Ken MacLeod's comments.
The title comes from two quotes:
“If these are the early days of a better nation, there must be hope, and a hope of peace is as good as any, and far better than a hollow hoarding greed or the dry lies of an aweless god.”—Graydon Saunders
Contact: kenneth dot m dot macleod at gmail dot com Blog-related emails may be quoted unless you ask otherwise.
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If the Greenland ice sheet slides into the ocean ...
Scotland at standstill as strange white substance falls from sky
Transport links across Scotland have been severely disrupted today by an overnight fall of an unknown substance from the atmosphere. Lying several centimetres deep over much of the country, it has made roads, railways and airport runways dangerously slippery and often impassable. As an emergency interim measure while authorities and scientists struggle to identify the phenomenon, schools have been closed.
The mystery material is initially white in colour, and is said to sometimes resemble salt. Attempts at closer comparison have failed because salt has - also overnight and unexpectedly - disappeared from all retail outlets.
Local sci-fi writer Ken MacLeod, who had to cancel plans to meet his daughter for lunch because of the transport chaos, blamed the lack of preparedness on 'cultural snobbery towards science fiction'.
'I'm not asking for some sort of instant readiness for anything,' he said. 'That would be utopian. But I do think that reading a few catastrophe novels or even watching the odd disaster movie on TV would open minds to the possibility of unprecedented events.'
A source at Edinburgh City Council accused the writer of having his head in the clouds. 'All we can do now is wait for the scientists to come up with something, which could take months. And keep watching the skies.'
Labels: climate, local, Scottish politics, squibs
Queen Victoria's Terraformers
In effect, what Darwin, Hooker and the Royal Navy achieved was the world's first experiment in "terra-forming". They created a self-sustaining and self-reproducing ecosystem in order to make Ascension Island more habitable..
Wilkinson thinks that the principles that emerge from that experiment could be used to transform future colonies on Mars. In other words, rather than trying to improve an environment by force, the best approach might be to work with life to help it "find its own way".
Labels: amazing things, climate, evolution
Gorby buys Indy
I found lots to disagree with the Indy about over the years, but that was part of its appeal. After the paper adopted what became its (understandably unique) selling point, the single-issue pictorial front page (polar bear, penguin, starving child, heroin syringe, baby seal, smoking chimney, polar bear polar polar bear polar bear will you please just sod off and drown you smelly seal-chewing top predator where was I?) I still stuck with it. Even after Johann Hari revealed that for years he'd been popping anti-depressants that made him unable to see the downside of anything he thought was a good idea at the time (which explained, a little too late for a lot of dead brown people, his drum-banging for the attack on Iraq), I blinked back the red mist. When its hard-pressed science editor explained that nanoparticles are a problem because they're so small that they no longer obey the laws of physics, I spluttered Crunchy Oats over the page and turned to the next. I went on buying the paper every day, but I read it mainly for the columnists, which was just as well because there was less and less actual news in it.
It was one of the columnists who finally did it for me. Bruce Anderson, the (predictably ex-Trot) Tory the paper keeps on a string in the back yard, wrote a column defending torture, yelping excitedly over the ticking bomb scenario as if it were a new, fresh, insightful thought experiment and running with it all the way to torturing not only Mr Alarm-Clock but also - should that fail to get results - Mrs Alarm-Clock and all the little Alarm-Clocks.
At this point it became difficult to hold the breakfast down.
So, with some embarrassment, I crawled back to the Guardian, and you know what? It's good. It's so good I don't have time to read all the good bits. Still infuriating and smug, mind you, but at least it doesn't keep banging on about polar bears.
Now the Indy has been bought by a former KGB man, in close association with the former General Secretary of the CPSU. This means it might become interesting again, but for me it's too little, too late.
Labels: climate, squibs, War on Terror
Climate science a hot topic at Social Session 04
Our fourth Social Session last week went well: the audience of thirty or so, a good proportion of which was from the natural sciences, almost packed out the room. The presentations were clear and the discussion lively. Thanks to all the participants, to the audience, and to Margaret Rennex, Jo Law, Emma Capewell, and Clare de Mowbray for making it all work.
As chair I welcomed everyone and made some opening remarks:
Last November one sentence from a hacked email by Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia from ten years earlier went around the world.
"I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."
These words have been and no doubt for a long time will be endlessly quoted and misquoted to suggest that climate scientists are conspiring to hide a recent decline in global temperature, and that global warming is a hoax. The saying that a lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on has seldom been so brilliantly confirmed.
When I looked into this and other supposed scandals in the hacked emails - about peer review, refusal to release so-called raw data, and badly-designed computer code - and especially when I compared what the scientists and their defenders had to say with what their critics said - from the most fervent doubters of global warming to George Monbiot - I began to suspect that lots of people have a completely false and idealised view of how science is actually done and what scientists are like. Now I knew a bit about that from my own experience as a postgrad, from talking to scientists, and also from some of the science studies literature that I've had a chance to look at over the past year or so. My initial pitch for this session was ‘Can Science Studies Save the Earth?’ but we decided to go for the populist version.
So tonight we're going to ask whether and if so how the messy, human and uncertain practice of science can deliver reliable knowledge, and how and whether this knowledge should be used to inform policy.
I then introduced the speakers:
Simon Shackley - School of Geosciences
Colin Macilwain - Nature columnist
Ben Pile - Climate Resistance blog
Colin Campbell - EaSTCHEM Research Fellow, School of Chemistry
Steve Sturdy - Genomics Forum Deputy Director
Here are some reconstructions of what the speakers said, taken from my scrappy notes. If anyone feels they've been misheard, please let me know.
Simon Shackley began by referring to the widely held ideal of science summarised as Robert K. Merton's CUDOS principles: communism (in the sense of no private property in ideas), universalism, disinterestedness, and organised scepticism. These work fine in normal science, but in post-normal science, where "facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent" , not so much. In normal science it would be quite acceptable not to provide algorithms and program code, but in post-normal science the only course to follow was complete openness. The CRU people were still doing normal science, when they should have realised that their situation was post-normal and that everything they did and said - not just their published work - would come under scrutiny from other interested parties, not just other scientists. Put it all up on the web!
Colin Macilwain pointed out that the public needed more than raw data on a website. A crucial mediating role was played by science journalists - Ben Goldacre is a good example. Colin argued that the CRU scientists had been harassed, including with FOIA requests, and that it was obvious that the 'trick' was not deceit. But he added that climate models - as distinct from climate observations - could very well be queried, and that in the models there was indeed much to be sceptical about.
Ben Pile insisted that the climate change issue was centrally about moral and political, rather than scientific, claims. Statements such as: 'We have just ten years to save the planet', or the comparison of fossil fuel use to slave-owning, are (overstated) moral claims. In the absence of clear sources of moral authority or political principle, 'the science' of climate change has served as a source of 'cheap moral realism'. ('Realism' in the sense, I think, of moral principles as existing independently of, rather than arising out of, human concerns.) The CRU had to carry the weight of being at the centre of all those moral arguments, thus making it, naturally, the focus of hacking attacks.
Colin Campbell, coming from a less publicly contentious field, allowed that some poor research gets published in the less prestigious journals, but that in science it's only possible to get away with 'low-impact lies'. He agreed that sometimes a scientific orthodoxy can shut out minority views, but not indefinitely: Peter Mitchell's chemiosmotic hypothesis was not at first well received, but eventually won him the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, and is now in all the textbooks. One advantage of doing normal science is not having to deal with the coupling of scientific debate and moral norms.
Steve Sturdy argued that scientists are seen as trustworthy not because the general public can independently assess their work - we can't, without being scientists ourselves - but to the extent that they live up certain expectations and ideals, which the Mertonian norms (referred to by Simon at the start) express as well as any. Scientists need to be completely open about the scientific process and about uncertainties. Science journalists are guilty of not engaging with the actual arguments of 'climate sceptics', preferring to expose their funding and political affiliations - which are, strictly speaking, irrelevant to the content of their arguments, which have to be met.
The discussion that followed ranged over science journalism - with Colin Macilwain sticking up for the profession - science education, with some in the audience arguing that it had all gone downhill in the past forty years or so - and the politics of the climate debate. Curiously enough, despite the differing perspectives of the panellists, what emerged was something like a consensus - that whatever may have been the case in the past, the only way forward for climate science was for every step of the process to be out in the open.
Scientists behaving badly? Social Sessions 04
Over the past few months the Genomics Forum has hosted three very successful public events, the Social Sessions, on: the scientist as seen in literature and in science studies; genetics and crime; and science as an inspiration for poetry.
We are now planning a fourth, to be held in March, on the relevance of science studies to the controversy arising from the East Anglia emails hack - labelled 'Climategate' in the media and online. Our panel and audience will discuss whether the attitudes and actions apparently shown in the emails and other documents are as scandalous as has been claimed, or whether they are (as some of the science studies literature would suggest) fairly typical of what goes on in everyday scientific practice. And if the latter is the case, how is that the results of scientific practice can be regarded as reliable?
Date: 10 Mar 2010 17:30
Time: 5.30pm for 6.00pm, drinks and nibbles provided
Venue:
ESRC Genomics and Policy Research Forum, 3rd Floor, St John's Land, Holyrood Road, Edinburgh EH8 8AQ
email: forum@genomicsnetwork.ac.uk
Organised by: ESRC Genomics and Policy Research Forum
Speakers:
Simon Shackley - School of Geosciences
Colin Macilwain - Nature
Ben Pile - Climate Resistance blog
Colin Campbell - EaSTCHEM Fellow, School of Chemistry
Steve Sturdy - Genomics Forum Deputy Director
This event is FREE, but as space is limited, please confirm your attendance as soon as possible to: forum@genomicsnetwork.ac.uk
Labels: climate, coming attractions, genomics, local
Science prof's office untidy - shock claim
[T]hanks to the row over leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit, we now learn that this body’s director, Phil Jones, works in a disorganised fashion amid chaos and mess. [...] His colleagues recall that his office was ‘often surrounded by jumbled piles of papers’.Elsewhere in the paper, we learn the full horror:
According to Mr Harrabin, colleagues of Professor Jones said ‘his office is piled high with paper, fragments from over the years, tens of thousands of pieces of paper, and they suspect what happened was he took in the raw data to a central database and then let the pieces of paper go because he never realised that 20 years later he would be held to account over them’.Tens of thousands of pieces of paper! Chaos and mess! Jumbled piles! In a scientist's office! Having been inside the offices of many science professors, and having worked for a year with social scientists who've made close anthropological studies of the everyday work of natural scientists, I'm shocked to the core.
Matt Coward's Acts of Destruction: neither Airstrip One nor Nowhere, but the Commonwealth!
Mat Coward sent me a review copy of this book, so I owe him a review. I don't owe him a good review, of course, but a good review is what he's going to get because I genuinely enjoyed the book.
It's very hard to think of a novel set in a future socialist Britain that isn't a dystopia or a utopia - Airstrip One or Nowhere. The Commonwealth of Britain in Acts of Destruction isn't described anywhere as socialist - in fact the word and its cognates don't occur anywhere in the text - but socialist it is. Socialism, if it's called anything, is called democracy. The revolution is called the Process and the constitution is called the Agreement of the People. After you've read a bit, you may find yourself thinking, 'Oh come on, it can't be as cosy and consensual as all that'. Reading on, you find it isn't: the state is definitely in the 'firm but fair' category, even if its laws are enforced by bobbies on bicycles.
Even Tories and libertarians might enjoy Coward's frequent baiting of current life-style politics: smoking is encouraged, particularly in local pubs, and healthy eating means good greasy spoon fare. There are even rifles in the hands of the people, though I would have strong objections to the limits placed on this - as does, to be fair, at least one of the sympathetic voices in the book.
Like in all the best crime novels, we start with the discovery of a body, go on to apparently unrelated matters - stolen tomatoes, a missing child, some problem about bees - and find they're all tied together by the end. Along the way we've had our viewpoint characters' relationships get interestingly more complicated. I hope Mat is working on a sequel, because I'd like to meet them again.
You can buy the book here (and sample it here).
Labels: climate, libertarian, Marxism, reviews, skiffy, writing
Working in the spaceship yards, for real
On Tuesday I gave a talk at Strathclyde University's Advanced Space Concepts Laboratory's seminar series. Professor Colin McInnes (who I'd met at Satellite 2, and whose talk there was recently summarised in an article in The Herald) and Dr Malcolm Macdonald had invited me, and they showed me around the labs and took me out for a few drinks, a meal and a very stimulating conversation afterwards - for all of which, much thanks.
You can see the seminar here - there's an opening sample on the page, and buttons for streaming or downloading if you want to see and hear the whole talk and discussion. Here's the (slightly tongue in cheek) abstract:
"The Imaginary Engine: notes for a research proposal on the 1990sThough my delivery, as usual, gives the impression that I am painfully dredging words from the vast shallows of my mind, and the camera and mic are unforgiving of my tics (fiddling with my glasses, clicking my pen, pushing up my sleeves), I had the benefit of an involved and SF-savvy audience whose questions and comments contributed a great deal.private spacespace opera boom in science fiction".
Abstract: The relationship between scientific-technological advance and science fiction has often been assumed and celebrated but seldom rigorously examined. A possible theoretical framework for doing this has emerged in the discipline of Science and Technology Studies (STS): 'the political economy of promise'. Usually applied in the context of biotechnology, this framework looks at the ways in which the 'promise' of new technologies or scientific breakthroughs is used to mobilise resources – of labour, capital, research grants, political credibility, public acceptance – in the real world. Imaginary representations of promising developments play an integral part in this process, acting as (almost literally) 'fictitious capital' in the boom phase of an economic cycle.
It is suggested that science fiction, by treating future possibilities as actualities, may function as an even more literal fictitious capital. In the second half of the 1990s, rapid technological development in, and the ever-widening application of, information technology and the consequent dot-com boom was accompanied by a surge of technological optimism – albeit combined, often, with social pessimism – in science fiction. One such area of optimism concerned the near prospect of large-scale private space exploration and settlement. Records of this period exist in the archives of numerous newsgroups and semi-public mailing lists such as alt.space, sci.space, and the Extropians email list. A mapping of discussion on these lists with influential works of written SF of that period and with speculative investment in a number of fields is outlined and further research proposed.
I was well impressed by the scale and scope of the engineering department, by the enthusiasm of the staff and the research students I met, and by the work of the Advanced Space Concepts Laboratory, which is collaborating with local space industry and other partners in numerous fields, including the exciting field of microspacecraft.
They're building spaceships on the Clyde! Who knew? As one of the builders points out, there are a lot of young people in Scotland who really need to know, and he's doing something about it.
Labels: climate, genomics, local, Scottish politics, self-promotion, skiffy, writing
Guilt-tripping and hair shirts not way to go, hair-shirted Green guilt-tripper admits
If the lesson for scientists is that the era when they can practice their trade entirely separately from the rest of society is well and truly over, the lesson for environmentalists is equally harsh. Having spent years (once again, myself included) reminding the public of the horrifying potential consequences of climate change, and demanding major lifestyle change on the part of ordinary people, it seems that our message is not just falling on deaf ears – but may even be counterproductive.
We have to start accentuating the positive, rather than constantly invoking apocalypse. Getting off fossil fuels is a necessity, but that does not mean that people’s lives must be made harder or more austere. Forget all the “war economy” analogies, locally grown jam and appeals to save old clothes. Our message needs to be a forward-looking one of hope, prosperity and technological progress.
We also have to stop trying to make people feel guilty. No, flying isn’t analogous to child abuse. Polar bears won’t drop from the sky. Constantly accusing normal people of immoral behaviour is perhaps a way to get noticed, but not a clever way to win converts. And the normal people in question, upset at being accused of killing babies every time they step onto Ryanair, will be very susceptible to the first conspiracy theorist who whispers in their ear: “Don’t worry, it’s not true.”
Labels: climate, far left, genomics, libertarian, squibs
CRU hackers reveal: Climate science conducted by human beings!
“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”These 33 words, it seems, are all most of them need to convince themselves they're living in a Michael Crichton novel, and they're an army of Davids, each lockstep blogpost slinging another shiny wet pebble from the brook at the glowering forehead of the Giant Green Climate Machine. And did you know that Al Gore is rich and Michael Moore is fat?
Few have stopped to think that 'adding in the real temp[erature]s' is a curious way to hide a decline in global temperatures, let alone that a decline in global temperatures for the past half-century would be hard to cover up. Even fewer have bothered to examine the context. What all this suggests to me is that the CRU scientists are probably right, and that most of the 'climate sceptics' are anything but sceptics.
And the seamy side of science, which has got poor old George Monbiot to issue a gleefully hailed apology and a disgraceful call for resignations? Science corrupted by politics? Bollocks, I say. That's what science - all science - is like. Peter Watts nails it.
Labels: climate, genomics, libertarian
"It’s like Sputnik went up and we think it’s just a shooting star."