The Happy Carpenter

More of this, please

It's not often I quote from the New York Times, but I thought this was a very good sign.  I think this fight is, in the long run, more important that the fight against Islam.

Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found, but he doesn’t plan to be isolated for long. He expects that environmentalists will soon share his affection for nuclear power. They’ll lose their fear of population growth and start appreciating sprawling megacities. They’ll stop worrying about “frankenfoods” and embrace genetic engineering.

He predicts that all this will happen in the next decade, which sounds rather improbable — or at least it would if anyone else had made the prediction. But when it comes to anticipating the zeitgeist, never underestimate Stewart Brand.

He divides environmentalists into romantics and scientists, the two cultures he’s been straddling and blending since the 1960s....

He is now promoting environmental heresies, as he called them in Technology Review. He sees genetic engineering as a tool for environmental protection: crops designed to grow on less land with less pesticide; new microbes that protect ecosystems against invasive species, produce new fuels and maybe sequester carbon.

He thinks the fears of genetically engineered bugs causing disaster are as overstated as the counterculture’s fears of computers turning into Big Brother....

He’s also looking for green nuclear engineers, and says he feels guilty that he and his fellow environmentalists created so much fear of nuclear power. Alternative energy and conservation are fine steps to reduce carbon emissions, he says, but now nuclear power is a proven technology working on a scale to make a serious difference.

“There were legitimate reasons to worry about nuclear power, but now that we know about the threat of climate change, we have to put the risks in perspective,” he says. “Sure, nuclear waste is a problem, but the great thing about it is you know where it is and you can guard it. The bad thing about coal waste is that you don’t know where it is and you don’t know what it’s doing. The carbon dioxide is in everybody’s atmosphere.”

Mr. Brand predicts that his heresies will become accepted in the next decade as the scientific minority in the environmental movement persuades the romantic majority. He still considers himself a member of both factions, just as in the days of the Merry Pranksters, but he’s been shifting toward the minority.

“My trend has been toward more rational and less romantic as the decades go by,” he says. “I keep seeing the harm done by religious romanticism, the terrible conservatism of romanticism, the ingrained pessimism of romanticism. It builds in a certain immunity to the scientific frame of mind.” ...

Mr. Brand is the first to admit his own futurism isn’t always prescient. In 1969, he was so worried by population growth that he organized the Hunger Show, a weeklong fast in a parking lot to dramatize the coming global famine predicted by Paul Ehrlich, one of his mentors at Stanford.

The famine never arrived, and Professor Ehrlich’s theories of the coming “age of scarcity” were subsequently challenged by the economist Julian Sinon, who bet Mr. Ehrlich that the prices of natural resources would fall during the 1980s despite the growth in population. The prices fell, just as predicted by Professor Simon’s cornucopian theories.

Professor Ehrlich dismissed Professor Simon’s victory as a fluke, but Mr. Brand saw something his mentor didn’t. He considered the bet a useful lesson about the adaptability of humans — and the dangers of apocalyptic thinking.

“It is one of the great revelatory bets,” he now says. “Any time that people are forced to acknowledge publicly that they’re wrong, it’s really good for the commonweal. I love to be busted for apocalyptic proclamations that turned out to be 180 degrees wrong. In 1973 I thought the energy crisis was so intolerable that we’d have police on the streets by Christmas. The times I’ve been wrong is when I assume there’s a brittleness in a complex system that turns out to be way more resilient than I thought.” ... (emphasis added)

This sounds like a brilliant man who has somehow managed to keep learning into late adulthood (69 just doesn't sound as old to me as it used to) and, man, do I hope he's right.  And I think he is, and I suspect the straw that will break what he calls the romantic's (what I would call the eco-religion's) back is global warming.  10 years from now I think it will be impossible to hide the error of the alarmist's predictions.  By the time science comes back in style, there will be a lot of really cool stuff available, like genetically engineered trees that can suck mercury and other pollutants out of the ground, effective fish farming, and maybe even a stone crab trap that doesn't move 3 miles every time the wind blows a little bit!

OK, that last one is crazy talk, but I can hope, can't I?

The Little Climatic Optimum that could

Would it really be so bad if the globe warmed up a bit?  It has happened before, recently, and things were pretty nice at the time.  Read this and relax.

...  It's quite true that a planetary climatic system exceeds any test that we can design. The best we can do is model it, through computer simulations that are by their very nature incomplete (not to mention contradictory). Wouldn't it be nice if we had access to some natural example comparable to what's occurring now, so that we could analyze it and get some idea of what we're facing?

It so happens that we have exactly that. This isn't the first time warming has occurred on earth - it's a commonplace and recurring phenomenon. As we've seen previously, one such episode took place in relatively recent historic time - the Little Climatic Optimum, better known as the Medieval Warming Period. During the LCO, worldwide temperatures rose by 1 to 3 degrees centigrade for a roughly three-hundred-year period beginning in the 10^th century and ending late in the 13^th century. Records from the era are abundant and easily available.

Warming advocates have made a series of predictions concerning climatic effects over the coming century. Do they pass the LCO test?...

I guess linking to this article makes me a holocaust denier.

I've been saying for decades we're living in a golden age. Here's proof.

This is amazing.  Notice how just about everything is getting better all over the world.  And to think this guy, Hans Rosling, is giving this amazing lecture in a foreign (to him, of course) language.

It's also pretty interesting if you've been following some of the comment threads lately.

Thanks again to Captain Capitalism.

Another scientist speaks up

From Canada.com via The Conservative Grapevine:

Astrophysicist Nir Shariv, one of Israel's top young scientists, describes the logic that led him -- and most everyone else -- to conclude that SUVs, coal plants and other things man-made cause global warming.

Step One Scientists for decades have postulated that increases in carbon dioxide and other gases could lead to a greenhouse effect.

Step Two As if on cue, the temperature rose over the course of the 20th century while greenhouse gases proliferated due to human activities.

Step Three No other mechanism explains the warming. Without another candidate, greenhouses gases necessarily became the cause.

Dr. Shariv, a prolific researcher who has made a name for himself assessing the movements of two-billion-year-old meteorites, no longer accepts this logic, or subscribes to these views. He has recanted: "Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media.

"In fact, there is much more than meets the eye." ...

"Solar activity can explain a large part of the 20th-century global warming," he states, particularly because of the evidence that has been accumulating over the past decade of the strong relationship that cosmic- ray flux has on our atmosphere. So much evidence has by now been amassed, in fact, that "it is unlikely that [the solar climate link] does not exist."

The sun's strong role indicates that greenhouse gases can't have much of an influence on the climate -- that C02 et al. don't dominate through some kind of leveraging effect that makes them especially potent drivers of climate change. The upshot of the Earth not being unduly sensitive to greenhouse gases is that neither increases nor cutbacks in future C02 emissions will matter much in terms of the climate.

Even doubling the amount of CO2 by 2100, for example, "will not dramatically increase the global temperature," Dr. Shaviv states. Put another way: "Even if we halved the CO2 output, and the CO2 increase by 2100 would be, say, a 50% increase relative to today instead of a doubled amount, the expected reduction in the rise of global temperature would be less than 0.5C. This is not significant."

It goes on, but the clear conclusion is that climate modeling is still in its infancy, and not worthy of basing drastic action upon it.

No doubt some people out there will dismiss this as just another Saudi disinformation unit.

RICHARD S. LINDZEN, MIT PROFESSOR OF ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE- On Global Warming Fears

From Greenie Watch:

I think it's mainly just like little kids locking themselves in dark closets to see how much they can scare each other and themselves.

And there's a lot of confusion in this and, you know, at the heart of it, we're talking of a few tenths of a degree change in temperature. None of it in the last eight years, by the way. And if we had warming, it should be accomplished by less storminess. But because the temperature itself is so unspectacular, we have developed all sorts of fear of prospect scenarios -- of flooding, of plague, of increased storminess when the physics says we should see less.

"[I]f there's anything that there is a consensus on, [it is that we] will do very little to affect climate. So right now despite all of the claims to the contrary, we're talking about symbolism. And I think Julian's point is correct. Do you spend a lot? Do you distort a great deal in the economy for symbolism? And I think future generations are not going to blame us for anything except for being silly, for letting a few tenths of a degree panic us.

And I think nobody is arguing about whether our climate is changing. It's always changing. Sea level has been rising since the end of the last ice age. The experts on it in the IPCC have freely acknowledged there's no strong evidence it's accelerating.

Senator Inhofe was absolutely right. All that's coming out Friday is a summary for policymakers that is not prepared by scientists. Rob is wrong. It's not 2,500 people offering their consensus, I participated in that. Each person who is an author writes one or two pages in conjunction with someone else. They travel around the world several times a year for several years to write it and the summary for policymakers has the input of about 13 of the scientists, but ultimately, it is written by representatives of governments, of environmental organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists, and industrial organizations, each seeking their own benefit.  (emphasis added)

Who is the greater threat to humanity, the Greens or the Islamists?  Time will tell.  I used to think it was the Greens, but I think (hope) I sense a backlash coming among the young.  They're all deeply committed to the environment, but I don't think (hope) they're quite as committed to the hysterical leftiness of their parents.  I might be just whistling past the graveyard, though -- I have no data, and there's plenty of anecdotal stuff to contradict me, but still, how long can good sense be suppressed?  As one doomsday deadline after another passes without disaster, surely the Chicken Littles will lose credibility.

This is your spider. This is your spider... on drugs.

A sobering message.

Now THIS is ahomework assignment

Whoa.  Here is a challenge for you and for me:  Must-know terms for the 21st Century intellectual.

A sample:

Bayesian Rationality: Bayesian rationality is a probabilistic approach to reasoning. Bayesian rationalists describe probability as the degree to which a person should believe a proposition. They also apply Bayes' theorem when inferring or updating their degree of belief when given new information. Some scientists and epistemologists hope to replace the Popperian view of proof with a Bayesian view.

Cosmological Eschatology (aka physical eschatology): CE is the study of how the Universe develops, ages, and ultimately comes to an end. While hardly a new concept, what is new is the suggestion that advanced intelligence may play a role in the universe's life cycle. Given the radical potential for postbiological superintelligence, a number of thinkers have suggested that universe engineering is a likely activity for advanced civilizations. This has given rise to a number of theories, including the developmental singularity hypothesis and the selfish biocosm hypothesis.

Engineered Negligible Senescence: Aging is increasingly coming to be regarded as a disease, and as such it is privy to treatment and therapies leading to outright eradication. Indefinite lifespans may be as little as 50 years away.

There are 31 in all, some hooah, some quite disturbing.  I'll be reading along with you, and perhaps mining this for future posts.  You can almost literally feel the winds of learning blowing through your mind.  (I'm serious -- when I'm in the learning groove I can actually feel it.  Can you?)

Voltage is key

The Speculist has an interesting take on a request from Detroit for federal funding into battery research, batteries being "the weakest link in the tech chain leading to electric cars."  First, the background argument from FuturePundit:

$25 million a year [what our government currently spends on battery research] is chump change. Even $100 million per year [what the automakers want] isn't much. The article reports a claim by a spokesman for GM that Japan and other East Asian countries are spending a few hundred million dollars to subsidize the development of battery technologies in order to give their automakers a competitive advantage.

Given the current $3 billion per week burn rate for US forces in Iraq (which understates total costs since deaths and disabilities will cost us far into the future) the $100 million per year proposed above would pay for 6 hours of the US expenditures in Iraq. 6 hours. We could defund Muslim fundamentalists if we developed cleaner and cheaper replacements for oil and we'd raise our living standards in the process.

Fossil fuels usage brings big external costs in the form of pollution. We are better off accelerating the development of technologies that'll reduce and eventually eliminate the need for fossil fuels.

The Speculist's take:

There's a historical precedent for this. As the Middle Ages came to an end, the Western World had given up on the Crusades. It poured its energies into the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, and The Enlightenment.

That worked out pretty good.

At first I was inclined to poo poo the cost comparison to the war in Iraq.  I'm generally against federal funding of anything.  And besides, everything is cheaper than war -- that's one reason war is a last resort.  And besides, what does that have to do with the price of cheese in Afghanistan?  But then I got it.  Gaining energy independence from the despots sitting on giant pools of oil would cut the legs out from under them.  The drive toward energy indepence should be seen as one front in the war on terror and, hence, worthy of federal funding.  If all we need to drive is electricity, then we can get that electricity from nuclear power, something we could have in abundance if we just kicked the BANANAs to the curb.  And, oh yeah by the way, it would lead to a huge leap in productivity and wealth for all of us.

A two fer.

Private spaceflight -- getting closer every day

Goddard flies!

Thanks to The Speculist

Interesting

It's rare to see the scientific community step back and look into its own navel; that's why I thought this was interesting.

Duh!

Thanks to Random Jottings for the lead.