Forum OpenACS Q&A: Greenpeace.org nominated for Webby-Awards

"Safe nuclear power is a myth."

Yeah.

First of all, thanks to the people that congratulated us and helped us make it a site that would deserve a nomination in the Webby awards!

This is a call that we are making in regard to the nomination...

The Webby Academy has nominated www.Greenpeace.org as one of the five best activist sites on the web! If you don't know the Webbies, they're the Oscars of the website world, and this is a great honour for all 128,000 of us cyberactivists.

There are two ways to win: direct selection by the Academy, and the popular vote in the "Peoples Choice" competition. We're shamelessly asking you to vote for the Greenpeace site for a number of reasons. For one, more cyberactivists: a Webby win would bring more people to the site, more cyberactivists into the fold, and lend more weight to every campaign we run. Secondly, everyone who stood up against the invasion of Iraq is feeling deflated when we see the horrors of a war we all feel we were powerless to stop. But don't let anyone tell you that the peace activists lost. Activism has built a base that's simply not going to go away, and its deepest concerns, far more to do with US unilateralist ambitions and the concept of "preventive" war than Iraq, have simply been confirmed. It's more important now than ever to show that activism can win, and peace is the real "People's Choice."

You can cast your vote at:

http://www.webbyawards.com/peoplesvoice/

I am posting the previous shameless call in here as well because, as you know, the web site is running on OpenACS and winning this award would bring significant exposure for OpenACS! So, go ahead and cast your vote! 😊

Patrick, why didn't you say you cared so much about the Iraqi people when Saddam was in power? Did your militia leadership have a gag order on you?

Btw, global warming is real.

talli

IMHO it's great that Greenpeace has been nominated for the webby and if they feel they can win with the statement above, that's fine. Furthermore it is okay that they post it here, for reference. I don't think Bruno's intention was to convert the community or act as a spokesman for it.

In general, it would be great if the community would adhere to the self imposed rules of not talking about politics here.

Btw, Talli, you're wrong, not only is global warming an utter crock, but measures to "fix" it are likely to be extremely counterproductive.

(That link will have to do, as I couldn't find any others quickly. More or less, we have absolutely no idea which way the climate is really going, but from the historical record it's rather more likely to go into a global ice age, which would be disastrous, than get warmer, which would be no problem at all, even beneficial. Really understanding which way the climate is going to go could be critical to the future of civilization, and thus the human race. And right now we don't know. But we do know enough to know that the gloom and doom "global warming" theories are BS. Spending $billions on the Kyoto protocols rather than pumping that money into research to actually figure out what we should do is insane. But real research is hard work, and doesn't pay bureaucrats to fly around the world and tell us what to do at our expense, etc. etc.)

But much more importantly, this is all far, far off topic. Greenpeace uses OpenACS, Greenpeace is a well known and effective international organization, and Greenpeace has been an excellent memeber of the OpenACS community. So in OpenACS terms, Greenpeace is good. Thus the smilies next to Jonathan's and my comments above.

Even if we lived in some bizzaro alternate universe where Greenpeace was murdering millions (like the national socialist and communist governments of the last hundred years), it would still be be hard to construe Greenpeace's use of OpenACS as somehow drastically improving their ability to wreak evil on the world. So to the truly politically devoted, to any cause, rest at ease - you are not collaborating with the enemy here, any enemy.

So Patrick, Talli, please shut up. I'm sure there's code or docs or whatever that could use writing somewhere. Open Source is good, OpenACS is good, and organizations that do a lot to help OpenACS, like Greenpeace, are also good - and that's all I care about for our purposes here in this forum.

From this page:

And Harry Erwin comments on the Mid East Policy as Fantasy paper:

An interesting paper. One issue is that I'm not sure anyone can claim they see the world as it really is. Mammals seem to live in an internal model that is updated asynchronously based on sensory data, and they choose their behavior based on that model, not on their sensations. This is particularly clear in bats, where we see the Wiederorientierung phenomenon: bats flying in a familiar area often seem to ignore sensory afference and instead depend almost exclusively on their memory of the area. First reported by Möhres and Öttingen-Spielberg in 1949, it describes two states: 1. Erstorientierung-when bats first encounter a novel situation. 2. Wiederorientierung-when bats fly in a familiar space. It was observed in the behavior of a bat that was accustomed to roosting in a cage in a room. The researchers rotated the cage and eventually removed it, and noted that the bat continued to behave as if the cage were in its normal position until forced to reorient. This suggests that bats use and maintain a world model that is only modified if circumstances force it to.

Rawson and Griffin investigated this further (see Griffin, Listening in the dark, the Acoustic Orientation of Bats and Men, Yale, 1958, and Griffin, "Cognitive aspects of echolocation," in Nachtigall and Moore, ed., Animal Sonar: Processes and Performance, Plenum Press , 1988). . Asked whether the bats even made cries at all. . Experiment involved placing and moving obstacles in a flight room. . Answer: the bat still made echolocation cries, but seemed to ignore the resulting returns. Maintenance of congruence between the internal model and the environment is asynchronous, low-rate, effortful, and involves a 'dialog' (Griffin) between the animal and its environment. There is also evidence from human psychology for similar ideas (see Walter J Freeman, 1995, Societies of Brains, LEA). The concept that brains are isolated from the objective world is called epistemological (not metaphysical!) solipsism.

Why do I mention epistemological solipsism? Because it implies _everyone_ lives in an internal model in more or less incomplete agreement with objective reality. The interpretations of 9/11 as a martyrdom and as a war by terrorists are both descriptions of internal models in incomplete congruence with reality. Objectively, it was an event involving the deaths of thousands, made 'meaningful' only by those internal models of how things 'really' work.

I seem to recall that Dr. Erwin told a simpler and more impressive version of that story elsewhere: Apparently, you can remove a bat's usual perch while it is out of the room, and when it returns, despite constant echo-location cries, it will proceed to "land" on the non-existant perch and then (and only then) abrubtly re-evaluate the faulty relationship between its model of the world and the real world, while falling towards the floor... (I don't know if the type of bat or any other factors matter, etc.)

Supposedly, all mammals' brains work in basically that way. Interesting implications, no? When I first read that it shed light on many aspects of human behavior I'd seen or read about.

Based largely on the above, I have an utterly speculative and untested theory which says that: Our internal models of "how the world works" are unlikely to be substantially revised and improved except in the face of either, one, major external stress (think Marine Boot Camp), or two, concerted, sustained, and substantial conscious effort on our part.

I further suggest that the first criteria certainly does not hold in this forum, and that the second is unlikely to as well - for any of us.

:)

One issue is that I'm not sure anyone can claim they see the world as it really is. Well, it's human nature or rather a side effect inherent in our languages to claim that our view of the world is "the way it is". Korzybski postulated that this is an effect of confusing the language with the territory. This view, which was later refined by Bateson and other Cyberneticians expresses that the only thing that the mind is capable of holding is a "map of the territory". Unfortunately too often we confuse the map for the territory. So in effect we conflict and fence with the depiction - the map.

It is indeed unfortunate that we rarely ask how the 'thing' we describe differs from the word(s) used to describe it. But what motivation is there to get people to really question their models of reality? From the governments point of view of maintaining a "manageable society" - none. Politicians and their rhetoric love group words like liberation, equality, cooperate and these words are rubbed together endlessly - but what is really meant?? One example of this is provided by Hampden-Turner. If you consider an ideological dispute in which one party says -"I'm an individualist therefore I must fight collectivism", while another party answers - "As a Cooperatist I must fight selfishness". They each speak as though enbodiments of these ideas are going to trip of each others tongues to beat the other into submission. But there is neither "substance nor essence" to the individuality and Cooperation is no "sacred object inhabiting the soul". All that there is, is a pattern of generally agreed upon differences which we have identified with codes. In Hampden-Turner's words - "The word 'cooperative' and a living cooperative community have a structural relationship similar to one inch to one mile on a road map, save that ideological maps are rarely as reliable!" So if the Individualist and Cooperatist question their models, they might find that indeed the individualst can cooperate while the Cooperatist may find that indeed competition is truly wonderful and both may find that they can accomodate their mind maps to include the others territory. Not a good scenario for many government administrations...

As the mind continues to codify and classify objects, it becomes increasingly important to question the very logic that is used to engage in codifying and classifying our 'reality'. Othewise, as Korzybski and Bateson pointed out, the mind itself divides into "exclusive fragments", we confuse the word with the thing, the mapper with the mapped and this leads to the belief that the mind must contain no 'contradiction'.

Nevitt Sanford and Bateson postulated the theory of Schismogenesis which says that there is a growing split in the structure of human interaction and the ideas communicated. As we look at much of what is happening in todays world, I have to concede that they are indeed right and anyone that is at all concerned with humanity can hardly afford to look away. Andrew points out that other Mammals have their own internal models of reality formed by whatever their sensory abilities might be e.g. bats. We are limited by nature to forming a map of reality as well by our own perceptive apparatus and our need to classify and codify the world we live in."The interpretations of 9/11 as a martyrdom and as a war by terrorists are both descriptions of internal models in incomplete congruence with reality. Objectively, it was an event involving the deaths of thousands, made 'meaningful' only by those internal models of how things 'really' work."Much of the Arab world holds a view that for them is congruent with reality as well. This is a perfect example of the growing split between human interactions and what actually gets communicated as concepts/ideas. The issue is not so much the "incongruence with reality" but rather with the fragmentary, exclusive nature of the ideologies expressed.

What does it take to get people to challenge the logic used to map the world? This is a tough one. I have seen people make major change due to extreme stress conditions as well as from seemingly (for us) minor events. I think that the issue of what causes change is as complex as the human mind is. I don't think you can reduce it down to a couple of options. On the one hand #1 implies that we don't have a choice and therefore must either seek out or wait for destiny to bring something in our direction which will "change" us. The other seems to imply a lack of will or morality. Is "change" even the best word to use here? I'm thinking out loud here, but I can't help but wonder the role of education in all of this.

Mike - I agree that the 404 page is really cool... Well, its interesting how this thread went from the Webby awards Greenpeace nomination to a discussion on epistemology, bats, human politics and cybernetics. 😊) I think while all this is off-topic, it does show what an intesting and diverse bunch our OACS community really is. I'm fairly new to this community, but I'm really enjoying being a part. I really look forward to increasing participation and interaction with everyone here. 😊)

(Only IMNSHO, no warranty included, all caveats apply, etc. etc.)

There are probably many other similar litmus test items for quickly ferreting out the symptoms of "choosing to see the world as you wish it were, rather than as it is", but those are two I'm aware of.

My ideal energy system would be fusion reactors performing electrolosis on their wastewater to generate hydrogen fuel, which is shipped out along the liquid/gas transport economy existing today (with minor modifications), to be used in fuel cells with 85% - 90% efficiency conversion back into electricity. It would be nice.... the near infinite energy supply of nuclear, no waste, a fuel transfer system we are already acquainted with, vehicles with greater range than ones with internal combustion engines, and no propping up third-world dictators for easy access to vital energy sources. The tech for everything but the fusion is already there, and the system can work with fission with the addition of higher security needs and long-term waste disposal. Only industrial inertia holds it back.

And that's some serious inertia... 683 billion USD of inertia per year, just from the top 5 oil & car companies in the US alone (bring in the non-US companies to knock it into the $1.2T range. Source: Fortune500). With that much at stake, do you think it's possible that these very powerful companies, and their well-connected friends in government, might seek to warp the debate? Just maybe?

Let's ignore global warming for now. What about the more directly observable outcomes? Air pollution doesn't just make pretty sunsets, it also kills people. Rather a lot of people, 3 million per year globally according to WHO, more than 3 times the number of people killed in auto accidents. (Within the US, the two numbers are roughly equivalent, 50k - 60k. Same as the total US casualties in Vietnam.) Let's assume you don't die from the air pollution, and neither do your children or your elderly relatives. Do you jog? Bike? Notice the difference in air quality on an ozone alert day? Feel your lungs burning? Notice how you can only run twice as far? Here in Texas, the official state response is "you don't need to be outside". When did we trade away our enjoyment of the outdoors? What did we get for it?

I liked this one:
Orange County could save $349 million a year in health care costs if stricter standards for airborne particulate matter were imposed. Source: The American Lung Association (Los Angeles Times November 20, 1997)
That in one county. Turns out, last week Alcoa lost in court and will spend $330 mil to fit their largest plant with scrubbers. It's the largest pollution source in Texas and affects 3 major cities. $330 mil in capital expenses, amortized out over a decade, and affecting dozens of counties, sounds like a hell of a good deal.

I would add something about political stability for access to oil, but it seems you can buy access for $200BN, albeit for a few years...

Why do you feel the need to vigorously defend the current system? When you say "Spending $billions on the Kyoto protocols rather than pumping that money into research to actually figure out what we should do is insane.", do you even know what you're talking about? Those billions give incentives to restructure operations to reduce pollution - aka less waste - aka higher efficiency! There is a long-term savings, by all players, by making something currently free, pollution, have value -- it financially motivates everyone to get creative. Do you watch the pollution trading markets? Have you seen how the integration of free-market capitalism and government pollution controls have halved the world sulfer dioxide emissions in just 10 years? The Kyoto protocol is not hemp designs and tofu recipes -- it is a hardcore capitalist document for sponsoring innovation.

We are shifting to a new energy economy. Step back 300 years and look at the pattern: from wood to coal in the 18th century, from coal to oil at the beginning of the 20th. Each time, the dependence on the old fuel had created an economic disaster: Europe was decades away from total deforestation in the former, in the latter coal had made cities hostile to human life. (The London fog would trap the soot & sulfer and kill hundreds in a night.) On each shift, the pollution-per-person plummeted, available energy soared, health improved, and whole new industries were developed.

In the long run, environmentalism is a net win for everyone.

If the US recinded a 1978 executive order and allowed for waster refinement once again, there would be substantially less waste. How much less? 10 000 tonnes a year less? What about the stockpiles of waste from the last couple of decades? And are you only talking about US waste? What about the rest of the world? And what part should the industry play in regulating its own waste and taking responsibility for its actions? I guess its ok to have, say 5 thousand tonnes instead of ten. A year.

Then you go on to say "consumer waste is also bad". Yes, I agree. Still doesn't excuse nuclear waste. I also agree everything we do creates waste; waste exists, it always has, so nuclear waste is ok? No. The answer is that as a society we must take responsibility for the practices and processes that produce waste. This has started to happen for consumer waste, and its a good sign. But you CAN'T get rid of nuclear waste.

The Chernobyl crap... ah this was my favourite bit. The USA is more accountable. Good. Hope it's still accountable in 25 thousand years. Even the mighty USA can't get rid of nuclear waste safely. But I'm not attacking the USA. I disagree with the entire nuclear industry. Which is, by the way, unbelievably subsidized. Chronic escalation of construction costs coupled with high operation and maintenance costs have meant cost overruns of 100 billion dollars in the United States alone. (Figures released by the U.S. Department of Energy). This is not 'power too cheap to meter'. It has real costs for the whole community. And let's just say that even first world countries are not invulnerable. The last big publicaly known accident happened in Tokaimura/Japan, 30 September 1999.

In a fuel fabrication plant, two workers mixed too large an amount of liquid uranium solution in a container, violating elementary safety regulations. A nuclear chain reaction started, highly radioactive fission products were released. Two of the three workers that received very high radiation doses died after months of radiation sickness. Over 400 local people were exposed to high levels of radiation.

And then you go on to say "Well, other people do it,"; the French and the Belgium. Erhmmm.... And a few taunts of 'most of you guys don't have college physics'.

Let me reply by quoting Dr. John Gofman , Professor Emeritus of Molecular and Cell Biology in the University of California at Berkeley, and Lecturer at the Department of Medicine, University of California School of Medicine at San Francisco:

"The ordinary man-in-the-street can look at the amount of radioactivity that would be produced in a full-scale nuclear industry and realize that containing such toxins to 99.9999% perfection day in, day out, year in, and year out - when one considers all the possible human and machine fallibilities - is impossible"

Do I really need a college physics to do a bit of thinking and come to the conclusion that the sweet promise of nuclear energy leaves a really sour aftertaste, and all things considered, it's a fruit better left unpicked?

You want to make most of the earth beautiful and pristine? It's easy, all you have to do, is make everybody on Earth, everybody, at least as wealthy as Americans are today. And that's going to take energy, lots and lots of cheap energy. Therefore, see also technology R&D, and especially space access and development.

(Note that I strongly suspect that world-wide wealth is the only way a pristine earth is going to happen. That is, other than mass murder, human species die off, and/or crushingly repressive Stalinesque regimes - all of which I presume are out of bounds for rational consideration by all participating here. One more way might be some bizarro new world-wide "green" religion, but barring mind control drugs that seems astonishingly unlikely - perhaps less likely than us all being killed by an asteroid.)

Overpopulation? On the large scale, the only proven method of birth control is wealth. (Sorry no reference. But there are historical studies looking back centuries, and good economic arguments for why the observed results, that as societies get wealthier they have fewer children, make sense.) See above.

And heh, I've never tried crunching all the numbers myself (although for what it's worth I was trained as a chemical engineer, so I probably could if I really had to, and had the time), but my understanding is it's usually possible to make just about any manufacturing process clean and non-polluting - it's just a question of how much energy it's going to take. Often the answer is, "a very large amount". See cheap energy above.

Btw, Todd, Malte, in particular, I salute you.

Recent reasons for possible optimism:

• Fully-built privately funded manned space plane unveiled.

• Turn waste into oil - cleanly and at a profit.

• Extremely efficient Brayton cycle IC engine, developed by Dr. Holtzapple of Texas A&M (which I saw reported here), which, coincidentally, should happily and efficiently burn the oil produced from turkey entrails above.

I think this is an overly pessimistic stance. No matter if people are far right conservatives, neo-liberals, or Greenpeace activists, we all want a high quality standard of living (this does not necessarily imply owning three polluting SUVs btw) and a clean environment and I think there are encouraging signs in this direction.

The environment *is* being improved in much of the western world. Even more importantly, major parts of the third world are reaching our standard of living and are starting to care about the environment as well. Food on the table will always be a higher priority for the poor than any abstract greenhouse problems with no immediate impact on their everyday life.

There have been predictions about natural resources (oil, minerals, etc) running out on numerous occasions in the last century and each time they have been proven wrong.

Let's see in 20-30 years time from now if the world isn't better off than it is today. I'm willing to bet that it will be.

As for Gofman, I previously read some of his stuff on reactor safety. He has some good points, but I think he is a bit extreme or purist on some arguments like voluntary versus involuntary exposures (unless you want to also shut down most industries using similar arguments).

Too many people fall for the Limits to Growth, zero-feedback, exponential growth models. There are other views. The earth does seem to be supporting much of the world living at incomes similar to America's. If some do it by using less energy, then they're demonstrating it's possible to be more energy-efficient, and that should give hope for the rest of the world. I tend to agree with Thomas Friedman's view that the real economic problem with most places is their business infrastructures are still using the economic equivalent of ms-dos 1.0.

On solid waste and landfills, most materials come out of holes in the ground, so there should be plenty of room to put wastes back into holes in the ground. Mass is conserved although volume may be increased some. The problem with the hazardous portions of those wastes is they don't all decay away like radioactive wastes.

I also liked the "stored sunlight" analogy until I read about possibility of "abiotic" formation of petroleum. I don't know if that's a crackpot idea or not. As for geothermal energy, I'm fairly comfortable with Hollenbach's recent work on a Deep-Earth reactor possibly being involved.

On Mayak and polluted sites, an interesting exercise to put things in perspective regarding nuclear waste problems versus other pollution problems is to look at some of the EPA superfund sites. Even in states with problems related to nuclear weapons production, those sites have mostly chemical problems, and there more sites with primarily chemical problems that are unrelated to nuclear (although some are other defense-related). Looking at power plants in Scorecard is also illustrative.

Every power source has advantages and disadvantages; we need to do the best we can with what we've got, and not put too many artificial barriers in our way. Most of our sources (coal, oil and gas) spew their leftovers directly into the air, but nuclear does the best we can to keep it bottled up as long as possible. But nothing raises donations like the fear of a meltdown...

Anybody checked prices on solar panel systems lately?!

-- Another environmentalist for nuclear power

The discussion here regarding nuclear power has been (pardon my Johnny Cochran impersonation) rather simplistic, positivistic and at times fetishistic over the role that technology can play in solving the world's problems.

Theoretically, nuclear power could be a big step towards solving our power issues, but the same can be said of multi-tier web architectures that are written in strongly typed object oriented languages with excellent XML integration. They both sound like great ideas, but no one's been able to implement them without screwing the pooch once or twice.

The step between having a working power reactor and turning that into a "weapon of mass destruction" seems to be one that is relatively small. The argument can be that turning it into weapons grade plutonium might take some work and then figuring out a way to deliver it may also be complicated, but we all learned what a couple dozen creative guys with box cutters were able to achieve.

Consider the current fun we are having with North Korea (Google news). Things may have turned out different had Saddam been able to threaten us with a "sea of fire" (Pyongyang's words, not mine.) What would the geo-political landscape look like if the standard solution to energy in the developing world were to just build another reactor?

Further, for many countries, the development of nuclear energy programs are not to provide their population with cheap, useable power but quite explicitly to develop nuclear weapons. The most obvious, of course, is Israel, who to my knowledge has yet to even admit it has nuclear capability.

So while I'm hopeful that the reliance on fossil fuels will lessen in the the near future, I'm not as hopeful reliance will switch to nuclear power for no other reason than I am not inclined to see Bush's "pre-emptive strike" policy come into effect. Again.

Also, Brian, I know someone who uses the Spiral Dynamics principles quite often and quite well. I don't know so much about Ken Wilbur, other than seeing his books on the shelf at the bookstore.

But I think that he and you are applying those principles way off the mark. To argue that taking a strong position against or for the war is on some kind of lower level of consciousness is, well, weird to say the least.

If I were an Iraqi (which I am, btw, my family having left in the fifties), would I be simply on the first level for wanting the war to take place and quickly in order to get rid of Saddam once and for all? Or perhaps the opposite, for no war to take place so that I wouldn't have to deal with all the destruction that war's implicity require? Or perhaps if I'm an American and I simply don't like the fact that schools are suffering massive budget cutbacks while we invest billions of dollars in an unpopular war?

When I am confronted by such a question, I usually refer to the important work by Dr Martin Luther King Jr, "A letter from a Birmingham Jail.". King wrote this letter while in jail during the civil rights protests in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. The letter is in response to 8 Birmingham clergymen who asked that the demonstrations end and that a return to "common sense":

When rights are consistently denied, a cause should be pressed in the courts and in negotiations among local leaders, and not in the streets. We appeal to both our white and Negro citizenry to observe the principles of law and order and common sense.

King's response was the Letter, which he wrote on the margins of a newspaper until he was finally given proper writing papers (not by his jailers, btw). In the Letter, he describes why he has been moved to demonstrate and commit civil disobedience. For me, the most powerful paragraph is this one:

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant 'Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

Whether a stance on the war in Iraq has as much moral clarity as the civil rights movement in the American South is certainly questionable. But I would certainly hope that Mr Wilbur wouldn't consider Dr King thoughts here to be "green."

talli

Gotta keep this going...

I also liked the "stored sunlight" analogy until I read about possibility of "abiotic" formation of petroleum. I don't know if that's a crackpot idea or not. As for geothermal energy, I'm fairly comfortable with Hollenbach's recent work on a Deep-Earth reactor possibly being involved.

Anyone ever hear of fossil natural fission reactors? Yes, these do exist. These are real nuclear reactors that occured in uranium deposits and nuclear fission occured naturally. Do a google search on "Oklo Natural Fission Reactors" and you'll get more info.

As of 20 years ago the theory on the formation of the earth involved the initial accretion of the planet from material collected in an eddy of the accretion disk around the proto-sun. The impact of matter created energy that heated the earth and compression of the matter as size (and gravity) increased created more. At this stage the earth is a homogenous mixture of stuff -- no oceans, mountains, or anything -- mostly a big half melted rock. Then radio-active decay adds heat until the melting point of iron is reached. Now the process of planetary differentiation takes place as all the iron sinks to the center of the mass releasing huge amounts of energy as gravitational energy is converted to heat. Lighter elements rise to the top as the heavy elements sink. Give it 5 billion or so years to cool down and here we are.

I gather Michael Crichton is unaware of Meher Baba and His Universal Message.

And gosh, just who recently has publicly stated that the supposed anomalies between satellite and and ground-based temperature datasets have now been reconciled, and um um um guess what those missing higher temperatures in the higher troposphere aren't missing after all?  And that he's satisfied with the predictative behavior of the most recent climate models?  John Christy, and if you don't know the name then you're not fit to step on the playing field.

Crichton's either a fool or dishonest, you can take your pick.

"In the early Eighties, climate alarmists warned us of the coming Ice Age, but it was hard for them to make a plausible case that socialism could prevent it happening, or that Big Brother could help us much when our homes and businesses were buried under a mile of ice. The very same people then switched to claims of global warming, which let them argue that the world was doomed unless individual liberty were curtailed and capitalist societies were subjected to draconian penalties."

We'll start with a simple, factual area.

A handful of scientists argued that we may be entering a new Ice Age a couple of decades ago.  This hypothesis *never* gained any traction within the professional community of climatologists.

The scientists who proposed that increases in CO2 and other so-called greenhouse gasses might lead to global warming weren't "the same people".  Initially their hypothesis was greeted with the same lack of enthusiasm as had greeted the pronouncements of the Ice Age folks.  But then more and more researchers got involved.  And slowly the idea gained credibility.  Not because of political beliefs but as a result of scientific research.  Unlike *real* junk science like, say, cold fusion in mason jars blessed by Mormon elders.

Global warming is an observed fact.  Just ask John Christy, who not many years ago said it was not.  After asking him, tell him that the fact that he's swung 'round to agreing with the consensus opinion of the professional community of climatologists makes him a socialist who is working to curtail capitalist societies.

And listen to this man, who is not only a NASA researcher but a politically conservative fundamentalist Southern Baptist, laugh in your face.

Good grief.  The crap people read in an effort to educate themselves.  You think Pounelle's more credible than the National Academy of Science?  You really think that?

character assassination aside, I'd rather read what someone without an axe to grind said.

IMHO, you'll do better talking to and reading about what real scientist think about issues rather than reading op-ed pieces in the popular press like those mentioned above.

OTOH, I have to agree that environmental science has a lot of crackpots -- on both sides -- and "facts" are often, if not routinely, stretched to the breaking point to fit a particular argument. To a public accustomed to "Reality TV" and Jerry Springer this seems to be an acceptable practice. But I digress...

(Check out Lawrence Krauss' essay "Scientific Ignorance as a Way of Life " that was presented at an AAAS meeting in Feb. 2003 -- do a google search -- he has the lecture in MP3 format available for download)

Talli, if you were actually as smart as you seem to like to think you are you'd be less obtusely condescending and snide. At least Don tries to stick in substantial helpings of real facts and relevant argument.

I'm not a scientist, nor do I play one on TV, so just one point: My understanding is that it's a known scientific fact, not open to any reasonable doubt whatesoever, proven via many indepent tree ring studies and correlated with various other temperature records, that over recorded history, the climate used to be both substantially warmer and substantially colder than it is now. If as far as we know a warmer climate didn't cause disaster during the "medieval climate optimum" - and we know it didn't - then a similarly warmer climate now probably isn't going to cause disaster either.

Seems to me we basically don't know squat about how the climate really works right now. And since this is one of various fairly serious risks to the human civilization and species, we should learn, fast. But deciding what your answers are going to be before you do the science generally doesn't help.

We need more honest science, less politicization of science. Crackpots are generally not a problem, their results are unreproducable and thus shown to be worthless. Ignoring whether or not there are any results at all to try to reproduce, that's a problem! That's what happens when scientists prostitute their scientific integrity to further political ends, and that is of real concern.

Patrick is correct, the "global warming" movement is a farce and has been for a long time. The various gloom and doom models have all been junk. None of them could correctly reproduce any known period of climactic history given the initial conditions, so why the heck would you think they can accurately predict the future? On the real world side, yeah, things seem to have gotten warmer this century. So what? Far as anybody can tell we're still a lot cooler than other periods in the historical record. (Then add in all the rest of the arguments, accusations of junk science, etc., etc.)

Isn't it interesting though, that some folks above whose smarts I otherwise respect seem convinced of just the opposite? Of course none of us can read everything and at least partly by necesssity, we do filter our own inputs in ways keeping with our current internal models...

Try to keep that in mind folks, I do try to remind myself. I strongly doubt that any of us, even, [cough], myself are the "enlightened ones" who achieved all their most opinions and beliefs solely through calm, unbiased, rational analysis, unlike the many other blind sheep around them. Sorry, far as I know, the human animal just ain't built that way.

(Of course I personally just happened to lucky enough to be indoctrinated the right way... [grin] Possibly a pernicious by-product of the particular reading I did as a kid...)

There is real, empirical, verifiable truth in the world, and science is our means to determine it. But doing so is hard. Spin, lies, and accusations of heresy are all easier - and must be avoided and guarded against, preferably a whole lot better than they seem to be right now.

In diurnal raptors DDT interferes with the laying down of calcium as the egg passes through the ovary.  This cause the eggshell to be thin - doesn't cause brittleness.  The thinness means that the eggshell is weaker than normal, and if thin enough the weight of the brooding parent (birds must warm their eggs for the embryo to develop) will crush it.

Since the ban on DDT, PCBs etc we've seen a steady recovery in terms of eggshell thinness in raptors.  Studies I've seen indicate shells in the 95%-ish percent of normal range (IIRC, it's been years since I've looked).  Normal thickness is established by measuring eggs collected in the 19th century by naturalists for museum collections.

The second mechanism answers an interesting question, which is the correlation with DDT levels and egg mortality in certain species in which the eggshells are NOT thinned.

Believe it or not, biologists actually look into these things, don't blindly indict compounds like DDT because they're Rabid Leftist Environmentalists or whatever it is folks believe.

In turns out in these species (I forget which order, but it's not Falconiformes, i.e. not hawks, eagles, falcons and friends) the deposition of calcium by the ovary is indeed interfered with, but takes a different form.  Eggs are of roughly normal thickness, but investigation by electron scanning microscope has shown that the structure is somewhat "ropy" or "fibrous" rather than a smooth, impervious layer of calcium.  The spaces between these fibrous calcium deposits are large enough for water molecules to pass through, which causes the egg white to dry out and the embryo to die.

It yet other orders of birds it appears that the changes in calcium deposition (while real) are relatively innocuous.

I'm just scratching the surface here.  I'm posting this in part because I think that many who blindly accept the pronouncements of sources like junkscience.com have NO IDEA as to how deeply phenomena of this sort have been studied, and NO IDEA as to how well-established they are in our current body of scientific knowledge.

Are some environmentalists ignorant of science?  Sure.  Are some critics of environmentalism ignorant of science?  Proof by example: Michael Crichton.

My understanding is that it's a known scientific fact, not open to any reasonable doubt whatesoever, proven via many indepent tree ring studies and correlated with various other temperature records, that over recorded history, the climate used to be both substantially warmer and substantially colder than it is now. If as far as we know a warmer climate didn't cause disaster during the "medieval climate optimum" - and we know it didn't - then a similarly warmer climate now probably isn't going to cause disaster either.

It is with the pace of climate change. The very records you cite make it clear that the pace we're seeing is abormally rapid.

And from a practical, management point of view we're far more locked into a pattern of land allocation and use than was true during, say, medieval times. This potentially has a huge impact on our ability to mitigate through management because in much of the world, conservation strategy has been based on the creation of conservation reserves (in our country National Parks and to some extent National Forests, wildlife refuges, and the like). Typically these are surrounded by private lands devoted to intense agricultural use or, in a surprisingly large number of cases, heavy urban or suburban use.

And, as mentioned above, from a practical, management point of view (if one is a conservation biologist) the whole debate over climate change is moot. We've been seeing the effects on the ground for a couple of decades now and conservation biologists aren't asking "what if", they're working on "what can we do to mitigate?".

Neither would meet the definition of modern science, so what you've done is to raise a strawman and then knock it down.

As far as models go ... they do a very good job of replicating  events when fed past data, and as I mentioned above, John Christy - a real scientist rather than a second-rate software hack not worthy of tying my shoestrings much less kiss my feet (since you do argue from authority, and from authority only, I am compelled to point out that in this the software engineering realm, at least, I have a pedigree that makes your achievements look trivial) - has professed himself satisfied with the current state of modelling.

The ironic thing about your line of reasoning - "models can't be accurate" - is *exactly* why climatologists urge caution.

We can't predict what is going to happen as surface temperatures climb, therefore we ought to consider slowing down the pace of this particular experiment.

And, of course, you are further implying that the whole global warming gig is an artifact of inaccurate models.

Which is false. There's tons of observed data that document recent warming, and models must fit that data to be credible.

Nothing to do with personal creditials?  Just the fact that certain assumed facts in the past have been proven false in today's world?  I'm to assume that today's scientists are as screwed up as the non-scientists who worked in the non-scientific past?

Phrenology was never a science, so your bringing this up demonstrates nothing more than an ignorance of science.  The fact that you mention phrenology at all is rather amazing, since it was never science-based.

Here is *my* argument against science: it doesn't always agree with Tarot cards or my horoscope.  Therefore, science must be suspect, just as it is because modern thinking doesn't jive with phrenology.

Surely you're aware that modern standards of peer-review, repeatable experimental results, and the like weren't in place in the days of phrenology?

And psychiatry - Freud - is not science.  It is medicine.  And though the two field meet, they are not identical.

You really don't know much about science, do you?

That is to say, the fact that we cannot predict an occurence does not mean that we cannot develop working theories that elucidate the underlying issues.

As Don says, the models that have been built do a fairly good job at describing phenomena based on past data. That means our job is to take data and turn it into empirical evidence for a particular theory.

What has occured to date is that frameworks have been built, data has been submitted to them and the evidence that was generated was enough to convince those whose *responsibility* it is to be skeptical that global warming does in fact exist and it is due to human environmental abuse.

In my experience, climatologists, biologists, activists, etc, are not so invested in the idea that Earth is doomed that they will support global warming in the face of bad science.

For a more complete discussion of this issue, please read this article by a former professor of mine whose focus is on philosophy of science and engineering epistemology (he's in the philosophy faculty at Tufts but is actually the most famous and respected engineer on the faculty there - in his "professional life" he is one of the world's most famous experts in turbo engines). The book he reviews is precisely about the burden of proof in the debate over the causes of the hole in the Ozone layer.

Here's a quick quote:

"Standards of evidence when risk is central can be very different from standards of evidence in either comparatively finished science or science in the early stages of theory construction

These differing standards can be a serious source of continuing confusion in disputes over such matters as ozone depletion. Indeed, they clearly have been so in respect to global warming. A consensus among scientists can form because the evidence strongly supports the promise of a theory. Those who think that their vested interests may be adversely affected by policies based on this evidence can always invoke the standard of finished science to argue for delay. And all the while the policy question is best viewed as a balance of risks against gains, given currently available information."

talli

PS

To further support Don's thesis that not everyone who argues we are facing an environmental crisis is a raving leftist. EO Wilson, in fact, is quite controversial given his socio-biological theories which to many on the Left sound dangerously racist.

However you claim to be better able to judge the state of climate science than a select committee of experts chosen by the National Academy of Science.

The basis for your claim of superior judgement is threefold:

1. Phrenology was wrong.
2. Freud was wrong.
3. Don said unkind things about you.

If this is the best you can do, your credentials are weak.  In my ever so humble opinion, of course.

thank god.

Not that I disagree at all with your politics but I am hoping everyone's fingers get tired soon since I don't think either side here is that interested in changing their views.

Can google find this thread, I guess it would attract quite a diverse crowd, that may even end up trying out OpenACS.

Pournelle may not be more credible than NAS, but it does not make NAS an ultimate truth, does it?  I have trouble buying extremist statments coming from both sides -- environmental and industrial all the same.

<blockquote>  Andrei, the NAS is *not* extremist.
</blockquote>

I am not saying it is.  'Extremist' referred more to the gloom/doom scenarios, sort of like what (ehm, here goes a non-Republican) Al Gore would portray.

I can't call myself a big expert on much of what was so vigorously disscussed in this thread, I just tend to be relatively more agnostic...

Lord, you're even farther off than i thought.

It's healthy to be skeptical, certainly. But according to those in the know, this stuff is pretty gloomy/doomy...

talli

The FACT is that they are not.  This fact is not something that depends on my scientific or software coding prowess, Don. It is simply an immutable fact.

Unless John Christy has "recanted" since his May 13, 2003 written testimony before the US Congress, he is in full agreement with me concerning the accuracy of climate models.

The Google-cache link I have is:

http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:k4_5xkvjB6oJ:www.co2science.org/edit/v6_edit/v6n22edit.htm+%22john+christy%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

For some reason I am not able to load the original site (and thus am using the cached copy).

Don, do you have a link later than May 13, 2003 from John Christy that refutes this?

Here's a relevant quote:

In the research published in the May 2 issue of "Science," scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Remote Sensing Systems and the University of Birmingham found that temperatures in the troposphere rose "by roughly 0.1 degrees C per decade relative to the corresponding ... data, which show little net change."

Furthermore, the group compared this change with those predicted by the Department of Energy Parallel Climate Model, and found that the model predictions and the actual satellite observations were compatible. "We note two important points," the authors write. "First, claimed inconsistencies between satellite estimates of tropospheric temperature changes and either model results or surface temperature trends depend critically on which satellite data set is used. These inconsistencies are minimized with the RSS data.

"Second, our identification of a model-predicted stratospheric temperature fingerprint is robust to satellite data uncertainties.

"Take together, these points strengthen the case for a pronounced human influence on global climate."

and, to be more clear about the relevance of this...

Tom Wigley, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and one of the authors of a paper published in Science on the subject said, "This is an interesting area because of the political/policy situation. Among the skeptics who say that there are no human influences on the environment, and therefore we shouldn't do anything about it, one of the pillars of their arguments is the Christy and Spencer data set. They say these data are manifestly better than anything else. It is much harder now to say that, because there are two different data sets out there."

talli

Here's a statement he recently made regarding a National Research Council committee he served on (I have a hard time keeping all these councils and academies and the like straight :)

"Our panel was asked to settle some of the puzzling inconsistencies that have helped spur the controversy over global warming in the first place. Many in the scientific community were troubled by an apparent incongruity between two different sets of temperature data. Surface-temperature measurements indicate that the Earth has warmed. But data collected by satellites and balloon-borne instruments since 1979 indicate little, if any, warming of the upper atmosphere.

After reviewing the data, we found that despite these differences in temperature data, the Earth has indeed warmed by about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the past century. In fact, surface temperatures in the past two decades have risen at a rate substantially greater than average for the past 100 years. These are important findings, to be sure. But we also need to be aware that although the Earth's surface temperature has increased substantially in the past 20 years, that increase may not necessarily be representative of any long-term climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

The differences between the surface and upper-air data are probably due to a combination of factors. For example, depletion of ozone in the stratosphere may have cooled the atmosphere without affecting the surface temperature. And the debris that entered the atmosphere when Mt. Pinatubo erupted in 1991 also produced cooling, which was probably more pronounced in the satellite measurements than in those recorded at the Earth's surface. When these factors are taken into account in atmospheric models, the simulated trends agree more closely with the temperature observations, although some discrepancies remain.

So we know that despite differences in the two sets of temperature data, the Earth's surface is in fact warming. Our panel did not address whether greenhouse gases have led to the temperature increases of the past two decades."

What he's not saying here is that this is a huge retreat from his earlier position, that surface warming was not real, merely an artifact of the data, and that his satellite data PROVED it wasn't real.

He is also accepting the probability that some of the hypotheses put forward to explain the discrepency, such as the several year cooling effect of the Mt. Pinatubo eruption (important because the satellite data only goes back about tweny years, with half the dataset impacted by the eruption) .

So he's been forced to make a partial, not total, retreat from his earlier position.

Someone - a scientist, but not climatologist - recently told me Christy's balloon data that supposedly contradicts the Science paper above has itself been shot down but I've not checked it out ... I wouldn't be terribly surprised, though, because his first published methodology for indirectly computing temperatures in the atmosphere using his satellite data included a very embarassing error.

"Reconciling Vertical Temperature Trends Workshop October 27-29, 2003". Some of the skeptics who have posted on this topic might do well to study the presentations available there. Among other things, the whole idea of urban heat islands is completely debunked (maybe the surface temps are not so "deeply flawed" after all). Also of interest are the many expositions on the complexity of the distribution of vertical temperature changes and the degree to which there are very large and persistant differences on regional and hemispheric bases. You get very different results if you look at the atmosphere/surface anomalies in the tropics versus in the northern hemisphere, etc. So the idea of a single-valued difference expands into a whole spectrum of differences, depending on where you look for your non-surface data. The idea that there is an alternative set of non-surface measurements to be taken as opposed to the surface measurements is a myth. What does exist is a whole array of non-surface measurements which could be used - but the theory does not exist today to tell you which one to use, and how it should relate to corresponding surface temperatures. As far as the expected relation between surface and atmospheric temps, one presenter (Trenberth) went so far as to say "Given that global mean surface temperature anomalies are dominated by continental land areas in the NH, while global “satellite temperature” anomalies are dominated by the Tropical regions, why should we expect a relationship at all"?

(BTW "NH" in this context means "Northern Hemisphere", which is where the majority of the world's landmass lies, not "New Hampshire" which is really tiny :)