What's it all about?

This blog is all about Politics, Science, Technology and where they all overlap. I'll probably talk about sport from time to time as well.

One of my chief preoccupations at the moment, and something that will be a central theme of this blog, is the seemingly intractable problem of how to deal with an issue that affects the whole of society, but can only be truly understood by a small elite. Chief among these is obviously climate change, though there are many others. Before you protest, it's clear that, say in the case of climate change, understanding in general terms how CO2 and other gases contribute to the temperature of the Earth is not so hard. What is incredibly difficult though, is knowing how and why a particular concentration of a particular gas will have an impact of a given value on the mean temperature and other climatic conditions. That is the key question and the details and arguments are neccesarily technical; this is not something that can be decided by a debate in parliament, on talkback radio, twitter or anywhere else.

We seem to be stuck with having to trust the overwhelming view of the experts (which on this issue I do), rather than be able to come to our own conclusion. That fine, and the evidence does appear to be overwhelming, but that leaves us in a tricky position, and sets an uncomfortable precedent. I don't for a moment defend the public faces opposing the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis; most seem to be driven by prior political, economic or personal agendas, I do feel some sympathy for members of the community with a healthy distrust of governments and authority and who could correctly point to the fact that many of those who support action on climate change clearly have prior politcal, economic and personal agendas which are supported by that idea.

For my own background, I have a PhD in physics and astronomy and work as a researcher in an academic environment. My particular field involves large computer simulations including hydrodynamics. I might therefore be expected to claim to be in a somewhat better position to understand the science behind climate change than most people in the community, but there's is no way I'd make that claim. If anything I'm even more painfully aware of just how tricky a lot of the details that go into climate modelling must be. That's not a reason to doubt the models out of hand, but it does suggest that reading a couple of 'climate sceptic' blog posts probably doesn't give you the neccessary background to argue with the experts. What would give you the neccessary background is 4-5 years of an undergraduate physics and maths degree and another 3-4 years of a PhD in climate science. Once you've done that you can comment. That leads back to my original point, this is an issue that affects us all, but one on which very very few people can make a genuinely well formed opinion.

I'll be discussing this and related issues over the coming months.