Put Another Log on the Fire

This week finds us wondering about something we thought we had gotten away from when we exited Upstate New York: the prospect of running out of firewood!  An early start to winter way down here at Latitude 30.32 has our wood stove working a lot harder than recent experience had led us to expect. A blast of snow and hard frost has it is starting to look like our not inconsiderable wood pile might not get us through winter. Now the consequences of this are not as bad as in one of our “favorite” memories of life in the Taconic Hills (i.e., stumbling around in the snowdrifts looking for deadwood that might be burnable) but it certainly helps to set my frame of mind as I consider the scandal that has engulfed the “science” of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). 

This recent uproar, wherein a coterie of scientists got caught red-handed perpetrating an array of dirty tricks in order to protect their carefully orchestrated “consensus”, does not offer much as to the substance of the debate over AGW. To argue that it somehow settles the matter as to whether the “A” belongs next to the observable phenomenon that is “GW” would be to stoop to the same tainted logic that its promoters have used in imploring that “the discussion is over”. A wobbly case just got a whole lot more so, but it is the authority upon which so much of it rested that took the real hit. At issue is a matter even larger than what the Gasbag from Tennessee or that weird man who is in line to be the next King of England have told us is at stake. Our worst suspicions about collaboration between corrupt journalism and corrupt science have been confirmed. Like the proverbial pair of sticks, portions of those two institutions were rubbed together under a pretense of producing illumination, but after years of generating nothing but blinding smoke have suddenly burst into a pyre that threatens to immolate both of them.  

Now to say that an enabling if not morbidly incurious Establishment media has lost yet another shard of credibility is not unlike describing the Titanic settling a bit deeper into the sea bottom as “sinking”. Corruption in the press has been with us for about as long as there has been printing, though the fatalism that has accompanied the technology driven splintering of media seems to have hastened the rate of putrification. The true heart of the matter is what this scandal has to say about the enterprise that calls itself Science. We should not be surprised that people who choose this path are any less corruptible than those who choose others. The proportion who succumb to, say, greed might not be as high as what we observe on Wall Street, but that does not mean that at least a few “scientists” will not sell out for money. The temptation to celebrity,  to prideful repute as a top “expert”, or that urge to be a part of some “inner circle”, and of course the impulse to exert control over others; has not Science grown to be a sufficiently capacious tent to provide cover for legions who are susceptible to these? Thoughtful observers will not be surprised to find that Big Science has its bad apples, too. But as others have already observed, AGW has over the past few decades become the face of Science as popularly understood. It has not helped that like so many other words, “science” has gotten so squishy, to degree that what we once called the “hard” sciences have been buried under all kinds of activities that employ a lot of “scientists” in what amounts to mere speculative (i.e., not subject to that empirical verification that once defined the heart of science) activity. With AGW having hogged the spotlight for so long and now having been rendered suspect by the exceedingly unscientific actions of its perpetrators, we have to wonder how much damage will be done to the credibility of science as a whole. 

This is not an altogether worrisome development. One wonders how hard anyone anywhere thinks about the science underlying the technology which enmeshed so much of their lives. How awful would it be if it got harder for charlatans to wrap themselves in that mantle of authority that so many people ascribe to science? I am thinking of someone I once did a bit of business with whose arguments are riddled with condescension rooted in his status as a “scientist”. The man rescues squirrels and cats for a living (okay, endangered snow leopards.), a kind of globe trotting dog-catcher if you will. A bunch of biology courses 25 years ago somehow makes him more of an authority on any matter encompassed by “science” than the rest of us. Not surprisingly, a lot of people fall for this. It has been said that Nathan’s of NY hot dog fame got its first leg up by hiring earnest looking young men wearing white lab jackets to hang around eating at their stand. It created the impression that if doctors ate there, it must be good for you. The bull case here, if you will, is that spurious “science” might lose some of its ability to bamboozle, that it will become harder for charlatans to extract money, political power or influence by invoking the priest caste that so much of the “scientific community” has become. 

I think we can expect this scandal to slow the advance of Green Tech and forestall some of its more damaging aspects, but there are good reasons to expect the body politic to proceed with some kind of Energy bill. The need for some kind of driver of economic growth will trump the shoddiness of the science. Recovery from a recession requires some kind of economic locomotive. Last time it was housing, the time before that, the emergence of the Internet economy. Neither of these look powerful enough to move the needle on 10% unemployment. A re-tooling of energy production and distribution, worldwide, certainly has that potential. Just because the issue of what the energy sector will look like in the future has been co-opted by jackasses does not mean that there are not bona fide investments to be made in safer, cleaner more efficient power. For example, the US seems to be dragging its feet while the rest of the world, down to the likes of Viet Nam and Bulgaria, are jumping on the nuclear power band wagon. Opponents have been reduced to making insinuations about “cost”, but considering our lack of focus here for the last 35 years, what do we know about what the actual costs might be? It is specious to say that its too expensive because we haven’t really treated it with the kind of priority that in the past have  yielded surprisingly good results. It is an engineering problem, the kind Americans are unusually good at. Make it a priority like the Space Race, and we just might surprise ourselves with just how cost effective a solution our engineers come up with.  

There are also ways that our electrical grid can be made a lot smarter, at least if politics can be kept at bay. There are certainly more places where siting wind turbines makes sense, though probably not as many as the industry’s advocates would have us believe. Likewise, if there really is a path forward for solar cell efficiency akin to what was done with previous nano-structures like microprocessors and LCDs (I suspect we will eventually find out why Moore’s Law is less applicable here than purported, but am willing to go along until more evidence is in.) moderate subsidies might prove to be a good policy investment. All this would be easier to implement if AGW was a credible, palpable threat its perpetrators have labored to trump it up to, but less so now that the credibility of Big Science has gone up in smoke. Expect a lot of Wizard-of-Oz-like “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” from the political class and their enablers, a greatly diminished likelihood of severe damage-by-legislation, but also a continuation of investment that improves the lives of millions, though perhaps with not quite the financial returns that a few friends-of-Al have been dreaming about. In the mean time, I’ve got to go and put another log on the fire.