Thursday, October 22, 2015

MIT and Climate Change

MIT announced its "Plan" to deal with Climate Change. To that end they announced:

...MIT has developed a five-year plan to enhance its efforts in five areas of climate action, whose elements have consensus support within the MIT community:
  • research to further understand climate change and advance solutions to mitigate and adapt to it;
  • the acceleration of low-carbon energy technology via eight new research centers;
  • the development of enhanced educational programs on climate change;
  • new tools to share climate information globally; and
  • measures to reduce carbon use on the MIT campus.
The process is laudable but as one commentator noted:

You missed Step One...convince the skeptics of the validity of your conclusions. The non-believers are not bad people, they just do not understand the basis for your conclusions. To some the names of scientists and MIT itself are not convincing enough to get them to commit. They see MIT getting years of funding as self serving and therefore mistrust the conclusions.

Indeed the steps seems a bit self serving. MIT is already and has been at it for years examining alternative, ie non carbon based, energy, understanding the mechanisms behind various pollutants and carbon off shoots, as well as large scale networks and the like. Thus one wonders what is new here other than more overhead and possibly less research.

The comment indicating that the non-believers are not "bad people"  is quite valid and unlike those who attack anyone who thinks differently tends to use logic and facts and not vitriolic methods to communicate.

Unlike some who look at their political opposition as the "enemy" one must look at them as groups with whom they would engage in discussion.