Vote for my friends!

Hey, remember when I wrote that post about how decision making affects decision making? I was talking about how we can structure the environment in which we make decisions--our "choice architecture"--so that we make choices more consistent with how we want to be.

Well, a couple of friends of mine developing an online game around this idea. They're actually making it sound pretty fun! Here's there video:



For this online game to become a reality, you need to go vote for it here. Please help them out!

"You Won't Find Wisdom Up A Lamp-Post"

Has anyone else noticed a surprisingly large amount of derisive commentary on the role of non-governmental groups at Copenhagen? Take, for example, this startlingly blunt editorial in the Australian a few days ago:

ever since [the 1992 Rio Meeting] self-accredited ambassadors for everything and everybody from polar bears to poor people have sought to bend sovereign states to their will at international meetings. The chaos at Copenhagen demonstrates what happens when they do, when international relations stop being about sovereign states and blocs of like-minded nations negotiating immensely complex issues and become an opportunity for slogan-chanting, empire-building activists, who adopt causes as careers in the way other people become teachers or accountants and assume that they alone can save the world.

It concludes:

On Wednesday, the activists were expelled from the Copenhagen conference - leaving the grown ups to get some work done.

I wasn't sure how to feel about this editorial.

Circling the Drain: Copenhagen and Local Politics

What is the relationship between the politics of Copenhagen and the politics back home? No doubt, it's different for every participating country. Roger Pielke recently highlighted a bizarre circularity in the case of the US:

Prospects for U.S. climate legislation hinge on a successful outcome at Copenhagen, says Senator John Kerry (D-MA).... Meantime, negotiators in Copenhagen await leadership from the United States as the basis for an international agreement.... There is a widespread reluctance among other countries to make significant concessions until the country which has caused most of the problem takes more of its fair share of the burden of solving it.... But the United States won't go further than its legislative process will allow...

As some might say, they're circling the drain.

Here in Australia, according to a nice summary by Dennis Shanahan in today's Australian, things are looking pretty bad for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, no matter where you stand:

Bjorn Lomborg makes sense

Bjorn Lomborg, scourge of climate scientists and author of two controversial books on issues of climate change and environmentalism, has been making the rounds. And he's been making a lot of sense. He must be reading my blog!

Lomborg had an op-ed in the Australian the other day, and I just watched him debate Paul Krugman on CNN, where he touched on a couple of points I have made here recently.

The first relates to trade-offs, and the dominance of climate change relative to other pressing problems in the world. As Lomborg says:

Politics of Impure Science

Today's LA Times is running an op-ed by my advisor, Dan Sarewitz, and Sam Therstrom of the American Enterprise Institute (a conservative think tank). This piece addresses the problem of making science the "arbiter of the political debate."

Many people believe that science dictates appropriate policy action. This article challenges that notion:

The real scandal illustrated by the e-mails is not that scientists tried to undermine peer review, fudge and conceal data, and torpedo competitors, but that scientists and advocates on both sides of the climate debate continue to claim political authority derived from a false ideal of pure science. This charade is a disservice to both science and democracy. To science, because the reality cannot live up to the myth; to democracy, because the difficult political choices created by the genuine but also uncertain threat of climate change are concealed by the scientific debate.

What is the solution? Let politics do its job; indeed, demand it.

There is already discussion of this piece elsewhere in the blogosphere (see here, and here), so I recommend reading the whole thing and chiming in.

Festive Headline Wall

Merry Christmas from the Headline Wall! The inexorable advance of climate coverage across my living room (read: entire apartment) continues!

Some highlights of this most recent update include:

• A story about mis-statements by Al Gore regarding the melting of the polar ice cap. This happens, but you rarely see it covered prominently (i.e. outside the blogosphere), and certainly not with quotations from scientists calling on him to not exaggerate so much!
• Journalists reduced to musings on the topic of logistical and organizational incompetence as they spend days waiting in line to just get into the friggin' Copenhagen Conference.
• And plenty of sparring between Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott over the topics of climate change, Copenhagen, and energy policy in Australia.

Of course, that's just a small sampling. Click on the image, and you should be able to see for yourself.

How AIDS might be like Climate Change

You often hear people argue that climate change affects everything, everywhere. An arguable statement in both senses of the word. But the assertion often leads to a far more delusional mindset, in which climate change is everything. Many people seem to believe that to solve climate change (as if that were possible) is to solve most of the problems of the world.

As Philip Stevens of the London-based International Policy Network discusses in a short article recently printed in the Australian, this mentality is dangerous. Especially when it becomes embedded in a large, powerful organization such as the UN.

Stevens sees an eerie similarity between recent calls for the creation of a massive UN entity that would "coordinate advocacy and policy on climate change" and the creation of UNAIDS in 1996:

Everybody's a Nazi!

Here's a headline that caught my eye today as I was updating the Headline Wall (more on that later):

Climate Deal Backers 'like Nazi appeasers.'

This genre of accusation is nothing new in the polarized world of climate politics, but it struck me that we may be witnessing a sort of Nazi accusation creep.

In August Roger Pielke highlighted a political speech in New South Wales in which climate skeptics were compared to Nazi appeasers. (Who then, asked Roger, are the Nazis?).

In late November, Lucia noticed footage of Hitler being played in the background during a discussion of "Climategate."

So now the deal supporters and the skeptics are appeasers, and the scientists are being compared with the Nazis themselves? By the time the smoke clears, will anyone have escaped the Nazi comparison?

Lucia would say that this is just more evidence in favor of Godwin's Law:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.

Though obviously these examples are not confined to the virtual world, and the comparisons are multiplying. Perhaps we need a corollary along these lines:

As the discussion continues to grow, the number of involved parties avoiding Nazi or Hitler comparisons approaches 0.

Copenhagen Off Target

image credit

Copenhagen is boring and dumb.

There, I said it.

I don't mean the city (LOVE the city); I mean the climate talks.

The problem with Copenhagen is not just that these countries will not agree on anything; it's that even if they did, it wouldn't make any difference.

If you have been paying any attention to Copenhagen, you've heard about targets. For example, should we try to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by mid-century, or 2? Is the appropriate target for stabilized atmospheric concentrations of CO2 450 parts per million (ppm), or 350? Or some other number?

The obsession with these targets is damaging.

Hard Heads, Soft Hearts, Young Minds, and... Talking Points

I attended an event hosted by the Left-Right Think Tank last night, in which the newly appointed US Ambassador to Australia, Jeffrey Bleich, gave a short speech and answered questions. Left-Right ("HARD HEADS, SOFT HEARTS & YOUNG MINDS...") is a relatively young organization, as are its members. I like their general purpose, which is to promote the ideas of young people, their involvement in public policy, and a diversity of opinion and perspective.

Headline Wall: Update and Comments on (its) Sustainability

For future updates I'll need to experiment a little with documentation methods, as this patchwork thing is not ideal. Click on each image to see a larger version, in which you should be able to read some of the larger entries on the Wall. There was no climate-related news on the front page of The Age today. I'm not completely sure, but I think this is a first since this little project began, and possibly a first since I arrived in Australia.

But fear not! There was an entire page devoted to the topic a few pages in. Obviously, Copenhagen is big news these days, so none of this is surprising. One of my particular favorites was the recent front page image of various world leaders playing poker in a smoke-filled room, which perhaps you can see by clicking on the top image and looking near the top-right corner (I just did a quick search for an online version of the image, but no luck).

Overwhelmed?

I don't know who this guy is, but I feel his pain.

"We're going to get nothing"

Under the amusing headline, "Politics Ruins Everything," Andrew Sullivan has posted two quotations that form an interesting dialog about the political viability of cap and trade policies vs. a carbon tax.

Adaptation Research and Climate Science - What's the relationship?

At least in terms of institutions and fancy websites, Australia really seems to be taking on the task of climate adaptation, and climate adaptation research (always important to remember that there's a big difference between those two things!). For example, the CSIRO has a high profile Adaptation Flagship. On the university side, there is the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF - just try pronouncing that acronym. Fun!). I'm still not sure what the annual funding of adaptation research is overall, but more on that later, perhaps.

Here's my question: what is the relationship between adaptation research and climate science?

Jon Stewart on ClimateGate: Don't Cut Corners!

As usual, Jon Stewart nails it.

The Title of this Blog

The particularly astute reader will have noticed by now that the title of this blog is "Adapt Already." Leaving aside the question of whether or not this blog actually has any readers, I want to say a bit about what this means to me. So far I've counted three connotations of the phrase "Adapt Already:"

More on Motive vs. Content

This National Journal interview with Judy Curry, an accomplished and respected climate scientist, is very insightful, and touches on the issue of motive vs. content, which I wrote about the other day. Here's a snippet:

NJ: Is the outside scrutiny from the skeptics making the science stronger?

Curry: Scrutiny from scientific skeptics makes the science stronger, either by identifying problems that can be addressed or by increasing confidence when problems and errors are not found. Scrutiny from [politically motivated] contrarians and deniers and the noise generated by such people do distract scientists from their real work... The scientists involved in the CRU emails are dismissing certain people as skeptics, assuming that they all have political motivations. Well, the motivation of the skeptic isn't really the point. The point is whether or not they have a valid argument.

NJ: Is the science community served well by ad hominem criticisms of the skeptics?

Curry: Absolutely not. Scientists should criticize the argument, not the person making the argument. The other fallacious criticism is "appeal to motive," looking for some link of the skeptics to the oil industry or advocacy group.... You [should] have to declare this, but it does not in any way disqualify you from doing research or publishing your papers.

Mann was on "The Diane Rehm Show" yesterday [Nov. 30]. He was very eloquent, but he was defending [an e-mail in which he suggested boycotting a journal that published an article questioning climate change by saying] it was a bad paper and besides, those people were affiliated with the oil industry. He really believes that's right, but medical research would stop if anyone who got their funding from the pharmaceutical industry could not publish their paper.

We don't really know how to behave in this politicized environment.... I don't think any of those scientists involved are out to be bad people. They think they have the moral high ground. Scientists just don't know how to behave in this politicized environment... and we really need advice from the social psychologists, historians and philosophers on how we should be dealing with this situation.

Science Policy Explained

In the column on the right I list "science policy" as one of my main interests. Outside of various wonkish and academic circles, I rarely encounter someone who knows what this term means. So I have at the ready, a short summary: science policy is the process of deciding what kinds of new knowledge to pursue--what kinds of science should we fund? Reactions to this explanation range from blank stares, to feigned interest, to polite but vague efforts to relate it to something recently read, thus demonstrating comprehension and enthusiasm. Anyway, it usually takes a lot more explanation.

But today, I'll let someone else do that work for me. NatureNews has just posted an article by Dan Sarewitz (subscription required; if you're at ASU, click here), which provides a straightforward and compelling example of what science policy is, and why it is important. As there is a subscription required to view the link, I'll quote liberally from the article in this post (my emphasis throughout), so you can get a sense of it. (Oh, and I should mention that Dan is my PhD adviser, so... please excuse the shameless adviser worship!)

Motive and Source vs. Content

In my recent post on the CRU email hack, I wrote the following about the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

Obviously the motives of CEI are, as always, to detract from the credibility of climate science writ large, but that should not detract from the legitimacy of their core question, which relates to the conduct of public employees who should be accountable to taxpayers.

I also wrote this about the Wall Street Journal:

Whatever you think about climate change, and whatever you think about the motives of the WSJ, I hope that you agree with that point [about further investigation of the conduct of climate scientists].

I've been reflecting about the caveats I made in these statements about the motives of a conservative think tank, like CEI, and the credibility of a source like WSJ, which has history of editorials criticizing mainstream views of climate change. Why does it feel necessary to direct attention to what is actually being said, and away from the inferred motives?

Headline Wall: still growing

Time for an update on the climate headline wall. It's grown a bit from last time. If I had not been in Sydney for the last week this would have grown quite a bit more. It's probably best that I missed all the craziness over the self destruction of the liberal party, because it would have worn out my scissors, and anyway this wall project is supposed to last longer than two weeks!

Incriminating? Stupid? Both?

Following up on the CRU email post from yesterday, the Sunday Times has a column called "Flushing Out the High Priests of Climate Change," in which he argues that the behavior of scientists involved in the controversy "is not necessarily incriminating, but it is stupid."

...You can hardly blame busy scientists who have spent their lives amassing a pile of data, which they have interpreted in their own way, for not wanting to release it to people who want to rubbish it. Still, release it they should, and it is up to the scientific establishment to set out better ground rules and insist on more openness. The problem is that establishment science has no means of engaging with outsiders in the blogging age. It needs to wake up.

No wonder the public is confused. No wonder journalists have a choice between waiting for the occasional tablet of stone from the keepers of the global warming flame, or joining the newer, hipper fraternity of bloggers who snigger about ManBearPig, the bogus global warming monster in South Park’s skit on Al Gore. This polarisation means that a considered view on global warming is much harder to achieve, so in the end people simply go for the belief that feels right for them.
Working scientists may be grumpy about the unfairness, but far higher standards are expected of them than of the rude blogger-sceptics who are crowing about the embarrassment.
Tough. They should get over it. If the high priests of global warming want to convince us that we could face a man-made rise of 4C in the global temperature this century, then they have to engage with their critics instead of hiding away in their ivory towers.