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What is causing the fires in Australia?


What is causing the fires in Australia?  

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  1. 1. What is causing the fires in Australia?

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Lessons from Australia’s Bushfires: We Need More Science, Less Rhetoric

Over the last two weeks, the Royal Australian Navy has been evacuating thousands of residents fleeing uncontrollable bushfires in the south-eastern part of my country. Amid scenes of desperate Australians being rescued from beaches, national-security writer Craig Hooper has called the operation a “mini-Dunkirk.”

At least 24 lives have been lost, and many others are missing. Hundreds of homes and businesses have been incinerated, as have more than 60,000 square kilometres of bushland. The Premier of my home state of New South Wales, the region that’s been worst affected, describes the crisis as “uncharted territory,” with some towns at risk of being completely wiped out. Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who took a brief holiday at the start of the crisis, has been accused of poor leadership. And critics have taken the opportunity to demand that Australia’s climate policy be immediately overhauled to reflect this national disaster.

But what exactly is causing this year’s extreme fire season? Climate change? Arson? Drought? In fact, it’s all of the above.

In 2019, short-term weather fluctuations in the Indian Ocean—the Indian Ocean Dipole, as scientists call it—pushed moist ocean air away from Australia’s shores, causing a severe drought, and drying out the leaves, sticks and soil on the bush floor.

This has come in tandem with unusually strong and sustained winds associated with a separate phenomenon known as the Antarctic Oscillation, which have pushed fires in all directions, turning isolated local crises into regional disasters. And of course all of this comes amid a steady increase in average temperatures across Australia, a phenomenon that climate scientists have warned us about for decades. They also have correctly predicted that long-term climate-change trends will increasingly interact disastrously with short-term climate phenomena in a way that catalyses and exacerbates extreme weather events.

Unfortunately, successive Australian governments have failed to adequately heed these warnings. A more aggressive use of controlled burns might have given firefighters a chance to control this season’s bushfires. But, as has been the case in other nations, climate policy in Australia has been mired in partisan politics, with both sides using the issue to score points instead of implementing sensible and pragmatic policies.

Conservatives in Australia, under the leadership of former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, have rejected warnings about long-term climate trends. The Greens, on the other hand, err in the other direction, inventing direct causal relationships between individual politicians and unusual weather events, implying that short-term weather trends can be manipulated by national governments. Both approaches are wrong.

As recent events show, variations in the aforementioned Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) can make Australian weather patterns inherently volatile, especially since the drying effects of a positive IOD phase often coincide with El Niño events in the Southern Pacific, which weaken (or reverse) the trade winds that bring rain to Australia from the east. (Indeed, an El Niño did arise in 2018-19, though its effects ended in late summer.) When the Black Saturday bushfires occurred in 2009, killing 173 Australians, the IOD was in a positive phase, as it is now. The same was true of the Ash Wednesday bushfires in 1982, which killed 75.

Although climate change affects the entire planet, the sudden stratospheric warming taking place above Antarctica has a particularly acute effect on Australia. The phenomenon, identified and named by Melbourne Bureau of Meteorology scientist Eun-Pa Lim, has caused an astounding 40-degree spike in localised upper-atmosphere temperatures. Lim predicted that this would exacerbate the spread of hot, dry winds across eastern Australia. And she was right.

Since at least the 1990s, researchers at Australia’s preeminent science organisation, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), have warned that fire frequency would increase thanks to global warming. In 2005, a CSIRO research team published a report entitled Climate Change Impacts on Fire-Weather in South-East Australia, which concluded that “the combined frequencies of days with very high and extreme Forest Fire Danger Index ratings are likely to increase 4-25% by 2020 and 15-70% by 2050.” We can’t say we weren’t warned.
https://quillette.com/2020/01/08/lessons-from-australias-bushfires-we-need-more-science-less-rhetoric/

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Talking about science, the following article serves as a warning to anyone who thinks all science is gospel, or even useful. This has full relevance to climate research. It’s long but it’s definitely worth the effort to read it through.......

 

 

How to Tackle the Unfolding Research Crisis

Scholarly research is in crisis, and four issues highlight its dimensions. The first is that important disciplines such as physics, economics, psychology, medicine, and geology are unable to explain over 90 percent of what we see: dark matter dominates their theoretical understanding. In cosmology, 95 percent of the night sky is made up of dark matter and dark energy which are undetectable and inexplicable. Some 90 percent of human decisions are made autonomously by our sub-conscious, and even conscious decisions often emerge from a black box and have little support. The causes and natural history of important illnesses—including heart disease, cancer, obesity, and mental illness—are largely unknown for individuals.

The second dimension of the research crisis is that systems which are critical to humankind—especially climate, demography, asset prices, and natural disasters—are minimally predictable. The best example of misguided theory can be seen in the conduct of organisations. Although a high proportion of their executives have formal training in management, its inadequacy is continuously evidenced by failures as serious as bankruptcies of globally significant firms (such as Enron, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Parmalat) and global recessions (including as recently as 2000 and 2008). Perhaps the best evidence of management theories’ poor value is an analysis rhetorically entitled “Is the US Public Corporation in Trouble?” which showed that profitability of firms fell significantly in the 40 years to 2015. This brings the important corollary that modern management and finance theory have been associated with declining economic performance.

The third dimension is a chronic inability to reproduce research findings. This replication crisis was highlighted by an online survey by Nature in 2016, in which over 70 percent of researchers reported that they had tried and failed to reproduce other researchers’ published findings. More specifically, scientists at biotechnology firm Amgen reported in 2012 that they could only confirm the results of six of 53 (11 percent) landmark cancer studies published in high impact journals. Another indication of the dubious benefits of research is its inability to ensure the integrity of findings. Doubts over quality are serious enough to be expressed in papers along the lines of that by medical researcher John Ioannidis entitled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” The variety of deceit is made clear at retractionwatch.com, and its extent is consistent with reports of endemic misconduct amongst researchers.

The final indicator of crisis in research is that progress in developing better theory and forecasting capability has stagnated since the 1960s. A paper by Stanford and MIT economists asked “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” and concluded that—although the number of researchers is growing exponentially—they are becoming less productive in terms of ideas generated, and sustaining research productivity requires ever greater expenditure. For example, yields of agricultural crops have roughly doubled since the 1960s, but this required research expenditure to increase by a factor of up to six.

Symptoms of incomplete theory were made clear by the 2017 BBC radio program: “Is the Knowledge Factory Broken?” which raised awkward questions about the poor return on vast sums being given to universities and other research institutions. It argued that something has gone fundamentally wrong because most published research cannot be repeated and thus is questionable, which means that science is not being done properly.

There are two bleak implications of this chronic failure of expertise. The first arises from the fact that risks in life are related to a lack of knowledge about the future: uncertainty leaves us unable to eliminate or avoid unwanted events and so we face a future that is axiomatically risky. This leads to the second implication of weak research which is that evidence-based policy and investment are chimera. Taxpayers and investors have the reasonable expectation that public policy and corporate strategy will be founded on accurate predictions so that financial, intellectual, and other resources secure a positive outcome. Weak research, though, means that actions are based on flawed beliefs, and are literally gambles. Every time knowledge gaps lead to social policies and corporate strategies that are based on unsupportable premises it brings a human cost. There is also a huge opportunity cost in the $1 trillion which governments provide to research councils each year, with ten times more in academics’ salaries.

What has caused the crisis in research? The most obvious reason is that systems and phenomena which are important to us—such as climate, markets, disease, institutions, and so on—are complex and dynamic. Complex because they comprise multiple systems: the performance of institutions as diverse as churches and corporations, for instance, depends on their governance and leadership, internal culture and mores in their sector, the tasks they face and the resources available. Dynamic because they face feedbacks from outcomes, and so important data about their future are not yet available. When the question of time is incorporated into such systems they become inherently hard to explain, and impractical to predict accurately. Researching them is difficult.

In addition to research’s inherent difficulties, its performance has been hampered by the sector’s poor structure and conduct. Most obviously, it can rely on government funds and is self-regulated by academic elites which has never worked for any endeavour. Research is also conducted in isolation from the real world, which means there is no external scrutiny of choice of topics and labour practices, and it never faces the competition or scrutiny that continuously improves other important tasks. This gives research weak economics such as the absence of a market and of independent measures of value added. Siloing of research and specialist theories within disciplines establish an intellectual echo chamber for insiders; and an opaque Tower of Babel for research outsiders. Inappropriate structure of the sector has allowed poor research to survive, often even to thrive.

Without regular real-world validation, research has become insular and focussed on normal science that is intended to buttress existing paradigms. That is, it takes existing intellectual frameworks or theories as truth and either fills in gaps or develops innovative strategies to confirm what is known. The result is intellectual stagnation which has two consequences. One is a marked slowdown in the rate of knowledge accumulation. An excellent example is provided by American Economic Review, which is its discipline’s premier journal. AER celebrated its centenary in 2011 by commissioning a distinguished panel of researchers to choose the top 20 most “admirable and important articles” that the journal had published. This presumably would list economics’ most innovative and influential thinking. So it is staggering that the most recent of these articles dates to 1981: the leading economists of our day think it is almost 30 years since the pre-eminent AER published an important idea!

It is hard to believe that a discipline which pretends to any credibility has not seen a thinking breakthrough published in its leading journal in three decades. A similar perspective, though, emerges from an article in Nature Ecology & Evolution which lists 100 seminal papers that comprise “a general must-read list for any new ecologist … to achieve satisfactory ecological literacy.” Only two date to this decade, and 27 to either the 2000s and 1990s: almost three quarters were published before 1990. The cognitive slowing of economics and ecology is matched by other disciplines where researchers show little curiosity about new theories, almost as if all questions have long since been answered and everything can now be interpreted through a Beatles-era prism.

Intellectual stagnation is facilitated by researchers’ studied refusal to investigate puzzling observations. Few are taught ontology and epistemology, or receive training in research techniques other than discipline staples: researchers rarely give much thought to their strategy, almost as if truth will emerge automatically. Thus, most fields treat shocks and crises as irrelevancies to be stepped around rather than learning opportunities. For instance, in March 2010, University of California economics professor Barry Eichengreen wrote in the National Interest that “the great credit crisis has cast doubt over much of what we thought we knew about economics.” This global market and economic catastrophe reverberated for years after 2007, but economics and finance theories saw zero change. Lack of researchers’ curiosity is abetted by perverse incentives that are based around the volume of publications in top journals and give no indication of research’s repeatability or accuracy, much less its real world significance. Researchers driving for volume publish rapidly, so the knowledge factory turns out noise that wastes resources and talent.

Why is weak research so seldom remarked upon? It seems that the staggering achievements of entrepreneurial engineers and scientists in commercialising new communications, transport, and other technologies during recent decades has distracted attention from poor research. Unproductive academic researchers were gifted a free ride.

The poor and worsening position of research is not self-correcting, and the sector needs to be redirected towards the solution of real world problems and developing an effective predictive capability. Energising research is best achieved through economic levers, and two are available because of the sector’s concentrated cashflows. Most researchers depend on funding from research bodies such as the Australian Research Council or through university salaries. Funders should develop a detailed code of research practice; and—without affecting researchers’ independence—prioritise research that solves puzzles in paradigms and enables forecasts of important phenomena. This would be best achieved by linking a significant portion of grants and incentives to paybacks from improving real world understanding and predictability.

A second economic lever is held by universities because scientific publications are researchers’ main communications channel, and publishers derive their income through subscriptions, or on a pay-to-play basis where authors meet publication charges. In both cases, universities provide most of the money, which should enable them to impose requirements on the content and editorial practices of journals while respecting the integrity of academics and journal editors.

In particular, universities should restrict funding to publishers with robust integrity programs, and preference journals which promote research quality. Publishers should centralise integrity checks of all submissions and send quality papers for review by qualified peers chosen at random. Journals should require self-replication of research so that innovative findings are confirmed in a totally independent setting. They should also adopt a multidisciplinary perspective, and encourage review articles which critically evaluate the prevailing paradigm with summaries including strengths and weaknesses and provide informed commentary on developments in research and its strategy.

There are further strategies available to universities to enhance research. One is to catalyse a holistic inter-disciplinary approach. Groups of complementary universities could develop an online platform where researchers could register their interests. This would reduce search costs for innovative researchers seeking like minds and promote formation of multi-disciplinary teams to focus on critical puzzles. A second strategy is to promote a groundswell in heterodox research by putting resources behind suitable journals, encouraging international conferences and incentivising researchers.

In these ways, we can begin to tackle the crisis in research and promote change in the way it is conducted by setting out practical and realistic solutions to obvious shortcomings. The goal must be to realign research priorities and incentives to avoid opportunity costs of weak research, and raise quality expectations to accelerate development of better theory that delivers real-world solutions of value to stakeholders. Failure to make research more productive will become increasingly important as the scale and complexity of societies grow—if we lack the foresight to respond, unmanaged risks will become ever more serious.
https://quillette.com/2019/12/14/how-to-tackle-the-unfolding-research-crisis/

Edited by Bill
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