On friends and boundaries
Mar. 2nd, 2012 06:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lederhosenI've been meaning to write this for the last couple of days, but I've been flat out. So.
When I started in secondary school I was small, nerdy, bad at sport, and socially awkward. (25 years later, I am now of average size. How things change!) Although most of my friends from primary were there with me, a lot of new kids came in too and the social order was all shaken up, so the bullying that'd eased off by grade 6 fired up again in grade 7. So, standard shy bullied nerd.
Not long after I started there, another kid at the school died. He was training for the school swimming carnival, and drowned in the pool. He was a good swimmer, the PE staff got him out of the pool quickly, and did their best to resuscitate him, but he died all the same, just one of those things. I don't think I'd ever met him.
But I got to know his older brother quite well. Blair and I were in the same house, and had similar interests: we were both tremendous maths-science nerds. Although he was four years older than me - which is a lifetime in high school - we ended up being quite good friends. That's something that means a lot to me; I don't make friends easily, and I value the ones I have.
It didn't magically fix all the other problems I had at school - in particular, I discovered that being bullied by other kids isn't as bad as being bullied by the staff. But it made it a lot easier to deal with that stuff. We were only at the same school for a couple of years - he graduated when I was in year eight - but we kept in touch by snail-mail for a year afterwards, while he was working at Winchester College in the UK. Eventually we drifted out of contact, as he knuckled down to study at university, but he was a best friend at a time when when I really needed one.
Blair was a star student. I think he represented Australia in the International Mathematical Olympiad (I made team reserve four years later) and he scored 492 in the HSC, which would've been somewhere around the 99.9 percentile. He was also personable, tall, and fit (unlike me, he was an enthusiastic orienteer). He had political contacts, and he had the support of a comfortably well-off family. (His father ended up as head of the same government agency that I now work for; he retired just before I joined, but plenty of my colleagues remember him with great affection.)
I mention these things only to underline the fact that this is a guy who had talent and opportunity, somebody who could have done pretty much ANYTHING with his life. Some of my other friends have gone on to carve out lucrative careers in politics, economics, and medicine (cosmetic surgery); Blair could probably have made a success of any of those paths.
In the end, he went into earth sciences, completing a PhD in meteorology, and he's done very well in his chosen field. Quoting from an on-line bio, he is now: "a senior climatologist with the National Climate Centre, a section of the Bureau of Meteorology, where he has worked since 1998. His main areas of research are long-term trends in climate extremes, and the development of data sets suitable for studying them. He was responsible for developing the long-term data set used for monitoring daily temperatures in Australia, and more recently has been working on improving Australia’s long-term records of tropical cyclones. He is a member of the international Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices, which is co-sponsored by the World Meteorological Organization. He is also editor of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Journal." I see him on TV or in the papers once in a while.
For the record, that position with BoM would pay somewhere around $120k-$160k/year, pre-tax. That's good by APS standards (it's around twice what I get) but he could be earning far more if he'd chosen economics or Diseases of the Rich.
Or, if he'd wanted to stay in climatology... well, climate change denial is where the money is. Folks like Ian Plimer (Australia's most prominent denialist) have done pretty well from the largesse of Gina Rinehart (richest person in Australia, she of the awful poetry). I daresay somebody with political and media skills, and actual climatology credentials, could do pretty well for himself if he wasn't too particular with the truth.
Now, if you've read this far: I do not require that you believe in anthropogenic climate change. I am quite capable of being friends with people who disagree with me on scientific, political, or ethical issues.
What I do require - and I've disabled comments because this is not a discussion, it's a non-negotiable boundary - is that when you comment on the scientists who believe in ACC, you do so in the awareness that you're discussing people like Blair. People who
(a) are highly knowledgeable on the subject
(b) could be earning FAR more money doing something else, or espousing the anti-ACC position
(c) are my friends.
If you want to disagree with them on the science, feel free.
But if you choose to insult my friends by suggesting that their views on the subject are motivated by self-interest, you can expect that there will be consequences for your relations with me. And that's all I intend to say on that.
When I started in secondary school I was small, nerdy, bad at sport, and socially awkward. (25 years later, I am now of average size. How things change!) Although most of my friends from primary were there with me, a lot of new kids came in too and the social order was all shaken up, so the bullying that'd eased off by grade 6 fired up again in grade 7. So, standard shy bullied nerd.
Not long after I started there, another kid at the school died. He was training for the school swimming carnival, and drowned in the pool. He was a good swimmer, the PE staff got him out of the pool quickly, and did their best to resuscitate him, but he died all the same, just one of those things. I don't think I'd ever met him.
But I got to know his older brother quite well. Blair and I were in the same house, and had similar interests: we were both tremendous maths-science nerds. Although he was four years older than me - which is a lifetime in high school - we ended up being quite good friends. That's something that means a lot to me; I don't make friends easily, and I value the ones I have.
It didn't magically fix all the other problems I had at school - in particular, I discovered that being bullied by other kids isn't as bad as being bullied by the staff. But it made it a lot easier to deal with that stuff. We were only at the same school for a couple of years - he graduated when I was in year eight - but we kept in touch by snail-mail for a year afterwards, while he was working at Winchester College in the UK. Eventually we drifted out of contact, as he knuckled down to study at university, but he was a best friend at a time when when I really needed one.
Blair was a star student. I think he represented Australia in the International Mathematical Olympiad (I made team reserve four years later) and he scored 492 in the HSC, which would've been somewhere around the 99.9 percentile. He was also personable, tall, and fit (unlike me, he was an enthusiastic orienteer). He had political contacts, and he had the support of a comfortably well-off family. (His father ended up as head of the same government agency that I now work for; he retired just before I joined, but plenty of my colleagues remember him with great affection.)
I mention these things only to underline the fact that this is a guy who had talent and opportunity, somebody who could have done pretty much ANYTHING with his life. Some of my other friends have gone on to carve out lucrative careers in politics, economics, and medicine (cosmetic surgery); Blair could probably have made a success of any of those paths.
In the end, he went into earth sciences, completing a PhD in meteorology, and he's done very well in his chosen field. Quoting from an on-line bio, he is now: "a senior climatologist with the National Climate Centre, a section of the Bureau of Meteorology, where he has worked since 1998. His main areas of research are long-term trends in climate extremes, and the development of data sets suitable for studying them. He was responsible for developing the long-term data set used for monitoring daily temperatures in Australia, and more recently has been working on improving Australia’s long-term records of tropical cyclones. He is a member of the international Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices, which is co-sponsored by the World Meteorological Organization. He is also editor of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Journal." I see him on TV or in the papers once in a while.
For the record, that position with BoM would pay somewhere around $120k-$160k/year, pre-tax. That's good by APS standards (it's around twice what I get) but he could be earning far more if he'd chosen economics or Diseases of the Rich.
Or, if he'd wanted to stay in climatology... well, climate change denial is where the money is. Folks like Ian Plimer (Australia's most prominent denialist) have done pretty well from the largesse of Gina Rinehart (richest person in Australia, she of the awful poetry). I daresay somebody with political and media skills, and actual climatology credentials, could do pretty well for himself if he wasn't too particular with the truth.
Now, if you've read this far: I do not require that you believe in anthropogenic climate change. I am quite capable of being friends with people who disagree with me on scientific, political, or ethical issues.
What I do require - and I've disabled comments because this is not a discussion, it's a non-negotiable boundary - is that when you comment on the scientists who believe in ACC, you do so in the awareness that you're discussing people like Blair. People who
(a) are highly knowledgeable on the subject
(b) could be earning FAR more money doing something else, or espousing the anti-ACC position
(c) are my friends.
If you want to disagree with them on the science, feel free.
But if you choose to insult my friends by suggesting that their views on the subject are motivated by self-interest, you can expect that there will be consequences for your relations with me. And that's all I intend to say on that.
