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However, a greater concern lies in the notion of climate change itself. Climate change is in essence one kind of nature-society relationship, in which humans influence the climate through greenhouse gas (particularly CO2) emissions, and the climate strikes back by heating up and going crazy at times. This can be further simplified into a battle between humans and CO2: reducing CO2 guards against climate change, and increasing it aggravates the consequences. This view is anchored in scientists’ recommendation that a ‘safe’ level of CO2 should be at 350 parts per million (ppm) instead of the current 390. Already, the need to reduce CO2 is understood, as is evident in the push for greener fuels, more efficient means of production, the proliferation of ‘green’ products and companies, and most recently, the Cancun talks.

So can there be anything wrong with reducing CO2? No, there isn’t, but singling out CO2 as the culprit of climate change or of the environmental problems we face prevents us from looking within. What do I mean? The enemy, CO2, is an ‘other’, an externality produced by our economic systems but never an inherent component of the systems. Thus, we can declare war on the gas or on climate change without taking a step back and questioning: is there anything wrong with the way we develop?  Take Singapore for example: the government pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 16% under ‘business as usual’ standards, which says nothing about how ‘business’ is going to be changed other than having less carbon emissions (in fact, it is questionable even that CO2 levels will decrease, as ‘business as usual’ standards project a steady increase emission of CO2 each year). With the development of green technologies, decrease in carbon emissions will mainly be brought about by increased energy efficiency and switch to alternative fuels (including the insidious nuclear energy).

Thus, the way we develop will hardly be changed. Nobody questions whether our neoliberal system of development, which relies heavily on consumption to drive economies, needs to be looked into. We assume that it is the right way to develop, and only tweak it for the amount of externalities produced. Whether or not we should be measuring development by the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or if welfare is correlated to the amount of goods and services consumed is never considered. Even the UN-REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) scheme which aims to pay forest-rich countries for protecting their forests, ends up putting a price tag on them. The environment is being subsumed under the economy, when it should be that the economy is re-looked to take the environment into consideration.

when the world is celebrating after having held at bay the dangerous greenhouse gas, why would anyone bother rethinking about the economy? Yet we should, simply because there are alternative nature-society relationships and discourses about nature that are more or of equal importance as global warming. Annie Leonard’s informative videos on The Story of Stuff and specific products like electronics, bottled water and cosmetics shed light on the dangers of our ‘throw-away culture’ on the planet and poorer countries. What if the enemy was instead consumerism? Doing so would force countries (especially richer ones) to fundamentally question the nature of development, instead of just applying a quick technological fix. This is so much more difficult (and less economically viable), alongside other issues like environmental injustices – e.g. pollution or dumping of waste by Trans-National Corporations in poorer countries and removal of indigenous land rights. It is no wonder that we choose to disregard internal problems and focus instead on an external enemy; when CO2 is the culprit, the solution is too simple and detached from the communities that are affected by changes in their environment.

We need hence to allow for a greater politics of the environment. What I am proposing is not to diminish our action to reduce carbon emissions, for I do believe that it is part of the environmental problem that we are facing. What instead should be done is to reduce our fixation on CO2 as the main or only driver of climate change, and of climate change as the most pertinent nature-society issue we are facing. We should understand that there are many other ways of thinking about the environment; ‘developing’ countries, for example, tend to have a closer relationship with their environment – it is not something ‘out there’ but constantly interacted with for food, water, regulating services and cultural value. Their views and the impact of the socio-economic forces (often from TNCs and multi-lateral organizations like IMF) that shape the environment must also be taken into account, as do alternative meanings of sustainable development. Thus, even as we pat ourselves on the back for having achieved something significant at Cancun, our action should not and must not end there. Even if climate change hogs the headlines now, we must embrace more plurality in environmental discourse, for nature is not and never so simple as climate change alone. And hopefully sometime in the future, alongside a multi-lateral conference on climate change, the world can have one which rethinks the meaning of development.

the public still thinks of genes as blueprints, providing precise instructions for each individual.

“The elegant simplicity of the idea is so powerful,” said Shenk. Unfortunately, it is also false. The blueprint metaphor is fundamentally deceptive, he said, and “leads people to believe that any difference they see can be tied back to specific genes.”

Instead, Shenk advocates the metaphor of a giant mixing board, in which genes are a multitude of knobs and switches that get turned on and off depending on various factors in their environment. Interaction is key, though it goes against how most people see genetics: the classic, but inaccurate, dichotomies of nature versus nurture, innate versus acquired and genes versus environment.

Belief in those dichotomies is hard to eliminate because people tend to understand genetics through the two separate “tracks” of genes and the environment, according to speech communication expert Celeste Condit from the University of Georgia in Athens. Condit suggests that, whenever possible, explanations of genetics—by scientists, authors, journalists, or doctors—should draw connections between the two tracks, effectively merging them into one. “We need to link up the gene and environment tracks,” she said, “so that [people] can’t think of one without thinking of the other.”

Part of what makes these concepts so difficult lies in the language of genetics itself. A recent study by Condit in the September issue of Clinical Genetics found that when people hear the word genetics, they primarily think of heredity, or the quality of being heritable (passed from one generation to the next). Unfortunately, the terms heredity and heritable are often confused with heritability, which has a very different meaning.

heritability has single-handedly muddled the discourse of genetics to such a degree that even experts can’t keep it straight, argues historian of science Evelyn Fox Keller at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in her recent book, The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture. Keller describes how heritability (in the technical literature) refers to how much of the variation in a trait is due to genetic explanation. But the term has seeped out into the general public and is, understandably, taken to mean heritable, or ability to be inherited. These concepts are fundamentally different, but often hard to grasp.

For example, let’s say that in a population with people of different heights, 60 percent of the variation in height is attributable to genes (as opposed to nutrition). The heritability of height is 60 percent. This does not mean, however, that 60 percent of an individual’s height comes from her genes, and 40 percent from what she ate growing up. Heritability refers to causes of variations (between people), not to causes of traits themselves (in each particular individual). The conflation of crucially different terms like traits and variations has wreaked havoc on the public understanding of genetics.

The stakes are high. Condit emphasizes how important a solid understanding of genetics is for making health decisions. Whether people see diabetes or lung cancer as determined by family history or responsive to changes in behavior depends greatly on how they understand genetics. Policy decisions about education, childcare, or the workplace are all informed by a proper understanding of the dynamic interplay of genes and the environment, and this means looking beyond the Mendelian lens of heredity. According to Shenk, everyone in the business of communicating these issues “needs to bend over backwards to help people understand.”

over time, as the data build up, we begin to see trends which suggest that rising temperatures are making a particular kind of weather more likely to occur. One such trend has now become clearer. Two new papers, published by Nature, should make us sit up, as they suggest for the first time a clear link between global warming and extreme precipitation (precipitation means water falling out of the sky in any form: rain, hail or snow).

We still can't say that any given weather event is definitely caused by man-made global warming. But we can say, with an even higher degree of confidence than before, that climate change makes extreme events more likely to happen.

One paper, by Seung-Ki Min and others, shows that rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have caused an intensification of heavy rainfall events over some two-thirds of the weather stations on land in the northern hemisphere. The climate models appear to have underestimated the contribution of global warming on extreme rainfall: it's worse than we thought it would be.

The other paper, by Pardeep Pall and others, shows that man-made global warming is very likely to have increased the probability of severe flooding in England and Wales, and could well have been behind the extreme events in 2000. The researchers ran thousands of simulations of the weather in autumn 2000 (using idle time on computers made available by a network of volunteers) with and without the temperature rises caused by man-made global warming. They found that, in nine out of 10 cases, man-made greenhouse gases increased the risks of flooding. This is probably as solid a signal as simulations can produce, and it gives us a clear warning that more global heating is likely to cause more floods here.

As Richard Allan points out, also in Nature, the warmer the atmosphere is, the more water vapour it can carry. There's even a formula which quantifies this: 6-7% more moisture in the air for every degree of warming near the Earth's surface. But both models and observations also show changes in the distribution of rainfall, with moisture concentrating in some parts of the world and fleeing from others: climate change is likely to produce both more floods and more droughts.

Schmidt has refused to retract his comments and maintains that the majority of papers published in the journal are "dross"."I would personally not credit any article that was published there with any useful contribution to the science," he told the Guardian. "Saying a paper was published in E&E has become akin to immediately discrediting it." He also describes the journal as a "backwater" of poorly presented and incoherent contributions that "anyone who has done any science can see are fundamentally flawed from the get-go."

Schmidt points to an E&E paper that claimed that the Sun is made of iron. "The editor sent it out for review, where it got trashed (as it should have been), and [Boehmer-Christiansen] published it anyway," he says.

The journal also published a much-maligned analysis suggesting that levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide could go up and down by 100 parts per million in a year or two, prompting marine biologist Ralph Keeling at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California to write a response to the journal, in which he asked: "Is it really the intent of E&E to provide a forum for laundering pseudo-science?"

Schmidt and Keeling are not alone in their criticisms. Roger Pielke Jr, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, said he regrets publishing a paper in the journal in 2000 – one year after it was established and before he had time to realise that it was about to become a fringe platform for climate sceptics. "[E&E] has published a number of low-quality papers, and the editor's political agenda has clearly undermined the legitimacy of the outlet," Pielke says. "If I had a time machine I'd go back and submit our paper elsewhere."

Any paper published in E&E is now ignored by the broader scientific community, according to Pielke. "In some cases perhaps that is justified, but I would argue that it provided a convenient excuse to ignore our paper on that basis alone, and not on the merits of its analysis," he said. In the long run, Pielke is confident that good ideas will win out over bad ideas. "But without care to the legitimacy of our science institutions – including journals and peer review – that long run will be a little longer," he says.

she has no intention of changing the way she runs E&E – which is not listed on the ISI Journal Master list, an official list of academic journals – in response to his latest criticisms.

Schmidt is unsurprised. "You would need a new editor, new board of advisors, and a scrupulous adherence to real peer review, perhaps ... using an open review process," he said. "But this is very unlikely to happen since their entire raison d'être is political, not scientific."

But the problem is deeper than simply intellectual inertia. It goes back, ultimately, to the unconsidered differentiations we make—at every moment when we distinguish among objects—between those in the foreground of our consciousness and the background places in which the objects happen to be situated. Moreover, this distinction creates a hierarchy of objects. We are conscious not only of the skin that encloses and defines the object, but of bits and pieces of that object, each of which must have its own “skin.” That is the problem of anatomization. A car has a motor and brakes and a transmission and an outer body that, at appropriate moments, become separate objects of our consciousness, objects that at least some knowledgeable person recognizes as coherent entities.

Evelyn Fox Keller sees “The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture” as a consequence of our false division of the world into living objects without sufficient consideration of the external milieu in which they are embedded, since organisms help create effective environments through their own life activities.

The central point of her analysis has been that gender itself (as opposed to sex) is socially constructed, and that construction has influenced the development of science:If there is a single point on which all feminist scholarship…has converged, it is the importance of recognizing the social construction of gender…. All of my work on gender and science proceeds from this basic recognition. My endeavor has been to call attention to the ways in which the social construction of a binary opposition between “masculine” and “feminine” has influenced the social construction of science.

major critical concern of Fox Keller’s present book is the widespread attempt to partition in some quantitative way the contribution made to human variation by differences in biological inheritance, that is, differences in genes, as opposed to differences in life experience. She wants to make clear a distinction between analyzing the relative strength of the causes of variation among individuals and groups, an analysis that is coherent in principle, and simply assigning the relative contributions of biological and environmental causes to the value of some character in an individual

It is, for example, all very well to say that genetic variation is responsible for 76 percent of the observed variation in adult height among American women while the remaining 24 percent is a consequence of differences in nutrition. The implication is that if all variation in nutrition were abolished then 24 percent of the observed height variation among individuals in the population in the next generation would disappear. To say, however, that 76 percent of Evelyn Fox Keller’s height was caused by her genes and 24 percent by her nutrition does not make sense. The nonsensical implication of trying to partition the causes of her individual height would be that if she never ate anything she would still be three quarters as tall as she is.

In fact, Keller is too optimistic about the assignment of causes of variation even when considering variation in a population. As she herself notes parenthetically, the assignment of relative proportions of population variation to different causes in a population depends on there being no specific interaction between the causes.

Keller’s rather casual treatment of the interaction between causal factors in the case of the drummers, despite her very great sophistication in analyzing the meaning of variation, is a symptom of a fault that is deeply embedded in the analytic training and thinking of both natural and social scientists. If there are several variable factors influencing some phenomenon, how are we to assign the relative importance to each in determining total variation? Let us take an extreme example. Suppose that we plant seeds of each of two different varieties of corn in two different locations with the following results measured in bushels of corn produced (see Table 1). There are differences between the varieties in their yield from location to location and there are differences between locations from variety to variety. So, both variety and location matter. But there is no average variation between locations when averaged over varieties or between varieties when averaged over locations. Just by knowing the variation in yield associated with location and variety separately does not tell us which factor is the more important source of variation; nor do the facts of location and variety exhaust the description of that variation.

A report in the Mail on Sunday said that Latif's results "challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy's most deeply cherished beliefs" and "undermine the standard climate computer models". Monday's Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph repeated the claims.The reports attempted to link the Arctic weather that has enveloped the UK with research published by Latif's team in the journal Nature in 2008. The research said that natural fluctuations in ocean temperature could have a bigger impact on global temperature than expected. In particular, the study concluded that cooling in the oceans could offset global warming, with the average temperature over the decades 2000-2010 and 2005-2015 predicted to be no higher than the average for 1994-2004. Despite clarifications from the scientists at the time, who stressed that the research did not challenge the predicted long-term warming trend, the study was widely misreported as signalling a switch from global warming to global cooling.

The Mail on Sunday article said that Latif's research showed that the current cold weather heralds such "a global trend towards cooler weather".It said: "The BBC assured viewers that the big chill was was merely short-term 'weather' that had nothing to do with 'climate', which was still warming. The work of Prof Latif and the other scientists refutes that view."

Not according to Latif. "They are not related at all," he said. "What we are experiencing now is a weather phenomenon, while we talked about the mean temperature over the next 10 years. You can't compare the two."

it can be trained from very early in a child’s education. There’re ways that you can get quite young children to recognize what’s a good argument and what’s a bad argument. And as children grow older, it can be done in a more and more sophisticated form until by the time they’re undergraduates in universities they would be studying Plato’s dialogues for example and really looking at those tricky arguments and trying to figure out how to think. And this is important not just for the individual thinking about society, but it’s important for the way people talk to each other. In all too many public discussions people just throw out slogans and they throw out insults. And what democracy needs is listening. And respect. And so when people learn how to analyze an argument, then they look at what the other person’s saying differently. And they try to take it apart, and they think: “Well, do I share some of those views and where do I differ here?” and so on. And this really does produce a much more deliberative, respectful style of public interaction.

The second [quality] is what I call “the ability to think as a citizen of the whole world.” We’re all narrow and this is again something that we get from our animal heritage. Most non-human animals just think about the group. But, of course, in this world we need to think, first of all, our whole nation -- its many different groups, minority and majority. And then we need to think outside the nation, about how problems involving, let’s say, the environment or global economy and so on need cooperative resolution that brings together people from many different nations.

That’s complicated and it requires learning a lot of history, and it means learning not just to parrot some facts about history but to think critically about how to assess historical evidence. It means learning how to think about the global economy. And then I think particularly important in this era, it means learning something about the major world religions. Learning complicated, nonstereotypical accounts of those religions because there’s so much fear that’s circulating around in every country that’s based usually on just inadequate stereotypes of what Muslims are or whatever. So knowledge can at least begin to address that.

the third thing, which I think goes very closely with the other two, is what I call “the narrative imagination,” which is the ability to put yourself in the shoes of another person to have some understanding of how the world looks from that point of view. And to really have that kind of educated sympathy with the lives of others. Now again this is something we come into the world with. Psychologists have now found that babies less than a year old are able to take up the perspective of another person and do things, see things from that perspective. But it’s very narrow and usually people learn how to think about what their parents are thinking and maybe other family members but we need to extend that and develop it, and learn how the world looks from the point of view of minorities in our own culture, people outside our culture, and so on.

since we can’t go to all the places that we need to understand -- it’s accomplished by reading narratives, reading literature, drama, participating through the arts in the thought processes of another culture. So literature and the arts are the major ways we would develop and extend that capacity.

For many years, the leading model of development ... used by economists and international agencies measuring welfare was simply that for a country to develop means to increase [its] gross domestic product per capita. Now, in recent years, there has been a backlash to that because people feel that it just doesn’t ask enough about what goods are really doing for people, what can people really do and be.

so since 1990s the United Nations’ development program has produced annually what’s called a “Human Development Report” that looks at things like access to education, access to health care. In other words, a much richer menu of human chances and opportunities that people have. And at the theoretical end I’ve worked for about 20 years now with economist Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel Prize in 1998 for economics. And we’ve developed this as account of -- so for us what it is for a country to do better is to enhance the set of capabilities meaning substantial opportunities that people have to lead meaningful, fruitful lives. And then I go on to focus on a certain core group of those capabilities that I think ought to be protected by constitutional law in every country.

Life; health; bodily integrity; the development of senses, imagination, and thought; the development of practical reason; opportunities to have meaningful affiliations both friendly and political with other people; the ability to have emotional health -- not to be in other words dominated by overwhelming fear and so on; the ability to have a productive relationship with the environment and the world of nature; the ability to play and have leisure time, which is something that I think people don’t think enough about; and then, finally, control over one’s material and social environment, some measure of control. Now of course, each of these is very abstract, and I specify them further. Although I also think that each country needs to finally specify them with its own particular circumstances in view.

when kids learn in a classroom that just makes them sit in a chair, well, they can take in something in their heads, but it doesn’t make them competent at negotiating in the world. And so starting, at least, with Jean Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century, people thought: “Well, if we really want people to be independent citizens in a democracy that means that we can’t have whole classes of people who don’t know how to do anything, who are just simply sitting there waiting to be waited on in practical matters.” And so the idea that children should participate in their practical environment came out of the initial democratizing tendencies that went running through the 18th century.

even countries who absolutely do not want that kind of engaged citizenry see that for the success of business these abilities are pretty important. Both Singapore and China have conducted mass education reforms over the last five years because they realized that their business cultures don’t have enough imagination and they also don’t have enough critical thinking, because you can have awfully corrupt business culture if no one is willing to say the unpleasant word or make a criticism.

So they have striven to introduce more critical thinking and more imagination into their curricula. But, of course, for them, they want to cordon it off -- they want to do it in the science classroom, in the business classroom, but not in the politics classroom. Well, we’ll see -- can they do that? Can they segment it that way? I think democratic thinking is awfully hard to segment as current events in the Middle East are showing us. It does have the tendency to spread.

so maybe the people in Singapore and China will not like the end result of what they tried to do or maybe the reform will just fail, which is equally likely -- I mean the educational reform.

if you really don’t want democracy, this is not the education for you. It had its origins in the ancient Athenian democracy which was a very, very strong participatory democracy and it is most at home in really true democracy, where our whole goal is to get each and every person involved and to get them thinking about things. So, of course, if politicians have ambivalence about that goal they may well not want this kind of education.

when we bring up children in the family or in the school, we are always engineering. I mean, there is no values-free form of education in the world. Even an education that just teaches you a list of facts has values built into it. Namely, it gives a negative value to imagination and to the critical faculties and a very high value to a kind of rote, technical competence. So, you can't avoid shaping children.

ncreasingly the child should be in control and should become free. And that's what the critical thinking is all about -- it's about promoting freedom as the child goes on. So, the end product should be an adult who is really thinking for him- or herself about the direction of society. But you don't get freedom just by saying, "Oh, you are free." Progressive educators that simply stopped teaching found out very quickly that that didn't produce freedom. Even some of the very extreme forms of progressive school where children were just allowed to say every day what it was they wanted to learn, they found that didn't give the child the kind of mastery of self and of the world that you really need to be a free person.

Physical means of amelioration, such as changing the planetary albedo, are the subject of other papers of this theme issue and I thought it would be useful here to describe physiological methods for geoengineering. These include tree planting, the fertilization of ocean algal ecosystems with iron, the direct synthesis of food from inorganic raw materials and the production of biofuels.

Tree planting would seem to be a sensible way to remove CO2 naturally from the air, at least for the time it takes for the tree to reach maturity. But in practice the clearance of forests for farm land and biofuels is now proceeding so rapidly that there is little chance that tree planting could keep pace.

Oceans cover over 70 per cent of the Earth's surface and are uninhabited by humans. In addition, most of the ocean surface waters carry only a sparse population of photosynthetic organisms, mainly because the mineral and other nutrients in the water below the thermocline do not readily mix with the warmer surface layer. Some essential nutrients such as iron are present in suboptimal abundance even where other nutrients are present and this led to the suggestion by John Martin in a lecture in 1991 that fertilization with the trace nutrient iron would allow algal blooms to develop that would cool the Earth by removing CO2

The Earth system is dynamically stable but with strong feedbacks. Its behaviour resembles more the physiology of a living organism than that of the equilibrium box models of the last century

For almost all other ailments, there was nothing available but nostrums and comforting words. At that time, despite a well-founded science of physiology, we were still ignorant about the human body or the host–parasite relationship it had with other organisms. Wise physicians knew that letting nature take its course without intervention would often allow natural self-regulation to make the cure. They were not averse to claiming credit for their skill when this happened.

The alternative is the acceptance of a massive natural cull of humanity and a return to an Earth that freely regulates itself but in the hot state.

Global heating would not have happened but for the rapid expansion in numbers and wealth of humanity. Had we heeded Malthus's warning and kept the human population to less than one billion, we would not now be facing a torrid future. Whether or not we go for Bali or use geoengineering, the planet is likely, massively and cruelly, to cull us, in the same merciless way that we have eliminated so many species by changing their environment into one where survival is difficult.

It’s amazing that the myth of the lone genius has persisted for so long, since simultaneous invention has always been the norm, not the exception. Anthropologists have shown that the same inventions tended to crop up in prehistory at roughly similar times, in roughly the same order, among cultures on different continents that couldn’t possibly have contacted one another.

Also, there’s a related myth—that innovation comes primarily from the profit motive, from the competitive pressures of a market society. If you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.

The musician Brian Eno invented a wonderful word to describe this phenomenon: scenius. We normally think of innovators as independent geniuses, but Eno’s point is that innovation comes from social scenes,from passionate and connected groups of people.

It turns out that the lone genius entrepreneur has always been a rarity—there’s far more innovation coming out of open, nonmarket networks than we tend to assume.

Really, we should think of ideas as connections,in our brains and among people. Ideas aren’t self-contained things; they’re more like ecologies and networks. They travel in clusters.

ideas are networks

In part, that’s because ideas that leap too far ahead are almost never implemented—they aren’t even valuable. People can absorb only one advance, one small hop, at a time. Gregor Mendel’s ideas about genetics, for example: He formulated them in 1865, but they were ignored for 35 years because they were too advanced. Nobody could incorporate them. Then, when the collective mind was ready and his idea was only one hop away, three different scientists independently rediscovered his work within roughly a year of one another.

Charles Babbage is another great case study. His “analytical engine,” which he started designing in the 1830s, was an incredibly detailed vision of what would become the modern computer, with a CPU, RAM, and so on. But it couldn’t possibly have been built at the time, and his ideas had to be rediscovered a hundred years later.

I think there are a lot of ideas today that are ahead of their time. Human cloning, autopilot cars, patent-free law—all are close technically but too many steps ahead culturally. Innovating is about more than just having the idea yourself; you also have to bring everyone else to where your idea is. And that becomes really difficult if you’re too many steps ahead.

The scientist Stuart Kauffman calls this the “adjacent possible.” At any given moment in evolution—of life, of natural systems, or of cultural systems—there’s a space of possibility that surrounds any current configuration of things. Change happens when you take that configuration and arrange it in a new way. But there are limits to how much you can change in a single move.

Which is why the great inventions are usually those that take the smallest possible step to unleash the most change. That was the difference between Tim Berners-Lee’s successful HTML code and Ted Nelson’s abortive Xanadu project. Both tried to jump into the same general space—a networked hypertext—but Tim’s approach did it with a dumb half-step, while Ted’s earlier, more elegant design required that everyone take five steps all at once.

Also, the steps have to be taken in the right order. You can’t invent the Internet and then the digital computer. This is true of life as well. The building blocks of DNA had to be in place before evolution could build more complex things. One of the key ideas I’ve gotten from you, by the way—when I read your book Out of Control in grad school—is this continuity between biological and technological systems.

technology is something that can give meaning to our lives, particularly in a secular world.

He had this bleak, soul-sucking vision of technology as an autonomous force for evil. You also present technology as a sort of autonomous force—as wanting something, over the long course of its evolution—but it’s a more balanced and ultimately positive vision, which I find much more appealing than the alternative.

As I started thinking about the history of technology, there did seem to be a sense in which, during any given period, lots of innovations were in the air, as it were. They came simultaneously. It appeared as if they wanted to happen. I should hasten to add that it’s not a conscious agency; it’s a lower form, something like the way an organism or bacterium can be said to have certain tendencies, certain trends, certain urges. But it’s an agency nevertheless.

technology wants increasing diversity—which is what I think also happens in biological systems, as the adjacent possible becomes larger with each innovation. As tech critics, I think we have to keep this in mind, because when you expand the diversity of a system, that leads to an increase in great things and an increase in crap.

the idea that the most creative environments allow for repeated failure.

And for wastes of time and resources. If you knew nothing about the Internet and were trying to figure it out from the data, you would reasonably conclude that it was designed for the transmission of spam and porn. And yet at the same time, there’s more amazing stuff available to us than ever before, thanks to the Internet.

To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap. Another example is spectrum. One reason we have this great explosion of innovation in wireless right now is that the US deregulated spectrum. Before that, spectrum was something too precious to be wasted on silliness. But when you deregulate—and say, OK, now waste it—then you get Wi-Fi.

If we didn’t have genetic mutations, we wouldn’t have us. You need error to open the door to the adjacent possible.

image of the coral reef as a metaphor for where innovation comes from. So what, today, are some of the most reeflike places in the technological realm?

Twitter—not to see what people are having for breakfast, of course, but to see what people are talking about, the links to articles and posts that they’re passing along.

second example of an information coral reef, and maybe the less predictable one, is the university system. As much as we sometimes roll our eyes at the ivory-tower isolation of universities, they continue to serve as remarkable engines of innovation.

Life seems to gravitate toward these complex states where there’s just enough disorder to create new things. There’s a rate of mutation just high enough to let interesting new innovations happen, but not so many mutations that every new generation dies off immediately.

, technology is an extension of life. Both life and technology are faces of the same larger system.

set out to model was the development of religious schisms. Such schisms are a recurrent feature of religion, especially in the West. The classic example is the fracturing of Christianity that occured after the reformation.

Their model made two simple assumptions. Firstly, that religions that are highly dominant actually induce some people to want to break away from them. When a religion becomes overcrowded, then some individuals will lose their religion and take up another.

Second, they assume that every religion has a value to the individual that is composed of it's costs and benefits. That value varies between religion, but is the same for all individuals. It's a pretty simplistic assumption, but even so they get some interesting results.

Now, this is a very simple model, and so the results shouldn't be over-interpreted. But it's a fascinating result for a couple of reasons. It shows how new religious 'species' can come into being in a mixed population - no need for geographical separation. That's such a common feature of religion - from the Judaeo-Christian religions to examples from Papua New Guinea - that it's worth trying to understand what drives it. What's more, this is the first time that anyone has attempted to model the transmission of religious ideas in evolutionary terms. It's a first step, to be sure, but just showing that it can be done is a significant achievement.

The value comes because it shifts the focus from thinking about how culture benefits the host, and instead asks how the cultural trait is adaptive in it's own right. What is important is not whether or not the human host benefits from the trait, but rather whether the trait can successfully transmit and reproducing itself (see Bible Belter for an example of how this could work).

Even more intriguing is the implications for understanding cultural-genetic co-evolution. After all, we know that viruses and their hosts co-evolve in a kind of arms race - sometimes ending up in a relationship that benefits both.

The problem is that people like Lord Monckton, Ian Plimer, Christopher Booker and James Delingpole act as an echo-chamber for each other's discredited beliefs. However nutty their views are, they will be affirmed by other members of the closed circle.

For instance, Monckton's claims that "Arctic sea ice is fine, steady for a decade" made reference to Alaskan research group (IARC).I wrote to members of IARC and asked whether this was true. Both their chief scientist and director confirmed that Monckton was mistaken.They also pointed me to the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) for a second opinion.A scientist there confirmed Monckton's error, as did Dr Ola Johannessen, whose work has shown ice loss in Greenland (Monckton reported that Johannessen's work showed that Greenland "was just fine".)

Next, I investigated Monckton's claim that the medieval period was warmer than today. Monckton showed a slide featuring nine researchers' works which, he claimed, proved that today's warming is not unusual – it was hotter in the past.I wrote to these authors and I read their papers. It turned out that none of the authors or papers made the claims that Monckton attributed to them. This pattern of misinterpretation was becoming chronic.

Next, I checked on Monckton's claim that the ocean has not been heating for 50 years. To quote him directly, there has been "no ocean heat buildup for 50 years".On this slide, he referenced a well-known researcher named Dr Catia Domingues. It turns out Domingues said no such thing. What would she know? She only works for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia.

Monckton referred to a 2004 statement by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) which stated that solar activity has caused today's warming and that global warming will end soon.The president of the IAU division on the sun and heliosphere told me that there is no such position of the IAU and that I should pass this information on to whomever "might have used the IAU name to claim otherwise".

That paper, like a lot of research, required a lot of effort.  So it was very disappointing to E&E in the years that followed identify itself as an outlet for alternative perspectives on the climate issue. It has published a number of low-quality papers and a high number of opinion pieces, and as far as I know it never did get ISI listed.

Boehmer-Christiansen's quote about following her political agenda in running the journal is one that I also have cited on numerous occasions as an example of the pathological politicization of science. In this case the editor's political agenda has clearly undermined the legitimacy of the outlet.  So if I had a time machine I'd go back and submit our paper elsewhere!

A consequence of the politicization of E&E is that any paper published there is subsequently ignored by the broader scientific community. In some cases perhaps that is justified, but I would argue that it provided a convenient excuse to ignore our paper on that basis alone, and not on the merits of its analysis. So the politicization of E&E enables a like response from its critics, which many have taken full advantage of. For outside observers of climate science this action and response together give the impression that scientific studies can be evaluated simply according to non-scientific criteria, which ironically undermines all of science, not just E&E.  The politicization of the peer review process is problematic regardless of who is doing the politicization because it more readily allows for political judgments to substitute for judgments of the scientific merit of specific arguments.  An irony here of course is that the East Anglia emails revealed a desire to (and some would say success in) politicize the peer review process, which I discuss in The Climate Fix.

For my part, in 2007 I published a follow on paper to the 2000 E&E paper that applied and extended a similar methodology.  This paper passed peer review in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Pielke, Jr., R. A. (2007), Future economic damage from tropical cyclones: sensitivities to societal and climate changes. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 365 (1860) 2717-2729 http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-2517-2007.14.pdf

Over the long run I am confident that good ideas will win out over bad ideas, but without care to the legitimacy of our science institutions -- including journals and peer review -- that long run will be a little longer.

But even if there is no law prohibiting Jones’ action, isn’t he morally to blame for creating the environment that led to the murders? Didn’t he know Muslims would riot, and people might die? It seems ridiculous to assume that Jones could know such a thing, even if parts of the Muslim world have a poor track record in this area. But imagine for a moment that Jones did know Muslims would riot, and people would die. This does not make the act of burning a book and the act of murder morally equivalent, nor does it make the book burner responsible for reactions to his act. In and of itself, burning a book is a morally neutral act. Why would this change because some misguided individuals think book burning is worth the death penalty? And why is it that so many have automatically assumed the reaction to be respectable? To use an example nearer to some of us, recall when PZ Myers desecrated a communion wafer. If some Christian was offended, and went on to murder the closest atheist, would we really blame Myers? Is Myers' offense any different than Jones’?

the deep-seated belief among many that blasphemy is wrong. This means any reaction to blasphemy is less wrong, and perhaps even excused, compared to the blasphemous offense. Even President Obama said that, "The desecration of any holy text, including the Koran, is an act of extreme intolerance and bigotry.” To be sure, Obama went on to denounce the murders, and to state that burning a holy book is no excuse for murder. But Obama apparently couldn’t condemn the murders without also condemning Jones’ act of religious defiance.

As it turns out, this attitude is exactly what created the environment that led to murders in the first place. The members of the mob believed that religious belief should be free from public critical inquiry, and that a person who offends religious believers should face punishment. In the absence of official prosecution, they took matters into their own hands and sought anyone on the side of the offender. It didn’t help that Afghan leaders stoked the flames of hatred — but they only did so because they agreed with the mob’s sentiment to begin with. Afghan President Hamid Karzai said the U.S. should punish those responsible, and three well-known Afghan mullahs urged their followers to take to the streets and protest to call for the arrest of Jones

Just as a robust economic system is one that encourages early failures (the concepts of "fail small" and "fail fast"), the U.S. government should stop supporting dictatorial regimes for the sake of pseudostability and instead allow political noise to rise to the surface. Making an economy robust in the face of business swings requires allowing risk to be visible; the same is true in politics.

Both the recent financial crisis and the current political crisis in the Middle East are grounded in the rise of complexity, interdependence, and unpredictability. Policymakers in the United Kingdom and the United States have long promoted policies aimed at eliminating fluctuation -- no more booms and busts in the economy, no more "Iranian surprises" in foreign policy. These policies have almost always produced undesirable outcomes. For example, the U.S. banking system became very fragile following a succession of progressively larger bailouts and government interventions, particularly after the 1983 rescue of major banks (ironically, by the same Reagan administration that trumpeted free markets). In the United States, promoting these bad policies has been a bipartisan effort throughout. Republicans have been good at fragilizing large corporations through bailouts, and Democrats have been good at fragilizing the government. At the same time, the financial system as a whole exhibited little volatility; it kept getting weaker while providing policymakers with the illusion of stability, illustrated most notably when Ben Bernanke, who was then a member of the Board of Governors of the U.S. Federal Reserve, declared the era of "the great moderation" in 2004.

Washington stabilized the market with bailouts and by allowing certain companies to grow "too big to fail." Because policymakers believed it was better to do something than to do nothing, they felt obligated to heal the economy rather than wait and see if it healed on its own.

The foreign policy equivalent is to support the incumbent no matter what. And just as banks took wild risks thanks to Greenspan's implicit insurance policy, client governments such as Hosni Mubarak's in Egypt for years engaged in overt plunder thanks to similarly reliable U.S. support.

Those who seek to prevent volatility on the grounds that any and all bumps in the road must be avoided paradoxically increase the probability that a tail risk will cause a major explosion.

In the realm of economics, price controls are designed to constrain volatility on the grounds that stable prices are a good thing. But although these controls might work in some rare situations, the long-term effect of any such system is an eventual and extremely costly blowup whose cleanup costs can far exceed the benefits accrued. The risks of a dictatorship, no matter how seemingly stable, are no different, in the long run, from those of an artificially controlled price.

Such attempts to institutionally engineer the world come in two types: those that conform to the world as it is and those that attempt to reform the world. The nature of humans, quite reasonably, is to intervene in an effort to alter their world and the outcomes it produces. But government interventions are laden with unintended -- and unforeseen -- consequences, particularly in complex systems, so humans must work with nature by tolerating systems that absorb human imperfections rather than seek to change them.

What is needed is a system that can prevent the harm done to citizens by the dishonesty of business elites; the limited competence of forecasters, economists, and statisticians; and the imperfections of regulation, not one that aims to eliminate these flaws. Humans must try to resist the illusion of control: just as foreign policy should be intelligence-proof (it should minimize its reliance on the competence of information-gathering organizations and the predictions of "experts" in what are inherently unpredictable domains), the economy should be regulator-proof, given that some regulations simply make the system itself more fragile. Due to the complexity of markets, intricate regulations simply serve to generate fees for lawyers and profits for sophisticated derivatives traders who can build complicated financial products that skirt those regulations.

The life of a turkey before Thanksgiving is illustrative: the turkey is fed for 1,000 days and every day seems to confirm that the farmer cares for it -- until the last day, when confidence is maximal. The "turkey problem" occurs when a naive analysis of stability is derived from the absence of past variations. Likewise, confidence in stability was maximal at the onset of the financial crisis in 2007.

The turkey problem for humans is the result of mistaking one environment for another. Humans simultaneously inhabit two systems: the linear and the complex. The linear domain is characterized by its predictability and the low degree of interaction among its components, which allows the use of mathematical methods that make forecasts reliable. In complex systems, there is an absence of visible causal links between the elements, masking a high degree of interdependence and extremely low predictability. Nonlinear elements are also present, such as those commonly known, and generally misunderstood, as "tipping points." Imagine someone who keeps adding sand to a sand pile without any visible consequence, until suddenly the entire pile crumbles. It would be foolish to blame the collapse on the last grain of sand rather than the structure of the pile, but that is what people do consistently, and that is the policy error.

Engineering, architecture, astronomy, most of physics, and much of common science are linear domains. The complex domain is the realm of the social world, epidemics, and economics. Crucially, the linear domain delivers mild variations without large shocks, whereas the complex domain delivers massive jumps and gaps. Complex systems are misunderstood, mostly because humans' sophistication, obtained over the history of human knowledge in the linear domain, does not transfer properly to the complex domain. Humans can predict a solar eclipse and the trajectory of a space vessel, but not the stock market or Egyptian political events. All man-made complex systems have commonalities and even universalities. Sadly, deceptive calm (followed by Black Swan surprises) seems to be one of those properties.

The system is responsible, not the components. But after the financial crisis of 2007-8, many people thought that predicting the subprime meltdown would have helped. It would not have, since it was a symptom of the crisis, not its underlying cause. Likewise, Obama's blaming "bad intelligence" for his administration's failure to predict the crisis in Egypt is symptomatic of both the misunderstanding of complex systems and the bad policies involved.

Obama's mistake illustrates the illusion of local causal chains -- that is, confusing catalysts for causes and assuming that one can know which catalyst will produce which effect. The final episode of the upheaval in Egypt was unpredictable for all observers, especially those involved. As such, blaming the CIA is as foolish as funding it to forecast such events. Governments are wasting billions of dollars on attempting to predict events that are produced by interdependent systems and are therefore not statistically understandable at the individual level.

Political and economic "tail events" are unpredictable, and their probabilities are not scientifically measurable. No matter how many dollars are spent on research, predicting revolutions is not the same as counting cards; humans will never be able to turn politics into the tractable randomness of blackjack.

Most explanations being offered for the current turmoil in the Middle East follow the "catalysts as causes" confusion. The riots in Tunisia and Egypt were initially attributed to rising commodity prices, not to stifling and unpopular dictatorships. But Bahrain and Libya are countries with high gdps that can afford to import grain and other commodities. Again, the focus is wrong even if the logic is comforting. It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied -- what physicists call "percolation theory," in which the properties of the terrain are studied rather than those of a single element of the terrain.

When dealing with a system that is inherently unpredictable, what should be done? Differentiating between two types of countries is useful. In the first, changes in government do not lead to meaningful differences in political outcomes (since political tensions are out in the open). In the second type, changes in government lead to both drastic and deeply unpredictable changes.

Humans fear randomness -- a healthy ancestral trait inherited from a different environment. Whereas in the past, which was a more linear world, this trait enhanced fitness and increased chances of survival, it can have the reverse effect in today's complex world, making volatility take the shape of nasty Black Swans hiding behind deceptive periods of "great moderation." This is not to say that any and all volatility should be embraced. Insurance should not be banned, for example.

But alongside the "catalysts as causes" confusion sit two mental biases: the illusion of control and the action bias (the illusion that doing something is always better than doing nothing). This leads to the desire to impose man-made solutions

Variation is information. When there is no variation, there is no information. This explains the CIA's failure to predict the Egyptian revolution and, a generation before, the Iranian Revolution -- in both cases, the revolutionaries themselves did not have a clear idea of their relative strength with respect to the regime they were hoping to topple. So rather than subsidize and praise as a "force for stability" every tin-pot potentate on the planet, the U.S. government should encourage countries to let information flow upward through the transparency that comes with political agitation. It should not fear fluctuations per se, since allowing them to be in the open, as Italy and Lebanon both show in different ways, creates the stability of small jumps.

As Seneca wrote in De clementia, "Repeated punishment, while it crushes the hatred of a few, stirs the hatred of all . . . just as trees that have been trimmed throw out again countless branches." The imposition of peace through repeated punishment lies at the heart of many seemingly intractable conflicts, including the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate. Furthermore, dealing with seemingly reliable high-level officials rather than the people themselves prevents any peace treaty signed from being robust. The Romans were wise enough to know that only a free man under Roman law could be trusted to engage in a contract; by extension, only a free people can be trusted to abide by a treaty. Treaties that are negotiated with the consent of a broad swath of the populations on both sides of a conflict tend to survive. Just as no central bank is powerful enough to dictate stability, no superpower can be powerful enough to guarantee solid peace alone.

As Jean-Jacques Rousseau put it, "A little bit of agitation gives motivation to the soul, and what really makes the species prosper is not peace so much as freedom." With freedom comes some unpredictable fluctuation. This is one of life's packages: there is no freedom without noise -- and no stability without volatility.∂

Critics of the UEA's scientists say an independent analysis of the temperature data may reveal that Phil Jones and his colleagues have misinterpreted the evidence of global warming. They may have failed to allow for local temperature influences, such as the growth of cities close to many of the thermometers.

when Jonathan Jones and others asked for the data in the summer of 2009, the UEA said legal exemptions applied. It said variously that the temperature data were the property of foreign meteorological offices; were intellectual property that might be valuable if sold to other researchers; and were in any case often publicly available.

Jonathan Jones said this week that he took up the cause of data freedom after Steve McIntyre, a Canadian mathematician, had requests for the data turned down. He thought this was an unreasonable response when Phil Jones had already shared the data with academic collaborators, including Prof Peter Webster of the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US. He asked to be given the data already sent to Webster, and was also turned down.