Climate Change and other Folk Devils and Moral Panics

[landsmand]

Now, before we start, let's just get it clear - I'm not a scientist and claim no expertise whatsoever in interpreting the results of scientific research.
What I am, however, is an experienced observer of the human race and to mark the start of the Group Hug and Love In in Copenhagen (where limousines have had to be imported from Sweden and Germany

Comments

[marypcb]

on the one hand, science has to stand on its own two feet. on the other hand, when you have Exxon Mobil buying research to disprove climate change, you can understand people loading the balance on the other side. on the gripping hand, scientists bitch about each other in private like any other discipline... asking governments to take their own snout out of the pork barrel is an unlikely sight too.

We got to meet the guy who did the original climate change maths this year; he's most worried about black carbon from cooking fires in the developing world and trying very hard to get solar stoves adopted by giving families tax credits for the co2 saved; this has the 'added' bonus of meaning women won't spend most of their live gathering firewood and cooking so I'm all for it, plus they're doing distributed pollution monitoring by mobile phone. This has to be about so much more than co2 to make a change; if the ice caps don't melt but we all get chromium poisoning from the tainted seas it's not that much of an improvement!

[landsmand]

Good luck to the guy - tax credits in the developing world? Heh. My experience of the sort of place where people cook over open fires is that those same people don't really figure in the tax system except in the informal sense of occasionally giving all their assets to bandits and gangsters.

Your point on corporate sponsorship of research is well made. Who to believe?

[marypcb]

By tax credit, I mean carbon credit - which comes out of tax somewhere: the $2.50 whatever is peantuts as a profit margin to any developed world company but is a significant income addition to developing world families at that. level so it drives adoption - they get paid for using a more efficient stove, which changes behaviour a lot more than pleading for improved lives for womenfolk...quite canny I think

[daveamongus]

One of the things that seems the most problematic for me, from a scientific viewpoint, is the heavy reliance on computer models. While I figure that they're necessary to some degree (ha!), I get kind of bent out of shape when we get people saying stuff, "It's even worse than the models predicted

[landsmand]

I'm absolutely sure Copenhagen is exactly the wrong approach. Governments are only really good at one thing and that's fighting wars, and they're not great at that.

My faith is in human ingenuity, personally.

[daveon]

In no particular order

[landsmand]

And I think that's one of my points, Dave - adaptation and ingenuity. Adaptation in this case having a lot to do with finding alternate, better (and more sustainable) ways still to support a high-energy civilisation.

My other point, I guess, has to do with the nature of the public debate, such as it is. Unfortuately, there are very few people left in the public arena who have credibility - politicians? Scientists? The media? - and the infatilisation of debate, coupled with the dreadful emotional and irrational stuff the more hysterical types on all sides produce - is now almost guaranteeing that we can't have a grown-up public conversation about this stuff.

[syllopsium]

The problem is that no one group has any credibility any more - or perhaps they never did. To establish the truth for many things requires the unravelling of a lot of complexity and vested interests.

I'm afraid that my considered response these days is to stop caring about it at all - other than to not be terribly excessive if I can avoid it (probably not very good at that either, given the house, car and computers). The best option is to concentrate on things I can change and leave other people to do all the useless arguing. I simply do not have the time or the inclination to do otherwise.

For 99% of people looking at climate change, their activities boil down to a) making them feel good and b) making them look good to other people (but not actually making a difference).