Oliver,
Oxford English Dictionary:
Humanist (n.), A person who pursues or is expert in the study of the
humanities.
Or in German “Cultural scientist” :-)
I responded to Ken earlier, that in the future, I would refer to him as a
strong advocate for geoengineering research.
Jim
On 9/27/10 8:18 AM, "Oliver Morton" <oemor...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Dear Jim
>
> Shouldn't that be lone scholar of the humanities, rather than lone
> humanist? (or is this an area where british and American usage
> differ?)
>
> Also, referring up thread, it seems to me quite clear that in the
> Slate piece you refer to Ken Caldeira as "a strong advocate of
> geoengineering", in that you say
>
>> I was the only historian on a panel of five, which included three strong
>> advocates for geoengineering and a climate modeler who warned of unintended
>> >consequences.
>
> and the other people on the panel were John Shepherd, Lee Lane, Ken
> Caldeira and Alan Robock. It's logically possible that you were
> describing Ken as the "climate modeler who warned of unintended
> consequences", since he works with climate models and said in his
> testimony
>
>> With regard to environmental negatives, it is possible there could be adverse
>> shifts in rainfall, or damage
>> to the ozone layer, or unintended impacts on natural ecosystems. These
>> unintended consequences
>> should be a major focus of a Solar Radiation Management research program.
>
> but it would seem odd to describe Alan as an advocate.
>
> If I understand you subsequent comments on this, you think that
> because geoengineering research might easily and perhaps unstoppably
> lead to geoengineering implementation, advocating research will lead
> to implementation and is thus, in effect, advocacy for implementation.
> So Ken's position as an advocate of research who stresses agnosticism
> on implementation reduces to advocacy for implementation. But, leaving
> aside Bill's points about the record on the relationship between
> research and implementation, stated views and intentions surely matter
> when talking about advocacy. So it seems to me that calling Ken an
> advocate when he says he isn't is either wrong or an imputation of bad
> faith.
>
> Best
>
> Oliver
>
>
> On Sep 26, 11:23 pm, "James R. Fleming" <jflem...@colby.edu> wrote:
>> I am delighted to see Bill Travis's sentence, "Wexlerian attitudes dominate
>> and Langmuirian schemes have ended up on the ash heap," which, for those who
>> will read my book to find out what these "-ianisms" are, is a very apt
>> summary of the argument.
>>
>> Travis argues that rational science policy serves as a corrective to wild
>> ideas -- I think this is largely true, and I certainly hope it will be the
>> case for overenthusiastic geoengineering proposals.
>>
>> In the book, the robust rhetorical option I chose was not analytical science
>> policy or heroic science writing, but to link geoengineering to a long
>> tragicomic history of weather and climate control, argue for a role for the
>> humanities and social scientists, and then present the argument as advocacy
>> for a more reasonable approach to climate change.
>>
>> Bill writes, "We¹re not managing the exosphere with nuclear bombs" -- an
>> allusion to US and Soviet space testing (actual geoengineering of the
>> magnetosphere) that peaked during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 -- no,
>> but then again, if a nuclear war had broken out, we could have lit up near
>> space and nearly everything else with nukes in a desperate attempt to
>> prevail.
>>
>> But before we credit too much to rational science policy, consider John von
>> Neumann, who thinks we have to be lucky to survive technological excesses
>> (this from p. 191 of Fixing the Sky).
>>
>>
>>
>>> In 1955 in a prominent article titled ³Can We Survive Technology?² von
>>> Neumann
>>> referred to climate control as a thoroughly ³abnormal² industry. He thought
>>> that weather control using chemical agents and climate control through
>>> modifying surface albedo or otherwise managing solar radiation were distinct
>>> possibilities for the near future. He argued that such intervention could
>>> have
>>> ³rather fantastic effects² on a scale difficult to imagine, and he pointed
>>> out
>>> that altering the climate of specific regions or purposely triggering a new
>>> ice age was not necessarily a rational undertaking. Tinkering with the
>>> Earth¹s
>>> heat budget or the atmosphere¹s general circulation ³will merge each
>>> nation¹s
>>> affairs with those of every other more thoroughly than the threat of a
>>> nuclear
>>> or any other war may
>>> already have done.² In his opinion, climate control, like other
>>> ³intrinsically
>>> useful² modern technologies, could lend itself to unprecedented destruction
>>> and to forms of warfare as yet unimagined. Climate manipulation could alter
>>> the entire globe and shatter the existing political order. He made the
>>> Janus-faced nature of weather and climate control clear. The central
>>> question
>>> was not ³What can we do?² but ³What should we do?² This was the ³maturing
>>> crisis of technology,² a crisis made more urgent by the rapidity of
>>> progress.
>>
>>> Banning particular technologies was not the answer for von Neumann. Perhaps,
>>> he thought, war could be eliminated as a means of national policy‹especially
>>> nuclear and environmental warfare. Yet he ultimately deemed survival only a
>>> ³possibility,² since elements of future conflict existed then, as today,
>>> while
>>> the means of destruction grew ever more powerful and was reaching the global
>>> level.
>>
>>> In Baconian terms, do we consider climate to be based on the unconstrained
>>> operations of nature, now modified inadvertently by human activities, or do
>>> we
>>> seek to engineer climate, constrain it, and mold it to our will? Certainly,
>>> the ubiquity and scale of indoor air-conditioning could not have been
>>> imagined
>>> less than a century ago, but what about fixing the sky itself ? In
>>> attempting
>>> to do so, we run the risk of violently rending the bonds of nature and
>>> unleashing unintended side effects or purposely calculated destruction.
>>> After
>>> all, von Neumann identified frenetic ³progress² as a key contributor to the
>>> maturing crisis of technology. Fumbling for an ultimate solution, but
>>> falling
>>> well short, he suggested that the brightest prospects for survival lay in
>>> patience, flexibility, intelligence, humility, dedication, oversight,
>>> sacrifice‹and a healthy dose of good luck.
>>
>> Thanks Bill for calling the book a "compelling read." And sorry for
>> forgetting that you too brought historical themes to CAS/NAS. I had been the
>> lone humanist at so many, many meetings before this one.
>>
>> Jim Fleming
>> Professor of Science, Technology and Society, Colby College
>> Atmosphere Blog:http://web.colby.edu/jfleming
>>
>> On 9/26/10 2:49 PM, "Bill" <w.r.t...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> It may be that Jim's book does, indeed, reveal how ideas get tested
>>> and often rejected. Having just finished it I'll say it is a
>>> compelling read, but my main criticism, besides to wince at the ad
>>> hominem and sarcastic asides, is that it lacks analysis. It is
>>> compelling science policy advocacy, but I¹d appreciate a more
>>> analytical, explanatory structure than tragicomedy, and would ask
>>> questions like: Why is it that every farfetched, and pretty much even
>>> every credible, scheme for controlling the weather and climate that
>>> Jim catalogs has been rejected, and is not in use? We¹re not managing
>>> the exosphere with nuclear bombs (nor, for that matter, digging canals
>>> and harbors and extracting natural gas with nuclear explosions), and
>>> even the tamer ³pathological science² proposals of Langmuir and others
>>> have not been implemented. It seems to me this is because they get
>>> analyzed, tested, criticized; because we do apply checks on science
>>> and technology (and physics plays its hand, too). And collectively we
>>> do worry about miss-use, equity, and untoward consequences. As he
>>> points out, the revelations that cloud seeding was used in Viet Nam
>>> rather quickly helped to squash further development of that
>>> technology. This is hardly a history that points to a society willing
>>> to do anything, take any risk, to control nature.
>>
>>> Reasoning from analogy is just one approach, but at least it is
>>> analytical, and seems pertinent, so let me take up one of Jim¹s case
>>> studies, Stromfury. In my presentation to the ACC/NAS meeting in June
>>> 2009 (where he incorrectly claims to have been the lone voice bringing
>>> history and STS themes to bear) I laid out some of the social science
>>> literature on social response to weather modification and similar
>>> efforts. My paper (on my web site) describes weather mod projects that
>>> made explicit attempts to measure social impacts and attitudes, so at
>>> least some of the researchers did indeed care to learn about public
>>> atttitudes. And I come to a different conclusion about Project
>>> Stormfury, which shows how ideas about controlling the weather and
>>> climate can be tested, found wanting, and rejected. Stormfury is
>>> telling, I think, as the rare case of actual, civilian, in-the-field,
>>> research on a scheme that involved potential hemispheric impacts
>>> (concerns were raised about seasonal rainfall and reduced poleward
>>> eddy energy transport), really the only scheme at this scale of those
>>> Jim describes that has actually made it into scientific field trials.
>>> And it reveals social checks on science and technology rather than
>>> hubris run amuck: complaints about the effects of seeded hurricanes
>>> (including hurricanes that were not seeded), led to limits on the
>>> experimental area. But Jim didn¹t report that, when NOAA scientists
>>> sought to shift the experiment to the Pacific, which offered more
>>> storms and more room, Japan and China raised concerns and, guess what,
>>> the project was canceled (despite the belief even today of some
>>> project scientists with whom I¹ve spoken that the trials were not
>>> conclusive and even that the ice and supercooled water measurements
>>> were not definitive). No one has experimented on a hurricane for
>>> decades, though their terrible impacts (Andrew, Nargis, Katrina), and
>>> credible hypotheses of how they might be weakened, abide. This is
>>> hardly historical evidence for arrogance, hubris, and dis-regard for
>>> social attitudes and sovereignty of nation-states. I argued at the ACC
>>> conference that somewhere between routine cloud seeding (which is
>>> widely practiced and, social science studies indicate, accepted) and
>>> hurricane modification we found the line past which experimenting on
>>> global nature became impermissible. This line emerges in other
>>> technologies and I think will emerge again with SRM and probably CDR
>>> geo-engineering.
>>
>>> My take is that Jim¹s catalog of wx/cx control schemes, even though
>>> explicitly meant to highlight the craziest schemes and to argue that
>>> geo-engineering is ³dangerous beyond belief², actually shows that
>>> scientific and policy processes can separate the credible from the
>>> incredible, and have applied cautionary tests to geo-engineering.
>>> Wexlerian attitudes dominate and Langmuirian schemes have ended up on
>>> the ash heap. The history shows that checks on geo-engineering are
>>> really quite strong, and we face, as with all controversial but
>>> potentially useful technologies, some probability of rejecting
>>> research that would have been quite useful, e.g., we find ourselves at
>>> Outcome 4, Fig. 6 in the Morgan and Ricke IRGC piece just sent around.
>>> I wonder what that probability is.
>>
>>> Bill Travis
>>> Center for Science and Technology Policy Research
>>> University of Colorado at Boulder
>>
>>> On Sep 26, 10:52 am, Dan Whaley <dan.wha...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Jim--
>>
>>>> Really, make up your mind. Now you seem to be saying that OIF patch
>>>> experiments are "legitimate", but that Climos or perhaps myself in
>>>> particular have been a hindrance to their moving forward?
>>
>>>> Didn't you just get done saying: "Our ignorance of a subject is a
>>>> justification for not doing field experiments. Do what you like behind
>>>> closed doors"?
>>
>>>> I'd think you'd have been happy that scientists planning more field
>>>> experiments were "vexed" in that process.
>>
>>>> Do you think that anyone with commercial intentions, past, present or
>>>> future, in the geoengineering space is a hindrance? Maybe your reasoning
>>
>> ...
>>
>> read more »
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