Although I enjoy writing articles, the format can be a bitch. Next week I’m submitting a paper to a conference, a paper I’ve been working fairly intensively on this semester. A few days ago the article was around 8500 words, and there were still a few elements I wanted to squeeze in. In stead I discovered that the maximum length of the paper would be 6000 words (including references). Oh, and they really stop you if the text is longer – the system for submitting work accepts 6000 words, no more. This is pretty slim for telling a good, qualitative story, so much of my last coupple of days have been spent butchering the text, trying not to loose the content.  I guess it’s good practice, though – and I can allways add stuff  later if it’s lacking something.

To wrap up – a joke:

Economists and reality:

Two economists are walking down the street. One sees a dollar lying on the sidewalk, and says so. “Obviously not,” says the other. “If there were, someone would have picked it up!”

The second day of the climate congress has come to an end (well at least almost, there is still a plenary session which I might attend, and a conference dinner later this evening). I’ll begin the sum-up of day two with a sum-up of the last half of day one. Basically I spent the entire afternoon yesterday “hanging around” in the poster area of the conference, talking to various people about the contents of a poster which is my contribution to the conference. The format of the session was simple – whoever was interested came to chat, and fortunately quite a few people cared about the topic (the medias dissemination of climate science). It was particularly interesting to meet actual natural scientists who could confirm our basic argument about journalistic dramatization about the material. I also encountered several other Scandinavians working with similar topics, some of whom were really interested in initiating a broader Nordic All in all a good experience.

Today has been really interesting as well. I’ve been following two sessions. The first focussed on the potential and limitations of biofuels, the second focussed more generally on renewable technologies asking the question; how far can they take us. The argument of the first session can be summed up pretty easily. In a carbon-perspective first generation biofuels are bad, second generation biofuels are not that bad, but really not that good either (it depends…). Production of heat and power, however, are great. The main argument in favor of bioenergy for most speakers is it’s storage capacity, and the fact that it can often be applied in cases when other renewables cannot (try running a jumbo-jet on steam or batteries – we’re not quite there yet). The main conclusion seemed to be; “we need more time” or “we need more research”.

The same conclusion was reached in the session dealing with renewables in general. Giving room to speakers researching a range of technologies, the one thing they all seemed to agree on was the fact that things were difficult and that neither of the technologies are potential panaceas to the problems of energy or the problems of the climate.

All in all a good day, I might go more in detail about some of the talks later, we’ll see

So, day one of the climate congress in Copenhagen is complete, and I thought I’d share some impressions. First off – it’s a very impressively organized event – 2000 people gathered and everything has gone streamlined and according to the plans so far (or at least so it appears). Cudos!

The first half of this first day of the congress was devoted to a plenary session with an impressive list of speakers. Interestingly for us STS’ers most of the plenary speakers were really concerned about the relationship between science, politics and the media. In other words: there appears to be a growing market for us in this “business”. I’ll briefly go through some of the speakers and highlight some of their main points.

Kathrine Richardson: Highlighted how humans historically have dealt with problems similar to those of climate changes at a smaller scale through regulation and legislation. She argued that in the past, knowledge has always proceeded these regulations. She indicated (somewhat linearly) the following model: Activity -> Harm -> Reaction -> Regulation. In the reaction phase knowledge was gathered, and now she claimed, we are at the end of this phase in relation to the climate issue. Thus regulation must follow. She also touched upon the role of the media, urging them to take their role seriously as communicators of knowledge.

Connie Hedegaard: Is the Danish minister of climate and energy. She underlined the role of the economy in the years to come, stressing how we needed “a new world economy” and a “new green economy”. This is to be achieved, among other ways, through scientific efforts. She urged the scientific community to be direct and blunt in their communication of results so that the politicians could make the right decisions:

You, the scientists , have to tell us – the politicians what you know. And you have to do so loud and clear!

These right decision would lead us towards a future in which the solutions were “Fun, fashionable and exciting”. In addition there were, as to be expected from a Danish minister, a considerable amount of time devoted to talking about the excellence of Danish action.

John Ashton: Is the UK’s “climate ambassador”, a diplomat with formal training in physics. His talk emphasized the low quality of communication between politicians and scientists, and that this communication is what we need to do “better”. Because politicians often see scientists as “simply another lobby” he claimed scientists needed to be more direct, more blunt in their dissemination and that the scientific doubt should be left elsewhere. Ashton also pointed to some of the possibilities created by the challenges of climate changes. For example he claimed that this was a first true opportunity of establishing “real collective self awareness as a species”, with the quest for a solution to the climate problem being our species “ultimate enlightenment project”

Quingchen Chao: Gave a talk on the scientific and technological challenges faced by the Chinese as a result of climate changes. The talk was fairly generic, underlining how seriously the Chinese government took the threat of climate changes. She gave three “policy recommendations” which I guess no one would disagree with, but I don’t really see how they do any good either: 1) Strengthen innovation efforts, 2) Strengthen international cooperation, 3) Strengthen outreach of scientific knowledge.

Richard Levin: Is an economist who preached that we should not be discouraged by the economic crisis, but rather see it as an opportunity to take political action. He had three main points: 1) We need a global carbon tax, 2) We need to make massive investments in “green technology” – this is also the key to reverse the economic situation we are in. 3) Recession decreases energy consumption.

Helge Sander: This is the danish minister of science, technology and innovation. His talk was politically charged, and circled around the topic of “change” (original, huh?). Basically he argued that our change needs to be informed by rigorous, scientific data, and as such also he addressed the relationship between science and politics. Also he argued the compatibility of economic growth and sustainability, which he labeled “Green growth”

Rajendra K. Pachauri: The head of the IPCC gave a speech entitled “The state of climate science: enabling enlightened policies”. One of his main arguments was that the task of science is to be at the service of policy, not to actually deliver “ready-made” legislation. He gave an overview of the recent developments in climate research “as such”, making a strong point for anthropogenic climate change as an established matter-of-fact. Further he hinted at the costs of reversing this development towards the year 2030, something he predicted would be about a 3 % reduction in GDP. Controversial, I would think, I hear they say “growth” is important to the economy.

Stefan Rahmstorf: Gave a very technical talk about models predicting sea-level rise. His argument was basically that his new model was very good, to say the least. He predicted at least a 1 meter rise by 2100, and warned about the consequences this could have in the even longer run (5 meters by 2200 and so on…)

Now, this post turned out longer than expected, so I’ll wrap up – part II of day one might follow tomorrow, or later, we’ll see.

Later today I’m going to Copenhagen where I will present a poster on the topic above at a conference on climate issues. The “presentation” for us poster-people consists of giving a 5-10 minute talk about the content of the poster and the research behind it, so if nothing else it should be a good chance to practice giving short talks. My session is tomorrow, already, So I’ll be spending the rest of the conference listening to others, should be good. 

More on the actual conferene later!

Lately I’ve been working on a paper that will hopefully be accepted for presentation at the 15th annual International Sustainable conference in Utrecht this summer. One topic of the paper are the innovation strategies and patterns of a company I’ve been studying, an innovation pattern that (to little surprise) lies far from the predictions and descriptions found in what we often refer to as the linear model of innovation. Basically the model postulates that the innovation process goes like this:

Basic research -> Applied research -> Development -> (production and) Diffusion

The model is famous, it is frequently referred to as an old and classical, but falsified theory. Since I like to refer to the actual work originally proposing, or at least actively using a model as it’s framework for studying something I started searching. The search was difficult, and I couldn’t really find much academic work stating that innovation goes as described above, or using the model to understand specific cases. I was about to give up and simply refer to a few of the numerous scholars saying “the traditional approach to innovation is the linear model, but now we have come to understand it as [insert new approach]“, when I stumbled accross the paper “The Linear Model of Innovation. The Historical construction of an Analytical Framework” by Benoit Godin published in ST&HV in 2006. No wonder then, that finding and citing the original work was difficult. Godin writes:

The precise source of the model remains nebulous, having never been documented. Several authors who have used, improved, or criticized the model in the past fifty years rarely acknowledged or cited any original source.

I found the article pretty interesting. I haven’t seen many STS-oriented studies of this type, treating concepts from the social sciences or humanities like we normally treat technological artefacts. I think, however, that they are needed, even we take our own conceptual tools for granted from time to time.  In 20 years, maybe we’ll be reading an STS story about ANT itself?