Diplomatic FIreworks at Bali Climate Change Conference
Ronald Bailey | December 14, 2007, 8:57pm
U.S. Prevails in Climate Talks (at least initially)
The U.S. appeared to have gotten pretty much what it wanted from the negotiatons when the U.N. Climate Change Conference plenary session resumed here in Bali at around 8 am on Saturday morning. Specifically, there is no mention in the text about cutting greenhouse gases (GHG) by between 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 as the Europeans and the developing nations wanted. Instead the preamble reads:
Recognizing that deep cuts in global emissions will be required to achieve the ultimate objective of the Convention and emphasizing the urgency to address climate change as indicated in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
There is a footnote after the word urgency which refers the reader to specific pages of the report by the IPCC Working Group III of the Fourth Assessment Report. (if you're interested see pages 39, 90, and 776.) One finds on those pages emissions reductions scenarios and their projected effects of future temperature increases. By putting it in a footnote, the U.S. hopes to avoid having the reductions transmogrify in subsequent negotiations into firm targets.
It also initially appeared that the U.S. had succeeded in getting language into the text implying that developing countries should also undertake GHG emissions cuts. To wit:
Enhanced national and international action on mitigation of climate change, including, inter alia, consideration of:...
Measurable, reportable and verifiable nationally appropriate mitigation actions by developing country Parties in the context of sustainable development, supported by technology and enabled by financing and capacity-building.
However, when the text was presented in the Plenary session, the representative from India stood up to object saying that his country would prefer a text that read:
...Nationally appropriate mitigation actions by developing country Parties in the context of sustainable development, supported by technology and enabled by financing and capacity-building in a measurable, auditable, and verifiable manner.
Note the difference--instead of putting the burden on developing countries to commit to emissions cuts, the new version puts the burden on developed countries to commit to supplying climate change technologies and financing to developing countries--and they don't mean by markets and trade. At that point the Plenary was suspended for further negotiations.
Diplomatic Tiff
An hour and half later, the president of the Conference, Rachmat Witoelar, tried to begin the meeting. The Chinese, Indian ,and Pakistani delegations objected that negotiations were still going on outside the hall. The Chinese delegate angrily asked, "Whose COP is is this?" and demanded an apology from the president for starting the meeting. The implication was that it is being hijacked by the rich countries.
President Witoelar then suspended the meeting again. We're all waiting to see what happens next. I must leave the Convention Hall in half an hour, so I may not get to report live on the diplomatic endgame.
robc | December 15, 2007, 5:19pm | #
I didnt click on the link above leading to all the laser talk but I was about to post a comment wrt liberal arts/math/science.
I went to an engineering school that was still on the quarter system (so convert if you wish) (they changed to semesters in mid 90s).
As an engineering major I had to take 18 hours of humanities and 18 hours of social sciences, so 12 classes in what I would call "liberal arts". I guess there is some question whether the 2 econ classes count, but call it 10 classes instead if you dont want them to count.
I think I took:
4 english classes
2 linguistic classes
2 econ
1 history
1 political science
1 philosophy
1 something else that I dont remember 16 years later. I took a Psych class, I wonder if that counted as a social science?
Anyway, my point is, how many liberal arts schools require the equivalent in math and science? 18 hours in math, 18 in science. Oh, and any math before calculus doesnt count, if you are a university student you should have got up to pre-cal in high school.
I guess that would be 4 classes in each on a semester based system.
A system like:
2 calculus classes, a management math class, a stats class +
2 one year 2 class sequences from physics/chemistry/biology
No physics for poets either, the calculus based physics, since you will have the math background anyway.
I can respect any liberal arts program that requires something like that.
thoreau | December 15, 2007, 5:24pm | #
When I see pictures showing a laser beam visible in the air, I assume the picture was edited to look cool.
Over the years, I've become less and less upset about pictures of laser beams being edited to look cool. It's just not worth getting pissed off over. I've even seen them in optics catalogs, things written by and for people who know better. Yet they put those pictures in anyway, because they look cool. And that's good enough.
On liberal arts: In college I didn't like most of the non-science stuff, except economics, which I minored in because I like math.
Then I taught freshman science classes for people who hadn't taken too many liberal arts classes yet, and I asked them to write papers.
Grading those poorly written papers was when I figured out why liberal arts classes are important.
Now I'm a faculty member, and I find that I have more in common with non-science faculty than I had in common with non-science students in college. We all seem to want the same things for our students, and we complain about the same things. To be honest, having done a lot of physics in different fields, I really don't give a shit whether students master any particular topic in physics. Rather, I care about the analytical abilities that they cultivate. I've done too many things and seen too many areas of research and applications to really believe that any particular topic is TEH MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE CURRICULUM! It's all about the skills that you acquire.
And looking back on my econ classes, I find that I value the skills that I acquired in those classes. If you were to ask me to go back and relate the cost curves to the supply and demand curves, or whatever it was that we did in Econ 101 (there's a lot more to it than just remembering the laws of supply and demand) I doubt I could get it right without a lot of effort. But I feel that spending all that time analyzing social phenomena with graphs and numbers made me smarter in a way that's hard to pin down. In fact, I think it was good to practice those quantitative skills in a non-physics context, because it made me able to distinguish general skills from specific contexts.
So I'm no longer so harsh on liberal arts. I think it's good for students to take classes with heavy reading and writing assignments. We don't give them much of that in physics and math (and, to be fair, it's harder to give them that, because we have so many other things we're trying to do). But they need it.
So, yeah, I'm kind of mellow on the whole thing now.
thoreau | December 15, 2007, 5:32pm | #
Oh, yeah:
Having defended liberal arts, let me also say that I nonetheless hate liberal arts snobs. There is a subset that looks down on scientists as uncouth and uncultured technicians. Not a lot, and I don't feel persecuted, but I find them from time to time. Science is just as much a part of mankind's intellectual heritage as literature or history.
Regarding GE science for liberal arts majors: I go back and forth on the purpose of GE science classes. That's actually a long conversation to have, because there are multiple goals that you could have for such a class, and it's probably good to have different classes focusing on different goals. I will say, however, that "They should take the hard stuff because that's what we have to take" is the shittiest reason to make somebody take a class. Figure out what you want them to learn and why you want them to learn it, and then design a class around that, not some sort of "Dammit, I had to suffer through calculus-based physics, so should you!" revenge fantasy.
I'm actually in the process of designing some GE science classes, and once you start asking what it is that you want them to learn, the whole thing becomes quite complicated. I don't have any easy answers there. The best I can say is that you should take more than one class from instructors with different goals, because it's not as simple as having only one goal that matters.
Besides, if you want to whine about your calculus-based physics class, let me be honest about something: I still go back and forth on what the real purpose of intro physics is. It may seem obvious, because this stuff is foundational, right? So it's the stuff that you just need to know to do anything else, right? Yes, it is, but there's still a lot of stuff there, and you can't emphasize all of it in the quarter, semester, year, or whatever the duration is. You have to pick what to emphasize, and once you look at it from the instructor's side of the classroom you'll see that there's a whole lot there and it isn't at all obvious what is most important. So, once again, I come down on the side of diversity: I'll pick one aspect of the subject and emphasize it, and pray that whoever my students take the class from next quarter emphasizes something different. That's all we can hope for.
VM | December 15, 2007, 6:24pm | #
"Having defended liberal arts, let me also say that I nonetheless hate liberal arts snobs"
QFT, but this citizen would like to amend it to "humanities snobs".
Those types he and I are thinking about (but with different tags, reflecting our different experiences) are just as anti learning, anti intellect as the LA haters.
and there's also the complication of public vs private schools. Williams, Amherst, Carlton, etc are private, so you could argue there is a different focus (where education might be viewed as a consumption and investment good) from the public ones (where you could argue that education on the public good should tend to pure investment good)...
But one thing about libertarianism or libertarians who are skeptics - learning, being able to learn, wanting to learn, and challenging your beliefs should be at the core. Those are intellectual pursuits.
The philosophy of individualism or libertarianism is intellectual and requires thinking, learning, reading, studying, and reflecting.
The economics of many libertarians, the Austrian school, is a school that doesn't rely on formal methods, but on interpretation and abductive reasoning - liberal arts-based processes. Certainly not the überformality of engineering. (or the oftentimes übermathed graduate Economics, for that matter)
Nothing about libertarianism is a proscribed, algorithmic approach that is basically programmed learning - it's dynamic, requiring computational, applied, conceptual, and theoretical (transferable) processes.
Many non liberal arts students would recognize those skill sets, but so would most liberal arts' students, too.
Guy Montag | December 16, 2007, 2:51am | #
Cesar,
Back to my comment to Jacob that, somehow, brought out such a defensive reaction from you.
"Our consumption must be restrained until English graduate students are the most productive members of our society."
It was not a comment on people who get LA degrees and then go out into the world and contribute great things, even though they posess said degrees. It was a comment on those who become English graduate (or other) students as an apparent substitute for a profession.
The ones who lounge around the Student Union, spouting all of this class struggle nonsense, while producing nothing but poetry that nobody but an instructor reads, while pontificating to all that the reason they have to shop at the food bank is because [insert productive business person here] has "all of the money".
Folks like
the forest raping orchid thief who know how to fix the election system, by making sure the only people who can vote are those who he approves of.
Like the topic at hand, with a bunch of Al Gore worshipers running about with their latest scheme to force the producers to fund the whining classes, that is the context of my comment.
In short, it is a comment about those who want a free ride just because they have proclaimed their own narrow little sliver of study to be superior to all others, therefore no others should be no more well compensated than them.
One thing I can be glad, entertained by, and sure of is your knee-jerk reaction to anything in the humanaties discipline, no matter how out of context that reaction might be.
I look forward to your spelling, grammar and other corrections to this post.
dhex | December 16, 2007, 3:28pm | #
thoreau: i can totally understand hating on the obnoxious types who seem to derive pleasure from inane misreadings of the dust jacket of the structure of scientific revolutions (probably the most quoted yet least read book next to the bible) in a weird attempt to play "my discipline's dick is bigger than yours." which is fairly fucktarded so far as things go but - as cultural anthropology shows us, lol - completely expected in any human clash over prestige and university resources.
now, i've never met any "math is imaginary" (keep the fucking imaginary numbers jokes at bay for just a minute, gentlemen) people in person, though i've read an essay or two that plays along those lines, and they were indeed painfully, agonizingly stupid. (we can measure stupidity in terms of steyns, so i'd put them at 4 steyns on a 5 steyn scale, one steyn being equal to 2 montblogs or 44 chalupas)
but actual humans who spout that stuff are far less common, i think. it's unfortunately like any office environment where you have to at least pay some lip service to the full-blown hallucinations of upper management lest ye find yourself in the cold and dark regions of shitsville.
now, i have a sinking suspicion (aka i know i'm dead right, but am employing false modesty for the sake of rhetorical entertainment) that were the bias rightist instead of leftist, h+r would not have READING IS FOR FAGS threads but instead would suffer an invasion of READING IS FOR IMPERIALIST FAGS by leftist.
The Mktg Division manager with BA in LA (humanities) and an MBA sends it back!!
too many long words without hypens make value-added MBA brain hurt bad. BAD HURT! BAD WORDS! BAD!
The ones who lounge around the Student Union, spouting all of this class struggle nonsense
you forgot the blowjob surplus, which i believe to be the root of all class struggle, as seen in the severe class envy displayed in this thread.
NERDS OF THE WORLD, LEARN HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS
YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT MONEY SPENT ON SOAP
also guy has a blog.
