I've argued in many previous posts against narrow views. This is one of the chief defects of the environmental movement, dating from decades ago when planning and systems thinking were touted as answers to various social ills. The inability to get useful and timely information to drive the simplistic models of the planners doomed the approach to failure, but that's not the only defect. In all cases the projects weren't even remotely plausible unless the systems described were narrowly bounded cartoon versions of reality. You can sell something like that to the gullible, but it can't possibly work.

Advocates began with some vision, some fantasy about a simplified world that they found compelling, and worked back from that vision, discarding any contrary information and unknowable aspects, to construct their models. After decades of futility and defeat most have abandoned the idea of being able to usefully model these systems, no matter how powerful their computers have become, and now just advocate the visions, as if they were proselytizing a belief system ungrounded in any reality. They construct scenarios, just so stories that use the same simplified and fragmentary descriptions of systems to support their visions, but have dropped any pretense of being able to predict or control them. You have to believe to see.

Slowly, ever so slowly, some of those visions have begun to expand. It is no longer possible to pretend that people and their societies can be excluded from any credible system description. We now hear of socio-ecology rather than simply ecology. People are an unexcludable part of ecologies. The distinctions have blurred in both directions as sociologists and economists now pay more attention to ecosystems.

But there's still a long way to go, a lot of mind and model expansion needed before the visions of advocates make any sense. Nowhere is this more evident than in the efforts of climate change advocates to impose social and economic controls on the whole world. Their scenarios are preposterous, their policy proposals worse than ineffective. They may be able to sell them to the gullible, but they can't possibly work.

Here too there is a dim glimmer of realization.

Human progress, Loren Eiseley wrote in 1954, has largely been a climb up “the heat ladder” from one energy source to the next. Each has been more convenient or potent or economical than the last. No one lugs firewood to warm a high-rise apartment building in Chicago.

But the climb has stalled. The potential of the atom has been sharply limited by safety and security questions and fusion’s persistent hurdles. Sunlight, identified as far back as Thomas Edison’s time as the ultimate energy source, is still costly to transform into electricity on a large scale.

As a result, 21st-century civilization is still stuck on a 19th-century rung — the coal step on that heat ladder — while two billion people in Africa and other struggling regions still cook meals on smoldering dung and sticks, with a million-plus dying young each year from lung ailments as a result. Many in such places would love nothing more than a lump of coal.

It's dim, but there is a small spark of comprehension. Nuclear energy wasn't limited by "questions", it was limited by the activism of the same people who are now crying doom about climate change. The questions are trivial, but that was enough for activists who didn't actually want to see humanity climb further up Eiseley's heat ladder. They still don't.

The huge projected expansion in coal burning over the next few decades, mainly in China and India but also in the United States and parts of Europe, will (without new technology) produce a buildup of long-lived carbon dioxide sufficient to warm the atmosphere, erode ice sheets and raise and acidify seas for many centuries. . .

It’s no wonder that scientists immersed for decades in this problem are running out of metaphors in pressing the public to act — whether the choice is a surge of research on nonpolluting energy technologies, a rising “tipping fee” for continued greenhouse-gas emissions, or a combination of these and other steps.

James E. Hansen, the top NASA climate scientist, has been lauded and criticized in recent days for accusing society of willfully ignoring a tragedy unfolding in plain sight in the same way millions of people did as the Holocaust swept Europe. As I noted last week in a post to the blog Dot Earth, he likened coal trains that serve high-emitting power plants to “death trains.” In response, Dr. Hansen distributed an essay apologizing for, and justifying, his language and calling for better ideas.

This is so, so confused. Nothing can be accomplished by "pressing the public to act". Climbing the heat ladder isn't a political problem. You may have a right to demand it, but no one can grant it. Your demands, tantrums really, at best make things more unpleasant, and usually interfere with the development of solutions, just as the anti-nuclear zealots have done. If Hansen can liken coal trains to Holocaust death trains, then what must his metaphors be for those who have impeded progress and kept us mired in coal? I suspect that they get a pass, because he is a fundamentally unserious opportunist engaged primarily in career management and doesn't really give a fig about climate change. It's a tool to accomplish his socio-economic purposes.

This is the same flaw as the one that afflicted the old environmentalists. None of them actually engaged with their subjects enough to grasp what they were or how they functioned. They have in mind crude cartoon versions of reality and imagine that they can just pencil in their changes and things will work out, somehow. It's a disease that reached epidemic proportions last century. It afflicted economists and sociologists too. They all had grand schemes based on cartoon versions of reality, and caused much misery with them.

Things are coming unraveled. Some now openly admit that the main reason they need to extend and expand unworkable policies such as Kyoto is the economic harm that would befall those currently mired in its convoluted mechanisms, such as carbon trading schemes. If Kyoto is not extended then the value of carbon credits will evaporate. These schemes do nothing about climate change, they are just money hustles, war by other means.

We need to keep climbing the energy ladder. We need it to support a still growing population and their development. Whether the climate is changing or not is irrelevant. We need to do this. The consequences of failure to continue to make progress are as bad or worse than all the scare scenarios dreamed up by various activists in the past. When they enlarge their view to include the whole system and its dynamics over time their current narrow worries pale to insignificance. The climate issue cannot be solved independent of all the other issues. Crippling society to achieve some narrow objective on climate just makes things worse. You have to do everything at once, as best you can.