We have assembled a group of leading scientists to improve communication on the issue of climate change. Our group is committed to providing rapid, high-quality information to media and government. Our members have expertise in virtually all areas of climate science and they are available to share their current understanding. Questions and requests can be submitted below.

Sounds great to me, but I was curious as to who was behind the project, and who these “scientists” I might talk to actually are. I submitted this query with their form, and got the following email back 20 minutes later. (Dr. Weymann kindly gave me permission to publish it; the added links are mine)

Dear Jonathan,

This is Dr. Ray Weymann, one of the 3 (along with John Abraham and Scott Mandia) who set up and are administrating the CSRRT.

I am a retired astrophysicist, and member of the National Academy of Sciences; John Abraham is on the faculty of St. Thomas University and is a specialist in thermal heat transfer, while Scott is a Prof. at a College on Long Island lecturing on climate science issues.

None of us are climate scientists, and we do not provide the answers to inquiries ourselves, nor do we edit them, but we do have extensive contacts with expert climate scientists. Our role is simply to “direct traffic” to those individuals who have the appropriate expertise for the inquiry in question.

Thus far we have enlisted approximately 70 climate scientists. They are chosen on the basis of their professional competence as reflected in original research in peer-reviewed professional scientific journals. Nearly all of them are members of University faculties in Departments involving some aspect of climate science or in Government laboratories (e.g. NASA, NOAA) both here and abroad.

In enlisting these individuals we have agreed that the full list would not be distributed to the media (the whole point of the CSRRT is to direct media inquiries to the best set of scientists to answer them).

However, when responses are provided, the name and affiliation of the climate scientist is provided and in the heavy majority of cases the scientist will respond directly to you. If you request it, in nearly all cases the home page of the responding scientist(s) can be made available: You can then see for yourself the professional qualifications of the person(s) who responded.

I emphasize that our role is educational; we are not a lobbying group for any political course of action but want to provide the best information from the people who are actually doing the research.

Let me know if you want further information.

-Dr. Ray Weymann

Weymann tells me that much of this information will shortly be up on the site itself. Naturally journalists must do their own vetting and  checks on sources, but this seems like an incredibly useful service to media professionals on a deadline.

Thanks to Danish environmental scientist @mona_jensen for the tip. She also points out Dr. Abraham’s previous climate education work.

Despite spending the last several days reading up on Treasury Secretary Geithner’s plan to buy bad bank assests, I now feel only marginally better prepared to judge whether this is a good idea or not. Of course, no one is asking me, but I still think it’s a big problem that I can’t evaluate this plan, because the fact that we live in a democracy means that citizens need to be able to understand what their government is doing. 

Now, I am no economist and I have no idea how to run a bank — much less all the banks. However, I am smart, interested, and I’ve done my homework, including previously reading a first year economics textbook (covering both micro- and macro-economics) and several other interesting books (1,2,3) on how markets work or don’t. In short I have been the model of a concerned citizen, and I still have no idea what is going on. This is partially because the situation is very complex, but it is also because there is no way a private citizen can get access to the data that would clarify matters — large banks will barely share their balance sheets with the government, much less me.

This is a problem. It means that the government, financial, and academic communities have not paid nearly enough attention both to basic economics education, and to transparency in real-world business. It is therefore impossible for anyone else to check their assumptions and restrain their huge power. Lest this sounds like unhelpful complaining, I promise to make a concrete suggestion for improvement by the end of this post.

I find it useful to compare the question of bank bailouts to climate change. Like the worldwide recession, climate change presents a policy problem of global scope that needs to be handled right the first time. And like the global economy, climate change is a ridiculously complex problem, depending on the long-term interplay of hundreds of variables interacting through physical laws that most people have never head of. Because I was once a physicist, I can appreciate the basic science involved, and I can even make credible sense of specialist papers in the field. However, I don’t have to: the most cursory investigation of the topic quickly leads to the IPCC reports, a series of massively collaborative international summaries of current knowledge. There is no such authoritative primer for the economic crisis.

The best I have been able to find is Baseline Scenario’s Financial Crisis for Beginners, a collection of articles and interviews on various aspects of the problem. On the Geithner plan in particular, I have also found Brad DeLong’s FAQ to be quite helpful. Unfortunately, his (good) opinion of the plan is not universal: noted (and Nobel-winning) economist Paul Krugman disagrees. There’s a lively debate in the New York Times editorial pages today, and so it goes…

The core of the plan is this: the US Treasury will provide loans to allow investors to buy up bad bank assets — mortgages that might not be repaid, that sort of thing — as a long term speculative investment. This will, in theory, make the troubled banks more solvent, which should encourage them to start lending again. The potential problem is this: the loans will be “non-recourse“, which means that investors don’t have to repay the loans if these assets really are worth little or nothing. It amounts to the government insuring financiers to take more risk — for free.

This galls me, but it actually makes sense if you believe that the root of the current problem is that everyone is scared to take risk, and thus businesses can’t get loans, etc., which is the well-reasoned position of yet another prominent economist. It doesn’t make sense if you believe that some of these bad assets are just that: worthless debt that will never be repaid, such as mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them in the first place. In this view, the pre-crash boom was just a pyramid scheme that finally collapsed.

Which view is right? I have no idea. Neither, it seems, does anyone else. The major papers seem more interested in covering the politics of who said what (see, e.g. this from the NYT) than getting deep into the complexities of what is actually going on. This isn’t helpful; it’s little more than celebrity gossip, yapping about what the stars are doing. It’s akin to talk-show pundits arguing about climate change — which, sadly, also happens frequently.

So where is the IPCC report for the financial crisis?  Where is the graph that shows that lending has collapsed? Where is the excruciatingly careful analysis of the relationship between credit and unemployment? What percentage of which assets at which banks are now considered to be bad? I know these things must exist — I surely hope they do — but I do not have the time, expertise, or connections to track everything down. Thus I want a careful overview, but I also want the citations, because requiring that claims be documented is a really good way of keeping people intellectually honest. Lacking this, what reason do I  have to believe anything that anyone is saying?

One of the clearer, more careful resources I’ve found is the Congressional Research Service report “Causes of the Financial Crisis.” Ironically, this document, like all CRS reports, was not meant for members of the general public, and it had to be leaked to the fabulous OpenCRS.com for us to get at it. And in this summary I find the most refreshingly honest sentence:

While some may insist that there is a single cause, and thus a simple remedy, the sheer number of causal factors that have been identified tends to suggest that the current financial situation is not yet understood in its full complexity. 

If we are at all serious about democracy, then public education about complex topics must be a specific goal. This is a goal that goes hand-in-hand with greater transparency, because it is not possible to make convincing arguments about data that is secret. We need to be treated like adults, not children: the level of economic discourse in the current press is scarcely high-school level, complete with whispered secrets and gossip about who is popular. At best, the major players in this game — the US government and financial institutions — have been negligent in educating the public on the functioning and dys-functioning of the economy; at worst they are playing politics to protect their power and money. Nor have academia or well-informed bloggers stepped in to fill the vacuum.

Again, what is needed is a meticulously documented argument as to 1) what happened and 2) what can be expected to fix it. The truth may be that we simply don’t know what happened or what will happen next — but even if this is so, I want to know why those in charge believe what they believe. Lacking such a detailed, evidence-based narrative, it is simply not possible to be an informed citizen. The worst part is, I’m not sure that our professional legislators currently understand any more than I do. Transparency and good education benefit us all.

Or at least help us to understand it. Climateprediction.net is a large-scale scientific computing experiment, relying on individual computer users who donate their computer time for the simulation of tens of thousands of global warming scenarios. This is important because, lacking other Earths to experiment with, computer simulations are really the only way we can validate our existing models of climate change — and then predict the future with models we think are accurate.

The climateprediction.net project comprises three separate experiments – one to explore the model we are using, the second to see how well the models replicate past climate and the third to finally produce a forecast for 21st century climate. Each model that we distribute will be used for all three experiments.

Built upon the BOINC scientific computing framework oriignally developed for the groundbreaking SETI@Home project, Climateprediction.net relies upon hundreds of thousands of volunteer users who donate their spare computer time. All of these machines together are effectively one of the largest supercomputers in the world, and this allows previously impossible scientific studies. The Climateprediction.net scientific team can run not just one or a few climate prediction simulations, but hundreds of thousands. One study performed this way was the Seasonal Attribution Experiment:

We focus on extreme weather events that occur on a seasonal timescale, and in our current project we focus specifically on the United Kingdom floods of Autumn 2000 which occurred during the wettest autumn ever recorded, causing widespread damage and an estimated insured loss of £ 1.3 billion.

Half of the climate model simulations we run are of the Autumn 2000 period, specifically including within them the effects of human-induced climate change caused by the emission of greenhouse gases. The other half will simulate a representation of the the Autumn 2000 climate had there not been any human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases over the last century. By then comparing the results of these two simulated climates, and recording the occurrence of floods like that of Autumn 2000 in each of them, we can determine how the frequency of occurrence (or ‘risk’) of such a flood has changed, and therefore how much risk is attributable to human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases over the last century.

So far, so good. This sort of modeling has been attempted before. Here’s the fun part: because so much computing power is available, a statistical study becomes possible. Rather than looking for floods in a handful of simulated case studies, the CPDN researchers are running 10,000 simulations each of the climate with and without post-industrial greenhouse gas emissions. Each simulation is started with slightly different initial conditions, which are then amplified by the classic butterfly effect into completely different simulated histories. Not every simulation will result in floods in Britain in the Autumn of 2000; in fact, because the flood was a once-in-a-century event in any case, most of them won’t. But by counting the number of floods with and without humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions, we can determine how much our industrial activity has amplified the risk of large flood.

This is akin to an epidemiologist determining how much smoking increases the risk of lung cancer, and the massive number of Climateprediction.net simulations are like to having not just ten but 10,000 case histories. It’s a breakthrough, and it’s only one of several different Climateprediction.net experiments, which have now cumulatively run almost 400,000 different climate simulations covering 41,000,000 years of hypothetical history. It made me very happy to learn about this project; it gives me hope that climate scientists have unlimited access to one of the largest supercomputers that has ever existed, given to them freely by the citizens of (it says on the map here) 132 different countries. You too can help.

Okay, but how did I end up on this side and not that side?

I went through this in Russia last year, when I was hosted in Moscow by a global warming skeptic; apparently it’s politically popular there to deny global warming, which sounds like a slight to Russia except when you remember that it’s politically popular here, too. But anyway, I was plunged headfirst into the debate with an ambitious little snot of a web-startup wannabe millionaire (“You should see our new offices! The Mafia used to operate out of there! They still visit someimes.”) Running through the arguments in great detail (as I previously reported here) I was forced to ask the very pertinent question, why do I believe that global warming is real, and man-made, and a serious problem?

The quick answer is that I believe the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, but that’s also just ink on paper. Why do I trust them?

It has to do with process. To begin with, I know what the IPCC process actually is. They have devoted almost as much dead tree to how they reached their conclusions as to the conclusions themselves. In short, they collected something like 600 climate scientists from 40 countries, locked them in a library with a complete and current set of all relevant academic and scientific publications, and threw raw meat at them through the bars until they reached consensus. Actually, that’s not quite how it happened. Some of them were vegetarians.

The 2007 Fourth Assessment Report was then further reviewed by another 600-odd people, corrected, argued over, politicized, and finally published. Although there is no way to guarantee against bias in the author and reviewer selection process, at least a very diverse range of viewpoints could be expected to be represented, and at least the people involved have some reason to know what they’re talking about, having spent significant chunks of their lives asking questions about the ecosystem. This is as global and as sincere an effort to answer a question as humanity has ever seen, and it was all meticulously open and transparent.

There is a moral here.

One of the great things that thorough education teaches you — any education — is just how deep the rabbit hole of knowledge goes. It’s a smart person who realizes how big and complex and subtle any real discipline is; and I am absolutely at a loss to answer the tricky questions of someone else’s field, be they about global warming, the effectiveness of acupuncture, or whether cutting taxes will really help with unemployment (or not.) The only truly universal approach, our only hope for living in a world too big for reason, is to learn to evaluate how any given body of knowledge decides what is true and what is not true. In painful depth and detail.

The method, philosophy, and process of coming to believe: that is everything. I can’t say I even understand this process in myself, let alone an entire civilization, but I can say with conviction that it’s my favorite field of study.

But only until Friday.

What can and cannot be regulated is in fact heavily regulated. In April 2007 there was a Supreme Court decision called Massachusetts vs. EPA, in which it was decided that the EPA did in fact have the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, including carbon dioxide, because they qualify as “polutants” under the Clean Air Act.

Actually, legally, the EPA now must regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, they still might not; the EPA could take years to draw up the rules, set the standards too low to have any effect, include the same sort of loopholes that we currently drive SUVs through in the fuel efficiency standards, or simply not enforce the resulting regulation.

But at least they’re currently asking for your feedback. They’ve put up a very official-looking page with the sassy title of Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking: Regulating Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air Act, wherein they announce their intention to respond to the court’s decision, and then provide about 600 more pages of material describing what the options might be. Both cars and “stationary sources” are potentially included, but the biggest issue is whether the EPA will set limits on the carbon emissions from newly manufactured cars, much as they already set fuel efficiency requirements. Then they ask for comments.

Anyway, it’s a mouthful. There’s a decent three-page factsheet, if you don’t want to get into the gory details of the full Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. Also included on the web site are six pages of instructions on how to comment. Or, you can do this the easy way:

• If you’re one of those who believe that global warming is real and dangerous and that industry just won’t take care of it without government leadership, you can use the convenient form over at the We Campaign.
• On the other hand, if you take the recent financial meltdown as evidence that business does best when unfettered by communist regulations, and desire as StopTheACLU.com does to “tell them NO on their jobs killing, economy busting plans to stop non-existent global warming,” there’s another convenient form over at StopEPA.

But you better do it soon, because the comment period closes Nov. 28th. Go comment. I bet Chevron already has.

Why? Probably because it includes the narration,

So why are we still stuck with dirty and expensive energy?
Because big oil spends hundreds of millions of dollars to block clean energy.

Instead, ABC aired Chevron commercials during the debate.

Sort of speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Call it confirmation bias, but I take this as a bad sign for the enviroment.

Are we completely powerless here? Probably not. One could take a moment to digg the story, and perhaps also to add your name to the letter that the We Campaign is sending to ABC. They’re hoping to get 100,000 signatures, which seems a very reasonable number. I wonder if they’re going to print them all out and hand deliver that stack of paper… and then smack someone with it. Sadly, this would probably not help them in their actual goal, which is to get the ad aired during next debate.

This may be difficult, because Chevron no doubt has an even bigger stack of paper.

Water shipped from Fiji is being advertised as environmentally friendly. Wow.

One sustainability blogger estimates that the total amount of water used to produce and deliver a single one liter bottle of imported water is 6.74 liters, and 250 grams of greenhouse gases are released.

The company claims that it intends to become carbon neutral, but not actually: they’re buying carbon offsets, which don’t actually reduce the quantity of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere (This is because there is no international framework to incrementally reduce the total number of credits available.)

There’s really no way around the fact that shipping water across the ocean in small plastic bottles is just a much dumber idea than getting it locally through pipes.

I mean, c’mon people.

Several friends have written to me about my piece on Gore’s Sustainable Electricity Challenge, trying to answer the question of how you make climate change mitigation sexy. One person argued that it’s all about associations. When people think of oil they need to think of black goo, the agony of war, evildoers and open sores. When they think of sustainability they should imagine pretty young people, green trees, crystal waterfalls and shining futures. This idea of associations is at the core of classic marketing and public relations techniques. Hence, the Biodiesel Hottie.

I mentioned this to a friend and he instantly translated the central meaning: “preventing the collapse of civilization gives me a boner!”

Well, yes. That is sort of what a hot body in biodiesel bling says. From this ridiculousness he argued that real social change had to include deep education at the primary and secondary school level. I agree completely — but we still need marketing, because, near as I can tell, people don’t actually base the vast majority of their opinions on critical thinking. This should not be shocking.

The argument against a clever, targeted public relations campaign to instill a lust for the Right Thing — sustainability — is that marketing sells image, not substance. Education makes people smarter, marketing makes them stupider, and so it’s entirely possible for people to “buy into” the image of sustainability without actually making any difference. We could all be walking around wearing our BIODIESEL baby-Ts, our fair-trade hemp jeans, listening to some fresh new update of Midnight Oil’s classic enviro-hit Beds Are Burning on our recylable greenPods and all the while continuing to drive our fossil-fuel cars to work. (And to live shows, of course.)

Put another way, we don’t want consumers, we want responsible citizens.

And yet, our world is heavily mediated by the messages we receive, because there’s simply too much world for us to figure it all out ourselves. Marketing sustainability is about more than getting 14 year old girls in Burbank to say things like, “oh my god! Carbon emissions are so disgusting!” It is about that, but it’s also about those who consider themselves generally awake, because even intelligent, caring, and otherwise conscious people can’t do an in-depth study of everything.

Our internal worlds are shaped by a mad swarm of “background” attitudes that we acquired without consciously choosing them. Here in California, smoking is generally considered just as gross as global warming. But why? Thirty years ago, it was awfully cool. Did the general public start reading the oncology, cardiology, and epidemiology journals and discover that (oh my god!) cigarettes are actually bad for your health? Of course not. Instead there was a massive public relations campaign to shape our perceptions. Only we called it a “public health” campaign, because no one likes to be told what to think.

This is about cultural context. This is about culture. This is about those associations I mentioned. Education and science and actual, you know, facts are critical, but the symbols we use in setting up the background assumptions of our society are important too. And we badly need new ones. For example I’m pretty sure that “eco-” has to go. “Eco-” has lost it’s original meaning of “ecological.” Now it sort of means “crappier than before” (eco-detergents like vinegar that don’t clean very well) or “inconvenient” (eco-friendly reusable bags that you always forget to bring to the store), or it might mean nothing at all, having become merely a market-speak word like “premium.” I bet it also invokes “hippie ” for a lot of people, and whatever that movement’s lasting cultural influence may have been, for many, many Americans today “hippies” are too closely associated with unshaven deadbeats, scratchy natural fibers, and a weird a-scientific love of hemp

Marketing is not a dark art. It’s just often used for dark things. If we’re serious about changing the way that that those who have not thought closely about sustainability think about sustainability — this would be almost everyone — then we have to understand what tools are available to shape perceptions. Oil has to be gross, sustainable energy has to be hot. Sure, we also need people to know why oil is gross, but that’s not enough.

Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.

This is going to be hard. Not because of the massive amounts of new technology and infrastructure required — though that will be hard too — but because preventing catastrophic climate change is not sexy. There will be no crowning achievement. There will not be any small steps for a man, only a completely invisible giant leap for mankind. We are not in a race against an evil superpower with bigger rockets. Sustainable electricity makes terrible television.

The Space Race stirred imaginations and made for wonderful nationalist symbols. Further, it was both justified by and perpetuated the Great Struggle against the evil Communists, and let’s not forget that the same engineering team was responsible for both the mighty Saturn V and the first ICBMs. Indeed, the first American in space was launched on top of a former nuclear missile. For our grand goal of climate change mitigation, we’ll have none of that. Even worse, it’s against pretty much all of the major interests — let’s just say it: military-industrial — which made this nation what it is.

Preventing climate change is like flossing your teeth: it’s sort of irritating and has no immediately obvious benefit. So for this to work, Gore (and anyone else who cares) has to link the project with ideas that stir people. He’s trying to do this by linking carbon emissions to other American problems, namely the economy and national security:

We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that has to change.

And he’s right. Trouble is, these are also negative goals. The trade deficit and the failing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are problems that need to be fixed, not new heights to aspire to. They’re no space program. This is not to knock Gore: I think that his ten year target for sustainable electricity is a fabulous idea. More than that: a necessary idea. All the science says we have to get serious about this, and that requires exactly the sort of deep politics and policy changes that Gore is calling for. What we need now is some way to see this as progress, rather than damage control.

Support him anyway on http://www.wecansolveit.org/