Category Archives: Global Warming

Happy Easter. Let’s solve some problems.

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As well-fed comfortable primates our interests tend to turn to the superficial, but wouldn’t it be interesting if we could focus our great resources and enthusiasm on the real problems of the world, and focus attention in proportion to their impact on the globe?

This list of Global problems and potential solutions from the Copenhagen Consensus:

Challenge   |   Opportunity

Communicable Diseases   |     Scaled-up basic health services
Sanitation and Water        |    Community-managed water supply and sanitation
Education                            |    Physical expansion
Malnutrition and Hunger  |   Improving infant and child nutrition
Malnutrition and Hunger  |   Investment in technology in developing country agriculture
Communicable Diseases    |   Control of HIV/AIDS
Communicable Diseases    |   Control of malaria
Malnutrition and Hunger  |   Reducing micro nutrient deficiencies
Subsidies and Trade Barriers | Optimistic Doha: 50% liberalization

Global Climate Change

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Hey, as I’m getting over the personal warming of the flu and a long stint of no blogging, what better topic than Global Warming to get me going again? Here, the BBC summarizes the latest IPCC report which deals with how climate change may affect humanity. I haven’t reviewed the real report yet.  Here’s the IPCC report summary for policy makers.

It is interesting how strongly they IPCC and news reports are focusing on the effect on the poor because for many the issues with poverty are the key criticism of how alarmists have interpreted the IPCC findings. Should we should spend money on current catastrophic conditions in developing world rather than spending on the possibility of alleviating future suffering. In May IPCC will release the report talking about recommended courses of action.

Lomborg on “Climate Hysteria”

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As concerned as I have been about the scientific sensationalism and downright deceptive presentations in Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth“, I was rooting for Al last night at the Oscars. Perhaps as consolation prize for losing the US Presidency?

Contrary to what many think it’s clear to me that Al Gore is sincere in his crusade against climate change, and also it’s important to remember that if the US electoral system OR the ballots in a critical county in Florida did not have significant quirks he is *extremely* likely to have won the presidency, shifting global affairs over the past 6 years about as much as you can imagine since Gore was strongly against the Iraq war and would have brought an entirely different agenda to the American political table.

As Arnold Schwarzenegger pointed out at the National Press club recently, political compromise and partnerships are the practical approach to solving problems. I really like that guy!

With this in mind I’ve been feeling too strident in my criticism of focusing far too much on Global Warming, but whenever I read Lomborg’s clear headed analysis…I know I’m right to be upset at the hysteria mongers who are deflecting us from caring about ongoing health and human welfare catastrophes in the 3rd world.

Lomborg’s got it right .. again… but nobody is listening … again.

PS – for anybody who thinks Katrina was from Global Warming *please* at the very least, review the comments by key, mainstream scientists which suggest quite clearly that it’s absurd to suggest Katrina is from warming.  Also interesting.  People have become so immune to the Global Warming truth they aren’t even reading any science. READ the IPCC summary!

Solar Warming Hypothesis heats up the GW debate

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Nigel Calder is no science slouch and he joins a growing number of voices challenging the conventional wisdom about warming. Although I think there are still too few such voices to reject the findings of the IPCC report that states it is 90% certain that observed warming is caused by humans, it’s should be clear to all now that dissenting voices in academic circles are stifled both by peer pressure and by grant pressure where projects that might challenge the current thinking simply are not funded.

Calder’s perspective is interesting. All of us should be frustrated by the intensity of the groupthink and alarmism that has characterized the warming debate, though there is enough of a concensus among respected researchers that I’m skeptical Calder is right that most of the warming is due to solar radiation fluctuation and not greenhouse gasses.

However I’m very respectful of the fact that Calder and many others are correctly asserting that good science comes from hypotheses that challenge conventional wisdom rather than adopt it unskeptically.

A book that needs to be written is one that exposes the academic censorship claimed by a growing number of insiders and outsiders in this heated global debate which arguably could lead to the most expensive project in history.

However, even if one accepts IPCC conclusions, I’m floored to see how many scientists are comfortable asserting that since IPCC suggests a 90% likelihood that warming is human caused we therefore should forego trillions in GDP to stop it.  This conclusion does NOT flow from science, and borders on economic and societal irresponsibility.

The global public, even more than scientists and politicians, seems unwilling to engage in an intelligent debate about whether to spend resources on current catastrophic conditions of poverty and health or on the potential dangers of global warming. As always, our ignorance is our peril.

Global Warming Report logical conclusion: Ignore Global Warming?

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My disclaimer: I’m a well educated and experienced (social) science research person and hardly ignorant about scientific analysis. Yet I still fear I must be missing something major in the Global Warming debate because I find only a handful of people agree with me that the current debates about Global Warming border on complete nonsense.

We certainly should look for CHEAP ways to reduce emissions. But we should NOT do the expensive things everybody seems to insisting upon now. I may revise my views when the next IPCC report comes out later in the year or when IPCC starts to address the economic implications of dealing with GW as they did in the earlier report. It was that report that led me to believe we should ignore global warming even though most others seemed to feel the IPCC 3rd report was a call to do everything possible at whatever cost to stem the tide of GW.

Of course there is Global Warming and of course it appears that human causes are significant – only a handful scientists believe otherwise. But it does not follow that we should forego trillions in global GDP in an effort to stop Global warming. On the contrary it’s not clear we should allocate any resources to the very low ROI Global Warming alleviation efforts while millions starve and die of diseases that cost dollars to prevent.

For the most part we should ignore Global Warming.

What should we do with the time and treasure that will likely be largely squandered failing to reverse the warming trend? Use these resources to solve the ongoing catastrophic conditions on earth that are the product of poverty and disease.

Bad water, malnutrition, and diseases like malaria run rampant in underdeveloped countries. Advocates for foregoing trillions of dollars in global GDP in the hope of delaying the effects of Global warming rarely (it would seem almost NEVER) even remotely contemplate the alterative uses for this money. The alternative uses are so dramatically superior to the life return on the GW investment that there is a *moral imperative* to ignore the warming in favor of saving lives NOW.

Ironically the current report actually *decreased* estimates for sea level rises, the median ranges of which are anything but catastrophic. Yet the media headlines imply something new has been learned. It’s been obvious for some time that humans play a role in warming. The issue we must address is: Should we forego trillions in economic development to delay the effects or should we solve other, easier problems? The answer is obvious – put the money where it will do the most good, which is saving the planet NOW, not later.

Why are so many failing to see the light here? I think several powerful forces are in play in this debate to fuel the intellectual irrationality. Among these forces are:

1) The selfishness and narrow focus that comes from our affluence. GW is seen as a threat to our personal affluence, rotaviruses and malaria are not. Picture a GW person strolling through a South African Aids ward with a can asking for carbon sequestration donations to see my point here.

2) Media frenzy, media math ignorance, and media excluding the daily catastrophes in health. The media, even non-commercial and blog media, generally seeks interesting and provocative content over reasoned logical content. Also, few journalists handle research well because they prefer reporting on contentious things rather than reporting the ‘gist’ of the subject in an educational way. This is why the current report, which mainly reaffirmed what most knew already, is presented as a big new indication that catastrophe looms around the corner. Media also fails dramatically to adequately address critical situations like Darfur, poverty, and global health challenges. These catastrophes are simply are not in the news, which needs to save precious room for the latest about Britney Spears.

3) The enthusiasm in the scientific community. I’m not suggesting the reports themselves are sensationalistic, rather what I think happens is that in normal scientific environments you have researchers checking and balancing each other. In the Global Warming community is seems it’s simply unacceptable to challenge the prevailing wisdom. Also, it’s simply naive to think that the jaw dropping amounts of grant money that are flowing into the process have no influence on research proposals. Scientists don’t have to distort the facts to create a problem – they just need to be silent when movies like “An Inconvenient Truth” suggest that science proves catastrophe is around the corner when science shows nothing of the kind. Example: Sea level rises were just predicted to be lower than previously thought. Unfortunately that headline won’t sell many papers or get any new grants funded.

4. Politics, rather than reason, allocates government resources and government attention. The above factors make it politically difficult to suggest anything but what many politicians are suggesting now – that catastrophe is looming around the corner and they want to fix it with more public spending. It’s not even clear you’d have a remote chance at winning an election on a “spend on Africa, not GW” platform.

This report would suggest I am wrong about this.

Bravo Branson

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Richard Branson, in this Forbes article, does a fine job of articulating how and why entrepreneurial capitalism and social responsibility can work together in vibrant ways.   Branson recently pledged to give *all profits* from his tranportation companies to projects that are working to alleviate global warming.     Although I’d rather see the money go to global health initiatives it’s admirable and exciting to see how socially proactive the “super rich” like Branson, Gates, and Buffett have become.     In fact it almost seems to be “infectious” which bodes well for a world desparately in need of innovative thinking combined with big money to fund clever projects.

I’d like to see a study of what may be a natural tension when Governments do a “really good job” at eliminating significant problems because it puts bureaucrats out of work and shrinks budgets.   Could this help explain why governments often seem to spend so much and accomplish so little when it comes to solving significant problems?

Collective Intelligence at MIT’s CCI.

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The new MIT Center for Collective Intelligence is a really interesting idea with *potentially* earth shaking implications. Or maybe I should say Climate shaking implications since Global Climate change collaboration is one of their first efforts.

The basic concept is simple: Use the internet to create global collaborations to solve problems.

My knee-jerk reaction after very briefly perusing the website is that some of the effort may get bogged down in it’s own somewhat beauracratically flavored “sign up here” approach:

Participation in the Handbook of Collective Intelligence is completely voluntary and participation will be subject to terms and conditions that will be added at a later date. While you should feel free to participate after registering by adding your contributions via additions, deletions, or edits of Handbook materials at this time, you should be aware that any such contributions will be subject to the terms and conditions that will be added at a later date. Once the terms and conditions are added, you will be required to re-register and assent to the terms and conditions. If you fail to assent to the terms and conditions within forty-five (45) days of their addition to the Handbook, all of your input will be removed from the Handbook. Upon your assent to the terms and conditions, you will be free to re-enter your contributions.

Given that the internet itself is already starting to resemble something of a collective intelligence entity, I hope MIT also works on ways to wire people in directly (or at least participate by simply doing things online) such that the collective contributions online become part of the collective intelligence network.

Yet however it all shakes out I can think of nothing more compelling than huge global collaborative intellectual efforts to solve the many pressing problems we feeble humans have wrought as a result of our inadequacies.

Cicarelli

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This is an blog search test to see how many click here for information about Cicarelli, the top search term at Technorati today. Cicarelli is Daniella Cicarelli, a Brazilian model featured on a rogue paparazzi Youtube video clip (no longer available) that featured Cicarelli and her boyfriend “fooling around”.

Wikipedia reports:

On September 18th, 2006 a paparazzi video showing Daniela on a beach in Spain in intimate positions with her boyfriend Renato “Tato” Malzoni leaked on the Internet and was uploaded at YouTube, but was deleted at same day. The episode echoed in both Brazilian and Spanish media.

Posts that contain Cicarelli per day for the last 30 days.
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Spinach economy losing $1 million per day. A microcosm of global concern overreaction and stupidity.

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Who’d have thunk that spinach was a pretty big biz. This article suggests that the spinach scare is losing a million per day for California farmers, some of whom are plowing it all under and laying off workers.

Of course if people are spending this million on *other* healthful veggies than the positive affects may wash out the negative, but it seems more likely they are buying something less healthful. If true the scare may have a (small) but net negative affect on health.

I think the overreaction to such small things offers great insight into how defectively we process the big stuff like global health and welfare, and lesser but still significant things like automobile and gun dangers and heart risks. Part of this is simple mental accessibility – “news” outlets report things that people can latch on to easily and we like “easy to digest” news sound bytes. But that’s no excuse. The news attention deficit syndrome is a perilous approach in these troubled times.

As with the ridiculous overreaction to Mad Cow non-disease, the spinach “cure” – basically nobody eating spinach for weeks or even months – combined with economic problems from the loss of milions of pounds of the crop, layoffs, and hardships in the agriculture sector, is likely going to have a more negative health impact than the problem itself.

When you expand this defective type of analysis to the overreaction to Global Warming and the underreaction to AIDs, Malaria, and Rotaviral diseases in underdeveloped world that kill millions per year the future looks … ummm….. green and leafy?

Clinton Global Initiative

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The Clinton Global Initiative is tackling the world’s major problems. It’s a great effort with the backing of one of the world’s most effective superpower schmoozers, Bill Clinton. Although I’d suggest that the Copenhagen Consensus is a more rational way to prioritize spending, Clinton’s group is far more likely to bring big money and big corporations and Government interests to the table.

Today’s announcement is that Richard Branson will donate 3 billion towards reduction of Global Warming via the Clinton Global Initiative. Although I’d much rather see the group put more towards current catastrophes at least this donation is consistent with the notion that big providers of greenhouse gasses like Branson’s many transportation interests should do the most to alleviate the effects of those gasses on the environment.

Perhaps my friend Linda was right to suggest that some people will support Global Warming initiatives in ways they won’t get behind those confronting global poverty. If we can do it all that’s great and for the first time in my life I do think there is a great, driving force on the part of most people, policy makers, and even Governments to initiate “Global Improvements”. Let’s do it!