In 2006 I wrote a short article about the danger of making climate change the center of every problem (I sometimes call this behavior ‘climate blinkers‘). The basic argument: just because climate change can be related to anything, does not mean that is important to everything.

A recent paper in Nature provides a very good example of this problem, as applied to malaria. The authors found that contrary to the received wisdom, the role of climate change is little more than an “unwelcome distraction” in the fight against malaria.

Many people believe that a warmer world will lead to more malaria, measured in deaths and the geographic spread of the disease. This assumption is based on a scientifically established fact: the malaria parasite can infect its hosts more effectively in a warmer climate. If you hold everything else constant, in theory a warmer world has a bigger malaria problem.

But you can’t effectively apply that logic to the real world, because nothing remains constant. In my 2006 article, I used the following diagram to illustrate this conceptual problem:

As I wrote at the time:

The red wedge represents the marginal increase in deaths that a climate impacts model might tell us to expect, all other things being equal. But the baseline projection is actually quite unlikely, especially in the context of an unstable government, a fragile and decaying agro-economic system or, conversely, a transitioning economy with the capacity to eradicate the disease. Whether the problem is largely solved by effective intervention, or greatly exacerbated by non-climate-related disasters like a civil war, overpopulation or some other collapse, the marginal change due to climate is rendered less important. Even if the baseline proves relatively accurate, the impact due to climate change pales in comparison to the massive failure of efforts to intervene in an eminently solvable problem that causes 8 millions deaths a year.

So now, in 2010, a prominent paper is calling climate change a distraction in the fight against malaria. What does this mean? I believe we should see this as a lesson in science policy. The mere existence of a link between climate and some problem should not be enough for us to dedicate millions of dollars to narrow studies of that connection. We need evidence that climate change is not just relevant, but actually important before throwing time and resources into it.

More importantly, we need to study social environmental problems in a systematic way, allowing for many different perspectives. We should be wary of researchers who take a climate blinkers approach. It may be convenient to their methodology; and it may help them to win grant money. But it does a disservice to our understanding of problems like malaria, and to those suffering from its devastating effects.

John Tierney, of the New York Times, finds himself “in the unfamiliar position of defending Al Gore and his fellow Nobel laureate, Rajendra K. Pachauri.” He’s calling out what he sees as a cheap way of scoring points in climate change arguments:

Conflict-of-interest accusations have become the simplest strategy for avoiding a substantive debate. The growing obsession with following the money too often leads to nothing but cheap ad hominem attacks.

Tierney is right that sometimes you need commercial involvement in working out how to deal with complex issues like climate change. The National Research Council in the US commonly involves industry people in the preparation of its reports. But this does not in any way resolve the quite valid questions about Pachauri’s connections, which are related to grant money and corporate profits, but also to the control of ideas and the prestige that comes with it. He basically points this out in later in the column (my emphasis):

There are, of course, notorious cases of corporate money buying predetermined conclusions, like the reports once put out by the Tobacco Institute to rebut concerns about smoking and cancer. But there has also been dubious work promoted by government agencies and foundations eager to generate publicity and advance their own agendas.

Exactly. Corporate involvement or not; money trail or not; conflict of interest is a serious issue that should be addressed by anyone in a position to give science advice.

I agree with Tierney’s points about the money trail obsession. But let’s not forget that this controversy could have been avoided if the IPCC had a policy for recognizing and dealing with conflict of interest. This is a pretty shocking oversight.

Is anyone not on Facebook? Well, just in case, I thought I’d re-post a discussion I and some friends have been having about our impressions of the roles of science and technology in the movie Avatar. I feel a little silly adding to all the attention that this movie is getting. In many ways it is kind of a crappy movie. Yet at the same time it is causing a lot of interesting discussion (for another example, see this very interesting discussion of the Noble (Sparkly) Savage). And of course, it was spectacular to watch.

This discussion began with me raising the question in the title: Avatar: Pro-Science; Anti-Intellectual? Here are some of the responses.

Zach: I like calling it “pro-science.” Avatar doesn’t care about nature because it’s important in and of itself; it cares about nature because lifeforms on Pandora have established a complex neural network that can host entire lived identities, exudes a power that allows mountains to fly, and that has a tangible social function through the ‘built-in USB connections that exist in every Na’Vi and every animal. This hippie lovefest is based on tangible scientific (in the story) phenomena.

i’m not sure i see the anti-intellectual point as clearly, although you could argue that based upon Sully’s uneducated character. If you think that the defense of nature is predicated on proscience grounds, then arguably the outcome of the movie is a defense of the planet’s metaconciousness, which might be more advanced than human conciousness. This would imply that the movie isnt anti-intellectual, it just defends a higher intellect than our own.

One way to deal with uncertainty is brute force engineering. See, for example, the canal that brings 1.5 million acre feet (1850 gigalitres according to Google) of Colorado River water into Arizona each year (the Central Arizona Project or CAP).

Or, here in Victoria, there’s the massive desalination plant under construction on the Bass Coast, which will deliver annually 200 gigalitres of water purified from the ocean.

This is apparently one third of Melbourne’s annual consumption. The fancy-pants animation provided on the project website ends with the dramatic and reassuring words:

“Water now

and for the future.

For sure.”

And this is precisely the point. The impact of climate change on annual rainfall is potentially quite bad, and at best, highly uncertain. The response? Find a source independent of rainfall. While fears of climate change no doubt played a significant role in bringing about this desalination project, this is one form of adaptation that doesn’t rely on detailed climate predictions in order to be effective.

Chalk this up as one of the many examples that contradicts the conceptual model proposed by the Climate Science Framework:

climate science –> adaptation research –> adaptation

On another note…

someone who knows more about it (and you know who you are!) really should do a comparative study focused on the politics of desalination in Australia and large water projects in the US (such as CAP). Or at least, they should chime in here with some more authoritative knowledge!

I had an interesting conversation last night with someone who works in the water engineering business here Melbourne. From her brief description, their seem to be quite a few similarities between the canal in Arizona (built in the 70s) and desalination here.

The $3.5 billion price tag of the desalination facility is to be repaid through water sales. It is expected that water prices will double over the next five years partly because desalination is so energy intensive, and thus expensive. But then again, if there is suddenly a huge increase in the supply of water to the state (especially if this drought ends), can we really expect prices to go up?

And another question: how should we expect this new-found water security to effect the public’s attitude toward water conservation?

In Arizona, the main effect of the CAP was to keep water prices low and encourage people to use more water. This helps to explain why the extremely dry state has an above average per capita water use, and below average prices. In addition to facilitating vast suburban sprawl, this has also made it pretty difficult to pay off the bill for constructing the canal in the first place. (Most of the canal water gets “recharged” into the ground, rather than pumped into lawn sprinklers and bathtubs).

These musings come from a position of relative ignorance, especially with respect to water politics in Australia, but the parallels drawn here at least provide a starting point for some interesting discussion.

Here’s a headline that caught my eye today:

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.

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.

Yglesias makes a fair point:

Their basic point, that the kind of carbon tax proposal that policy wonks would dream up would be superior policy to the kind of cap-and-trade plan that would result from the compromises necessary to get 60 votes in the Senate, is very true. But by the same token, the kind of cap-and-trade proposal that policy wonks would dream up would be superior policy to the kind of carbon tax plan that would result from the compromises necessary to get 60 votes in the Senate.

Drum interjects:

In the near term, no serious carbon tax will ever pass the U.S. Senate.  Period.  If you believe otherwise, you’re just not paying attention to things.  A big part of the surge in interest in a carbon tax is purely cynical, coming from special interests who are afraid a carbon cap might actually pass and want to muddy the waters with pseudo-liberal arguments in order to build an anti-C&T alliance and keep anything at all from passing.  There are plenty of carbon tax advocates who are perfectly sincere, but I gotta tell them: you’re being played by people who are the farthest thing imaginable from sincere.  If you win, we’re not going to get a carbon tax.  We’re going to get nothing.

I imagine the same dynamics exist here in Australia (correct me if I’m wrong!). The Opposition is now hinting at all sorts of alternatives (e.g. nuclear, green tax credits, and “biosequestration”) to Rudd’s ETS, and it is hard to tell whether these proposals are sincere, or simply meant to (further) weaken the Labour policy (the ETS).

The dialog above is flawed in that it constrains our choices. The types of targets and carbon trading schemes recently proposed in the US, UK, and Australia are toothless, unrealistic, or both. If we’re choosing between nothing and these policies, then our choice is really between “nothing” and a more complex and expensive “nothing.”

Sullivan concludes that “when nothing is revealed as insufficient, maybe a better solution will emerge.” But there are already other choices which involve adopting a different perspective. For example, the Breakthrough Institute argues that we need to do away with these complex attempts at reaching abstract targets, and focus on direct investment in the kinds of technology that will actually help with the problem:

If you haven’t heard yet, you should get out of your finals cave and update yourself on ClimateGate. In brief, e-mails at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) a the University of East Anglia were hacked. The e-mails show climate scientists discussing their data, how to present it and which (skeptical) papers not to publish. Even if you still believe that the science is sound and justifies action on climate change, this seems like it could potentially shake an already shaky public perception of climate change… and, I would argue, with good reason.

As Nordhaus & Schellenberger, authors of The Death of Environmentalism and Breakthrough, argued before just before ClimateGate at Yale Environment 360, apocalyptic visions of climate change or even an unreflexive call for action based on the science has had the following effect:

“Rather than galvanizing public demand for difficult and far-reaching action, apocalyptic visions of global warming disaster have led many Americans to question the science. Having been told that climate science demands that we fundamentally change our way of life, many Americans have, not surprisingly, concluded that the problem is not with their lifestyles but with what they’ve been told about the science. And in this they are not entirely wrong, insofar as some prominent climate advocates, in their zeal to promote action, have made representations about the state of climate science that go well beyond any established scientific consensus on the subject, hyping the most dire scenarios and most extreme recent studies, which are often at odds with the consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

According to them much of the problem has been the way we talk about climate change (”doom and gloom”) and the corresponding emphasis this puts on science and the way it frames potential action (i.e., we need to change our lifestyles and that will cost a lot). Again, this was before ClimateGate… now the situation exists wherein we have similar science/policy arguments leading up to Copenhagen while the public, or at least politicians, have the perception that not only is the science uncertain, especially considering the types of changes that would be needed, but maybe the scientists aren’t so legitimate after all.

It would seem the situation looks pretty dim. There may be some hope, however. Perhaps not for Copenhagen, but for the longer-term relationship between science, policy and society. Mike Hulme, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia and formerly with CRU, has written two op-eds (here and here with Jerome Ravetz) in the last couple of days. His basic argument, with which I wholeheartedly agree, is the following:

“The problem then with getting our relationship with science wrong is simple: We expect too much certainty, and hence clarity, about what should be done. Consequently, we fail to engage in honest and robust argument about our competing political visions and ethical values.”

This is a problem not just with the way the public has come to understand science (as a collection of certain facts rather than more of a social process that produces reliable knowledge) but also with the way scientists view their own work and it’s role to social and environmental policy-making (what Dan Sarewitz calls “knowledge first”). Instead, he argues that

“The central battlegrounds on which we need to fight out the policy implications of climate change concern matters of risk management, of valuation, and political ideology. We must move the locus of public argumentation here not because the science has somehow been “done” or “is settled”; science will never be either of these things, although it can offer powerful forms of knowledge not available in other ways. It is a false hope to expect science to dispel the fog of uncertainty so that it finally becomes clear exactly what the future holds and what role humans have in causing it.”

Here, I think is where the hope lies. Perhaps ClimateGate, so long as it does not fundamentally shake our confidence in the science behind climate change which I don’t think it will, will create the opportunity to do two things. First, it might enable other types of knowledge and language regarding ethical values, political ideology, etc. to enter in the debate. With the realization that science is a messy, social process that can help us understand phenomena but cannot be “settled” or show us how we should act, the debate may shift to the grounds that central battlegrounds Hulme mentions. Second, it may result in greater transparency for science that deals with complex issues of societal concern which would allow for great public participation and deliberation. As Hulme notes, “If ClimateGate leads to greater openness and transparency in climate science, and makes it less partisan, it will have done a good thing.”

According to a recently leaked report, the Victoria state government sees clean coal as a major part of its energy portfolio going forward, (though it acknowledges the technology may not work). The plan includes a major “public education campaign.” And while the role of coal may decrease locally, they hope to make up for this by increasing exports.

And the coal industry, anticipating the challenges of adopting carbon capture and storage technology, has told the state government that it will need guaranteed access to more of the drought-stricken state’s water resources.

Latrobe Valley power generators already use about 125 billion litres of water each year - equivalent to one-third of Melbourne’s annual consumption - and have asked the Government for improved access to dams and groundwater. … The bid has sparked a new battle between power generators and environmentalists who believe the water should go to stressed rivers if it is to be tapped.

So… expanded exports and increased water use. This should remind us that new technologies to address climate change, however attractive, will not offer panaceas. As these articles point out, there will always be trade-offs.

And of course, these tradeoffs are not confined to Australia. Warren Buffet has just invested $40 billion in the US coal industry (h/t Roger Pielke).

I see a lot of my fellow grad students constantly thumbing their Blackberries or iPhones, checking e-mail (often during conversations) and I admire their ability to multi-task.  I’m the kind of person who needs absolute silence when I read…no classical music for me.  I own a stereo and CDs (and that dinosaur, cassette tapes!), and when I listen to music, I’m usually on my couch…concentrating.  And on the rare times I’m on the elliptical at the gym, I don’t watch the handy TV on my machine…instead I watch the minutes crawl by.  I’m a little bit of a Luddit in other ways, too. Although I own a cell phone, I frequently don’t answer it.  And although I own a television set, I only watch DVDs on it.

Jamey Wetmore once gave a Science Cafe on technologies of distraction.  I think I might be one of the individuals who are not easily distracted– by technology at any rate.  I used to have some misguided notion that this might be a good thing, but now I’m not so sure.

Being a grad student in a field where being aware of current events is crucial to holding intelligent conversations, reflecting on one another’s work, and trying to understand the world, I feel I might be rapidly falling behind.  Browsing through online newspapers, magazines and blogs, and even checking e-mail, requires sitting in front of a computer, which I am always loath to do.  But this is the norm and I do it, albeit unwillingly.  I’d rather be holding a newspaper in my hand.

Ultimately, I think I resist that fact that my performance as a grad student, intimately tied to notions of intelligence, is heavily mediated through technology. It is not just about the medium through which I get my news, but how fast I get it.  If we are all living in a “knowledge society” then I am not soaking up knowledge fast enough.  And if I can’t keep up with the world, then I can’t effectively engage with the world.  (A very Western paradigm, indeed).  But this bothers me a great deal.  As a graduate student, I am acutely aware how technology facilitates how I learn and access materials.  I could be listening to podcasts while walking across campus, checking for the latest news before a meeting starts, and actively engaging in class when a  topic comes up and the professor asks those with laptops to Google it.  I could be present in multiple places at once.

And, of course, there is the issue of maintaining social contacts online.  Posting articles, reading and debating them, and networking with people require a good amount of upkeep, and maintaining a high profile online.  If I don’t regularly talk to people or post interesting status reports, I am no longer interesting and am the object of divestment.  No more Wall posts for me.

All these issues create a very isolating effect, not only from a social network, but also from the new norms of what is considered intelligent, academic behavior.  Listening to NPR is not enough anymore.  Ah well, I suppose I better wise up and get with the program.

I used the calculator from The Nature Conservancy website: http://www.nature.org/initiatives/climatechange/calculator/?gclid=CKLfvobngJ0CFR5HagodHgcrbQ.  Briefly, it has four categories (home, eating, travel, recycling) that start you out at the national average yearly CO2 emission for each category. Then it subtracts from this average if you recycle or use energy-efficient appliances, for example.  Finally, it compares your result to the total national average (27 tons CO2 per year) and the global average (5.5 tons per year). I came out at 11 tons per year, mostly because I don’t drive a car.

Interesting things I learned: 

Sorting all that recycling saves the same as eating organic (0.5 tons / year). I was surprised at how low the savings were for recycling.

My habit of eating less red meat (2.5 tons / year) more than offsets my guilty pleasure of taking long hot showers (0.9 tons per year) – though I still wish our apartment complex would install flow restrictors.

I heard that all incoming freshman at ASU have calculated their carbon footprint during orientation. I wonder what calculator website they used? I liked the Nature Conservancy calculator because it was fast and easy to use, and allowed you to see the change in  CO2 emissions you would make just by toggling back and forth in a category. I’d be interested in hearing about your carbon footprint calculation experience.