Fragilecologies

Category: Climate Affairs

  • “An IPCC dilemma: Who to trust talking to the media, its critics or its colleagues? ” Mickey Glantz (July 12, 2010)

    “An IPCC dilemma: Who to trust talking to the media, its critics or its colleagues? ” Mickey Glantz (July 12, 2010)

    The title of this editorial is a play on words with a bottom-line message: whom should you keep your eyes on — your enemies (critics) and or your colleagues, when it involves talking with the media about IPCC’s 5th Assessment findings.

    A colleague of mine, Ed Carr at the University of South Carolina, received a letter from the Head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) cautioning those selected to prepare the next (5th) Climate Change Assessment Report not to talk to the media, leaving that task to the IPCC Secretariat.

    Ed Carr wrote (his blog in just below this one):

    So I [Carr] was dismayed this morning to receive a letter, quite formally titled “Letter No.7004-10/IPCC/AR5 from Dr Pachauri, Chaiman of the IPCC”, that might set such transparency back. While the majority of the letter is a very nice congratulations on being selected as part of the IPCC, the third paragraph is completely misguided:

    “I would also like to emphasize that enhanced media interest in the work of the IPCC would probably subject you to queries about your work and the IPCC. My sincere advice would be that you keep a distance from the media and should any questions be asked about the Working Group with which you are associated, please direct such media questions to the Co-chairs of your Working Group and for any questions regarding the IPCC to the secretariat of the IPCC.”

    It is clear that the IPCC still has a problem. It claims the problem is with the media, or at the very least it strongly hint at that. However, in this day and age, if one type of news medium does not catch IPCC scientists off guard another type will. That is what the media is paid to do. I would argue that secrets are hard to keep from the media and are hard to be kept by the media.

    A political ‘rule of thumb’ is that ships of state (eg, governments) tend  by metaphor to leak from the top; that is, leak confidential information to reporters either to reinforce a political position or to undermine it. I would argue that the same rule applies to the IPCC as a scientific climate-change- related ship of state. Leaks about scientific deliberations came from within the IPCC science community. Partly it is due to the persistence of reporters and science writers and partly it is because of the egos of some scientists who thrive on media attention. [NB: climategate was the result of hacked emails and NOT the result of loose lips (off-hand comments) by IPCC scientists (as far as we know).]

    So, it seems that the email directive and the defense of issuing it by the Head of the IPCC makes little sense. instead of embracing openness with the general public, the IPCC leadership has chosen to cast another shadow about the objectivity of the forthcoming 5th scientific climate change assessment. Is there something to hide? I don’t think so. Will the public be led to believe that there is something to hide? I think so.

    Instead of emerging from the climategate situation feeling exonerated and with heads held high, the IPCC leaders seem to haves come out of it paranoid and less secure about how its work presented by the media to the public.


    Transparency is the best cure for the IPCC’s image. Even with critics at the door and media as well, the best strategy to pursue is to pursue openness. Good objective science will win out. Policing the comments of your colleagues (eg, friends) will likely generate frustration and resentment thereby converting friends into “frenemies” (friendly enemies who support IPCC science but not the IPCC process).

  • The Van Jones resignation: Do “right wing” Republicans know what they are doing?

    Well, the right wingers have done it again: Acted against their own interests. That would make a difference to them if they took a long term perspective. But, they don’t. They like winning small victories. However, the end result is that they will lose the proverbial war. Right wingers (and ultra right wingers like Glen Beck) have hounded a President Obama appointee, Van Jones. Jones was in the Obama administration in a position to generate “green jobs”. The “whitee rightees” dug up statements that Van Jones had made earlier this decade in which he referred to some Republicans as “assholes”. They also found Jones’s name on a petition calling for a government inquiry into who knew what about the 9-11 attack on the Twin Towers. About three and a half centuries ago French Cardinal Richelieu once said “Give me six sentences by the most innocent of men and I will hang him with them”. Well, I guess some Republican obstructionists are using the Cardinal’s playbook on dealing with the opposition! But the whitee rightees are not thinking things through. Sure, they got a person dedicated to improving the well-being of Americans to resign from working inside the government bureaucracy. Inside the government, comments by Van Jones would have had to been restrained. He would have been silenced in a way, unable to respond to the worst statements they might make about progressive politics. Instead they put him once again on the outside of the controls of government, no longer a government bureaucrat. Now he is free to call the Republicans as he sees them, as right wing obstructionists. Political talk show hosts — guys like Beck, Savage, Reagan, and Limbaugh along with senators like Inhoff (R-Oklahoma) — are not true Republicans. They are really “REPUBLICAN’Ts, putting their own blinding hostilities against the well-being of the American people. Welcome back to an “open mike”, Van Jones. Your voice will be louder than ever.

    WHO is Van Jones? [from: www.vanjones.net]

    Who is Van Jones?

    Van Jones is a globally recognized, award-winning pioneer in human rights and the clean energy economy. He is a 1993 graduate of the Yale Law School and an attorney.

    Van wrote the definitive book on “green jobs”: The Green Collar Economy. In 2008 — thanks to a low-cost, viral marketing campaign — his book became an instant New York Times bestseller. It is today being translated into six languages.

    As a tireless advocate for disadvantaged people and the environment, Van helped to pass America’s first “green job training” legislation: the Green Jobs Act, which George W. Bush signed into law as a part of the 2007 Energy Bill. He is the co-founder of a number of successful non-profit organizations, including the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and Green For All.

    Van is the recipient of many awards and honors, including: the Reebok International Human Rights Award; the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leader designation; the prestigious, international Ashoka Fellowship; and many more. Van was included in the Ebony Magazine “Power 150” list of most influential African Americans for 2009. In 2008, Essence magazine named him one of the 25 most inspiring/influential African Americans. TIME Magazine named him an environmental hero in 2008. In 2009, TIME named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

    In March 2009, Van went to work as the special advisor for green jobs at the White House Council for Environmental Quality.

  • “No Disaster Recommendations without Ramifications”:

    MICKEY GLANTZ

    SUNDAY, 24 MAY 2009

    Every assessment of a disaster, where natural or human-caused, has begins and ends with a list of recommendations or lessons learned. I have done that in my reports as well for almost four decades. The recommendations or lessons are about “how to get it right the next time there is a similar disaster?” That is always the hope. That is always the dream.

    Many of those recommendations or lessons learned are right on target in terms of requirements needed to reduce the adverse impacts of the hazards of concern. They are the result of serious scrutiny of hazards, their impacts and societal responses to them. They are the findings through serious discussion, brainstorming and plain common sense of what went right, what went wrong, and what wasn’t considered. For Katrina, for example, America’s most costly and most embarrassing so called natural disaster, one can find thousands of lessons learned from various levels of government from local to global, industries and businesses. That is the good news. However, it is, all too often, the good news in theory only. I say in theory because of a gut feeling have: that most recommendations are not acted upon. Phrased a different way, the disaster lessons we have been calling ‘lessons learned” are really not learned but only identified. When they are addressed they can legitimately be called lessons learned. Otherwise, they should be called “lessons identified”.

    The problem in all this is that when recommendations and lessons have been identified, many observers in all walks of life tend to think that the recommendations and lessons are being enacted in order to avoid similar hazard-related disasters in the future. Given the reality of an issue-attention cycle of the American public that lasts but a couple of years (as identified by Anthony Downs in the early 1970s), for example, the public turns to focus on other pressing issues, no longer focusing on the previous disaster and its recommendations. How then can we get decision makers to take recommendations or lessons more seriously? How can we get them to realize that not following up on the lessons can have considerable costs?

    It is essential to break the vicious cycle of disaster—lessons & recommendations— disaster — same lessons, etc. Many of the same lessons appear decade after decade. Our children and our children’s children will end up reading the same sets of disaster-related recommendations and lessons that our predecessors and we have been identifying. We can end the vicious cycle in the name of progress. It is a simple next step to take.

    My recommendation:

    Recommendations (and lessons learned) should no longer be presented without comment on what the consequences might be if the recommendations (and lessons) are not addressed. This way, decision makers can explicitly be made aware that there is also a likely cost for inaction when the next natural hazard turns into a national disaster. Succinctly stated, “NO RECOMMENDATIONS SHOULD BE OFFERED WITHOUT ALSO NOTING THEIR RAMIFICATIONS.”

    The ramification (if the recommendation is not acted upon):

    Business as usual (BAU) with regard to identifying lessons and making recommendations in post-disaster assessments will mean that policy makers in the future will continue to receive lists of lessons that had already been identified over previous decades and, as a result, their societies will continue to remain at risk to the impacts of hazards for which risks could have been reduced, had recommendations been pursued and identified lessons applied.