Edge 220
—August 15, 2007 |
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THE CHANGING ARCTIC: A RESPONSE TO FREEMAN DYSON'S "HERETICAL THOUGHTS"
Knowing that Arctic climate models are imperfect, it would be reassuring for me, if not for the scientists, to be able to write that scientists keep making grim predictions that just that don't come true. If that were so, we could follow Dyson's line that the models aren't so good and "the fuss is exaggerated". Scarily, the truth is the other way around. The ice is melting faster than the grimmest of the scientist's predictions, and the predictions keep getting grimmer. Now we are talking about an Arctic free of ice in summer by 2040. That's a lot of melting given that, in the long, dark winter the ice covers an area greater than that of the entire United States. |
THE THIRD CULTURE THE CHANGING ARCTIC EDGE IN THE NEWS THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS THIRD CULTURE NEWS DISCOVER MAGAZINE THE NEW YORK TIMES THE NEW YORK TIMES PROSPECT MAGAZINE PROSPECT MAGAZINE PROSPECT MAGAZINE THE NEW YORK TIMES |
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OPINION:Points "People have a nasty habit of clustering in coalitions, professing certain beliefs as badges of their commitment to the coalition and treating rival coalitions as intellectually unfit and morally depraved," writes Harvard scientist Steven Pinker, in an edge.org essay about dangerous ideas. "Debates between members of the coalitions can make things even worse," he continues, "because when the other side fails to capitulate to one's devastating arguments, it only proves they are immune to reason." ... |
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MIND & BRAIN Jaron's
World: Peace through God ...I’ve kept quiet during the past year or so of high-profile science/religion bickering because I assumed there would be no use for yet another voice in the agitated crowd. As it happens, though, the approach to science/religion questions that I prefer has remained almost entirely unrepresented, so now I will join in. |
A CONVERSATION WITH
GINO SEGRE; In the Footsteps of His Uncle, Then His
Father But Dr. Segre, 68, has a second profession: he writes popular books about the history of science. His most recent book, “Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics,” about a 1932 conference at Niels Bohr’s Institute for Theoretical Physics, has just been published, drawing praise from reviewers. ... |
THE
FIRST WORD ...In 1989, Pinker and a graduate student named Paul Bloom wrote a paper in which they argued that “language is no different from other complex abilities, such as echolocation or stereopsis,” and that “the only way to explain the origin of such abilities is through the theory of natural selection.” Just as the eye — an organ of breathtaking complexity and specialization — evolved incrementally through the combined effects of random mutations and natural selection over millions of years, so, too, Pinker and Bloom insisted, did language. The authors were invited to present their paper at M.I.T., where Pinker was then a professor, and they learned that Chomsky had agreed to serve as a commentator. Kenneally quotes Bloom on his reaction to this news: “I was absolutely terrified. ... Chomsky is utterly merciless in debate.” In the end, Chomsky failed to show (apparently he had back trouble), and Pinker and Bloom went on to publish their paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, a leading scientific journal, where it appeared along with comments from 31 scientists, including one who titled his endorsement “Liberation!” “From that point on,” Kenneally writes, “more and more researchers felt that studying the origin and evolution of language was a legitimate academic inquiry.” ... ...In 2002, Fitch and Marc Hauser, another prominent evolutionary biologist, wrote a landmark paper with Chomsky, in which they acknowledged some of the recent work on the origins of language and defined the uniquely human aspect of language quite narrowly, as recursion (the capacity to embed phrases inside one another, as in “the woman reading the book about the ape who threw the carrot that the trainer had washed in the morning before arriving at the lab to...”). Three years later, when, at a symposium on the evolution of language, Chomsky was asked what he thought about the field, he remarked, “I wouldn’t have guessed it could go so far.” |
Peter Houghton is grateful for his artificial heart. After all, it has saved his life. ... He's just a little wistful about emotions. ... He wishes he could feel them like he used to. Houghton is the first permanent lifetime recipient of a Jarvik 2000 left ventricular assist device. Seven years ago, it took over for the heart he was born with. Since then, it has unquestionably improved his physical well-being. He has walked long distances, traveled internationally and kept a daunting work schedule.... At the same time, he reports, he's become more "coldhearted" -- "less sympathetic in some ways." He just doesn't feel like he can connect with those close to him. He wishes he could bond with his twin grandsons, for example. "They're 8, and I don't want to be bothered to have a reasonable relationship with them and I don't know why," he says. ... He can only feel enough to regret that he doesn't feel enough. ...Could the poets have been right all these millennia? Could emotions be matters of the heart? ... |
The
sacred and the human It is not surprising that decent, sceptical people, observing the revival in our time of superstitious cults, the conflict between secular freedoms and religious edicts, and the murderousness of radical Islamism, should be receptive to the anti-religious polemics of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others. The "sleep of reason" has brought forth monsters, just as Goya foretold in his engraving. How are we to rectify this, except through a wake-up call to reason, of the kind that the evangelical atheists are now shouting from their pulpits? |
JOURNAL ... Such broader questions benefit from historical perspective, and few scientists can provide as much of it as Freeman Dyson. One of the most influential and politically aware of the post-Manhattan project physicists, he is now 83 but still game for a freezing midnight ride through icebergs. For all its genius, his generation failed to forsee the technological future, he said: "We totally missed all the important things." He recalled how his former Princeton colleague John von Neumann, one of the founders of computer science, estimated that the US would only ever need 18 computers. Dyson himself confessed to once trying to persuade Francis Crick against moving into biology. ... |
...Enter Andrew
Keen, a British internet entrepreneur living in California
whose new book, The Cult of the Amateur, witheringly
criticises Web 2.0 and its acolytes. Interestingly, it
was O'Reilly who
originally inspired Keen's apostasy. Each year, O'Reilly
runs an exclusive get-together called "FOO Camp" (short
for "Friends of O'Reilly"). Keen, invited one
year, describes going on a "two-day camping trip
with a couple of hundred Silicon Valley utopians. Sleeping
bag under my arm, rucksack on my back, I marched into
camp; two days later, feeling queasy, I left an unbeliever." |
Early on, before the campaigning begins in earnest, presidential candidates lunch with journalists in order to get acquainted. During one of these lunches, Mitt Romney was talking about the global economy and was asked why he thought some nations grew rich and others didn’t. He said there are at least two schools of thought on this question, one associated with Jared Diamond of U.C.L.A., which emphasizes natural resources, and another associated with the Harvard historian David Landes, which emphasizes culture. Over the next several minutes, he weaved the two theories together, siding a bit more with Lande. ... |
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Knowing that Arctic climate models are imperfect, it would be reassuring for me, if not for the scientists, to be able to write that scientists keep making grim predictions that just that don't come true. If that were so, we could follow Dyson's line that the models aren't so good and "the fuss is exaggerated". Scarily, the truth is the other way around. The ice is melting faster than the grimmest of the scientist's predictions, and the predictions keep getting grimmer. Now we are talking about an Arctic free of ice in summer by 2040. That's a lot of melting given that, in the long, dark winter the ice covers an area greater than that of the entire United States.
THE
CHANGING ARCTIC: A
RESPONSE TO FREEMAN DYSON'S "HERETICAL
THOUGHTS" [8.14.07] ALUN ANDERSON has been the U.S. Editor of the journal Nature, International Editor of the journal Science; and for 12 years, Editor, then Editor-in-Chief and Publishing Director, of the weekly magazine New Scientist. |
THE CHANGING ARCTIC: A RESPONSE TO FREEMAN DYSON'S "HERETICAL THOUGHTS" There is a clear view from the high point of the glacier in Ammassilik, East Greenland. To the north, behind me, you can see fifty miles up to the highest range of mountains. To the west, there is a huge iceberg-dotted fiord and the main ice cap of central Greenland. But looking around closer by, you ask, where is all the ice? At the top, instead of the expected ice cap, there is this honey-coloured rock, scoured into deep grooves by the passage of old ice. Here, on this summit spot in July, the ice has already gone. Everywhere the ice has retreated deep into the shady hollows of the mountains. Lower down, paths which just last summer cut across glacier ice now pass amid the soft moraines left behind as the glaciers draw back. High up, where I am now, the silence of the mountains is profound. But listen carefully and your ears begin to pick up a faint background sound. Walk down to where the glacier remains and the sound become clearer. It is water trickling away beneath the ice as the Arctic melts. Here you don't find so many people asking "what's all the fuss about global warming", as Freeman Dyson does in his recent controversial defence of "heretical" views of climate change on Edge. Climate change has arrived. Any Inuit hunter living in the nearby villages can tell you what they see. The sea ice melts earlier and earlier in the spring. Well-known winter routes across the ice that connect hunting areas can't necessarily be trusted any more. The ice may be too thin. You need smart and well-trained lead dogs on your sledge team to sense the ice and keep you safe. The arrival of fish and the passage of whales are changing. You'll hear the same lament from Inuit all over the Arctic. "The narwhal used to come right up to this bay," they told me at a settlement in Ellesmere Island, "but now the ice is all different and we don't know where they go." I'm up in Greenland along with the celebrated photo-essayist John McConnico, who took picture above, because I am reporting on the future of the Arctic. And it's not that I just want to lament the end of the polar bear, though hard times for the bear and other creatures that rely on sea ice are looking more than likely. I think there is a lot more to it than that. This is one of the regions of the world that will change first and fastest as a result of climate change. There will be losers but there may be winners too (on this I would agree with a heresy of Dyson). And there will be wrenching change, startling technological developments and political strife. It will be a microcosm of what will happen elsewhere. First and foremost, of course, we would like to know what to expect. And here I would agree, just for a moment, with half of another of Dyson's heresies. Our models of climate change do not entirely capture "the real world we live in". We do know that temperatures are rising faster in the Arctic than almost any other place and that the extent of the sea ice is shrinking with dramatic speed but our models aren't accurate. That said, Dyson is totally wrong with the second half of his criticism, that the climate experts end up believing their own imperfect models when they should "put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening". Scientists are totally aware of the shortcomings of their models and up here in the Arctic they are gathering data with unprecedented energy. Now that International Polar year has begun, there are going to be more scientists up in the Arctic that at any time in history. They need that data to validate their models and satellite observations. They are coming in icebreakers, helicopters and planes. Some are even coming aboard air ships, on floating ice floes (an 8 month trip to the pole from Russia aboard an "ice station") and on foot, with two Belgian scientists having just completed the walk from Russia to Greenland. Some will fly underwater planes beneath the ice. Yes, they have their winter clothes on and it's exactly their adventures and the new data that they generate that I am following for my book. Knowing that Arctic climate models are imperfect, it would be reassuring for me, if not for the scientists, to be able to write that scientists keep making grim predictions that just that don't come true. If that were so, we could follow Dyson's line that the models aren't so good and "the fuss is exaggerated". Scarily, the truth is the other way around. The ice is melting faster than the grimmest of the scientist's predictions, and the predictions keep getting grimmer. Now we are talking about an Arctic free of ice in summer by 2040. That's a lot of melting given that, in the long, dark winter the ice covers an area greater than that of the entire United States. Some of that fresh water stored up in the Arctic Ocean might find
its way out into the Atlantic, as happened during the Great Salinity
Anomaly of the 1970s, giving the Arctic a chance for revenge on the
rest of the planet. Repeated on a larger scale, the fresh water has
the potential to change ocean currents and world climate. The emerging riches of the region lead to the next part of the story—the awakening of geopolitical rivalries as a result of climate change. The US, Canada, Russia, Norway and the Danish territory of Greenland all face one other around the Arctic Ocean. They all claim rights to bits of it and are all in dispute. Russia has already claimed the seas up to the North Pole, recently depositing a titanium flag on the sea bed at the pole to make that clear. The circumpolar powers are beginning to worry about how to project power in the Arctic. Last month, the Canadian government ordered a new fleet of ice breakers to reinforce its territorial claims and began opening new military bases in the high Arctic. For better or worse, the Arctic is going to see some exciting times. With a bit of luck, and if the US signs up to the Law of the Sea, the claims to different bits of the Arctic may be resolved scientifically, rather than militarily, through surveys of the sea bed to determine whose continental shelf extends where and how far. But there is still a lesson for the second of Dyson's declared big heresies, "the wet Sahara". Climate change might actually bring the wetter climate of the Sahara of six thousand years ago back and Dyson argues that the "warm climate of six thousand years ago with the wet Sahara is to be preferred, and that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may help to bring it back". So we should believe that climate change may make life hard on some parts of the planet but open a new Eden elsewhere and we should not make a "fuss". The problem, of course, is that as the incipient signs of strife in the Arctic show, the planet's losers from climate change are hardly likely to make it to a new green land without a war. |
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John Brockman, Editor and Publisher |
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