"C" stands for consciousness

108: Methane Burps & Tele Everything



KMO welcomes Dennis M. Bushnell, chief scientist of the NASA Langley Research Center, to discuss climate change and ways of combating it that don't produce Big Brother on steroids. Mr. Bushnell also discusses the existential risks that could arise from the "simultaneous IT, bio, nano, quantum, energetics, double exponential tech revolution."

Dennis M. Bushnell's Lifeboat Foundation bio: http://lifeboat.com/ex/bios.dennis.m.bushnell

In our conversation, Dennis Bushnell makes several references to and speaks very highly of a book by Peter D. Ward called Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future.

Wow! Someone over on the Peak Oil News & Message Boards transcribed the whole interview. You can find it here:

http://www.peakoil.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=42186

Yesterday I posted the conclusion to an essay by Nir J. Shaviv which stated that human generated green house gases probably didn't have much to do with the global rise in temperature over the course of the 20th century. His notion is that solar activity effects the way in which cosmic rays interact with Earth's atmosphere the composition of which either reflects or retains energy from the sun. Right now, I don't have any opinion as to whether he's right or wrong about that, and while it's an important question, for my purposes yesterday, I didn't much care about whether he was right or wrong.

Upon reading his conclusion, it occurred to me that folks with an existing ideological commitment on the question of human culpability for global climate change would probably make certain assumptions about Shaviv's motives and credibility depending on those pre-existing commitments. With this idea in mind, I concocted a quick poll. You can find it here:

http://kmo.livejournal.com/313210.html

Only 15 people (other than me) took the poll, though two people left comments telling me why they refused to participate. ankh_f_n_khonsu gave, to my way of thinking, the best response:

It seems absurd to try to guess someones credentials from two paragraphs. It seems equally absurd to try to figure out their motivations - or yours.

Hurray for epistemological humility.

lordshell posted a comment that I took as an indication of just how strong a hold his memeplexes have over him:

Science is proven neither by consensus or polls. Either AGW is happening or it isn't. It's either a disaster or not. It's either time-sensitive or not particularly.

Now this is certainly a respectable position to take, and Michael Crichton has gotten a lot of mileage out of it, but it completely misses the fact that none of the four questions in the poll asked whether the pollee thought that Shaviv's conclussion was right or wrong.

Other folks posted longer comments about the likely truth or falsity of Shaviv's proposal. As soon as I realized what tack they were taking I stopped reading. I'll go back and read them later when I do dig into the question of whether his theories should be taken seriously, but as I've mentioned, and as should have been obvious from the poll questions, that was not the focus of my curiosity yesterday.

Two poll questions asked about Shaviv's motivations, one asked about his scientific credentials, and one asked about my probable motivations for creating the poll.

I haven't done any research into Shaviv's possible political affiliations and motivations. It does seem as though corporate energy "think tanks" are anxious to throw buckets of money at any scientist who questions the position that anthropogenic GHGs cause global warming. I don't know if any of that money has landed in Shaviv's accounts.

After his conclusion, Professor Shaviv provided the following clarifying remarks which convinced me that he's not a shill for the oil industry:

So, as you may understand, I am quite sure Kyoto is not the right way to go. I should however stress that there are a dozen good reasons why we should strive to burn less fossil fuels.

The two primary reasons why fossil fuels are bad are of course pollution and depletion, while minor reasons include for example the fact that many fossil fuel reserves are controlled by unpleasant governments.

Thus, I am very much in favor, and always have been, in using less fossil fuels and keeping the environment clean (I am proud to say that I grew up in a solar house), but we should do things for the right reasons, not the wrong ones (and I don't see Kyoto addressing the right reasons). I am therefore in favor of developing cheap alternatives such as solar power, wind, and of course fusion reactors (converting Deuterium into Helium) which we should have in a few decades, but this is an altogether different issue.

I've given away the answer to the question of his bona fides by referring to the author as Professor Shaviv above. You can find his CV here:

http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~shaviv/cv/cv.html

But here's the meat of it:

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Associate Professor, Racah Institute of Physics, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Senior Lecturer, Racah Institute of Physics, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Post doctoral fellow at CITA - The Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Toronto

Lee DuBridge Prize Fellow at TAPIR - Theoretical Astrophysics Group, Caltech - California Institute of Technology

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Over half the people who responded to the poll got that one right. He's a real scientist. You may argue that he's an astrophysicist and not a climate scientist, but he's obviously more than an unaffiliated boob with a theory and a website.

Next up; my motivations. Here again, there is a right answer, and again most people got it right. I put in the "promoting the C-Realm Podcast" answers as a joke. If I'd really been aiming to promote the podcast, I would have at least provided a link to it, and if I'd meant to make a sneaky political point about soft-headed "liberals" or soft-headed "conservatives" I wouldn't have explicitly pointed out that possibility. I may be a space case, but when I want to be sneaky I do know to cover my tracks and not to leave my business card at the scene of the crime.

Well, there it is. Now, I will go back and read the comments about whether Professor Shaviv is right or wrong, and if you want to talk about that, I'm game.