Food for thought

Every good manifesto should start with the words "I think..."

So here are my two cents about GLOBAL WARMING!

The problem really, with global warming, is that if you say to a Climate Scientist (such as I hope to be in a couple of moons) "So, climate change. It's happening, right?" they tend to look a bit panicky.

And naturally so. They probably have a background in say, Physics or Maths, and they like things to be provable. They like graphs. They like experiments. What they don't like is when someone says "I disagree - prove me wrong" and they can't.

And that's the exact problem we face. We don't have a test earth, and it turns out Newton was wrong about some stuff, and unfortunately in the absence of a computer with a brain the size of a planet, we'll never simulate anything half as well as we'd like to.

And all this time, while we really think it's extremely likely that climate change is screwing us over even as we speak, there's nothing we can do. Personal conviction can be thwarted in the time it takes to say "Possible multidecadal oscillation - need more observations". By the time anyone has collected enough data, it will all be over¹.

The problem as I see it is not what we can do to halt climate change now², but what we can do to facilitate living with it. It's often misrepresented as a doomsday scenario - the world will end - but what I think we're most likely to have is a situation in which life continues in almost the same way for the western world, but Sub-Saharan Africans and Polar bears³ have a hell of a time. And that is what we really need to avoid. More should be done to help people in the firing line - flood defences, irrigation, hurricane proof homes.

In summation - I think we have the wrong focus. I'd love to be able to say that if we all work together, we can halt climate change, but no documentary is going to make people switch off their TVs. No concert is going to persuade people to catch the bus home if it's raining. Madonna shouting "If you want to save the planet, Jump Motherf*ckers!" solves nothing.

It's only right that climate change is a pressing issue for the generation currently in power. The issue for our generation is how we're going to live with it.

---

1. You could argue that this is a situation where we can't afford not to act. Well, tell that to the Government.
2. Though Geoengineering offers some interesting ideas, they do all sound like they have the potential to go horribly, horribly wrong. And frankly asking people in the West Midlands to recycle a bit more isn't going to do a whole lot for the rainforest.
3. Well, this cleared up a couple of my fears about Polar Bears.

Scientists gone wild

OK, in case you lot didn't know, I enjoy playing games. And I especially enjoy playing games that have a point to them, or games that involve numbers. That made the game I recently played with Nathan extra fun¹. But this is a different game, one that arose out of the fact that there's a road in Chicagoland that's called Euclid Avenue. That brought up the discussion about naming roads after people who were valuable in the sciences, not just politicians and activists.

So we got to a-thinking, about who we'd name streets after. And, just for fun, we decided that we'd limit our city plan to 26 consecutive streets, alphabetically. Sure, then we have to chose between Hooke, Halley or Heisenberg and Fr. Mendel or Mendeleev², but it's easier that way than having unending roads named after semi-obscure scientists.

So my game is: who would you have as your alphabetic roads, keeping in mind both scientific advancement and popular opinion of them?

My partial list;
(Archimedes, Boltzman, Curie, Darwin, Einstein, Faraday, Geiger, Hooke, and then I give up trying to think of an "I" without straining myself)


¹I am thinking of a rule which governs sequences of three numbers. The sequence 2-4-6, as it so happens, obeys this rule. Write down a sequence of three numbers on a card, and I'll mark it "Yes" for fits the rule, or "No" for not fitting the rule. Then you can write down another set of three numbers and ask whether it fits again, and so on. When you're confident that you know the rule, write down the rule. You can test as many triplets as you like.
²I really wanted to link to the Oscar Mayer Periodic table, but after 10 minutes of searching, I couldn't find images of Bolognium.