The Psychotic State Number 12 Aug 31, 1999 The Other World Wide Web The end of the summer finds my psychosis running a bit slower than usual. I didn't finish this issue by the date above, my self-appointed deadline, and the completion of the effort awaited Labor Day weekend. But just because I run down a bit in the sultry days at the end of summer, that doesn't mean that my psychosis is cured. In fact the heat has left my brain in a more addled state than usual, and this month's note will take me a bit farther afield than I have gone to date. We are, I think, living in the most remarkable time in human history. This decade, the infancy of the internet, will be regarded by our descendents as an unprecedented era of technological advance. My guess is that the next 10-15 years will bring social/technical changes which will dwarf those of the preceding century. What I think our great-grandchildren will find the most remarkable about the 1990s, however, is not the world wide web we are building, but way we are allowing one to be destroyed. I refer to the nearly total lack of action on the part of our society to protect the planet - the web of nature - from the changes we are making to it. There are host of ways in which we are changing the world, and I'm sure you've heard of them all already: deforestation, habitat destruction, industrial pollution, overfishing, the greenhouse effect. I wouldn't burden you with a rant on generalities, since in any case my rhetorical skills can't build a relation between what we do at AGENCY.COM and the plight of the Giant Panda. Nonetheless, there is something interesting to discuss: I want to focus a bit on the greenhouse effect and our role in it. I first heard about the greenhouse effect when I was in physics grad school in the late 1980s. The idea wasn't new then, but it had regained currency and was being looked at anew by earth scientists. Since then there has been a near total scientific consensus that the greenhouse effect is real, and that it will have measurable effects on the earth in our lifetimes. Let me briefly remind you what the greenhouse effect is. The earth has the temperature it does because every day it is warmed by the sun, and at night it radiates the heat out into space. The surface temperature of the sun is about 6000 degrees fahrenheit, and the rest of space is at about 4.9 degrees F above absolute zero. (Absolute zero is the coldest possible temperature, or about -460 degrees F.) The earth receives radiation from the sun characteristic of a hot body at 6000 degrees, which is white hot. The greatest amount of energy the earth gets is in the range of visible light. (It's not unexpected that our eyes are most sensitive to what's around!) The earth itself is not nearly so hot - we're at about 60 degrees F - and so the radiation we send out into space is characteristic of a much cooler temperature. Virtually none of it is visible - that is to say it's dark at night. The radiation the earth sends back out is strongest in the infrared, frequencies of radiation below those our eyes can see. The greenhouse effect comes about because humanity is changing the composition of the atmosphere: We are adding gasses that are transparent to sunlight, so that all the suns energy gets in to warm the earth, but opaque in the infrared, so that the earth's radiation can't get out to space. This will warm the planet. The most troublesome greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide, or CO2. CO2 is not the most potent greenhouse gas, but is the one that will be the hardest to stop emitting. Most of the CO2 we are adding to the atmosphere comes from our habit of digging up fossil fuels and burning them. Different kinds of fuels have differing amounts of carbon in them per unit of energy generated (with coal having the most, natural gas the least), but until we live in a society in which our energy is generated without burning fuel - for example, by solar, hydro, or nuclear power - using energy inevitably means adding to the CO2 in the atmosphere. I said that there was a near total scientific consensus that the greenhouse effect will cause the earth to warm in coming decades. Yes, there are a few scientifically qualified people who still argue with the conclusions, and they get quite a lot of play in the media. That's largely because there is a lot of desire on our part pretend that there is no problem, and that no action is needed. This viewpoint is especially prevalent on the political right. I don't really understand how someone can believe that raising taxes by 1% will have dire consequences for the future of humanity, but that doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is of no major import, but indeed it appears there are people who think this way. You can find them if you read the editorials of the Wall Street Journal, or the ads that Mobil takes in the New York Times op-ed page. Let me tell you why I believe that the greenhouse effect is real. These are the reasons I find convincing, in decreasing order of persuasiveness. *) The argument above is pretty darn simple. It can be understood in detail by anyone with a bachelors degree in physics. The data is there to back it up: it is now known that during the last 100 years or so the CO2 in the atmosphere has gone from about 250 parts per million (PPM) to about 330. How do we know that? Just open a jar that's been closed for about a century or so and see what's in the air inside. In fact, recently scientists have measured the CO2 content in the atmosphere for the last half million years - using samples from ice cores in antarctica - and they found that the CO2 level now is higher than it has ever been. If the CO2 in the atmosphere is going up, I would expect the temperature to rise. *) The physics of weather is extremely complex, and to make a real calculation of what the temperature is requires tricky scientific models calculated on massive supercomputers. Even then the predictions are iffy - you have to understand niceities such as how clouds are formed and how how ocean currents work. Doing the best job we can today, scientists who make the calculations predict that during the next century, the surface temperature of the earth will rise by somewhere between 2 and 10 degrees fahrenheit as the CO2 level rises to twice the preindustrial level. The upshot is this: the complex physical models make the same prediction as the back-of-the-envelope argument given above. *) It really does appear that the weather is warmer than it used to be. This is the least persuasive argument, because the weather really is complicated. But still, it seems to be happening and we all feel it. I do find it significant that the amount of the apparent rise is just about what the models predict it should have been by now. In sum, those who are publicly casting doubt on the existence of the greenhouse effect, those who say we need to study it more before doing anything, have about the same level of credibility with me as the scientists at The Tobacco Institute who used to say that there was no proof that cigarette smoking causes cancer. So far, this is just the sort of detached rant I promised you I wouldn't indulge in. Please read on, I promise there is a connection to our lives. What has surprised me about the last twelve years or so is how little things have changed. We really don't have a huge amount of time to do something about all of this - a few decades really - and we've spent the last one doing nothing. This despite all the best words from our political leadership. The cars we drive are more gas guzzling than they were at the beginning of the decade, and the homes we build are no more energy efficient. Humanity has to cut our CO2 emissions by about a factor of three (!) by the middle of the next century even to stabilize the situation. Let's ask what fraction of the energy we use at AGENCY.COM is really necessary. My guess is that most of our energy consumption is from a few different things: *) Computers and Monitors *) Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning *) Lighting *) Travel I don't really have a good sense of how much energy is used in each of these three, but one thing is pretty clear: quite a lot of it is wasted. Take the computers and monitors. Most of them are on all the time, whether or not there's someone sitting there. Let's be generous: we're all hard workers, we always put in 70 hour weeks. (Right.) But there are 168 hours in the week, so we're only at our desks 42% of the time. But I hear you object, the screensaver is on when I'm away. In fact, each of our computers and monitors uses about 80 Watts when its on. If yours is a powersaving monitor (which it seems only about 1/2 of AGENCY.COM's are) it goes down to about 10 Watts when it's in power saving mode. Otherwise, the screensaver doesn't reduce energy consumption at all. The computer itself just sits there using power full tilt. So probably at least half of the energy used by our computers and monitors is wasted. (BTW, by comparison, a human being uses something like 100 Watts, so a computer and monitor emits more heat than you do.) Our lighting situation is just as bad. We have incandescent lights most places, which use about 4 times as much energy as compact fluorescents would use. To top it off, they're frequently left on all night - and all weekend. I can only guess that our HVAC situation is a total disaster. It is, of course, not under AGENCY.COM's control. It seems that the building owners invest very little in infrastructure in general, so I can only guess that the situation is grim. Why does the building have to run the AC when it's 40 degrees outside? In fact, why does the building run the AC absolutely full tilt even on nights and weekends, when no one is around? (A popular misconception is that most of the CO2 emission comes from vehicles. This is false: most energy is used in buildings.) In sum, there's a lot we could be doing in all of our lives, and at AGENCY.COM, to help solve this very serious issue. There's no reason ever to leave an incandescent light on when it's not being used - leaving it on just burns it out. With other devices the situation is somewhat more complex - for example, fluorescent lights should be turned off only if they are not going to be needed for about 2 hours, because turning them on and off damages them. Turning off your monitor when you leave for the night is definitely a good idea, and I've been told that turning off the computer itself is also fine. (We only expect our computers to last 2 1/2 years anyway!) The main thing, of course, is just to become aware of what you're doing, and what its effects are. Now really is the time to pull our heads from the sand and take action.