ClimateChange and Harvard Magazine: My Jaw Dropped

For my sins – and especially the sin of having gone to Harvard University at one point – I used to get an alumnus copy of Harvard Magazine.  I cancelled my subscription last year, when a fatuous article by a Harvard professor of environmental science recommended that the US allow the Keystone XL pipeline without the slightest effort to explain why James Hansen (far more expert in climate science than the professor) had said “Keystone XL means game over for the environment”.  At that time, it was clear to me that Harvard Magazine’s editors had not the slightest idea that there was anything wrong with the article, and not the slightest intention of boning up on the subject because of the gravity of the issue.

However, other members of the family still get the rag, and I took a brief look at an article in the latest issue about “why the US may be on the cusp of a [sustainable} energy revolution.”  And, although I was braced for something clueless, my jaw still dropped.  Here’s the quote (condensed):

“Beyond the connection between long-term climate change and the use of energy … lies another stark reality: the total amount of fossil fuel on earth is finite, and so, inevitably, eventually, ‘We will run out.’”

Not sure why this is so awful a framing of the article’s issues?  Try this equivalent.  In the middle of global nuclear war, Harvard Magazine publishes the following:

“We need to think about beginning to substitute something else for atomic bombs, because, at this rate, in about twenty years (long after the rubble has stopped bouncing) we will run out of uranium.”

And the rest of the article shows absolutely no consciousness of what climate science is predicting.  The focus is on wind power.  Double the wind speed means four times the energy, so the middle (windiest) 1/3-1/6 of the US should be covered with turbines – no mention of the likelihood that average wind speed is likely to increase by 1/3 over the next 30 years, nor that wind patterns are likely to change (as they are already doing in winter because of the disruption of the jet stream), so that the middle third of the US may not be the windiest.  Offshore wind farms are good with regard to wind speed but more expensive to build – no mention of the likelihood that East Coast waters are likely to rise by a foot over the next 35 years, drowning low-lying turbines, or that higher-category hurricane patterns that might overstress the turbines are also likely.  And then there’s the assertion that biofuels are renewable – it’s not clear what the article is referring to, since corn ethanol production and use can in some cases involve more carbon emissions than oil, while cellulosic ethanol is not yet as widely used.

To summarize:  Harvard Magazine is by no means a set of climate change deniers – there is no sense that the truth is something to twist in order to make money for oneself, no matter the consequences.  Rather, Harvard Magazine is a representative of what I would call, in drug addiction terms, enablers.  Their minds are simply not open to the possibility that delay involves exponentially increasing costs and deaths.  And so, they allow deniers to carry the day by sheer weight of inertia, just as enablers multiply addiction’s costs simply by deciding that they don’t need to face the addiction problem just yet.

I am reminded of someone once saying of an outrageous act, “It wasn’t just immoral – it was downright stupid.”  But, heavens, how could someone like Harvard be stupid?  In the words of Westbrook Pegler, that last sentence “was writ ironical.”

HP: Memristors And Things Past

As noted in the latest issue of MIT Technology Review, HP’s research arm is making a major bet on memristors, seeking to deliver a major performance boost beyond the traditional processor/memory/disk hierarchy.  More specifically, as presented in the Review, HP would replace memory, SSDs, and disk with “flat” memristor memory, and then communicate within the new processor-memory architecture using optical-fiber-type light-speed technology rather than today’s slower-electron-speed technology.  In the Review, HP projects initial product ship as next year, although it appears from Wikipedia that 2018 is a likelier date.

It is exceptionally difficult to tell whether the resulting products would really outdistance SSDs and cables over the long haul, because HP is making its bet at an unusually early stage in the technology’s development.  However, my skepticism is not of the technology, nor of its potential to deliver major and scalable performance benefits beyond the transistors beloved of Moore’s Law.  Rather, I believe that a critical success factor for HP will be delivery of an operating system (HP has christened the concept The Machine, and the operating system Machine OS) plus the attendant compilers and interpreters.  To put it bluntly, HP has been late to realize that it needs software development savvy in its DNA, and past experience with HP software development suggests that even if the technology pans out, HP will probably fail at giving business and consumer customers a reason to insert Machine OS in place of the old-architecture operating systems.

Let’s dig further into the details.

More On Memristors

As Wikipedia notes, it is not clear even now that what HP is touting is indeed, strictly speaking, a memristor.  This matters only if, as fab facilities are developed and the technology tries to scale like the transistor, it turns out that HP’s technology is not only not a memristor but also cannot scale as the memristor should.  That’s one unusual technology risk for HP.

The second technology risk is that the actual “unit form” of the memristor memory has also not yet been specified and verified.  Apparently, a “crossbar latch” approach has been tested at a small scale with good results, but it is not certain whether that’s the best approach or if it will scale appropriately to memory chips.  If it does, HP estimates that 1 cubic centimeter can contain 1 petabit of memory (all accessible at the same tens-of-nanoseconds speed).

Other details of the memristor seem less relevant at this time.  For example, a true memristor effectively keeps a “memory” of past changes of state, so that, as with a disk but unlike with main memory, if you turn off the power and then turn it on again, the memristor will be able to recover its value at the time of shutoff (or previous values).  This type of “remembrance” does not seem important in computations, although it certainly might help with machine-learning experiments.

Remembering Itanium

Again citing MIT Technology Review, initial plans are to create a “Linux over memristors” OS first, called Linux ++, which would not be a “clean slate” optimization for the new “flat” memory, and then a version called Carbon that would be optimized for flat memory and open sourced.  Left unexamined are such questions as “Do I need to recompile my Linux apps so that they’ll work on Linux ++, as was the case between Red Hat and Novell Linux?”  If most apps must be recompiled, business use of the new OSes is probably in most cases a non-starter, and even cloud providers might question the business case.

We have been here before.  When HP committed to Intel’s Itanium line, I remember from my briefings that they did not at all appreciate the importance of having well-tuned compilers and interpreters with minimal recompilation involved from the get-go.  I believe that Itanium’s variable-length-word instruction set approach was a very good idea at the time, but without a clear transition strategy, HP’s effort to implement it was pretty close to doomed at the start:  it could never gain critical mass in the market. 

I see no indication yet that HP has the software-development prowess to succeed in an even larger app conversion.  This is especially true because HP’s tradition since the early ‘90s has by and large been “let customers pick other companies’ software where needed”, which is fine until you really need in-house software to boost your new hardware technology, and quickly.

Is The Era of the Hardware And/Or Services Critical Success Factor Over?

It is generally understood that HP is not in a great strategic position these days, having decided to split PC computing from the server side as two separate companies and with a small but consistent decline in revenues (together with a larger early dip in profits) in its immediate past.  I do not, however, view HP as wildly less successful than other of the traditional hardware/services-biased companies, including IBM.  There does, however, seem to be a continuum ranging from purer hardware/services offerings to predominantly software-related competitive advantage, and it correlates with revenue trends.  HP is down more than IBM, which does less well than Oracle, which does less well than Microsoft.  Apple may seem to be an outlier, with its smart-phone hardware, but the differentiator that allowed Apple to croak Nokia’s hardware focus was the swipe touch screen – software all the way. 

If I am right, then HP really needs to do something about innovative-software development.  If it were me, I’d bet the farm on a better form of agile development than other large firms are practicing, plus meshing agile marketing with agile software development in a major way.  Despite welcoming some major agile-development upgrades in firms like IBM, I believe there’s plenty of room for additional goodness.

Failing that, it’s hard to see how HP turns itself around, as one company or two, via the memristor route or something less risky, in the next few years.  To misquote Santayana, even those who have hardware that remembers for them are doomed to repeat software-driven history – and that ain’t good.

IBM-Weather Company Alliance: The Benefits and Limitations of Weather-Driven Analytics

Make no mistake about it, combining IBM and The Weather Company (TWC) is about as good as it gets for companies looking to improve their responsiveness to today’s extremes of weather.  This is not just because IBM’s Watson Analytics promises to add in-depth business insights and additional predictability to your basic average weather forecast.  In fact, The Weather Company is if anything the more important partner, because it has established a solid track record for anticipating some of the more unusual effects of such events as Hurricane Sandy – and Jeff Masters of Weather Underground is an effective analyst with a good appreciation of the effects of climate change on weather patterns.

And yet, the recent announcement of the alliance also serves to show how today’s business analytics is severely handicapped in its ability to incorporate likely future changes in climate and their effect on business for all but the next few days.  To put it another way, IBM/TWC can help a Boston-based firm anticipate and adjust on the fly to a 2-foot snow 5 days from now; but to make the necessary repairs to buildings to avoid roof collapses and leaks, and to make plans to truck snow to more remote locations because local “snow farms” can’t handle so much snow, when there has never been a need before – well, that IBM/TWC probably won’t help with.   However, increasingly, that’s where much of the additional weather-related business cost these days resides.  (And of course, what goes for IBM/TWC goes for other analytics solutions in spades)

The real problem here is the lack of a global climate model that operates on the basis of the most likely climate changes over the next 30 years, not just the ones that can be verified by conservative scientific analysis.  To take one example, we know that melting permafrost is likely to have a significant effect in warming the globe by releasing carbon and methane over the next 30 years, but since we can’t rule out the possibility that it will have no effect, today’s climate models do not include permafrost melting effects. 

As a result, even if Watson were to incorporate such a model in its projections of weather over the next couple of years at business locations, it would be very likely to fail to anticipate the extremes of weather that would actually occur.  Thus, Heidi Cullen, another meteorologist savvy about climate change, wrote a book a few years back in which she projected that NYC would see a major hurricane with a dangerous rise in the water level that threatened the city – but with a near-miss in 2017 and with a greater Hurricane Sandy equivalent happening in 2041.

A Quick Fix

So what’s a poor business to do?  Well, as of now, someone within the organization needs to develop enough expertise in today’s climatology to be able to create an informal “model” based on current research that can project possible regional climate changes for business and sales locations over the next five years – assuming non-zero global-warming effects of “known unknowns.”  Then, the business needs to run “what-if” weather scenarios that include these new possible extreme weather events – high winds, new hurricane locations, extreme rain and snow, extreme drought – and also their ancillary effects – water shortages, stressed utilities, difficulties getting to stores and work, impoverished consumers.  TWC’s expertise would be critical in determining the “penumbra” of related weather – geographical size and track of an extreme storm, frequency/length of extreme droughts – while IBM’s analytics would scrutinize the unfolding scenario for business impacts of ancillary effects.  This approach would do a far better job of adequately preparing the firm for the medium term (say, 2-5 years). 

Ah, but then there’s the longer term, 5-35 years out.  What prepares the firm for medium-term adaptation may very well prove to be more costly than adaptation that gives up certain locations as lost causes – and far, far more costly than the firm taking its fair part in effective global mitigation.

Getting Specific

What follows is necessarily speculative and US-centric, but should give an example of both medium-term and long-term business thinking.  Today’s “new climate” as it plays out over the next 2 ½ years is characterized by a modified “el Nino/la Nina” cycle and a new Arctic impact on weather, especially in winter.  High temperatures along various parts of the Pacific have attenuated el Nino and delayed its onset, but over the next 2 years, and possibly for longer, we should be in an el Nino phase characterized by higher temperatures than normal, especially in the western US.  At the same time, extensive warming of the Arctic combined with a mild el Nino should lead to significantly higher Arctic temperatures in the summer (and winter), and may redirect the cold and “extreme snowfall” of this winter to the European side of the Atlantic.

However, at the same time, Greenland ice melting has been putting a fresh-water “cap” on the area where the Gulf Stream dives down to the deep ocean, slowing and weakening the “force of flow” of the Gulf Stream.  At the same time, the greater increase in winter temperatures in the Arctic due to global warming compared to the continental US has made it easier for Arctic cold to “punch through” the jet stream and park over the eastern US for weeks at a time.  The increased warmth of that Arctic air means increased incidence of “extreme snowfalls” either in the eastern US or (in the other phase of the “Arctic oscillation”) in northern Europe.

Combining the two effects above with ongoing global warming, and we might project winters similar to the last 2 in the eastern US, but with a shorter snow season and slightly warmer temperatures.  The southern and western US may see significantly higher summer temperatures, and we cannot anticipate that the drought in the California area will be overcome by enough rain to replenish reservoirs, especially with little or no snowpack in the Sierras.  Finally, we might anticipate that there may be another out-of-season Hurricane Sandy or 75-80-mph nor’easter in the Northeast, with higher-wind-speed hurricanes in the South.  Overall, the globe should see a faster increase in temperatures year-round, leading to record high temperatures over much of the globe.  Businesses should review not only their dependence on water but also the reliability and cost-effectiveness of their air conditioning.

Beyond that, in the next 5-35 years, another main actor is sea level rise.  It is plausible that on average, global sea level will rise almost a foot over the next 35 years, and the slowing of the Gulf Stream means that sea level rise along the East Coast may even double that.  Sooner than expected, then, cities such as Miami and perhaps even Boston are under threat, and increased wave levels during more-violent storms mean faster coastal erosion and destruction.  Businesses should rethink their investments in locations less than 25 feet above sea level, in areas of high drought (western and possibly southern US), and in areas requiring high levels of air conditioning costs.  Analytics such as that available via IBM/TWC plus “what-if” scenarios should allow fine-tuning these shifts in investments within regions.

The Bottom Line

One line credited, I believe, to an IBM employee way back when, said of programs in general what could well be said of “business as usual” weather-related analytics:  “Garbage in, garbage out.”  In other words, if you assume that future weather will be like the past, with today’s climate change, that assumption is untrue “garbage”; and the result of your analytics will be either a 5-day horizon that gives you that long to make major changes in your current setup at various locations, or a very misleading guide to your multi-year strategy’s chance of avoiding major unnecessary weather-related costs – a medium-term forecast that is “garbage” as far as effective planning is concerned.

I have suggested one approach to overcome this problem; but, really, the first step is to recognize that dealing “just in time” with a weather problem is far less than half the battle, and to do something about it.  If you do create an approach along the lines I have suggested, however, IBM/TWC is an exceptional partner, because TWC “gets” climate change and because IBM via Watson and the like can dig deeper for related business effects, once the data it is fed is no longer “garbage.”

One final thought:  I and others like Joe Romm have said that mitigation (avoidance of further carbon emissions and hence far greater climate change) was and is far less expensive than adaptation such as the steps we have talked about here.  Unfortunately, in the 5-7 years since this point was made, most businesses have failed to have much positive impact on mitigation, either in their investments or politically.  As a result, the costs of mitigation have not increased significantly, but the costs of the adaptation that has now become necessary have risen quite a bit.  To put it another way, ignoring mitigation has guaranteed much more in the way of adaptation costs – and we may anticipate the same happening over the next 5-35 years, unless most businesses change both their political and investment practices in a much more drastic way.     

Climate Change: That Is All

In the movie M*A*S*H, someone would periodically announce upsetting news like “The US announced today that it had tested a nuclear device with one thousand times the explosive power of the bomb at Hiroshima” in a matter-of-fact voice, and would end the announcement with a brief “That is all.”

A recent study has now projected that under the “best-case scenario” (now changed to have atmospheric carbon level off at 525 ppm rather than just above 400 ppm) temperatures over the middle of the 21^st century will increase by 0.5 degree F per decade, and in the Arctic by 1 degree F.  In the worst-case scenario, temperatures will increase by 1 degree F per decade, and in the Arctic by 2 degrees F.  None of these scenarios take into account melting permafrost, which is likely to increase atmospheric carbon and the increase in temperature yet further.

In the Arctic, after 2 years in which sea ice minima reverted to a little above the level of 2007, it now appears very likely that the yearly maximum will be well below past recorded maxima, and will be the first recorded maximum at less than 14 million km.  Meanwhile, a weak el Nino has been announced, and in the past el Ninos have been associated with accelerated sea ice melting over the summer.  Another recent study has shown that on average 65 % of Arctic sea ice has vanished since 1975, and 85 % at sea ice minimum in September.  Another study has found that a so-called “hiatus” or “slowdown” over the last 15-20 years in global warming does not exist once Arctic data are added.  It is anticipated that over the next few decades, the global warming will speed up instead of rising at a constant rate, and therefore warming south of the Arctic will likewise speed up.

Another study has shown that melting of Greenland land ice is proceeding faster than previously thought, and therefore its contribution to sea level rise in the next few decades is going to be greater than anticipated (in previous studies that projected a 6 foot rise by the end of the century).  In the Antarctic, likewise, studies show the present rate of land ice melt has been underestimated, and therefore that Antarctic melting will likewise contribute significantly to sea level rise.

Finally, atmospheric carbon measurements for February are now out.  For the first time since records began to be kept in the 1950s, February atmospheric carbon is above 400 ppm, and approximately 2.5 ppm above last year.

That is all.

Memories of Bad Development Experiences

Recently, Charles King of Pund-IT Review was kind enough to send me a link to an old blog post talking about a type of bad software development experience that the writer had undergone – one that the writer christened “A*h*-Driven Development”, or ADD.  The comments on that blog post added some other wonderful designations of bad development experiences, complete with acronyms, many of which I enjoyed as well – until it struck me that in my 12-year developer career I had not experienced any of them.

And so, Charles has inspired me to set down my own experiences of misbegotten, crippled-from-the-start development, with due attention to appropriate acronyms.  And if you don’t like it, remember, don’t blame me for this post – blame Charles.

Commentless Reverse-Engineered Ugly Development (CRUD)

In my time, I ran into two extraordinary examples of this phenomenon.  The first was the case of a talented but strange person who had single-handedly created the first version of the software for an intelligent terminal.  This was in the days when in order to develop software for certain firms, one had to write out the programs (in Intel 8080 assembler language, of course) and then submit them to typists who would type in the written program, then run the compiler and linker and passed back the results to the programmer, until the program worked. 

However, the person who created the first version did not believe in comments, so it was very difficult to determine how the program worked.  What’s more, that person had a tendency to label statements that were to be branched to with obscenities, so that the typists had reached the point of refusing to type in his code.  Above all, the person was surly to the point that asking him to do a far larger second version in a timely fashion was risky if not asking the impossible.  However, it was also necessary that the second version provide the functions that the first version did, to ensure that customers went for the upgrade.

Eventually, management bit the bullet and hired more developers who would do v2.  However, because of the lack of comments, the functions of v2 had to be reverse engineered:  these developers had to guess just how the original developer had created these functions in v1.  In the end, the development had to take a long while to create a massive initial specification that included “best guesses” as to how v1’s functions worked, and the usual discoveries of problems combined with the new problems of coordinating multiple programmers made the development process very long.  Eventually, v2 got done; but by that time, the lead in the market that v1 had given had pretty much dissipated, as I understand it.

And that talented but strange developer?  Upper management found a solution that to my mind smacks of genius:  they promoted him to be a software development manager.  No more obscenities, no more surliness; he had to get what he wanted done through other programmers, and in order to do it he even improved his physical appearance so he wasn’t so unsanitary.  In fact, after his transformation he was by no means the worst personality problem among the developers – that would be someone we called the Mad Russian.  But that’s a story for another time.

On to story number two.  This was in later times, when one had one’s own IBM terminal to type in, compile, and link programs that were written not in assembler but in what used to be called a 4GL – a language a step up from C or PL/I, and vaguely English-like in its commands.  This particular company had a “wonder installer” who knew the product inside and out and knew just how to make the latest version run superbly when he installed it at customer sites.  In effect, he was so good that he seemed to sell the customer himself. 

And then the next version of the product would come out, and if he did not install it, screams of anguish would arrive from existing customers about all sorts of vital programs that didn’t work – this despite careful efforts at backward-compatibility testing by some extremely capable programmers.  What on earth could be going on?

As it turned out, when this installer would show up at a customer site, the customer would in the course of installation say, “gee, wouldn’t it be nice if …” and the installer would say “Of course I can do that for you”, and in a flash would whip up a program based on the product that would do just what the customer wanted.  There was one problem:  that little add-on was based on the innards of version x, and when version x + 1 arrived, those innards had changed, and the add-on no longer worked.  Of course, testing did not catch the problem, because users were only supposed to use the interfaces, not the innards beneath them.  And, of course (since a 4GL was English-like, the installer assumed no commenting was needed), there were no comments explaining what the program was doing, and the installer was out doing another job, and there was a key customer screaming bloody murder.

In the end, as in case 1, some of these programs had to be “reverse engineered”.  Luckily, the programs were generally small, so it was less difficult to accomplish this.  Still, it continually slowed down development of new functionality in the product, because these programs that only one or two key customers wanted were preempting new functionality that most customers needed.

I don’t know for sure how the company finally solved this problem.  I think that they finally pulled back the installer from the field and redirected him to new-function design, where it was impossible for any of his little per-company customizations to make it into running product.  In the end, as in story 1, a good but clueless programmer created CRUD, and the company that had to clean up the mess decided it never wanted CRUD again.

Design-By-Meeting Endless Asinine Development (DEAD)

I don’t know what your reaction to this story will be, gentle blog reader (OK, just a little snark), but even 30 years later I cannot believe it actually took place.  Here goes.

Again, this involves a software company using a 4GL (yes, the same company), and this time I should note that one of its products was a database.  At the time of which I write, the company decided that the accompanying data dictionary needed a major refresh, and the person who had been upgrading the product all along moved on to other things, while a mostly-new development team was brought in to create that plus a new development tool for the 4GL – and one more person, crossing over from sales and assuming the position of overall development manager.  I believe that she apparently had no development or development management experience, but some first-line sales managerial experience.

At this point, I think I should make one thing clear.  As I sometimes put it, “The worst development manager I had was a woman; and the best development manager I ever had was a woman.”  Someday I hope to write about why I feel that Leslie Turek, then of Computer Corp. of America, was and is my beau ideal of a development manager, even better than several superb managers I had during my development career.  Even though, to me, the manager mentioned in this story is the worst development manager I had, I don’t believe that most of the problems were her fault.  She was, simply, wrongly put by the company into a situation in which because of her lack of previous experience it was practically impossible for her to avoid managing development poorly.

Anyway, so here you are, tasked with managing multiple developers, with no experience or software programming knowledge as a guide, and with your first task being to create a design spec for the new product in seven weeks.  What do you do?  Well, this manager’s idea was to sit the programmers down in a meeting and have them discuss it, then reflect that discussion in an agreed-on design spec.  As part of the team, although I was in parallel creating a design spec for the development tool, I was expected to attend and contribute.

Sounds plausible, yes?  Except that what it turned out to mean was seven consecutive weeks of meetings from 9 to 4:30, Monday through Friday, with ½ hour break for lunch.  And don’t forget that this was our manager running the meetings.  Any sign of deviation from the consensus as she saw it was delaying the completion of the spec and a black mark against you.  Any undue sign of impatience or inattention due to the exhausting nature of sitting there concentrating on very fuzzy stuff for hours was a black mark against you.  And those who, like me, sometimes had limits on how much into the night we could work in order to write down the day’s production into an evolving design spec (in my case, because I had to get home to help with an autistic son) got black marks.

Here’s an example of how the process worked – or rather, failed to work.  At the point where we had to decide on the data dictionary’s user interface, the manager happened across someone who had begun to do academic-style research on user interfaces, and had discovered that in menus, if there were more than seven choices, users would forget about some of the choices.  This immediately got translated in the manager’s mind into “we should use menus” as well as “menus should have no more than seven choices.”  We then spent two hours generating off the top of our heads menu choices for a particular screen that “we really should have.”  There was no consideration of whether the choices could be implemented given the information that the data dictionary would have; there was no discussion of how readable the menu choices we generated were; as often happens in this sort of idea generation, we wound up with 10 menu choices instead of 7; and there was not even any consideration of making the choices involve action verbs or otherwise making the differences between the choices apparent to the reader.  No; what mattered was that there was a great deal of detail provided by all of these menu choices, and by sheer weight of detail this would look great in a design spec to the untutored eye.

I spent much of that two hours (and the rest of the meetings) screaming in silent designer agony.  I had at the same time created in my mind and noted simply on paper a design for the development tool that had a user interface with typically three choices per screen, very simply and clearly put – what I have called in other posts “orthogonal.”  I had little time to flesh out my own design spec because of these meetings.  And raising a point about anything I have listed above would require objecting at the end of the discussion – because only then would it become clear that there would be no discussion of these points.  And if I did that, then I would get a black mark for going against the consensus as the manager viewed it and delaying the spec creation process uselessly.

The rest of the story, really, is anticlimax.  At the end of the seven weeks, the manager decided that because of the lack of detail in my design spec, I should be cut loose.  I stayed on to help another programmer to complete the development tool that I had designed, a process that we completed in 2 ½ months despite the lack of “detail.”  I was told later that the development tool was widely implemented and well received by the customer base.  Meanwhile, as I was also told later, the data dictionary kept missing deadlines.  Finally, after about nine months of development, the programmers under my manager revolted and literally refused to work for her any longer.  I am not sure whether some form of the data dictionary that this design by meeting specified was ever implemented, but it was certainly not the full design.

The moral of the story, to me, is simple.  If one tries to design by meeting, and by nothing but that, in the long run (say, a year from now), the careers of all involved in the company are DEAD.

Envoi

What really strikes me, looking back all these years later on these (to me) horrible development-process experiences, was how few of them there actually were.  Perhaps I’m an old softie, inclined to sugar-coat my younger life – naah.  Or perhaps those who contributed comments to the blog post Charles sent me really are experiencing a greater frequency of lousy development experiences.  Somehow I doubt that, as well.  In my early years, especially, managers were just beginning to realize that there was more to software-development management than there was to managing, say, the accounting arm.  I know there were a lot of clueless and therefore paranoid managers out there; I think I was just lucky enough to run into fewer such experiences. 

But it still puzzles me that no one out there has mentioned the kind of experiences I had.  Maybe that is a hopeful sign.  Maybe, in the words of the Latin teacher in Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co., “you see, even among the barbarians – some of it sticks”.  “Amen,” said the chaplain.  “Go to bed.”

2014 Sets Another Heat Record. Are We Doing Anything About It? Apparently, Not Much

2014, according to Japanese, NOAA, and NASA measurements, was approximately 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than any previous measured year, or about 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer globally than the early 1900s.  6 of its 12 months set monthly heat records.  Scientists are now confident about asserting that this is the warmest it has been in the past 50,000 years, and we are rapidly closing in on clearly being warmer than at any time in the last 5 million years.

As James Hansen has recently noted, the global temperature more or less parallels the increase or decrease in carbon in the atmosphere, with each doubling being associated with a 4 degrees Centigrade (about 7 degrees Fahrenheit) increase in global temperature.  About 2/3-3/4 of this is from the effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide itself, and 1/3-1/4 due to linked increases in black carbon, methane (CH4), and the like.  Thus, since we are about halfway between our 1800s starting point of 250-280ppm of atmospheric carbon and a doubling of that amount, we have essentially “baked in” an increase of about 2.3 degrees Centigrade or 4 degrees Fahrenheit – the level at which, according to some scientists, catastrophic effects start to occur.  What consequences?  Movement of drought-ridden subtropical zones north to encompass much of the US except the Northeast, much of Southern Europe through France and Germany, and places such as the Fertile Crescent, India and Southern China.  Loss of all Arctic sea ice as well as some Greenland and Antarctic ice, for a potential total (including expansion of the ocean through warming) of perhaps 25-80 feet.  Loss of at least 1/3 of presently arable land, to be replaced by Canadian, Argentinian, and Siberian land that is presently mostly tundra and permafrost, and which would likely become fly-ridden, easy-to-burn-via-methane, peat swamps.  Speed of winds in storms on average might increase by 10 mph.

But the “worst consequences” occurring if we go ahead and use more than 17% of present coal reserves, more than 50% of available oil and natural gas, and more than a small fraction of tar sands and oil shale, are far more dire.  A rise in sea level of 216-240 feet.  Possibly, iron blooms periodically releasing unbreathable sulfuric acid, making living near the new sea coasts impossible.  Loss of perhaps 90% of arable land, making it impossible to feed more than about 1 billion people on minimal rations.  Acidification of oceans that means destruction of all ocean-based food sources.  Heat that makes working outside during 6 months of the year a death sentence.  Storms in which the wind speed increases by more like 40 mph, so that the average high wind is a 110-mph hurricane, and somewhere in the world just about every year there is a 200-mph hurricane bearing down on humanity. 

So how are we doing in avoiding “worst consequences”?  Well, there are lots of encouraging superficial signs, including international agreements, preliminary data suggesting that Europe and the USA are decreasing their carbon emissions in constant terms, and so on.  The problem is that such data is partial – for example, the emissions data just tracks carbon emissions via industry-based estimates and for those sources we don’t know about.  There’s really only one holistic indicator, approximate as it is:  the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere measured at the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii.  You can find the data by googling “CO2 Mauna Loa”.

This set of measurements was started by Charles Keeling in 1950, and he picked  a spot high on Mauna Loa because it was out of the way of the kind of things that would contaminate measurements.  Interestingly, it has been joined in the last few years by a new measure based on widely dispersed global sites, which until recently had tracked 10 ppm less than Mauna Loa.  In the latest data, it is now virtually identical at at 400 ppm, suggesting that the original global sites were contaminated more than expected and biased in a downward direction.  At any rate, the new global measurements, like the old, tend to “smooth out” the more jagged spikes and dips in CO2 ppm yearly growth as measured by Mauna Loa.  So Mauna Loa is more volatile, but the two agree in both the amount and trend over periods of perhaps 5 years or so.

What is Mauna Loa saying about the last 3 years?  These years, in which the world economy is mostly flat or down – which should lead to decreased carbon emissions – and various policies have been implemented to reduced emissions, notably in Europe, are also the first years in which the CO2 growth has been above 2 for each year.  In fact, according to the global “smoothed” data, it has been above 2.4 ppm each year.  Not only are we not making progress; things are getting worse.

How can this be?  Speculation is a bit early, but what it suggests is that US efforts are counteracted by attempts to “grow domestic oil production”, and that European efforts are more than counteracted by Chinese increased coal use (despite its rhetoric).  I conclude that we must run faster to fall behind slower, and at an amazing speed just to stay in the same place.  Happy New Year.

So Long 2014, and No Thanks From All the Fish

I haven’t had the heart to put something in my blog since the elections. As Paul Krugman succinctly put it, the US elected a Congress that does not believe in climate change and will try to prevent anything being done about it.  Given the power of Congress to obstruct, that is a very bad sign for doing anything meaningful about climate change for the next few years – and that, to me, overshadows anything else that happened this year.

Still, I would like to take note of a few other things worth thinking about that happened this year.  In climate change, commentary on the issue in some print venues and some radio outlets, not to mention the cable-channel special Years of Living Dangerously, actually began to represent the facts of climate change and to treat them in a more serious manner. 

In computing, it seems to me that there was a bit of a technology-advancement slowdown this year.  Much of the impetus of the year was in things already pretty much in the works, like further exploration of hybrid clouds, wider application of IBM’s Watson, and the next generation of touch-screen smartphones and tablets.  I hope to do some searching for something, anything really new and potentially valuable come the New Year – yes, it’s a New Year’s Resolution.

If I had to give an epitaph for 2014, I would call it the year when people refused to admit that there were times when the needs of the future trump the needs of the present.  Playing games yet again with the full faith and credit of the US by holding the debt ceiling limit hostage to letting banks play games again with derivatives; cementing climate-change denial in our governance; attempts to stifle scientists in the US, Canada, and probably Australia, the so-called “free-speech democracies”; the EU shutting its ears to criticisms of austerity policies; Putin and his belief in realpolitik; Netanyahu and Israel’s onward push into what John Le Carre aptly called a “grubby little Spartan state”; the list goes on and on.

One of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker books was called So Long and Thanks for All the Fish – in which the dolphins decide they’ve had enough of suckering stupid humans into giving them free fish and leave this Earth, leaving behind that message.  I doubt very much we will get thanks from future generations of humans for 2014’s accomplishments, nor from the animals or fish who are already bearing the brunt of them, as evidenced by the accelerated rate of species extinction and the increased acidification and fertilizer pollution of the oceans.  Hence:  So long 2014, and no thanks from all the fish.

In a Barney Miller TV series episode, the Hasidim and African-Americans of Brooklyn get into a spat, and after it’s over the local rabbi drops by for a chat.  Maybe it’ll turn out to all be for the best, the rabbi says.  Maybe, says Barney, but I sincerely doubt it.  That’s good, says the rabbi:  too much hope makes you crazy.  I hope I can be more cheerful about 2015.  So far, looking ahead, I sincerely doubt it.