Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
The idea that the planet underwent climate change before humans lived
on it, therefore humans can't be the cause, is one of my favorites.
Parallel: forest fires occurred long before humans lived on Earth,
therefore humans cannot cause forest fires. 
  

    
>>I was telling a friend about your book last night, Eric, and I
>>realized that you are doing for the climate what Michael pollen has
>>Bern doing for the food system. 

Trying to, anyway! Thanks!
  

    
Good analogy. 

Also, tipping points matter a lot in this--humans may only be adding a
small amount of greenhouse gases compared to how much is already in
the atmosphere, but that small amount could tip the climate into a
whole different set of feedback loops.
  

    
The psychological barriers to acting in time are very powerful. Max
Bazerman, a Harvard Business School professor who wrote a great book
called "Predictable Surprises" (why do we keep getting caught
flat-footed by things that are obviously coming at us?), has a paper
about some of these cognitive barriers here:

http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/09-063.pdf
  

    
(iPhone posting is damn treacherous! Thus thing has a mind of its
own!)
  

    
And it's not all that bright.
  

    
Regarding tipping points, human culture may be considered as a
"system" that may have them as well.  Don't we tend to assume
(erroneously?)that the more evidence we present the more people will be
won over.  This suggests a linearity that may be wishful thinking.

Resistance to being stampeded can be a "virtue" at some times and a
"vice" at others.  I tend to prefer decision by experts in many
situations over politicians or "majorities" fully recognizing that
experts can get things horribly wrong at times.  Of course, none of
these are willing to accept blame for the negative consequences of
their decisions.

BTW, great responses to the questions earlier.  I didn't realize that
the water vapor issue had been addressed in more recent models.
  

    

wow. thanks for the Bazerman paper.
  

    
Water vapor always has been addressed; as Eric said, it's not a forcing.
That constant increment of extra CO2, exceeding the sums taken up by life
and seawater, is a forcing, a ratcheting up. In human terms, it's permanent,
even though in geological terms, yes, the Earth always adjusts.
  

    
the underlying problem is, no matter how many experts agree on the
science, the political process has to agree to impose economic costs,
which have to be agreed to by people both unable to understand where
the expert consensus comes from and propagandized by people with an
interest in shedding doubt. Peer review works really well for
scientists among scientists, but outside that ambit is a different
universe, one which unfortunately determines public policy.
  

    
Eric Mankin nails it.

Here's an essay I did for Yale Environment 360 about what went wrong
in the political process. I'm already working on a sequel to it--I
didn't have room to include all the culprits in this whodunnit.

http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2299

And here's a column I did for Businessweek about how the US, thanks to
political inaction on climate and energy, has lost the clean energy
race to China. 

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_32/b4190006428519.htm
  

    
That second article really highlights the fact that these climate
deniers are stealing our future in more ways than one--both our
ecological stability, and the technology that we would profit from in
the coming world. It's incredible that they are holding us all hostage
to their own narrow gains. 
  

    

So now that it looks like we're headed back to fighting in the courts over
EPA regulations and enforcement, is there a strategy emerging aimed at
preventing republicans and some coal state democrats from stripping EPA of
its authority over carbon?  You say that Obama's aids claim he is engaged in
this defense, but he still seems to be on the sidelines.  Who is leading
this effort and how can we help?
  

    
What maddens me is the right-wing Republican anti-deficit rhetoric
about saddling our children and grandchildren with debt, but no worries
whatsoever about saddling our children and grandchildren with enormous
quantities of CO2, methane & etc. 
  

    
#86 "has lost the clean energy race to china"

The chronicle had an article in sunday's paper that although china has
quite a lot of rhetoric on "clean" energy, they are actually some of
the worst offenders of "dirty" energy. They have the most coal burning
sources for energy and are putting more up with the type of coal that
is most polluting.
  

    
That's true Marika but the two are not mutually exclusive. The Chinese
need so much energy that they are continuing to exploit dirty sources
while cornering the market on new ones. Re those dirty coal plants,
they are well ahead of us in deploying carbon capture and storage
technology, which would catch the CO2 from smokestacks, liquefy it and
pump it underground. The world burns so much coal, and is planning to
continue burning so much coal, that it's hard to see us solving the
climate crisis without making CCS work. 
  

    
For a truly weird footnote to this: I'm reading a memoir called "The
Wreck of the Barque Stefano Off the North West," about a three-masted
freighter that ran aground in 1875 near Pt. Cloates, W. Australia.
What's so strange: the Stefano was carrying a cargo of coal from Wales
halfway around the world, to Hong Kong. 
  

    
Is there a policy/practice disconnect in China?  

I was involved with the biological effects of non-ionizing radiation
back in the 80's.  The Soviet Union had very strict limits on the books
but practice turned out to be quite different. 

 >What maddens me is the right-wing Republican anti-deficit rhetoric
about saddling our children and grandchildren with debt, but no
worries
whatsoever about saddling our children and grandchildren with enormous
quantities of CO2, methane & etc. <

Our politicians (and the public?) may be unable to deal with two or
more issues at once.
  

    
It's called misdirection and denial.
  

    
aka for dixie southern iraq
  

    

> It's incredible that they are holding us all hostage to their own narrow
> gains.

Shouldn't surprise us even slightly, though.
  

    
That Max Bazerman paper is very interesting.  In the suggested
principles at the end, one comment:

"I hope that in 2009, the new administration will agree with
Stiglitz’s argument that “if everyone except a narrowly defined
special-interest group could be shown to benefit, surely the change
should be made.” "

Great insight in #64 Eric that you could look at climate Deniers as a
projection - if they didn't exist, we'd invent them as an excuse for
not getting anything done.


 
  

    
Michiko Kakutani reviews my book (and another, by Heidi Cullen) in
today's New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/books/03book.html?_r=1&ref=books
  

    
mazel tov!
  

    

This just in:

Updated 4:26 p.m. Eastern

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has given up on efforts to pass a scaled-
back energy bill dealing in part with offshore drilling amid unified
opposition from Senate Republicans.

<http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20012540-503544.html>