The End is Nigh-ish

I don’t really know what to make of blogging, so I would like to try my hand at a Very Big Topic: Global Warming. Next week I’ll discuss my relationship with God (no, I am not his Son; but he’s my uncle).

Actually I don’t know much about Global Warming, except that it’s real, it’s largely man-made, and has uncertain but potentially disastrous consequences. It’s not much, but I suspect it’s not substantially less than what a lot of people know, including those who feel the urge to opine on the issue (I just added myself to this unsavory group).

It is becoming increasingly clear to me is that Global Warming is almost unique in that it lies at the busy intersection of Science, Engineering and Policy. I believe that the only other area that shares this feature is Bioengineering. But whereas Climate Change has no potential upside, Bioengineering can be very bad (as many zombie movies remind us) and good. Moreover it has no inertia, unlike Climate Change.

Aside from the intrinsic challenges of Global Warming, the interdisciplinary side of Global Warming is a recipe for disaster. Absolutely no one is able to read first-hand sources of knowledge from all three areas. What is instead happening is that everyone is feeding on secondary or even tertiary sources. This applies especially to economists, who are neither real policy-makers nor scientists, and should I mention engineers? So we have every columnist and prominent blogger playing modern jackass.

This coach was designed by a physicist, to specifications provided by a policy-maker, to be driven by an engineer.

Even if we ignore the “everythingologists” [1] like Krugman or Cowen, the competence attribution problem is serious. Climatologists and most Physicists for example make poor engineers, and yet they are proposing or even outlining engineering solutions on what is the most complex engineering challenge we have ever faced, and the most expensive by at least two orders of magnitude.

What is a poor man to do? For once, I am a Cartesian, in that I’d rather

[...]conquer myself rather than fortune, and change my desires rather than the order of the world, and in general, accustom myself to the persuasion that, except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power; so that when we have done our best in things external to us, all wherein we fail of success is to be held, as regards us, absolutely impossible[...]

So I have no hope to effect change. The rational thing to do would to have lots of sex but no children while waiting for the apocalypse. I am afraid I already screwed up on that one. For those who haven’t, don’t waste your time reading the self-righteous tirades of Krugman or the cute-clever-contrarian-positivistic proposals by Dubner and Levitt.

My only recourse is a different hope: that the impact of Global Warming is felt on a timescale longer than that of policy changes. That’s a folk lesson from Control Theory. But don’t hold your breath.

[1] “everythingologist” is an imperfect translation of the italian “tuttologo”, and my tentative contribution to the Oxford English Dictionary.