Captain Future's Log

The Flaws of the Information Age

We all know the multiple problems of a world dominated by large quantities of fast moving information.

There's information overload and its paradoxical companion, information addiction (leading perhaps to wanting to monitor everybody's every phone call, even when using that information well is dangerously improbable.)

There's the Goebbels-Rove industry of designing, manufacturing, amplifying and distributing alloy for your allies out of gross forms of information: half-truths, entire lies, obsfucations, deceptive oversimplifications and propaganda/spin.

And then there's the granddaddy of flaws in information: refusing to accept and act on it. This is a system's problem, and a challenge to democracy and self-government problem. Most creatures must act on information that threatens their survival --without doing an elaborate song and dance on the subject, how we deal with threat and opportunity is probably at the heart of our big brains. We're a self-aware social species, so it's not a simple matter. We've built systems to organize information and action, but those systems also create anomalies, like distance in time from cause to effect.

As a self-governing democracy of at least partially rational beings, we expect our leaders to fool around with information, to play politics with it, when there's no immediate large threat. But then when there is a threat to us all (or at least a lot of us) we expect them to take their brains to another level, and work together to do the job we chose them to do. We expect them above all to deal honestly with information.

Every day brings more examples of how they don't--examples that frankly scandalize those who remember the Eisenhower 1950s and Kennedy 1960s, let alone the 40s and 30s. A fitful deterioration since the Johnson years has come to this not very pretty picture of our present.

In today's news alone...

New York Times reports on former FEMA director Michael Brown's testimony that he informed the White House of flooding and a levee breach or overtop a full day before officials there admit having this information. Other evidence before a Senate committee indicates this information came from other sources as well, some of them public (as some of us remember.) Think Progress has a very useful Katrina timeline. This is criminal failure to use information to mitigate a disaster that cost thousands of lives, and will affect everyone in this nation for years to come.

In an article in Foreign Affairs widely reported today, a former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East during the Iraq invasion, Paul Pillar, accused the White House of misusing prewar intelligence to justify its case for war.

"Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war," Pillar wrote."If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid war -- or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath."

He also charged that the Senate intelligence committee and a presidential commission overlooked evidence that the Bush administration politicized the intelligence process to support White House policymakers.

Last but certainly not least, an ingenuously designed study described in the journal Science and reported by BBC News shows that the northern hemisphere of a planet you may have heard of was warmer at the end of the 20th century than in the previous 1,200 years. The findings support evidence pointing to unprecedented recent warming of the climate linked to greenhouse emissions.

Because the kinds of information in records on climate that scientists now use is relatively recent, researchers from the University of East Anglia in England used multiple other sources.

In addition to 14 sets of temperature records from various places in the northern hemisphere, they studied the rings of long-lived evergreen trees in Scandinavia, Siberia and the American Rockies. They looked at the chemical composition of ice in Greenland ice sheets which have become a key source for climate-related information in the deep past.

In addition to other natural indicators, they examined diaries written by human beings from the past 750 years, plus other written records.

A key test of their methods would be if they reflected periods of relative warmth and cold already established. They did. Their analysis confirmed the warmer years from AD 890 to 1170 known as the "Medieval Warm Period." They confirmed the much colder centuries from 1580 to 1850 called the "Little Ice Age."

They found that our time represents the most widespread temperature anomaly of any kind since the ninth century. "The last 100 years is more striking than either [the Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age]. It is a period of widespread warmth affecting nearly all the records that we analysed from the same time," co-author Timothy Osborn told the BBC.

There is now so much information leading to the same conclusion without our governments or our species doing much to use it that it becomes an oppressive and depressive and probably widespread feeling that we're going to ignore it until it's much too late to even mitigate the doom we daily create.