On climate, measuring the wrong damn thing and false negatives (aka “what Horatio Hornblower can tell us about the future”)

I came to the “Horatio Hornblower” books only when I was 18, sadly – too much bloody ropey Doctor Who in my youth. So it goes.

There’s one of these stories, set during the Napoleonic wars that comes to mind every-so-often. Hornblower is a midshipman and the ship he is serving on captures a bunch of cargo barges in the Atlantic. He is given charge of one. He’s worried that it was damaged during the chase and capture, so has soundings taken of the hold to see if it’s taken on any water. The soundings come up bone dry. Somethings not quite right, but he’s young and exhausted from the chase and gets some sleep. When he wakes in the morning, he realises that the barge isn’t handling well. It’s sluggish. He repeats the check – still dry. He calls the barge’s captured captain onto deck. The captain points out the cargo is rice… rice that has been soaking up all the water that’s been coming in. Thus the dry soundings. As Hornblower, horrified, realises this, the planks of the deck start buckling upwards and the ship starts bursting at the seams…

Or, as wikipedia has it

In The Cargo of Rice, aboard the Indefatigable, the newly situated Midshipman Hornblower commandeers the French ship Marie Galante, carrying a cargo of rice from New Orleans, by order of Captain Pellew after engaging it in battle. It is Hornblower’s first time in command of a ship since joining the Royal Navy. He is instructed to take the captured French ship and her crew to a British port where he is to receive his next orders. Sailing is relatively smooth for Hornblower and his four seamen, until one of the crew (Matthews) informs him that the ship is taking on water from somewhere. Hornblower recalls that the Marie Galante was struck below the hull’s waterline by a cannonball from the Indefatigable before her capture. They check for moisture but find none until it is pointed out that the dried rice will absorb all of it. They hastily attempt to patch the hole with a sail, but by then the rice has expanded so much that the ship is breaking apart. A massive attempt to jettison the rice comes too late and Hornblower commands all hands to abandon ship and Hornblower’s crew and the French prisoners are left at sea in an open boat.

Where does the climate angle come into this?

We are measuring the wrong thing. We are measuring economic “growth” via GDP even when there are other less wretched measures (Measures of Economic Welfare). And we’re not measuring the stuff that matters- atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (also, beyond carbon dioxide), ocean acidification, sea-level rise, biodiversity.

And that’s before we even start on some of the Development Index stuff…

The “we” in this is spurious, of course – it’s not like all these have been voted on in a binding referendum. It’s just the way they have become obligatory passage points on your way into the black box (to get all Actor-Network Theory on you…)

The ship? It’s coming apart at the seams…