Luck and Good Fortune

The Climate Controversy

2009-12-01T08:18:00.003+08:00

The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.
- Bertrand Russell

This quotation captures the essence in the climate-change debate. On the one side are the climate change supporters with a scientific consensus to back their position who advocate punitive taxes and societal change from our high-carbon emitting condition to a future world free of carbon emissions. On the other side are climate-change sceptics who deny that carbon emission, primarily from burning fossil fuels, are responsible and that if there is climate change any human contribution is swamped by natural variation.

Scepticism is good in all things cerebral, by the way, especially where science is concerned. It is unreasonable for scientists take a dogmatic position because this is contrary to the scientific method which demands an open-minded approach to investigation and discovery. The problem with the climate debate is that one side seems to be pushing an extreme position with inadequate data and uncertain modelling - certainly nothing of the kind sustained by physicists and engineers - and the other side is similarly empty handed, lacking any hard evidence for their position of maintaining the status quo.

The problem I have with this state of affairs personally is that at this point the debate breaks down completely instead of reasoning and rationality taking over. It is okay for the man-made climate change advocates to have their opinion and equally valid for the sceptics to have their opposing view because it is important the scientific debate continue until it is resolved. What's more important is that policy is shaped by rational thinking instead of emotional decision making.

Risk management is an exercise we all undertake in our daily lives; directors and managers of companies for their members, shareholders and other stakeholders; politicians for all of us. There are serious trade-offs to be made between fossil fuel, renewable or nuclear power; cap-and-trade versus carbon tax; subsidise change or feed the starving; grain, meat or bio-fuel; temperature rise versus deaths due to cold; and so on.

Policy making must be properly informed for effective decision making by our political leaders. The problem for the climate-change advocates is the longer the status quo stays the stronger is the position of the sceptics and outright deniers that significant climate change is occurring at all. If there isn't any climate change or it is of natural rather than human origin then doing nothing will have the same outcome as doing anything at all.

Right or wrong?

2009-09-21T19:37:00.000+08:00

There is no greater importance in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.
- Norman Mailer

Pliny the Elder

2009-03-05T22:47:00.001+09:00

Gaius or Caius Plinius Secundus (AD 23 – August 25, 79), better known as Pliny the Elder, was an ancient author, naturalist or natural philosopher and naval and military commander of some importance who wrote Naturalis Historia.

He is known for his saying

"True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written; in writing what deserves to be read".

(From Wikipedia.)

Reason

2009-01-11T14:44:00.000+09:00

He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.
- Sir William Drummond

Live free of terror

2009-01-11T10:07:00.018+09:00

The terror wrought upon Israeli citizens by rockets fired by Palestinian militants into Israel is matched by their callous and illegal disregard for their own people by launching those rockets from within civilian areas. Hiding behind civilians is a war crime perpetrated by Hamas and the ensuing civilian casualties should be counted among those caused by Hamas, not tallied onto the total of the defending side. (Photo from The Australian.)

Not free as in free beer, or free as in free speech, every sane person, including the citizens of democratic Israel, seeks to live free from terror. The terror of rockets raining down on Israeli citizens has sparked little mention in the media over the past few years since the democratic nation finally quit Gaza and the West Bank in 2005, at the same time unilaterally withdrawing all Jewish settlements.

The calls for an end to occupation are moot since there has not been an occupation of the territories captured by Israel in the defensive Yom Kippur and Six Day wars (in 1973 and 1967) since 2005. The call of war crimes against Israel acting in self defence is misplaced since Hamas violates all of the accepted international rules of combat set by the Geneva convention. If anything, the Israeli government has been remiss in its responsibility to act against the threat to its own citizens posed by the continuing rocket barrage.

Arafat rejected the offer of a Palestinian state of Gaza, West Bank and Jerusalem, turning yet again to the intifada and terror attacks, including suicide bombings. This was a disappointing end to the processes set in train by the 1993 Oslo Accords, that would have led to the creation of an independent Palestinian state had Arafat not rejected Israel's offer in 2000.

This article eloquently explains why after WW2, in the shadow of concentration camps at Belsen and elsewhere, Israel has become so important to Jews, and that:

Again and again - again and again - the Palestinians have been offered a nation state in a divided Palestine. And again and again they have turned down the offer, for it has always been more important to drive out the Jews than to have a Palestinian state.

When you are faced with well meaning supporters of the Palestinian movement towards self determination who oppose Israel's right to self defence, ask these questions:

Do you understand that territory gained in a defensive war can be held by the victor to dissuade aggressors from war mongering?
Notwithstanding this, are you aware that Gaza was turned over to Palestinian control in 2005?
Why do you think that Hamas continues to pursue a path of terror?
Are you aware of antisemitism against Jews over the centuries?
Are you aware know of Arab support for the Nazis during WW2?
Have you heard the Arab calls for genocide of the Zionists? Even before the creation of the state of Israel and in its aftermath during the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948, 1967 and 1973.
Why did the aggressor and losing side in each case gain the sympathies of the world instead of having to sue for peace?

The Palestinian people should elect a capable leadership who rather than calling for the destruction of the state of Israel instead wants to build the welfare of the Palestinian people in a free state of their own. All sane and right-minded people of the world must encourage such a course of action towards peace and prosperity for the Palestinians in place of indifference towards their plight.

Simultaneously, we must stop the abysmal and tacit support for terrorism against Israel by ceasing to reward, in one-sided media reports and by misplaced public statements, the illegal terror war being waged by Hamas. Let everyone live in peace and allow Israelis to live free of terror.

Acquisition of knowledge

2008-08-17T21:32:00.000+08:00

Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.
- Samuel Johnson

Authorities Tell Us To Stop Eating Meat

2008-07-25T17:00:00.005+08:00

Do we really want a society where the authorities tell us what to eat, to think, what we can do with our bodies, our lives, our families and our communities? I fear that the authority personality lends to our leaders has overtaken the democratic foundation of authority being the will of the people.

Unfortunately people can be manipulated in the way they think and act by the kinds and amount of information provided on the subject at issue. For instance consider that when it comes to UFOs, cold fusion, nuclear power and the immigration debate, to take four contentious or incendiary examples, seldom does a proper debate take place nor even do the facts get a proper airing.

Equal time for each side is the cry of fair reporting but it isn't by any stretch of the imagination. The facts usually lend themselves to scientific analysis however any rational argument can be completely buried by the numerous false or misleading alternatives to doing so. 50% equal time to each side of these debates: 1) UFO remnants are kept hidden by the government; 2) Cold fusion provides an inexhaustible supply of clean energy; 3) Nuclear power is unsafe; and 4) Immigration should be cut to save the environment.

Without going into details the correct answers are: 1) There is no credible evidence for the existence of terrestrial UFOs; 2) Cold fusion has not been demonstrated in a repeatable experiment on any scale and there is no physical theory to support that is can be; 3) Nuclear power is produced by hundreds of fission reactors without giving off pollution or contributing to greenhouse gases; and 4) The contradiction that exploitation of resources should be reduced by cutting immigration is an inconsistent moral position and probably demonstrates racial prejudice since the majority of immigrants are Asian and African.

The Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is an outcome of Ross Garnaut's Draft Report on Climate Change in order to implement the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme and each of these present dreadful examples of weasel words. The ETS is just another name for a tax, the assumption of climate change and its impacts are givens, and the wrong implication that carbon is a pollutant, whereas carbon dioxide is an essential component of the food chain.

Without going into the details that can easily be found elsewhere on the web, I wish to make a few short and sharp points about the climate change agenda. The reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have produced dramatically different positions at each publication. This is often cited as a case of a scientific position being improved however the rapidity of change and fluidity of positions and the scarcity of data lead me to conclude that the authors themselves have low confidence in their own conclusions.

The film An Inconvenient Truth has been credited for raising the environment consciousness of many people however it has done so by misrepresenting the facts. The media that stands apart from the adulation directed at the film is to be commended because it is impossible for the people to participate in the debate and to make informed decisions if they are fed misinformation and when facts that are pertinent to the matter are disregarded by the authorities making those questionable assertions.

The theory of anthropogenic climate change is either right or wrong and if right may or may not itself have an impact on society however the incredible cost of trillions of dollars being mooted for global mitigation of the primary greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane, surely may be better spent of other social projects such as alleviating poverty and disease in the third world.

Al Gore, Tim Flannery and Ross Garnaut are paraded in Australia as experts giving advice to the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and the Minister for the Environment, Penny Wong. However Richard Feynmen, warns his students and anyone else who asks for his opinion to distrust authority for the simple reason that authorities are often wrong. He implores us to explore on our own and to try and understand the facts so as to form our own opinion. His dissenting opinion of the causes of the Challenger disaster against the collegial consensus is a case in point.

Is the goal of the ETS when it is applied to agriculture to reduce the number of cows and sheep thereby promoting alternative food sources? In this case, the repricing will greatly affect the poor and middle class leaving the wealthy and well off the primary consumers of meat products. Is this a desirable and equitable outcome or should agriculture be excluded from the ETS?

Let's face it, if there is not a product substitute for affected products then the ETS is just another tax.

Greenhouse Computer Modelling

2007-07-27T18:19:00.003+08:00

The general public's perception of the greenhouse debate rests upon some pretty shaky science and some fairly impressive if flawed computer modelling. The science of atmospheric temperature and the earth's climate is fairly well understood.

Dividing the discipline into theoretical and empirical divides we have a solid theoretical model of atmospheric circulation that is well understood and applied to short-term weather forecasting with increasing confidence over periods of several days. The computer models are seeded with actual measurements of surface and air temperature, pressure and moisture content with assumptions about dry and wet adiabatic lapse rates in order to model the temperature drop as air rises through the process of atmospheric circulation.

There is unjustified confidence among a circle of environmental and atmospheric scientists who are willing to extrapolate the results of such modelling to extended periods of time. This wiki page recalls the surprise of Edward Lorenz that small changes in initial conditions produced large changes in the long-term outcome of his computer simulations for weather prediction. The book Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick gives a wonderfully readable exposition of the history and meaning of chaos science.

When the issue of global warming is raised in the workplace I feel obliged, as an engineer and physicist, to raise the issue of proper science versus pseudo-science. As an example of the latter, the movie An Inconvenient Truth should not be screened as an education resource in schools or corporations nor should we generally encourage its viewing. (Perhaps in time it will be seen as the parody it is.)

There is much evidence to debunk the myth, if not of global warming, of An Inconvenient Truth. Two easy links from a quick Google search: The first presenting the scientific basis for atmospheric warming and mean planetary temperatures; the second a political reason for Al Gore's movie that reproduces arguments and conclusions that are contrary to scientific reasoning.

I note that the scientific method prevents us from drawing proper conclusions from limited temperature data and computer simulations of the weather. The scientific method involves fitting empirical data to a theory however a few reasonable assumptions usually apply, namely that the experiment is repeatable, that the theory both fits the data and makes testable predictions, and that a superior theory in explaining the phenomena measured will supersede its predecessor theories.

The great divide between Popper and Kuhn on the philosophical basis of contemporary science applies with a twist. The debate about the nature of the development of scientific truth is usually understood to evolve from the scientific community engaging in Popper's critical rationalism in execution of their research. Kuhn believes that scientists work in a series of paradigms rather than actually following, as espoused by Popper, a falsificationist methodology. It appears that the greenhouse debate falls squarely into this camp as being an accepted theory, a paradigm of scientists that matches the zeitgeist - the spirit of the times.

While nobody seriously denies that environment action is needed in order to make the most of our limited natural resources and to preserve these resources, and indeed the livability of our planet, for future generations it is a stretch to assume that such a belief applies to all aspects of our human interaction with the planet. The science that we know from facts that have been routinely collated for decades from studies of weather and long-term climate is extraordinary in its clarity and lack of ambiguity that there is not what is popularly known and the greenhouse effect that leads to runaway heating of the earth's atmosphere as a result of human behaviour.

As an aside, note that a while back cold fusion was a similarly controversial issue, if less enduring in the media. In summary, most of the early studies into cold fusion are widely believed to be cases of scientific fraud or just poor science; there isn't any reliable evidence for cold fusion as a viable energy source; current physics cannot explain cold fusion; funded research continues nevertheless.

Just as a liar often continues to dig a deeper hole for himself before being found out it appears that the current saga of lies and untruths about the environment are set to continue for some time yet. The case of SCO v IBM presents another case study into the sort of perverse behaviour that takes place when an aggrieved party that bases its case, in this instance formally in a court of law, on a stretch of misunderstanding (being kind) and rather than backing down continues to fight a nonsense cause that will finally cause its apocalyptic downfall.

In these cases reputations have been tarnished or destroyed but the record has largely been set straight and it is equally certain that the climate debate will eventually return to normality. Some people will continue to believe there is some kind of global conspiracy to suppress their own favourite, nonscientific idea but in truth it is highly unlikely to be the case. Does anyone still believe that oil and car companies suppressed advanced hydrogen technologies decades ago in order to protect their profitable oligopolies?

For years it seemed plausible however these same companies are racing to develop alternative energy supplies, including green and renewable energy sources, because oil supplies are dwindling. If not in 40 years or 100 years the recoverable reserves will dwindle as there is only a finite amount of accessible oil even with improvements in technology for oil recovery. The key point is that about now it appears that more money can be made from renewable and alternative energy sources yet the multinational companies that in some circles purportedly suppressed those advanced technologies cannot, against all rationality, now find them again.

Conspiracy theories aside, where does our moral and ethical position stand on this kind of issue? Is it proper for someone to promote a theory they believe to be for the greater good when they know that theory to be flawed? How about if they hold a reasonable belief in the theory without proper justification?

In the first case, there is scientific fraud and a kind of personal conceit that beggars belief. In the latter case, we again have the same sort of intellectual laziness that William Clifford railed against. Public trust in the scientific establishment has always been one that ebbs and flows, increasing trust and respect as people become more educated and declining when seeming advances lead, in war for example, to widespread unhappiness and distress.

While I believe environmental action is well within the scope of directors and officers acting with a proper purpose (eg. management of reputational risk) I am unsure where a corporation should stand with regard to social responsibility in consideration of staff, customers, the general community and our kids understanding of basic science.

For example, the hockey stick graph - smoothing the Medieval Warm Period - that has so badly humiliated many right-minded members of the IPCC and damaged its standing features prominently in An Inconvenient Truth and even more so in the public consciousness. Such distortions and convenient mistruths to push one line of thinking are quite damaging to trust and serve to close down alternate lines of enquiry.

Surely we can do better than this to stimulate and encourage public debate on this and a range of other issues. The truth based on a rational, scientific approach is the minimum the public deserves on the issue of climate change and other important issues like education and health care.

Life and Responsibility

2006-11-02T21:26:00.000+08:00

Life sure is fun. Aside from all of the technical stuff that has excited me since I was a wee lad, reading and writing has always been great loves of mine. Slices of life. Fiction and nonfiction. Reliving the experiences of others through their words and insights printed on paper; coming alive in my minds eye. Life, the universe, you know what I mean. The covert and hilarious insights into life provided by Douglas Adams and in a similar, light-hearted vein Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, one of my favourite strips. Right up there with Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Waterson. Black Adder. Black Books. Other good, subversive material that often comes out of the UK. But not always.

On a more-serious side, the Kuhn-Popper debate on scientific orthodoxy and the periodic overturning of contemporary theories by new theories versus the naive, rational, scientific assumption of falseability promulgated by Popper. Denied by many philosophers in the modern day. Basic truth to the thinking man. Denied in the citadel of scientific funding and adminstration.

The relationship to completeness in the Turing sense, self-referential Godel statements, and the various towering works of Bertrand Russell culminating in the History of Western Philosophy. Linguistics and number theory as put by Douglas Hofstadter in his masterpiece GEB The Eternal Golden Braid. More later on his thesis about the development of consciousness as a result of the 'I' symbol that develops in our minds.

I am more likely to have my friends and family throw something at me to return my own serve of a delicious pun. Not always does my turn of phrase, choice of imagery or morsel of word play satisfy to dish a platter of words, the ingredients that resonate tastily with my listener. To mix a metaphor is fine, not only five; tell me why?

There is a formal relationship between personal and professional ethics, intellectual integrity and the way in which responsible members of society address public debate. In the home, as we grow through studies, the workplace, the wider world. To make an informed choice is more than just to take the random opportunity to express an opinion. My colleague and very good friend Geoff pointed me towards a wonderful, historic speech by William Clifford to the London Metaphysical Society in 1876 that deals with this very issue.

In business, to meet governance and compliance regulations and the duty of care owed to various stakeholders through the corporation act, common law and good sense. The members, the shareholders are owed the greatest duty of care and diligence in carrying out the affairs of business. Other peoples money. The integrity model is one key to assessing strategy. Corporate social responsibility presents another, more challenging face to meeting less obvious, though no less important, obligations to indirect stakeholders. A formidable challenge.

We enjoy so many privileges and are gifted with incredible opportunities to live freely and to seek out, to achieve our ambitions. Our wonderful society allows us to pursue which ever endeavour and to chase our pleasures, both fanciful and real in our families, our friends, our colleagues, our society and our civilisation.

Qui pro quo. With privilege taken we have responsibilities owed. Luck and good fortune play their part in the unfolding of our lives. I believe it is a great pleasure to contribute to our society in any way that we can.