08 December 2009
 
Disclaimers

I am feeling drained of energy this morning. The sheer number of business proposals we are working now has got out of hand.
 
I was sitting in a large conference room yesterday, being forced to operate a virtual office via my briefcase and lap-top to demonstrate commitment to the commercial enterprise, which trying frantically to manage the actual office from the remote location.
 
I got the word about the death of a friend there on the internet. We had known it was coming, but it still came as a chill shock, and I had to forge on as though nothing untoward had just occurred.
 
I will have to get to the obituary tomorrow.
 
The crush of work is a natural enough response of business to available opportunities under this austere Continuing Resolution budget environment. The Congress is determined to do something about Health Care Reform, and the Defense Appropriation is just going to have to wait for passage until that is done. Next up, beyond that, is Carbon-cap-and-trade.
 
What happens in Copenhagen will naturally affect that, since America’s level of participation, as one of the two leading emitter of CO2, is essential to any comprehensive solution to address the issue of Green House Gases.
 
As a consequence of all the weekends blurring together to accommodate the onslaught of business, I was starting the week behind with an early-start to go to a conference room where I don’t normally work to write things I normally wouldn’t. Consequently, under the gun to deliver some copy, I took the easy road and vented the morning spleen about the Climate-gate matter.
 
My apologies for that, retrospectively. Lack of time prevented me from inserting the necessary disclaimers, which are so important today.
 
That lack of context caused me to veer, in the kinder words of a respected peer who has retired to the Pacific Northwest, into the ranks of the lick-spittle running-dogs of the Right.
 
There are so many disclaimers that one is obligated to put in one's public thoughts that when forced by time to cut to the chase, one can inadvertently forget to include some of them.
 
Specifically, when speaking of crazed blood-thirsty terror-bombers, one must always include words to the effect that "all the great faiths have traditions of peace" even if at the moment there is one- and only one- religious tradition that produces mass murderers with distressing regularity.
 
Like this morning, in the Baghdad market at with all those dead women and children. But I digress.
 
As to the disclaimer matter, I am Green by orientation and taste. My litany of Things I Believe In includes recycling, breaking the chain of foreign oil dependence, responsible fish husbandry, saving the Chesapeake, which we live near, and the rain forest, which we do not. I believe in packing out of the wild what we take in, though I confess the great battle with deer ticks keeps me out of the forest more than I am in it.
 
I am a strong supporter of the T. Boone Pickens initiative to move away from an oil-based economy, and am trying to get cleaner-burning propane on the farm to demonstrate commitment.
 
Further, I am fully prepared to believe that the world is getting warmer, since it has been warmer than it is now and doubtless will be again, just as it will be cooler if the warming stops the Gulf Stream's flow north and the glaciers return. The evidence of that appears indisputable, I think, not that I did any peer-reviewed research on the matter.
 
Anyway, the coverage of the Climate-gate material in the media has driven me not quite to distraction, but close. There is enough of the inside chatter between the scientists that is a little repellant, but shoot, if what we put in e-mail traffic was published in toto, all of us could be pilloried for the sin of being human.
 
What appeared to me to be most reprehensible was the manipulation of the historical temperature record, which produced the famous hockey stick graphic of doom. I confess to being a climatological dilettante, not interested enough to make it a central passion, but as a concerned rider of the planet, naturally alarmed at the prospect that we will fry in our own juices in the next few years unless we do something right away.
 
I caught a sense of it in the well-balanced coverage on NPR last night, when I finally dragged my tired butt back into Big Pink.
 
The moderator did not bring up the central issue in my concern, which is that the climatic reconstruction appears to be seriously flawed, and instead questioned the earnest young reporter from the Post about the criminal theft of the material, followed by a special appearance by Dr. Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University.
 
He is one of the scientists involved in the imbroglio, and naturally would be considered by any fair-minded peer an unbiased commentator. The three callers from radioland also displayed a singular unanimity about the inevitability of doom and the futility of dealing with the public apathy.
 
There are some times when you have to admit that the preponderance of the data suggests that something is probably true.
 
I would have considered myself in that camp on the warming matter, up until I read the programmers remarks on the temperature reconstruction.
 
The data crunchers themselves complained that they were getting lost in the sea of algorithms that changed the results of the original information to be more in accord with the logical outcome. The lengths they had to go to in order to make things "right" made them quite cranky.
 
There are higher truths, after all. I was quite taken by Dr. Mann's description of the scientific triumph over the depletion of the Ozone Layer. You may remember the controversy, since it was a big deal at the time, maybe the last time the Fate of the World hung in the balance.
 
It appears to be quite true, and the proactive nature of science in contributing to the awareness of the consequences of the uninhibited release of chloroflorocarbons (CFCs) into the atmosphere from things like automobile air conditioners.
 
Pesky cars. Personal freedom of mobility in the First World is doubtless the cause of many evils. Maybe we should stay put.
 
Because of measures taken under the subsequent Montreal Protocol, signed by 190 nations, the emissions of ozone-depleting substances are already falling. Levels of total inorganic chlorine in the stratosphere peaked in 1997 and 1998. The good news is that the natural ozone production process will heal the ozone layer in about 50 years, if the current models are correct.
 
So, this good thing led to other good things. The Nuclear Winter movement, derived from peer-reviewed studies may have contributed to the end of the concept of viable deterrence as the two Superpowers knew it, and helped to end the Cold War, which enabled some pesky regional players to embark on nuclear weapons programs of their own.
 
The fires of Kuwait set by that rascal Saddam at the conclusion of the First (or Second) Gulf War (depending on who was doing the fighting) caused the models to be changed, since the predicted global gloom didn't happen, but that is the nature of science. When your peers move on, you have to as well.
 
There are also some times when the louder and more imperious the common wisdom becomes, you want to dig in your heels and say "this theory seems to have some problems."
 
That is where I am at the moment. Dr. Mann told the Penn State student newspaper that the controversy over the leaked e-mails was simply part of a systematic smear campaign to prevent climate researchers from doing their work, and that the leaks were timed to derail next week's climate summit.
 
Well, of course. Duh.
 
Someone leaned over to me in that endless meeting yesterday and said it was the Russians who hacked the computers in England and let loose the controversy. They have a dog in the fight, as the world's largest oil exporters and one of the best of the computer attack powers.
 
Oops- disclaimer alert- not that the Russian Government is necessarily responsible for the hacking of the climate data. There could be private citizens who are behind it, if it happened that way.
 
All the great powers have traditions of peace, after all.

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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