It's summer, and a searing drought is shriveling corn fields in the Midwest. Meanwhile torrential rains (the worst in 60 years) have killed several dozen people in Beijing. Sea ice continues to shrink in the arctic -- the decline in June was the largest in the satellite record -- creating new sea areas for the Coast Guard to patrol. Welcome to climate change 2012.

But how serious is the problem? How worried should you be? I don't know, because I'm neither an atmospheric physicist, environmental economist, nor specialist in global institutions designed to address collective goods (or negative externalities). Nonetheless, I do try to stay informed on this issue, and I occasionally use the case of climate change to illustrate certain features of international politics to my students. And what makes it frustrating for a layperson like me is the range of opinion one can find even among well-informed journalists.

Case in point: two prominent articles on this topic appeared this past week, reaching sharply contrasting conclusions. The first article, by science writer/environmental journalist Bill McKibben, presents a deeply worrisome picture of the planet's future. According to McKibben, it's all in the math. There is now a strong scientific consensus that human beings can only put another 565 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere without causing average atmospheric temperature to rise more than two degrees Celsius. (Two degrees was the agreed-upon target figure at the 2009 climate change summit in Copenhagen, though many climate scientists think even that level of increase would be very harmful.)

Unfortunately, a recent inventory of current oil and gas reserves showed that they contain enough carbon to release roughly 2,795 gigatons of CO2, if it is all brought to the surface and burned. That's about five times the upper limit identified above. The problem, of course, is that the companies that own these reserves will want to pump the oil and gas out and sell it -- that's the business they're in -- even though spewing that much more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere would be disastrous. In the absence of effective government action to discourage consumption (i.e., by taxing carbon to raise the price and diminish consumption) we're in deep trouble.

The second article, from yesterday's New York Times, offers a cheerier view. In the words of business reporter David Leonhardt, "behind the scenes. . .a somewhat different story is starting to emerge -- one that offers reason for optimism to anyone worried about the planet." He describes how investments in clean energy are reducing the price of solar and wind power and how shifts from coal to natural gas (which is less carbon-intensive) for electricity generation have accelerated. And he dangles that hope that government-sponsored R and D will eventually create "disruptive technologies" that "can power the economy without heating the planet."

To be sure, these two articles aren't totally at odds. Leonhardt acknowledges that we have a long way to go, and that many experts believe that you need a combination of regulation to raise the price of carbon along with further reductions in the cost of alternative energy sources. Similarly, McKibben's account accepts that there is probably still time for effective political action to address this situation (Indeed, his whole article is clearly intended as a clarion call for greater activism).

As is so often the case, the issue boils down to politics. And that's why I'm pessimistic, because I can't think of any issue where the barriers to effective political action are so great. First of all, you have an array of special interests with little or no interest in allowing the government to interfere with their ability to make money in the short-term (see under: Koch Brothers). Second, you have a political system in the United States (the world's second largest greenhouse gas producer) that is unusually open to lobbying and other forms of political interference. Third, climate change is a classic example of an intergenerational equity problem: it's hard to get people to make sacrifices today (i.e., in the form of higher energy prices, less comfortable houses and offices, more expensive travel, etc.) for the sake of people who haven't even been conceived yet. That same principle applies to politicians too: Why should they jeopardize their re-election prospects for the sake of voters who won't be around until they are long gone? Fourth, there's also a thorny equity issue between advanced industrial countries like the United States (whose economies were developed before anyone knew about climate change) and emerging economies like China or India that don't want to slow their economic growth by reducing greenhouse gas emissions today. Even if there is a rapidly growing consensus on the need to do something soon, everybody wants somebody else pay most of the price or bear most of the burdens.

For all these reasons, the well-publicized effort to devise an effective global solution to the problem of human-induced climate change has largely failed thus far. It's possible that some new disruptive technology will swoop in and solve the problem for us, or maybe some of the intriguing proposals for "geo-engineering" the planet may prove workable and effective.

Maybe, but such hopes remind me of this old cartoon. If we're going to need a miracle (whether political or technological) we're going to have to be more explicit about what happens in step two.

Apologies if I've blogged about this before, but reading Micah Zenko's excellent post on "ten things you didn't know about drones" reminded me of something I've pondered a bit over the past couple of years. To be specific: I wonder if we are reaching a moment in which traditional "surprise attacks" are less and less likely, at least between major powers.

Genuine "surprise attacks" are pretty rare already -- at least at the strategic level -- for the simple reason that mobilizing large military forces is a huge undertaking and hard to conceal. Hence, opponents are likely to see what you're doing and know that you're coming. The United States fought Iraq twice, for example, and though Saddam apparently clung to the hope that we wouldn't actually fight, it can't have been a complete surprise to him when the bombs started falling. After all, in both cases we'd been talking about it for months while building up our forces right next door.

To be sure, in some cases information may be ambiguous and you can imagine how one side might be able to mask its intentions or create sufficient ambiguity so as to pull off the surprise. And it helps if the victim is complacent or misreads the available intelligence (as Israel did in 1973), or if it stubbornly refuses to believe that an attack is coming (Stalin in 1941). And surprise may be achieved if the attacker is both lucky and surveillance is hard (Pearl Harbor), or if the target doesn't "connect the dots" (the US on 9/11). But in a world where communications are instantaneous and surveillance is increasingly widespread, pulling off a genuine strategic surprise is bound to get more difficult.

This is not to say that unexpected and small-scale attacks cannot occur when the necessary forces are already in place, which is why North Korea could suddenly shell a South Korean island in 2010. Surprise can also work if the target is undefended and it doesn't take a lot of mobilization, which is how Argentina could seize the Falklands in 1982. Similarly, tactical surprise is commonplace once forces are engaged in the field.

But for today's major powers, it is hard to imagine conventional forces inflicting a genuine strategic surprise attack. Reconnaissance satellites can monitor global hotspots on a more-or-less real-time basis and let leaders know if forces are being moved and prepared for combat. Drones can provide even more detail, and electronic surveillance capabilities of various sorts can monitor message traffic. And the victim doesn't have to be the party that detects the preparations, if the party that does is willing to blow the whistle. It is possible that these capabilities could be disrupted by countermeasures or a cyber-attack, but a large-scale effort of that sort would itself be a warning sign.

This means that large-scale surprise attacks may be increasingly rare, except in certain special circumstances. What might those circumstances be? First, states that lack advanced surveillance capabilities are still vulnerable, unless someone tips them off in advance. Second, we will still see surprise attacks by airplanes, drones, or missiles, particularly if the attacks don't require a lot of advanced preparation and/or involve short distances. A third possibility are cyber-attacks or attacks by terrorist groups, especially because the latter operate in clandestine fashion. Nor can one rule out really elaborate efforts at deception (such as staging an attack in the context of a previously announced exercise, or something like that).

But notice that most of these scenarios depict attacks of rather limited effect. Air strikes can destroy specific facilities (e.g. Osirak, or the Syrian reactor site), but can't topple a government all by themselves or enable an attacker to take over territory.

None of this is to say that major power war is gradually becoming obsolete (though some have argued that it is for other reasons). Rather, I'm just suggesting that the sort of "3 AM phone call"/bolt-from-the-blue scenarios much beloved of strategists may be less and less relevant, because global transparency has made it very hard to mask the preparations.

Apart from a few brief sojourns at various think tanks, I've spent most of my professional life in the academic world. Seven of these years were spent helping run various programs, first as deputy dean of social sciences at the University of Chicago and later as academic dean here at the Kennedy School. I have one child in college and another heading there in two years. You can therefore assume I have a certain professional and personal interest in the whole business of higher education.

Which is why I find discussions of how technology might transform this whole enterprise quite fascinating. It's hard not to read such articles and wonder how my own job might change in the years ahead, and to reflect on how I think it ought to change. I have not studied this issue in detail, so what follows are some purely impressionistic observations, based mostly on my own experience.

1. I think there's no doubt that the traditional model of the academic lecture is headed the way of the dodo. I say that with a certain wistful regret, because I enjoy lecturing and like to think I'm fairly good at it. But it's hardly an efficient mode of information-transmission, and there are plenty of studies suggesting that students don't learn particularly well in this sort of passive "I-speak-while-you-listen-and- take-notes" experience. Lecturing of the old-fashioned sort can be entertaining and inspirational, but real learning requires students to engage and wrestle with the material instead of just hearing some older person declaim about it.

2. Given that top-flight faculty are among any college or university's scarcest resources, having them stand in front of a handful of students and talk is especially inefficient, and all the more so in basic introductory courses. In other words, you probably don't want Nobel Prize winners teaching basic statistics, Economics 101, or even Intro to Biology -- especially when there may be lots of less renowned people who are actually better at doing that. But you do want students to have the opportunity to interact with the most brilliant minds, to argue with them, to see how they do their work, and to be inspired by their example. And that means creating different sorts of educational experiences (seminars, workshops, mini-courses, etc.) rather than just one.

3. Information technology is making it possible to transmit educational content at almost no cost; you can put course materials on the web and stream lectures to anyone with an internet hookup. This is what MIT is doing now, and it doesn't seem to be discouraging people from wanting to attend full-time and pay full-freight. There are also online teaching programs that might do a better job of teaching basic materials (such as introduction to microeconomics, statistics, calculus, etc.) than that old model of the single lecturer with a chalkboard and a pile of notes. This suggests that we ought to be thinking of ways to use faculty rather differently -- in more interactive and personal modes--where hands-on attention, genuine inspiration, and pedagogical ability can produce big payoffs, while using online tools to deliver basic factual or technical content.

4. I suspect that in the near future we are going to see a lot of experimentation with new forms of higher education, reflecting the fact that these institutions in fact serve many purposes other than merely transmitting knowledge/skills to students. One reason MIT can make its content available for free is that students understand there is a difference between watching lectures online and actually being in the class, being on the campus, and being immersed in the broader in-person environment. In the United States, at least, universities and colleges also provide a relatively safe space for making the transition from adolescence to adulthood. They are environments where young people can meet future spouses of similar class or social backgrounds, have lots of arguments with peers and with their professors, and get a lot of preconceived notions challenged. For many young people (though not all), college is about a lot more than just what they learn in class, which is one reason parents are willing to pay through the nose to make that whole experience possible.

What I'm describing here, of course, is the traditional model of a liberal arts education, and it's hardly the only model out there. Other institutions (e.g., commuter colleges, junior colleges, vocational institutes) serve somewhat different educational functions and are already organized differently. My guess, therefore, is that changes in information technology and the overall globalization of information and education is going to produce an explosion of innovation over the next few years. The traditional four-year university/college won't disappear, but it will be coexisting and competing with a lot of other models.

Lastly, this is going to be a painful process. Universities are filled with brilliant and innovative people -- as individuals -- but they are also incredibly conservative institutions (not politically, but in the sense of being wary of change). As a former Harvard president reportedly said, "trying to change the curriculum is like moving a graveyard." Faculties don't like having to retool and alumni and other stakeholders often have powerful emotional attachments to traditional ways of doing business. And the older and more successful a university is, the more impervious to change it is likely to be.

Plus, coming up with new educational models is hard to do if you're already working pretty hard teaching the existing program. But there's no stopping this sort of Schumpeterian "creative destruction," and I'd hate to be working for the educational equivalent of Polaroid -- a brilliant and innovative company that proved unable to adapt to a rapidly changing technological frontier.

Now if we can just get universities out of the business of running semi-professional athletic teams...

Explanatory Note: A couple of weeks ago, I read a news story about how museums around the country were competing to exhibit the retired space shuttle Discovery, after its long and supposedly distinguished career. That's not surprising, of course, as having a shuttle on display would undoubtedly be a big draw for a lot of museums. What troubled me was the suspicion that future museum exhibits would depict the whole shuttle program in laudatory terms, instead of treating it as an foolish diversion of national resources. Space policy isn't really my thing, however, and I said to myself: "You know, you'd need a rocket scientist to write this properly!" Fortunately, I have one available: my father. He's a geophysicist who spent much of his career designing satellite packages and interpreting the data they produced, so I asked him if he'd be willing to contribute a guest post on the topic. Here's what he sent in. -- S.M.W.

By Martin Walt IV

Recent news columns have commemorated the retirement of the Space Shuttle orbiter Discovery. It is indeed noteworthy that this vehicle experienced some 39 launches and traveled 150 million miles in near-Earth space. This achievement was made possible by the imaginative engineers and scientists who conceived the Shuttle program and developed the necessary technical innovations. Recognition must also be given to the dauntless flight crews -- both military personnel and civilians -- whose courage and dedication were outstanding, especially those astronauts who volunteered to fly after two orbiters were lost in accidents that revealed serious weaknesses in the hardware and in NASA's managerial culture.

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Some readers may recall that I've been a skeptic about the whole "cyber-war" business, and suggested that it was an ideal policy arena in which to expect threat-inflation. To be clear, I did not argue that there was absolutely nothing to it, or even that we could afford to ignore the problem, but there's no question that I've been less than fully persuaded by a lot of the hype.

It is therefore a fair question to ask whether the whole Stuxnet affair has altered my views on this matter. (For those of you just returning from a month wandering in the desert, I refer to the computer worm whose origins remain obscure but which has apparently affected a number of industrial control computers in Iran, presumably with the intent of disrupting their nuclear enrichment efforts).

So has the Stuxnet worm convinced me that the cyber-war/cyber-terror threat ought to be taken more seriously?

Yes and no.

On the one hand, this incident has provided a vivid demonstration of the potential impact that various cyber-weapons could have, and so it has led me to revise my concerns about the problem upward. But as noted above, I never said it should be ignored; only that we had to be careful not to over-hype it.

On the other hand, I think this incident also demonstrates why this whole problem is still so hard to evaluate, and why we really need greater information and assessment before we'll know if we are over- or under-reacting. Although some people undoubtedly know who made the Stuxnet worm and how it got into Iran's industrial control systems, it hasn't been made public thus far. Indeed, private computer security experts are reportedly miffed that the U.S. government isn't providing them with everything it may know about the Stuxnet problem. So it's hard for us laypersons to judge just how broad or serious such a threat might be, or how easy it would be for others to do something like this to us. The apparent success of the Stuxnet attack may not tell us very much about the vulnerability of other systems (including military systems), especially when they are equipped with more sophisticated defenses.

The reports I've seen also suggest that the worm was almost certainly the product of a sophisticated programming team, and most analysts seem to think that a wealthy and/or advanced country had to be behind it. If so, then one might be justified in concluding that cyber-war in the future will be a lot like conventional war in the past: the richest and most advanced countries will be better at it, simply because they can devote more resources to the problem. Even if Stuxnet suggests that cyber-war has more potential than people like me had previously believed, it doesn't herald some sort of revolutionary shift in the global balance of power, in which a handful of clever computer-wielding Davids suddenly strike down various lumbering, computer-dependent Goliaths.

In any case, the one thing I haven't changed is my desire to see this problem analyzed in a more systematic and public fashion, and by a panel of experts with no particular professional or economic stake in the outcome. Ironically, in the aftermath of the Stuxnet attack, I'd like to see that even more.

No profound thoughts to offer today; instead, ten rapid-fire, shoot-from-the-hip impressions -- some of them snarky -- from my current road trip. Readers who want to discount what follows can chalk it up to some serious jet lag.

1. British Airways has mastered the art of predatory pricing. First, they canceled my initial flight to London, which meant I couldn't make my connection to Paris in time for my first commitment. So I had to buy a separate one way ticket on Air France to preserve my schedule. But did BA offer to refund the unused portion of my itinerary (which was unused because they canceled the flight)? But nooooooooo! If I wanted a refund, I had to cancel my entire itinerary (which involved four more flights) and then rebook all four of the remaining legs under a new reservation number, but at a new, higher price that cost more than the original ticket. Heads they win, tails you lose. Resolved: avoid BA whenever possible in the future.

2. Alas, Air France is not an appealing alternative; it's no longer a great airline but instead is merely adequate. I still have vivid and glowing memories of flying first class to Paris on my honeymoon (a gift from my mother-in-law, who had a gazillion frequent flyer miles back then). I wasn't in first class this time, but even taking that into account, it was a pretty mediocre experience. And the "tournedos" they served for dinner would have made Escoffier tear his hair. Some poor vache died for no good reason.

3. Public transportation. On the other hand, there were a few experience on the road that put les États-Unis to shame. In Paris, there's a direct train from the airport into Paris, or you can take an Air France bus that leaves frequently, is cheap, and gets you to one of several convenient Metro stops. In London, the "Heathrow Express" rail line is equally convenient, and a virtually seamless way to get from the airport to central London. As you leave customs, there's a guy standing there with a credit card swiper. Thirty seconds later, you have your ticket, the trains leave every 15 mins., and they get you to Paddington in about 20 mins.. Consider that you can't take a train to Dulles or JFK and it reminds how bad most public transport and infrastructure is in the Land of the Free(way).

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