Techonomy

And Now For a Little Pessimism

The Reinventing Media session at Techonomy this morning had a somewhat different tone than many of the others here: It was tinged with sadness. There is a lot of hurt in the media world today, a lot of pain. And…the Internet did it.

The traditional print media industry has been decimated by the growth of the web, which has undermined the business models of newspapers and magazines. And this is surely no unmitigated good, despite the massive amounts of information now freely available—because it means that despite the many advantages of online content, quality and professionalism often suffer.

As Scientific American VP and Publisher Bruce Brandfon put it at today's session, “Information wants to be free, but it needs to be very expensive.” Otherwise, the best reporting, the best analyses, the journalistic endeavors that maintain the highest standards, may not be able to compete with less valuable but more sensationalized content. Information, Brandfon continued, “needs curators.” You can’t make it a full democracy, or you run the risk of being overwhelmed with misinformation and lowest-common-denominator fare.

Geoengineering: The Most Important Technology Nobody’s Heard Of

 In a breakout session here at Techonomy, David Keith of the University of Calgary and Margaret Leinen of the Climate Response Fund led a discussion of the prospect of geoengineering the climate—in other words, engaging in some type of deliberate intervention to alter the planet and thereby counteract global warming.

The reason scientists and policymakers are increasingly thinking about geoengineering is clear: Major climate change now looks increasingly unstoppable. As Leinen put it, even if the proposals on the table at Copenhagen had been adopted, we’d still end the century with an atmospheric carbon dioxide of 700 parts per million--more than enough to cause climate upheaval, raise seas dramatically, and so forth. 

So it seems clear that if we can’t cut emissions, at some point we’ll be forced to consider a more radical alternative, at least if we want to preserve a planet anything like the one our species evolved on.

And as it happens, geoengineering does indeed appear to be on offer. According to Keith, the most popular and prominent idea for doing it—injecting sulfur particles into the stratosphere that would reflect sunlight away from the Earth, thereby causing a global cooling—could be begun almost immediately. “You could do this with current technology now,” Keith said, and he estimates that moreover, you could do so for about $ 1 billion a year. “Venice could pay to do it based solely on real estate prices,” said Keith.

Who's Ahead, Who's Behind--And Who's Missing the Point

Unlike my fellow blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick, I don't have anything too astute to say about the opening pre-conference workshop of Techonomy—hosted by the World Economic Forum and entitled “How to measure the impact and transformational power of technology?” 

But I do have a remark on how sophisticated conversations like this one often get mashed into meaningless by media coverage--which is why we need ideas-oriented conferences like Techonomy in the first place.

A Science Wonk Covers Tech

This is my first post on the Techonomy blog, so I mainly want to introduce myself. I’m Chris Mooney, a blogger for Discover and author of several books about the relationship between science and politics, and how things sometimes go dramatically splat in this area.

So I may seem, in some ways, an odd duck at Techonomy—except for the following fact.

As someone who’s extensively covered climate change, evolution, and stem cell battles (among others), I’ve learned there’s a fundamental dynamic here. Something in science or in technology comes along and dramatically changes our lives—and then people resist it. They fight back against the future, or change, or just plain reality.