Earth Hour 2010

Earth Hour is happening again on March 27th. I have argued before that it is a bad idea, and I stand behind that assessment. I think it propagates faulty beliefs over what needs to be done, and what sort of tactics can succeed.

One more reason why Earth Hour is counterproductive is that it feeds naturally into one of the most common arguments against action on environmental issues: namely, that environmentalists just want to shut down everything people rely upon and enjoy. Turn the lights out, ban travel, etc. They may ask you to do it voluntarily for an hour, but they really want to force it on you forever. That’s how the Conservative Party portrayed the Kyoto Protocol – as though meeting it would mean shutting down a third of all of Canada’s energy use overnight.

Dealing with climate change does require us to change behaviour, and the ethics considerations everyone needs to make now must take climate change into account. That being said, the solution doesn’t lie with shutting everything down, but rather with replacing the energy basis of our society with one that is clean and renewable, leaving most remaining fossil fuels unburned. I don’t see how Earth Hour helps us move in that direction.

LeBreton Towers

For the whole time I have been living in the LeBreton Flats area, these towers have been under construction. They are out in an open patch of land, with the War Museum in one corner and open fields in most of it. Apparently, the land used to be contaminated, but has had the soil carted off and been re-designated for development. Along with residential structures, another national museum is promised on one of the many billboards that keep getting knocked over and smashed by the wind.

One tower is already finished and has some people living in it, though it is far from full. A second is just a skeletal frame of steel and concrete.

Thankfully for wandering photographers, the fencing around the site is far from complete. Likewise, the level of surveillance. Indeed, someone bolder than I could probably have their run of the semi-constructed tower, if they wanted.

A bit of the ways up Booth Street, there is another significant project ongoing. This one part of the much-touted ‘Economic action plan.’ Between the two, the area north of Chinatown has been in a fairly dynamic state lately.

People are already living in the first tower. Probably, those with apartments facing towards downtown have made the safer choice. While there is a creek and a park off in that direction, the view the other way remains unknown until the plans for the whole area are sorted out.

To me, it seems a bit curious to light the whole site up so elaborately at a time when nobody is working.

The towers are mostly glass and concrete, like most of the high structures in the area. At the top, the first one has a pretty elaborate looking penthouse with balconies, but it seems to be uninhabited still.

The gray rectangular block in the corner here is Canada’s National Archives.

The new towers do seem more attractive than the giant concrete waffles that were put up in previous decades. That said, the nicest housing in this area probably consists of converted two-story brick houses. The condition varies a lot, and they are often poorly insulated (foolish in this climate), but at least they make you more connected with your neighbourhood than living in a big filing cabinet.

Pitfalls in statistics

Statistics are a powerful thing, but they are easily to use sloppily and incorrectly. This article identifies a few important pitfalls related to statistical significance, problems with testing multiple hypotheses simultaneously, issues with clinical trials and meta-analyses, and the usefulness of Bayes’ Theorem.

While statistics are a far sounder way of knowing about the world than anecdotes and intuition, it is definitely worrisome that they are so poorly understood. My graduate statistics course at Oxford is evidence enough of just how poorly the subject can be taught.

Ice roads and climate change

As climate change continues, the Arctic is warming more than any other part of the world. This year’s mild winter is having an effect on northern communities, by making ice roads they depend upon impassable. Now, a state of emergency has been declared:

Mild weather shut the roads down after just under a month, which cut off more than 30,000 people from the south. Normally, the 2,200 kilometres of temporary routes over frozen swamps, muskeg and lakes are open for up to eight weeks.

About 2,500 shipments of fuel, groceries, construction materials and general freight are brought in at a reasonable cost using winter roads. Otherwise, goods have to be flown in at great expense.

Of course, there has always been variation in the severity of winters, arising from the complexities of the climate system. What climate change does is shifts the distribution: making the mean winter warmer, and increasing the number of very unusually warm winters relative to very unusually cold ones.

The specific case of ice roads and Arctic communities also demonstrates a broader situation. Every community in the world has evolved into its current form based at least partly on the climate in which it exists. This includes everything from transportation and housing infrastructure to energy generation facilities and emergency response capacity. The more climate change takes place worldwide, the greater the mismatch will be between the climate communities were built for and the climate they actually experience.

CITES and bluefin tuna

Bluefin tuna, mentioned here before, are in worse trouble than ever before. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) has voted against a moratorium on fishing them, despite collapsing stocks. As a consequence: “The outlook for the bluefin tuna is not good. Scientists already agree that the population is crashing, and that quotas allocated to fishermen remain too generous to give any reasonable degree of certainty of a recovery.”

It is remarkable and disheartening that human beings are basically choosing to wipe them out, with full knowledge of the consequences of their actions. It shows how little regard we have for nature, future generations, and even ourselves in decades hence. It suggests that human intelligence and rationality operate only within strict and rather disturbing limits.

Conference on a world more than four degrees warmer

Given our increasingly slim chances of avoiding more than 2˚C of global warming, it makes sense to start thinking about what a world hotter than that could be like.

The University of Oxford recently hosted a conference on the subject: 4degrees International Climate Change Conference: Implications of a Global Climate Change of 4 plus Degrees for People, Ecosystems, and Earth Systems.

32 of the short lectures are available free, via iTunes.

As an aside, posts might be thin here for the next while. Work is busy, and I am concentrating efforts on BuryCoal. If you haven’t had a look at that site yet, please do. Some good discussions on the posts people have already written would be just the thing.

Personal experiences with coal

Willa Johnson has written an interesting post about her personal experience with coal, an industry which her family works in but which she now opposes.

Much of it focuses on the apparent tension between dealing with climate change and addressing unemployment:

People say that I am ungrateful and that I don’t understand, but I do. I grew up with my house shaking from the explosions blowing the mountainside off. I know what it feels like not to be able to breathe the air on certain days because it is so thick with dust.

But layoffs are spreading across the region, and local activists like me are feeling the heat. Summer barbecues are tense when the person sitting across the table from you just lost the mining job that you spend a great amount of time speaking against. It’s not easy feeling like you’re fighting the people you love.

What makes the emotional situation here so unbalanced is the contrast between the powerfully immediate (though ambiguous) physical and economic impacts of coal mining, and the distant but invisible consequences of the emissions being generated. The former has a much greater capacity to engage human emotions than the latter, despite how the latter is a consequence on a much larger scale. Also, the sheer wretchedness of the local destruction caused by coal mining somewhat tempers the tendency to accuse the people in these communities of being gross abusers of the rights of innocent people around the world, and in future generations. While there is some truth to that perspective, people in coal mining communities are clearly victims too.

In any event, it highlights how pragmatic approaches to escaping fossil fuel dependence will require special assistance for those most directly affected by the transition.

Incidentally, it would be wonderful if some people with personal experience with the coal industry could contribute some posts to BuryCoal.com. The site would surely be enriched by the addition of some less distant perspectives.

More on Singh and libel

In a development that annoys me as much as one of my favourite novels being banned in some libraries, one of my favourite authors of non-fiction has been bullied out of having time to write columns for The Guardian by the British Chiropractic Association and the awful libel laws of the United Kingdom. It also seems probable that his book projects would be more advanced, if not for this pointless and anti-democratic headache.

Singh has been courageous enough to appeal the painful initial decision against his entirely fair and justified comments, as well as try to kick off a public movement to change the laws in the UK. The need to do so is broadly recognized, with several other jurisdictions having already passed laws to protect their citizens from ‘libel tourists’ who use the UK to file baseless or frivolous claims. Newspapers including the Boston Globe and New York Times have also complained about how British law imposes on them unjustifiably.

Having a free and democratic society depends on being able to express honestly-held and justified opinions without fear that someone will exploit the law to silence you. Hopefully, the lawmakers in the UK will change tack, reform their laws, and apologize to those who have been harmed by them already. We might also hope that people will recognize that the chiropractic view that all disease is caused by ‘subluxations’ in the spine is baseless quackery (a claim far bolder and less exhaustively justified than the one that got Singh in all this trouble).

Why We Disagree About Climate Change

My review of Mike Hulme’s book Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity has been published in the most recent issue of the Saint Antony’s International Review (STAIR). It is the fourth review down, starting on the eighth page of the PDF.

I found the book interesting, but too heavily focused on the psychological ramifications of climate change, compared with the real physical effects. To summarize:

In addition to being an observable physical phenomenon, climate change has taken on a broad range of social, political, and even theological meanings. Mike Hulme’s Why We Disagree About Climate Change seeks to chart out the major lines of argumentation that have emerged around the subject, as well as to consider the implications that flow from them, both in terms of climate policy and in terms of broader matters of ethics and public policy. Ultimately, Hulme argues that “climate change should be seen as an intellectual resource around which our collective and personal identities and projects can form and take shape” (p. 326). The range of discourses Hulme considers is restricted to a particular segment of the overall climate change debate—specifically, those contributors to the debate who accept three scientific touchstones: that greenhouse gases affect the climate system, the recorded rise in global temperatures, and the possibility of non-linear responses in the climate system. Restricting the scope of consideration in this way allows Hulme to exclude viewpoints that have no scientific basis. However, doing so also precludes examination of all relevant actors in the global political discussion about climate change policy. While Hulme effectively examines the social, cultural, and political aspects of climate change, he may inappropriately downplay the observed and possible future physical consequences resulting from greenhouse gas emissions.

The book is worthwhile for those with a major interest in the subject area, but I do not consider it to be one of the key texts on the science and policy of climate change.

Previously, STAIR published an article of mine about nuclear power.

The last tree on Easter Island

One section of Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed has been haunting me a bit of late. He refers repeatedly to the person who cut down the last tree on Easter Island, effectively completing the undermining the basis of their society. He ponders what the person thought while doing it – in particular, whether they had a sense of the magnitude of the progression that they were completing.

Up to this point, I have thought it highly probable that worsening climate-related disasters would eventually be sufficient to produce major mitigation effort, on the part of humanity (even if simple discussion of the facts at hand might not). From this perspective, the risk arises from lags in the climate system and feedback effects; by the time we are seeing the consequences of our emissions being manifest in the world to a frightening extent, we may no longer have time to prevent catastrophic or runaway climate change.

The Easter Island scenario presents an alternative possibility: that we might keep accelerating towards the cliff face even long after the full consequences of doing so are blatantly obvious to all but the most deluded. If there is a danger of humanity as a whole replicating that situation, then perhaps even the great majority of climate change campaigners are excessively complacent about the scale of the task before us.

To go a bit ‘meta’ for a minute, I recognize that people are of mixed views about all the recent posts about abrupt and runaway climate change scenarios, both here and on BuryCoal. Some people think they are so far outside the mainstream discussion that they confuse people and put them off, rather than making them more supportive of climate change mitigation. Partly, the increased prominence of these posts is reflective of the dire state of the climate policy debate at the moment. A well organized smear campaign against the science has combined with the paralysis of the Obama administration, ongoing concerns about jobs and the economy, and the failure of the Copenhagen talks. Together, these naturally make one pessimistic about the prospects of getting started on serious mitigation in the next few years, which is deeply troubling given how important the peak date for emissions is, in determining how aggressive a pathway we will need to follow afterward.

The best pathway forward remains unclear. That said, it seems almost tautologically true that it will involve the extension of three tracks: working with the level of public and elite support that exists to enact whatever effective policies that allows, working to build greater public and elite support for more ambitious efforts, and preparing strategies to put in place for when that level of support exists.