Rush and lying

I find it amusing that Rush Limbaugh accuses scientists of lying. After all, he's an entertainer--someone who is paid to lie to us. Scientists, on the other hand, are paid to investigate truth. It is a sad state of affairs that so many people in this country trust someone who is paid to paint an unreal picture of the world over those whose job it is to investigate the true nature of the world around us.

Unfortunately, I don't know what to do about this. Engaging with liars like Rush doesn't do anything--he's a skilled talker who is very good at weaving half-truths into something that resembles whole cloth closely enough to fool many educated, thinking people. He's good at getting people riled up, and when emotion enters the picture, people stop questioning some things they should be questioning. Science, which is supposed to be beyond emotion, just can't compete with the hot anger pouring from these entertainers. We rely on critical thinking, but people seem to stop being truly critical when emotions get entangled in an issue.

The environmental-evangelical movement

For Eco-Evangelicals, Questions About the Future | John E. Senior and John Wihbey | Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media | February 3, 2009

This article came out a while ago, but it's a topic I find really interesting. In many ways, it makes me hopeful that more and more people, especially young folks, are aware of the environmental consequences of our actions. The thing that really struck me was this part:

• "Some evangelicals she [Candis Callison, a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] has studied, for example, are motivated by concerns that the world’s poor likely would be dramatically affected by global warming. So it’s the biblical “moral call” to help the dispossessed, Callison said, that remains important."

Whenever people ask me if I think that we're doomed because of climate change, my answer is similar to one that I've heard my adviser give. Wealthy countries and wealthy people in general will probably find ways to adapt or escape from high risk areas. It's the poorer countries and poorer people who will suffer the most from the effects of climate change because they don't have the resources or power to relocate or bioengineer their way out. Well, if this idea motivates people one wouldn't normally expect to do something about climate change, I'm all for spreading the message.

Popular policy

If CO2 really is the threat to our way of life, and even to our species, as Al Gore and the Stern report claim, how should we deal with the problem? And perhaps more importantly, how do we decide what to do?

The root of our climate (and many other environmental problems) boils down to us humans being bad stewards. There are too many of us using too many resources, living in an unsustainable way. There are ethical problems with reducing our numbers, and ethical problems with telling others to live sustainably, especially when we don't. We can't really say to India and China "oops--you can't industrialize and emit CO2 because we already did!" That just wouldn't fly.

Popular proposals to address the excess forcing from our emissions of greenhouse gasses are frequently based on shaky science. It is unclear that anything so far proposed--including this week's proposal to increase the Earth's albedo by breeding crop plants with higher albedo--will actually do anything either in the short or long term. A lot of popular policy proposals are based on a single idea that may or may not be valid at longer timescales.

So, cementing technological solutions with policy decisions probably isn't the best idea. At best we'll get an idea that sort of works and will implement it further than is really useful while ignoring ideas that could be better--faster, cheaper, or just plain more successful. This really is a situation where policy should focus on creating market mechanisms that will encourage (or force) environmental solutions without picking a winner.

Penguins are in trouble

Penguins setting off sirens over health of world's oceans | Vince Stricherz | EurekAlert | Jul 1, 2008

This article is from a while back, and it references a paper published in BioScience in the July/Aug 2008 issue. According to the latest research, populations of different penguin species are declining not only due to overfishing and pollution, but also due to climate change. Increasing temperatures are causing sea ice to retreat earlier in the year before baby penguins have developed insulating fat and feathers, and it's also causing fish populations that penguins depend on to migrate farther and farther away.

I was pretty surprised that I hadn't heard about this sooner. One would think that if a cute and cuddly charismatic megafauna were in trouble, it would get a lot of attention. (It definitely made me feel a bit heartbroken to know that baby penguins are freezing to death.) Maybe it's because no one has photographed a penguin floating on a piece of sea ice yet or maybe it's because 2008 has been an unusually eventful year. In any case, just wanted to put this out there.

(Thanks for adding me to the blog, Kristine!)

Food insecurity

After a more than year-long hiatus, I am resurrecting the Breakfast Club. To start things off, I'll summarize the paper we discussed in the Friday afternoon lit club: "Historical Warnings of Future Food Insecurity with Unprecedented Seasonal Heat." The paper was pretty much a synthesis of information that was already out there, utilizing previously published predictions of average summer temperature, predictions of summer temperature extremes in the future, and then suggesting based on historical incidents that the extremes we're likely to see will lead to food insecurity.

Frequently I think the papers we read in lit club are more or less jumping off points for a discussion. We (of course) discussed how to do the paper better. The last part of the paper wasn't particularly quantitative, relying on anecdotes rather than any statistical analysis. A more quantitative approach might take the predicted temperature extremes and correlate them to crop losses, and use that to predict some financial loss. A project of this sort focusing on Tanzania is under way here at Purdue, trying to predict the impact of climate change on poverty. One of the complicating factors is the response of countries (which tend to put up protective tariffs when one country has a bad crop year, even though doing so tends to exacerbate the economic impact of the crop failure) and the response of individuals (who may move from rural to urban or urban to rural areas in response to economic stress).

Also discussed: GTAP, which is a database of trade flows between something like 200 countries. It is also the database that shows why biofuels are, in the final analysis, bad for CO2 emissions. As food crops are diverted from food use to fuel use, something else must take its place. Marginal land that was used for grazing, for instance, might be converted to cropland to grow the soybeans that the US stopped growing in favor of corn, and more forest then converted to new grazing land. Using fossil fuels, growing crops simply to burn, we are burning sunshine.

Thom's bells

Climate change is depressing.

Last week in Lit club we discussed a paper that pointed out that if we stopped using CO2 this instant, we would still experience 2 degrees C warming. If we can manage to just stop increasing the amount of CO2 we emit (so, keep our emissions to 2006 levels--oops! we're already past that, but close enough) we'll see something like 8 degrees of warming by 2500. That's another PETM, but probably even faster! I know, that's so far out in the future for us measly humans with our short-term attentions, and we may not even have enough fossil fuels available to sustain that level of emissions, but even so, that's depressing.

Today we talked about Geoengineering as an alternative strategy to dealing with global warming. The paper we discussed dealt specifically with the possibility of using sulfate aerosols to cool the planet in much the same way that volcanoes cool the planet naturally. So here's the idea--we take mass of sulfate equivalent to a volkswagon and shoot it up into the stratosphere 20,000 times every day! If we stop, all the warming we prevent with this particular brand of geoengineering comes into play almost immediately. According to their calculations, it would work, as long as we could shoot the sulfate into the stratosphere in a carbon neutral way, and as long as we never stopped. What a great plan, right?

Anyway, I think everyone left the room a bit down, wondering how exactly we can fix global warming, especially in such a way that people will actually be willing to do it. As Matt Huber so eloquently put it, we humans are like voracious locusts, whose every activity puts more CO2 into the atmosphere. We need a giant, non-emitting CO2 sucker and a huge pit in which to dump all the CO2. Any ideas out there?

The Day After Tomorrow

According to this article on BBC news, scaring people into doing something about global warming won't work. There were suggestions from some reviewers that The Day After Tomorrow, (a movie replete with bad science) were more skeptical about global warming after seeing the film. Guessing BBC shouldn't be surprised!