Trust and Transparency

My most recent Qualia post:


I have spent the last couple of days trying to decide what I think about the most recent Wikileaks dump.  On the one hand, I think that transparency and a free press are vital elements of functioning democracy.  On the other hand, I do not have much confidence in the ability or willingness of our media and other social institutions to be nuanced in their reactions to the material.

My deepest concern related to this latest episode is that it will unnecessarily erode hard won trust among diplomats and politicians whose job it is to make the our planet a safer place to live (this concern is nicely captured in a recent TNR article by James Rubin).  Climate science experienced its own analogous brouhaha with the release of emails among prominent modelers.  The subjects of that leak did not always come off as particularly nice folks, but who among us does not have moments of lesser discretion?  And while the climate science has been vindicated, it is less clear that relationship between the scientific community and others has come away unscathed.

I have reached the following conclusions so far:

• each of us should all strive to be the best human that we can be, 
• each of us is indeed human and with that comes a set of foibles and flaws which brings a need for nuance and forgiveness in our trust building, and finally,
• well-deserved and robust trust enhances our ability to the create the communities we need in order to address the complex challenges that we face going forward.

Sustainability as a Satisficing

(this is a cerebral version of the last post on satisficing - it also has some better links)
Curious readers of my last post may have clicked on a link and found themselves in a wikipedia entry on satisficing.  That link was part of my implied definition of sustainability as the existence of a set of possible futures that are at least acceptable to Earth’s current human inhabitants.  So where did that come from...

As I pondered the classic definition of sustainability, I found it lacking.  Specifically, in order to determine whether or not we are in a sustainable state, that definition requires that we know things about the future that are unknowable in the present (e.g. the needs and capacities of future generations).  Hence, I set out to devise a definition in which the presence or absence of sustainability could be determined in present.

Among the things we can know now, at least as individuals, are characteristics of the futures we would wish for our progeny.  (The problem of the aggregate was opened in the last post.)  We can also make some reasonable guesses as to whether those futures are possible.  I might wish that my great grandkids live on an Earth where the wooly mammoth is abundant; this is not going to happen.  But an Earth where all children receive at least an 8th grade education? - this is still possible.

While some sort of maximized future might be wonderful, I am inclined to set the bar for “sustainability” lower.  If we take now as our baseline, I think that breaking even counts for sustainable.  Even if we want to include some notion of progress in our definition, there is still a lot of room between the baseline and utopia; hence sustainability is the condition of possible futures that are at least “good enough”.

Note added in proof: that last link is quite obscure and not as good as I would have liked.  Any ideas about a good utopia link would be greatly appreciated.

Science can only do so much...

In his column in Nature this month, Dan Sarewitz gives a very clear assessment of the current foundering of climate scientists.  He points out that in the case of climate, we have asked Science to carry out a task that is best left to Politics.

Climate science has made it clear that Earth's atmosphere is warming due to increasing accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere.  It is becoming increasingly clear that that same CO2 is changing the pH of the surface waters of the global ocean in ways that will make it harder for the bottom of the ocean's food chain to function.  A number of consequences of the increasing heat content of our planet's atmosphere are also beginning to become evident, in particular increases in the variability of weather and climate.  Climate science has also established with reasonable certainty that humans have a discernible influence on the atmospheric changes that are currently underway.

Climate science does NOT tell us that these things are bad.  The scariness of glacial retreat, sea level rise and other effects in the climate litany is a human response to those things.  There is no external reference frame that we can call on that will impose mitigating or adapting actions on the part of humans.  We must CHOOSE to do those things ourselves.

Choosing what to do next has at least two components.  The first, and most argued about, is the resource component.  Should we reallocate resources currently allocated to X over to Y?  The second element has to do with norms and values.  Is switching from X to Y the right thing to do independent of the associated risks and benefits.  Science can help us place boundaries on some of the benefits and risks of switching from X to Y; but it cannot tell us which choice is better.

The choice of better is political and, as we have seen over recent decades, it has time and space varying components.  I will reiterate - there is no external framework that can unambiguously impose a choice on how we should re/allocate our resources in the face of human impacts on our planet.

Humans can, and I would say very likely will (albeit through passive rather than active means) , choose to continue to use the atmosphere as a dumping ground for CO2.  This choice makes me quite sad, and I think it will prove to be a costly folly with respect to human well being.

But the sooner that we start talking about this choice in the context of political tradeoffs rather than scientific uncertainty and foibles, the better off we will be and the better the decisions we actively make are likely to be.