The philanthropic investment portfolio must be rebalanced |
|
 |
| Related Files |
|
| Most philanthropy focusses on human health and education. Its time to consider alternative investments for the long range health of society.
Americans are a generous people. Our tax laws and general prosperity have
fostered a level of philanthropy unheard of in any other country. The beneficiaries of our largesse are
primarily religious, health and educational institutions. Given the great new challenges expected in
the light of a changing climate, we question whether the current distribution
of philanthropic investments is well suited to societies’ long term needs.
Consider the eventual outcome of the over $3B annual
philanthropic support of health research in the US. It will inevitably lead to longer human life
spans. While great for humans, this will
undoubtedly further burden the climate system of the Earth. Similarly, many $billions per year are
donated for education, which may have the laudatory effect of raising some
peoples awareness of the environment, but it most assuredly raises their
expectations for quality of life. Who
can doubt that a healthy, educated populace consumes far more energy, water and
natural resources than a primitive, subsistence level society? Thus, the many billions spent on health and
education, while serving obvious human needs and aspirations, are not
necessarily doing our planet any good! A
longer-lived, healthy and educated society will place ever-growing demands on
the life-support systems of Earth.
Is there scope within the philanthropic community for less
attention on the short term needs of mankind and more on the longer range
condition of our planetary home? The
problem of understanding the climate system is an excellent example. Much of the uncertainty in the arena of
climate change and global warming lies in the lack of data. In order to understand a cyclic process it is
essential to have many realizations of that process. You can’t deduce the physics of a 10 second
wave with only 10 seconds of data. Yet
society demands to know the outcome of decadal and centennial variability in
the climate system without anything like an adequate record. We have few human institutions that have
endured for the long times required for climate data. We expect the government to maintain data
collecting systems for weather, but the record is not good when considering the
decadal and longer times scales. Data
systems are changed, calibrations are suspect, data are lost once the short
term need is met. Consider the iconic
case of the CO2 time series at Hawaii.
It is now a 50 year time series, reproduced endlessly in the debates
over global warming and carved in marble in the halls of the National Academy
of Sciences. David Keeling struggled
mightily in the early decades to maintain that record with grant support coming
two years at a time from a variety of agencies with other science
priorities. Funding a record that should
be maintained indefinitely with short term renewal grants is crazy.
Consider our poor knowledge of the oceanic heat
content. It is 1100 times larger than
that of the atmosphere yet has been barely measured. Much of the oceanic data
comes from the Navy’s cold war interest in the temperature structure of the sea
for antisubmarine warfare. The number of
observations peaked in the mid-1980s, then declined with the end of the cold
war through the ‘90s. Given the stagnant federal budget for science in the face
of massive deficits and a declining discretionary budget, it is naïve to think
that government will provide the long-term commitment to data systems needed to
understand climate. Governments have lifetimes
of hundreds of years, some universities claim continuity for nearly a thousand,
the Christian church for nearly two thousand.
Universities and religions use endowments to perpetuate themselves,
cannot we not begin to build a new endowed institution that would have a
similar long term commitment to collecting climate data? An endowment of about $1B would go a long way
toward solving the problem of trying to maintain a number of key time series
for the physical climate. The payoff
would be for our descendents, as they would then have the data they need to
make informed decisions about the climate system. What we envision is a sort of Howard Hughes
Medical Institute for the climate sciences, something that would assure the
survival of a systematic, sustained record of the state of the climate system
of the earth. We are not endorsing a
specific antidote to climate change, as these could be misguided until the
complexity of the system is fully understood.
Rather we advocate for a means of developing and sustaining the required
instrumental record. Is there scope for
such long-range thinking in the philanthropic community?
|
|
