The Deployment Mirror - Part IV

Chapter I - Monday:

I wipe the sweat from my brow as the crew and I walk into the entryway of the guard shack leading into the dining facility (DFAC). I hand my ID to a Ugandan guard in a SOC uniform. He adjusts the loaded AK-47 on his shoulder, glances up at my face to ensure I am who I say I am and returns the card to me. I walk around the corner and into the DFAC to wash my hands. The paper towel saturates and rips leaving remnants of wet paper stuck to my fingers as I open the door into the dining facility. For some reason all the paper towels over here are the consistency of toilet paper. One of the small annoyances that whispers in your ear not so reassuringly reminding you that you are not in the comforts of home.

I scan my ID as I enter and am hit with the smell of DFAC. It is not an entirely bad smell but the multiple visits a day cause the smell to become an all too constant presence in the groundhog day that has become my life. I grab a tray, a plastic plate and silverware, and make my way briskly over to scan the line.

"Chicken sandwich day dude!" Heichs yells from behind me. Like a bird returning to the flock I swiftly alter course and head to the chicken sandwich bar that has become a regular on Monday's. We spread out and grab our various drinks, salads, and other items and reconvene in the back hall that somehow has a bit better air conditioning than the main area. We find and open table and plop down for a much welcomed break from the monotony of the contracting workload.

We sit down and start catching up on the few hours we have been dispersed carrying out our separate niches within the organization. The hustle and bustle of the various troops and contractors in the DFAC provides a backdrop of noise and movement that at first was overwhelming but is now the norm. The conversion inevitably turns to stories about contracting, another glaring reminder that I am deployed. Our job serves as our lowest common denominator of shared experiences and thus is often the topic of conversation. This is out of necessity and definitely not out of enjoyment. I have recognized a pattern in our conversations though. We often start with a contracting story. The story then leads to complaining. Not the type of complaining that comes from tainted and bitter people, but the kind that arises from those that are hungry and impatient with bureaucracy, injustice, and plain idiocy. The topic of conversation inevitably leads to higher ideals and principles that transcend our common deployed experiences and align more with our common human experiences and values.

I am amazed at how no matter where we start we end up talking about very high level, simple shared topics. We start bitching about contracting, navigate our way into strategic discussion on the way the war is being fought and how we fit into it. We then talk about what we would do if we were king for a day, and inevitably end up talking about our life goals and values like happiness, the importance of family, fulfillment, cultivating human relationships, and experiencing this gift of life that we are given.

I am no Socrates or Aristotle, but some of my best memories from this chapter of my life will definitely be centered on those shared discussions with my peers. People will want to hear about my travels to the desert. They will want to know how hot it was, how the palaces looked, and if I met any 'real' Iraqis. I will patiently answer their queries as these experiences will undoubtedly be cherished. But my foresight tells me that my best feel good moments will be the connections I established with my buddies and those moments in time where we got a glimpse into each other's souls and recognized the ideals we all shared; the things that are truly important to living an amazing and fulfilling life.

"You guys ready?" I ask the group. We stand up in concert and take our trays over to the industrial garbage cans lining the exits. I push open the swinging door and am once again blasted with a combination of dust, intense sunlight, and heat that pulls me back to the reality of where I am at. We head back to the vehicle and make the drive back to the office.

To Be Continued....

We Can't All Be Right; So What Works? More Super Freakonomics Debate, Trolls, And Creation

After I wrote the post on the Super Freakonomics controversy regarding global warming/climate change, the controversy actually grew larger. Most notably when economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman got involved. I have included the second rebuttal by the Super Freakonomics team and I find it quite interesting how they are dealing with their critics criticisms. In fact they aren’t really arguing with their critics at all. They are merely outlining more definitively on the issues and more importantly what issue they are actually examining.

We are answering a different question than our critics.

Our question, at noted above, is what is the cheapest, fastest way to quickly cool the Earth. Like every question we tackle in Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics, we approach the question like economists, using data and logic to conclude that the answer to that question is geo-engineering. Not coincidentally, almost every economist who has asked the same question has come to the same conclusion, including Martin Weitzman and the economists at the Copenhagen Consensus.

But that is not the question that Al Gore and the climate scientists are trying to answer. The sorts of questions they tend to ask are “What is the ‘right’ amount of carbon to emit?” or “Is it moral for this generation to put carbon into the air when future generations will pay the price?” or “What are the responsibilities of humankind to the planet?”

Unlike the question that we are asking — How can we most efficiently cool the Earth fast? — the types of questions that environmentalists are trying to answer mix together both scientific issues and moral/ethical issues. If you have any doubts about this, watch Al Gore’s movie, in which he says explicitly that reducing carbon emissions is not a political issue, but a moral issue.

That is why someone like Ken Caldeira can agree with the facts presented in our chapter, say that the chapter is written in good faith, but still disagree with the conclusion that geoengineering is the answer. It is because the question Ken Caldeira is trying to answer is not the question we are trying to answer. The same is true of our critics. But instead of just making this simple point — that we are asking different questions — the critics have either intentionally or unintentionally confused the issues by making all sorts of extraneous arguments.

I do not mean to imply that the question we answer in the book is the most important question. It may be that the questions that environmentalists are trying to ask are more important and more interesting, but that certainly does not mean that we don’t want to know the answer to our question, a question that the environmentalists don’t bother to ask very often because they are focused on their more philosophical questions.

So for all the blogosphere shouting against our chapter, I have to be honest and say that I just don’t get it. I can’t understand why any environmentalist who really cares about the Earth’s future could say with a straight face that geoengineering doesn’t deserve a seat at the table as the global-warming debate heats up.

This is why I have always been interested in economics. Especially the economics of social issues. I definitely have an idealist side to me. Being an optimist by nature I have a predisposition to strive for the way things should be. Although I am proud of that quality, it can be a dangerous trait as you are susceptible to having the blinders on. Economists are important because they study the science of incentives. Their study is the study of creating action. I read another extremely insightful post (as always) from Seth Godin regarding what he calls “trolls.” Here is what he had to say about trolls:

Trolls
Lots of things about work are hard. Dealing with trolls is one of them. Trolls are critics who gain perverse pleasure in relentlessly tearing you and your ideas down. Here's the thing(s):

1. trolls will always be trolling
2. critics rarely create
3. they live in a tiny echo chamber, ignored by everyone except the trolled and the other trolls
4. professionals (that's you) get paid to ignore them. It's part of your job.

"Can't please everyone," isn't just an aphorism, it's the secret of being remarkable.

I love number 2. Critics rarely create. I am not advocating abandoning debate and philosophical exploration. However there are times, as illustrated by the Super Freakonomics crew controversy, where it may be more important to stop debating what is right and start creating what will work. I am not saying stop moral debates, however each side of any issue feels that they are right. We cannot all be right, especially if we are on opposite ends of the spectrum. So there are times where maybe we should move onto agreeing on what can work....and what can work now. If you think this only applies to global warming you are wrong. Look at all the politically significant and unfortunately politically stagnant issues that consistently arise in Washington. Just a thought….

Super Freakonomics Book Causing Stir In The Global Warming Debate

The next edition of Freakonomics, appropriately titled Super Freakonomics, tackles a polarizing issue known affectionately to many as climate change. Before the book has even hit the shelves it is causing a stir surrounding the evaluation of climate change and our role in dealing with the realities and myths regarding the environmental subject. Interestingly it seems as though the book doesn’t necessarily take an “anti-climate change” stance, yet environmental advocacy groups and bloggers are lambasting the book as entirely false or moreover, libelous (here are a few samples from metalfilter). I have included a few interesting excerpts below, but it would do you well to read the entire passage here. I can empathize with both sides of the climate change argument and feel as though, like most arguments, the truth likely falls somewhere in the middle. I tend to feel that we should err on the side of caution due to the implications of mother nature’s retaliation if the climate change naysayers are wrong. With that being said I recognize the difficulties associated with combating climate change no matter how substantiated or unsubstantiated the claims may be. The article highlights perhaps the most unfortunate reality surrounding global warming in that “pollution is an externality – that is, the people who generate pollution generally don’t pay the cost of their actions and therefore don’t have strong incentives to pollute less.” Where ever you fall on the spectrum of belief, exposure to contrary beliefs and arguments is rarely a negative thing. I, for one, am looking forward to the second Freakonomics book and the quest for truth and solutions surrounding the environmental health of our world.

Here is a brief passage about the overall premise of the chapter and the controversy it is causing:

Our global-warming chapter has several sections. We discuss how it’s a very hard problem to solve since pollution is an externality – that is, the people who generate pollution generally don’t pay the cost of their actions and therefore don’t have strong incentives to pollute less. We discuss how even the most sophisticated climate models are limited in their ability to predict the future, and we discuss the large measure of uncertainty in this realm, given that global climate is such a complex and dynamic system. We discuss some of the commonly held misperceptions about climate and energy, including the fact that the historic relationship between global temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide is more complicated than is generally thought.

The real purpose of the chapter is figuring out how to cool the Earth if indeed it becomes catastrophically warmer. (That is the “global cooling” in our subtitle. If someone interprets our brief mention of the global-cooling scare of the 1970’s as an assertion of “a scientific consensus that the planet was cooling,” that feels like a willful misreading.) To think we are “deniers,” would obviate the chapter’s central point: if we weren’t convinced that global warming was worth worrying about, we wouldn’t have written a chapter about proposed solutions.

I found this passage very interesting in that it discussed something that you rarely hear; a potential solution if we are in fact past the point of no return in the global warming battle:

The most controversial of these solutions – a “stratoshield” — involves the controlled injection of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to cool ground temperatures, which mimics the natural cooling effects of a big volcanic eruption like Mount Pinatubo. This sort of “geoengineering” solution is intensely disliked within environmental circles, and we discuss the reasons why. And we discuss why, if global warming gets worse, it might still be a good idea to consider further research on the stratoshield. We also discuss a much more environmentally friendly anti-warming solution from I.V. that uses salt-sea spray to increase cloud reflectivity.

We describe how when Caldeira first heard about the stratoshield from Lowell Wood, another I.V. scientist, he “disliked the concept” but nevertheless “ran a climate model to test Wood’s claims.” Furthermore: “his model backed up Wood’s claims that geoengineering could stabilize the climate even in the face of a large spike in atmospheric carbon dioxide, and he wrote a paper saying so. Caldeira, the most reluctant geoengineer imaginable, became a convert — willing, at least, to explore the idea.”

That is why Caldeira was in the room with his I.V. colleagues that day – talking to us, exploring the idea – and that is one reason that we gave as much credence to I.V.’s climate and geoengineering proposals as we did: because Ken Caldeira is not a climate-change-denying know-nothing, but quite the opposite. Because even though Caldeira would like to see us become a zero-carbon society, he seemed to agree with Nathan Myhrvold’s assessment that if global warming is as real a problem as they think it may be, then an overreliance on carbon mitigation may be “too little, too late, and too optimistic.”

How could a devoted environmentalist who wants a zero-carbon society believe this? Because, as we wrote (with input from Caldeira), “the half-life of atmospheric carbon dioxide is roughly one hundred years, and some of it remains in the atmosphere for thousands of years. So even if humankind immediately stopped burning all fossil fuel, the existing carbon dioxide would remain in the atmosphere for several generations.”

And the closing argument:

Levitt and I – and Nathan Myhrvold, and maybe even Ken Caldeira – look forward to debating the content of the chapter itself, the actual ideas and conclusions.

Will a lot of people argue with them? Absolutely. Some critics claim that we are too pessimistic about carbon mitigation, that we understate the probability of catastrophic climate change, that we are wrong to write that “the movement to stop global warming has taken on the feel of a religion.” Fair enough: we will debate those issues.