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Rewriting Environmental Science
Aqua OS X writes to tell us CBS News is reporting that government scientist James Hansen recently spoke out against the White House in an appearance on 60 Minutes. From the article: "Hansen is arguably the world's leading researcher on global warming. He's the head of NASA's top institute studying the climate. But this imminent scientist tells correspondent Scott Pelley that the Bush administration is restricting who he can talk to and editing what he can say. Politicians, he says, are rewriting the science."
A couple of years ago I read about a large permanent settlement which Archeologists discovered here in Australia. It was occupied by Aboriginal people for a period of time and then abandoned.
The implication was that indiginous Australians tried to follow the natural progression from hunter gathering to large scale settlement, but it somehow failed.
I too wonder if this will happen here again.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Or, you could actually -read- the article.
Specifically the parts that note he was permitted from discussing a number of things and he had to give the interview with a NASA watchdog recording and overseeing the interview.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Why would we need to limit population growth, and how would you ever propose we do this?
... the earth can barely handle the 6 or so billion people here now; try 60 billion on for size. As for the how ... well people aren't gonna like it, but its gonna have to happen one way or another.
Environmentalists say that the best thing you can do for the earth, the best way to conserve resources, is to not have more than two children. In retrospect, this is obvious
...while they KNOW exactly that scientists ARE absolutely right. The awful truth is you will be greatful for that... because US government is preparing for worst case scenario - they know that world is facing imminent ( hey, there's that word again :) ) turmoil, which will produce large scale of instabilities, disasters (floods, storms), hungers, wars, probably even epidemies of tropical diseases hitting heavy populated former mild climate belts, and all this is already UNSTOPABLE, whatever we do now (too little, too late). So, they are counting on taking as much advantage as possible from this change, instead of attempting to stop it in vain. "Accepting responsibility" and "Doing something about it" would be noble thing to do, of course, but not much too wise.
Therefore, the 9/11 set of peculiar events are just excuse for fortifying against torrent of refugees that will pour "fore walls and gates", just warming up of engines for greater threats that are soon to come. Likewise is the frantical hunt against WMD - not because of the "mad dictators" who could use them for political reasons, but because they could be used a tool of a blackmail to extort food and drinking water from reserves of "the fortress". Decline to respect Kyoto accord is there for sole purpose of sustaining future (unavoidable) war preparations - producing more steel (CO2 generating process all along!), continuing armed forces training (including occasional local or regional war), etc.
After the Great Extinction of less fortunate human population ceises and US survives as least damaged and still strongest nation, THEN, in World undisputably BELONGING to strongest survivor, it WILL make sense to (it will pay to) try to repair the climate, not NOW. Now... it should be ignored and disputed.
Not necessarily; Developed countries undergo population implosions.
Schools in Japan are shutting down in a wave, starting with the first grades, and then pushing onward through the school. Sometimes, they just shut down entire floors in their schools.
This is happening elsewhere, as well.
People are seriously freaked out about this.
The thing I find amusing, is that many environmentalists have problems with this.
In the 1990's, a bunch of environmentalists got together, and said, "What do we need to do? We need to seriously do something, so that people will be more environmentalist." The strategy, they decided on, was to mythologize environmentalism. That is, to get people to worship the Earth Mother, to shun technology, to get in psychic harmony with nature, and so on, and so forth.
And that strategy is totally being played out.
So when you tell them, "Hey, in Japan, they're freaking out, because people aren't having kids, and it seems to be because they're developed," it tends to not go over so well.
Here in Holland, many times i see the same problem. Close to where i live, the government wants to build a highway to relieve congestion on a parallel highway. So they hired scientists to study the effects of the new road. It turned out the road would make things worse: instead of relieving the congestion on the other road, it would increase congestion on every other main road in the surroundings.
The scientists, knowing what would happen, leaked this result immediately to the press, but the final report got stowed away in a very deep drawer. Parliamant had a tough job to get the report out of this drawer again.
But. Then came the obligatory environmental impact study. In this study, the former report is completely ignored. The vast increase of congestion is not taken into account in an evironmental impact assessment!
If the politicians have it their way (and they must be quick, everyone knows they will get their asses kicked next elections) we'll have a road that increases the congestion, costs about a billion euro's of tax money and will terribly damage the environment and landscape. But the construction firms will be very happy.
Trust me, I work for the government.
I think you're leaving out a few factors, though... tradition and religion, for example.
/until/ they had the 5th or 6th child and had to pay for their education, etc.
If a society traditionally has large families, then it doesn't matter whether they live in poverty or health - they're likely keep that tradition.
As for religion - there's highly catholic families here who have 7-9 children. Not because they're poor - in fact, most of them lived in wealth
Of course these probably don't even begin to offset all the people who decide to have only 1 child or no children at all.
I first learned about Japanese schools closing through a friend, and then confirmed it by talking with another friend's wife, Yumiko. "It's because people are being selfish," she said, with some anger.
My research into NEET, freeters, hikikomori, support this.
As for the environmentalists:
-- the Unibomber Manifesto
You may also want to read Adbusters, Daniel Quinn, and whatever other primitivist tract you can find.
Myself, I just know these things because I've been steeped in the culture of community health centers, co-ops, IndyMedia, various movements and efforts.
I was in the community health center, the other day. I decided to look through the books they had available for kids. I picked one up about a couple of young kids (9? 10? 11? 12?) that find a portal to the future. In the future, the world has been picked apart "by technology," but there's this thriving citadel of Gaia: Where the people have no technology, and have a huge organized society, and have all these rules against developing any sort of technology.
The boy has a prolicivity to inventing, and gets these ideas about machines to make, and things like that. The girl is more "in touch with nature," though, and doesn't see what's so necessary about the boy's machine making.
The long trials in the book are all dedicated to showing that they boy's prolicivities are wrong, and should be avoided, at all costs.
The story ends with the boy realizing the error of his ways, and realizing he should be paying more attention to the universal sisterhood of nature.
I don't remember the name of the book; Sorry. But it's not really tricky to find; These kinds of messages are all over the place.
Here's another source: My best friend Phil. Phil's been my best friend since around 4th grade. (I'm 28, right now.) He went more the green route, me more the technology route. We've stayed up many late nights, talking over all sorts of things. I remember tromping through the golden grass fields back of UCSC. (We both grew up in Santa Cruz.) I remember him telling me about how all the top soil would be gone within 10 years, and there'd be no more food for anybody.
At any rate, we've had many discussions about activist strategy, and we've talked about mythologizing environmentalism several times. I think he thought it was a good idea. Myself, I love nature, but I also love computers and machines and buildings.
I don't have a book or a plan guide that I can point you to, and say: "There! There it is! The master plans! The blueprints!" I imagine there are several of them, floating out there. (EcoTopia?) But I assure you, this is quite real; This is a motive force; People are doing this. First hand, I tell you, people have been talking about this.
It's no more surprising than car manufacturers mythologizing cars.
Most people are not aware that government routinely "rewrites" history in order to present itself as ethical, necessary, and productive. This is one of the cornerstones of government education -- it's an opportunity they couldn't pass up. When you are taught lies from an early age, it's very difficult to break away from those lies and confront the truth.
For example, the Hiroshima bombing (no I'm not afraid to mention it) is never presented as the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of [mostly civilian] human beings that it was. It is presented as a "tough decision", but one that "saved" more lives than it took (as if government can predict the future), and most importantly, one that is "justified" (as if murder can ever be justified). Look at the difference between the US government's account and an actual eyewitness (victim) account. The difference is night and day.
Lincoln's war is never presented as a violation of the US constitution (states do have a legal and moral right to secede), but as the end of slavery. In reality, Lincoln was much less concerned about slavery than retaining and expanding federal power, and his war killed many more innocent human beings than it saved.
Mark my words: 50 years from now, the invasion of Iraq will be universally accepted as necessary, moral, and justified, and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians who died for nothing will be forgotten.
You would be right, except that _60 Minutes_ interview is ephemera, while a report on climate-change, rewritten to not offend members of the petrochemical lobby, will be posted on a public website and referenced for years. This is similar to NIH, which had a website on birth-control edited to abstinence only, and of course the recent Big Bang flap, where a political flunky wanted a public essay rewritten to cast doubt on modern cosmology. Being able to speak is of no use if nobody hears it, or if they hear it in passing, but then can only find documents that say the opposite. Being discouraged from speaking because presenting reproducible results which disagree with predetermined conceits will result in loss of employment is being supressed, though in a softer manner than that used in Iran.
Nobody is arguing that NASA scientists are being rounded up, or threatened at night by Men in Black, but their work is being systematically supressed or altered beyond recognition by an ideologically driven administration which has nothing but contempt for the rational thought-processes of the enlightenment. They have publicly derided their opponents as being members of the "Reality-based Community", and openly stated that they believe that they make their own Reality.
This administration is arrogating powers to the executive branch in a manner not seen since the Nixon administration, without pursuing the middle-of-the-road policies of Richard Nixon. You may approve of the war in Iraq, support the tax cuts, or be a fan of whatever other administration policy you choose, but don't be blind that there are side-effects, and those need to be kept in mind.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
"OK. I admit it was forged, but it's still true."
See, Dan Rather never said that. And in fact, the documents were never proven to be forgeries. Moreover, the content of the documents is known to be accurate. Bush did get preferential treatment.
It's all about smearing your enemies and promoting your agenda.
Something the GOP seems very good at. They even have you manufacturing inaccurate little "quotes" and posting them on web sites. Such a little tool.
Does poor science qualify? How about Michael Mann's Hockey Stick work? From this week's New Scientist (subscription only article)
Though McKitrick and MacIntyre's paper is hidden behind Nature's subscription firewall, McKitrick shows the graph on his webpage. Note that McKitrick and MacIntyre aren't saying global warming isn't happening, they're just pointing out Mann's method is suspect.The New Scientist article goes on to cite poor data sources such as tree rings with known variability issues and inherent bias in data selection. When Mann was asked to divulge his source code so it could be inspected for methodology errors, he declined saying it was proprietary code. Revealing methodology is inherent in good science and Mann violated that key precept.
You should be skeptical of climatology in general given that it's even more removed from model failure than meteorolgy. Meteorologists are well acquainted with their models failing because they get feedback on a daily basis. Climatologist don't get that feedback because there's only one climate so they retrofit their models to fit past performance of the climate - a methodology that meteorologists have demonstrated doesn't work very well.
Even worse, they can't even agree on what's going to happen. One model has Europe roasting, another freezing. It can't be both but regardless of which outcome we eventually encounter, climatologists will claim they predicted it.
At it's core, the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis has relied on CO2 emissions as being causative. You have to be skeptical of a claim that an incredibly complex atmosephere which we can't fully model is being driven by variations of a single gas. A gas whose concentration is less than a tenth of one percent.
Puh-lease. The documents were never proven to be forgeries? Is a journalists' job to advance suppositions, which are given the weight of truth until somebody proves them false? NO!. A journalist:
Anything less is rumormongering. Rather & Co. never did #3, and that is why they wound up in trouble. You believe Rather's premise, and so you accord it the weight of truth, even though unsubstantianted? How is that any different then what you accuse the GOP and the GP poster of doing? You believe what you want to believe, and those who agree with you, even when they cannot substantiate their stories. You, sir, are just as much of a tool as the GP poster.
Unfortunately, contrary to popular belief, planting trees is not a solution per se. The carbon cycle may slow down a little, but eventually, all the carbon in leafs and trunks will end up as CO2 in atmosphere again.
Dynamically, some of it is retained (new trees hopefuly grow, as old die and rot) in forests, but forest fires can dramatically change that.
Besides, some experimental research had shown that plants have upper limit on CO2 atmospheric concentration they can handle. After that limit is breached, photosinthesys stops...
The only direction is to think of a way to speed up sinking of CO2 to the bottom of the ocean rifts and back under the Earth's crust.
Out of the hat, it could go as follows:
- pressurise and liquidify air (first step in obtaining industrial nitrogen, too).
- do fractional evaporation of liquid air and extract the CO2 fraction.
- pump the taken out CO2 to the ocean bed.
or else:
- use fast growing algae to tie carbon into biomass. If nescessary, engineer the strain that can handle high concentration of CO2, then feed it with CO2- enriched (use gas centrifuges - CO2 is one of the heaviest components of air) air in controlled environment (hydroponics)
- harvest algae and carbonize them by anaerob baking in (i.e. solar) ovens.
- compress and burry or sink thus obtained charcoal.
but first: stop pumping natural carbon reserves into atmosphere (burning fossil fuels)! We don't need to stop using fire, but we must stop adding ancient carbon into short (atmosphere-biosphere) carbon cycle.
With all the recent advances in genetics, why can't we have an highly efficient single-cell photosynthetic lipid (oil) factory little friend? Put them in the glass tank, conduct light to the bottom of it using mirrors, let the little buggers swim down so that they don't get stuck in the oil layer forming on top of the tank, pump the CO2-enriched air thru the water (or do it separately, not to stirr the water) so that they have what to eat... and just let the oil pour from the top. Voila - diesel fuel at your disposal!
That's a very good point. I am encouraged becasue there is some recent movement in Evangelical circles to challenge this kind of policy on the climate. Driven by literal interpretation of Genesis, consumption of natural resources was once seen within conservative Chrstian theology as the birthright of humanity. That theology of dominion is starting to give way, now, to a theology of stewardship - still working from the idea that God has given the natural world to humanity, but changing the spin from domination to caretaking, and acknowledging that it is possible to "sin against the creation."
I think there is still a huge cultural gap in America that needs work on both sides to close - religious conservatives need to realize that scientific knowledge doesn't kill God, and scientists need to acknowledge that religion is not a dead weight to be cast off. But, the fact that Evangelicals in America are showing more openness to the science of climate change gives me hope that the conversation at least has a future.
>Blah, food already dealt with. We likewise have vast surpluses in all other areas. Even waste disposal ain't so hard. I'm not advocating the reloaction of everyone on earth to one big city. I'm just saying the earth isn't overpopulated.
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I have yet to see a large mass of land that is in equilibrium - meaning not degrading fast. Underground water levels drop, species disappear, cats and dogs living together, people get fat because they have nowhere to go walking or running or bicycling, etc. Show me such land and extrapolate it then to the world.
Oh by the way, you could use some help from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre:
http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/gsfc/earth/landsat/spraw
According to that 10-15% of artificial cover on land does not constitute an equilibrium state - meaning the environment will be degrading fast. Good luck!
Okay, okay, okay -- this sounds like McKitrick's bluster. I actually READ his book, I read his criticism of Mann's methodology, and I read a few rounds of responses. This doesn't make me educated on the subject, but it makes me more than educated enough to talk about McKitrick. His credentials on the subject are poor, his charges against Mann's work do not invalidate it, and having read his book, I cannot seriously believe that he is working in good faith.
There are valid criticisms of current climate science, and they are coming from within the scientific community, including the IPCC. The field of research is moving fast and the near-consensus from the people who know the most is that we're in trouble.
Did you read McKitrick's recommendations for climate science? Basically this: "Boy, math sure is hard, so let's all give it up and go home and have drinks with our friends." I really wish I was joking.
A few fundamental truths to chew on: A) Most scientists are cheap whores. They got used to supporting liberal doctrines to earn their pay while democrats controlled congress. Now they moan and cry because somebody "moved their cheese", and they have to learn a new set of political doctrines to get their free drink from the government teet. Quick - call the Waaahhhmbulance! B) Global warming is a hoax C) EVEN if it was real it won't hurt anything because the ice caps are like the ice that floats in your drink. They will shrink as they melt and the net change in sea level will be zero point zero inches. D) If Global warming WAS real it would bring enormous benefit to mankind by dramatically increasing the amount of farmable land available - it would offset world hunger significantly. E) There is no Gaia. The earth is just big a ball of dirt. The only thing special about it is that I live here. F) The best way to reduce any greenhouse effect is to fire a lot of useless scientists to decrease their spewing of hot gas.
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
Oh, you came so close. "Fairness" has nothing to do with it. The key to reducing population growth, is, as you deduced, more wealth. Redistributing resources contrary to the efficient allocations determined by free markets, however, consumes wealth. To counter population growth, you need economic growth, and the absolute best grower of economic wealth is free markets.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Thank you, I was going to point out that according to Thomas Malthus' explanation of carrying capacity, a species does not ease up comfortably to the carrying capacity as a limit graph would show; the species will grossly overshoot the carying capacity of the environment it lives in, and will die off rapidly, dip under the carying capacity, flourish, and overshoot it again. The real graph depiction is something approaching an oscilating sine wave, where as time increases, the modulation decreases, but is ever present.
That's what we're steaming head on for.
It's thanks to the works of people like Norman Borlaug that we are even where we are today. A supremely intelligent geneticist, he actually had the conviction in his ideas to step out of the comfort of a lab and move his family to mexico, where he doubled wheat production of the country in just a few years. He did it again in India, and again with rice production in Asia.
In Penn and Teller: Bullshit!, Borlaug refutes the claims of green activists who claim that genetically engineered crops are going to ruin the world and poison the food. He says that's easy to say when you're not hungry, but without GE crops, we've only got enough food to feed 4 billion people, and I don't see 2 billion volunteers to dissappear. And he's right - If we're going to have the population, we're going to have to feed them. It's estimated by some that Norman Borlaug has saved the lives of over a billion (carl sagan with a "B" billion) people. Greatest human being ever, indeed.
~Will
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