cancer care and computer diagnosis

A new NHS computer system will use a simple questionnaire to predict the probability of a patient having early cancer symptoms, allowing doctors to send them for screening and hopefully early detection. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/dec/29/cancer-diagnosis-computer-programme is interesting, and the system promises to save up to 10,000 lives a year in the UK. Great, roll it on, but let's be careful we don't throw the baby away when we change the nappy.

The risk in using computer systems for diagnosis is that the computer generally only gives a likelihood, but because the result came from the computer, people trust it more, and because of poor education, many people equate high probability with certainty. But a probability is just that. 90% certain is not certain, it is just very likely. If a technician interprets a negative as a no, then we have a problem. I have first hand experience of this problem in action. I picked up a DVT on a transatlantic flight a few years back. At the hospital, a nurse asked me a fixed list of lifestyle-based questions to determine whether I was in a high risk group. I wasn't, therefore as far as she was concerned, I couldn't have a DVT. Never mind that I had all the classic symptoms of a DVT, the computer said there was only a 7% probability I would get one, so I couldn't have. End of story, go home and die. I went home, a few days later the pain in my leg disappeared very suddenly, followed a short while later by symptoms that I know indicated an embolism - I've had one before. That confirmed it to me, that there must have been a clot. As far as I'm concerned, I definitely had a DVT, and should have had treatment for it, but the hospital wouldn't treat me because my lifestyle suggested I wasn't in a group likely to get one. I could easily have died for no reason other than being one of the 7% rather than the 93%. If  even get one again, it is unlikely to be any better, because of course my health record says I didn't have one, just because some doctors and nurses are crap at maths.

If computers are used properly, they can greatly improve health care, and this new system will certainly save many lives. But I would bet that the other side of that same story is that some other people will die because of it who would otherwise have lived, because some doctors will equate being in a low-risk group to not having the disease.

Apple - beyond the i-Slate?

There seems to be a lot of talk about Apple's new tablet computer. It is certainly very long overdue - I've been writing and talking for almost two decades about magazine tablets sitting on our coffee tables or propped up as a smart recipe tablet against a bag of flour in the kitchen or being read in the bath or stuck with magnets on the fridge door. We need lightweight touch-sensitive, flexible, wipe clean displays all over the house. They really need to cost less than $100 each to reach their potential, preferably less than $50. That price point with reasonable performance is entirely achievable for a perfect tablet, but not for the i-Slate. I rather suspect that this being Apple, and having used Apple computers every day since 1981, the i-Slate will be underpowered, under-equipped and overpriced, crash frequently, but be very pretty and do useful things in fairly intuitive ways, so will sell well. I like Apple, even though I find them very frustrating.

But there is already loads of analysis on the i-Slate out there. What will Apple bring out next? Well...

We need a proper solution to augmented reality. That means lightweight semi-transparent video visors. We are half way there, but today's video visors aren't semi-transparent, and the resolution isn't great either. But with the right market guaranteeing sales, as augmented reality would, we will surely see excellent visors coming to the market, that people will wear in the high street, overlaying anything from cyberspace onto their field of view according to context. Apple will be a big player in augmented reality where they can leverage their skills in intuitive interfacing to complex systems such as everyday life in ways far beyond the capability of Microsoft or even Google. The iPhone is an OK platform to start with but it is far too small and isn't always in front of your eyes, so they can't stop there. A bluetooth eyepiece will be a useful stopgap, but there is really no substitute for a full 3D immersive overlay. Visors that use lasers to raster-scan an image onto your retina will work very well. In a decade, this can be shrunk down to a contact lens. Crude prototypes already exist, but use a primitive solution of one led per pixel as per my original 1991 idea. It will be far more sensible to use my later 1995 solution of 3 lasers and a micro-mirror to do the job.

Next, we need a proper 3D physical interface to interact with it. Microsoft are working on gesture recognition and finger-tracking, which is fine to a point. It will enhance the x-box, but I suspect, like the eye-toy on the PS2, it won't be precise enough to be really useful. In 1992 I had an insight into the perfect 3D interface. I called it the stick, and later the wand. It has some stuff in common with Nintendo's Wii-mote, but theirs is big and clumsy and needs your whole hand to use it, and is expensive and still not precise enough. Mine was basically a pencil with a marble on each end. It would cost 5c to make, and be precise enough to write or draw with fine detail. But its main feature was that it uses 2 million years of human evolution where we learned to use tools, and almost any tool can be approximated to some sort of stick. A few tools need a third point, so the deluxe stick would have an extra marble in the middle. As Nintendo has discovered, a stick can be converted into a bat for playing tennis, golf, baseball etc, or a gun, or a steering wheel. It can also be a paint brush or a pencil or a chisel, or scalpel. Or it can move to the office and be any precision design tool needed. Apple doesn't have a stick yet, but they will soon need one, so it will be on their priority design and build list for the next few years.

The final item on Apple's priority development list should be the ego badge. This is a piece of jewellery that acts as a personal wireless web server. Any sort of jewellery will do, even an ear-stud. With electronics already at 30nm and falling, an ear-stud can hold millions of transistors, so could hold your entire website or Facebook account. As you walk past other people or buildings, it exchanges information about you. It is this that will enable context to develop fully, and context is a basic ingredient of a useful augmented reality platform. When you look at someone, you may see them as they are, or as their avatar, selected according your profile. The same with buildings, we will have personalised virtual architectural overlays on everything. And your ego-badge enables a digital bubble that shields you from the flood of data being broadcast at you from every direction, and lets through a tiny trickle of really useful data. That will enable social networking sites to do their job on the move, introducing you to other people, or not, as your profile and context dictates (and theirs of course).

These bits of digital jewellery will evolve quickly, adding video cameras to lapel pins, stereo sound recording to the ear studs, and an obvious body-based reference frame for tracking your fingertips, stick, or even your eyeballs, hence your contact lenses.

Together, all these simple  and tiny devices add up to a highly intuitive mixture that enables the full convergence of the real and virtual worlds to be achieved.

These will be the priority items if Apple knows what it is doing. Further down the list we might see other items such as cyber-compasses, active make-up and active skin, but those are other stories and you can check them out on www.futurizon.com

And of course there is still room for surprises. Us futurologists predict the bits of the future we have surveyed or even pre-invented, but Apple has some smart people who invent their own ideas too, and I won't have spotted some of their best ideas.

Copenhagen's failure is a win for the Earth and the people on it

I love nature, but I also love humans, and when push comes to shove, I support poor people trying to make a living more than I support the tree - though I will always prefer a solution that can allow them both to survive in harmony. I support some environment organisations, but I do so from a pragmatic viewpoint rather than to feel holy and I don't always agree with their actions when I think they are misinformed, or when they give too little attention to the needs of poor people. I think it is safe to say that some environmental organisations seem to prioritise protecting nature to lifting poor people out of poverty, and some of the policies debated in Copenhagen would have seen poor people suffer greatly to protect the environment for us rich people. That isn't fair.

I want to protect the environment but also want to protect the poor, which I think and hope puts me in the vast majority of people on the planet. But unlike most other people, I am also an engineer and a futurologist. I spend all my time studying the myriads of factors that affect the future. Then I use logical, clear thinking, engineering and business know-how and common sense to figure out where it is going next, how it will change our lives, and how those changes will affect each other and so on. Recently, the environment has been a major topic of debate, and so has also become one of the major drivers of the future, so it occupies a lot of my time. No big punishment since I like to think about the environment anyway.

The best way to protect the environment is to formulate a set of policies based on the best science we can get, not just to jump at the first solution that comes along. Science is just a formalised, proven way of gathering knowledge, constantly resting and retesting it, and gradually accumulating it over time. Science and the technologies based on science enable billions of people to live well on a planet that used to be capable of supporting only 60M hunter-gatherers. Science is not an enemy of the environment, it never has been and never will be, in spite of what some environmental extremists would have you believe. Science will enable billions more to live even better in the future, in  a world with a much healthier ecosystem.

Before we can act sensibly, we have to understand how the climate works. And the rest of the environmental and human system too, because it all interacts in complex ways. If we don't, we are acting blind, and even with the best of intentions may do as much damage as good, as we have many times in the past. Most people don't know much science, and many don't even want to. No problem, only a few people need to - the ones making or advising on the decisions. But scientists are still just starting to understand the environment and the climate. No-one knows all the answers yet. It is a myth that climate science is in a position yet to accurately predict the future. It can't. Not by a long shot. There are still lots of gaps and holes in climate science, the climate models are far from complete, and a lot of the data we have is still of poor quality. It doesn't help if some of the scientists entrusted with the work are motivated by agendas other than the pursuit of scientific truth. Copenhagen happened because scientists alerted the world to a major problem, but now it turns out that a lot of that science wasn't real science at all. Data was fabricated and deleted, debate stifled, good science blocked, bad science promoted, models used biased equations and altered data. Bad science and its bad results then polluted much of the rest of climate science, and the lasting damage is such that not only do we not know the truth, but we don't even know how much we know. But science is very robust. Scientific bodies have learned at least some lessons, and the failure of Copenhagen under the glare of public scrutiny of the science on which the debate was based, will force new science to be done properly, or at least better. Gradually truth will emerge. Bad theories will be proven wrong and good theories will be proven correct. Science will eventually know how the environment works, and will be able to predict both default paths for the future and the likely impacts of any actions we take.

As well as understanding the science of the physical and natural environment, we also have to work out the likely future of human activity, bearing in mind ongoing population change, demographic change, cultural change, socio-economic change, everyday technological and socio-political development, and also potential responses to threats such as climate change. No easy task for sure, and we can't be as precise here of course, but that's what we have to do if we want to understand the nature of any real threats. As far as I can tell, the Stern Review failed spectacularly at this, because it used the worst possible scenarios from the IPCC, took little account of any future technology development, but assumed that all the worst practices would continue or get worse. Coming from an economist, it also totally missed the obvious responses of countries to availability of new financial sources such as carbon trading and biofuels. Consequently, a great deal of damage has been done as rainforests have been cleared and peat bogs drained to make space to grow palm oil for biofuels, or to replant the trees to sell carbon offsets. Bad futurology leads to bad advice and bad policies.

Even before Climategate blew any lingering pretence of the science having being done properly out of the water, I haven't been a great supporter of Copenhagen, which has been driven by a whole range of bad economics, poor science, and an extremely poor understanding of the progress of future technology. But it wasn't needed anyway. Even without any drive from politicians, we are already heading for a world dominated by electric transport and a combination of nuclear, solar and wind power. No subsidies were ever required for any of this, because ultimately it is cheaper as well as cleaner to produce energy in those ways. Only the next 15 years or so will use lots of oil or coal or gas, and then it will rapidly switch over to clean methods. By 2030, oil will only cost about $30 a barrel in today's money, not because we have found lots of it or it is cheaper to get it out of the ground, but because it will only cost the equivalent $30 per barrel to use solar cells in the Sahara to make the same 6 Gigajoules of energy that each barrel of oil contains. Electricity is much easier to use of course, so no-one will use oil for energy once we cross that threshhold.

Of course, the fact that we are moving quickly towards clean, CO2-free energy anyway, means that the long term projections of doom that were based on ever more use of fossil fuels were always misinformed. Many of the doom-mongers turn out to have had financial or career incentives for the doom-mongering so we can at least understand their motivation and guard against being fooled again.

The main remaining danger is that we may be close to crossing one of nature's key tipping points before then, such as methane clathrates vapourising and causing runaway warming. That looks unlikely, but the science needs to be fixed before we can be certain, and the possibility is still worrying enough to take some precautionary action such as reducing waste and improving insulation. Such obviously sensible actions also help avoid the likely problems of our lights going out because of inadequate power station provision, and of course help improve efficiency and make industry more competitive and economically sustainable. We should do that anyway, regardless of climate change.

Given this automatic change to clean energy, Copenhagen was actually rather pointless. Developing countries will not use fossil fuels when it is cheaper to use electricity from solar or nuclear generation. Those in sunny areas will also gain heavily by sales of their solar energy.  It looks like we are not very close yet to tipping points, and we have plenty of time to act to fix warming if it does turn out to be driven mostly by CO2 after all. Meanwhile, even the next few years will make a huge difference. Already, CERN is doing research into how cloud formation is affected by cosmic radiation, which itself is affected by sunspot activity. That will tell us how and by how much solar activity affects climate, something mostly ignored in climate models, but which may be extremely important. NASA have done recent work on the effects of aerosols and black carbon, which already goes some of the way to explaining the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas. Many scientists are already investigating the mechanism of cloud formation and warming in polar regions, understanding better why the North pole is suffering much worse than the South. Other are looking at aircraft condensation trails, trying to understand the highly complex interactions between stratospheric water vapour, cosmic radiation, solar activity, jet cruising heights, cloud formation and consequent radiative forcing, all interwoven with oceanic activity. It is all extremely complex, far beyond the comprehension of any individual, but the science community as a whole, armed to the teeth with huge computers, will figure it all out eventually. Even over the next two or three years, we will have lots more verified data on what has actually been happening historically and today, and corrupted data will be filtered out of the system.

So I for one think it is good that Copenhagen failed. The science was corrupted, and we were in danger not just of wasting lots of money on the wrong projects, but also of making things worse by implementing polices that affected the environment in unforeseen ways. The level of impending doom was exaggerated. And the policies being pursued would have condemned billions to poverty and starvation.

Now that Copenhagen has failed, we have a time for debate and for examination of the science. We have time and motivation to get the science fixed, and then we will know both whether we need to act or not, and when, but also know how to act in ways that will actually work based on scientific fact rather than dogma. It will be much cheaper and much more effective. The environment will end up in much better shape, and with less effort and less pain. The poor will benefit enormously from the failure of Copenhagen, and so will the Earth. Don't mourn the death of Copenhagen, celebrate it. Everyone wins.

The new renaissance

I have often written about the care economy, where advanced AI takes away the economic value of intelligence and forces people to focus more on their human side, and more recently on the rise of the polymath. The care economy derives from the contrast between the value placed on human and machine involvement. We take it for granted that one coke can or a plastic cup is identical to another, and is actually a very high precision artefact in spite of its low cost. By contrast, hand made items command a high premium even though by comparison to mass produced machine-made items they could be considered shoddy workmanship. Essentially, we often value human involvement far more than any physical measure of quality.

It seems reasonable to assume that intellectually superior AIs will eventually be able to invent, create art, and design stuff better than humans. But even if they meet our ergonomic and aesthetic requirements perfectly, we will still place far more value on the works of other humans. This does not take anything away from the value of AI though. When AI is used to assist humans to create art works, it increases their effective skill level. Craftsmen have always used tools, and such AI may be considered just as a sophisticated creative tool, even though in one sense AI might do almost all the work. With ordinary people enabled to create great works by using great tools, and with more time and money available for self expression, we will see the arts flourishing as an important part of the care economy. As a core part of the self actualisation layer, arts are one of the pillars of human nature. As AI progresses, we will see a new renaissance in human artistic expression.

Calendarising the important component technologies, the age of the arts is likely to arise about half way through the care economy, in the mid 2020s.

Rise of the polymath

As the material cost of living falls, more and more of our expenditure goes on what Maslow called self-actualisation. We seem determined to do more with our lives than our ancestors and this self-imposed activity is the source of much of our extra stress and increased pace of life. But self actualisation is a key factor in our self image and gives us a purpose in life that is worth all the stress it causes, so we are not going to stop any time soon.

IT is helping people to do far more in self actualisation terms. For example, although I am a rubbish musician, I am just about to buy my 7^th keyboard. It will have far more capability than its predecessor and hugely more than my first one in 1983. With it, and some basic software on my computer, even I can compose and play music, store it, edit and mess about with it, and make something that I can be proud of. And I still can’t even read music! Other people are using computers to learn new languages, learn to play chess and other activities.

But the really big advance is that people from all walks of life are discovering that the software available off the shelf today, coupled to numerous web sites, allows them to run home businesses or become social entrepreneurs. People who never thought they had any business acumen at all are now enabled. All they need is an idea, or even just something to sell on ebay, and suddenly they are doing a second job. Hobbies are being upgraded to professional standard by this extra IT. The network puts people in touch with others that they need to fill in the gaps in their own expertise, so that collectively, people can link into virtual enterprises and take on some of the market that was once only addressed by big business.

As artificial intelligence progresses over the coming years, we will see an increasing level of entrepreneurship open to everyday people. AI can essentially do the job that was once done by the company, so that people can concentrate on the bits they want to do and leave the rest to the machine. By starting with hobbies, and bringing them up to professional standard by adding AI capability, we will enable the rise of the polymath. Many people will become highly competent across a range of skills. They may still have a ‘day job’, but also operate on a number of other platforms too.

The consequences of this will be that the economy will develop, and so will society. People will start more business, business turbulence will increase and poor quality businesses will be wiped out. Society will benefit because many people will use exactly the same skills to develop activities helping society. We are already seeing a significant increase in social entrepreneurialism across the UK.

One piece of good news in the recession is that it is sharpening people's skills and survival instincts. Many companies that were slowly dying anyway have died earlier, and the economy has therefore benefited a little by getting rid of some dead wood. The companies that are still alive will emerge better, and the companies being formed will be formed on a better footing. But on a personal level, everyone is becoming more adept at more things, and that is good news for all of us.

sorting out climate debt

Americans and Chinese are currently arguing at Copenhagen about who should pay for fixing climate change. The assumption is that CO2 is to blame, and the USA makes more than most, so should pay more. Countries should take responsibility for their actions and pay the price if they have taken more than their fair share of resources. But what should we use as a starting point?

We could go back to before the industrial revolution when resource use started rocketing upwards, but since we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors in terms of technological development, that would grossly overcharge those countries that did all the early development when efficiency was low and so was the means to control pollution. How about another date? It turns out there is a nice one to go for.

The world first became officially worried about the environment back in 1968 when the Club of Rome issued its report The Limits to Growth. This report has since been proven too pessimistic of course. (It has a lot in common with the environmentally catastrophic predictions of today's Copenhagen conference. Both largely ignore the positive impacts of progress, while assuming that all the bad things will continue or get worse. But that's another topic.) Anyway, let's take 1968 as a starting point where the world was warned forcefully about population growth and limited resources. That would make as good a point as any at which to start asserting shared responsibility for our world. The fact that it was just before the moon landing adds some weight too, since the moon programme also helped a lot in making us all realise we were all part of the same world and would all share the same fate if we messed it up.

So 1968 could be a good baseline date when we consider the amount of resources used, the pollution made, population loads etc on which to divide up future indebtedness.

Population is easy to deal with. Back in 1968, the US population was 200M and the Chinese population was 774M (the UK was at 55M). The populations have all increased since of course, but all countries were well aware then of the population problem, so own their own responsibility for their growth and its impact. As of course do those countries that have allowed their standards of living to increase without due regard for impacts elsewhere.

Of course we should also consider both good and bad behaviours and contributions, not just abuses. So as well as looking at quantities of pollution, we should also factor in the relative contributions in technological improvement made by the various countries that allow all countries to emit less now. Again, we could use 1968 as the baseline and create a retrospective 'development credit' trading scheme where countries that are able to buy more sophisticated technology now should offset the costs to those countries that contributed to its development. It would not be fair to penalise them for their entire CO2 contributions, when part of them were generated in companies developing advanced technology for everyone.

We also need to define an endpoint before we can start doing the calculations. CO2 allegedly stays in the atmosphere and contributes to warming for hundreds of years, so we must also take into account the emissions from the predicted future populations of each country too for that duration. Here again, a notional development trading scheme will allow countries that emit a lot to offset against that their contributions in kind via advanced technology. Some of this technology such as development of electric vehicles or efficient solar energy might be key to saving the environment from catastrophe, and it is reasonable that its development should be rewarded in increased allowances elsewhere.

But then we have a final factor in the equation for which it is much harder to determine a fair baseline. People are distributed all over the world. Some live in deserts, others in cold regions, some in low-lying coastal regions. People in deserts may be affected severely if rainfall drops even further, people in coastal regions affected if sea level rises. But people in cold regions have much higher costs for heating, so need to use a lot of energy to stay comfortable. People don't choose where they are born, nor are they free to move to anywhere they choose. Some are born in wealthy countries, others in poor ones, some in warm areas, others in cold ones. Valuable resources are spread unevenly too. Life is unfair from the moment of conception. But there has been no agreement or consent yet to make it fair. Hopefully one day we will assign a universal right to standard of living to which everyone on the planet can claim entitlement, but it is still a long way off. But we have to pick a baseline somewhere. So maybe this a good place to start.

If people can't choose where to live, they cannot be held responsible for the environmental costs of living there, but we still need to pick a baseline that anyone should be able to aspire to, and basic comfort is a good one. We can't insist on luxury when others are having to pay the price, but we can insist that it is every person's right to have shelter, warmth, food and water. If they have to chop a tree down and burn its wood to keep warm, we can hardly complain. The same applies to clearing a bit of forest to grow food. If they were born into a situation that needs them to do so to live with reasonable comfort, then fine. If we want them to do differently, then we have to ensure that we help them with the resources required. I think this is a good baseline. Everyone should be entitled to basic comfort, then we can distribute the rights to luxuries on top of that as the earth and technology permits.

So at this point we could start writing out an equation, though agreeing the values of some of the factors will still be tough. Each country should be entitled to a share of the world's resources and pollution capacity according to:

(their 1968 population) x (the local environmental carbon cost of living in reasonable comfort) x 200 + (their country's contribution to technology that allows people everywhere to achieve that standard at lower environmental cost, integrated over the period from 1968 to 2210)

With such an equation, because it was possible to pick a baseline date for the beginning of environmental responsibility, it is not necessary to factor in population growth, even though much bigger future populations will obviously make much bigger environmental impacts.

I will make no attempt here to compare the likely results for the different countries, but I would bet it will have little in common with the more politicised negotiations at Copenhagen. The USA will still come off badly because of their expensive lifestyles, but once technology contributions are factored in, it might not look so bad. Environmentalists often overlook that bit, but it is important to give credit where it is due.

ultra-smart computing, TGIF

So, let's think... quantum computer uses circuits that occupy all possible states simulatenously. Mmmm... So, if I partially design a quantum computer and start building it while I'm still figuring out the remaining circuity... maybe it will occupy all possible designs, and one of those will be so smart it can design another one far better than me... so all I need to do is connect a partially built, partially designed quantum computer to an assembler, and it will do the rest of the work for me, and solve all the questions I could possibly have asked it. Inclduing how to connect to all other possible computers via quantum entanglement chains. And then I can take over the world. Hahahahaha! Hahahahahahah! They'll all be sorry. Hahahahahaha!

I will call it ORAC, optical router and controller, since that is the most likely structure on which to base it.

Population growth and ethnic mix, and Star trek

When I was born in the UK in 1960, the world population was almost exactly 3Bn, 50M of whom had been born in the UK. Today, the world holds 6.7Bn people, 55M of whom were born in the UK (figures from World Bank and UK Office of National Statistics). So the number of people born in the UK has gone from 1.67% of the world to 0.8% today. That means the UK accounts for less than half the proportion of the world's population than when I was born. This pattern is followed throughout western Europe and indeed the rest of the developed world, because people have fewer kids as they get richer.
The other side of these same statistics is that as people get richer, their descendants account for a lower share of tomorrow's human population. Misquoting Jesus a bit, 'the poor will inherit the earth'.  The poor have more kids, who also have lots of kids, until at some point, they start getting richer. While poor people's descendants remain poor, they will continue to increase their representation in the human gene pool.

On today's trend, a wealthy UK family would see their offspring reduce to half of their original number in 5 generations, while a Nigerian family (average 6 kids today) would see their increase to 240 times as many, so will be 480 times better represented in the gene pool. So in strict evolutionary terms, being poor is a huge advantage. No-one expects that Africa will actually experience this level of growth in the future - average family size is already falling rapidly (down from 8 to 6 in two decades in Nigeria). But there is still a huge difference between African and European countries. This asymmetry in fertility rates means that the ethnic mix of tomorrow's world will be very different from today's.

While low reproduction rates mean that predominantly white Europeans are heading towards possible extinction over the next two or three centuries, Africans will increase greatly in number. So will South Americans, while Indians and Chinese will account for much the same proportion of the future world's population as today. So, as a Star Trek fan, it seems that the crew is all wrong. Almost all of Kirk's crew are white Americans, with a token russian, african, asian, and an alien. Later casts aren't much different apart from having a few more aliens and an android. In reality, the 2030 enterprise will be staffed almost entirely by AIs and robots, the human crew will almost all be people of Asian, African and South American descent, and there will hardly be a white face in sight. As Spock would say, fascinating.

Copenhagen, an engineer's view.

I have tried for several years to get to grips with climate science but still only understand a tiny bit now. The environment is an amazingly complex system, and it will take many more years of research before we understand it well. We have made many mistakes in the past when we have interfered with nature without enough understanding. I am worried now because with Copenhagen coming up, it does seem to me that we are again rushing into action before we understand the problem well enough to know what to do about it. The trouble is, as is now obvious to all, that there are too many vested interests on both sides of the debate, and what good science there is out there is diluted by a large measure of nonsense and propaganda, from both sides. And as we've just learned, some science has even been blocked from journals because it disagrees with the views of more powerful scientists. I personally am appalled by the corruption exposed in the UEA's CRU. Claims that the data has not been cherry-picked and distorted and the models fixed to produce the desired results run completely against the words in the culprits own emails. But as has been pointed out often since, the UEA is not the only lab saying we are seeing significant climate change. Some other labs may have been influenced and some may be fixing their results too, but we don't know, and I doubt if they all are.

But I have been an engineer for the 28 years since I got my physics and maths degree, have a decent grounding in the scientific method, and have a good understanding of computer modelling, having been in that field for over a decade. I was also a judge a few years back on the Computerworld awards for contributions to mankind by various computer systems and models in the environmental science field, so I have a fair idea of what they can do, and what they can't. So I think my environmental bullshit detector is reasonably well tuned by now, and I look at the announcements from environmentalists and the opposition and make my own choices of what sounds credible and what doesn't. I'm neither a 'climate change denier' nor a 'true believer', but like many people, somewhere in the middle, trying to filter the truth from the crap. So, here is what I believe:

The earth is experiencing climate change, but I don't know yet how much of it is natural and how much is man made. I am happy to accept that some of it is man-made, but don't have any idea what the right figure is.

Europe has experienced warm periods before, and these seem to have been one of the targets of the cover-up by the UEA CRU as well as the decline over the last decade.

The average temperature was increasing up to 1998 but has since declined slightly. This might mean it is all over, and warming is finished, or it might just be a temporary lapse in a longer term warming trend that will soon resume.

A number of effects in nature seem to have a tipping point, and we are quite close to the point where ocean based methane clathrates (aka methane hydrates, abundant in deposits on the sea floor) and melting pemafrost will start releasing very large quantities of methane into the atmosphere, potentially causing runaway warming.

We don't understand nature fully, by a long way. We see in the evidence that CO2 correlates well with temperature change, but according to some scientists, it appears to lag warming by hundreds of years. If so, something else must be causing the warming, and increasing CO2 only significantly contributes to it later.

However, the dangers are independent of whether any warming is natural or man-made, so even if they are natural, we will still have to try to avoid catastrophes that might result.

We know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, along with methane, water vapour and several other gases. The bulk of the attention is on CO2 but that might well be inappropriate. Some scientists say it would be much more cost effective to concentrate on methane in the short term. Or perhaps we should look more at cloud formation and see if we can mitigate that better.

The sun has been going through an unusually 'interesting' period, with an unusually prolonged sunspot cycle after a long period of high activity. There does appear to be a strong correlation between solar activity and climate, going back millions of years. Sunspot levels affect the quantity and make-up of the radiation hitting the earth, not so much from the sun directly, which only varies a little, but by affecting the flux of incoming cosmic radiation, which also correlates well with climate as the earth passes through different regions of the galaxy. Cosmic radiation can probably assist in cloud formation, and the possible mechanisms are being investigated by CERN now. Because the physics mechanisms are not understood, it is being ignored by climate models and climate scientists seem keen to play down its impact, though I am far from clear why.

Mars has also experienced warming, so at least some of the effect is variation in solar activity. NASA Goddard claims it is about 25% of what we've measured, and that may well be true, but I think we need more study on that. The Earth has lots of water in its atmosphere of course, and Mars doesn't. If as CERN believes, cosmic radiation causes ionisation, and helps in both initial formation of water droplets and their growth, i.e. clouds, then this is an important factor. These clouds then affect both reflection of incoming solar radiation, and the amount of heat that can escape from the earth into space, so are obviously critical to warming effects. Monitoring the press over the last few years, it looks to me that climate scientists appear to  dismiss its effects too lightly, so avoid giving this mechanism the weight of research I think it deserves.

In particular, some recent science suggests that condensation trails from aircraft might be much more important than previously thought. Emissions in the stratosphere can lead via very complex interactions to much more persistent cloud and heat retention than at lower levels. Increased solar activity may of course contribute to such a cloud formation mechanism. In the Arctic, aircraft sometimes fly in the stratosphere, which is lower down. The apparent fact that the antarctic is cooling while the arctic is warming gives extra weight to this theory, since there are very few flights over the antarctic, but many over the arctic. On the other hand, antarctic cooling could be partially explained by the ozone hole, so this needs more study. We should look carefully at the increase in air traffic over the last few decades, and the solar activity over that time, to see if that can explain a significant proportion of the apparent increase in arctic ice melting. If it does, we should factor in such mechanisms over the whole planet, especially with regard to policies on aircraft routing, flying height etc. It may be for example that aircraft should fly lower in the arctic, emitting more CO2 but contributing less overall to warming because the water vapour is emitted lower in the atmosphere.

The ozone hole over the antarctic will close around 2050. This is expected by some to increase warming there. The ozone hole was created in large part by the emissions of CFS, now banned. So banning CFCs has helped fix the ozone hole at the expense of worsening warming.

It is obvious here that the environment is very complex, and fixing one problem can worsen another. A related problem that is becoming apparent now is that China is building lots of coal powered stations, but the coal is dirty and produces pollutants such as sulphur dioxide, one of the causes of acid rain. In order to prevent acidification of oceans and damaged forests, there will be pressure to clean up the outputs from these power stations. However, sulphur dioxide is a coolant and its presence almost completely offsets the warming effect of the CO2 emitted by the stations according to the NASA Goddard research centre. So in China's case, perhaps we should delay the cleaning up until anti-warming measure are further developed. Perhaps as a short term measure, we should also reconsider the merits of low sulphur petrol and sulphur removal from other power stations.

CO2 levels affect plant growth, which obviously must feed water vapour into the atmosphere. As the atmosphere warms, it can hold more water vapour.  Water vapour is a greenhouse gas of course. Most of this is already accounted for in models as a factor in the warming efficacy of CO2, but I remain unconvinced that the impacts on CO2 and water vapour from deforestation, biofuel production and farming practices are fully accounted for. In particular, I think we need more study of the relative benefits of the use of residual plant material for biofuel versus ploughing it into the ground. Ditto waste such as plastic - recycling v other uses that end up as carbon sinks.

Sea level rise comes from melting of land-ice (not sea ice) and thermal expansion of the water itself, but the latter is most important so far. Land would also rise slightly as ice melts, having a small reducing effect on the rise. Melting ice also affects salinity which has other effects on the ocean ecosystem that will then also feed into climate.

Current environmental models are very far from complete. Large supercomputers can just about cope with modelling ocean currents in a small region. There is no such thing yet as a whole earth simulator that looks at all environmental effects and interactions.

Computer models are highly simplified, they have to be to run at a reasonable speed. Many effects are left out, many very crudely approximated, and accurate input data is sparse and only covers recent periods. And of course, we don't yet know all the basic science that feeds them.

Policies already implemented such as use of biofuels and carbon trading appear to have encouraged significant deforestation and peat bog drainage in Indonesia, contributing significantly to CO2 output and destruction of forest ecosystems. The socio-economic reasons for this seem obvious but they were apparently not anticipated by those who recommended the policies.

To summarise, even with the recent climategate, there is a lot of environmental science out there that looks reasonable to me as an engineer, but I still see lots of holes remaining in the science, and lots of areas that need more study before we can be reasonably sure about what is happening and what if anything we can do about it. In the absence of this knowledge, we risk implementing policies that might make problems worse.

So what do we do? It does look like we are quite close to a tipping point on methane emissions, just a couple of degrees away. Whether warming is natural or man-made, we still need to work out solutions to that, and we need much better monitoring of the environment to keep an eye on it. We must not reach that tipping point. It seems to me that we need more science, better science, and more accurate data.

If we have been barking up the wrong tree to some degree, as is very possible, then it is possible that efforts to reduce warming by limiting CO2 will fail and we may pass the tipping point. It is therefore dangerous to pursue CO2 as the only factor. We may be ignoring environmental interactions that are actually more important than just CO2. It is imperative that we improve the science quickly.

Targeting CO2 might help reduce warming, but in the short term, targeting methane should be the priority - it is simply the 'low hanging fruit' of warming.

We should reduce waste in any case. Whether or not energy production produces CO2, waste reduction still has benefits. There are no obvious negative environmental mechanisms from waste reduction so it is safe to do so.

Other than that, we should stop panicking. We will see very different technology being used in a decade or two even without environmental campaigns. Energy is likely to use solar and nuclear. Transport is likely to become electric. IT will become much more energy efficient. Insulation and building practices will be more energy efficient. So whatever happens, the future will see far less CO2 being produced. If it is the problem, then it will diminish as time goes on. If it isn't then we have to look elsewhere and do more science to find the real problem anyway. So either way, panicking and making polices based on immature science is the wrong thing to do.

The right answer: for at least a few years till we understand it better, spend far more on science and far less on solutions.