Global Warming Can Be Fun

Well, this is depressing news.

2006 was the hottest year on record. Or maybe the second hottest, depending on how you massage the data.

The last 9 years were all in the top 25.

When viewed by state, New Jersey had its hottest year ever. Another six states had their second hottest year ever. No state ranked below average for the year.

Dr. Jeff Masters wrote:

December’s weather in the Northeast U.S. may have been a case of the weather dice coming up thirteen–weather not seen on the planet since before the Ice Age began, 118,000 years ago. The weather dice will start rolling an increasing number of thirteens in coming years, and an ice-free Arctic Ocean in summertime by 2040 is a very real possibility.

That title is an anagram of the phrase “ExxonMobil Corporation”. Today, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a remarkably detailed document that says:

In an effort to deceive the public about the reality of global warming, ExxonMobil has underwritten the most sophisticated and most successful disinformation campaign since the tobacco industry misled the public about the scientific evidence linking smoking to lung cancer and heart disease.

I’ve been reading about this for a long time. Many authors have written about the disinformation campaign being waged by oil interests against global warming. In Elizabeth Kolbert’s book Field Notes from a Catastrophe, she notes:

The United States is also the world’s chief purveyor of of the work of so-called global warming skeptics. The ideas of these skeptics are published in books with titles like The Satanic Gases and Global Warming and other Eco-Myths and then circulated on the web by groups like Tech Central Station, which is sponsored by, among others, ExxonMobil and General Motors.

The introduction to the report says:

ExxonMobil’s cynical strategy is built around the notion that public opinion can be easily manipulated because climate science is complex, because people tend not to notice where their information comes from, and because the effects of global warming are just beginning to become visible. But ExxonMobil may well have underestimated the public. The company’s strategy quickly unravels when people understand it for what it is: an active campaign of disinformation.

This is why I’m trying to be really transparent about the climate science built into Melting Point. I want to be sure that people know where my data and formulas come from, and why the science behind the game is believable. If people accept the science, then the game can help them come to conclusions about what our strategy should be.

I don’t know the answers. I’m hoping the game will help us find the answers together.

I took this in Vermont over the holidays. Obviously, those aren’t real flowers. There was even a dusting of snow on the ground. But this is a place where I’m used to inches of snow at this time of year, if not feet of it, or at least enough ice to skate on. This year, mud was more of a problem than snow, and the local ski mountain only had about half its trails open.

Can we attribute it to global warming? In the specifics, no. We can’t blame any specific weather event, or even a whole year’s worth of weather on human-caused climate change. But in general, there’s something going on. When I was a kid, I lived in upstate Connecticut. In New England, the climate moves north about 25 miles a decade. So the weather experience in mid-Vermont in 2007 is pretty similar to what I used to have as a kid in Connecticut in the 1960s.

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Sorry I’ve been out of touch. The exigencies of life with a college student (read: tuition) required that I take on some consulting work for a client I won’t name. It was challenging for a variety of reasons. I met some very interesting people in an area I haven’t worked in for a while (embedded systems). The work was well-suited to my skills, but the development environment was pretty much a mess. Despite a large team, they hadn’t allocated any software engineers to the problem of maintaining the development environment, so there was a tremendous amount of friction in the development process. It took 6 hours to get a fresh checkout and working build, and 13 minutes to build and test a minor change to the code.

I’ve been used to coding in Python on a PC, where the time from change to test is only a second or two. Even when I was working in C++ on Cosmic Blobs, the time from change to test was less than a minute for simple edits.

It changes everything. It’s almost back to the days of programming with punch cards. In order to be efficient, you have to make all your edits in one big bunch, then build and test them all together. This means that you have to make changes more carefully, which slows things down, and makes it more likely that you’ll include bugs that would be caught in a tighter-turnaround environment. It makes refactoring hard.

If you’re building software, spend the energy to get the tooling and build systems right. Allocate time to the problem. That product I was working on is going to be buggier, slower, and significantly more costly than it has to be.

It’s been bouncing around news and the net this weekthat the Supreme Court will be hearing arguments in Massachusetts v. EPA today. This is an important case, but I’m not at all sure it’ll be resolved in any way that will actually prove useful in the fight against human-caused climate change.

The history of the case can easily be found. I spent a while today reading the decision of the Appeals court. What’s interesting about it is that the three judges each had a different opinion.

The Bush Administration, in the guise of the EPA, argued in this case

that it did not have statutory authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles and that, even if it did, it would not exercise the authority at this time.

Basically, they wanted to punt on global warming. Beginning back in 1999 and continuing until the ruling in 2003 that prompted this case, EPAs administrators argued that the science on global warming was too uncertain for it to take any action on greenhouse gas emissions, and that even if it wanted to, Congress hadn’t given it the ability to.

Before the court could even rule on this case, they first had to show that the court had jurisdiction to rule on it. As I understand it, the EPA argued that the court could only take up the case if EPA had taken “final action” on the issue, and that inaction could not be interpreted as action, final or not.

The court basically shot down that argument.

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Half-Real: A Video Game in the Hands of a Player

Jesper Juul is an Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen.  He used to be a media scholar at MIT, turned his dissertation into a book.

He’s talking about the relationships between video games and reality.

What we’ll talk about:
* After “what is a game”
* After ludology and narratology
Where games come from, how they change, what happens when player picks up a game, and where do they stop? (uncertainty)

Interesting question, but undefined: how do we use games?

What’s wrong with this question?

Can a computer game make you cry?

Thousands of people ARE crying now. Characters die, thrown out of guild, lost game. People are crying over user-generated content, social status, NOT over predefined content. It’s about their social relationships.

Games are the most emotional of all media. Storytelling is about secondhand emotions; in games, we REALLY win or lose. We experience our own self-doubt, not someone else’s.

There’s a forgetfulness about the fact that games are really emotional.
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When I gave my talk at the Serious Games Summit, someone asked me if he could videotape it. I said yes. Well, he posted the video, and I just found it. If you have an hour with nothing else to do, there ya go. You can follow along with the slides if you like (amusing transitions omitted from the PDF…sorry about that).

Feel free to frag me in the comments if you like.

He won pulitzer prize, wrote a book called The Heat is On, then another called Boiling Point. One of the top science books of 2004.

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Just to avoid losing any more posts or parts of posts, I’ll keep them as separate entries.

Next speaker is Kim Lundgren - regional director of ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability, Northeast Regional Capacity Center.

Local Governments and the Cities for Climate Protection Campaign

An international association of local governments interested in global environment issues through cumulative local action. She covers the 9 northeast states (NY, NJ, Penn, plus New England).
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Back for the afternoon breakout sessions…

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