PAW[4]: fossil fuels, sea birds, and anchoveta

[Further flushing of fusty fragments . . . .]

This article is a classic (if seemingly random) testimony to the interconnectedness of the universe, and the frustratingly surprising ways that this manifests itself in the collective human experience. Frustrating because the globally pervasive network of causal influence remains surprising, at least as guaged by our institutional responses it.

Organic-would-be's want the guano; colonial powers have fought wars over it; unsustainable exploitation of fish stocks threaten the continued production of it; spiking fossil-fuel prices are causing a surge in demand for it . . .

Lest PAW be misread, while everything (Everything!) seems to me indeed to be connected to everything else, this is not to argue that all connections, at every scale, are codominant.

PAW[3]: learning about climate change

From the drafty draftsome archives of this blog. There's a PAW homily somewhere (don't overthink it; it's not buried very deeply) in my perverse inclination to include stale and incomplete fragments of my thinking into this hypothetically omni-available, hypothetically continuous, hypothetically representative-of-my-thinking metatext. At any rate, I feel a stirring inside moving me to write, and as I've indexed all my drafts according to the convention self-referentially mentioned in PAW[0], I'm uncovering this scrap, which must date back to 2008 or 2009.

Dear Climatologist former Professor,
I have a question for you. My firm is consulting on a project which involves production of educational material for people in the transportation industry regarding air quality. It turns out that the client staff member most directly involved with air quality is an immovable climate change skeptic, and I’ve found myself persistently in the position of arguing for stronger, unambiguous language describing the issue and its significance. Given the nature of the climate system and the science that investigates it (both being complex and non-linear), much of the research activity and accreting understanding is diffused among studies, not to mention sequestered in publication organs out of the view if not the comprehension of non-specialists. And I understand that results, in terms of our growing understanding, are not tidy or certain. So here’s the question: what do you think is the best strategy for, if not persuading immovable skeptics, at least inoculating from their skepticism other laypeople who wonder what climate change is and whether to be concerned about it?

Are there key talking points to make? Is there some summary source that you invoke to laypeople when you are discussing the issue with them? Mention of the IPCC Fourth Assessment report, in spite of murmurings over conservative bias, latency between research and meta-analysis, and disincentive for top-tier researchers to participate on account of the time demands?

I’m gauging the likelihood that you’ll say “educate more on the first principles”. The threat posed by the expansion of human knowledge generally and its concurrent narrowing individually is that people are increasingly required to make a leap of faith on issues that impact them significantly, but about which it becomes intellectually unsupportable to expect them to be fully educated. :( A university education in basic science for all human beings is arguably an achievable goal, but not within the time horizon required, as far as I understand, for minimizing climate-related impacts of the Anthropocene. So are we left with appeals to Authority, the inscrutably (to non-acolytes) fractious and changeable Authority of communities of scientists? Any thoughts you might be able to share, no matter how brief, would be greatly appreciated.

Aloha,

Martin

PAW[2]: human behaviour

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/22/science/22smoke.html

The very definition of PAW!

PAW[1]: Hello World

Perceptions of phenomena as Parts or as Wholes are orthogonal constructions of meaning, in some tenuous and trivial way analogous to vertical versus horizontal heads of hair. 

PAW[0]: 0

Part_and_Whole[0]: the firstest element