NASA director Mike Griffin set off a firestorm of criticism yesterday when asked about whether or not NASA’s mission should include more work on global warming. Wiki provides this summary of the exchange and its fallout:
In an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep airing May 31, 2007 on NPR News’ Morning Edition, Griffin said the following: “I have no doubt that global — that a trend of global warming exists. I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of earth’s climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change.
“First of all, I don’t think it’s within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown, and second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings – where and when – are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.” [17]
James Hansen, a NASA climate scientist, stated that Griffin’s comments showed “arrogance and ignorance”, as millions will likely be harmed by global warming.[18] Jerry Mahlman, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said that Griffin was either “totally clueless” or “a deep antiglobal warming ideologue.”[19]
It is fascinating that Griffen, who has spent much of his life piling up academic degrees, fails to consider how his answers are likely to be received by an audience partly up to speed on global warming issues. Most scientists readily concede humans, including Americans, are doing a damn fine job modifying our atmosphere and climate. What they don’t see is how the new equilibrium state we seem to be heading for could in any way be “optimal” for humans, or, for that matter, any lifeforms from cyanobacteria to cheetahs.
In Griffin’s favor, he is apparently an accomplished engineer and probably had no intention of portaying himself as a whack job when he made his comments. If his efforts to save the Hubble Telescope are indication, there’s just no way he could simply be a consummate Bush “fox in the hen-house” appointee or a cog in the federal money machine whose job is assuring that the spice uh, funding to NASA contractors, must flow.
But at a deeper level most people have trouble with numerosity, and by extension, judging the likelihood of something happening. Indeed, we even call big concepts that are hard to get our mind around “mind-boggling.” Wasn’t it Watership Down, where rabbit counting was limited to six numbers: one, two, three, four, five and many? Hare-brains simply could not comprehend immensity beyond a certain point. For the three-year-old this unknown is called the Boogie Man, or The “Kuh” Thing in my case. As we get older, the fear may subside, but the blindness to the Great Statistical Beyond persists. The only reason public lotteries attract any business is the profound probability blindness of the clientele. If lotto was not a sucker’s game, every math department in the world would be playing it for keeps.
There’s even a flip side to the probability blindness coin — it causes some of us to lose our fudge at the mention of remote risk. Drivers are likely to have some bump-up during their lives, but we deal with it. Then there’s that target demographic that buys into George W. Bush’s rhetoric about “terrists” doin’ “evil” to “good people” (and to which Dick Cheney might add “of Wyoming”). Not being able to accurately assess risk can also get expensive. Last November, former US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin complained:
Our society seems to me to have an increasing tendency to want to eliminate or minimize risk. Instead of making cost–benefit judgments on risk in order to achieve optimal balances, the result too often, again in my judgment, is regulation, legislation, or litigation outcomes whose cost in other areas greatly exceeds the benefit of risk reduction.
So what is the actual risk of global warming, and what would an appropriate, non-alarmist response be? The only calculation for quantifying such risk that I’ve seen lately comes from a Finnish engineer:
E = ∫∫ (Aρst) ΔA Δt,
where E = environmental impact, A = surface area of the earth affected, ρ = relative magnitude of the impact, m = ecological importance of the area affected, and t = how long the effect lasts
Consider a worst-case scenario, an asteroid collision. Even here, we know that t is finite, so while everything on the surface is vaporized or fried, the little bacteria colonies a couple of kilometers below us will eventually get some DNA back to the surface and start things over.
One order of magnitude below that we find all-out thermonuclear war. So much for our species, but I understand cockroaches and even certain higher plants may keep going.
Two orders of magnitude below that we get to what happens if global temperatures increase another 3°C on average (IPCC scenario), loss of most rainforest, melting of polar cap, substantial decline in human population, etc. Assuming the contributing factors to global warming are arrested at some point, the planet could recover extensively in just 500 years.
One order below that we have a limited theater nuclear conflict, pretty messy locally, but limited in its overall planetary effects.
So here’s the deal. First, even at “man in the can” NASA, I suspect there is an unspoken mandate to “be useful.” The argument that NASA is not tasked to study climate change is absurd. When a problem of vital interest to us all emerges, any organization with the resources to be useful has a duty to help. Second, a NASA director, like any CEO, has full authority to distiguish emerging threats. He can, of course, ignore them, or he can balance. Risk can come in the form of rather infrequent encounters with large space objects or ineluctable orders-of-magnitude-less-destructive climate change .
The Glyphians 