Challenging the dogmas (more dogmas...)
Climate Change, or not
The politically correct storm driving Climate Change is still THE
dominant funding source for scientists and policymakers in our
department (and to a lesser extent Environment Canada, and "even
lesser" at Industry Canada), so the "poor mining sector"
of NRCan is trying to pry loose some funding from our rich Energy
and Geological cousins in the same department, with extremely limited
success.
However, in spite of the propaganda
spewing out of the environmentalists, the UN and national
governments' "communications" shops, policy groups, and
research labs, it seems to me that it is still a very open question
as to the quantification of anthropogenic effects on the natural
variability in climate. The good news is that countervailing
opinions to the "Climate Change Doctrine" are now surfacing
more in the media and being heard (after almost being stifled for
some time by Official Science, the media and popular beliefs). Even
so, some scientists are apparently still afraid of expressing an
opposing viewpoint, and many others are quite happy simply to go with
the trend and get the funding (our lab sure needs it). The
worst-case politically-correct estimates of the "anthropogenic
Greenhouse effect" are "maybe" 3 to 6 times the
"natural climate variability" over the last 800 years, and
similar to swings on the 10,000 or 500 million year scale. However,
many of the politically-correct estimates do not seem to be
self-consistent (such as the "hockey stick" graph from Mann
etc that was one of the key underpinnings of Kyoto). In other words,
yes the climate is changing – but it may not be changing much
more than it always has and always will. Moreover, more and more
analysis cast a great pall of suspicion over the politically-correct
model forecasts – but I haven't yet personally looked at the
details of how the models may have been mis-applied and
mis-interpreted.
In any case, anthropogenic effects or
not, the natural swings apparently can be large and fast enough to
justify continued studies of the climate (processes and models for
what has happened and what is happening) and ways for us to adapt to
it. Given the very serious loss of credibility of the whole Climate
Change community (that's my opinion), it is not appropriate to spend
huge amounts of money on reducing GHGs – consider that even
Kyoto would not have had any substantial effect on GHG levels in 100
years time. Let's go for the "easy" reductions to start
with (like, wear a sweater and turn your thermostat WAAYYY down.,
take the bus, and do winter camping for your January-through-March
vacations to show if you are really serious <joke>), and wait
for more clear information before we cause more damage than good with
extreme actions. Nuclear power is ONE obvious key solution if we
were really serious about climate change (or even if we don't even
care about climate change), but politically correct thinking (but
technically/ environmentally/ ?safetily? incompetent thinking)
leaves it totally out of the solution set of the official programs.
Emotion has almost totally displaced rational thinking on these
issues. Garbage... but still good garbage if our lab can get more
money <grin>. (Dec03 Xmas letter)
Cheats, Parasites, and Fools
As for a 25 cent theory, it seems
to me that societies and organisations must be robust with respect to
many things, but three simple basic requirements are often taken for
granted or glossed over for politically-correct reasons (in
increasing order of importance) [Howell]:
- cheating theory – like theft, fraud, cutting corners. Normally
this is really well taken care of, because people are so sensitive
to, and critical of, it. But if cheats aren't nailed to the wall,
they dominate.
- parasitic behaviour – is far more costly than cheating. The problem
is that it "flies under the radar screen" of human
compassion, politically-correct action, motherhood and apple pie.
(Moreover it is closely related another of my 25 cent theory of the
socially negative effects of over-insurance, which promote the
behaviours they seek to protect against, and which are totally
underappreciated by our society. theft, health, etc... maybe some
other year I'll write about that).
- stupidity - by far the most costly of the three, and much more difficult to
"fix". Unfortunately, the corollary is that we're all
stupid – nobody can be well-informed and expert across all of
the issues that we face. In spite of this, it's amazing how well
our systems actually work! (fault tolerance to the extreme! - and
this leads into behaviour-based programming and ultimately Mindcode
) (Dec03 Xmas letter)