Science – Page 41 – a sibilant intake of breath

Meteorologists on climate

Writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, Charles Homans has a piece on why so many television meteorologists are climate change deniers. He cites the particular case of John Coleman, whose opposition to mainstream climate science was motivated more by personal animosity than by any doubts about their empirical methods:

Coleman wasn’t arguing against the integrity of a particular conclusion based on careful original research — something that would have constituted useful scientific skepticism. Instead, he went after the motives of the scientists themselves. Climate researchers, he wrote, “look askance at the rest of us, certain of their superiority. They respect government and disrespect business, particularly big business. They are environmentalists above all else.”

Coleman’s 2007 essay was picked up by right-wing news sites, with his experience as a weatherman used as a justification for taking his position seriously.

The issue of meteorologists making decrees on climate goes back to the basic question of what constitutes expertise and whose views – if anyone’s – we should pay special attention to when making up our minds. Apparently, the majority of professional meteorologists in the United States reject the mainstream science of climate change:

Twenty-nine percent of the 121 meteorologists who replied agreed with Coleman—not that global warming was unproven, or unlikely, but that it was a scam. Just 24 percent of them believed that humans were responsible for most of the change in climate over the past half century—half were sure this wasn’t true, and another quarter were “neutral” on the issue.

Despite how climate science and meteorology are very different fields, the Yale Project on Climate Change found that 66% of Americans listed television meteorologists as a credible source of information on climate change. It’s not surprising – though it is certainly regrettable – that this helps keep the general public confused about the issue.

Alief

One interesting idea discussed in Paul Bloom’s How Pleasure Works is that of ‘alief.’ Originally developed by Tamar Gendler, this concept refers to how we cannot entirely separate fantasy from reality in our minds. Even though we know better, we respond to fiction in similar ways to how we would respond to seeing the actual events described; similarly, we would hesitate at least a bit to drink from a cup marked ‘cyanide,’ even if we just saw it filled from the tap. We can quite rightly believe that the water is perfectly safe, while at least slightly alieving that it is poisoned.

Bloom highlights how children are more vulnerable than adults, when it comes to being emotionally influenced by alief. Partly, he thinks this has to do with their lesser sophistication about fiction. He points out how, when watching Free Willy II with his child, his child became frightened that characters on a raft could drown. While he was sophisticated enough to recognize that adorable children don’t drown in such films, his child was not.

In general, Bloom has a lot of interesting things to say about fiction and imagination – including why people enjoy tragedies and horror films, the appeal of varying degrees of masochism (from enjoyment of hot sauce to much more extreme varieties), to the limitations of fantasy and the effects they have on social dynamics.

Climate change and individual ethics

During today’s earlier discussion of climate change and partisan politics, a distinction was eventually drawn between the key principles that underlie intergenerational justice, the ways in which those principles manifest themselves in individual morality, and the question of how to bring our politics more in line with what those principles demand.

The final question is the topic of the previous discussion, but it seems worth having another about the broad question of what the moral consequences of climate change are for human behaviour. Naturally, this has come up before with reference to specific behaviours (especially voluntary travel). It has also come up in broader discussions, such as on the relative importance of abstaining from emissions, compared with resisting societal structures that perpetuate climate change.

This discussion is meant to be broader than those: what are the moral consequences of climate change, when it comes to individuals?

Climate: integrated left or post-partisan?

In a recent article, British journalist George Monbiot argues that climate change mitigation advocates must join forces with a broader progressive coalition in order to see their ideas implemented. Alongside environmental concerns, this coalition ought to be “against the [public spending] cuts, against the banks, against BP, unemployment, the lack of social housing, the endless war in Afghanistan.” It should have the same kind of dynamism as the American Tea Party movement, and the same sort of enthusiasm for demanding policy changes.

While I certainly recognize the current impotence of the climate change mitigation movement (backsliding from the United States to Australia to UNFCCC negotiations), I don’t think Monbiot is right. Climate change mitigation is something we must undertake because of the physical realities associated with the climate system and the consequences of emitting greenhouse gases. It is not fundamentally a partisan issue, and dealing with it is not fundamentally tied to political views on issues like housing or Afghanistan.

Furthermore, the world cannot afford climate change mitigation to be a policy only of the political left. Inevitably, left-wing and right-wing governments alternate in power, as voters become disgusted by the excesses of each subsequent administration. Dealing with climate change requires a long descent towards zero net global emissions, over a span of decades. It’s not something that can be vigorously taken up for four, five, or eight years and then abandoned in favour of aggressive exploitation campaigns for unconventional fossil fuels and loosened environmental planning regulations.

Climate and the right

Besides, climate change is something that can be integrated into the political traditions of the right in several ways. Conservatives should love carbon taxes, since they are a mechanism to keep one person’s behaviour from impacting unduly on the freedom of others, while also allowing the maximum range of possible means for stopping the harm. Such taxes demonstrate faith in markets, innovation, and the capability of people to respond rationally and effectively to appropriate incentives. Further, there is a long tradition in conservative political philosophy of seeing the current generation of human beings as trustees of the planet, with a duty to pass it along in an improved or at least preserved state.

That being said, climate change is a major challenge to the libertarian view that people are essentially autonomous and should be free to do as they like. Laissez faire policies that ignore ever-rising greenhouse gas concentrations are likely to create the need for a far harsher eventual clampdown, once the harms associated with climate change become entirely undeniable. Also, given the lag time between emissions and their consequences, those concerned for the future state of the world cannot continue to tolerate ethical systems that include an unlimited right to pollute. Political thinkers across the political spectrum need to come to grips with what climate science has taught us, and think deeply about how that affects both the factual inputs to their moral reasoning and the moral precepts that serve as the foundation of their political philosophy.

Blocking opportunism

Broad political consensus on dealing with climate change would also have another important role, as protection against populist opportunists. Once serious carbon prices have become common, making things like travel significantly more expensive, it seems inevitable that political parties will crop us that campaign to eradicate the fetters people have put upon themselves and return to the happy free-wheeling days of unlimited greenhouse gas emissions. In order to head off such short-sighted but potentially popular responses, it is necessary for serious politicians and parties of all stripes to continue to publicly express their appreciation for how cutting global emissions to zero is a practical necessity, and a project that cannot be abandoned because of the impracticalities it imposes on people.

Eventually, climate change denial must become entirely discredited among all serious politically active people, and the political conversation about climate change must shift to being about the mechanisms through which deep cuts can be rapidly achieved, rather than about whether such cuts are necessary, or whether we should condemn future generations to a harsh and unstable world for the sake of short-term economic benefits for us.

Peak oil and climate change

Given the multiple lines of evidence demonstrating that humanity is causing the climate to change in potentially dangerous ways, climate change has to be part of medium- to long-term planning for almost everybody, and part of the policy development processes of government. At the same time, there is a plausible case that global production of oil will peak at some point in the relatively near future, with potentially important economic, political, and geopolitical effects.

How will these two phenomena interact? I can think of lots of possibilities. These are not ranked in any way, and are not equally plausible.

1) Worries about peak oil prove premature or overblown. Liquid fuels stay cheap for the foreseable future, causing more climate change than there would have been in a scenario where they became more costly.

2) Natural reserves of petroleum cannot keep pace with rising demand, initially driving liquid fuel prices through the roof. Some combination of biofuels and coal-to-liquids (CTL) technology counteracts that, also worsening climate change. (Coal-to-liquids and fuels like palm oil grown in rainforest have huge climate impact per unit of energy)

3) Peak oil proves serious, and biofuel and CTL alternatives prove very costly. This has potentially large social and economic consequences, but makes climate change mitigation easier. For many people, the world gets a whole lot smaller.

4) Climate change occurs much more quickly than expected, perhaps because of major positive feedbacks like melting permafrost or burning rainforest. Governments sense their increased vulnerability and abandon attempts to cooperate internationally, seeking to make themselves as robust as possible in the face of the chaos ahead.

5) Climate change occurs much more quickly than expected, perhaps because of major positive feedbacks like melting permafrost or burning rainforest. Governments finally get the picture and introduce harsh policies restricting fossil fuel production domestically. Powerful states now profoundly concerned about climate change (the US, EU, China, Japan, etc) force petrostates like Canada and Kuwait to shut down production.

6) Not only does oil production peak, but so does gas and coal production. Dealing with climate change becomes much easier politically, given that there is no longer any real alternatives to switching to renewables and nuclear as principal sources of energy.

7) Peak oil proves serious, but cellulosic and algae-based biofuels finally emerge as commercially viable alternatives.

Personally, I think peak oil is a much less serious problem than climate change. For one thing, it is just the sort of phenomenon that markets deal with relatively automatically – something gets scarce and people find ways to use less, while developing alternatives. For another, it doesn’t include the same dangerous lag times. It is quite possible that we could emit enough to cause catastrophic warming, but only see concrete proof of that decades later. Peak oil, by contrast, seems likely to unfold with fewer surprises. Finally, there aren’t really any positive natural feedbacks that would further constrain the availability of oil, as it began to get scarce (though falling energy return on investment (EROI) is an issue). By contrast, warming is likely to beget more warming as ice vanishes, forests dry out an burn, permafrost and methane clathrates melt, etc.

Surely there are many other possibilities, aside from those listed above. Please post some below, and comment on those listed above. How do the different possible scenarios effect how we ought to be hedging our bets, both climatically and in terms of energy sources?

The Economist mentions runaway climate change

For the first time, I found a reference to the possibility of runaway climate change in an article in The Economist. Oddly enough, it is not in an article on climate change, but rather in a survey on water from last month:

Few people have dwelt on the worst possibility, even if it is highly unlikely to come about: that the extra water vapour held by a warmer atmosphere might set in train a runaway greenhouse effect in which temperatures rose ever faster and tipping-points for, say, the melting of ice sheets were reached. This possibility has received little consideration outside academia, perhaps because less improbable consequences of climate change provide enough to be gloomy about. The wise conclusion to be drawn may be that all planning should allow for greater uncertainty, and probably also greater variability, so every plan will need to have a greater degree of resilience built into it than in the past.

This account doesn’t even mention the most shocking possible form of runaway climate change, where the oceans boil away and the Earth becomes permanently uninhabitable for life as we know it.

I wonder how long it will be before the main opinion pieces in The Economist take this risk into consideration. So far, they seem to remain convinced that climate change is a rather secondary problem – certainly less important than maintaining global GDP growth – and that it will eventually be efficiently dealt with through carbon pricing schemes.

As I have said countless times before, the major risk with climate change is that the lags between emissions and effects will conceal just how gigantic a problem climate change could be until it has become too late to prevent the worst effects.

Switching subjects

I am relieved to say that my most active area of reading has turned away from biological weapons and towards the question of what makes humans happy. Toward that end, I am reading Yale psychologist Paul Bloom’s new book: How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like. He taught the psychology course that I discussed at length earlier, and which included some discussion of happiness.

Just a few pages into the book, there is a nice nugget from Steven Pinker, who explains that humans are happiest when “healthy, well-fed, comfortable, safe, prosperous, knowledgeable, respected, non-celibate, and loved.” In addition to providing some interesting intellectual insights, I am hoping the book will provide some additional practical advice and insight into how humans operate. In particular, it is always useful and intriguing to learn what people generally misunderstand about themselves.

Biohazard

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ken Alibek – a formerly high ranking official within the Russian biological weapons program – defected to the United States. His 1999 book can be seen as a declassified, commercial, civilian version of what he told the American intelligence officials who he initially debriefed. Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Biological Weapons Program in the World focuses on the facilities of Biopreparat: an ostensibly civilian organization that was actually the major developer and stockpiler of biological weapons. They made anthrax and smallpox by the tonne, and developed mechanisms for deploying these agents ranging from assassination-type mechanisms to delivery via intercontinental ballistic missile.

Alibek makes a number of serious allegations:

Russia developed biological weapons as far back as 1928, when work was done on weaponizing typhus;
That Russia violated the Biological Weapons Convention from the start;
That biological agents like plague and smallpox were genetically modified to be resistant to treatments and vaccines, to be more virulent, and to produce additional toxins;
That Russia continued to develop and stockpile biological weapons after the Cold War ended;
And that Russia used biological weapons, both against the Germans during WWII and against the Afghans during the Soviet invasion. In the first case, an attack on German Panzer troops ultimately ended up sickening far more Russian civilians than enemy soldiers.

Alibek’s book also provides considerable insight into the character of the Soviet system of government, including military and security matters. His perspective as an insider in the system is one of the most interesting aspects of the book, including his account of American inspections of Biopreparat facilities (and how he helped to trick them) and the Soviet inspections of US facilities like Fort Detrick that followed.

The book does have some flaws. As with any document on sensitive security matters, it is impossible to know how much of what is claimed is really accurate. Furthermore, this is the work of a defector, and Alibek goes to some length to try to highlight the good things he did. For example, he talks about trying to divert more of the production of a facility he ended up directing towards civilian medical purposes. He also omits any mention of the ‘Alibek’ strain of anthrax that he was responsible for developing. The book also jumps around chronologically in a way that can be confusing, and the chapter titles do not provide a very good sense of the content.

All told, Alibek’s book is interesting and worthwhile to read. It highlights how, alongside all the nuclear dangers of the Cold War, there was another separate type of appalling risk to civilian populations that had been created, and for which the legacy is enduring. Indeed, proliferation of biological weapons may well be a far more serious matter than proliferation of nuclear weapons. Building a working atomic bomb requires fissile material, knowledge, and engineering capability. By contrast, a biological weapon smuggled out of a lab in the pocket of an underpaid Soviet scientist can be duplicated to mass quantity in fermentors, with relatively little technological sophistication required.

That being said, it is worth nothing how biological weapons haven’t yet seemed to live up to their frightening potential. Alibek mentions the Japanese Aum cult as an example of a non-state entity that developed biological capabilities, and yet their attempts to actually employ biological agents failed to produce significant damage. That said, weapons in the hands of states like Russia that have had sophisticated weaponization and testing programs for decades are likely much more dangerous, as all the deaths from the accidental Sverdlovsk anthrax leak illustrate.

The book talks very little about delivery systems for biological agents; quite possibly, that is in response to the particular sensitivity of such information, which may not yet be in the hands of groups that do have access to dangerous strains of bacteria and viruses. Alibek explains that:

Bioweapons are not rocket launchers. They cannot be loaded and fired. The most virulent culture in a test tube is useless as an offensive weapon until it has been put through a process that gives it stability and predictability. The manufacturing technique is, in a sense, the real weapon, and it is harder to develop than individual agents. (p.97 paperback)

He goes on to explain that detailed recipes for the production and weaponization of biological agents were developed by Biopreparat, and that they were retained by the Russian government even after the collapse of communism. In a few months time, facilities re-purposed for civilian use could go back to making smallpox, anthrax, and plague by the tonne.

In light of the increasing authoritarianism of the Russian government, this book makes especially worrisome reading. Back in the Soviet era, the government blamed the Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak on ‘contaminated meat.’ Black market vendors were even punished for their supposed role in causing the disaster. For a span after the fall of communism, the reality that it arose from a leak in a bioweapon production plant was acknowledged. More recently, the government has gone back to the old contaminated meat deception.

On smallpox

In 1977, smallpox was eradicated as the result of a massive global effort. Rather than completely eliminate the virus, it was decided that the United States and Russia would each keep a sample. Part of the reasoning for this is that pox viruses are common in the animal world, and could potentially jump between species. Having samples of human smallpox could be useful, in the event that such a thing occurred.

Unfortunately – and rather threateningly – the Russian smallpox sample didn’t sit idly in a freezer. Smallpox is a highly contagious, highly lethal disease and yet Biopreparat, the Soviet Union’s biological weapons agency, made some twenty tonnes of the stuff, tested it on animals, and developed mechanisms to use it as a weapon, including delivery via warheads on intercontinental missiles. This was done at the State Research Institute of Virology and Biotechnology (also called Vector), outside the city of Novosibirsk, in Siberia, as well as at a more secret facility in Sergiyev Posad. It was also tested on Vozrozhdeniya Island. The Soviets made so much that it couldn’t all be accounted for. Quite possibly, some found its way into biological weapons programs in other states, such as China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Cuba, and Serbia.

Whereas human beings once had two major forms of protection from smallpox – immunity resulting from exposure to the virus, and vaccination campaigns – the former is now absent and the latter defunct and potentially difficult to restore. A single case, perhaps arising from some accident, could directly infect hundreds of people and kick off an escalating series of waves of infection, spaced fourteen days apart, as people go through the incubation period and become infectious. Such a global outbreak could kill a massive number of people.

The idea of an accidental release is not fanciful. In 1978, medical photographer Janet Parker became one of the two last people to contract smallpox, working in the anatomy department of the University of Birmingham Medical School. It seems entirely plausible that accidental exposure could occur at some shady biological weapon lab in Cuba, Pakstan, or North Korea.

If anything like that ever happens, people may end up looking on the decision not to stick to just one frozen sample of smallpox as the worst thing the Soviet Union ever did. Hopefully, all the concern and money expended on security since 2001 has at least left the world in a better position to launch a mass vaccination campaign, should the need ever arise.

Our imperfect memories

Slate has produced a good series highlighting the limitations of human memory, particularly how easily it can be manipulated and people can be made to remember things that never took place.

The imperfect nature of human memory has important consequences, including in situations like criminal proceedings and psychotherapy. It is also discussed in this Paul Bloom lecture:

It turns out that the same sort of experiments and the same sort of research has been done with considerable success in implanting false memories in adults. There are dramatic cases of people remembering terrible crimes and confessing to them when actually, they didn’t commit them. And this is not because they are lying. It’s not even because they’re, in some obvious sense, deranged or schizophrenic or delusional. Rather, they have persuaded themselves, or more often been persuaded by others, that these things have actually happened.

Psychologists have studied in the laboratory how one could do this, how one can implant memories in other people. And some things are sort of standard. Suppose I was to tell you a story about a trip I took to the dentist or a visit I took to–or a time when I ate out at a restaurant and I’m to omit certain details. I omit the fact that I paid the bill in a restaurant, let’s say or I finished the meal and then I went home. Still, you will tend to fill in the blanks. You’ll tend to fill in the blanks with things you know. So, you might remember this later saying, “Okay. He told me he finished eating, paid the bill and left,” because paying the bill is what you do in a restaurant.

This is benign enough. You fill in the blanks. You also can integrate suppositions made by others. And the clearest case of this is eyewitness testimony. And the best research on this has been done by Elizabeth Loftus who has done a series of studies, some discussed in the textbook, showing how people’s memories can be swayed by leading questions. And it can be extremely subtle. In one experiment, the person was just asked in the course of a series of questions–shown a scene where there’s a car accident and asked either, “Did you see a broken headlight?” or “Did you see the broken headlight?” The ‘the’ presupposes that there was a broken headlight and in fact, the people told–asked, “Did you see the broken headlight?” later on are more likely to remember one. It creates an image and they fill it in.

It is always troubling to be reminded that we cannot entirely trust our own minds. That said, it is far better to be aware of the limitation and suffer from its troubling implications than it is to ignorantly assume that our memories are an accurate record of past events that cannot be altered.