Second Workshop on Software Research and Climate Change

Here is another ICSE 2010 workshop you should be interested in: the Second Workshop on Software Research and Climate Change.

The call for papers is just out –you might find it a bit unusual that there will not be a formal publication of the proceedings but the intent of the workshop is to create a lively discussion on the topic and to build a community of researchers interested in tackling it. Here is the challenge for participants:

How can we, as experts in software technology, and as the creators of future software tools and techniques, apply our particular knowledge and experience to the challenge of climate change? How can we understand and exploit the particular intellectual assets of our community — our ability to:

• think computationally;
• understand and model complex inter-related systems;
• build useful abstractions and problem decompositions;
• manage and evolve large-scale socio-technical design efforts;
• build the information systems and knowledge management tools that empower effective decision-making;
• develop and verify complex control systems on which we now depend;
• create user-friendly and task-appropriate interfaces to complex information and communication infrastructures.

In short, how can we apply our research strengths to make significant contributions to the problems of mitigation and adaptation of climate change?

I should mention I am also in the Program Committee for this workshop — if you have anything to say on the subject I’d love to hear from you!

 

Global warming scepticism and academic intolerance

Someone very dear to me told me, a few weeks ago, that he had noticed I was becoming more and more intolerant with several positions and people —among them, climate change deniers. He felt it wasn’t fitting for a scientist, a person supposed to examine the facts objectively and to be a professional doubter, to reject challenges to the scientific consensus as a matter of principle.

So I started thinking whether I was indeed failing to uphold the values of my profession; whether I was becoming intransigent on scientific matters. I concluded that, at least for software research, I wasn’t at fault: several of my papers are challenges to popular notions in my field. Among other things, my coauthors and I have argued that mining software repositories is plagued with dangers, that software processes may be irrelevant or, at least, of very limited applicability, that literally replicating experiments of software developers may not be an appropriate strategy under some conditions, and that software estimation is extremely sensitive to judgmental biases. In fact, the theoretical foundations of my field are so weak that I think professional sceptics could build a good and productive academic career mainly by poking holes in them. (They would build an even better academic career by developing better theoretical foundations, though.)

What about scepticism towards climate change? Well, first of all, I am not a climate scientist. Though the theoretical foundations of climatology are relatively simple, there are far too many details I do not know, and if I wanted to know them I’d need to spend another decade at school. As a scientist, I must defer to the conclusions climatologists reach —with caution, of course, especially if their field is as immature as mine.

But it turns out to be quite mature, and for several years now climate science has reached a consensus as strong as that on evolution or the germ theory of disease. You wouldn’t know that by just tuning in to the news: in the interest of “balance,” journalists often look for someone -anyone- to counter the very grave conclusions reached by climate scientists. But if you talk to climatologists or read their work you’ll discover that the debate is artificial, that it happens almost exclusively in the media, and that denialism is entirely disconnected from scientific practice.

So the science is clear — we’re essentially burning our planet. There is simply no credible scientific opposition to this consensus. Since the consequences are so catastrophic, it is everyone’s moral duty to fight them, and at the very least to stop the misinformation in the public sphere — even if we sometimes, sadly, appear to be intolerant.

This is why I love John Cook’s Skeptical Science website (found via Steve’s blog). It’s a sort of Snopes.com for climate science: it lists all the popular arguments against the scientific consensus and it explains how they have been debunked. The site also sorts denialist arguments under a useful taxonomy, in case that works better for you. So just like you’d refer your uncle to Snopes whenever he sends you a chain letter telling you that next month Mars is going to look as big as the moon or some other nonsense, you can use Skeptical Science as a handy reference to fight his fabricated doubt on climate change.

 

Workshop on Software Research on Climate Change

Today was (still is, at the time of writing) the 1st Workshop on Software Research on Climate Change, down in Florida. Jon Pipitone and I planned to attend remotely, skype-ing in, but never got around to make it work satisfactorily: our connection kept getting dropped, perhaps due to bad connectivity at the conference centre.

In any case, Jon and I decided to have our own mini-workshop in Toronto, and to share our conclusions with the Florida group. Jon posted our thoughts on his blog; if you’re interested in these things we’d love to hear what you think about it.

The cultural cognition of climate change

Would you agree that discussing climate change with a denialist is one of the most exhausting and frustrating debating experiences there are? Then you’ll enjoy reading Steve Easterbrook’s informative summary of a series of studies by Kahan and Braman on cultural cognition (and you might enjoy the studies themselves!). Kahan and Braman write:

Individuals’ expectations about the policy solution to global warming strongly influences their willingness to credit information about climate change. When told the solution to global warming is increased antipollution measures, persons of individualistic and hierarchic worldviews become less willing to credit information suggesting that global warming exists, is caused by humans, and poses significant societal dangers. Persons with such outlooks are more willing to credit the same information when told the solution to global warming is increased reliance on nuclear power generation.

New visa requirement for Mexicans in Canada: write to your MP!

You’ve probably heard about the new visa requirement for Mexicans (and Czechs) that want to visit Canada. According to the Immigration Minister, Jason Kenney, Mexicans now require a visa due to the abuse of the refugee claims system by some of us.

For a while I’ve heard stories about these supposed refugees and the immigration advisers that help them, and I have no sympathy for them. But imposing a visa on all Mexicans to address this issue is absurd (it will reduce the number of false refugee claims simply by greatly reducing the number of visitors to the country). There are other, simpler, solutions to the problem that do not involve this sort of imposition. Michelle Collins, at the Embassy magazine, has a good analysis on why this is a bad decision for all the parties involved.

I’m upset about this, not just because this is a significant hurdle for the families and friends of the Mexican community here in Canada, myself included, but because of the way it was executed: the requirement came on an extremely short notice, with a ridiculous grace period of 48 hours, catching the Canadian Embassy in Mexico unprepared to deal with the huge number of visa applications that fell upon it from all the people that had already made plans to visit Canada and causing many families and business people to cancel their travel plans. The new visa is more expensive, and its required paperwork more intrusive, than any other nations’ visa processes I’ve ever needed to go through, including the United States.

So what can we do about this? Val and I redacted a letter that you can send to your MP. If you don’t know who is your MP you can find out here. If you’re a Mexican living in Canada, a Mexican-Canadian, or a Canadian that is at all bothered by this decision, please help us out —all you need to do is print the letter with your MP’s name (editing anything you wish to, of course), and mail it in. Or at least send the letter and our request to your friends. It’s just a few minutes of your time, but it might make a difference for us.

Thanks!

Carbon clock

Via George Monbiot, here is a counter that estimates the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere. Monbiot writes (emphasis mine):

The carbon clock suggests that the cumulative total of long-lived greenhouse gases in the atmosphere so far is 3.64tn metric tonnes, carbon dioxide equivalent. It is rising by 2bn tonnes a month. To have a good chance of stopping at the all-important temperature barrier, we need to produce, across the remainder of human history, not much more than a quarter of the total accumulation so far. In other words, no more than 500 months (42 years) of current production. The clock must stop at 4.6tn. There’s our challenge in stark numbers. Sobering to have it spelt out.

Online climate simulator

C-Learn is a simplified online climate simulator you can use to play with possible CO2 emission scenarios. It may take you a few minutes to figure out how to change the input variables, and what do they mean exactly, but once you get the hang of it its a very sobering exercise.

I just spent some time trying to bring us down to a temperature increase of “only” 2 degrees Celsius, and when I got there (hint: you pretty much need a reduction in emissions of at least 90% from 1990 levels across the board, and huge efforts in stopping deforestation and increasing afforestation, which is what our best current models demand as well) I started playing with delay tactics –what if we wait a few years to start getting serious about stopping our emissions; what if developing countries get a few years’ handicap– and mostly hitting against a wall in every case (with one exception: action in developed countries is far more urgent than in developing ones).

So give it a try and pass it around. The more people know about the true magnitude of the mess we’re in, the better.

(via Jon Pipitone)

Light bulb ad

I loved this ad by the World Wildlife Fund for its simplicity.

(via Jon Pipitone, who has also posted some related thoughts on why consumer choice is only a small part of the equation when it comes to addressing climate change.)

Economic measurement

I just finished reading Fritz Schumacher’s “Small is Beautiful”, and it reminded me of a speech by Robert F. Kennedy that I wanted to share:

Too much and for too long, we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over eight hundred billion dollars a year, but that GNP — if we should judge the United States of America by that — counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and it counts nuclear warheads, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

The morality of a flat rate tax

Politics are a bit raw in the US these days, and while I spent the summer in Seattle I got into a few discussions about the current campaigns and public policy in general. 

One of the most unexpected positions I found was that of people being in favour of a flat rate tax. Twice I heard people independently defending flat taxes –one rather superficially, because he believed that a flat tax “should be enough” to cover the needs of society, and the other as a matter of principle and fairness. That’s the one that caught my attention: I’ve heard the arguments based on the simplication of the tax code and on the generation of wealth through flat taxation, but never that flat rates were morally defensible.

The argument goes as follows: The income an individual receives is a reward for the value that such individual adds to society. The market determines the value of each good and service; since trivial needs are easily satisfied, they are not as highly valued. Therefore, the more we contribute to satisfy society’s needs, the more money we earn. And, roughly, the more effort we apply to fulfill society’s needs, the more value we provide.

Therefore, we all earn our wealth rightfully (as long as it was legal), and it is unfair for the rich to be taxed at a higher proportion than the poor, since their wealth is simply a manifestation of the greater value they have provided to society. A progressive tax rate takes money away from the most productive and helpful citizens, and gives it to the least productive and helpful, which is an injustice to put it mildly.

(To be sure, this argument should conclude with a proposal not for a flat rate tax, but for a flat fee tax, where the government charges the same minimal fee to all its citizens and gets out of their way, like a club membership. But I have yet to hear anybody advocating the morality of a flat fee tax with a straight face.)

Now, the friend that gave me this argument is well-meaning, principled, and not particularly rich. For him, it is not simply an excuse to support selfish tax policies, it’s a consequence of a sincere belief in the free market system. I guess many compassionate, well-to-do people think similarly when faced with the deep inequalities in our economic system. But it’s a naive and erroneous argument, for two reasons.

First, it is false that the money exchanged in a transaction is generally a good approximation of the value provided to society by the transaction. Sometimes it is a good approximation of the value provided to the payer, but inconsequential or detrimental to the payer’s community (for instance, arms trading and stock exchange speculation). Sometimes the value provided to society is impossible to assess at the time of the transaction (as with scientific research). Sometimes the value is far higher than the money exchanged, because the benefitting party is disadvantaged and cannot pay an amount corresponding to the benefit received (for example, most volunteer work). It is then wrong to reason that the value provided to society equals the wealth earned in the process.

Second, it is false that the effort one exerts optimally corresponds to the benefit one will provide to society. We do not have a level playing field: poor citizens have by definition less capital than rich citizens, and hence less leverage to provide greater value to society with the same amount of effort.

So, effort exerted does not correspond to value provided to society, and value provided to society does not correspond to personal wealth. We simply cannot assume that the rich among us have provided greater value to society, or that they have made greater sacrifices for it. We can see, however, the ethical case for using superfluous capital to address society’s ills, through taxing proportionally more those with proportionally fewer needs.