Please Write to Your MPs Asking Them To Support Fossil Fuel Divestment

It's is now clear that the incoming Trump government will be the most environment-hostile, and fossil fuel-friendly US administration in history.  As this perceptive post points out, this is no incidental feature, it is the defining feature of Trump and his plans:

Trump has surrounded himself with more oil industry and oil industry connected people than any president in history (even George W. Bush). You can’t understand what’s going on with Trump unless you understand the oil industry… and you can’t understand the oil industry without understanding climate change.

That's the bad news.  The good news is that we can fight this in a way that neither Trump nor the fossil fuel industry can block.  Given that it is unlikely that any progress in tackling climate change will be made on the political front, with the US blocking thwarting everything it can, we must turn to economics using divestment from fossil fuels as our main approach.

This is already happening on a massive scale, even if most people are unaware of that fact:

The value of investment funds committed to selling off fossil fuel assets has jumped to $5.2tn, doubling in just over a year.

The new total, published on Monday, was welcomed by the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, who said: “It’s clear the transition to a clean energy future is inevitable, beneficial and well underway, and that investors have a key role to play.”

We must do everything in our power to accelerate that move away from fossil fuels.  Once the business world gets the message that investing in fossil fuels is not just a bad idea, but potentially disastrous, the shift to renewable energy will happen rapidly, regardless of what Trump does.

Here in the UK, there's an opportunity to encourage a key group of decision makers to tell their pension fund to divest from fossil fuels: MPs.  In fact, there's an entire campaign to encourage them. If you are a UK citizen, I would like to urge you to contact your MP asking them to support this campaign.

You can either do this using the link above, or directly using the indispensable WriteToThem site.  Here's what I've just sent my MP: 

I am writing to ask you to support a call for the MPs' pension fund to divest from fossil fuels (details here: http://gofossilfree.org/uk/divest-parliament/). There are two main reasons for this.

The first is that it is clear that climate change is the greatest threat we face – not just because of its direct effects on the environment, but also because of the knock-on effects – for example in creating millions of climate refugees, or threatening the world's food supplies.

Confronted by an incoming US administration that is the most environmentally-hostile ever, it is clear we cannot expect the US to lead here – indeed, it seems likely actively to obstruct efforts to address climate change through international agreements.

Divestment from fossil fuels is the most effective way to counter that threat, since it is something we can all do, both as individuals and as groups. The net effect is to divert investment away from the technologies that are exacerbating the problem of global warming, towards those that help solve it, creating new jobs in the process.

Fossil fuel divestment is already taking place on a massive scale: a report published last week now puts the figure at $5 trillion (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/dec/12/fossil-fuel-divestment-funds-double-5tn-in-a-year). If the MPs' own pension fund divested, this would both strengthen that movement and set a good example for others to follow.

The other reason why I would urge you to support divestment is that the "carbon bubble" is likely to burst soon, and will take with it any pensions that still have large-scale investments in fossil fuels. No less a person than Mark Carney warned of this last year (https://www.ft.com/content/622de3da-66e6-11e5-97d0-1456a776a4f5), so this is by no means some fringe idea, but mainstream and increasingly accepted.

I hope you agree that for the sake of this and future generations, we must move as rapidly as possible to embrace renewable energy, and that an effective way of accelerating that shift is to divest from fossil fuels.

Thank you for your help in this important matter.

Which Would You Rather Have: The Planet, Or A Patent?

One of the more controversial approaches to the already controversial field of climate change is geoengineering, which Wikipedia defines as "deliberate large-scale engineering and manipulation of the planetary environment to combat or counteract anthropogenic changes in atmospheric chemistry." 

On Techdirt.

Registry of Interests

This is a list of my main sources of income, and of any other work-related benefits, as of 1 October 2011. I will update this as and when any major changes occur.

My main sources of income are from writing for Computerworld UK, The H Open and Techdirt. In the past I have occasionally written for other titles, but not recently, and given my many commitments I think that is unlikely to change.

I also get paid to give talks, mostly on free software, intellectual monopolies and digital rights.

I occasionally accept paid-for trips to attend conferences related to my work; I aim to declare that fact in any writing that comes out of such visits. In the past (ten to twenty years ago) I accepted these routinely, as did all journalists. For the record, the company that invited me most frequently back then was probably Microsoft....

I am not, and never have been, a consultant for any company.

As for unpaid positions, I'm on the Open Knowledge Foundation Advisory Board, and also on the Advisory Committee of the Climate Code Foundation.

I do not own (and have never owned) any shares except those that might be hidden away in financial instruments I may have or have had: I have never tried to find out if there are any, or what they might be. Similarly, I do not have, and have never had, investments in any company.

I no longer accept freebies in the form of review software/hardware (though I did a couple of decades ago when this was standard practice.) I buy all my own computers and smartphones at full price (luckily, the software comes free...)

I very occasionally receive free review copies of books on areas I'm interested in, but I'm trying to discourage this since I never have time to write the reviews (er, sorry about that.)

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The Value of Clear Code is Clear

Here's an interesting move in the highly important area of climate science:

We are pleased to announce the creation of the Climate Code Foundation. The Foundation is a non-profit organisation founded by David Jones, Nick Barnes, and Philippa Davey to promote public understanding of climate science. The Foundation will continue work on the Clear Climate Code project, and also related activities, encouraging climate scientists to improve and publish their software.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Something in the Air: the Open Source Way

One of the most vexed questions in climate science is modelling. Much of the time the crucial thing is trying to predict what will happen based on what has happened. But that clearly depends critically on your model. Improving the robustness of that model is an important aspect, and the coding practices employed obviously feed into that.

Here's a slightly old but useful paper [.pdf] that deals with just this topic:

In this paper, we report on a detailed case study of the Climate scientists build large, complex simulations with little or no software engineering training, and do not readily adopt the latest software engineering tools and tech-niques. In this paper, we describe an ethnographic study of the culture and practices of climate scientists at the Met Office Hadley Centre. The study examined how the scientists think about software correctness, how they prioritize requirements, and how they develop a shared understanding of their models. The findings show that climate scientists have developed customized techniques for verification and validation that are tightly integrated into their approach to scientific research. Their software practices share many features of both agile and open source projects, in that they rely on self-organisation of the teams, extensive use of informal communication channels, and developers who are also users and domain experts. These comparisons offer insights into why such practices work.

It would be interesting to know whether the adoption of elements of the open source approach was a conscious decision, or just evolved.

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Should Retractions be Behind a Paywall?

"UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim", so proclaimed an article in The Times earlier this year. It began [.pdf]:

A STARTLING report by the United Nations climate watchdog that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise.

Well, not so unsubstantiated, it turns out: The Times has just issued a pretty complete retraction - you can read the whole thing here. But what interests me in this particular case is not the science, but the journalistic aspect.

Because if you went to The Times site to read that retraction, you would, of course, be met by the stony stare of the latter's paywall (assuming you haven't subscribed). Which means that I - and I imagine many people who read the first, inaccurate Times story - can't read the retraction there. Had it not been for the fact that among the many climate change sites (on both sides) that I read, there was this one with a copy, I might never have known.

So here's the thing: if a story has appeared on the open Web, and needs to be retracted, do newspapers like The Times have a duty to post that retraction in the open, or is acceptable to leave behind the paywall?

Answers on the back of yesterday's newspaper...

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Lies, Damned Lies and Climate Science

If, like me, you were wondering where on earth (and atmosphere) we now stood with climate science in the wake of recent events, here's the best discussion I've seen:

Currently, a few errors –and supposed errors– in the last IPCC report (“AR4″) are making the media rounds – together with a lot of distortion and professional spin by parties interested in discrediting climate science. Time for us to sort the wheat from the chaff: which of these putative errors are real, and which not? And what does it all mean, for the IPCC in particular, and for climate science more broadly?

There then follow several thousand words analysing what exactly the errors were, where they came from, and what they mean, all meticulously referenced so that you can go to the sources in question and make up your own mind.

Here's the concluding paragraph:

Overall then, the IPCC assessment reports reflect the state of scientific knowledge very well. There have been a few isolated errors, and these have been acknowledged and corrected. What is seriously amiss is something else: the public perception of the IPCC, and of climate science in general, has been massively distorted by the recent media storm. All of these various “gates” – Climategate, Amazongate, Seagate, Africagate, etc., do not represent scandals of the IPCC or of climate science. Rather, they are the embarrassing battle-cries of a media scandal, in which a few journalists have misled the public with grossly overblown or entirely fabricated pseudogates, and many others have naively and willingly followed along without seeing through the scam.

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Of Open Science and Open Source

Now here's an idea:

Computer code is also at the heart of a scientific issue. One of the key features of science is deniability: if you erect a theory and someone produces evidence that it is wrong, then it falls. This is how science works: by openness, by publishing minute details of an experiment, some mathematical equations or a simulation; by doing this you embrace deniability. This does not seem to have happened in climate research. Many researchers have refused to release their computer programs — even though they are still in existence and not subject to commercial agreements. An example is Professor Mann's initial refusal to give up the code that was used to construct the 1999 "hockey stick" model that demonstrated that human-made global warming is a unique artefact of the last few decades. (He did finally release it in 2005.)

Quite.

So, if you are publishing research articles that use computer programs, if you want to claim that you are engaging in science, the programs are in your possession and you will not release them then I would not regard you as a scientist; I would also regard any papers based on the software as null and void.

I'd go further: if you won't release them and *share* them, then you're not really a scientist, because science is inherently about sharing, not hoarding knowledge, whatever kind that may be. The fact that some of it may be in the form of computer code is a reflection of the fact that research is increasingly resting on digital foundations, nothing more.

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Canadians *Do* Have a Sense of Humour

Want a good laugh?

One hour ago, a spoof press release targeted Canada in order to generate hurtful rumors and mislead the Conference of Parties on Canada's positions on climate change, and to damage Canada's standing with the international business community.

The release, from "press@enviro-canada.ca," alleges Canada's acceptance of unrealistic emissions-reduction targets, as well as a so-called "Climate Debt Mechanism," a bilateral agreement between Canada and Africa to furnish that continent with enormous sums in "reparation" for climate damage and to "offset" adaptation.

Of course, everyone should have known that Canada wouldn't do anything like accept massive emission reduction targets, or agree to reparations. No, this is what it *really* has in mind:

Today as always, Canada's binding responsibility is to supply the world - including its burgeoning developing portion - with those means of transport, health, and sustenance that prosperous markets require. Stopping short of these dictates would violate the very principles upon which our nations were founded, and endanger our very development.

As you will note, there's nothing here about that tiresome need to minimise climate change, it's all about "prosperous markets", yeah. Indeed:

Canada's current energy policy represents an elegant synthesis of the most advanced science, while remaining faithful to Canada's tradition of political pragmatism. Experts note, for example, that the much-decried oil sands of Alberta, contrary to environmentalists' dire assertions, are enabling Canada to meet ambitious emissions goals by providing her, as well as her neighbors, with the energy resources needed to transition to a cleaner energy future.

Cunning, no? Canada notes how using energy from one of the dirtiest sources, the "much-decried oil sands of Alberta", is in fact absolutely fine because it will allow a transition to a "cleaner energy future". Which means that we can justify *any* kind of energy source, no matter how dirty, provided it makes things better at some ill-specified time in the future.

If we have one, of course. (Via Tristan Nitot.)

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Preserving Patents Before the Planet

I don't think this needs much comment:

The Chamber's Global Intellectual Property Center (GIPC) has been front and center in this debate, and our position is clear: if governments are serious about addressing climate change, and all agree that new technologies are a vital part of the answer, then IP laws and rights need to be protected in any Copenhagen agreement. Indeed, in our view, a Copenhagen Summit with NO mention of IP at all is a successful conclusion. Current international laws and norms are working, and need to be preserved.

Got that? Stuff the environment, we've got to protect the *important* things in life, like intellectual monopolies...

Nothing to See Here, Absolutely Nothing At All...

As we all now know, Climate Change is fake. Sure the precarious resource and geo-political struggle fossil fuels continues to place us in are clearly real but instead of investing in clean alternatives, we should continue to destroy and re-build nations half way around the world. That’s a much cheaper and more productive alternative than investing in our own infrastructure and innovating our way out of the very real logistical and foreign-policy problems we’ve created for ourselves.

Speaking of cost, we can’t afford to save the planet or invest in our future. That could hurt the economy and we can’t risk that. We can just switch planets or go back in time when the planet dies. At least the economy will be safe though. There’s no possible way that comparing the needs of the economy to the whole planet is a false dichotomy. Sure, the economy depends on the fact that our world remains as it is today – No mass migrations due to new extreme climates. No real shortage of energy. No resulting wars (well, not too many anyway). Land to grow things. The status quo is the most likely future scenario right?

To my shame, I fell, hook, line and sinker, for the first paragraph of this hilarious piece...

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James Hansen: the RMS of Climate Change

Under the rather, er, dramatic headline "Copenhagen climate change talks must fail, says top scientist", we have the following:

In Hansen's view, dealing with climate change allows no room for the compromises that rule the world of elected politics. "This is analogous to the issue of slavery faced by Abraham Lincoln or the issue of Nazism faced by Winston Churchill," he said. "On those kind of issues you cannot compromise. You can't say let's reduce slavery, let's find a compromise and reduce it 50% or reduce it 40%."

Wow: someone whose refusal to compromise matches that of RMS. Respect.

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Openness as the Foundation for Global Change

What do you do after Inventing the Web? That's not a question most of us have to face, but it is for Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Heading up the World Wide Web Consortium to oversee the Web's development was a natural move, but valuable as its work has been, there's no denying that it has been sidelined somewhat by the rather more vigorous commercial Web activity that's taken place over the last decade.

Moreover, the kind of standards-setting that the W3C is mostly involved with is not exactly game-changing stuff – unlike the Web itself. So the recent announcement of the World Wide Web Foundation, also created by Sir Tim, has a certain logic to it.

Here's that new organisation's “vision”:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Of Credibility, Openness and Scientific Tribalism

I've steered clear of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) break-in since emotions are still running high, while information content remains low. But aside from the significance (or otherwise) of the emails, one thing is abundantly clear: if the climate data had been released from the beginning, this would really be a story of negligible interest to the wider world.

Here's an insightful post that explores not only that issue of openness, but also an extremely important factor I'd not really appreciated sufficiently before: scientific tribalism.

Tribalism is defined here as a strong identity that separates one’s group from members of another group, characterized by strong in-group loyalty and regarding other groups differing from the tribe’s defining characteristics as inferior. In the context of scientific research, tribes differ from groups of colleagues that collaborate and otherwise associate with each other professionally. As a result of the politicization of climate science, climate tribes (consisting of a small number of climate researchers) were established in response to the politically motivated climate disinformation machine that was associated with e.g. ExxonMobil, CEI, Inhofe/Morano etc. The reaction of the climate tribes to the political assault has been to circle the wagons and point the guns outward in an attempt to discredit misinformation from politicized advocacy groups. The motivation of scientists in the pro AGW tribes appears to be less about politics and more about professional ego and scientific integrity as their research was under assault for nonscientific reasons (I’m sure there are individual exceptions, but this is my overall perception).

...

Scientists are of course human, and short-term emotional responses to attacks and adversity are to be expected, but I am particularly concerned by this apparent systematic and continuing behavior from scientists that hold editorial positions, serve on important boards and committees and participate in the major assessment reports. It is these issues revealed in the HADCRU emails that concern me the most, and it seems difficult to spin many of the emails related to FOIA, peer review, and the assessment process. I sincerely hope that these emails do not in actuality reflect what they appear to, and I encourage Gavin Schmidt et al. to continue explaining the individual emails and the broader issues of concern.

This analysis exposes the worrying possibility that the fractures within the scientific community can be further exploited by those who wish to see climate change science damaged and the necessary measures it calls for delayed or even dismissed.

It looks like the greatest enemy to climate change science comes not from the denialists - be they fools or knaves - but from narrow-minded tribalists within the scientific community itself who cannot see the bigger picture. Perhaps we should be grateful for the ugly fissures that the CRU incident seems to reveal, since it gives the people concerned a chance to heal them before they lead to irreversible fractures.

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Won't Someone Please Think of the, er, Plants?

I've tweeted this, but it's so good, I just have to blog it too:

CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 makes Earth green because it supports all plant life. It is Earth's greatest airborne fertilizer. Even man-made CO2 contributes to plant growth that in turn sustains humanity and ecosystems.

CO2 Is Green is working to insure that all federal laws or regulations are founded upon science and not politics or scientific myths. No one wants the plant and animal kingdoms, including humanity, to be harmed if atmospheric CO2 is reduced. The current dialog in Washington needs to reflect these inalterable facts of nature. We cannot afford to make mistakes that would actually harm both the plant and animal kingdoms.

Oh lordy, those poor little plants and animals - deprived of the life-giving CO2. How could mankind be so cruel and insensate? How could we have overlooked such an obvious thing until now?

Update: Don't miss Adam Pope's super-sleuthing in the comments that suggests this site just might have something to do with the gas and oil industries...

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How Open Source Will Save the World (Really)

Apparently, I'm not the only one to think that open source will save the world - literally:

Could open source software save the planet? Steven Chu, the US energy secretary, says it can certainly help, by making it easier for all countries to access tools to design and build more energy-efficient buildings.

More specifically:

[It] should be open source software, so companies can add to that and put whatever they want on it but then you get this body of programmes, computer aided design programmes, as a way of helping design much more efficient buildings.

Now if we develop this with China together so that this intellectual property is co-owned, co-developed, free to be used by each country, you get away from this internal discussion of ‘we’re not going to do anything until we get free IP’.

Fantastic to see someone with considerable power making the connection between intellectual monopolies and the problem of mitigating climate change - and seeing that open source is a practical way to get around the problem.

We Have a Choice

as civilization collapses, we're going to see horrific scarcities, creating massive personal and collective stresses that will break both individuals (to the point of suicide, terrorism and murder) and nations (to the point of insurrection, civil war, and anarchy -- a hundred Afghanistans). We're going to see dreadful pandemic diseases and poverty and famine that will be utterly shattering, like the abject horror the world witnessed during the Irish potato famine where millions simply sat around, hopeless and increasingly gaunt, until they died an agonizing death alongside those they loved and couldn't save. We're going to see the kind of spiritual vacuum and decay that is eating Russia and the former Soviet republics alive today, with population and life expectancy plummeting, drug addiction at epidemic levels, and crime and gang violence out of control. It is nature's last and most reluctant way of restoring to sustainable populations species whose numbers and voraciousness have run amok.

Or, as an alternative, we could be sensible and tackle the problems facing us - climate change, deforestation, overfishing, overpopulation, peak oil, peak water, poverty - seriously, not with political posturing and soundbites, and maybe come out the other side.

Why We Need Open Data

Despite the good-natured ding-dong he and I are currently engaged in on another matter, Peter Murray-Rust is without doubt one of the key individuals in the open world. He's pretty much the godfather of the term "open data", as he writes:

Open Data has come a long way in the last 2-3 years. In 2006 the term was rarely used - I badgered SPARC and they generously created a set up a mailing list. I also started a page on Wikipedia in 2006 so it’s 2-and-a-half years old.

The same post gives perhaps the best explanation of why open data is important; it's nominally about open data in science, but its points are valide elsewhere too:

* Science rests on data. Without complete data, science is flawed.

* Many of todays global challenges require scientific data. Climate, Health, Agriculture…

* Scientists are funded to do research and to make the results available to everyone. This includes the data. Funders expect this. So does the world.

* The means of dissemination of data are cheap and universal. There is no technical reason why all the data in all the chemistry research in the world should not be published into the cloud. It’s small compared with movies…

* Data needs cleaning, flitering, repurposing, re-using. The more people who have access to this, the better the data and the better the science.

Open data is still something of a Cinderella in the open world, but as Peter's comments make clear, that's likely to change as more people realise its centrality to the entire open endeavour.

Trees Will Save the World

We need more trees. This is what they did 500 years ago:

The massive depopulation of the Americas via smallpox, hepatitis and other diseases introduced by Westerners (perhaps as much as 95 percent of the existing population died in vast pandemics) and the large landscape-altering scale of agriculture practiced across the "New World" by pre-Columbian cultures are two of the big themes of "1491." Both popped up in a presentation made by two scientists at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union last December. (Thanks to MongaBay for the tip.)

The scientists contend that after the die-off, massive reforestation on abandoned agricultural land occurred on a large enough scale to contribute significantly to the period of global cooling between 1500 and 1750 known as the "Little Ice Age."

After examining soil samples and sediment cores from numerous locations in Central and South America, Richard Nevle, a visiting scholar at Stanford's Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences at Stanford, and Dennis Bird, also from Stanford, concluded that the reforestation sequestered as much as 10 to 50 percent of the carbon necessary to cool the earth. Up until 1500, the soil samples showed a steady increase in charcoal content, likely generated from human-caused fire used to clear forest. After 1500, the scientists discovered a drastic drop in charcoal content. No more burning.

The good news is that we've cut down so many trees, there's huge scope for harnessing this effect to mitigate climate change by planting lots of trees.

Climate Change Implies Open Access

One of the answers to What Will Change Everything? is - reasonably enough - climate change. But interestingly it focuses on the way that climate change will mean that science itself must adapt and become more interventional:

Climate may well force on us a major change in how science is distilled into major findings. There are many examples of the ponderous nature of big organizations and big projects. While I think that the IPCC deserves every bit of its hemi-Nobel, the emphasis on "certainty" and the time required for a thousand scientists and a hundred countries to reach unanimous agreement probably added up to a considerable delay in public awareness and political action.

Climate will change our ways of doing science, making some areas more like medicine with its combination of science and interventional activism, where delay to resolve uncertainties is often not an option. Few scientists are trained to think this way — and certainly not climate scientists, who are having to improvise as the window of interventional opportunity shrinks.

One consequence of this is that science will have to adopt open access. The pace and seriousness of climate change means that humanity does not have the "luxury" of hiding scientific results for six or twelve months: everything must be out in the open as soon as possible for others to use and build on. Delaying could literally be fatal on a rather large scale....