Month: September 2023

Givers and takers

There‘s a video clip going around showing ageing Australian edgelord Tim Gurner — who built a property empire on nothing but grit, moxie, and capital borrowed from his grandfather — speaking the capitalist quiet part out loud, arguing that we need higher unemployment to keep employees from getting uppity.

This reminded me of a thought I‘d had about the peculiar moral judgements built into our language of employment. Whereas a worker is an active agent, an employee is passive, shifting the active role to the heroic employer, that benevolent figure who grants them the opportunity to work.

This role-reversal is even more stark in German: The one who sweats and strains building or cleaning or making — that one is the Arbeitnehmer, the work-taker. The one who owns the business, maybe because they started it, maybe because they inherited it, or purchased it with inherited capital, is the Arbeitgeber, the work-giver.

Climate-change denial and the paradox of scrupulous science

I had a conversation recently with a relative who is generally quite intelligent, but also deep down the rabbit hole of climate-change denialism. And in talking to him, I realised something about a dilemma in science communication that is particularly acute for any topic where there is a vested interest willing to devote some significant effort to mystification. (So, climate science and vaccine immunology, but not, for instance, condensed-matter physics.)

Here’s the problem: The basic principle of the greenhouse effect — that the Earth’s temperature is regulated by the atmosphere, and that is scientifically almost trivial. It was first formulated by Fourier more than 200 years ago, in the course of making the first quantitative theory of heat transfer. Basically, it was unavoidable. Fourier didn’t know how the thermal insulation properties were specifically related to the composition of the atmosphere, but this was pretty comprehensively explained in 1898 by Svante Arrhenius, who recognised that carbon dioxide and water vapour were the main insulating gases, and then went on to calculate that doubling the CO2 content of the atmosphere would raise global temperatures by 5 to 6ºC.

That science is as certain as anything can be, and it’s not complicated. It’s accessible to anyone with high-school level chemistry and physics (and not any controversial theoretical components of the curriculum, nothing that anyone would challenge if they didn’t have uncomfortable implications for the profits of wealthy corporations). And we did the experiment: CO2 has been increased by about 50% since Arrhenius’s paper was published, and global temperatures have increased by almost 1.5ºC.

So, the quantity of carbon we’re burning globally is (by simple arithmetic) clearly the right amount to shift the CO2 content of the atmosphere by a substantial amount, and elementary physics tells us that this amount of extra CO2 should warm the globe by several degrees, and that several degrees of warming will be insanely destructive. We could stop there, and focus on thinking about how to clean up this mess. But again, there are vested interests whose profits and/or lifestyles depend on not understanding this.

As far as I can see, they mostly don’t challenge the first step (measuring CO2 seems like it should be pretty straightforward, and there’s no time lag or other complication) or the third (not sure why, since 2 or 3ºC doesn’t sound like so much — maybe I just haven’t explored the right dark corners of the interwebs), but focus on the middle step: Does CO2 really cause warming?

Now, the climate is a funny place, and all kinds of feedback effects could affect the result of the doubling CO2 experiment. Rationally, the core intuition should be to expect what elementary physics tells us: 5-6ºC increase. If you want to claim that something very different will happen, you should need a theory to explain the divergence, backed by rock-solid evidence. Instead, the challenges were of the sort, well, it’s all so complicated, anything could happen. Backed by the core intuition that the Earth is so big, and we are so small, that probably whatever we do is pretty harmless on a global scale. Or that said the Earth has homeostatic forces that will prevent any large changes — basically, the Gaia hypothesis.

In the 1980s climate scientists took on this challenge. And this is where things went off the rails. They studied all the feedback loops anyone could think of. They built up multiple lines of evidence about the palaeoclimate. They vastly expanded their theoretical understanding of and empirical measurements of deep ocean currents. They combined all of these into simulation models that can estimate the range of possible outcomes based on all the unknown and unknowable factors. And the outcome of all this effort and increased understanding is that smart (but scientifically naïve) laypeople have gotten the impression that anthropogenic warming is not a simple physics calculation, but the counterintuitive prediction of some complicated, abstruse modelling that no one understands very well… sort of the equivalent of asking ChatGPT for a weather forecast. And those precise measures of uncertainty, well, get back to us when you’re certain.

Tremendous effort has gone into trying to figure out whether these first-order effects might be overwhelmed (in either direction) by second-order feedbacks. And it turns out they might, to some extent, that it could happen in either direction, and there’s a fair amount of randomness, or at least, irreducible uncertainty, but we’ve acquired a much better understanding of how the climate system works. The result of all this, though, is to reduce the confidence among a segment of the public that looks at it and says, they sure seem to be working awfully hard to convince us of this totally counterintuitive claim that harmless CO2 is going to wreck the planet.

The depressing thing is, I can’t see how this could have been handled differently, or how it could be improved for the future. The work really did need to be done. The quibbles were right, in a sense, in that it’s all much more complicated than anyone even imagined, and there are huge feedback effects, positive and negative, increasing and decreasing the extent of warming. The final result, though, is that the central prediction for doubling of CO2 isn’t too far off what Arrhenius calculated, but we have more uncertainty on either side. And more ominously, rather than the gradual change that Arrhenius might have expected — with CO2 increase being directly translated into temperature increase — we have a system that responds with both time lags and in irreversible jumps, both of which make control extremely difficult — particularly in a situation where there is strong pressure not to take any action.

Concrete proposals

The UK government is taking its talking points from third-rate comedians. You can barely get a chuckle anymore with the tired joke template “No one talks about all the things we didn’t screw up.”

Now, with hundreds or even thousands of UK schools facing emergency closure because the government — and specifically Rishi Sunak when he was chancellor of the exchequer — drastically cut the budget for repairing the crumbling concrete that was cheaply put up in the 1950s and 60s that was only supposed to last 30 years, the PM is offended that nobody is talking about all the schools whose roofs haven’t collapsed. He said

There are around 22,000 schools in England and the important thing to know is that we expect that 95% of those schools won’t be impacted by this.

I’m waiting to hear the government focus more attention on all the millions of migrants who haven’t tried to come to the UK — indeed, on the billions of people who haven’t even left their home countries — rather than harping on the tiny percentage who have tried to cross the English Channel in small boats.

Satire is dead.