some controversies come up. It really saves a lot of headache if you can define you base policies right away. In the case of LibriVox, here’s what we came to as fundamental principles:
- Librivox is a non-commercial, non-profit and ad-free project
- Librivox donates its recordings to the public domain
- Librivox is powered by volunteers
- Librivox maintains a loose and open structure
- Librivox welcomes all volunteers from across the globe
The most important principles there are: no ads; all recordings in public domain (not creative commons); no one is getting paid; we’ll take any language; and the project is open. In addition to these principles, we’ve developed a few policies that help guide what we are doing:
- we only accept published texts in the public domain (no self-published, creative commons stuff)
- everything done for LibriVox is public domain - audio, images, text etc… this just makes life so much easier
- no criticism of reading styles allowed on the forum (unless requested by the reader) - this one is controversial, and I’ll address it separately later
- be nice - we have a pretty stringent non-flaming policy on the forum which has come under some fire, but the result is that we have among the friendliest forums you’ll find on the net - which helps keep volunteers around
The policies cover a number of things, but it’s been helpful to limit what texts we can take. And on the other issues we tend to make policies that help make volunteers comfortable about participating. That’s been such a huge part of our success, I think, cultivating that sense of a supportive community of volunteers - rather than the more critical communities that are elsewhere.
Conclusion
Clarity in what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how people can participate is of utmost importance if you want to compete for eyeballs, and more importantly participants in this busy web world. If you feel passionate about something, chances are others will too. Trust that passion, but be careful to articulate exactly what it is you are trying to do. Leave out the politics, the ideals, the history, or at least leave it off the front page. All those things might be important to you, but they might be less important to others. Focus on exactly what you want to do. Tell people in clear English. Give them a clear path to participation. And as things develop, make sure you head off complicated conundrums by making your policies clear.
If you do all that, and if you manage to pave a way for others who share your passion to easily participate, you’re on your way.
Welcome to the new dosemagazine … I moved from the old one, for a number of reasons: mainly, I am an adult now and thought it was about time I got my own server space, and officially launched the domain name I bought in 2002. Blogsome was a fine home for a long while, but I was constrained by the version of wordpress they are running, the available themes, and especially their limited number of plugins. On the other hand, if things go pear-shaped here, I am on my own, so I better figure out how to back-up my posts.
I’m still fiddling a bit, but things are more or less how I want them. I don’t like the way the header graphic looks here tho, so I’ll have to figure out what to do about that. I’ll likely be testing a few options.
Anyway, comments welcome etc.
UPDATE: if anyone knows of a tool that will let me get all the info out of my old blogsome.com blog, please let me know.
we have mice. they have started to make squeaky noises. when it was the odd rustle in far the pantry, or the much less common skitter across the floor, it was OK. but when they start sqeaking in the walls, that’s really too much.
This is the new & improved (?) dose. I am fiddling, tweaking, playing and trying to get it all to work properly. Comments welcome.
Robin mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, and I think I posted already, but I met Freddy last night. He’s making a fantastic graphic novel of Orwell’s 1984 (see: gutenberg australia’s ebook).
Freddy is selling these posters for $12 a pop:
And here is the opening scene (you can get it in B&W or colour):
Michael Geist has a nice long bit on Canada’s take on Net Neutraity, and here he summarizes the Conservative position:
We think blocking or prioritizing content may be acceptable, we recognize it is inconsistent with the recommendations of the Telecommunications Policy Review Panel, and we don’t care because we plan to the leave the issue to the dominant telecommunications providers. This is not - as some suggest - about letting freedom reign. It is about leaving Canadian consumers and the Canadian Internet vulnerable to a two-tier Internet and providing tacit approval to those telecommunications companies that actively engage in network discrimination.
Some time ago I sent out emails asking about positions on net neutrality to the Conservatives, Liberals (federal), Bloc, NDP, Liberals (provincial), and PQ. Here are responses I got:
Conservatives:
Dear Mr. McGuire:
The Office of the Prime Minister, has forwarded your electronic correspondence of November 9, 2006, concerning net neutrality to the Honourable Maxime Bernier, Minister of Industry. I am pleased to reply on behalf of the Minister and I regret the delay in relying to you.
The Minister of Industry is responsible for the Telecommunications Act, which sets out the objectives of Canadian telecommunications policy, while the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), an independent public authority, is charged with implementing these objectives through its regulation of the telecommunications industry.
The CRTC determined that the market for retail Internet access was sufficiently competitive to forgo economic price regulation. Nonetheless, the Commission has residual authority to address some issues of discriminatory and anti-competitive behaviour with respect to such Internet services should they arise.
The issue of net neutrality is also being deliberated in other countries. Industry Canada is monitoring domestic and international developments to determine the need for future domestic policy initiatives.
I appreciate your having taken the time to bring this important matter to our attention.
Yours very truly,
Leonard St-Aubin
Director General
Telecommunications Policy Branch
Parti-Quebecois:
Monsieur McGuire,
Au nom du chef de l’opposition officielle, je confirme que nous avons bien reçu votre message. Je vous en remercie.
Je me permets de le transmettre à Monsieur Daniel Turp, porte-parole de l’opposition officielle en matière de culture et de communications, afin qu’il en prenne connaissance.
Je vous souhaite une agréable fin de journée.
Mélanie Malenfant
Conseillère politique
Cabinet du chef de l’opposition officielle
Assemblée nationale
418.643.2743
mmalenfant@assnat.qc.ca
The other parties (NDP, Liberal-fed, Bloc, Liberal-provincial) did not answer. Which tells you how high this issue is on their priority list.
(tip to patrick)
J’ai l’intention de participer à ces evenments:
from patrick, chalk one up for the good guys.
UPDATE:
says mayor tremblay on the radio this morning: “I have learned that the opinion of citizens is important.”
glad to know such important lessons are in the process of being absorbed by our leading politicians.
Net Neutrality: A Public Discussion on the Future of the Internet in Canada
Date and Location:
Tues, February 6, 2007 , 7 pm
Admission: Free
Ottawa Public Library Auditorium
120 Metcalfe St.
Moderated by:
Pippa Lawson: Executive Director, Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa
Panelists:
* Michael Geist: Professor of Law, Research Chair of Internet and E-Commerce Law, University of Ottawa
* Ren Bucholz: Electronic Frontier Foundation Policy Coordinator, Americas
* Andrew Clement: Professor, Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto; Principal Investigator, Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking
* Bill St-Arnaud: Senior Director, Advanced Networks for CANARIE, Inc.
For the hardcore info junkie, there was no better feed for your veins than diggdot.us: a feed of the purest quality, distilled from a mix of digg.com, del.icio.us/popular, and slashdot.org.
Cease and desist letters sent. diggdot.us is now doggdot.us. No harm done I guess, but digg are jerks.
Book by Philip Roth
Roth didn’t quite catch me with this book: it seems very much rooted in its time (1998, when the President’s offences involved fellatio and cigars, and not dubious wars), though there was much more in there, among other things: race relations, violence, Vietnam, the Greeks, the lies we tell ourselves and those closest to us. But something felt forced, the allegorical structure a little too present, a little too solid. Still, a master craftsman, to be admired.
My rating: stars
We seem to have reached a tipping point in public and policy opinion on climate change, which is something of a relief, but also very scary. Up until even the last few weeks, I felt that my tiny contribution to the debate was through occasional posts here, addressing some of the science as we know it, mostly in an attempt to make known the state of science. (In a previous life, I spent a few years working more directly on climate change issues, in policy, finance, and technology development).
But now that, in Canada at least, it has become politically untenable to deny climate change - the Liberals, NDP and Bloc are all climate believers; the Conservatives have just converted, either for political expediency, or after finally coming to terms with the science. There is no going back, unless the science changes. So the question is no longer: Is it a problem? or Should we do anything? but: What (the hell) do we do now?
The Liberals, NDP and Bloc have all come out demanding that the Conservative inplement policy to make Canada “meet Kyoto’s targets.” This is inane political posturing, and on the part of the Liberals, a little hard to stomach. The Liberals presided over the entire Kyoto era, and agreed in 1998 to GHG emissions reductions to 6% below 1990 levels; and in 2002 ratified the Kyoto Protocol (meaning those reductions became “binding”). As the Conservatives keep telling us (rightly) the Liberals signed and ratified the Protocol without putting in (or even proposing) one shred of binding policy, or any kind of serious plan to meet those targets. Under their dismal environmental stewardship, Canada emissions grew to something like 30% higher than the targets they agreed to as ratified (and is, by the way, twice as bad as the US that signed, but never ratified Kyoto). Stephane Dion may have a dog named Kyoto; and he may be serious about the environment, but his party sure as hell has not demonstrated any leadership on climate change in the past, except for ratifying an international treaty that binds Canada to reductions without giving any thought to how those reductions would be met. Which has one positive impact: it highlights in glaring blod face how much work we have to do.
Which is why the Libs/NDP/Bloc calling for the Conservatives to meet Kyoto targets is dishonest and laughable, though it does put the pressure on to come up with concrete policies (which, to their credit, the Conservatives have started to do, for all the criticisms heaped on their Clean Air Act).
To put it in context, to meet our Kyoto targets we would have to do several things (based on 2003 numbers):
1. make all Canadian houses 30% more energy efficient
2. make all Canadian cars 30% more efficient (or, say, make every Canadian take a bike to work two days a week)
3. make every business (including industrial manufacturing, mining, and oil production) 30% more energy efficient (or close them down for 2 days of the week).
4. shut down all thermal power plants (about 30% of electricty production in Canada, the balance being hydro 60% and 12% nuclear) and replace with nukes, or some other renewables, equalling a 4x increase in nukes, or a 2000% increase in renewable contributions, going from roughly 500 MW of wind to 10,000 MW of wind, an investment on the order of 10 billion dollars).
We should be doing these things, but the scale of change to our society needed is truly massive. All areas of energy use must change: housing, transport, food production, manufacturing, urban planning, oil and gas production. To make that happen the empty posturing of the Liberals and NDP and Bloc is perhaps politically useful (if disingenuous), but it does nothing to solve the problem, which transcends party lines.
What IS needed is a massive investment in time and energy to come up with some concrete and serious ways that we can address the issue in a reasonable way without throwing the country on its ear. The sooner we start the better. It would have been nice to start in 1998 when we first signed Kyoto, but for whatever reason - political or practical - that hasn’t happened.
I’m no great fan of the Conservatives, but they are in theory the hard-nosed pragmatic doers, not the political dreamers we lefties are supposed to be. That’s encouraging (though I said the same thing when Bush won the presidency on a CO2-regulation platform in 2000, and look where that got us). So: do the Conservatives have the political will to do something about climate change? Or are they just shifting their rhetoric in response to polls? We’ll find out.
Also, just an asside. What can the world of the web do to help address this problem in a serious, significant way? Anyone have any ideas?
Explains what the hell is going on on the web in a pretty compelling way. If you know all this, its fun to watch. If you don’t know all this, it might be too fast to follow. But entertaining nonetheless.
So it’s registered and up and running: http://visiblepolitics.org/
VisiblePolitics is a project to create a complete listing of Canadian federal politicians, parties and ridings, with information about policies, funding, voting records, public statements, press, among other things. VisiblePolitics is a source of information; it is NOT a source of, or forum for advocacy of any kind.
A totally open project if anyone wants to join in to help out. Doesn’t have to be wiki I guess, but I just cant see another way to get the info in so easily. I guess project discussion should happen here: About the Project. There’s a short list of things that could use some help, but I didn’t think very long or hard about it. No idea if this’ll work or not…
The one thing I REALLY want is someone who can help me install/figure out how to use this:
XFeed-RSS Aggregator
HOW YOU CAN HELP:
1. Find out who your Member of Parliament is
2. Visit the site: http://visiblepolitics.org
3. Add some info about your MP (you can copy some stuff from Wikipedia, some from the Canadian Parliament website, and ideally from the mess that is Elections Canada’s financial info site).
OR:
4. Help with layout, wikiness, project direction, and tools (RSS aggregator in the wiki!!)
According to a recent Globe & Mail poll, suddenly, strangely, climate change has become the most important issue for the majority of Canadians (climate change topped the list for 26% of Canadians, followed by health & security). A curious and surprising event, perhaps an interesting result of the democratic system.
When the Liberals (as a centrist/left party, theoretically more enviromentally friendly than the right wing Conservatives) were in power, they did NOTHING on climate change. No policy, no effective strategy, no concrete action, and no results, except a 30% increase in CO2 emissions. But when the Liberals were in power, the official oposition was the Conservatives, right wing, oil-based, and hostile to policies addressing climate change (which will have a big impact on the oil industry and energy-intensive business). So agressive climate action on the part of the Libs would have resulted in strong opposition from the Conservatives. So the Libs did nothing.
Now, the Conservatives are in power, and they just got slaughtered (by the Libs, Bloc and NDP, and public opinion) for their weak stand on climate change in their recent Clean Air Bill (tho, in their defense, at least they tabled serious policies/laws with actual impacts on industry: the Libs never did). Stephane Dion is leading the charge, and in all the hooplah, climate change lands at the forefront of issues in the mind of Canadians. Harper shuffles his deck, and climate change becomes the Conservatives shiny new focus.
So, strike one up for Minority government as a good way to get things done that people actually want: those who pull the strings in power (the Conservatives) are forced to adjust their policies according to pressures from the other side of the spectrum. Which, theoretically at least, is a good way to ensure balanced government…And one hopes, a step in the direction of taking climate change seriously as a problem.
Hopping from government to media, interesting shift in the Globe and Mail this weekend too. Rex Murphy is the Globe’s shrillest climate alarmist-alarmist (he worries endlessly about the climate change propogandists and doomsdayers that run the National Academies of Sciences in all the biggest countries and economies of the world). He has spent the last 5 or 6 thousand years scoffing at, sneering about, and dismissing climate change, with few updates in his rhetoric for annoying things like the scientific advances. But even Rex seemed to back off in his weekly column yesterday. Well, almost. He presents a couple of examples of climate research gone wild (an Italian study linking suicide with climate change, and Al-Qaeda’s insistence that the US sign the Kyoto Agreement) as evidence that the rest of the scientists are single-minded fools. Yet he after all that silliness, he finally says:
“If we believe global warming is as big a problem as the world’s experts are telling us, we also have to believe the world’s politicians are capable of fixing it.”
And concludes that their inability to fix potholes suggests they won’t be much good at fixing climate change. He might have a point there, who knows? But there was a subtle, grudging, shift, almost imperceptible, but present. A back-handed acknowledgment that maybe, perhaps, it’s possible that all those damned scientists might be worried about something worth worrying about. Even if he does not trust politicians to do anything useful about it.
Margaret Wente is another of the Globe’s usual “climate change is bullshit” columnists. A sample of her headlines from the last few years (the Globe is subscription only, so you can’t read the articles): “Ice the ‘polar bears are drowning’ theory,” “Will we freeze or will we fry?” “Kyoto always was a fantasy,” “The collapse of climate ‘consensus’” “The Kyoto-speak brainwashers” … etc.
In an article in this Saturday’s Globe, Wente finally, finally, finally actually talks to some mainstream climate scientists, instead of the odd-ball guys she fished up in previous articles (it’s all good and well to say there are scientists who don’t agree with the consensus, but they are a small minority, and often not active scientists, and more often not regarded as very serious in their research).
In any case, her article in Saturday’s Focus section of the Globe, is titled “A Questionable Truth.” She has spun her argument something like this: Al Gore’s movie an Inconvenient Truth exaggerates the likelihood of bad effects from climate change. And mainstream scientists think the probability of catastrophic climate change is … uncertain. In fact, much of climate science is uncertain. So …
And here is the interesting thing. In the past Wente’s “So…” used to be followed by, “So the climate alarmists are a bunch of propagandists, and we should ignore them…”. But this time she ended (almost, as well as a swipe at Gore) with: “So what can a worried citizen do?” To answer, she quotes Mark Jaccard of Simon Fraser University, who answers: “Lobby the politicians to put policies in place immediately that put a value on the environment … Drive your car to Ottawa if you have to. The most important thing is to get policies in place that are intelligent.” Translation (I think): we have a problem here, and something should be done.
(Not content to leave it at that, however, Wente finishes with a swipe at Al Gore, “even though much of what he says is dubious or just plain wrong, he’s going to win that Oscar anyway.”)
But when you read the text of her article, and what the actual scientists say (rather, what she decided to quote them as saying), it’s a funny thing. There is not one scientists there arguing that climate change is not a major problem worth addressing. Not one person saying: climate change is not happening. Not one person saying: humans have no impact on the climate. Not one person saying: there is nothing to worry about. Not one person saying: we should do nothing. The scientists she interviews, instead, are cautious, level-headed, and, like most scientists, uncomfortable with sensational headlines. Says one, “The probability of another metre of or sea-level rise in the next 50 years isn’t zero, but it isn’t 90 per cent either. And if you pinned me down to tell you what it really is, I couldn’t do that.” That is, there is a risk of serious problems, and scientists can’t pin down just what that risk is. Which hardly suggests: a) that there is no risk, or b) that we should do nothing.
Another interesting thing: Wente and some of her pals at the Globe (the paper probably has had a 50-50 split on the issue) have spent the last ten years pillorying the Kyoto Protocol. Yet when discussing how to address climate change in this article, she writes: “But climate economists generally agree that the first and most important thing to do is to put a value on the atmosphere. You do this with carbon taxes and emissions caps. If emitting carbon costs money, then people will have a big incentive to cut down on it.” The Kyoto Protocol was a loose international framework whose objective was to a) get nations to agree to emissions caps on their national emissions, b) provide a timetable to try to meet those targets, c) provide some loose mechanisms to meet them. The Kyoto Protocol does not say ANYTHING about how any one country should meet their targets; that is left to countries figure out for themselves. (Which is why the “Made in Canada” solution trumpeted by Harper is hogwash: Kyoto’s objective is to get every country to come up with their own solution). Wente’s main expert’s opinion about how to address climate change suggests, essentially, that we should have started working within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol years ago. Wente manages make it sound as if she had just uncovered a sensible and innovative answer to this climate problem, a solution ignored by the hordes of rabid alarmists with Kyoto as their bible as they made their joyful march to climate apocalypse. That’s pretty disingenuous. The whole point of Kyoto was to do exactly what she seems to agree with here. And she has spent 10 years mocking Kyoto. At least, Ms. Wente, have the decency to utter a quiet little mea culpa. There is more dishonesty (intentional or accidental, I don’t know) in that article, but Rome was not built in a day. Ms. Wente has written her pivotal article on climate change, hovering on both sides of the argument, but she won’t go back to her old ways. She will continue to be distrustful of the enviros (which is fine), but I’d wager that she’s now convinced that things must be done.
I wonder: does the Iraq debacle Iraq have anything to do with this sudden turn-around in the public’s climate opinions? After all, those for the Iraq war tended to be, on balance, those against doing anything about climate change. And personally I always found it strange the dichotomy between the logic of spending billions on Iraq as compared to billions on climate change. Both threats (Saddam’s WMDs/climate chaos), according to their proponents, could have catastrophic impacts on all of us. Both would take massive amounts of resources, effort and policy will-power to address. Yet Iraq will gobbled up an estimated $1 trillion, with probable results of: destabilizing the Middle East, weakening the American position internationally, both among friends and foes, exposing the US as bad failed occupiers, stretching the military to the breaking point, and emboldening enemies (after all, the US can hardly make any military moves now, and Iran is the big winner in their blunder). All this sold by the same folks who told you not to worry about climate change (including Wente, including Murphy). So, maybe this is the effect of a little reality settling in. If the right was SO wrong about everything in Iraq, maybe it’s time to wonder what else they might have gotten wrong. Is the collapse of the Neocons and their grand vision for Iraq a chance for thier more moderate cheerleaders (in the press and public) to examine everything they sold with a new eye? After all, you only buy a lemon from a car salesman once. After that you steer clear.
It’s pretty hard to believe anything the current President says these days. It always was, for me; but it seems the naked emperor and his disastrous war has been revealed. So if you don’t have any more faith in the guy who is President, maybe it’s time to take a look at what the other guy, that guy who *could* have been President, has been parroting on about for the past few years.
I didn’t like the movie, and sure he goes too far in parts, and gets some things wrong. But hark: that’s the sound of Wente and Murphy reevaluating climate change. A good sign.
Splitting my previous climate post into 3 (since it was 3 separate ideas):
Interesting shift in the Globe and Mail this weekend. Rex Murphy is the Globe’s shrillest climate alarmist-alarmist (he worries endlessly about the climate change propogandists and doomsdayers that run the National Academies of Sciences in all the biggest countries and economies of the world). He has spent the last 5 or 6 thousand years scoffing at, sneering about, and dismissing climate change, with few updates in his rhetoric for annoying things like the scientific advances. But even Rex seemed to back off in his weekly column yesterday. Well, almost. He presents a couple of examples of climate research gone wild (an Italian study linking suicide with climate change, and Al-Qaeda’s insistence that the US sign the Kyoto Agreement) as evidence that the rest of the scientists are single-minded fools. Yet he after all that silliness, he finally says:
“If we believe global warming is as big a problem as the world’s experts are telling us, we also have to believe the world’s politicians are capable of fixing it.”
And concludes that their inability to fix potholes suggests they won’t be much good at fixing climate change. He might have a point there, who knows? But there was a subtle, grudging, shift, almost imperceptible, but present. A back-handed acknowledgment that maybe, perhaps, it’s possible that all those damned scientists might be worried about something worth worrying about. Even if he does not trust politicians to do anything useful about it.
Margaret Wente is another of the Globe’s usual “climate change is bullshit” columnists. A sample of her headlines from the last few years (the Globe is subscription only, so you can’t read the articles): “Ice the ‘polar bears are drowning’ theory,” “Will we freeze or will we fry?” “Kyoto always was a fantasy,” “The collapse of climate ‘consensus’” “The Kyoto-speak brainwashers” … etc.
Wente finally, finally, actually talks to some mainstream climate scientists, instead of the odd-ball guys she fished up in previous articles (it’s all good and well to say there are scientists who don’t agree with the consensus, but they are a small minority, and often not active scientists, and more often not regarded as very serious in their research).
In any case, her article in Saturday’s Focus section of the Globe, is titled “A Questionable Truth.” She has spun her argument something like this: Al Gore’s movie an Inconvenient Truth exaggerates the likelihood of bad effects from climate change. And mainstream scientists think the probability of catastrophic climate change is … uncertain. In fact, much of climate science is uncertain. So …
And here is the interesting thing. In the past Wente’s “So…” used to be followed by, “So the climate alarmists are a bunch of propagandists, and we should ignore them…”. But this time she ended (almost, as well as a swipe at Gore) with: “So what can a worried citizen do?” To answer, she quotes Mark Jaccard of Simon Fraser University, who answers: “Lobby the politicians to put policies in place immediately that put a value on the environment … Drive your car to Ottawa if you have to. The most important thing is to get policies in place that are intelligent.” Translation (I think): we have a problem here, and something should be done.
Not content to leave it at that, however, Wente finishes with a swipe at Al Gore, “even though much of what he says is dubious or just plain wrong, he’s going to win that Oscar anyway.”
But when you read the text of her article, and what the actual scientists say (rather, what she decided to quote them as saying), it’s a funny thing. There is not one scientists there arguing that climate change is not a major problem worth addressing. Not one person saying: climate change is not happening. Not one person saying: humans have no impact on the climate. Not one person saying: there is nothing to worry about. Not one person saying: we should do nothing. The scientists she interviews, instead, are cautious, level-headed, and, like most scientists, uncomfortable with sensational headlines. Says one, “The probability of another metre of or sea-level rise in the next 50 years isn’t zero, but it isn’t 90 per cent either. And if you pinned me down to tell you what it really is, I couldn’t do that.” That is, there is a risk of serious problems, and scientists can’t pin down just what that risk is. Which hardly suggests: a) that there is no risk, or b) that we should do nothing.
Another interesting thing: Wente and her pals at the Globe (the columnists are probably 50-50 split on climate) have spent the last ten years pillorying the Kyoto Protocol. Yet when discussing how to address climate change in this article, she writes: “But climate economists generally agree that the first and most important thing to do is to put a value on the atmosphere. You do this with carbon taxes and emissions caps. If emitting carbon costs money, then people will have a big incentive to cut down on it.” The Kyoto Protocol was a loose international framework whose objective was to a) get nations to agree to emissions caps on their national emissions, b) provide a timetable to try to meet those targets, c) provide some loose mechanisms to meet them. The Kyoto Protocol does not say ANYTHING about how any one country should meet their targets; that is left to countries figure out for themselves. (Which is why the “Made in Canada” solution trumpeted by Harper is hogwash: Kyoto’s objective is to get every country to come up with their own solution). Wente’s main expert’s opinion about how to address climate change suggests, essentially, that we should have started working within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol years ago. Wente manages make it sound as if she had just uncovered a sensible and innovative answer to this climate problem, a solution ignored by the hordes of rabid alarmists with Kyoto as their bible as they made their joyful march to climate apocalypse. That’s pretty disingenuous. The whole point of Kyoto was to do exactly what she seems to agree with here. And she has spent 10 years mocking Kyoto. At least, Ms. Wente, have the decency to utter a quiet little mea culpa. There is more dishonesty (intentional or accidental, I don’t know) in that article, but Rome was not built in a day. Ms. Wente has written her pivotal article on climate change, hovering on both sides of the argument, but she won’t go back to her old ways. She will continue to be distrustful of the enviros (which is fine), but I’d wager that she’s now convinced that things must be done.
I wonder: does the Iraq debacle Iraq have anything to do with this sudden turn-around in the public’s climate opinions? After all, those for the Iraq war tended to be, on balance, those against doing anything about climate change. And personally I always found it strange the dichotomy between the logic of spending billions on Iraq as compared to billions on climate change. Both threats (Saddam’s WMDs/climate chaos), according to their proponents, could have catastrophic impacts on all of us. Both would take massive amounts of resources, effort and policy will-power to address. Yet Iraq will gobbled up an estimated $1 trillion, with probable results of: destabilizing the Middle East, weakening the American position internationally, both among friends and foes, exposing the US as bad failed occupiers, stretching the military to the breaking point, and emboldening enemies (after all, the US can hardly make any military moves now, and Iran is the big winner in their blunder). All this sold by the same folks who told you not to worry about climate change (including Wente, including Murphy). So, maybe this is the effect of a little reality settling in. If the right was SO wrong about everything in Iraq, maybe it’s time to wonder what else they might have gotten wrong. Is the collapse of the Neocons and their grand vision for Iraq a chance for thier more moderate cheerleaders (in the press and public) to examine everything they sold with a new eye? After all, you only buy a lemon from a car salesman once. After that you steer clear.
It’s pretty hard to believe anything the current President says these days. It always was, for me; but it seems the naked emperor and his disastrous war has been revealed. So if you don’t have any more faith in the guy who is President, maybe it’s time to take a look at what the other guy, that guy who *could* have been President, has been parroting on about for the past few years.
I didn’t like the movie, and sure he goes too far in parts, and gets some things wrong. But his point, that something must be done, is starting to sound reasonable even to the Wente’s & Murphys of the world.
Book by Ruth Kinna
As someone influenced by anarchist thought, I know embarrassingly little about the source texts of the movement, and its historical proponents: Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon and the rest. What I know, I know mostly from the application of anarchist principles in online projects (the free software movement, wikipedia, and of course, most intimately, LibriVox), and their proponents, mainly the writings of Richard Stallman.
(For those wondering, anarchism is not about Molotov cocktails, but something like a belief in non-hierarchical organization of society, through collective actions of free individuals).
I was keen to get a primer to the historical movement and where it fits into society today. I corresponded briefly with Ruth Kinna in response to an interview with her on BBC, and decided subsequently to pick up her book.
“Anarchism: A Beginner’s Guide” is designed mostly, I think, as a companion book to a university course on anarchism and the reading of the key texts of the movement. As such, it covers important figures of the past (those mentioned above, plus Ayn Rand and Emma Goldman, and many others), and more recent anarchist thinkers as well. The writing is clear and engaing, and much is packed into the slim volume, as befits a beginner’s guide. But the book has two major faults.
First, it fails to give an adequate account of how anarchism fit into the political consciousness as a serious alternative in the past. There was a time when anarchism was a popular movement among intellectuals and trade unionists, and Bakunin did battle with Marx for control of the “socialist” movement. Anarchists were considered a real threat, featuring in fiction (Conrad’s The Secret Agent text, audio), state executions (Sacco and Venzetti), and for a brief time running a country (CNT in Spain). Yet anarchism is now considered, mostly, the domain of a few crackpot hippies, the odd masked troublemaker, and, of course, a big population of hackers (more on that later). But it is not seen, I do not believe, as a major threat to established order, so much as a nuisance at WTO meetings, and good training for riot squads (who are often, much to the total unconcern of the population at large, more than happy to demonstrate the violence of the state anarchists wish to oppose). So, some questions: Why was anarchism such a powerful idea in the late 19th and early 20th century? Why did it fall by the wayside, in the face of other political doctrines (socialism, fascism, communism, and liberal democracy)? And, since it has not survived well as a political movement, why is it still important? Kinna’s book doesn’t address these questions adequately.
But the second, and most puzzling failure is that the book ignores completely the flourishing movement of anarchist-inspired activity online (except one aside mention of hacktivists, who jam corporate websites). The free software movement, and other online-enabled non-software projects such as wikipedia, distributed proofreaders, libirvox, and countless other open projects, as well as groups such as the anarchist librarians, all offer important examples of concrete implementations of anarchist ideals, implementations that actually work. When I first became interested in free software, back in 2004, I thought there must be many political philosophers studying this explosion, real-time, of anarchist-ish communities. My searches on Google Scholar turned up surprisingly few academics looking at this with any seriousness. The only philosopher I know of looking at these issues (surely there are more) is Dylan E. Wittkower, perhaps not coincidently, a LibriVox volunteer.
Those criticisms aside (and they are significant), Anarchism: A Beginner’s Guide is concise and clear and an engaging read. It is a toe-dipping kind of book, one that, as a guide for beginners, provides a starting-point to explore the different movements and personalities within the somewhat chaotic ideology that is anarchism.
My rating: stars
Lullabies for Little Criminals
Book by Heather O’Neill
O’Neill, whose radio work can be heard on Public Radio International’s “This American Life” and CBC’s “Wiretap,” channels her gift for images through Baby’s words: “His compliments,” she says about her father, “were like little cupcakes all lined up in a window.” She is also a heartbreakingly wise poet: “If you want to get a child to love you, then you should just go and hide in the closet for three or four hours. They get down on their knees and pray for your return. That child will turn you into God. Lonely Children probably wrote the Bible.”
Since Mordechai Richler died, you hear the occasional mutterings about who will be the next anglo bard of Montreal. Yann Martel took a stab by winning the Booker Prize for Life of Pi, but his writing (whatever its success) is in no way attached to Montreal. But here, I think, we have the only true contender to date, a novelist that in zeroing in on the gritty particular, has raised her book to a marvelous universal. This is the most exciting novel I have read by a Canadian writer in many years. It has its flaws (the impressionistic and circumambulatory narration feels a little forced in places; the staccato writing somewhat disjointed), but those minor quibbles are nothing compared with its strengths: the voice, the humour, the beauty, the emotion, the full broken-down world recreated in the eyes of its beholder.
O’Neill’s second novel is reportedly coming out soon. Second novels, so they say, are the tough ones. I’m rooting for her.
My rating: stars
Book by Seth Lloyd, about quantum physics and cosmology
He has also written an important book, which is at once mind-bending and accessible. He is patient and clear (and funny), and this slim text presents a revolutionary interpretation of the cosmsos, which Lloyd thinks might provide a pathway to solving the great challenege of modern physics: uniting the theory of general relativity and quantum physics, which don’t get along. It might also prove a (testable) theoretical underpinning for the creation of life.
My rating: stars
Book by Haruki Murakami
Talking cats, raining fish, death, trapped souls, parallel universes, a confused fifteen-year-old, and of course a good smattering of sex. Among other (sometimes heart-breaking) oddities. With Kafka on the Shore, Japanese novelist and fabulist Haruki Murakami continues his metaphysical exploration of the odd underside of human and not-so human experience, getting at the raw truth that lies obscured by everyday reality. The writing seems less assured than in the masterful Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which might be blamed on the translator: Philip Gabriel replacing Jay Rubin. The prose is a bit clunky (possibly Murakami, possibly Gabriel), but the narrative transcends those problems, much as his characters, willing and not, transcend physics.
My rating: stars
book by Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow, who died in 2005, was one of the great American writers of the post-war period, among a group (including Mailer, Cheever, Vonnegut; later: Heller, Roth, Updike) who forged the American literary and cultural consciousness of the late 40s, 50s, and paved the way for the revolution that came in the 60s.
Henderson the Rain King, written in 1959, is very much a book to presage that revolution. Henderson is a loud, brash voice of a wealthy America unsatisfied (spiritually, socially, morally) with the position attained at the top of the global heap. He is a 50ish millionaire, a former WWII commando, a pig farmer, father, and the sort of smashing North American intent on fixing things, and afflicted by a constant voice in his head: I want I want I want. What he wants, as with so many of us, is not so clear, and so he heads to Africa to find an answer. There he travels, tells us the story of his life, wives, the time he tried to shoot a cat, and his daughter who brings a small black baby home, and hides her in the closet; he also finds frogs poisoning the well in an idyllic village in the middle of nowhere, and sets about solving the problem. Smasher that he is, he fails, despite his good intentions; does much dammage. He flees the village, and eventually lands under the wing of a philosopher king, former medical student, and lion affictionado, Dahfu. From Dahfu he tries to learn to be, rather than to become.
Bellows writes with a vigorous honesty, maybe unmatched in American letters (Roth called him, along with Faulkner, the backbone of 20th Century American writing). It’s hard to figure just what it is about his writing that is so powerful; he is not a pretty stylist, like, say, Nabokov, and his prose is almost raw, though that rawness has a beauty about it, the rough beauty of the market, maybe, with jarring jumps in language that work even though they probably shouldn’t; and his sentences contain so much, with such little artifice, no trickery, and again, an almost brutal honesty. Henderson says: “We hate death, we fear it. But there’s nothing like it.”
I keep thinking about how conservative we are these days, despite all our freedom and access. Perhaps it is just a matter of our place in history: in the West, we are rich, we are satisfied, and our relationship with things like hunger and war are filtered through media that keeps those problems abstract and far away, in time, space. As the son of Jewish immigrants (first in Montreal, then Chicago), Bellow knew what it was to stuggle to forge a place in an unsettled society, and he served in the Merchant Marines in WWII, so would have known something of fear and death. Not to mention the Holocaust. He, like most from that generation, was acquainted with the dangers and possibilities of humans, of life on the street in America, of the risks of living, and he wrote as if things mattered, because they did. Now in 2007, maybe, things are just too easy, too fixed: we don’t feel, as people did in the post-war era, that we are building things, we don’t feel as if our decisions matter the way they might have 50 years ago. But of course they should, they do, and reading Bellow reminds you of that.
My rating: stars
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Book by Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins’ 1974 book, the Selfish Gene is probably one of the most important science books written for the general public (I’ll be reviewing that book here later) in the second half of the 20th century. Not only did the Selfish Gene do much to explain evolutionary biology to the average reader, but it also contributed a significant new conceptual framework to neo-Darwinism, that genes program biological hosts to be selfish (meaning they privilege propagation of those genes above all other imperatives), even when being altruistic. This follows from an important observation of Darwinism: that which succeeds is that which propagates, and vice versa. Genes that are not, ultimately, selfish, will not propagate = not succeed = not propagate.
What I have read of Dawkins’ work, I have liked; and I am always happy to hear him speak (thank you podcasts). He is passionate, articulate, and convincing when he discusses evolution and science. So I was excited to read his new one, the “God Delusion.”
And starting for page 1, I was deeply disappointed. Infuriated, actually. The God Delusion is a different kind of book from the Selfish Gene, though what kind of book it was intended to be is hard to say. Whatever kind, Dawkins badly missed the mark. It’s possible that I read it unfairly, expecting it to be something it wasn’t meant to be: an exploration of the scientific/cultural reasons behind the almost-universal human belief in some kind of supernatural deity or deities. But it is not that book at all. It is many other things, and none of them particularly effective. It is a catalog of many stupid things said in the name of religion; it is a list of many bad things religious people have done; it is a sarcastic dismissal of the “religious mind” (whatever that is); it is a refutation of creationism; it is a defense of the separation of church and state; it is a book of sloppy theology; poor philosophy; shoddy psychology; and most offensive to me, given Dawkins’ bona fides, a book of lazy science.
Dawkins has an axe to grind here, and he leaves no doubt that he *hates* religion. He thinks it is childish, ignorant, dangerous, evil, contemptible, disgusting. Such beliefs are not necessarily problematic, except that his contempt for religion gets in the way of his ability to make a cogent case for whatever it was he meant to elucidate (which is not particularly clear in this muddled book).
As a leading public exponent of Darwinism he has been the target of countless attacks from religionists and creationists (many of them abusive and threatening, some of them printed in this volume). As a public and vocal atheist the target on his head is that much larger. He is frustrated with dangerous and anti-scientific movements such as Intelligent Design, and is offended by the valued place religion is given in policy-making, particularly in the USA, but elsewhere as well. He doesn’t like the way religion treats homosexuals and stem-cell research, and abortion. All of which is fine.
Indeed a book about all the bad things done in the name of Religion in the past six thousand years, or even the past six years, would be a thick tome, and anyone would marvel at the horror. But I wouldn’t have much interest in Dawkins’ account of such things - I need no convincing on that point in any case. He is an evolutionary biologist, and I wanted his views on where religion comes from, and why it is a delusion. To be fair, he occasionally provides some theories on this count (one chapter): mainly that religion is the “byproduct of childish gullibility,” that children learn to obey orders from parents (helpful for keeping them alive), and later this “gullibility” mechanism is erroneously transferred onto “God.”
Perhaps. (Though I find, as almost everywhere throughout this book, Dawkins’ use of language is unnecessarily non-neutral… “childish gullibility” is an odd way to state a useful evolutionary trait).
But here is another Darwinist theory (mine, perhaps others’) of why religion and belief in God might have persisted and spread: religion is a useful way to organize societies, to force people to obey laws, to enforce social norms, to inspire warriors and to placate the discontented. Hence, from a cultural Darwinist vantage, religious societies have historically been better at organizing themselves, hence defeating their foes, hence surviving. So there has been a “natural selection” of religious societies over non-religious. Perhaps this theory is wrong, yet Dawkins is so hostile to religion, he cannot admit that religion might serve any useful purpose at all (except to produce good music, poetry, and to console the dying). And so his theories of the delusion of God, such as they are, seem woefully incomplete as any kind of explanation for the persistence of the idea of God across almost all ages, and cultures in human history. Including our own, scientific age.
I should note here my own biases: I am a very lapsed Catholic, mostly agnostic, vaguely influenced, perhaps, by the belief in some kind of universal power, but certainly not a “personal” God, certainly not as reflected in particular religious doctrine. (In fact, I think that the idea of having a “true” religious doctrine is logically inconsistent with the Christian/Judeo/Islamic concept of an infinite God; our puny human minds are too small for such things). Curiously, Dawkins dismisses this kind of loose pantheistic belief, which he calls Einstiennian belief, after Einstein’s statement: “I don’t try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.” Dawkins says this sort of belief is not religious at all (hence not worth considering), and doesn’t really address it in any serious sense. Which is curious, because if God is a delusion, surely this kind of vague belief, the kind that secular, scientifically-minded people like me harbour, would be just the kind of belief that an evolutionary biologist would be interested in studying. There are easy explanations for why teen-aged Evangelicals and those who grow up in Amish towns and Madrasses believe in God … But what about us thoughtful agnostics? Dawkins explains this away with some cheap logic showing that agnostics are in fact atheists (check this video for the hilarious “logical” move in the other direction).
Because this is a book by Richard Dawkins, it does have its moments, mostly when he is doing what he does best: explaining evolution. He does far too little of that in these pages. It is not a science book, or a philosophical book; it is a political book. An effective political book should make its case coherently, objectively. Dawkins has not done that here, and should get back to his desk and work harder to write the book this ought to have been.
My rating: stars
Veeeerrrry interesting. I wrote a little post on Climate Change (a letter to the editor of the Globe and Mail regarding Rex Murphy’s latest bit of climate idiocy). And I got two comments from people who have certainly never been to this site before. I presume there is a concerted blog/commenting effort, probably funded by PR companies, to troll through the blogosphere and make “grassroots” comments. I noted this kind of thing before on my Zune post a while back, and if I were a PR company, I would be doing this too. Good, cheap, and very direct way to get your message out. Even if you don’t reach the writer (in this case me) you might sow some doubt in other readers of the post.
I was going to answer these fellows in the comments, but it’ll take some links etc, so I’ll do it here instead.
First, Ken Ring from predictweather.com has explaned his position onglobal warming: here. He’s from New Zealand and predicts weather partterns using moon cycle analysis. Here is his comment, and my response below:
Instead of berating Murphy, how about listing the ACTUAL evidence that the world is warming. By the world I don’t just mean the tiny areas occupied by the cities, I mean the oceans, icecaps, swamps, craggy monutain ranges, deserts etc that comprise, without human habitation, 98.4% of the Earth’s surface. Oh bother, there aren’t any thermometers in those places. (Now aint that the inconvenient truth..)
Evidence coming, but first some propositions:
1. earth’s climate is a complex system
2. human civilization has developed in a period of relative warmth & climate stability (allowing for agricultural food production)
3. global temperature is directly correlated with CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere
4. if CO2 concentrations rise, there is a good chance that temperature will rise too
5. if the temperature rises significantly, the complex system of the climate will be destabilized
6. if the climate system is destabilized, our ability to manage a global agricultural system will be destroyed
7. if we cannot manage a global agricultural system, human civilization as we know it is finished.
8. CO2 is rising, partly due to human emissions of CO2
Now for some evidence, the most powerful piece of data I have seen in climate change science, from the Vostok ice core:
Note CO2 concentrations follow temperature. Note also that the past 10,000 years (far right of graph, blue) have seen something extraordinary: relatively warm, stable temperature, also the period when human civilization developed.
Now perhaps doubling or tripling or quintupling C02 concentrations is fine. But if I were a betting man, given a graph like that, I would say there is 50% chance that rising CO2 will raise the temperature. And knowing a little about the history of the earth, I would say we don’t want temperatures to go up, and we should do what we can to make sure they don’t.
If you want some more evidence, in counterpoint to climate-denial, a good place to start is this article from Realclimate.org: Wall Street Journal vs. Scientific Consensus.
Regarding Ken’s other comment about measurement of temperatures out of cities, I’m not sure that’s even worth responding to, but satelite data, and the Vostok ice core (from Antarctica) are a good start. For more reading, see: NASA’s GISS Surface Temperature Analysis. For less theoretical evidence (ie. the kind you can feel in your cold, wet toes) here’s an article about the melting Arctic.
I think that’s all for Ken.
Now for the other commenter, Jeff Jones, no URL. Here’s what he had to say:
Notice how the doomsayers claim, as the host does, that each year the scientific community gets more certain. Which scientific community? Certainly not the 19,000 who signed the Oregon petition.
It’s the kind of dishonest device that the Church used to deny Copernicus and Galileo.
Maybe you mean the scientific community made up of political scientists like David Suzuki whose goal is to destroy the corporate basis of Western democracy.
So, the famous Oregon Petition is widely regarded as bunk. There was no control on petition signers, no required proof of academic creditials, no stated affiliation with academic institutions. I did a cursory search through the signatories, and of 15 names I checked I was able to find three academics: Earl Aagaard, professor of biology at Christian creationist university; Arthur Ballato, an Electrical Engineer with the US Army; and Daniel J Cantliffe, a biologist at University of Florida. None of whom has any direct experience with climate science, as far as I can tell.
But rather than spend time on the discredited Oregon Petition, better to answer the question directly: Which scientific community does get more certain? Well, for one (sorry, for eleven) the National Academies of Science of the following countries: Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, UK and the USA.
Say these Academies, in the following document (Joint science academies’ statement: Global response to climate change-pdf):
We urge all nations, in the line with the UNFCCC principles, to take prompt action to reduce the causes of climate change, adapt to its impacts and ensure that the issue is included in all relevant national and international strategies.
As for scientific literature, Naomi Orseskes did a random study of 928 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals, with the key-words “climate change.” Of the articles, about 75% of them deal with the question of causes of climate change, 100% support the view that a significant fraction of recent climate change is due to human activities.
And what exactly is the consensus? According to realclimate.org, the consensus is:
1. The earth is getting warmer (0.6 +/- 0.2 oC in the past century; 0.1 0.17 oC/decade over the last 30 years)
2. People are causing this
3. If GHG emissions continue, the warming will continue and indeed accelerate
4. (This will be a problem and we ought to do something about it)
So … as they say: who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?
Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change
Climate Change Book by Elizabeth Kolbert
My first job out of university, as a fresh-faced, idealistic engineer, was in the energy industry, for a sort of international think-tank made up of eight of the biggest electric companies in the world from G7 countries. I got there in 1998 (a year after the Kyoto Protocol was signed), and climate change obviously was high on the agenda, so I got to know what many in the energy industry thought of it (it was a big problem, and these companies were generally worried about how to address it in the most efficient, and least-costly way. That is, they were concerned, but wanted to avoid losing lots of money as a result). From the E7 (now E8) I went on, in the summer of 2000, to a financial brokerage called Prebon in New York, which was setting up an investment banking team to build financial products tailored for Kyoto Mechanisms - financial mechanisms aimed at getting funding into projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I was the policy guy, mainly, looking at national and international frameworks, as well as doing marketing of our insurance-based products to big energy companies around the world; and negotiating with potential sellers of emission reductions. I attended the COP conference in the Hague and talked to government officials all over the place. (Those were my jetset days of flying around the world, when I thought I might just be able to save the human race and become a multibillionaire at the same time). I worked at Prebon for a year and a half until the election of George Bush (and US abandonment of Kyoto, going back on a GOP campaign promise to regulate CO2 in the US); and then September 11 forced Prebon to shut down our group. Also a factor in shutting us down: we hadn’t made a nickle, despite having a $350 million deal in the works, though I don’t think we would have made the sale even without Bush and September 11. After I came back from NYC to Montreal, I spent some time working with a small alternative energy company here in Montreal, with toes still in CO2 waters … tho since 2004 I have been just an observer.
But I have been following Climate Change more or less closely for ten years or so, and have watched as the science matured (and Canada, incidently, did absolutely nothing except sign papers year after year). I am, you could say, a Climate believer…though I have an open mind to new research: if it were to turn out that everyone was mistaken about the climate, I would be happy to recant my former beliefs. But, the opposite has happened. Since 1998 when I started paying attention, various predictions from the models (then very uncertain) have started to come to pass: plants and animals are changing their breeding habits, the Arctic and Antarctic are melting, glaciers around the globe are receding, and the temperature keeps going up. Closer to home, the ski hill I grew up on no longer operates (they never made snow, and the natural snow isn’t enough to guarantee a viable season any more), and it regularaly rains in January and February.
And so when I first read Elizabeth Kolbert’s series of articles on climate change in the “New Yorker” in 2005 I was captivated. Field Notes on a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change is a compilation and expansion of those articles. It is the only climate book I have ever been inspired to buy — all the others seemed to rehash things I knew already, but there was something about the way Kolbert writes on climate — at once scientifically compelling and personal. And frightening. Of the many hundreds of articles I have read about climate change, Kolbert’s are the best.
In this book, Kolbert weaves a compelling tale, focusing on a handful of active scientists, their work on climate, and an underlying sense of terror that seems to infect all of them. They are at the front lines of climate research — out in the field and building the models. She visits the melting permafrost in Alaska