The reason you don’t understand quantum computing, according to this article in Wired, is that you are too stupid. Only a person with a Ph.D. in quantum computing is alllowed to try to understand it, and they should not have to take the time to try to explain it to the likes of you.
Some books just have good titles. And this one is called Advertising Shits in Your Head: Strategies for Resistance. From the publisher:
Advertising Shits in Your Head calls adverts what they are—a powerful means of control through manipulation—and highlights how people across the world are fighting back. It diagnoses the problem and offers practical tips for a DIY remedy. Faced with an ad-saturated world, activists are fighting back, equipped with stencils, printers, high-visibility vests, and utility tools. Their aim is to subvert the adverts that control us.
“PM Press is an independent, radical publisher of books and media to educate, entertain, and inspire.”
Really, they had me at the title. But it seems to me that the main way to counter the shit is to teach children from a young age to evaluate the source and quality of information they are taking in, expose themselves to multiple sources of information, think critically, draw their own conclusions, discuss their conclusions with other informed people, and be open minded.
Somewhat related is this new browser plug-in Newsguard, which provides “Trust ratings for all the news sites that account for 95% of engagement” and is “Written by journalists, not secret algorithms.” Sounds okay, although I think I have too many browser plug-ins already.
This is a nice piece of risk communication from Dominic Walliman at Domain of Science (which I discovered on Open Culture.com). The “map” is actually a log-log plot of severity (number of deaths) and likelihood (average return period), but this guy manages to convey all that in a digestible way without dumbing it down. You can just stare at the chart, but in this case it really is worth watching the video.
So what should we be paying more attention to? Well, we might actually pay more attention to pandemics now, and we should. The AIDS pandemic has actually been really bad, and is a good example of how we can just get used to and accept a hugely terrible event that unfolds over a long time. Also antibiotic resistance, synthetic biology, and some complex of climate change/ecosystem collapse/food supply issues. This last he explains pretty well and succinctly between about minutes 12 and 13, so that is worth watching if you have only one minute.
If I were a politician, I would want a chart like this on my wall, prepared by experts in risk management and system theory, and tapping into experts on each of the major risks. I would also want to add more mundane risks that are certain to happen and killing a lot of people, like air pollution, motor vehicle crashes (and pedestrian and cyclist deaths), and diabetes. Then I would tackle some of the worst ones and try to align my policies and budget allocations with them. Not glamorous stuff, but I would hire this guy to try to help explain it to the public. If he wasn’t available, I would pick another photogenic person with a soft and pleasing British (Australian?) accent to help.
Back in 2012, Columbia Journalism Review gave some tips for how the media can try to counter misinformation. It’s hard and nothing is foolproof, but there are some best practices. People tend to believe things they hear repeated, things that meet their preconceived notions, and statements from people and organizations they trust. One best practice is to state the truth in a positive way rather than as the negation of a false statement. Another is to not quote partisan or ideological sources when refuting the false statement. Another is using graphics where possible to give context to numbers.
I find some of the IPCC terminology interesting. Alternatives analysis and communication of uncertainty are professional interests of mine. I am afraid I am not all that good at them, but when I see the state of the art in scientific communication from the experts sometimes I feel a little better.
Here is a footnote in the Summary for Policy Makers on the terminology they use to try to communicate uncertainty.
A level of confidence is expressed using five qualifiers: very low, low, medium, high and very high, and typeset in italics, for example, medium confidence. The following terms have been used to indicate the assessed likelihood of an outcome or a result: virtually certain 99–100% probability, very likely 90–100%, likely 66 100%, about as likely as not 33–66%, unlikely 0–33%, very unlikely 0–10%, exceptionally unlikely 0–1%. Additional terms (extremely likely 95–100%, more likely than not >50–100%, more unlikely than likely 0–<50%, extremely unlikely 0–5%) may also be used when appropriate. Assessed likelihood is typeset in italics, for example, very likely.
Here are some definitions of scenarios and pathways in Chapter 1 of Global Warming of 1.5 °C.
A ‘scenario’ is an internally consistent, plausible, and integrated description of a possible future of the human–environment system, including a narrative with qualitative trends and quantitative projections (IPCC, 2000). Climate change scenarios provide a framework for developing and integrating emissions, climate change and climate impact projections, including an assessment of their inherent uncertainties. The long-term and multi–faceted nature of climate change requires climate scenarios to describe how assumptions about inherently uncertain socio-economic trends in the 21st century could influence future energy and land use, resulting in emissions, and climate change as well as human vulnerability and exposure to climate change. Such driving forces include population, GDP, technological innovation, governance, and lifestyles. Climate change scenarios are used for analysing and contrasting climate policy choices.
The notion of a ‘pathway’ can have multiple meanings in the climate literature. It is often used to describe the temporal evolution of a set of scenario features, such as GHG emissions and socioeconomic development. As such, it can describe individual scenario components or sometimes be used interchangeably with the word ‘scenario’. For example, the RCPs describe GHG concentration trajectories (van Vuuren et al., 2011) and the SSPs are a set of narratives of societal futures augmented by quantitative projections of socio-economic determinants such as population, GDP, and urbanization (Kriegler et al., 2012; O’Neill et al., 2014). Socio-economic driving forces consistent with any of the SSPs can be combined with a set of climate policy assumptions (Kriegler et al., 2014) that together would lead to emissions and concentration outcomes consistent with the RCPs (Riahi et al., 2017). This is at the core of the scenario framework for climate change research that aims to facilitate creating scenarios integrating emissions and development pathways dimensions (Ebi et al., 2014; van Vuuren et al., 2014).
Here’s the new IPCC report, Global Warming of 1.5 °C. I guess the idea is to show that this amount of warming, which most nations of the world have tentatively agreed to target, is still pretty bad. And the world is not even remotely on the path toward limiting warming to this level.
The report estimates the world has already warmed by about 1.0 degree C on average due to emissions that have already happened. If we stopped emissions today, the world would continue to warm, but warming would peak somewhere between 1.0 and 1.5 degrees C. I think this is an important concept to grasp – the effects that are beginning to be felt now are not the result of emissions happening now, but of past emissions including emissions decades ago. They would continue and get worse even if we stopped emitting today, and not only are we not lowering emissions, we are continuing and even accelerating them. So the problem is potentially one of runaway, exponentially growing consequences and we are only at the very beginning of the curve.
I find the report difficult to distill into key messages. Here are a couple paragraphs on impacts (starting on p. 1-29 if you are following along at home):
Impacts of climate change are due to multiple environmental drivers besides rising temperatures, such as rising atmospheric CO2, shifting rainfall patterns, rising sea levels, increasing ocean acidification, and extreme events, such as floods, droughts, and heat waves (IPCC, 2014e). For example, changes in rainfall affect the hydrological cycle and water availability (Schewe et al., 2014). Several impacts depend on atmospheric composition, for example, increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels leading to changes in plant productivity (Forkel et al., 2016), but also to ocean acidification (Hoegh Guldberg et al., 2007). Other impacts are driven by changes in ocean heat content, for example, the destabilization of coastal ice-sheets and sea-level rise (Bindoff et al., 2007; Chen et al., 2017), whereas impacts due to heat waves depend directly on ambient air or ocean temperature (Matthews et al., 2017). Impacts can be direct, for example, coral bleaching due to ocean warming, and indirect, for example, reduced tourism due to coral bleaching. Indirect impacts can also arise from mitigation efforts such as changed agricultural management (Section 3.6.2) or remedial measures such as solar radiation modification (Section 4.3.8, Cross-Chapter Box 10 in Chapter 4).
Impacts may also be triggered by combinations of factors, including ‘impact cascades’ (Cramer et al., 2014) through secondary consequences of changed systems. Changes in agricultural water availability caused by upstream changes in glacier volume are a typical example. Recent studies also identify compound events (e.g., droughts and heat waves), that is, when impacts are induced by the combination of several climate events (AghaKouchak et al., 2014; Leonard et al., 2014; Martius et al., 2016; Zscheischler and Seneviratne, 2017).
The rest of the report goes into various scenarios and pathways for achieving the 1.5 degrees C limit.
The Summary for Policy Makers has some attempts to convey these concepts in a more graphical way.
SpaceX is planning to launch over 4,000 small satellites to provide internet service. In the meantime though, it is apparently raising some cash by launching spy satellites for friendly foreign governments.
Here are some apps you can use to pester your elected representatives semi-automatically. Please, do not use them for revenge, stalking, or other nefarious purposes.
Calling is supposed to be the most effective. If you have the time and motivation to do that, here are a couple articles: Call the Halls and and this Wired article called Congress’ Phone System Is Broken—But It’s Still Your Best Shot.
Texas Monthly has an interesting profile of Katharine Hayhoe.
co-author of the last two National Climate Assessments and a reviewer on the Nobel Prize–winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Hayhoe—the daughter of missionaries and the wife of a pastor—is herself an evangelical Christian. In her talks, she uses the Bible to explain to Christians why they should care about climate change and how it affects other people, from a poor family on the island nation of Kiribati who will be displaced by rising sea levels to an elderly couple in Beaumont who can’t afford to pay for air-conditioning in Texas’s increasingly sweltering summers. As she puts it, “The poor, the disenfranchised, those already living on the edge, and those who contributed least to this problem are also those at greatest risk to be harmed by it. That’s not a scientific issue; that’s a moral issue…”
If she was going to leave astronomy behind, Hayhoe wanted to do policy-relevant climate science. When she was considering graduate programs, she was thrilled to learn that Don Wuebbles, who had been instrumental in addressing the chlorofluorocarbon problem in the eighties, was the new head of the department of atmospheric science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He would serve as her adviser for both her master’s degree and her doctorate. Under Wuebbles’s guidance, Hayhoe eventually began focusing on statistical downscaling, which was still a relatively new field when she started graduate school, in 1995. “There was very little of this being done at the time,” Wuebbles recalled recently, “and the methods were not capturing the full extent of the science, so she set about to develop a new technique and very successfully did so. She’s brilliant…”
Hayhoe’s first step is always to “genuinely bond over a shared value,” with an emphasis on that shared value’s being genuine. “The key is not to pretend; we can all smell someone who is not genuine a mile away,” she said. “If I’m talking to farmers or ranchers or water managers, I start off by talking about what we all care about, which is making sure we have water. And that, for many Texans, is almost as strong of a value as whatever it says in the Bible.” Her next step is to connect that issue to climate change. So when talking about water, she describes how climate change is changing rainfall patterns. “We’re getting these heavy downpours, and then we’re getting longer dry periods in between, and our droughts are getting stronger because the warmer it is, the more water evaporates out of our lakes and rivers and our soil,” she said. She tries to end her talks with solutions that inspire people, ranging from the personal (measuring your carbon footprint and installing energy-efficient light bulbs) to the large-scale (putting a tax on carbon). Hayhoe herself is most excited by the efforts of Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors and founder of SpaceX. “If I had to pick one person to save the world—and I don’t think any one person will but if I had to pick one—it would be him.” She is excited about the battery packs that Tesla is developing, declaring energy storage the “single technology that will make the most difference.”
Here’s an article from Hydrology and Earth System Sciences on better communication between scientists and the lay audience. An excerpt:
More theoretical knowledge on science communication can provide useful background knowledge for geoscience communicators, and thereby positively contribute to the geoscience debate in society. With this latter goal in mind, in this paper, we provide geoscientists with a review of relevant general science communication the- 5 ory. We focus on television appearances of (geo)scientists, though much of the research/themes/literature discussed also holds for popular-scientific presentations or for interactions with newspaper journalists. We use the term television loosely, also applying it to programs that appear online.
In this review we discuss six major themes in science communication research 10 related to television performances: scientist motivation (Sect. 2), target audience (Sect. 3), jargon and information transfer (Sect. 4), narratives and storytelling (Sect. 5), relationship between scientists and journalists (Sect. 6), and stereotypes of scientists (Sect. 7). For each theme we make the results from the literature tangible by analyzing a television appearance of a geoscientist from a science communication perspective. 15 For these case studies we use examples for which we had background information on behind-the-scenes discussions and negotiations, namely television appearances of authors Hut and Stoof.