Well, that was certainly predictable

BBC NEWS | UK | Iran condemns Rushdie knighthood

I'm happy to see Salman Rushdie receive this honor.

The measure that has taken place for paying tribute to this apostate and detested figure will definitely put British statesmen and officials at odds with Islamic societies, the emotions and sentiments of which have again been provoked.
- Iran Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini

The emotions and sentiments of islamic societies aren't as much provoked by this knighthood as agitated by islamist demagogues for power points.

Not that the same sort of thing doesn't occur on our side of the cultural divide, of course.

It would have been interesting to observe the discussions leading to the decision to knight Sir Salman.

The Independent - Salman Rushdie: His life, his work and his religion:

[Rushie] senses soft racism in the refusal to see Islamic fundamentalists for what they are. When looking at the Christian fundamentalists of the United States, most people see an autonomous movement of superstitious madmen. But when they look at their Islamic equivalents, they assume they cannot mean what they say.

It's unfortunate that the title of The Independent's piece implies that Rushie has religion. He doesn't. Rushdie is a wholly secular person.

Fundamentalism isn't about religion. It's about power.

Hear! Hear!

"Sir Salman Rushdie" sounds good on him.

Pick a target with a pin

Well, I don't know anything about James Wimberley other than what it says in his bio (scroll down a bit) at Mark Kleiman's Reality-Based Community blog, and that he seems to be a very bright guy.

Today, Wimberley has a piece over there entitled, A radical thought experiment in halting climate change. In it, Wimberley writes

You wake up tomorrow as [a ruthless and utilitarian but benevolent world dictator]. Sitting down at the jade desk in your palace in Persepolis at 6 a.m - being emperor of the world is no sinecure - you find a file marked "Climate Change". What do you decide?

It is stipulated that you are as benevolent as Asoka, as strictly utilitarian as Bentham, and as ruthless as Tamerlane. Justice, rights, and national feeling are to you just petty foibles of your subjects, and there are few practical limits on your power to coerce obedience to your commands. (I won't bother making this male fantasy gender-neutral).

Let's open the file.

Wimberley then goes through some words from the G8 and from the IPCC, calls both of them something to the effect of more words, writes about GNP, GNI at PPP, tabulates some presumed costs of CO2 stabilization, and discusses how American GDP should be "downgraded (at least by half), and African GDP upgraded (at least doubled)" because of the different marginal values of different GDPs.

Wimberley packs a lot into a few paragraphs, then states that the optimum policy for his (ruthless and utilitarian but benevolent) dictator is to pick a target with a pin and order your satraps to get moving. You can always adjust as you go, but get going.

Wimberley says this is the only way things can change, and that it's been Angela Merkel's intended course at the G8. As for Americans,

The current health care debate in the USA is welcome but it's an impossible model for climate change. Health care reform will take the form of a set of once-off measures that can be implemented by federal legislation and budgets. It's reasonable to demand that the proposals are detailed, coherent and joined-up. Climate change is complex, world-wide and only partly understood: like unemployment during the Depression, or race inequality in the 1960s. Measures addressing them will start processes that themselves can't be fully predicted: as with a carbon tax, a right to reverse metering, massive research on renewable and fusion energy. On climate change, the models for American politicians should be FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society, driven forward by men who were not wonks - though they listened to them - but visionary, flexible (and none too scrupulous) leaders.

If they fail, I fear the world may spiral into a night of chaos in which the despairing peoples may, as many of them have done before, sacrifice their freedom to a Strong Man. There is zero probability that such a man would be an Asoka, and very little a Bentham or Augustus. What they would likely get would be more like an unvarnished Tamerlane.

Aside from a slight quibble about the title (because it's too late for halting climate change), this sounds about right to me, except he doesn't give the odds I'm sure he's thought about a lot. I wonder if he's got as bleak an outlook as mine?

Jack Kevorkian, Hero, Released from Prison

Kevorkian Out of Prison After 8 Years - Forbes.com

I admire Dr. Kevorkian, and wish him well for the rest of his days.

He can speak about assisted suicide, but can't show people how to make a machine like one he invented to give lethal drugs to those who wanted to die, Department of Corrections spokesman Russ Marlan said.

I wonder if he's prohibited from mentioning Derek Humphry's book, Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying?

I wonder if he's prohibited from telling people about the Internet as a means of finding information?

Long live Jack Kevorkian!

The Nuclear Temptation: The Perils of Pushing Atomic Energy as the Climate Change Panacea - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News

The Nuclear Temptation: The Perils of Pushing Atomic Energy as the Climate Change Panacea - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News

This article leaves me frustrated. There's nothing new, and the anti-nuclear slant gets old. Even the title is annoying. "... the Climate Change Panacea ..." Anybody who uncritically uses the word "panacea" in a sentence containing the phrase "climate change" ought to be shot, not only because there is no climate change panacea, but because nobody with half a brain claims that there is.

Uncritical association of "panacea" with "climate change" is suitable for setting up a straw man, and nothing more.

What might have been new would have been some sort of analysis of exactly how humanity can expect to obtain the energy needed to replace depleting energy presently liberated from polluting fossil sources, all the while providing vast quantities of new energy to meet the needs of expanding economies and many millions of new people (two or three billion of whom already exist in squalor).

But no. The question is acknowledged as pressing, but that's about it.

The article acknowledges the "largely carbon neutral" nature of nuclear energy, but only as a back-handed explanation that the fact "allows the industry to accept and promote the worst-case climate change scenarios while simultaneously presenting itself as a potential solution to the problem of global warming."

In a variant of the "panacea" fallacy, some activist doctor is paraphrased as saying that "Nuclear power simply doesn't have the ability to influence global warming decisively..."

Decisively?

Does the good doctor actually think that any option could be individually decisive? Human dieoff would be decisive, but that's not much of an option. I wonder if this doctor has considered the decisiveness of battle deaths in resource wars, the likelihood of which is some function to energy availability?

Enough.

Principles of Policy Analysis: Final Exam

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Well, I'm just a dumb engineer barely able to spell "policy analyst", but for some reason I thought Mark Kleiman's post - a public policy final exam - was very interesting. He didn't provide an answer key, but I found myself thinking up answers anyway, wondering what conceptual blocks he might be trying to expose and so on.

Clearly, Kleiman knows a great deal, and I know next to nothing, about public policy analysis.

Kleiman is a prohibitionist with respect to drugs, whereas I think our national drug policy is the stupidest goddamn thing I've ever seen.

Should I defer to Kleiman with respect to drug policy on the basis that he knows a great deal about public policy analysis while I know next to nothing?

Naa... Interesting test though. Probably has something to do with the fact that Kleiman's blog remains on my read list while my collection of unclicked links grows and grows.

Futureal

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"It's tough to make a forecast, especially about the future."
-- Yogi Berra (presumably)

I have no forecast. The one I started to post met the delete key. I deleted it not because I thought it was wrong, but because I hope it is wrong.

Certain things seem more likely than others, though. I think Martin Rees is a bit of an optimist. Eric Pianka is probably right. Albert Bartlett is probably right.

Time will tell. Que sera sera.

Coping with Climate Dread :: thetyee.ca

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Coping with Climate Dread :: thetyee.ca:

Depleted fish stocks, species extinction, SUV and oil obsessions, Kyoto rejections, disenfranchized youth, the Alberta tar sands and deadly methane gas: Condon says 'an emerging consensus' is setting in among his colleagues; 'Every hour of [our] work is in the context of 'Can the madness be stopped?'' he relates. 'And when you're looking critically at the information, and using your critical functions, you often conclude that it can't be.'

I don't often conclude that the madness can't be stopped. It is my conclusion, period.

Which is a bitter pill to swallow, when the conclusions you draw from your professional life spell a disastrous future for your own children. When she's at her lowest, Campbell has moments where she looks at her son and second guesses the wisdom of having brought a child into the world.

That's the hardest part of all.

Rees gets philosophical: "I suppose I'm an existentialist: you have to decide what you're going to do," he says. "I mean I could go and shoot myself, I'm wealthy enough to put my feet up, go out and buy myself a boat and a case of rum and enjoy the remaining days of my life."

But, like the others, Rees has resolved to continue the fight, and to see global warming through, in whatever shape or form life on earth takes in the coming decades. Just because this is the grimmest thing we've ever faced as a species doesn't mean they're throwing in the towel. Far from it.

But it's going to take some work.

"The very tendencies that gave [us such] a leg up in the competition with the other species 50,000 years ago are maladaptive today," Rees concludes.

"Now, if we are intelligent enough to recognize that, at least in theory we should be able to over-ride our biological predispositions. If we don't, we're doomed."

If we don't, we're doomed.

The title of this piece is "Coping with Climate Dread". Expanding the scope only makes the outlook worse.

My own prescription for coping is one of resignation, acceptance, hoping against hope that I'm wrong, and trying to live in the present.