Sunset Scenario

BY THE POOL, I'm reading a book by Frances Drake on Global Warming, and it seems to me: Global temperature trends are noisy and the direct evidence for recent global warming is less compelling than I expected. There are enormously many variables in the global climate, much uncertainty even in measurements, let alone predictions... As a warning against over-simplistic assumptions, the Norse Greenland settlements may have died out as much because of time wasted on church-building and praying, as because of the temperature falling. BUT that rising curve has to be taken seriously... ...because human carbon dioxide production is on the same scale as the natural carbon cycle. The atmospheric level has definitely risen sharply. Human activities are not just a small perturbation in the biosphere. There is nothing to ensure that the present state of the earth is a stable equilibrium. Glaciation obviously involves an unstable effect, as snow and ice reflect solar radiation back into space. The other book I was reading, Ian Stewart's The Collapse of Chaos comments (page 212) as an illustration of dynamical systems that ...global warming is just a change of a few degrees. It moves the 'mild' attractor a little. Ice ages take our climate to a totally different attractor, one that is colder by a hundred or more degrees. We are currently on the mild attractor, but out in the space of he possible there lurks an ice age. Disturbances - and we're throwing enough junk in the environment to create them ourselves - could switch out climate to the cold attractor... it may take only the tiniest of changes to trigger the switch. Such general features of dynamical systems are undeniable (even though too often trivialised as 'the butterfly effect'). But Stewart's figure of 'a hundred or more degrees' must be wrong; in fact Drake (page 97) gives the figure of only 8 degrees, with local effects of 20 degrees. So the 'few degrees' of global warming predicted for this century already approach the scale of ice age changes. I am also struck by Drake's mention of the evidence of very rapid changes attributed to melting of ice sheets 10000 years ago and their effects on the great ocean currents.	complex cats
	hunt and play
	like boys around the pool

	SO it seems possible to me that the planet may undergo a sudden and irreversible qualitative change, not just a small adjustment to prevailing temperatures and 'bad weather'. Such a change would completely wreck what civilisation we have. If there is even a chance of this happening then there must be massive changes right away in energy and transport; probably a radical change in the expectations of industrial growth.
Short of another rapid visit from the super-intelligent Stargate, there doesn't seem the slightest chance of humanity implementing any such co-operative plan, even if anything remotely fair and effective could ever be agreed. The world is at a rare moment when there is no serious dispute between major powers. But if nation states can't agree to serious changes even in such favourable circumstances, what hope is there once trouble starts? This is a classic prisoner's dilemma. for there would always be a short-term benefit for any power abandoning environmental constraints in the name of essential national interests. How could such treaties be enforced, especially against the United States or its mega-corporations?
My training is in mathematics, and a great attraction of mathematics is that you can see everything for yourself; within mathematics itself nothing need be taken on trust. In science this isn't true: no-one can collect the data, or model the atmosphere and oceans, without placing trust in the scientific community. So what strikes me most in the global warming question is the crucial importance of knowing that scientific conclusions can be regarded as objective and trustworthy.
Unfortunately I don't find my own experience very confidence-building in this respect. There are arguments at the highest level in science, which mean that at least some leading figures must make completely wrong judgments. Even in physics, it seems to me that purely psychological and sociological elements play an important role.
	The 'free enterprise' lobby makes much of environmentalism as a 'special interest'. It is undeniable that scientists can be and are influenced by ideological and media-generated currents. Against this scenario of 'corrupt science', must be set the adulation of business since the 1980s, which pushes in the direction of training scientists to be more 'businesslike', instead of persuading business to pay attention to science and scientific method. The British government's Science Enterprise Challenge takes this line.
I see my own 'enterprise challenge' entirely differently: the challenge is to remain as independent of money and fashion as possible. But I fail! I am a social animal... ...and my enterprises are much more risky than anything undertaken by businesspeople who moan endlessly about 'uncertainty' and want governments to arrange everything for their benefit. But I am often tempted to give up...
naked ape I am gripped by pessimism: and not just because my jetting around is only adding to atmospheric degradation. My scientific work is not doing anything for the world except inasmuch as it helps maintain the infrastructure of science. Yet even that is depressing me at the moment, because what I am actually doing is finishing the text of the talk I gave in Hamburg last October. A lot of it is about why the philosophers Copeland and Proudfoot have published a ridiculous account of Turing's oracle-machines in Scientific American. Negative, and far too much like a flame war on an email list. But if I don't speak up then silence seems to give consent.
I like the intelligence that we naked apes somehow got, but not the aggression that 2001 showed as being its first application.
I lie back... Above me there are Escher-like patterns in the architecture... and around me, mysterious emergent order from natural non-linear systems...
It's hard for me to remember the magic that science, mathematics and science fiction meant for me as a young lad. Academic life has virtually killed it. But I feel more optimistic after some local warming on the beach:

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