Death by a thousand blogs

The fact that anyone who has an internet connection to the outside world can publish anything they like doesn't mean that everything published on the net is good. On the contrary, it's likely that as the fraction of the world's population with internet connectivity grows, more drivel will be published -- unless there's a mechanism to edit or select content. For example, although anyone can edit most material on WikiPedia (material subject to malicious edits, or wars over content does get locked down), the fact that the information is in one place on the whole makes it possible to arrive at some sort of reasonable standard.

When it comes to blogs, though, there is nothing to stop anyone from posting whatever they like (aside from laws on libel, copyright, and anything that applies if you live in a police state).

So if you try to find out something, it's possible that you will find a slew of drivel -- especially if there's a campaign going to push a point of view.

Let's try a few experimental searches.

First, the claim that Einstein said humanity would die out if bees disappeared... Search for the words Einstein bees. What do you see? Of course the internet is a moving feast so the hits you will get will not be the same as mine. What I found was a fair number of articles putting the case that this quote was a myth, as well as a few that treat the quote as fact. In this case, it's not hard to determine that the quote should at best be treated with suspicion.

Next, try this one: bumble bees can't fly. Again, there's a fair mix of articles, and it's not hard to arrive at the conclusion that the original story may (possibly) not have been a myth, but certainly has become a bit garbled. A bumble bee's wing area is insufficient to generate lift (taking into account its weight) but that calculation is based on the theory of fixed-wing aircraft. A bumble bee's wings aren't stationary, so the mathematics doesn't apply.

Here's another: HIV causes AIDS. This time the majority of the hits on the first page (when I did this on 24 June 2008) were articles supporting the conventional theory, with a small number opposing – the group who for whatever reason claim that HIV does not cause AIDS.

So it seems we have a general pattern: while there is a fair amount of garbage or controversial material, you get a good balance and can find the most plausible position fairly easily. Relatively few authoritative-looking sources are making strong claims that are hard to dismiss, against the "correct science" position.

How about this one? Search for passive smoking harm. This time, while the majority of articles agreed with the conventional position, I found some surprisingly vehement articles in mainstream media, not just amateur blogs, pushing the line that the science has to be wrong.

Next, let's go to a more current issue, climate change. A couple of searches will illustrate the point. Try climate models fail to predict. Now this one is admittedly a bit different from the others by addition of the words "fail to". But the result is startling. Almost the entire first page of hits is articles claiming that climate models are not able to predict future climate change. Take out the word "fail" and you do get a very different result. With that in mind, I tried adding "less" onto the end of the smoking search: passive smoking harmless. The result? A slew of articles claiming that environmental tobacco smoke was harmless, research to the contrary was fraudulent, etc.

There are two questions that arise out of this experiment. How is the ordinary person with no training in searching to arrive at a reasonable mix of articles? How is someone without a research background to tease apart the mythology from the worthwhile content?

Taking the climate change one again, I spend a good fraction of my blogging time debunking climate change myths. The claim that models have no predictive power is only one of these (in fact, the IPCC validates the models in their previous reports by comparing them against subsequent measurement). Another is the claim that solar variations (search for sun explains all climate change) are sufficient to explain all climate change. Again there is a mix of articles, including some that clearly overturn the claim. This time around, bizarrely, if you change the search to the negative, sun does not explain all climate change, you get a higher fraction of hits pushing the case that climate change is purely down to the sun.

So what's the take-home point from this?

Blogging is not science. Neither, for that matter, is journalism. Blogging seldom is even as good as amateur journalism; very occasionally a whole lot better. Whatever the case, beware of following the line of least resistance, and only reading the material that comes up in the first page of searches. It's not that hard for a small number of people (possibly with an agenda; now who could care so much, I wonder, about confusing people about how harmful tobacco is?) to generate a lot of material, aided and abetted by the gullible who copy their line.

Information on the net is free, but so too is junk. Making life-and-death decisions based on a web search without digging deeper to understand the underlying science, whether it's how to tackle the HIV pandemic, how to deal with the health threats of tobacco or what to do about climate change is silly. Yet many people seem to do exactly this. South Africa delayed its response to HIV by almost a decade. Progress worldwide against public smoking was delayed even more. And the rate of progress on climate change, it appears, is more in the hands of the blogosphere than of informed decision-makers.

Darwin?

Sound Science and Climate Change or What are the Denialists Smoking?

George Monbiot, in his book Heat, reveals the link between organized tobacco and organized climate change denial. I followed up his references and the documents he found make for interesting reading: memos from APCO, a PR firm, to Philip Morris on how to fake a grassroots movement (what we'd call astroturfing today). I strongly recommend reading Heat but in the meantime here are some examples, in which APCO is discussing the strategy for setting up The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC).

In proposing a European version of TASSC, the following are suggested, in a document dated March 25, 1994:

• Preempt unilateral action against industry.
  
• Associate anti-industry "scientific" studies with broader questions about government research and regulations.
  
• Link the tobacco issue with other more "politically correct" products.
  
• Have non-industry messengers provide reasons for legislators, business executives and media to view policies drawn from unreliable scientific studies with extreme caution.
  

And what were those "broader questions"? Here's a list from the same document:

• Global warming
  
• Nuclear waste disposal
  
• Diseases and pests in agricultural products for transborder trade
  
• Biotechnology
  
• Eco-labeling for EC products
  
• Food processing and packaging
  

So the agenda was this: confuse the public on the merits of science in the tobacco arena, but create a smokescreen (how appropriate) by having similar debates in other areas and – here's the critical point – ensure that the same people were involved so it would be harder to see the whole thing for what it was, a front for tobacco. Here's another snippet (document dated September 30, 1993):

APCO recommends that we steer away from launching TASSC in Washington, D.C. or the top media markets of the country. Rather, we suggest creating a series of aggressive, decentralized launches in several targeted local and regional markets across the country. This approach:

• Maximizes recruitment efforts. Stresses that TASSC is a grassroots effort that will fight unsound science on both the local and national levels.
  
• Avoids cynical reporters from major media. Less reviewing/challenging of TASSC messages; increases likelihood of pick up by media.
  
• Limits potential for counterattack. The likely opponents of TASSC tend to concentrate their efforts in the top markets while skipping the secondary markets. Our approach sends TASSC's messages initially into these more receptive markets - and enables us to build upon early successes.
  
• Allows for a national coordinating effort. Publicize, in each market, a national 800 number, the supporters of TASSC and the existence of the TASSC Public Information Bureau.
  

Now, of course, it is unlikely that the majority of people who have taken a pro-industry stance on these matters are in the pay of organized tobacco or their successor in the climate change debate, Exxon, but the planting of these seeds is all that's necessary. As uninformed members of the public pick up a perception that there's a vast groundswell of scientists who disagree with the position they see from the mainstream media, they are conned into thinking the debate is real. It's even possible that some genuine scientists were sucked in (I've noticed how most of those are retired or late-career scientists, playing on their standing, but likely to be out of touch with the latest science). Sadly, some of the mainstream media consequently pick up the spin as real, the approach of seeding it in less critical media having done the job of giving the position legs. Reporters in publications like The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and The Australian, seeing the story coming at them from many sources, mistakenly believe what they are seeing represents a genuine grassroots movement of concerned scientists. So why, now that this whole thing has been exposed, do some of these publications continue to take the inactivist position so seriously? Because no one likes to admit to being a dupe. Or maybe because no one likes to admit that they need to make major lifestyle changes to eliminate a social harm – in other words, that they are part of the problem. This is why climate change persists as a misreported issue. And why the original "junk science" myth, tobacco is not that harmful, persisted so long, in smokey editorial offices. So, what's to be done? We must recognize that in the Internet age, knowledge is not created centrally, but by networks of potentially disorganized individuals. APCO tapped into this concept in an era when the Internet was not as universal as it is today, so they needed significant funding to set up their astroturf operation. The good news is that, today, you do not need major funding to set up a genuine grassroots movement. All you need to do is to recruit friends who recruit friends, via personal networking sites like FaceBook. So, now you know what to do: take the message out there. The climate inactivist movement is an outgrowth of the tobacco denial movement, and just as bogus. Equip yourself with the facts by reading sites with real science (to which you will find pointers on this site: I do not claim to be a great primary source; for example, the RealClimate site is run by real climate scientists). This article is another take on APCO's role in creating TASSC.

Addendum

I add new links here as I discover new data sources:

• There are some good links to bolster the case in this RealClimate discussion (and the next page). Could this be a smoking gun?
• A report in New York Times on how the fossil fuels industry knew as far back as 1995 that “contrarian” theories did not seriously challenge mainstream climate science – but suppressed an internal report to that effect.
• The Union of Concerned Scientists in January 2007 reported that ExxonMobil had at that time spent $16-million on supporting anti-science lobbying groups, in a tobacco-style campaign to discredit  the science by propaganda rather than sound scientific investigation
• John Mashey has written an extensive study of the anti-science tactics of the fossil fuel industry including the lessons they learnt from tobacco
• Tobacco companies in Australia are at it again: they created a fake retailers association to protest plain wrapping in the lead-up to the 2010 federal election
• Graham Readfearn in the Guardian summarizes where the main anti-science lobbyists are today (2015)
• Union of Concerned Scientists reports internal fossil fuel memos and emails show that climate change was being factored into their plans as early as 1981 – much as organized tobacco knew of the health risks of their product decades before the issue became public, forewarning them of the need to launch a denial campaign (2015)

Finally, a really good authoritative book by Naomi Oreskes, published in 2010, details the whole denial industry right back to its roots:

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

Peak Oil, Poverty, Moore's Law and Manure

Peak Oil

As oil and with it products we use to fuel our cars and trucks gets more expensive, there is growing anguish about the effects on the cost of living. China alone is adding millions of cars a year to the total, and peak oil theory says we should be hitting limits soon on production growth.

In reality, as prices go up, there will be options of exploiting kinds of oil previously too expensive: under the deep sea, in the arctic (conveniently being freed of ice; what's doing that, I wonder, if there's no climate change?), tar sands, shale oil… so production may not drop off as fast as predicted by peak oil theory. But should we want to squeeze every last drop of oil (and coal and gas) out of the ground?

Not only do we have climate change to worry about, but the economics of fossil fuel has a lot to do with the gap between rich and poor nations.

The Poverty Gap

In the twentieth century, the cost of communication increasingly split rich from poor. By communication, I mean movement of people, goods and information. Part of this was energy; another part telecommunications. The common thing was the distinction between countries with a comprehensive network of roads, rail, electricity and telephone connections, and those without.

Addressing this gap became increasingly hard, as the cost of new infrastructure has to compete with infrastructure created in an era of lower costs (e.g., coal was cheaper because demand was lower). It is this gap which for example makes fruit in a third world country absurdly cheap in tradable currency terms, while making a local phone call is ridiculously expensive. There's a kind of arbitrage, but one where the places where the price differences occur are too hard to connect, to correct the pricing anomaly (as would happen for example if the US$ to euro exchange rate was out of synch with the US$ to pound sterling exchange rate).

Somehow, despite all this, we have arguments from climate change inactivists that addressing poverty is an alternative to addressing climate change. Yet if you accept that poverty is largely structured into communication infrastructure (or lack thereof in poorer countries), new technologies that reduce the need for infrastructure can go a long way to closing the poverty gap.

An example is the cell phone. In many poor countries, cell phone roll-out has been many times faster than predicted, because of communication starvation. People in Nigeria didn't have phones not because they were poor, but because there was no infrastructure. Cell infrastructure is relatively cheap to put in: as long as you have electrical power, you can virtually parachute base stations in. By contrast, a nation-wide wired phone network needs wiring to the home, with extensive local wiring, even if trunk lines are wireless.

This example generalizes to other cases like electricity. If you can generate power locally without a grid, you can make energy accessible a lot faster in countries without infrastructure. Eliminate the cost of consumables, and you also eliminate another huge problem: rapid price increases as supply fails to keep up with demand. If you think this is bad for wealthier countries, what will doubling the fuel price to to someone who can barely afford a car?

Moore's Law

The nice thing about renewables is that technology changes reduce prices. It doesn't matter if coal supply runs low, oil runs out or gas slows to a trickle. The wind will still blow, the sun will still shine. Just as Moore's Law has pulled computer prices down dramatically over decades, photovoltaics and wind are getting cheaper. Eliminate the consumables and you have a real revolution in energy economics, far bigger than Henry Ford's revolution in personal transport.

This is an exciting time once we forget doom and gloom and think of what could actually be done.

Instead of living in terror at consequences of change, how about accepting that we are looking at a change as big as the move from horse and buggy to cars?

Think of it this way: the cost of renewable energy sources only depends on the technology, not consumables. Once we get this right, we can make energy cheaper with every new development. As long as we are stuck with fossil fuels, prices can only go up as demand overtakes supply.

Why are we so scared of this great new concept? Once we solve the energy storage problem (there are already good ideas like compressed air) poorer countries will benefit too. What's the downside? Unless you own a coal mine ... the horse industry lost big time when the Model-T appeared, but think of the advantages to society as a whole: personal mobility on a level never experienced before.

Now we have the next level: energy with radically lower constraints on supply and infrastructure. If you can do local microgeneration with efficient storage, you no longer need a grid. In rural Africa, for example, you could almost parachute in (where have we heard that before?) a solar or wind microgenerator.

Manure

Back in the nineteenth century, it's alleged that someone predicted that London would be metres deep in horse manure in a few decades. It's a nice story, even if it's improbable that it's true (I have yet to find a direct source for it, and there are several variants – the hallmarks of a myth or urban legend). It is certainly true that getting rid of horse manure in the streets of major cities was a growing headache – just as cutting carbon emissions is today.

So why, today, are we staring down the problem of curbing carbon emissions when there are far superior alternatives – alternatives that only need a little development to be viable?

The only alternative is to consume fossil fuels like there's no tomorrow, then it's back to the stone age. Why are we even debating this?

Science, Governments and Industrial Impact

The still new Rudd government in Australia has announced deep cuts in funding for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), one of the few research bodies to receive consistent funding under the previous anti-intellectual Howard government.

The CSIRO and to a lesser extent universities are suffering from the misplaced desire by governments for research entities to function as commercial operations. If what they were doing had a clear and obvious low-risk commercial outcome, business would be doing it.

The purpose of government funded research is longer-range outcomes which may not have immediate economic impact but when they do turn into something economically viable are game-changing. At Stanford, rightly acknowledged as a world leader in not only blue sky research but in industrial outcomes, the university does not try to hoard IP. If a grad student or academic has a great commercialisable idea, they are encouraged to go out and start a business.

By trying to merge the concepts of blue sky research (needs the stability of a large organisation with deep pockets) and innovative start-ups (need the nimbleness of a small organisation without deep bureaucracy) you end up with neither.

As to the question of the Rudd government's commitment, look no further than the "means test" on solar panels. This is a government which is focused on what it takes to win the next election, not what makes sense for the environment, academia, or anything else long term – despite anything they say to the contrary.

But back to the CSIRO.

From what I know of the organisation, it does some really good work, but has an excessively bureaucratic culture, with an emphasis on booking everything against a project, whether it makes sense to do so or not. This emphasis arises from a desire to appear to be operating "commercially".

What should a government wanting to make best use of a resource like this do?

I would take away the imperative to commercialise, and institute benchmarks similar to those for research academics. I would base funding on outcomes against these benchmarks. Some of these benchmarks would include long-term impacts (e.g., the fraction of research that resulted in a commercial outcome; the fraction of research that was highly cited). But I would not require that the organisation itself do the commercialising. If the CSIRO publishes some breakthrough concept which results in a major new business being started, why should the government care who owns the business, as long as there's a return to society?

The same applies to universities. The University of Queensland proudly compared its income for patents and royalties with that of Stanford, at a talk I attended a few years ago. However, that's not how Stanford operates. The university seldom tries to claim ownership of IP. Academics and grad students have formed many successful start-ups (HP, Sun, SGI, FedEx, to name a few).

The big difference in the US which makes the Stanford approach work well for them is the generous tradition of alumnus donations. However, even without this, a switch to separating commercialisation from research would be beneficial. In the absense of donations, the government could add successful spin-outs as a factor in funding research.

By making this change, the CSIRO – and universities – could revert to doing what a large government funded organisation does best: providing job security for those developing ideas for the long term. Unfortunately, cutting funding without a structural change is likely to have the opposite effect: an increased emphasis on commercial outcomes.

Perpetual motion machine, anyone?

As Kermit said, it’s not easy being green.

I recently stumbled upon a bunch of excitingly clean green things, like claims you can run a car on water (a teensy bit of electricity separates out the water into hydrogen and oxygen and you burn the hydrogen) and magnetic power generators that apparently make electricity out of nothing.

Now, I have actually majored in physics, and while some people may regard violating the law of conservation of energy as a victimless crime, I have to say that if any of this stuff was remotely close to possible, everyone would be doing it.

Let’s take running a car on water. So maybe the oil companies would suppress such an invention. But the sites claiming it can be done also claim it’s really simple. So what’s to stop an insignificant poor country without oil developing this technology for their own use? Even if it’s too hard a job for a backyard tinkerer to convert their car engine, why isn’t everyone running their lawnmowers on water? Why are there no modern-day Albert Schweitzers in darkest Africa, running their clinics off water powered internal combustion engines?

Anyway this stuff has been thoroughly debunked many times so why bother? One of these things has turned up in my own back yard. There is a bunch calling themselves Lutec in Queensland, Australia who claim they can amplify electricity.

An amplifier, in the usual sense, has two inputs: the signal you want to amplify, and a power source that provides the amplification (which sets an upper bound on the output signal). Theirs is really special. The input signal amplifies itself. No kidding.

Their device involves a few steps including:

1. run mains AC through a transformer to step down the voltage
   
2. rectify to DC
   
3. run the DC through a pulsed motor which drives an AC generator
   

This is not quite all but their big claim is that if they stick a DC voltmeter and ammeter on the DC side, and AC equivalents on the AC output, the volt x amp product (watts) is significantly higher on the AC side. They are amplifying electricity.

Or so they claim.

A moment’s thought should reveal how absurd this is. If they fed the output back to the input, you would get a positive feedback loop. The output would increase indefinitely until something blew – even if you disconnected the mains input.

There are two reasonable possibilities. These people don’t understand what they are doing and are not measuring what they think they are measuring, or they are frauds.

How could they be getting the results they claim? If they are frauds, it’s easy: they could have another power source hidden somewhere – or they rigged the meters. If not, how could they be getting such a big instrument error? The trick is to understand how AC voltage and current are measured. Since AC is constantly fluctuating between a positive and equally low negative value, you need to take an average to get a voltage number that equates to DC voltage (or amperage). The standard formula for this is the root mean square (well explained on WikiPedia so I won’t repeat the explanation here).

The problem with taking the root mean square is that if you are designing a voltmeter, it would be hard to calculate the RMS voltage correctly, so my understanding is that most voltmeters fake it by assuming the AC is in the form of a sine wave, and calculate the RMS voltage as peak voltage / square root of 2. If the wave is different shape, the voltmeter will give an incorrect result. If your AC voltage is nominally 240 as in Australia, the actual peak voltage would be about 339, as illustrated in the first picture.

The second picture shows a different wave form in which the peak is still 339V, but the RMS is now 200V.
So if you had a machine that was producing this sort of output, your voltmeter would be registering 20% more than it should.

You can play around with wave forms to adjust the inaccuracy even further. I chose this particular one because it wasn’t terribly hard to construct out of sines and cosines.

I’m not an expert on AC and measurement techniques but this is a plausible indication of where the problem may lie – that’s if they aren’t straight-out charlatans, with a compact battery secreted somewhere to boost the output, hidden wires back to mains, or deliberately inaccurate meters.

As I said at the start – it would be great if these things were for real. If you want to be green, you can’t be gullible, that’s for sure. Poor old Kermit.

---

For those who want to check my working, here it is. I graphed the equations using the free Grapher program that ships with Mac OS X. Yet another reason to buy a Mac. PS: I checked the details with several engineers who are more familiar with AC measurement than I, and they agreed that this is a plausible explanation. You need to shape the wave so that it’s far enough off a sine shape to fool the voltmeter, but still register the peaks.

Here's another view on Pure Energy Systems Wiki.
The Australian Skeptics' journal has published a debunking of the Lutec device in two parts (part 1; part 2).

Lutec were claiming they had a machine ready to sell at least as far back as 2002. So where is it?

And if you are keen on powering your car with water, read this contribution at the good old Mythbusters site. Let me know which parts are wrong. Science please, not conspiracy theories.

Are we doomed?

The link between smoking tobacco and cancer was first established in the 1930s, and it took about 60 years for a good fraction of the world to accept the need to limit smoking.

The climate change debate is of similar character – some of the same players are even involved. The tactics, not surprisingly, are similar. Promote the view with a combination of bought off scientists and fake grassroots (astroturf) movements that there is more debate about the science than there really is. Promote the view that there is a mafia who attack anyone who opposes the mainstream scientific position. Argue that the mainstream is "junk science" as opposed to opinions of non-specialists, who do not do any real scientific work, who somehow have it right. Position dissenters from the mainstream as Galileos.

No one would be happier than me if the link between CO₂ and climate could be convincingly debunked, because the tobacco example shows just how hard it is to change government policy, not matter how convincing the science, in the face of a determined industry lobby. For this reason, I've been taking a skeptical view of the climate change "skeptics": trying to find evidence that they may just be right. This has been pretty heavy going, because a lot of them are clearly uninformed and a lot of "skeptic" commentary is plain garbage. Some of course is valid. In an area as complex as this, there have to be errors and omissions in the accepted models. A genuine scientific skeptic will of course validly explore these problem areas and either find improvements, or overturn the whole model.

So far, in my reading of this work, I've not managed to find anything better than nitpicks. Some details of the models may not be totally accurate, not that anyone ever claimed they were. All of the models used by climate modelers of any worth are reported as representing a range of values, allowing for uncertainties – as they should.

The thing which troubles me about the self-appointed (being kind and not assuming they are not industry shills) "skeptics" is that they all insist that the range of values in IPCC projections are "alarmist", i.e., that the "skeptical" position is that things are better. I have not seen one person in the group widely touted as representing correction to the "mainstream" arguing that science could be badly wrong in the other direction. There are climate scientists in the "mainstream" who argue that some numbers could be optimistic, e.g., James Hansen at NASA argues that we don't have good data to support the view that sea level rise will be within the relatively benign range the IPCC accepts for 2100 (or more recently, 2099).

A true skeptic has to look at the whole range of possibilities for error in the modeling. So, what evidence is there that the modeling could be radically wrong in the direction of optimism?

A popular "skeptic" argument revolves around looking in the paleoclimactic record for instances of temperature-CO₂ coupling, and demonstrating that temperature change leads the trend. This is not particularly useful, because such instances do not mirror the current scenario, where gigatonnes of CO₂ are being added to the atmosphere independently of a temperature trigger. It is more useful to look for past events where a massive infusion of greenhouse gases was not triggered directly by a temperature increase, i.e., something bigger than can be explained by reduced solubility of CO₂ when the oceans warm up.

The best candidate is the Permian-Triassic extinction event (I cite WikiPedia because it's easy to read and accessible, but I have read relevant literature in academic journals as well to check; I encourage other genuine skeptics to read further). Let's call this one the PTE for brevity. PTE is the biggest extinction event since the fossil record began, and wiped out 90% of all life. it took 3-million years for coal to form in significant quantity, so severe was the die-off. What triggered it? That far in the past, exact mechanisms are hard to pin down, but it is known that massive volcanos, the Siberian Traps, spewed out millions of cubic kilometres of lava. Some of this lava landed in coal beds; much also landed in a shallow sea. Seas contain methane clathrates (also called methane hydrates), methane trapped in water molecules in relatively cold water. If the temperature increases, the methane is released. These two effects combined to have a significant greenhouse effect, and the resulting rapid temperature rises may have made the oceans become anoxic. The dominant life form in the oceans became sulfur-reducing bacteria, which exhale toxic sulfur dioxide, which poisoned life on land. How quick was the die-off? One study [Rampino et al 2000] shows that it could have taken under 8,000 years, but definitely less than 60,000 years, for most animals to die off.

How close is this scenario to what is happening today? The Siberian Traps eruptions occurred over a much longer time period, of the order of hundreds of thousands of years at least. The continental configuration was different – this was the era of the single supercontinent, Pangea, so ocean circulation would have been very different. The presence of a significant polar land mass in the south today means we have a larger buffer against warming (sea ice is much less stable than land ice). On the other hand, the atmospheric CO₂ levels were very similar to today's before being elevated over a relatively short period by a factor of 5 to 10.

So on balance, I can't say that what is happening today is cause for much optimism. The fact that we are adding CO₂ to the atmosphere so much faster cannot be good for the environment. The worst-case IPCC scenario has CO₂ levels rising by a factor of 5 on pre-industrial by 2100, scarily close to what happened at the end of the Permian – but thousands of times faster. Time is of course a critical variable in biosphere adaptation. Evolution does not work on decadal time-scales. If forced change in thousands of years was catastrophic, where are we headed now?

Then there's the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), around 55-million years ago. Methane clathrates have also been implicated in this one, as has a release of between 2000 and 5000 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere over 10,000 to 20,000 years. There is also the possibility of volcanic events causing the greenhouse gas releases. As with the PTE, the key issue is the rapid deployment of greenhouse gases, followed by global warming, then a large-scale die-off. In the case of PETM, the die-off was more restricted, with some molluscs heavily reduced (over 90%); this was the time when many older mammal forms died off, and precursors to modern life forms appeared. As with PTE, the time-scale was much longer than today's. Since PETM is much more recent, it is an easier target for study, and figures in IPCC reports. What is particularly worrying about PETM is that the rate of warming is outside the range of climate models, suggesting that contrary to the common "skeptic" position that cliamte models are alarmist, the opposite may be true.

In conclusion, from what I've found so far, there is a strong relationship between relatively rapid increases in greenhouse gases, similarly rapid climate change, and mass extinctions.

If anyone can find an example of this scale of increase in greenhouse gases (doubling or more, with a baseline similar to today's levels), over a time period short enough to cause problems with biosphere adaptation, which is not associated with a significant extinction event, let me know.

So, to answer the question in the title: are we doomed? On the evidence I've found so far, yes. Until I turn up something better, it seems we have no option but to fight the fossil fuel industry, futile though that may seem. Meanwhile, this all reminds me of one of my favourite Far Side cartoons: "The Real Reason Dinosaurs Became Extinct". A bunch of dinosaurs are seen smoking. Larson tied the two issues together nicely.

In case you can't find references on the net and have a library:

[Rampino et al 2000] Rampino, M. R., A. Prokoph, and A. Adler, 2000. Tempo of the end-Permian event: high-resolution cyclostratigraphy at the Permian-Triassic boundary. Geology, 28: 643-646.

South African Technology Career Options

Recently, I saw a story that one Llew Jones had been appointed head of the State IT Agency (SITA) in South Africa.

Llew Jones, as far as I know, is an engineer, with a background in the armaments industry, so why is he being appointed as head of a government agency in an area in which he has no background?

Then again, he was acting director of Meraka, an agency supposedly the leading ICT reseach body in the country for a while – and he was not particularly qualified for that either*.

Some may be rather puzzled at this point, as there is a broad perception in South Africa that Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) is the main driver of senior appointments to the government payroll – and white South Africans mainly get appointed to fill gaps in competence. So why him?

No big mystery. The ANC, absent serious opposition, has fallen into the comfort zone of favouring team players over competence – and this is not a strictly racial issue. Some of these "team players" are members of the old order. Troublemakers from the old days are not favoured. The government continues to favour the Afrikaans universities and the CSIR over the English universities as sources of advice, and Reserve Bank Governor Tito Mboweni notoriously said Afrikaners were much more reliable appointments than blacks. What he meant, of course, is that the old hands at the broederbond game know how to keep their heads down and work the system.

Expect this to continue until there are enough voters who don't have memories of the old system. In Zimbabwe, that took 20 years (unfortunately, Mugabe didn't want to let go – otherwise they would probably have had an MDC government by now; even if not totally competent it would certainly have been less of a disaster).

South Africa is about halfway through the post-liberation transition. The realization that the main liberation party doesn't hold all the answers may go a bit faster than in Zimbabwe because South Africa is a more diverse society with a longer tradition of a critical civil society, but the ANC can certainly expect to win at least the next election with a massive majority. That being the so, it's hard to put the case that there is something systemically wrong with the whole approach. Look what happened to the deputy health minister.

In my view the best thing South Africans with strong technical skills who want to contribute to the long-term development of the country can do now is to get some experience in government to learn the lie of the land then go to the private sector to develop their skills. To stick too long in the government sector risks burning yourself out with frustration. It's not as if all good in society flows from government activity. Business has some contribution, and SA does have some particularly good NGOs – despite my broad perception that "NGO" stands for "never gets organized".

So what am I doing outside South Africa?

I was a computer science academic at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) for around 20 years, up to mid-2002, and felt that I needed some international experience – not only because it was useful, but because there is a prejudice in small countries that foreign is better.

There is a long history at Wits of favouring "foreign experience" over locals. The first head of computer science had a Stanford PhD but hadn't published much and had no PhD completions. His Stanford PhD plus industrial experience was sufficient to make him a full professor and head of department. He eventually left because he realized he wasn't cut out to be an academic. We later acquired a Hungarian of lazy disposition with a PhD I think in mathematics. He lasted until we had an activist class who complained of his abject lack of preparation for any of his courses. Then we acquired a new head from Russia, whose background was not in computer science. Each time he was exposed as knowing nothing about an area in which he claimed expertise, he moved on to another. At various times, he was an authority on AI, graphics, parallel computing and smart cards. He had one PhD completion to his name when he started, and a fair number of publications but none in computer science. To my recollection, he only published one paper when he was with us. Eventually, he was forced to leave after he got involved with a startup while on sabbatical, and didn't want to do any lecturing on his return. Somewhere along the line, we also managed to acquire a Bulgarian and someone from the UK, neither of whom amounted to much acadamically. The last instalment of this type was an American who had significant industry experience in Germany and was appointed a full professor straight out of his PhD. Of this bunch, he was by far the most successful, and published some papers – but he was on a time-limited contract and didn't stay.

So: international experience, a PhD, limited publications, zero or possibly one PhD completion: this combination was viewed highly favourably at Wits. Three people were appointed as full professors with these credentials. So when Wits advertised for professor and head of computer science in February 2007, I applied. All I heard since was one email telling me I would be informed of progress (28 March 2007). This is kind of puzzling since I was previously appointable as an associate professor (this happened last time I applied for a vacant chair) and I now have not only the prized international experience but also a PhD completion and relevant experience. It seems I am still missing something important – or could it be that once you have gone up the slippery pole of promotion at Wits, you are judged to a much higher standard?

Whatever. But I do feel that having put 20 years into producing a large number of successful graduates, I have done my part. If the experience I have gained in the process is not valued in South Africa, others will value it. I wish those still in the system luck. They are going to need it.

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* See another article in this blog on whether Meraka was a success. For the record, I applied to Meraka for a position, and was only made an offer (which I turned down) after Jones left; I spoke to him on a trip to South Africa, and he was not keen on having me on board, claiming my area of research was not a "national priority". That seems excessively picky when you don't have nearly enough skilled people on board to meet your goals.

Computer Science in South Africa

In 2002, the South African government announced two things: a change in the university funding model which cut funding per computer science student by 40%, putting it below pure maths, let alone comparable subjects like physics or electrical engineering.

Around the same time, the government announced that it wanted to found an “ICT university”.

Clearly, the government thought the universities were doing a lousy job: it cut the funding in an area so important, the president thought there should be a dedicated university in the area.

Let’s look at publications and citations for the top 4 universities in the country, according to the Times Higher Education Supplement international ranking (available through Top Universities), from best down: Cape Town, Witwatersrand (Wits), Kwazulu Natal (merged from Natal and Durban-Westville) and Pretoria.

The following are all searches on the combined indexes, Science Citation Index Expanded, 1900-present; Social Sciences Citation Index, 1956-present; Arts & Humanities Citation Index, 1975-present (all searches done on 30 May 2007).

As you can see, all of the results show some level of research activity with some citations – but nothing brilliant (click on the pictures for larger versions).


Cape Town: 59 publications, 139 citations, 2.36 citations per item.


Wits: 46 publications, 58 citations, 1.26 citations per item.


Natal (includes Kwazulu Natal): 86 publications, 238 citations, 2.77 citations per item.


Pretoria: 84 publications, 151 citations, 1.80 citations per item.

The Natal results are skewed by the fact that there was a period when computer science was combined with geology, so these results aren’t an accurate basis for comparison and I will not consider these further. The others though present a consistent picture. The higher ranked universities have a higher publication count per academic (Pretoria has a much higher head count that Wits and Cape Town), but the general numbers are in approximately the same ballpark. The Wits figures should be considered in the light of the university having badly fumbled the ball on the management of the subject. The School of Computer Science there in recent years has collapsed from 12 academics to only 5, and recruiting is a shambles.

In any case, the government clearly didn’t think all this was so great. The ICT university idea however was replaced by creating a research institute, the Meraka Institute. Meraka has a few new people but is mostly comprised of the CSIR’s ICT division, Mikomtek, which has been rolled into Meraka.

Why, you may wonder, did the CSIR get this funding boost, rather than placing Meraka in a university? Clearly, if the universities are no good, the CSIR, and in particular, Mikomtek, must be a whole lot better. So let’s look at their numbers.


Mikomtek: 6 publications, 2 citations, 0.33 citations per item.


Meraka: 2 publications, 0 citations, 0.00 citations per item.

Now here is an interesting challenge for the reader: explain why the combination of Mikomtek and Meraka is so much better than any university in South Africa, to the extent that the CSIR has been made the sole custodian of this new bucket of money. Of course Meraka is in its infancy and could do better in future. It has after all only been going since May 2005. However, in 2 years, I would have thought that a well-funded institute would have recruited high fliers who would have published more than 2 papers that have made it into the top research indexes.

Perhaps the CSIR’s outputs are in other areas than publications. They generate a large number of press releases, for sure – and those are not listed in things like the science citation index. But that obviously counts for a lot in winning political support.

What about impacts on the economy which can’t be measured by publications?

The universities named here (and of course there are others) have produced thousands of computer science graduates between them. An organization which is not degree-granting like the CSIR has to do a lot to match that scale of contribution. One would expect many publications (oops) and other measurable impacts, such as commercial spin-outs.

For the latter point, let’s consider the case of commercializing the Internet.

In the 1990s, when the technology wasn’t commonplace, many small startups sprang up, touting the concept to business. The CSIR jumped in rather late and despite its massive government subsidy, it wasn’t able to compete. The top service provider in South Africa today, The Internet Solution, was one of those small startups, and was started by Wits computer science graduates.

Commercializing the internet is but one example; I believe it is up to the CSIR to make a case, rather than for me to tear them down, because the case for better funding for the universities is so clear. Universities produce graduates; the CSIR consumes resources. They need to demonstrate that they do so to useful effect.

Disclaimer: I applied for a position at Meraka in June 2006, and am still waiting for a definite response. I applied for a Wits position too, and am awaiting the promised feedback (no word for almost 3 months), so you can see that I am trying to curry favour. For the record, here is my publication record by the same measure: 19 publications, only 1 citation – fair, not great. Not quite 3 times the entire output of Mikomtek plus Meraka combined. (My actual output is significantly higher than this – but to compare like with like, I am using the same measure throughout.) Then again, if I google on my name, I only get 28,500 hits; Meraka gets 160,000 [counted 14 June 2007] – those press releases really work. I should try that.