Must We Pretend?

An article at countercurrents.org said this recently:

«A new study has warned that if global temperatures rise more than 1.5°C, significant crop diversity could be lost in many regions»
—Global Warming and Food Security: The Impact on Crop Diversity

Are we not sufficiently at the 1.5°C mark that this dance in reporting is ludicrous?

I'm starting to perceive the weather/climate distinction less as a matter of scientific certainty and more as an excuse to delay action for a long time. Here that distinction seems to be actively working against the cause of human survival by delaying what seems a truly obvious conclusion, and in doing so giving cover to inaction.

We already have a many year trend that shows things getting pretty steadily worse year over year, with not much backsliding, so it's not like we realistically have to wait 10 years to see if this surpassing 1.5°C is going to magically go away on its own. Indeed, by the time we get that much confirmation, these effects we fear will have seriously clubbed us over the head for too long.

«“The top ten hottest years on record have happened in the last ten years, including 2024,” António Guterres said in his New Year message, stressing that humanity has “no time to lose.”»
—2024, Hottest Year on Record, Marks ‘Decade of Deadly Heat’

I keep seeing reports (several quoted by me here below) that we averaged above that in 2024, so I find this predication on a pipe dream highly misleading.

Even just wordings suggesting that the crossing of some discrete boundary will trigger an effect, but that not crossing it will not, is misleading. It's not like 1.49°C will leave us with no loss of diversity, but 1.51°C will hit us with all these effects.

What needs to be said more plainly is this:

Significant crop diversity is being ever more lost in real time now, and this loss is a result of global average temperatures that are dangerous and getting moreso. That they are a specific value on an instantaneous or rolling average basis gives credibility and texture to this qualitative claim, but no comfort should be drawn from almost-ness nor from theoretical clains that action could yet pull us back from a precipice that there is not similarly substantiated qualitative reason to believe we are politically poised to make.

Science reporting does this kind of thing a lot. Someone will get funding to test whether humans need air to breathe but some accident of how the experiments are set up will find that only pregnant women under 30 were available for testing so the report will be a very specific about that and news reports will end up saying "new report proves pregnant women under 30 need air to breathe", which doesn't really tell the public the thing that the study really meant to report. Climate reporting is full of similarly overly specific claims that allow the public to dismiss the significance of what's really going on. People writing scientific reports need to be conscious of the fact that the reporting will be done in that way and that public inaction will be a direct result of such narrow reporting.

In the three reports that I quote below, the Berkeley report at least takes the time to say "recent warming trends and the lack of adequate mitigation measures make it clear that the 1.5 °C goal will not be met." We need more plain wordings like this, and even this needs to have been more prominently placed.

There is a conspiracy, intentional or not, between the writers of reports and the writers of articles. The article writer wants to quote the report, but the report wants to say something that has such technical accuracy that it will be misleading when quoted by someone writing articles. Some may say it's not an active conspiracy, just a negative synergy, but the effect is the same. Each party acts as if it is being conservative and careful, but the foreseeable combination of the two parts is anything but conservative or careful.

References
(bold added here for emphasis)

«The global annual average for 2024 in our dataset is estimated as 1.62 ± 0.06 °C (2.91 ± 0.11 °F) above the average during the period 1850 to 1900, which is traditionally used a reference for the pre-industrial period. […] A goal of keeping global warming to no more than 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above pre-industrial has been an intense focus of international attention. This goal is defined based on multi-decadal averages, and so a single year above 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) does not directly constitute a failure. However, recent warming trends and the lack of adequate mitigation measures make it clear that the 1.5 °C goal will not be met. The long-term average of global temperature is likely to effectively cross the 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) threshold in the next 5-10 years. While the 1.5 °C goal will not be met, urgent action is still needed to limit man-made climate change.»
—Global Temperature Report for 2024 (Berkeley Earth)

«The global average surface temperature was 1.55 °C (with a margin of uncertainty of ± 0.13 °C) above the 1850-1900 average, according to WMO’s consolidated analysis of the six datasets. This means that we have likely just experienced the first calendar year with a global mean temperature of more than 1.5°C above the 1850-1900 average.»
— WMO confirms 2024 as warmest year on record at about 1.55°C above pre-industrial level

«NASA scientists further estimate Earth in 2024 was about 2.65 degrees Fahrenheit (1.47 degrees Celsius) warmer than the mid-19th century average (1850-1900). For more than half of 2024, average temperatures were more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the baseline, and the annual average, with mathematical uncertainties, may have exceeded the level for the first time.»
— Temperatures Rising: NASA Confirms 2024 Warmest Year on Record

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This grew out of an essay I posted at Mastodon, and a haiku (senryu) that I later wrote as a way to distill out some key points.

Parallel Universes

My friend Probyn Gregory has been writing about his nervousness being near the fires in LA.

Probably a lot of people have.

I assume it helps people dissipate stress, or to feel less alone.

Fortunes might change on a dime, so perhaps some want to leave a realtime record of what's going on, just in case they suddenly blink out of existence.

Some are poised to run, and want to leave hints about where they might be found in case they are delayed or blocked from their chosen destination.

Some probably want to communicate the urgency of dealing with Climate by personalizing the risk. It's too easy to think this happens only to other people. Within the US, it's often portrayed as something affecting only far away countries.

Today Probyn wrote:

“We may not live in Altadena but our lives are enmeshed in it. I see people just a mile or two away driving in rush hour presumably to work and it seems positively surreal, this facsimile of normal juxtaposed with what I feel inside, this aching sadness and not-quite-coming-to-grips.”

—Probyn Gregory on Facebook (Jan 12, 2025)

I think this is a metaphor for our nation.
And the world.

AI-Generated envisioning of a divided world: some experiencing collapse, the rest in denial.

It's not just our neighbors' world that is on the brink of collapse. We live in that same world.

Individually, some of us get it. But, collectively, as a society, we're still not quite coming to grips with how serious this is.

Time to wake up.

 

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The image was generated at abacus.ai using Claude Sonnet 3.5 and FLUX 1.1 [pro] Ultra. The initial request was for “a generic part of downtown Los Angeles, looking down a street that divides the image into two parts. on the right hand side, show ordinary buildings and people casually moving among them, cars parked, cars driving normally, business as usual. On the right side, show parked fire engines, buildings in flames, a world in collapse.” Some post-processing was done both by the LLM and by me using GIMP.

Election 2024 FAQ

Q. Who should I vote for?

A. Kamala Harris.

Q. But what about Trump?

A. The guy with 34 felony convictions and several court cases pending?

The guy who says he'll be a dictator on day one? He says only day one. Give some thought to how much you trust his impulse control.

I could go on, but just read some of these other questions and answers. They should make it plain why Harris is the only safe, sane, and moral choice.

Q. OK, so he's pretty evil. But I'm willing to put on my blinders because he's quite a business man, am I right? He'll make our economy successful, right?

A. Rachel Maddow spent a segment calling his bluff on all of this. This shouldn't be a great surprise. Trump was convicted in of fraud in New York civil court, and ordered to pay $355 million dollars. It is not a stretch to think he might commit fraud in other situations. Trump's niece, Mary Trump, has a lot to say about his lying.

Q. But hasn't Biden just weaponized the Justice Department? Those aren't real charges are they? Surely they're partisan fictions.

A. No. Biden hasn't done any such thing. In fact, it's the other way around. We're finding more and more evidence that weaponizing the Department of Justice (DOJ) is something Trump sought to do as President. He was held back by others in the government who told him he couldn't. Such restraint is unlikely to happen again because he'll pick yes men to advise him this time around.

Also, Trump is promising to prosecute his political rivals. That isn't how we've traditionally done politics in the US. The whole point of “free speech” is the free exchange of ideas. He wants to end that. He doesn't like dissent. It could get very ugly.

Q. Trump says he'll protect American business by adding big tariffs other countries have to pay. Isn't that good?

A. In a word? No. Trump can't make other countries pay anything. He can make you pay to receive things from other countries. Economists estimate this will cost the average household an extra $4000 a year. Harris is calling it a Trump “sales tax,” which is what it will feel like.

Also, it's been widely reported that businesses are readying to raise prices in anticipation of Trump's tariffs.

Q. But isn't Trump a business guy? He says he'll hire “only the best people”.

A. Many of those same people warn strongly against electing him.

Q. This is upsetting. If that's true, what about his January 6 “lovefest”? Surely you're not saying that was a fiction.

A. Several people lost their lives at Trump's so-called “lovefest” that day. Pence barely made it to safety as crowds chanted “Hang Mike Pence”. The House investigated and confirmed the seriousness of these actions, calling Republican witnesses, many of them Trump staffers, to build their case.

Q. Trump says he'll be a protector of women—

A. Oh, just stop. I know you didn't even get all the way through your question, but, please, just stop. No. He will not. Neither will Vance.

The Washington Post counted his false and misleading statements over a four-year period. They tallied 30,573. You can't trust his promises. He knows they are not legally binding.

But he also appointed Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade and bragged about it. During the 2016 campaign period, MSNBC's Chris Matthews got Trump to say “there has to be some form of punishment” for a woman getting an abortion.

And if you haven't read Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale, might I suggest you do? It just might turn out to be a useful reference.

Q. My husband tells me I should vote like he does. Is that true?

A. No. We vote privately in the US. At least we do now, under democracy. Who knows what will happen if Trump gains control. He'll probably appoint still more Supreme Court justices. The ones he already appointed have suggested they may want to roll back women's right to vote.

Q. I hate all of this. What if I just “send a message” by staying home?

A. Sitting it out does not send the message “I want another choice.” It sends the message “I'm equally happy with either of these choices.” Read the rest of this FAQ and then get yourself to the polls. You'll be glad you did.

Q. I'm mad about Harris's Climate policies. Can I “send a message” by voting for Jill Stein?

A. Only Trump or Harris will be elected. Stein doesn't have any hope at all of being elected. So the message you send will be at a steep price because Harris has by far a more Climate-friendly record and platform than Trump. Trump does not think that “science knows” if Climate Change is real. (Spoiler Warning: Science knows.)

Voting for Stein does not send the message “I want another choice,” but instead sends the message “I'm equally happy with either of these choices.” There are better times and ways to protest Climate policy.

The world will be very different under these two candidates.
If you care about those differences, you need to vote.

There is good reason to think that protest votes for Jill Stein may have tipped the 2016 election to Trump. If you care about Climate and would be otherwise voting for Harris, there are other ways to protest than to throw the election to Trump.

Q. But what about the Gaza genocide? Biden and Harris are still sending munitions.

A. This is a real concern, but boycotting the election is the wrong way to solve it. Whatever you think of Biden and Harris on Gaza policy, Trump is much worse. He wants to be best friends with Netanyahu, in part because both of them see it important to stay in power to avoid prison.

My advice? Find another way to protest. But believe me, you want to be protesting under Harris, who thinks that's a normal thing to do. Trump wanted to shoot at protesters. He does not like dissent, and especially when it's by or about people of color.

Q. But, but—the border. And all those migrants.

A. The border issue is a real issue, but very complicated. In collaboration with the Biden/Harris administration, Republican conservatives drafted a somewhat harsh policy that nevertheless had bipartisan support and by all accounts would have passed. But Trump asked Republicans to kill it because it doesn't matter to him to have that problem solved. He just wanted something to whine about, and to blame on Biden. Republicans did kill it, and Trump's the one that deserves the blame, not Biden.

Q. But shouldn't I worry that Trump often says Harris is “low IQ”?

A. I'm going to bite my tongue and not ask if you seriously think Trump is “high IQ.” Let's instead just jump straight to the heart of the matter: Calling someone “low IQ” is just a pattern behavior he has for how to talk about people who are black or female. He obviously hopes that, through force of repetition, you'll eventually associate certain attributes with certain people or certain demographics. Of course, he offers no evidence. And anyway, polls suggest she unambiguously beat him at the debate.

Q. It's only for four years, though, right?

A. That's how it used to be. But staying in office keeps him out of prison.. Liz Cheney has credibly suggested that if Trump is given power again, he will not yield it voluntarily.

Q. Maybe Vance will take over. That will fix things, right? He seems more sane.

A. Vance seems comfortable with the US following Rome's pattern, turning from a Republic to an Empire (in effect, giving up our democracy for a dictatorship). He appears to see Project 2025 as the implementation mechanism.

Q. Is there a place I can learn more about Project 2025? Are you sure it's associated with Trump?

A. Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025 because he knows it's a source of concern. However, many connections between Trump, Vance and Project 2025 have been documented.

There are several places you might want to consider to find out about Project 2025:

• Democracy Forward has created a user-friendly way to browse its serious dangers: The People's Guide to Project 2025.

• A band of graphic artists—some named, some anonymous—has brilliantly put the issue into graphic novel (comic book) form. This is a “must see.”

• The Center for American Progress (CAP) offers a useful explainer piece, The Dangers of Project 2025: Global Lessons in Authoritarianism, that puts Project 2025 into perpective by showing how it will “threaten American democracy by mirroring authoritarian tactics seen in Hungary, Turkey, and beyond.”
• The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has an article, Project 2025, Explained, that summarizes what they see as key dangers in Project 2025, and what Trump's connection is to it.

• Project 2025 has its own web page. It's very detailed. 900+ pages. It's highly specific about the speed and scope of what it plans. The goals it sets are scary enough, but the highly undemocratic ways in which it proposes achieving those goals is scary in its own right.

Q. This FAQ by Kent Pitman was kind of fun. Is there more stuff by Kent that I can read?

A. So glad you enjoyed it. Yes, here are some election-related writings by Kent:

• Common Ground on Reproductive Health (on Liz Cheney's fresh outlook)
• Emperor's Wardrobe Day (about those who've been silent)
• The Fraud Who Stole Freedom (an epic poem, with audio)
• Vance Notice (about the danger Vance poses)
• Political Terraforming (why they're limiting rights)
• A to-do list for repairing US democracy (some helpful suggestions)
• American Dictatorship (thoughts on a possible loss of democracy)
• The Pace of Political Evil (what we come to see is normal)
• Conspiring to Contest Key Elections (it won't just be about votes)
• Stayers and Steppers (my advice to Biden to step back, let Harris run)
• Supreme Challenge (urging Biden to use power SCOTUS gave him)

Don't forget to check for other posts that may follow the post you're reading.

The Politics of Delay

Martin Tye wrote in a post on the ex-bird site:

"Scale of demand" is the key component of #Sustainability.

Almost anything is #sustainable if demanded on a small enough scale,
& almost nothing if demanded on too large a scale.

— Martin Tye (@martinrev21) October 24, 2024

I replied with a thread, that I have reproduced with some corrections and clarifications here:

Yes, large scale is a risk. But not of unsustainable full coverage; rather, of sustainable-yet-incomplete coverage.

Either way not meeting climate goals, but depending how you describe predictions, you'll be seen as wise or not.

They'll say “it's working, but not yet done, wait more.”

Capitalism relies for its correct function on strategic choices by businesses about who not to serve. This is why government must never be asked to “run like a business.” Some issues must be handled fully. Government projects are just not all correctly described or modeled as profit & loss centers.

Capitalism, at least until we overconsume generally and it kills us, reacts to scarcity by hiking prices (price elasticity), so rather than too-large demand causing the system to implode, it will “just” not reach coverage—or not yet reach coverage. The public is ill-equipped for such conversation.

I'm no mathematician, but I'll risk their terminology in order to make a brief point: Many Capitalists' alleged or accepted “truths” (to include some mere “rules of thumb”) presume asymptotic effect. Climate physics adds a bounding box, inside of which such curves are truncated. It matters where that truncation occurs. It calls for different lemmas and fights common wisdom.

For example, capitalists might say “if X occurs, prices will naturally come down,” but if there is a bounding box, a time limit, then it matters whether “eventually” falls inside or outside of the box.

It may be that certain things we're used to seeing converge eventually do not converge in the short term, and that's all the time we have. So our rule of thumb that “the market will sort it out” might be true if we have infinite time, but false if we do not. Moreover, if they weren't going to converge at all, that fact may be hidden behind a time horizon. We might need to think very differently in a bounded-time scenario than we do if we think we have unbounded time. This might change how we have to judge what market-based strategies are acceptable.

So the difficulty is that we must convince people that certain rules of thumb they'll want to use to evaluate proposals are wrong, while at the same time proposing new ways to do something that will need some way of being judged. Changing both “manner of practice” AND “theory of testing” at same time is conversationally hard. It's needed, of course. But be ready for confusion, suspicion, and pushback.

Denialists have reimagined and reconfigured themselves as “delayists so they can say “we're getting there” or “we're going in the right direction.” It makes it not sound as much like lying. Unless people actually believe in the bounding time box. Folks still today, as we reach and possibly already exceed certain Climate tipping points, make economic and political choices that presume infinite time.

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I created the plot in Python using numpy and matplotlib, then touched it up in Gimp.

Still imaginable

“Don't wear your heavy coat yet,” my mom used to warn me. “You'll need it when it's colder.” She knew I had no heavier artillery for holding the cold at bay and felt somehow it was best to have a sense of proportion.

I mention that because news reports are describing Hurricane Helene's aftermath described as “unimaginable.” It's not. It's very, very painful to imagine because all death and destruction is painful, but we can imagine this much if we try.

Of course, if you have to go through it, even a single death—a single building falling in, a single shooting, a single cancer—is, in some sense, unimaginable. Words will never capture the horror. But, collectively, when doing news reporting, we don't use the word “unimaginable” for that. And it's not because it isn't severe. It's just because, horrifying as each individual bit of death and destruction is, we still need words left over to describe bigger events, those with more people, those that will take communities a longer time to recover from, if at all.

Maybe let's dial the language back. We probably shouldn't use up these extreme words yet. Save them for later. Climate's wrath has barely even given a hint of where it's going, and it's not going to relent until we start taking meaningful action. So far we're still mired in denial and daring Climate to do its worst.

So, yes, every death matters, and I hope not to trivialize a couple hundred deaths. What Helene did was horrible. And yet… And yet, let's be clear: The possibility of billions of deaths hangs now tangibly in the balance, or should. If you don't see that as a possibility, consider that you might be engaged in Climate denial.

The problem is that Climate is bigger. It's hard for us to see, but if there were a thousand deaths, even a million, that could still be comparatively small compared to what is very likely coming. Implicitly, by using superlative terms like “unimaginable” we send the subtle cue “this is it, this is finally an example of what we've been talking about.” It is not. A thousand instances of a million people dying is closer. Or a million instances of a thousand people dying. Or ten million situations like Hurricane Helene if it helps you visualize the magnitude of the pain—if it helps you imagine it.

We'd be alarmed about a thousand traffic accidents—we'd have trouble imagining even that because we'd want that to be an upper bound. But a couple hundred people dying due to a climate-related event (a storm, a flood, a fire, a famine, etc.) is not an upper bound on how bad things can get. It's not even a rounding error. I'm not saying it's small if you're living it, but I am saying Climate is big in a way that we're not used to talking about. So that's why I'd like to hold a few words in reserve. Otherwise, we'll be reaching for phrases like “unimaginable squared“ to compensate for the wasteland of available terminology.

We'll look back and wish for events so small as Helene, if there are any of us left to look back. Even that is not clear. If there is something for which the term unimaginable is warranted, it is that. And yet even for that, we must try to imagine it, because otherwise we're not going to fear it enough. We already don't.

 

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This essay began with a post on Mastodon. On a first pass, I did very light editing here, mostly to add fonting and a graphic, a few small wording changes. Later in the day, after publishing and before doing any broad advertising, I decided to expand this a little, so this version ended up more elaborated than the original.

I'm worried people will interpret my remark about 20 million such events literally. It might be fewer but larger events. They might not be hurricanes but floods, fires, famines.

The graphic was produced at abacus.ai using Claude Sonnet 3.5 and Flux.1. The prompt was “Draw an image of a meter that is a semi-circle with a range of measurement that is normal, a range that is marked in yellow as indicating concern, and a range that is marked in red as an active problem. Show the meter pointing into the yellow area.”. Using Gimp, I made some adjustments to the image it generated, removing some lettering and changing where the dial pointed to.

Unhelpful Paywalls

It happens quite often—sometimes many times a day—that someone gives me a link to information somewhere that they think I should read. Many of those those links don't actually take me where the person referring me meant for me to go. There's an intermediate stop at a paywall, a chance to subscribe to someone's information source.

Another time I'll talk about what's wrong with news pricing, but for today I hope we can agree that some news subscriptions are too expensive for mere mortals, and even free subscriptions aren't really free—they take time to sign up for, and they promise cascades of unwanted email. So when people reach one of these paywalls, there are various reasons why they often either can't or don't go beyond it. If not out-and-out barriers, paywalls are major impediments to obtaining timely information.

They are also more likely to be actual barriers to someone who is poor than someone who is rich, so they create a stratification of information availability by class in our society, dividing us along familiar lines into “haves” and “have nots,” informationally speaking.

Sometimes the downstream effects of that information imbalance just seem very unjust.

Insisting on a “Paywall Exception”

While I'd like to propose a wholesale rethinking of how we fund our news industry, for now I'll propose something simpler—a “Paywall Exception” for some topics: that are just so important that it isn't in the public interest for them to enjoy intellectual property protection. I just don't want to see paywalls keeping the public from knowing about and sharing important categories of information:

• For impending storms, lives are on the line. Advance notice could make the difference between life and death. If there is information about where those storms are going or how to prepare, that information should be freely available to all. Anyone who wants to profit on such information is guilty of sufficiently immoral behavior that we need a strong legal way to say “don't do that.”

• For pandemics, a lack of information is a danger not just to each citizen's own personal health, but to the health of those impacted by people making poor decisions that might lead to transmission. It is a moral imperative that everyone in society have access to best possible information.

• For existential threats to democracy or humanity, we cannot afford to close our eyes. The stakes are far too high. Democracy is under active assault world-wide, but especially in the United States right now. Climate is similarly urgent, and aggravated by how societally mired we are in deep denial, unwilling to even admit how very serious and rapidly evolving the problem is. Disinformation campaigns are a big part of both situations. Those peddling misleading information are most assuredely going to make their propaganda as freely available as possible. Truth can barely keep up. We don't need further impediments like paywalls on top of that, or else, soon enough, there won't be any of us left to matter.

I get that news outfits need to make money, but when I see critical information about an upcoming storm, or a possible pandemic, or assaults on democracy or climate change, I get more than average frustrated by seeing that such information is stuck behind a paywall.

There must be no secret storms, no secret pandemics, and no secret existential threats to democracy or humanity.

They should make their money another way.

 

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It's beyond the scope of this essay, and would have complicated things too much to mention it in the main body, but there is also the issue of how to implement this exception. It could be voluntary, but I doubt that would work. Or people using the information could assert fair use, but that's risky given the economic stakes in copyright violations. Three strategies occur to me that perhaps I'll elaborate on elsewhere. (1) We could expressly weaken copyright law in some areas related to news, so that it exempted certain topics, or shortened their duration to a very small amount measured in hours or days, depending on the urgency of the situation; (2) we could clarify or extend the present four criteria for fair use; or (3) we could (probably to the horror of some of my lawyer friends) extend intellectual property law to have the analog of what real estate law calls an easement, a right of non-property holders against property holders to make certain uses. I kind of like this latter mechanism, which leaves copyright per se alone and yet could be better structured and more reliable to use than fair use. (One might even sue for such an easement where it didn't occur naturally.) But that's topic for another day.

The graphic was generated at Abacus.ai using Claude Sonnet 3.5 and variously either Dall-E or Flux.1. There are many reasons I'm not entirely sure I'm happy with so-called “AI”—or Large Language Models (“LLMs”)—but for now I am using graphics generation to experiment with the technology since, like it or not, we don't seem to be able to hold the tech at bay. The prompts used were, respectively:

1. (Flux.1) «Design a 500x500 image of a fancy signpost, with text on a brown background and white gold trim, that bears the words "Entry Restricted" with a horizontal line below that text and above additional text that says "Critical Info Beyond Only For The Rich".»

2. (Dall-E) «Design a color image of photocopier under glass with a sign attached that says "In case of societal threat, break glass." A small hammer is affixed, attached by a chain, to help in the case that the glass needs to be broken.» (But then the hammer was not correctly placed in the picture. It was detached from in the chain and in a strange place, so I had to fix that in Gimp.)

3. (Flux.1) «Draw a 1000x500 image of an elegant sign, with a brown background and white gold borders and lettering, in copperplate font, that has three messages, each on a separate line which are "No Secret Storms", "No Secret Pandemics", and "No Secret Existential Threats", but make these messages share a single use of the word "NO" in the left hand column, tall enough that the rest of the phrases can appear stacked and to the right of the larger word "NO".»

Should Fix Climate

On Mastodon, Bookchin Bot, a bot that posts book quotes, circulated this quote:

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 “The term ought is the stuff out of which ethics is usually made—with the difference that in my view the ‘ought’ is not a formal or arbitrary regulative credo but the product of reasoning, of an unfolding rational process elicited or derived eductively from the potentialities of humanity to develop, however falteringly, mature, self-conscious, free, and ecological communities.”
  —From Urbanization to Cities

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I found this philisophical discussion of “ought” interesting. I learned philosophy from various people, some of whom seemed to grok its importance, and others who lamented its impotence, openly fretting it might have practical value only at cocktail parties.

As a computer professional who's pondered ethics a lot, I've come to see philosophy as what makes the difference between right and wrong answers or actions in tasks involving complex judgment. It can be subtle and elusive, but is nonetheless necessary.

I was Project Editor for the Common Lisp programming language, in effect holding the quill pen for reducing a number of technical decisions about the meaning and effect of the language that were voted by a committee in modular proposals but needed to be expressed in a coherent way. Nerd politics. They decided truth, and I had a free hand in presenting that truth in a palatable way, time and budget permitting. Programming languages are complicated, and implemented by multiple vendors. Some effects must happen, or must not. Others were more optional, and yet not unimportant, so we struggled as a group with the meaning we would assign to “should”.

Computer programs, you see, run slower, or cost more to run, if they are constantly cross-checking data. In real world terms, we might say it's more expensive to have programs that have a police force, or auditors, or other activities that look for things out of place that might cause problems. But without these cross-checks, bad data can slip in and get used without notice, leading to degraded effects, injustices, or catastrophes.

Briefly, a compiler is itself a program that reads a description of something you'd like to do and “compiles” it, making a runnable program, an app, let's say, that does what the description says.

A colleague criticized my use of “should” in early drafts of the language specification, the rules for how a compiler does its job. What is not an imperative has no meaning in such a document, I was told. It's like having a traffic law that says “you should stop for a red light”. You might as well say “but it's OK not to”, so don't say it all. And yet, I thought, people intend something by “should”. What do they intend that is stronger?

As designers of this language, we decided we'd let you say as you compile something that you do or don't want a safe program. In a “safe” world, things run a bit slower or more expensively, but avoid some bad things. Not all bad things. That's not possible. But enough that it's worth discussing whether the expense is a good one. Our kind of “safe” didn't mean safety from everything, but from some specific known problems that we could check for and avoid.

And then we decided “should” was a term that spans two possible worlds. In a “safe” world, it means “must”. That is, if you're wanting to avoid a list of stupid and easily avoidable things, all uses of “should” need to be interpreted as “must” when creating safe applications, whereas in an unsafe world the “should” things can be ignored as optional.

And so it comes down to what kind of world you want to live in.

Climate change, for example, presents us with problems where certain known, stupid, avoidable acts will put humanity at risk. We should not do these things if we want better certainty of survival, of having a habitable planet in which our kids can live happily or perhaps at all. Extinction is threatened if we don't do these things.

But they are expensive, these actions. They take effort and resource to implement. We can do more things more cheaply without them, by being unsafe, until we are blind-sided by the effects of errors we are letting creep in, letting degrade our world, letting set us up for catastrophe.

So we face a choice of whether to live knowingly at risk of catastrophe, or do the costly investment that would allow us to live safely.

We “should” act in ways that will fix Climate.

But we only “must” if we want to sleep at night knowing we have done the things that make us and our children safe.

If we're OK with mounting pain and likely catastrophe one day , perhaps even soon, then we can ignore the “should”. The cost is that we have elected an “unsafe” world that could quickly end because we'd rather spend less money as we risk such collapse than avoid foreseeable, fixable problems that might soon kill us all.

That's how I hear “should”. I hope you find it useful. You really should.

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This post is a mirror of a post I wrote yesterday (March 11, 2024) on Mastodon.

Degrees of Climate Catastrophe

What's the most civilization-destroying error in climate communication? I guess this is something that people might disagree on, but to me it has a very definitive answer: It's talking about climate change severity in terms of degrees Celsius (°C).

Scale

To begin with, it seems like using Celsius rather than Fahrenheit has to make it easier for folks here in the US to lowball or ignore those numbers. We're used to bigger numbers. For example, 3°C sounds small, since we're used to hearing it referred to as 5.4°F. The use of small numbers surely causes some people in the US to dismiss worries over temperature change even faster than they already seem predisposed to do.

Thinking Linearly

Another problem is that use of degrees is a linear measure, but °C as a measurement of badness is confusing because the badness doesn't grow linearly. In other words, if a rise of 1°C has some amount of badness B, it is not the case that a rise of 2°C is twice as bad, and 3°C is three times as bad. The rate that things get bad is worse than that. Some sort of upwards curve is in play, perhaps even exponential growth like Michael Mann's hockey stick. If small integers are proxying for exponential degrees of devastation to society, that's another reason °C is a bad measure. Well-chosen terminology will automatically imply appropriate urgency.

Quantitative vs. Qualitative

And, finally, measuring Climate Change severity in degrees seems to me an open invitation for people to confuse weather with global average temperature. I'm just sure it must affect their sense of urgency. After all, daily weather varies hugely with no global consequence. Small numbers of degrees sound like something that should influence whether you pick out a sweater to wear for the day, not whether human civilization is at risk of coming to an end.

If instead of using small-sounding, homogeneous, quantitative labels like 1°C, 2°C, etc. we used more descriptive, heterogeneous, qualitative labels like

• home-destroying
• community-destroying
• nation-destroying
• civilization-destroying
• ecosystem-destroying

we might better understand conversations warning of climate danger. I'm not wedded to these particular words, but they illustrate what I mean by “qualitative” rather than “quantitative” measures. I'd just like the scientists to move away from dinky little numbers that sound like harmless fluctuations on a window thermometer.

To me, small numbers are too abstract and clinical. I think we need words like this that evoke a more visceral sense of what the world looks like if temperature is allowed to rise. Rather than talk about “5°C rise,” I would rather people talk about “climate that threatens civilization itself,” because then we'll have an ever present and highly visible understanding of the stakes.

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By the way, an early version of this idea was something I tweeted about in May, 2019.

Democratizing Climate Discussion

The Importance of Keeping Pace

In the early days of the web, it was not obvious that sites like AltaVista (the original full text search site, predating Google and others) would win the “web search” wars. It seemed to me that keyword-driven, manually curated sites—like Yahoo started out to be, if I recall correctly—did a more recognizable thing, classifying and filing everything in the world into neat little categories where you could go and look things up more like the paper encyclopedias I grew up with.

Full text search, by contrast, seemed messy and really like such a terrible solution. How could anyone possibly rely on the actual text of something in a durable way? And yet, what we found was that it was just too expensive to add keyword metadata to content at the pace it was arriving on the web. Orderly, manual curation of knowledge couldn't keep up. The web was destined to be messy, and the tools that would survive had to embrace that messiness.

Passing the Baton

There's an important lesson here for those involved in the science and politics of Climate Change, I think.

Bill Nye's recent video about a world on fire, using colorful language to wake people up, has ignited a burst of public conversation about Climate.

But in addition to the simple shock of seeing Nye use foul language, there's another and more important issue in play here: Fixing climate is a relay race. There is much to be done and scientists are not sufficient in number or skill to get us across the finish line. The baton needs to pass from the scientists to regular people.

Until now, we have been relying for a long time on scientists to lead the climate conversation. Science is and will continue to be an important aspect of the conversation, but it must move beyond that. Regular people, people without credentials, need to feel free to speak. We all need to own this discussion, to personalize it, to take responsibility for it. We can't expect it to be done by others.

Unchaperoned Climate Debate

The language of science is careful, precise peer-reviewed, cautious. The language of regular people is not. Until this point, we've allowed “others” to talk about climate, but often only with a scientist looking over their shoulder like nervous parents watching a child learn to use a sharp knife. The slightest misstatement might be quickly corrected, but it's a too-slow process to roll out at scale.

And, in fairness, there has been a lot of misinformation out there, so the corrections have been helpful in many ways. There are people who are strongly motivated by short-term profits to introduce misstatements and to see them replicated as memes. So one can easily understand the desire of scientists to watch over the conversation and insist it adhere to standards. They say it's not paranoia when the enemy is real.

But people are finally starting to get it, and as they do, the discussions move faster—much faster than scientists can keep up with. So tactics and norms have to shift to respond. We need people talking all the time everywhere. Addressing climate change is a big problem, and it needs to be at the core of pretty much everything society does. And we don't have enough scientists to chaperone all those conversations.

The language of regular people is coarse, poetic, abbreviated, blurry, emotional, imprecise, and most important unchecked. I often find myself telling people that the Climate problem is about physics, and that physics doesn't negotiate. Here is where I have to push back on the scientists: the Climate discussion problem is about human socialization, about how we build consensus, about how we express our goals and fears, about how we manage trust. These are things that scientists can't negotiate away. In order for public dialog to proceed, scientists need to prepare themselves for sloppy conversations, conversations that frankly will not make them happy at the detail level.

Climate scientists will need to loosen their grip.

A Coping Mechanism for Nervous Climate Parents

A thing that bothers me about Climate messaging—makes me terrified actually—is that climate badness is expressed in degrees of global average temperature. This leads to big confusion because within the course of a single day, weather and local temperature varies a lot. Temperatures at any given location might fluctuate ten or twenty degrees in a day and we wouldn't think that anomalous. Sometimes that's just the difference between day and night, sometimes the effect of a storm or a new front moving in. But if the global average temperature went up by ten or twenty degrees, we'd be cooked. We expect regular folks to get that, but I'm not sure they always do.

Temperature is not distributed evenly, so even though the temperature might be spiked high in one place, it might be quite low in another (or vice versa). It only matters that it averages out. Scientists shrug off local anomalies because they understand that the global average is quite different than any one point location. Let me suggest that there is an important metaphorical lesson for scientists there about how to manage conversation.

Just as daily temperature fluctuations outside your house don't tell you much about climate, so too the daily misstatements by individuals also don't matter either, as long as the overall message trends are right. Some will get the data right, some wrong. Some will exaggerate to make things seem worse, some to make it seem better. People will understand and communicate the problem in different ways, but we have to let them do that. That's part of integrating the message into society. It can't be done some other way.

If the public at large, on average, is panicking that we're going to die tomorrow, or in the other direction if the public is lulled into thinking there's not a problem, it's definitely worth scientists stepping in to speak to that general trend in an organized way. But if a given scientist on a given day observes someone who they feel hasn't got the message quite right, they need to be prepared to hold back. Regular people need to feel they have the right to speak freely without being slapped down for it. Also, an exaggeration in some places may add balance to another person being too unconcerned.

Think about the ways we talk about health or war or other big issues. The conversation is not at every point precise, but it isn't always the wrong way to gain consensus.

At this point, I think, it's better to just let people run with it for a while and see what the trend is than to get involved in the microscopic detail of every single conversation, hoping against hope that scientists can, by force of will, make everyone be precise. That isn't the path to the solution.

Climate scientists need to let go, so they can get their sleep and focus on their research and be ready to answer questions. I don't think they have to worry we'll suddenly have no need of them. Their role just needs to change. They are still are trusted advisors, but they cannot be our nannies. We need both permission and pressure to grow up, to take this on ourselves.

Author's Notes:

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xkcd comic “duty calls” by Randall Munroe used with gratitude under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.5) license.