George Rebane

The following came in an email from a learned friend and regular RR visitor who lives in New Hampshire.  I think these thoughts frame so well the complexities and unknowns of the anthropogenic global warming and climate change issues that I wanted to share them in their entirety.  My responses to specific points/questions follow.

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Morning, George,  Your summary dismissal from The Union blog sounds egregious and ignominious, though it certainly reflects the times, and obviously your “diverse viewpoints” did not at all fit-their-bill,  and I could not tell if condolences were in order.  If so, please accept them.  Or locally is there an aspect of the wounded warrior here? We loved your “local dust devil on main street”. 

I read your earlier writings on climate and had some  chuckles at some of the responses … man, you get’m all upset, even if they don’t understand you … and was  impressed by some good arguments by others.  I am sending along here some of my own thoughts. Non-scientific.  Sorry.  And before I forget, what is utility & decision theory?
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Rubric:  Your Sisyphean Task.
Global climate change is not a “yes” or a “no”, not a “true” or a “false”.  It is the natural, perpetual condition of what we call the earth’s “weather”, and our existence depends on it.  But the phrases climate change and global warming have become “memes” and taken on lives of their own, so now when I hear people refer to either, I know they are referring to changes and warmings which they believe are the result of human activity and which are different from what is considered normal.  I also know that they are referring to anthropogenic changes and warmings which they believe are nudging the parameters of our planet’s climate toward ever more extreme conditions and even out to the edges of those conditions that sustain life on earth.  And, finally, I know that they are referring to anthropogenic pollution as the cause.  Whether-or-not that is the case we don’t know, but I think it’s irrelevant.

It does appear that the debate is over, but I do not believe it’s over because the science is right or that an age of enlightenment is upon us but because climate change and global warming have become inextricably linked in peoples’ minds to pollution.  It no longer matters whether CO2 and mercury and all their little brothers-and-sisters have anything to do with global warming.  Most people believe they do. Plus, the pollution here on the ground is nasty.  If there is a link or no-link, so be it.  Even if a very high wall could be built between pollution and climate, even if it turns out we are dealing with normal global climate fluctuations, the clean-up needs to happen.

So the contestants can parse and deconstruct the terms and the science until the cloned and genetically modified cows come home, and they should, and someday many scientists may have egg on their faces, but in the end, sooner better than later, we will have a lot of good science, a lot of good technology, and maybe a lot of good fresh fish back in the seas. 

I think at this juncture we would all do well to be reminded of Emmanuel Kant and of those wondrous hours we spent years ago trying to make sense of his categories of mind and of being humbled, and somewhat annoyed, to discover that our capacity to think and to know is not quite as infinite as we thought and that the terms of the analysis alter the outcome and that just because we can think in a certain way does not mean that we should or that it does us any good. That’s about as close as Kant ever got to humour.

So, George, I hope that this gives you a sense of where I am at on all this. Some days I am very pessimistic, and others I can see some light.  My (wife), who is even more ferocious on this than I, is even more pessimistic:  that our entire society and economic model are dependent on excessive consumption which in turn results in excessive energy needs which result in more and more pollution here and around the world.  We do believe, however, that technology is one of the things man does well and agree with you that somewhere in the next 100 yrs, we’ll get a handle on it.   A nip of trouble awaits us, however, between now and then, and even possibly an unforeseen thing or two. 

Hope this finds you well and ever embroiled.  Ne perds pas la foi. 

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Re my dismissal from The Union’s blog – thanks to friends and readers like you, I am in no sense the “wounded warrior”.  I hold the hope that after some period of purgatory, I will again be admitted into their dominion of light – but there is, of course, no guarantee since I’m not sure that they have yet properly assessed and digested all my sins.  The newspaper is going through a difficult transition, and we independent bloggers are definitely seen as loose cannons, no matter which way our muzzles may point.  I have kept a civil tongue in hopes that such contrite behavior will bear on their better natures.

Re utility and decision theory.  These are fairly arcane yet critical-to-understand areas of systems science.  Both disciplines are almost always intimately entwined in practice.  Utility theory teaches a system designer (or problem solver) to begin his work with a formal definition of what is a good design or problem solution.  The formal definition usually is expressed as a figure of merit (FOM) or utility function which is actually a formula that contains the output (dependent) variables of the system going through a specific operational scenario, or the anticipated after-effects of applying a given solution to a problem.

The output variables are, of course, determined by the input (independent) variables, system design parameters, and other outside variables not under control of the designer or problem solver.  So in the final form the FOM is calculated from system design parameters and input parameters.

The FOM always evaluates to a number (a scalar) so that the results of one design or solution can be unambiguously compared against another.  The ‘best solution’ among several candidates will be the one with the highest or lowest FOM value.  The ‘optimum solution’ is literally the best possible solution given all the constraints that may attend the design or problem to be solved.  A ‘satisficing’ solution can be thought of as the one which satisfies all attendant requirements and is as good as you are going to get given the resource limits available to find the optimum.  For many realworld problems, it is not possible to guarantee an optimum solution, but only to find a satisficing solution.

For example, the utility function or FOM for a transport vehicle, going in a straight line from point A to B, may be the time interval from start to stop.  If that is the only ‘attribute’ of utility, then the intuitively optimum scenario would be to accelerate maximally to an intermediate point from which one may then apply maximum decelerating force (brakes?) so that the vehicle just comes to a stop right at B.  The system design that now minimizes this FOM, consisting simply of ‘travel duration’, will be the best.

Most realworld FOMs are formulated from competing performance variables and require trade-offs in their application.  Returning to the above example, consider an FOM where energy (fuel) consumption is an added attribute to travel duration.  So now our FOM may be a weighted sum of the energy (say, kilowatts) used and the time duration.  Then the question immediately comes up – ‘how do we assign the relative weights to energy and travel time in our FOM’.  And here comes the important part to take away from all this.

The adoption of a utility function or FOM is necessarily an exercise where the subjective values of the designer/solver or system/solution user come into play.  Science can provide little help here because what is required to formulate a FOM comes from ‘outside the problem’ and ‘inside the solver/user’.  In sum, ultimately what is a ‘good’ solution or design is not an absolute, especially, when the FOM contains multiple attributes – like energy and duration, or number of lives saved and deaths due to collateral effects.  Finally, things get a bit more complicated when we introduce uncertainty and randomness into the mix, such as using in the FOM the estimated lives saved traded off against estimated deaths from unintended collateral effects.

And for the present, let’s describe decision theory as a collection of systematic ways of finding the highest/lowest value (extremum) of the FOM given the constraints and attendant uncertainties involved.  The hardest part is always discovering or agreeing on a satisfactory FOM, especially when several parties with different needs and agendas come together.  In politics and human affairs in general, such an FOM is the formal expression of the compromised definition of how to identify good, better, and best.  People with hidden agendas and/or of ill-will never want to adopt such a FOM, for doing so would eliminate opportunities for intended subsequent perfidy that would gain them the advantage.  We have now deconstructed political behavior with the tools of system science.  Probably more than you wanted to know.

Re “excessive energy consumption” and “excessive pollution”.   With the above understanding of utility, your concerns may conceptually be expressed as a computable FOM having the attributes of energy consumed (in some form over some period or at some rate) and measures of pollutions (combining the measurements of certain/zillions of pollution monitoring devices in a formula which is another FOM).  We will not know what is “excessive” and what the scope of such an appellation is until we agree on an FOM.  Until that time the parties will just continue to talk past each other while attempting to coerce their respective constituencies into some action they each consider beneficial in some sense.  And I don’t see that accords such as Kyoto or Bali will help much because they don’t start with an explicit FOM but go directly into ad hoc prescriptions which are hard/impossible to defend on any reasonable basis.  Nevertheless, they seem to be defining the direction of our headlong rush for some ‘solution’.

Consternations withstanding, your reasonable sentiments must be taken with the inevitable tendency of all critters to soil their nest/habitat if they become too numerous for its carrying capacity.  The impetus to do this is strong and ‘locally reasonable’ as we were taught by Garrett Hardin (‘Theory of the Commons’).  In this, the reality to which we must all return is that the richer (better off) critters soil their nest least, and have the only chance of achieving some sustainable balance short of mass slaughter of the innocents.  Then as we sort through our reactionary regimens for a cleaner and kinder future, we must be careful not to pick one that leaves the earth teeming with polluting paupers – then all will be lost.