This started as a comment on Information Dissemination, my favorite Navy blog.
(1) All science, and in particular relatively young sciences like climatology or insect aerodynamics (my field), carry a lot of uncertainty. The problem arises when those discoveries have policy implications. Does one wait for the field to mature, which takes a couple generations, or accept the risk of "false positives" in favor of avoiding predicted catastrophe?
(2) It's very rare for anyone to publish their raw data. Methodologies and results take up most of the journal articles, and scientists work from these to reproduce results if that's important to their research. NOAA publishes a lot of raw climate data, and over all it shows a warming trend, mostly, with lots of local hicups.
(3) The politics of this issue is particularly nasty because it challenges the definition of prosperity in the modern world. If we can't burn fuel, the cost of doing anything gets expensive in a hurry, and as Galrahn mentioned in his post of grand strategy, providing prosperity is a critical component of government legitimacy.
Climate science is not at the point where it can guarantee avoiding type-II errors (falsely assuming a causal link). But what has been done all suggests that there is a strong link between human activity and climate change. The question today is just how harmful is burning fossil fuels. Is it like a steady diet of Big Macs or eating questionable sushi? Certainly the structures needed to run a fossil fuel economy are relatively fragile. The acidification of the oceans isn't such a great thing, as some of the extra CO2 becomes carbonic acid. We will run out coal, oil and gas in the foreseeable (if distant) future.
All this suggests that forward looking policy would make sustainability a primary goal. The climate is going to change, and probably become very similar to the one that existed when the plants we're burning as coal today were alive and sequestering carbon (considerably warmer, with bigger ice ages thrown in). The right approach, I think, is to think not in terms of carbon footprints (or water footprints) but universality and sustainability. In other words, when looking at long term policy, ask "Can everyone in the world live our way?" and "Can my great grandkids do it this way?" If the answer to both questions is not "yes", then the rest of the world and your grandchildren deserve an explanation.
The world looks to the United States as an example. As we export and defend globilization, a key to our security is helping everyone live better. If our policy decisions ensure that prosperity is only available to countries that can control vast quantities of coal, gas and oil, then implicitly destabilize regimes that cannot and invite wars with those that can.
I am not a doey-eyed leftist. 4th and 5th generation warfare is fought against the legitimacy of the state. Countering it means providing weaker states with the ability to build up their own middle class in a way that does not require them to import fuel. The US is uniquely able to do the research (we've got a lot physicists who used to work for investment banks) and spend the capital.
Climate change is not the only problem with fossil fuels, for all that it is a big one. It is very much in the strategic interest of the US to help the world move away from them as quickly as possible. The great public debate that Galrahn is calling for should not only be about climate change, but sustainability.
3 comments:
You've got several good points there. But I thought I'd throw in my two cents.
1) Thinking in terms of sustainability does not get us out of having to trust the (relatively new) sciences that are looking at these sorts of impact. In fact, it requires us to ask them to project forward in more and more complex ways.
2) I'm not sure climate change was intended to be thrown around as the be-all/end-all of the sustainability argument. Rather, it's meant to be a rallying point. People can get behind stopping climate change because it's easy to get behind. Ask people to pay $X to offset their carbon footprint or get behind solar power because it saves cute penguins and baby polar bears, and they're all for it. Ask them to subtly alter their way of living because it will help us to get to a point of sustainability that will be important to our grandchildren's grandchildren and the universality of sustainable power, and people scratch their heads and wander off. This was the problem the green movement faced when they were shouting about peak oil a few years ago. Climate change is also a uniting battle cry, similar to Intelligent Design for some fundamentalists. A lot of groups who can't agree on anything else can get behind one banner and fight the power, at least for a little while.
So, yes. For the policy-makers, thinking in terms of sustainability has gotta be the way. But for presentation to the average pie-eater, that's often too much to take on.
Oh, and two nitpicks:
1) Scientists are often required to share their raw data. It's just that nobody looks at it, and they're often very bad at ACTUALLY sharing it.
2) Type I error is a false conclusion. Type II is failing to come to a conclusion when you should've.
Thanks for the nitpicks, darned partial dislexia.
In several of the communities I follow, the "cute critter" arguement holds no water. Adherents to the "Realist" school of political philosophy (continued existence the purpose of the state) don't care much for polar bears, and very few families will purchase things like vehicles that feel less safe to save distant creatures.
So, as the chief among several good environmental reasons to move away from fossil fuels, it's important to keep climate issues in the public eye. However, much as we learned with the housing market (and tech bubble, S&L scandal, Dutch Tulips, etc.), people have trouble believing that risky choices will go against them until they create one mell of a hess. There's plenty of evidence for skeptics to cling to, and will be until the more dire predictions come true.
So, rather than discuss risks with people disinclined to believe them, discuss certain things. We will run out of fuel eventually. Wars today are fought over access to these resources, and their use empowers our competitors. The ocean is becoming more acidic, putting more pressure on depleted fish stocks.
I admit I'm not aiming so much at the average pie eater as the national security community, but convincing a good chunk of them would go a long way. There's no shortage of cute critters to rally others about when the time comes to push legislation.
Tim - thinking in terms of sustainability DOES prevent us from having to trust new sciences. The effect of anthropological carbon release is not yet quantified, but the effect of oil imports from the Middle East is well understood geopolitically. Ergo, this becomes a political question - of will - and an engineer question - of how - and not a scientific question.
The technologies for solar, wind, geothermal, and other 'sustainable' energies exist and can be taken off the shelf today. Making them more efficient, cheaper, and easier to deploy is a job for engineers and entrepreneurs.
Tom - Us 'realists' may not much about the polar bears as things-in-themselves, but we do care about their plight as signposts to bigger underlying problems. You are correct: climate change is a security issue; energy dependence is a security issue. Fortunately the known solution for the latter has a high probability of being a solution for the former.
I doubt very much that the needed systemic social and political change will have a chance until we stop talking about them as separate issues - the joint case has to be made and made loudly. But this isn't saying anything you don't know, I'm just procrastinating from charity work, because I'm a horrible person like that.
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