The Frog jumps to "Resource Crisis"

"The Frog that Jumped Out" was closed in 2014. The discussion is now on the new blog "The Seneca Effect"

 

One year ago, I started the blog titled "The frog that jumped out." The first post appeared on April 28 2013 and from then on I published 127 posts for a total audience of more than 80,000 contacts. Not a bad result for a blog that was a totally personal effort - without any attempt to use SEO or other Web tricks to diffuse it.

This year of blogging on "The Frog" has been a learning experience that changed my views of how to act on the climate problem. At the beginning, I thought that there was a problem of communication; that the fact that nothing was being done about climate change was the result of us not being able to pass the message in the right way. That is something that many scientists have discovered. The result has often been a search of better methods of communication. It has led, for instance, to books such as "Don't be such a scientist" where the main idea is that scientists should improve their skills of communicating with the public by becoming clearer and more entertaining. That, in itself, is not a bad idea: scientists are often extremely poor at communicating: boring, pompous, incomprehensible, and even worse. Improving on that is surely a welcome trend.

But transforming yourself into a Ronald McDonald of climate science doesn't solve the problem. No amount of gee-whiz power will carry the message across to people who don't want to hear it. The mistake in this idea is steeped in the so called "information deficit" model. It says that people are not doing anything about climate change because they are not informed enough. Therefore, if we find a way to explain to them how things stand, they'll do something. Hence, the idea of "sweetening the pill". Alas, no. It doesn't work that way.

The real problem can be summarized by a comment that I received from a friend of mine (DJ at Bottleneck Foundation):

"The main problem is that the deniers are rolling rocks downhill in human mindspace and we are rolling them uphill. "


I think this concept explains a lot of things, although I would personally modify it as follows: "The main problem is that we are trying to roll rocks in human mindspace and the deniers are trying to keep them where they stand".

That is, in order to fight the dire effects of human caused climate change, it is not enough that the problem is recognized. We need to generate deep changes in the way society functions. But this is almost impossible to do because society is simply not geared for deep changes. Our society, as most complex systems, exists because it has built-in mechanisms that resist change. It is much easier to keep things as they stand than changing them.
 
So, effecting change is a systemic problem, not just a communication problem. That makes the problem more difficult but, at the same time, gives a different perspective to it. Systemic changes occur all the time - they are simply unavoidable. No matter how much society tries to resist change, it must, eventually, cede to physical reality. So, at some moment in the future, we'll have to stop our emissions of fossil carbon in the atmosphere either as the result of depletion or as the result of the damage generated by climate change. The problem is that we are not doing that fast enough to avoid a traumatic adaptation (this is what I call the "Seneca effect"). However, the end result is certain: it is only a question of which trajectory we'll follow. Eventually, we'll have to learn to live within the limits of this planet.

These considerations affect the future of this small blog, "The frog that jumped out". Once you see the climate problem as a systemic problem, you see that the solution is not just communicating what the problem is (although that's also necessary) but promoting a whole array of actions that go from new technologies to new kinds of social and economic behavior. As a result, I think that the focus of this blog on communication alone is a bit too narrow. So, my idea is to merge it with my other blogs, of which right now the most important one is "The Seneca Effect"

 
"The Frog" does not disappear from the Web, I'll still keep it as a repository of posts specifically dealing with climate change. But most of the action will be on the other blog, The Seneca Effect. So, thanks to all of you for your attention and your support and I hope we can continue the discussion "The Seneca Effect"

Earth's temperatures: to bet or not to bet?

 Viscount Monckton of Brenchely, has been challenged to a bet of $ 1000 by John Abraham on Monckton's own predictions of an incoming global cooling. Monckton has refused to pick up the challenge. (image: Christopher Monckton)

In 1980, Julian L. Simon and Paul Ehrlich entered in a famous bet on a mutually agreed-upon measure of resource scarcity. They chose a number of mineral commodities, with Simon betting on a price decrease and Ehrlich betting on an increase. Ten years afterwards, Simon won the bet.

Today, if you search the Web using Google, you'll find more than 250,000 pages dealing with the Simon-Erlich wager. It remains today one of the best known and most used examples put forward to discredit a vision that sees mineral resources as precious and scarce and recommends that they should be used with caution.

If you think about that, it is nearly incredible that the price trends of a few commodities over just a decade are considered so important for a complex and long-ranging question as the depletion of the Earth's mineral resources. By the way, if the bet had been for a later decade, Simon would have lost.

But these are the laws of communication: normally, it is not a question of relevance, it is a question of volume. Repeat something a sufficient number of times, and it will be perceived as true by the public. In this case, the message repeated over and over was that these pompous scientists are so silly to be always caught in the Chicken Little trap: always believing that we were to run out of mineral resources, and always being found wrong. So, the bet that Paul Ehrlich lost has done immense damage to an entire field of scientific research. It was, probably, a significant factor in the nearly complete disappearance of "world dynamics" studies in the 1980s; those which had started with "The Limits to Growth" in 1972.

Because of this story, I tend to believe that scientists working on climate change or resource depletion should never, never bet on anything. Any fluctuation in the wrong direction of temperatures or market prices can be picked up by the propaganda machine and be used against science and scientists. But even if trends do not fluctuate away from the expected direction, the problem is that the communication war is asymmetric. If a scientist bets against an amateur and wins, that's hardly news (dog bites man). But if the amateur wins, it is worldwide news (man bites dog).

So, I would say that John Abraham's bet against Christopher Monckton about Earth's temperatures is, at best, risky, probably counterproductive in any case. I agree that chances are largely in favor of Abrahams; Monckton himself seems to think the same, since he has refused the challenge. But climate is complex and always variable(*) and so why take this risk? Besides, as I said, if Abraham wins, (as it is very likely) nobody will take much notice. So, why give to Monckton an importance that he doesn't deserve?






(*) Abraham has been correctly cautious in mentioning that the bet would be rendered invalid in case of a "major volcanic eruption", but it is hard to define what we mean exactly a "major" volcanic eruption.

The moth effect: blinded by too much evidence

 

A moth flying into a flame probably doesn't see it any more in the last moments before being consumed. Too much brightness creates blindness. Too much evidence is blinding us from seeing the threats we are facing: catastrophic climate change and resource depletion. (image from goodgrieflinus) 

Many people have been asking me why my new book, "Plundering the Planet" was published in German and not in English (even though I wrote it in English). The reason is simple: it was relatively easy to find a German publisher, much more difficult to find one who would publish the English version (*). When contacted, American and British publishers simply shook their head. They felt that there was zero interest for a book about resource depletion and catastrophic climate change - which form the basic thread of the book. These are both unthinkable and unspeakable subjects in the present debate in the English speaking world except as a fringe opinion held by small groups of contrarians.

I can't fault these editors: they know their market. Right now, the general feeling seems to be that a few years of increasing oil production in the US (and in a specific region of the US) have been enough to completely destroy the very concept of "peak oil" and - additionally - to completely discredit any claim that we have a general depletion problem with all mineral resources. At the same time, catastrophic climate change remains a subject of interest only for polar bears.

The situation is better in Germany, where it is still possible to carry on a serious debate on these subjects and where the press has been highly responsive to the publication of the book. Even in Germany, though, there are signs that the debate may be evolving in the wrong direction; that is closing to all options except to the one involving drilling more and drilling deeper for oil and gas.


Think about this situation for a moment: what the hell is going on? The problems of climate change and oil depletion have never been so clear as they are now. Just look at the Arctic ice cap: would you deny that it is melting, and melting fast? And look at the market prices of all mineral resources: can you deny that everything costs now three times more than it used to cost just ten years ago. And you know that depletion is forcing us to use more coal, and that more coal is bringing more climate change. Come on, dammit: how can you ignore the evidence so blatantly? All this is happening for real!

And yet, the English speaking world seems to be nearly completely oblivious to evidence. I think there is no other explanation that to invoke the concept of the "moth blinded by light". I imagine that, in the last moments, a moth doesn't even see the flame it is flying into. It is totally blinded by it. We must be subjected to something similar. We are flying into total disaster willingly, perfectly aiming at maximizing damage to ourselves, and totally blind.

They say that moths fly into bright lights because their brains are geared for seeking faint lights; maybe for orienting their flying - they simply are not equipped for managing very bright lights. Our decisional system seems to suffer the same problem: it is geared to seek for short term economic profit and it was never conceived for anything else. The evidence of incoming disaster is incomprehensible to it, so it just shuts it off. The more the evidence grows, the more actively the system operates to shut it off. And it flies into the flame.





(*) Eventually, we were able to find a publisher who will take care of the English version of "Plundering the Planet". If everything goes well, it should appear this fall.