Proactive Interventions 6

[zdas04]

Is Anthropogenic Climate Change (ACC) a real phenomena? I don't think so, but others do. If AGC is real, is human-generated CO[sub]2[/sub] the driving force? I don't think so, but others do. If human-generated CO[sub]2[/sub] is the driving force in ACC, can it be mitigated? I don't think so, but others do. If human-generated CO[sub]2[/sub] can be mitigated, what are the potential unintended consequences?

My basic question is: Can anyone name a grand-scale human intervention in nature that did not lead to unintended consequences that were on a par with the thing we were trying to "fix"?
[ul]
[li]Soil erosion? bring in Kudzu, Russian Olive, and Salt Cedar[/li]
[li]Wildfires? Fight them and allow a fuel inventory to build up so large that when the forests catch fire today they burn so hot that they sterilize the soil and spread so fast that they can't be contained.[/li]
[li]Hole in the ozone layer? Ban the most effective refrigerant ever developed, ban effective propellants in spray cans, then find that the ozone layer is patchy and has always been patchy and the R-12 and spray cans had nothing to do with the hole (and the original data was fabricated in the first place).[/li]
[li]Floods? Install dams and find that the Grand Canyon is filling in with silt because it needs floods. So do farmlands. I'm not saying that flood control is bad (but many environmentalists are saying exactly that), but we have to accept the unintended consequences.[/li]
[li]Eliminate predators? The prey animals lose their fear and congregate closer to rivers, eating the plants that stabilize the banks, turning rivers into swamps.[/li]
[/ul]

The list goes on and on. Is there a single case where we "fixed" something in nature and find that decades later there isn't something we created that is worse than what we were trying to fix? Before someone points to the Clean Air Act or cleaning up the smog in LA or the fact that the East River hasn't caught fire in decades--all of those things are about people fixing the mistakes that people made, not about "fixing" a natural thing. CO[sub]2[/sub] is less than 2% of the so-called greenhouse gases, the human-generated CO[sub]2[/sub] is less than 1% of that number (virtually all of the CO[sub]2[/sub] in the atmosphere comes from insects on land and krill and smaller sea life), so people are putting 0.02% of the CO[sub]2[/sub] into the air. What are the benefits and consequences of reducing that number unilaterally? Now if we could get the termites and krill to sign on, not to mention reduce ocean evaporation, then you could possibly lower the CO[sub]2[/sub] in the air to the extreme detriment of the plant life on earth.

People frequently say "what if you are wrong and ACC is real? We have to do something" My answer is always "engineers can deal with conditions that develop, our track record with proactive interventions is so bad that that is really the best we can do."


[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[zdas04]

IDS,
Why don't you start a thread on this "principle" and stop hijacking this discussion? No one on eng-tips.com has any obligation to answer any question. We are all here for our own reasons and it bothers me that you won't accept that.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[moltenmetal]

Personally I think that IDS has actually found the crux of the argument- the fundamental point on which we disagree on this subject. I find his question to be totally relevant to the discussion.

To elaborate a bit: the precautionary process that we use in the safety evaluation of a chemical plant might be termed a cost-benefit analysis, but that would be a gross and inaccurate over-simplification. A hazards and operability study (HAZOP) is certainly far more than a mere evaluation of the cost of safety mitigations versus their benefit in hazard reduction- in fact, it is NEVER done on those terms in my experience. Rather, the probability and severity of a particular harm are multiplied by one another as a measure of comparative risk. We then use our values- DIFFERENT values for money versus for human life- to evaluate how urgently and to what degree of certainty we must mitigate the hazard by reducing either the probability or the severity with mitigating measures if possible. There is nobody in those meetings sitting there deciding that the risk of losing a human life is worth $1 million but not $2 million worth of mitigation efforts- THAT would be a cost-benefit analysis. No, a cost-benefit analysis has long ago been relegated to the far simpler task of making decisions of a financial nature, where a value on human life and injury etc. reduced to dollar terms is never actually made.

In every HAZOP I've ever participated in, it was a given that if the team felt that a risk of serious harm to persons or the environment that we could reasonably forsee could not be mitigated to an acceptable level, the decision would be made to terminate the project until such a mitigation could be designed or some other means could be deployed to eliminate or reduce the probability or severity of the harm- a wholesale redesign rather than just an additional mitigation.

It has never been my experience that a HAZOP review encountered a harm with a high risk ranking, i.e. moderate probability and high severity- with the conclusion being to keep operating the way we are now while gathering more data. No- instead you'd be shutting things down until necessary mitigations can be put in place. If a professional engineer were involved and the team chose to proceed down that "run it but monitor" path, if they disagreed strongly enough with the finding, they couldn't let it lie there without taking further action- doing so would put them in violation of their duty to hold the public safety as paramount.

So: I'd argue, as I've argued in past, that when we encounter a risk of harm, there is a world of difference between stopping what we're doing until we're more certain that the risk of harm isn't realistic, and chugging along doing what we've always done until the risk can be PROVEN to be realistic. And certainly if the source of the prediction of the harmful outcome is the peer-reviewed literature on a scientific subject, it would be very strange indeed if the team were to turn their nose up at it and say, "sorry, that's not a good enough standard of proof to change our current course of action."

There's how the precautionary principle applies to this issue, from my perspective.

 

[rb1957]

that is IMHO a very simplistic view, although completely appropriate for a class of risks (like chemical spills).

Say someone came to a HAZOP meeting and said "I've done a quick analysis of a problem and I think there's a 10% chance of human fatality". Would you ask him to refine his analysis before taking action (taking him seriously) ? If he added "I've run the analysis pass a couple of friends, experts in the field, and they agree." would that make you take him seriously ?

part of the problem with this topic is that it relies completely on models. Anything Wrong with that per se, until you add "unvalidated" models. Anyone who's worked with models knows they can trick you quicker than anything. Too coarse and they obscure important details, too detailed and they flood you with irrelevant "hot spots".

another day in paradise, or is paradise one day closer ?

 

[IRstuff]

Maybe we should ask whether Neil Armstrong actually landed on the Moon. It took far less people to fake that than the number required to generate fake data and bogus models supporting ACC.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

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[rb1957]

"Maybe we should ask whether Neil Armstrong actually landed on the Moon." why? ... no, it's not worth the agro.

another day in paradise, or is paradise one day closer ?

 

[moltenmetal]

OK rb1957, I see your point, and my analogy was not meant to be perfect either. It was merely meant to show how the precautionary principle applies not only to routine engineering, but also to this issue- which it very clearly does.

While it is a measured certainty that a) we've increased the atmospheric [CO2] substantially as a result of burning fossils and b) that results in climactic forcing by narrowing the IR radiative window into space, we must rely on models to determine the severity of the result. The alternative, i.e. finding another Earth in another universe where accelerated timescale experiments are possible, is just not on the table.

So: how do we deal with the obvious uncertainty of the models? The same way we deal with uncertainty in other engineering problems- and where risk assessment is concerned, that's most often the case. We put error bars on the inputs and outputs. We realize there will be a range of possible outcomes. And we attribute a probability to how far wrong we might be. How likely are we to be completely wrong, i.e. to the point that the added CO2 has no negative effect? How likely are we to be on a path to 5 C temperature rise in the next century? How likely is it that we'll fall somewhere in between? We can then calculate a risk by multiplying probability times severity and determine whether we need to take action at all, and if so, how aggressive that action needs to be.

We've done that. And we've concluded that we need to take action. By "we" I mean the people who actually are qualified to do that work.

I agree 100% that unlike the certainty we have about the causes, the outcomes are much less certain. They are not founded in measurements, but rather on model predictions of an enormously complex system.

We also must acknowledge that all mitigations have a cost- that's always true. People are wont to say that "safety is always #1", implying that it's worth any cost- but that's actually empty rhetoric for the most part. All activity- all benefit we might extract from anything we do- comes with associated risk. We can definitely argue about the cost and potential effectiveness of particular mitigations- we could spend a long time arguing that and nobody would be absolutely right or wrong. But we do generally acknowledge one thing: the universe working the way it does, it is usually far easier to deal with a problem by prevention than after entropy has had its way. By "easier", I mean with less human and economic cost. Again, that is absolutely fair game for debate among reasonable people.

 

[FoxRox]

Maybe my interpretation is to rigid, but as I see it, we are not, can not, and will not ever apply the precautionary principle to ACC. By that standard we would need to return to the stone age posthaste. I don't see anyone here advocating for that.

I see a lot of discussion about trying to find things we can all actually agree on. e.g. in another thread trying to establish an agreement on the fundamentals of the greenhouse effect and anthropogenic CO2 increases. What about this one: Is it possible to agree that the climate science community has at least some self-induced credibility problems? I acknowledge that they are the authority on the issue, but their poor record of predictions doesn't help them. Much of this is undoubtedly due to every small claim being blown out of proportion by the media and political figures, but some very poor predictions were made nonetheless. I understand it is a fallacy to say "wrong then - wrong now", but anyone's credibility is damaged when they are proved wrong about something. It must also be acknowledged that there is some echo-chamber effect within the field. It is not healthy for any scientific field to be isolated from the greater academy and dismiss external involvements and opinions. Peer-review becomes less and less valuable when the peers rarely disagree, or may even be scared to disagree.

 

[IDS]

Why don't you start a thread on this "principle" and stop hijacking this discussion?

My initial post was a response to a post by rb1957, which quoted a comment you had made. Every other post has been a direct response to later replies. I'm not sure how that constitutes hi-jacking.

No one on eng-tips.com has any obligation to answer any question.

Of course they don't. But if a question is unanswered, then everyone is also free to make note of that.

We are all here for our own reasons and it bothers me that you won't accept that.

I have absolutely no idea why you think I don't accept that, but I'm very happy to tell you that I completely accept it.

Doug Jenkins
Interactive Design Services

http://newtonexcelbach.wordpress.com/

 

[IDS]

Maybe my interpretation is to rigid, but as I see it, we are not, can not, and will not ever apply the precautionary principle to ACC. By that standard we would need to return to the stone age posthaste

I don't know about too rigid, but I don't see that as being an outcome of applying the precautionary principle to ACC. A return to the stone age would have immediate adverse consequences far greater than the short term consequences of climate change, and probably greater than the long term consequences as well, so the precautionary principle rules that out as a solution, just as much as it rules out "do nothing" as a solution.

The precautionary principle requires that we make an assessment of all the available evidence, considering the extent and likelihood of all consequences, and that where there is conflicting evidence, greater weight is given to the evidence of adverse consequences. That seems completely within accepted standard engineering practice to me.

I would also note that when considering proactive interventions, the precautionary principle is certainly highly relevant, and failure to do this is certainly a reasonable criticism of some measures taken or proposed for reducing climate change.

Doug Jenkins
Interactive Design Services

http://newtonexcelbach.wordpress.com/

 

[IRstuff]

"By that standard we would need to return to the stone age posthaste. "

No, it's pretty clear we only needed to go back no more than 100 years.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

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[moltenmetal]

There's no need to talk about going backward in time- we'll need all our modern technology to deal with the issue of AGW, and we have reasonable hope that we'll continue inventing new technology in future which will be even more helpful.