May 04, 2008
Quiet Altruists
It's not just the Brits that are barmy, it's an international problem. Robin Hanson posts about an OpEd: . . . top universities accept hundreds of individuals who have demonstrated the highest levels of citizenship. These teenagers have volunteered in more food banks, sponsored more fundraisers and lobbied more officials than any previous generation. ... Sometimes some of these students will denounce world hunger but be unfriendly to the homeless. They will debate environmental policy but never offer to take out the trash. They will believe vehemently in many causes but roll their eyes when reminded to be humble, to be generous and to "do what is right." It is these people, though, who often climb America's ladder of success. They rise to the top, partly on their own merits yet also partly on the backs of equally deserving but "nicer" people who let them steal the spotlight. ... Watching the race for the presidency, I cannot help but...
April 20, 2008
More Dorks
Even those who have at last gotten some glimmer of comprehension about natural systems cling to their old ways. Their analyses have been demolished, but they have not yet abandoned unworkable prescriptions. Mr. Bush . . . set a target for halting the growth in carbon dioxide emissions by 2025, without specific mandates to achieve that, and in the meantime he blasted proposed Senate legislation for tougher measures as unnecessary. Unnecessary? When scientists detect accelerating melting in the Arctic and confidently predict centuries of coastal retreats and climate shifts, endangering the only planet we have? . . . Unnecessary since they would be insufficient, ineffective, just feel good wanking for the twittering set. imagine that we instituted a brutally high gas tax that reduced emissions from American vehicles by 25 percent. That would be a stunning achievement — and in just nine months, China’s increased emissions would have more than made up the difference. . . “If we approach...
April 19, 2008
Part Duh
More about enviro-dorks. Even before Kyoto, policy experts were considering an enticing concept: “avoided deforestation.” After all, existing rain forests, in particular, are crucial carbon sinks, and from Indonesia to Brazil, they are being cut down — mainly for grazing land and timber. This doesn’t just lead to the loss of a carbon sink; in many cases the forests are cleared by burning, which itself pours carbon into the atmosphere. It’s widely reckoned that global carbon emissions would be 20 percent lower were it not for the destruction of forests and the resulting loss of their carbon-storage capacity. It's actually soybeans and palm oil plantations that are replacing rain forests, but even so there is no real loss of carbon-storage capacity. More carbon could be stored in the soil than in the forest, and it could be done in a truly durable way. If the biomass from the forest, and wastes from continuing operations, were returned to the soil...
April 19, 2008
Enviro-Dorks
Or perhaps enviro-whiners. Tell me: How did it come to pass that virtue — a quality that for most of history has generally been deemed, well, a virtue — became a mark of liberal softheadedness? How peculiar, that doing the right thing by the environment — buying the hybrid, eating like a locavore — should now set you up for the Ed Begley Jr. treatment. The answer is obvious: being a green fashion victim is not virtuous, it is softheaded at best but likely worse. It accomplishes no more than changing your hat color. That isn't virtue, it's dim wits. There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing nothing, but perhaps the most insidious is that, whatever we do manage to do, it will be too little too late. Climate change is upon us, and it has arrived well ahead of schedule. Scientists’ projections that seemed dire a decade ago turn out to have been...
April 17, 2008
Truer Knowledge
Many posts here complain about poor experimental design. Most of them focus on natural systems, and a lot of those focus on climate change related issues. Recently, Sweet Nothings took issue with a study that jacked up the CO2 in a part of a field of soya, and then complained that insect predation increased. A realistic experiment, one that might yield useful information, would control for invasion from outside areas, and make changes slowly, as they would be in reality, since life adapts to change. Here's a new example of this type of problem. The main threat to many marine organisms is not global warming but ocean acidification, as carbon dioxide from the air dissolves into the water and turns into carbonic acid. Acid dissolves calcium carbonate in the skeletons of corals, for example; many scientists fear that acidification of the oceans will kill many, if not most, coral reefs by the end of the century. Similar concerns have...
April 13, 2008
Rootless Bloviation
About food. As Becker points out, Paul Ehrlich and others predicted in the 1970s (beginning with the first "Earth Day," in 1970) mass starvation as a result of continuing population growth. They were wrong, in part by failing to predict the Green Revolution, which greatly reduced the cost of food production. The situation today is different. The green revolution is misunderstood. The development and/or introduction of new food crops and new cultivars of old crops isn't novel, isn't revolutionary. It has happened repeatedly in the past and will happen again in future. New materials and methods for increasing soil fertility have also happened repeatedly in the past, and will happen again in future. It is no accident that these advances do not happen before time, before they are needed. So long as a given agronomic system is good enough, it will endure. When it isn't, it changes. The demand for agricultural products has grown, though not as a result...
April 11, 2008
Myth Makers
Why did Gintis call those who lie with statistics slimebags? You may say that they are well-intentioned, but that does not change the fact that they are liars out to mislead the uniformed. . . . how are we to identify and solve social problems if we do not know what they are? That earlier post faulted Krugman for pervasive slimebaggery, but the NYT in general is slimebag central for many of the issues I care about. The world has seen the first international conference on manufacturing meat. This is the process, tested so far only at laboratory scale, of growing pork, chicken, or beef through cell culture in vats instead of raising and slaughtering animals. My colleague Mark Bittman wrote a fine piece recently about the greenhouse-gas consequences of conventional meat production. Fine article? Just this week, the president of Brazil announced emergency measures to halt the burning and cutting of the country’s rain forests for crop and...
April 09, 2008
Half Way
The environmental movement, mired in bad analyses and even worse prescriptions, is in turmoil. . . . a funny thing has happened over the last several years, as opinion about the reality and urgency of the climate crisis has "tipped." The consensus that would allegedly result once broad public acceptance of anthropogenic climate change was achieved has fractured. . . . . . a variety of scientific and economic analysis has come out, not from opponents of action to address climate change but from supporters, suggesting that the policy framework developed by environmentalists in the early 1990's to address climate change will not be capable of achieving its objectives. . . . . . the IPCC may have vastly underestimated the likely growth of carbon emissions over the next century, and thus underestimated the scale of the technology challenge necessary to stabilize carbon levels in the atmosphere, and a raft of studies and other analysis suggesting that carbon caps,...
April 07, 2008
Slimebags
Gintis explains in a review of Thomas Sowell's Economic Facts and Fallacies. Everyone interested in economic and social policy should read this, and his other writings. Sowell is best as showing how statistics can mislead. For instance, he says "It is an undisputed fact that the average real income...of American households rose by only 6 percent over the entire period from 1969 to 1996...But it is an equally undisputed fact that the average real income per person in the United States rose by 51 percent over that very same period." (p. 125) Both are true because average household size decreased dramatically over the period, with more elderly couples and fewer children per married couple in the later period. Nota bene: commentators who give the household change while ignoring the individual change are slimebags. You may say that they are well-intentioned, but that does not change the fact that they are liars out to mislead the uniformed. Sowell often manages...
April 07, 2008
Green Ham
As usual, societies are being fleeced by governments and industries in the name of a crisis. By giving away greenhouse-gas emissions permits for free, Europe may hand power companies windfall profits of up to 71 billion euros—about $100 billion—and undermine the fight to curb emissions. . . In Europe, utilities have gotten almost all their emission permits for free, yet electricity rates have risen as if utilities had to pay for their permits. Utilities say that’s only natural, reflecting the “opportunity cost” they incur in not being able to sell their permits into the market. . . That’s why Europe plans to sell the permits starting in 2013—though several countries and many utilities are screaming to keep the free handouts. Cap-and-Trade? Surely you jest....
April 07, 2008
How Else?
The green exploitation industry is spinning in confusion lately as it becomes ever more necessary to retreat from some of their silliest advocacy positions - such as ethanol. “Dangerous Assumptions,” as it is titled, has been covered extensively by the mainstream media as a warning about ‘underplaying’ climate change. The environmental press, however, has attacked it for blandly pushing technology investment without taking into account the current technologies that could be deployed to fight climate change. Joseph Romm, over at Grist, for example, calls for more deployments of existing technologies over more R&D. What he, and a lot in the environmental movement miss, is that clean technologies, especially new energy tech, require a lot of development long after they are conceived or patented. Take the majority of industries that E2T follows–cellulosic ethanol, algae biodiesel, thin film solar PV–and it becomes clear that much of this technology still exists in journals and papers, not in the marketplace yet. Saying that...
April 02, 2008
Goose and Gander
Muddled thinking about climate change faith. [via Instapundit] When a panel of scientists addressed the ethical implications of geoengineering at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in February in Boston, it was a clear sign of how far this seemingly out-there field has advanced toward legitimacy. While no proposed geoengineering fixes have yet been tested on a global scale, all of them have the irresistible lure of immediacy. Once deposited, CO2 can linger in the atmosphere for more than 100 years, meaning it will take decades or centuries for emissions-reduction policies to cool the planet significantly. Geoengineering, on the other hand, could potentially send global temperatures back to preindustrial levels within only a few years, bringing the Arctic melt to a screeching halt and keeping extreme weather patterns and rising sea levels associated with warming in check. "Every simulation that's been done shows that geoengineering doesn't bring the climate back perfectly," says Ken Caldeira, an...
March 26, 2008
Poli Tards
Many Green Tards are also, perhaps primarily, Political Tards. . . . an assistant professor in the Truman School of Public Affairs at MU, recently surveyed 1,000 adults concerning their attitudes about the environment. The survey polled respondents about their levels of concern for the environment and preferences for government action to address a wide set of environmental issues. A strong majority of the public expressed general concern about the environment. According to the survey, the top three issues that the public wants the government to address are protecting community drinking water, reducing pollution of U.S. rivers and lakes, and improving urban air pollution issues like smog. In the survey, global warming ranks eighth in importance. . . the best predictor of individuals’ environmental preferences is their political attributes. They examined the relationship between party identification and political ideology and support for action to address environmental problems. “The survey reinforced the stark differences in people’s environmental attitudes, depending on...
March 22, 2008
Dimonomics
I read a lot of crack pot arguments on the net, as do you. It's the net. Still, I'm surprised and disappointed at how many of them come from supposedly educated folks of supposedly more than average intelligence. Education and intelligence aren't much help it seems, except in getting a gig. See this supposed rebuttal to the brain dead ideas of Steven Levitt that driving is better than walking, from an environmental perspective, since food is more harmful than fossil fuels. One would not expect a man of Mr Levitt's analytical ability to buy this argument, delightfully counterintuitive as it is. It seems to assume an awful lot: that the distance traveled is neither too short or too long, that the calories are entirely replaced, that the replacement calories come from animal products, that the car gets greater than 24 miles to the gallon, that the car does not contribute to congestion, thereby slowing other drivers and increasing emissions,...
March 17, 2008
95% Kosher
The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. [I]t seems odd that after hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising and $20 billion in sales, no one is sure what organic food is. There are two sides to the organic food issue to most people; genetics and chemicals. . . There are people rightfully concerned that genetic modification of fruits or vegetables can lead to unknown consequences. . . In looking at the history of agriculture, almost everything is 'genetically modified', they just use a different name for it. . . Professor Lee Silver . . . put it much more succinctly than I can: ... organic food is defined not by any material substance in the food itself, but instead by the "holistic" methods used on organic farms. Furthermore, the physical attributes of the product and any effects it might have on environment or health are explicitly excluded from U.S., European, and international definitions. The implicit, unproven...
March 11, 2008
Tis A Gift
A current example of the harm resulting from backward looking politics and moralities is in the news. [via FuturePundit] The growth in China's carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is far outpacing previous estimates, making the goal of stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gases much more difficult, according to a new analysis by economists at the University of California, Berkeley, and UC San Diego. Previous estimates, including those used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, say the region that includes China will see a 2.5 to 5 percent annual increase in CO2 emissions, the largest contributor to atmospheric greenhouse gases, between 2004 and 2010. The new UC analysis puts that annual growth rate for China to at least 11 percent for the same time period. The politics of limits and the ethics or moralities of simplification and self-denial blink reality. If emissions are a problem then local reductions in the comparatively sparsely populated developed world are simply irrelevant. The overwhelming majority of...
March 10, 2008
Natural Rhythm
Since I'm involved in agriculture rather than manufacturing or service I don't pay much attention to clocks. What matters is the sun, and that's quite variable at this latitude. I rise with the birds, who anticipate sunrise and shriek their joy, and tend my animals who are more than ready to begin their day too. And, like them, I rest during the day when it is too long, and often too warm, but work again in the late afternoon and evening with the lingering light of mid summer. Still, I have to deal with the rest of the world and they are clock watchers. It's a real pain for them that clocks change due to political shenanigans. If you cursed daylight savings time for throwing a wrench in your schedule this weekend, you have Congress to thank. It extended daylight savings time last year by four weeks, citing claims of reduced crime, fewer automobile accidents, more light for summer...
March 01, 2008
Farsight
Charlie Stross boggles at the difficulty a modern SF writer has in plausibly predicting near futures in fiction. Here, in a nutshell, is why writing near-future SF has become so difficult. Say you want to set a story 30 years out, and as part of your world-building exercise you want to work out what technologies will be in widespread use by the time of the story. Back in 1900 to 1950 you could do so with a fair degree of accuracy; pick a couple of embryonic technologies and assume they'll be widespread (automobiles, aircraft, television): maybe throw in a couple of wildcards for good measure (wrist-watch telephones), and you're there. But today, that 30-year window is inaccessible. Even a 15-year horizon is pushing it. Something new could come along tomorrow and overrun the entire developed world before 2023. He bases this conclusion on evidence of the time compression for technology spread. In the day it took a century for...
February 20, 2008
Toxic Watermelons
One of the glaring weaknesses of climate change hysterics is their lack of comprehension of climate change. This isn't only true for the uninformed majority, it is also true for advocacy groups and many scientists. Their arguments are unpersuasive even when one is sympathetic to the thesis. Climate Science has reported that the narrow focus on carbon emissions as the dominate threat to society and the environment has unleashed unanticipated consequences (e.g., see Has The IPCC Produced A Hydra?). A recent (February 8, 2008) New York Time article by Elisabeth Rosenthal Biofuels Deemed A Greenhouse Threat provide yet another example of the inappropriate and inaccurate focus on just one human influence on the climate system. An excerpt from the article summarizes the issue, Almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of producing these “green” fuels are taken into account, two studies being published Thursday have concluded. “This land...
February 04, 2008
Forests and Trees
Anti-humanist political activists have been foaming about deforestation for decades. Several different types of activist use the same data to support their biases. The best solution to this problem? Free contraceptives and other forms of birth control to everyone in the world. We have too many people. We aren't going to persuade them all to consume less. They will gobble up more and more habitat. Since large chunks of our elites have decided (in a sort of madness of the intellectual crowds) that anthropogenic global warming (now renamed as Climate Change as part of that madness) is the biggest problem facing the planet they have decided that habitat loss must be seen through the lens of global warming (er, climate change). I suspect that they are in basic agreement but have different emphases. They can't imagine really mobilizing to stop the problem of habitat destruction unless they can shout "Climate Change!" It is not enough for them to say...
January 29, 2008
Liberal Myths
Timothy thinks and thinks about ways to improve academia so that it begins to deliver the semi-mythic liberal arts education. This is in part a response to criticism of the state of universities and calls for external regulation to overcome what some see as structural factors that inhibit progress and genuine intellectual engagement, and in part a desire to improve individual outcomes independent of concerns about narrowness or indoctrination. If I don’t want to have a test of a fixed body of knowledge, but I agree that we ought to have benchmarks, what represents the bull’s eye? I figure that if you can identify a successful embodiment of the liberal arts in professional and personal life, and the person who represents that successful standard feels that the content of their education produced ways of thinking about the world that led to that success, you might have a better idea about what kinds of courses and teaching approaches would favor...
January 22, 2008
Reasonably Wrong
Often when I read economists I find their reasoning to be good though their conclusions are false. This happens not only with economists, I just read them often so they provide abundant examples. If we know that the earth is warming, but are uncertain about how fast and with what effects on climates worldwide, what are the most urgent steps that we should take to address it? One, of course, is to keep studying climate phenomena and their ecological impact. Another is to promote research and development aimed at remediation. We urgently need to understand what alternatives to fossil fuels there will be, how much energy can be conserved, how to extract CO2 from the atmosphere, and, if necessary, how to increase the earth’s albedo, its reflectance of incoming sunlight. One way to ensure the necessary R&D is to rely on the market to finance and direct the work by using taxes, subsidies, rationing, and – most important –...
January 16, 2008
Good Grief
Great effort has gone into politicizing education. Kids end up highly indoctrinated, but poorly educated. Nearly three out of four students surveyed in the annual Lemelson-MIT Invention Index think high-tech inventions can help solve issues such as climate change and natural-resource depletion within the next 10 years—and 64 percent of them think they could come up with the a-ha moment themselves, compared to 38 percent of adults. The problem? A majority of United States teens say their science education is lacking and that they aren’t prepared to pursue careers in engineering and technology. All dressed up and nowhere to go. If those responsible for failing to educate the kids actually cared about the issues they spend so much effort politicizing they couldn't help but realize that they are working at cross purposes to their stated objectives. School authorities’ cancellation of a talk that a Nobel laureate climate researcher was to have given to high school students has deeply divided...
January 14, 2008
Even Bigger Pics
In Bigger Pictures the selective use of factoids to support advocacy was noted and questioned since doing so misleads people and often results in mistaken views or bad policies. More. Corn doesn’t grow like a weed. Modern corn farming involves heavy inputs of nitrogen fertilizer (made with natural gas), applications of herbicides and other chemicals (made mostly from oil), heavy machinery (which runs on diesel) and transportation (diesel again). Converting the corn into fuel requires still more energy. The ratio of how much energy is used to make ethanol versus how much it delivers is known as the energy balance, and calculating it is surprisingly complex. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory states that, “Today, 1 Btu of fossil energy consumed in producing and delivering corn ethanol results in 1.3 Btu of usable energy in your fuel tank.” Even that modest payback may be overstated. Skeptics cite the research of Cornell University professor David Pimentel, who estimates that it takes...
January 10, 2008
Power Drinks
The illusion of action and competence is what politics is about. Offering a tangible plan that promises this tax incentive, that fact-finding commission, this reinvestment project, this funding for retraining doesn’t reach people who perceive the present as a slum left behind by a low-rent version of Benjamin’s angel of history. In fact, all it does is convince them that the candidate with the plans is one of those folks with his hands on the levers, one of them who always seems to come out on top. . . There isn’t a policy package that can straightforwardly address some of the underlying structural changes in the global political economy that affect Peoria as surely as they affect Shenzen. Your wonkish arms are too short to box with that god. I don’t think anyone is the master of these changes, even though some people and social classes and systems have way more power to direct what is happening than others....
December 26, 2007
Green E. D.
It's true, greens can't perform. Worse, they try to prevent others from doing so by smearing fud on everything. Japan . . . Flirts With Environmental Disaster Fifty-five million years ago the world's climate was catastrophically changed when volcanoes melted natural gas frozen in the seabed. Now Japan plans to drill for the same icy crystals to end its reliance on imported energy. . . Japan is joining the U.S. and Canada in test drilling for methane even as scientists express concerns about any uncontrolled release of the frozen chemical. Some researchers blame the greenhouse gas for triggering a global firestorm that helped wipe out the dinosaurs. They just want to huddle together under the bed and whine. Others don't have these defects. In the West, this potential fuel from the ocean floor has for the most part been the stuff of fantasy. But it's a different story in Asia. The People's Republic of China is investing millions to...
December 18, 2007
More Piling On
Shorter Muck&Mystery Much of climate debate is exactly backwards. Advocates are spending far too much time arguing over how important that it is that others change their behavior, usually in ways that those doing the advocating would want regardless of climate change. In this way climate change becomes not a problem to be solved but a political weapon in service of other goals. The alternative to the dominant approach to climate change would be to initiate those steps that will actually make a difference, thus enabling political compromise. As Dan Sarewitz and I have often argued it is often technological advances that enable compromise rather than vice versa. And in the case of climate change those steps that will actually make a difference begin with making the costs of producing alternative energy cheaper than fossil fuels (as Shellenberger and Nordhaus have argued, and now Google), and working to make people and ecosystems more resilient/less vulnerable to climate impacts. Of...
December 17, 2007
Piling On
You might not know it from media reports and the self congratulation of advocates but Bali was a bust. The Bali global warming talks ended in nothing, but that didn't stop European leaders from pointing to the bright side: the U.S. was booed. Here's Wash Post: "As we saw in the room today, the political price for blocking things has come up in recent months," said Connie Hedegaard, the Danish climate and energy minister, whose government will host the 2009 treaty talks. Hedegaard was referring to boos the U.S. representative got after rejecting emissions reductions goals and timetables. But having diplomats boo each other would seem to indicate a new nadir, not a new peak, in climate negotiations. (At least WWF's climate head was honest, acknowledging that, "in the process, we lost substance.") The truth is that those countries that ratified Kyoto haven't any more reduced their emissions than the U.S. Those countries that have did so for reasons...
December 13, 2007
Earth to Bali
It may seem rude to interrupt the Bali fantasy, but reality will rear its ugly head at some point. Better now. Here's a recipe to head off the worst effects of global warming: Start with 30 new nuclear power plants around the world. Add 17,0000 wind turbines, 400 biomass power plants, two hydroelectric dams the size of China's Three Gorges Dam, and 42 coal or natural gas power plants equipped with still-experimental systems to sequester their carbon dioxide emissions underground. Build everything in 2013. Repeat every year until 2030. It's an intentionally implausible plan presented this week by the International Energy Agency to make a point: For all the talk about emissions reductions, the actual work is way beyond what the world can achieve. As delegates from 190 countries gather here on the Indonesian island of Bali to negotiate a "road map" for the successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming, some experts are wondering whether the...
December 13, 2007
Dim Economics
I grow increasingly displeased with the low quality output from The Economist, especially its blog. DEBATES over energy policy have an odd way of turning typical ideological stereotypes on their heads. This peculiar effect has recently been on display as the handful of conservative leaders and pundits who acknowledge the threat of warming have offered their policy prescriptions. Strikingly, given the source (remember Newt Gingrich?), conservative plans lean heavily on government funding for technology research, relying upon the wisdom of central planners to spot the most promising avenues for innovation. Wrong, cry liberal critics. We can only hope to halt warming through carbon pricing, which will slow energy demand growth and allow the market to find the best technological investments. This is false. The ideologies are playing out as usual. Conservatives wish to keep the dead hand of government out of the market and statists want ever tighter control. Conservatives aren't against government. They have always been happy to...
December 11, 2007
Blurred Vision
They never had good vision, and they are getting very old now. They still embrace the situation though: Be realistic - demand the impossible!. Environmental groups and the European Union are calling for a more stringent 25%–40% reduction in greenhouse gases under 1990 levels by 2020 to be included in the agreement reached in Bali. This range is mentioned in the draft text of the agreement. . . But a group of nations including the United States, Canada, Australia and Japan is opposed to including this specific range in the final output from the two-week conference — even as a guide. . . “The spirit of Kyoto is dying,” says Kimiko Hirata of the Kiko Network — a Japanese non-governmental organisation dedicated to implementing the Kyoto Protocol — who was in Bali today. . . Just a day after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore were formally awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo for their...
December 11, 2007
Chickens and Eggs
Lest you are worried that I have gone over to the darkside, here is some red blooded climate scepticism. I've been expecting some to balance all the pixels being spent on the Bali holiday junket. First, more model criticism. A new study comparing the composite output of 22 leading global climate models with actual climate data finds that the models do an unsatisfactory job of mimicking climate change in key portions of the atmosphere. . . “The usual discussion is whether the climate model forecasts of Earth’s climate 100 years or so into the future are realistic,” said the lead author, Dr. David H. Douglass from the University of Rochester. “Here we have something more fundamental: Can the models accurately explain the climate from the recent past? “It seems that the answer is no.” . . . “The last 25 years constitute a period of more complete and accurate observations, and more realistic modeling efforts,” said Dr. Fred Singer...
December 07, 2007
Next Screen
Climate change advocates are stuck on stupid. The "global" problem of climate change is endlessly discussed, but rarely looked at in a cold light. The crux of the matter is that all of us, everywhere, share this same monumental problem. To prosper we need energy security; but if we persist in using fossil-fuels with current technologies, our prosperity will founder. Cold light? Well, I suppose you could call it that if by cold you mean mental inactivity, as in dead. It isn't certain that by continuing to use fossil fuels that our prosperity will founder. It could even be the opposite. It isn't clear that the air can't be processed to remove some carbon, and it isn't clear that some of the other mechanisms lumped together as geo-engineering won't relieve pressures. It isn't even clear that the net result of warming will not be positive, though there would be huge change as climate zones shifted. The roadmap drawn up...
December 03, 2007
Tunnel Vision
I've argued in many previous posts against narrow views. This is one of the chief defects of the environmental movement, dating from decades ago when planning and systems thinking were touted as answers to various social ills. The inability to get useful and timely information to drive the simplistic models of the planners doomed the approach to failure, but that's not the only defect. In all cases the projects weren't even remotely plausible unless the systems described were narrowly bounded cartoon versions of reality. You can sell something like that to the gullible, but it can't possibly work. Advocates began with some vision, some fantasy about a simplified world that they found compelling, and worked back from that vision, discarding any contrary information and unknowable aspects, to construct their models. After decades of futility and defeat most have abandoned the idea of being able to usefully model these systems, no matter how powerful their computers have become, and now...
November 30, 2007
Bum's Rush
The increasingly loud and hysterical claims of the eco-feudalists in the run up to Bali is an example of why we can benefit from listening to some of the views of those like O'Neill and Gintis. Consider: O'Neill: [L]et’s first deal with the luddites, locavores and eco-feudalists who have given anti-capitalism a bad name. Gintis: [A] truly progressive movement must built on technical progress that is impeded by the reigning powers that be . . . not the beggar-thy-neighbor, zero-sum-game sort of redistribution favored by Krugman. An eco-feudalist: Time is running out. And while talking is key, demonstrating a willingness to take action is desperately urgent. An ambitious, robust and fair deal on climate change will have three key elements: a firm commitment from the north to push for a 2-degree target, backed up by credible domestic measures the provision of big developing-country emitters with the technology, investment and incentives to go for low-carbon growth an increased focus on...
November 26, 2007
Just Listen
I feel that I am misunderstood. That's my fault of course for not speaking clearly. Fortunately, Herb Gintis speaks. This is what I would say if I could speak clearly. [via Free Exchange] "Being progressive,'' says Paul Krugman in the concluding pages of The Conscience of a Liberal, "means being partisan." Like Krugman, my training lies in economics, but unlike Krugman, I am not partisan. Rather, I take a policy orientation to social issues: there are problems to be solved in order to enhance the lives of citizens, and it is our job to discover and publicize solutions to these problems. Krugman's partisan stance only clouds the issues. I'm not an economist, but I think that any other discipline would serve as well here, and Krugman could be replaced by any number of partisans since they are as thick as thieves. The idea that partisanship trumps good policy is the glaring defect with Krugman and those other partisans. For...
November 21, 2007
Hissy Fit
Here's an example of the silliness and political chicanery noted in Much Ado. How does a high-level federal policymaker go on and on about energy policy, energy "balance," energy technology, clean coal, etc. without the slightest nod to climate change? . . . Senator Cornyn's op-ed does one thing: it paints very clearly the climate policy battle lines, and provides a strong reality check for the attitudes that are and are not changing. If you can't get a U.S. Senator to deign to mention climate in a 700-word piece on energy balance, you can see dirt flying from the trenches as they get dug deeper. And the opposite. If you can't get a climate hysteric to deign to mention economics and geopolitics in a blog rant, you can see dirt flying from the trenches as they get dug deeper. When you read the article without the hysteria and political agenda it's merely a bland political position that at best...
November 19, 2007
Much Ado
About exceedingly little. Locavore, for those of you who missed its Oxford Word of the Year coming out party, refers to an individual attempting to maintain a diet of locally produced food--with local generally assumed to mean within about 100 miles. Many wonderful qualities are (dubiously) ascribed to locavorism, including increased happiness in agricultural communities and rejuvenated local economies, but the primary selling point appears to be a reduction in global carbon emissions. . . Or so the thinking goes. In fact, emissions per unit of food depend heavily on how the food is shipped. . . Mr Harford [Undercover Economist and recent addition to the economics blogosphere] continues: Two-thirds of the social costs of the food distribution system have nothing directly to do with the environment at all: They are attributable to accidents and congestion. More than half of those costs are caused by driving to the shops. My socially responsible advice to you, then, is not to...
November 19, 2007
The Obvious
Paying attention to politics is unrewarding. Those who practice it seem to be intellectually challenged, save for a sort of venal craftiness, and those who support it descend to that level even though they may demonstrate high capabilities in other areas. So, to repeat the obvious for the benefit of politicians and political supporters: [U]ntil now the Nobel Peace Prize has been clearly recognized as a political award. The award to the IPCC thus implies that the IPCC is not a predominately scientific, but is in fact a political process: the award equates the scientific study of climate change with political advocacy. As we already knew. The IPCC is a political advocacy group like all other UN groups. That's all the UN is or ever has been, and it's a low sort of politics that reflects the low sort of politics of the world, especially Europe which still struggles to find its way in the world after centuries of...
October 27, 2007
Old Time Religion
Regulation religion that is. I have no problem with Stossel pointing out uncertainties in our understanding of climate, or even arguing in an opinion piece that "the debate is not over." But I'm not at all certain his viewers understood that his "Give Me a Break" segment on global warming was not actually journalism but straight up bloviation. Stossel is clearly motivated less by a desire to follow the truth than by blind allegiance to a laissez-faire ideology. Since the free market alone probably cannot solve global warming, Stossel's ideology likely will prevent him from ever acknolwedging even the possibility of a threat from anthropogenic climate change. He is therefore disqualified from covering this issue as a journalist. Disqualified? What kind of idiocy is that? And the regulation advocates are motivated by a desire to follow the truth? Hardly. Stossel's sins are no greater than those who have alternative beliefs. Blind allegiance to a totalitarian ideology, like that supported...
October 12, 2007
Nurse Ratchet
Here's a not very insightful discussion of a quoted passage from Break Through by Shellenberger and Nordhaus, the Death of Environmentalism twins. The passage: “In America, the political left and political right have conspired to create a culture and politics of victimization, and all the benefits of resentment and cynicism have accrued to the right. That’s because resentment and apocalypse are weapons that can be used only to advance a politics of resentment and apocalypse. They are the weapons of the reactionary and the conservative — of people who fear and resist the future. Just as environmentalists believe they can create a great ecological politics out of apocalypse, liberals believe they can create a great progressive politics out of resentment; they cannot. Grievance and victimization make us smaller and less generous and can thus serve only reactionaries and conservatives.” My emphasis. S&N have been humming this tune for quite a while. ...the stalemate over addressing global warming highlights the...
October 08, 2007
Caplan's Fallacy
Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, this must be done. Robin Hanson quotes Caplan in Regulation Ratchet. [I]t seems biased to call for more regulation given a certain cue, without calling for less regulation given some other cue. If we all agreed we have too little regulation, then we should just add more regardless of whether news is good or bad. This bias would seem to produce a regulation ratchet: increased regulation after bad times, but little change after good times. Of course this by itself doesn't say if we have too much or not enough regulation; it just says the time trend is wrong. Perhaps this regulation ratchet arises from a hindsight bias, i.e., an illusion that regulators could have foreseen current crises, combined with a tendency to more often think "something must be done" in bad times, combined with Caplan's fallacy . . . The regulation ratchet is bad at every level and time scale,...
October 07, 2007
Panacea Traps
Thanks to an unnamed angel I have been reading the articles in a PNAS special feature: Going Beyond Panaceas. The abstract from the lead perspectives article sums up. In the context of governance of human–environment interactions, a panacea refers to a blueprint for a single type of governance system (e.g., government ownership, privatization, community property) that is applied to all environmental problems. The aim of this special feature is to provide theoretical analysis and empirical evidence to caution against the tendency, when confronted with pervasive uncertainty, to believe that scholars can generate simple models of linked social– ecological systems and deduce general solutions to the overuse of resources. Practitioners and scholars who fall into panacea traps falsely assume that all problems of resource governance can be represented by a small set of simple models, because they falsely perceive that the preferences and perceptions of most resource users are the same. Readers of this special feature will become acquainted with...
October 01, 2007
Loopy Economics
OK, it's not real economics, just pseudo-economic punditry. Mr Sachs writes that the world faces a growing triple threat--rising food prices, conversion of food into fuel, and global warming--which will hit those living in the least developed nations hardest. It isn't particularly difficult to see where he's coming from. Wheat prices have been navigating unknown territory recently, due in part to high food demand but also to reduced wheat acreage in response to high prices, and high subsidies, for fuel crops. It seems that it's been a bad year for Australian wheat growers as well. The Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Research Economics (ABARE) today released its latest crop forecast as drought grips much of southern Australia. "Winter grain production in 2007/08 is forecast to total 25.6 million tonnes," the forecast said. "Even though this amount is well above last year's drought affected crop, it will be around 27 per cent below the five year average." The forecast for...
September 30, 2007
More Assumptions
A post from a few days ago, Assume Something, lamented the low and declining public credibility about the environmental community, and the scientific discourse more generally due to deliberate manipulation of information to advance political and cultural agendas. A case in point. Projecting Heat-Related Mortality Impacts Under a Changing Climate in the New York City Region -- Knowlton et al., 10.2105/AJPH.2006.102947 American Journal of Public Health analyses the effect of climate change on heat-related premature mortality. They get increases in the 2050s between 47% to 95%, with a mean 70% increase compared with the 1990s, and a decrease of these estimates by 25% due to acclimatization (i.e. being used to it, more use of air conditioning). . . What I'd like to see is a validation of this method by using 1963 US data on mortality and air conditioning use in today's climate. In 1963 domestic air conditioning had just recently become affordable and was still a middle class...
September 16, 2007
Assume Something
Anything. Determine your heart's desire, and assume that it is true. First, any model, by virtue of being a reasonable expression of a particular worldview, is necessarily incomplete and contingent. Second, because models immediately become part of the dialog that they are drawn from, they reflexively affect that dialog in ways which are essentially impossible to predict, and which invalidate the assumptions that underlie the model. Thus, modern science requires models, but all models are necessarily normative, partial and contingent, and most models reflexively falsify their assumptions, and thus invalidate their predictions. Needless to say, this conundrum poses significant problems for the scientific discourse going forward. Do all models reflexively falsify their assumptions, or it is just the ones that deal with politically contentious issues? Note, however, that the problem of models arises primarily from their misuse in discourse, rather than from models themselves. That models are contingent and normative does not mean they are wrong in themselves. But...
September 14, 2007
Double Muddle
Reading the contorted arguments pf politicized economists (and their pseudo-environmentalist supporters) is amusing. One implication of the Earth system’s deep nonlinearities is that estimates of climatic parameters based on observations from the recent past are unreliable for making forecasts about the state of the world at CO2 concentrations of 560 p.p.m. or higher. Moreover, the nonlinearities mean that doing more of a bad deal (Kyoto) may well be very good. These truths seem to escape Lomborg. His cost–benefit analysis involves only point estimates of variables (interpreted variously as ‘most likely’, ‘expected’, and so forth), implying that he believes we shouldn’t buy insurance against potentially enormous losses resulting from climate change. His concerns over the prevalence of malaria, undernutrition and HIV in today’s world show that he is an egalitarian. There is, then, an internal contradiction in his value system, because if you are averse to inequality you should also be averse to uncertainty. May well be very good? Is...
September 10, 2007
Misère
I read a lot of "best sentence of the day" posts. Au contraire. . . The strongest argument against significant action is not from cost-benefit analysis in the narrow sense, but simply that we are not very good at producing international public goods. Especially when it comes to extended, intertemporal collective action problems directed against small probability events, with unclear periodic feedback, and dealing with the Chinese and the Indians, who feel they have the right to pollute as much as we did, and also with the not-nearly-as-cooperative-as-they-might-sound Europeans. . . This one is better. This argument sounds immoral and indeed perhaps is immoral -- "we're ruining things for others, yet if we tried to fix things we would ruin the fixing, so let's do nothing." Yet I do not think this issue should be disregarded. If I can't open up my computer, dissemble it, and then put it back together again, surely my repair plans should take that...
August 29, 2007
Mind Death
The notion that political activism deadens the mind has been mooted in several earlier posts. (BTW, that idea didn't originate with me, but I forget where I first encountered it.) An aspect of that was part of the discussion of Dyson's essay in Necessary Heresy. It bears repeating: [T]he experts who talk publicly about politically contentious questions tend to speak more clearly than they think. They make confident predictions about the future, and end up believing their own predictions. Their predictions become dogmas which they do not question. Here's a recent example. Matt Nisbet has a good paper out now about polling results on global warming. . . The polling supports what we've been saying for a while: the public is there. They believe (even if they think the scientific consensus isn't as strong as it really is). . . So why are we (through our electeds) still not doing anything about it then? Because even the public realizes...
August 22, 2007
Kill Them All
The climate change farce is growing ever worse. Now Moose belches are being cited as a cause of climate change. [via Instapundit -> News & Comment] Norway is concerned that its national animal, the moose, is harming the climate by emitting an estimated 2,100 kilos of carbon dioxide a year through its belching and farting. Norwegian newspapers, citing research from Norway's technical university, said a motorist would have to drive 13,000 kilometers in a car to emit as much CO2 as a moose does in a year. Bacteria in a moose's stomach create methane gas which is considered even more destructive to the environment than carbon dioxide gas. Cows pose the same problem . . . Norway has some 120,000 moose but an estimated 35,000 are expected to be killed in this year's moose hunting season, which starts on September 25 . . . Well, climate is always changing, and there have been moose around for a long time,...
August 15, 2007
Necessary Heresy
I have a healthy respect for my ignorance. Everything I know is wrong. But, I don't think I'm as ignorant as many others who are proud of their knowledge. This gives me an unfair advantage sometimes, and at other times makes me a sucker for contrarian and heretical thought. In the modern world, science and society often interact in a perverse way. We live in a technological society, and technology causes political problems. The politicians and the public expect science to provide answers to the problems. Scientific experts are paid and encouraged to provide answers. The public does not have much use for a scientist who says, “Sorry, but we don’t know”. The public prefers to listen to scientists who give confident answers to questions and make confident predictions of what will happen as a result of human activities. So it happens that the experts who talk publicly about politically contentious questions tend to speak more clearly than they...
July 27, 2007
Boutique Fuels
Several pundits have discussed this Jesse Ausubel opinion piece that flatly denounces several flavors of renewable energy systems and proposes increased use of nuclear power instead. This article is an example. Ausubel . . . says the key renewable energy sources, including sun, wind, and biomass, would all require vast amounts of land if developed up to large scale production – unlike nuclear power. That land would be far better left alone, he says. Renewables are "boutique fuels" says Ausubel, of Rockefeller University in New York, US. "They look attractive when they are quite small. But if we start producing renewable energy on a large scale, the fallout is going to be horrible." Instead, Ausubel argues for renewed development of nuclear. "If we want to minimise the rape of nature, the best energy solution is increased efficiency, natural gas with carbon capture, and nuclear power." Critics point out that there are some misleading assumptions in Ausubel's analysis. John Turner...
July 12, 2007
More Cranks
Creeps and Cranks noted the small and diminishing leftist extreme that clings to paleo-socialist ideas and so doubts climate change as being a capitalist plot. The marquee slogan in the new cold war on global warming is that the scientific consensus is virtually unanimous. This is utterly false. The overwhelming majority of climate computer modelers, the beneficiaries of the $2 billion-a-year global warming grant industry, certainly believe in it but not necessarily most real climate scientists-people qualified in atmospheric physics, climatology and meteorology. It was noted that "this puts them in a similar position to some of the right, not allies precisely but singing some of the same hymns, from different hymnals, and so unintentionally supporting one another." For example: I've long thought that the anthropogenic global warming/overwhelming scientific alarmism campaign involves a nexus between politics and marketing, and that to this end, the average person (especially in the United States) is being kept in the dark as much...
July 04, 2007
Clerk Spoor
I too read Tyler's recent link to a muddled and ahistorical account of the conflicts about water in the Klamath area. I considered debunking it, but really, this is widely available information. Only willful ignorance*, political cynicism or, well, whatever, could have resulted in the vacuous arguments being made. Today Tyler links to a rebuttal. Someone made the effort. It is unfortunately characterized as a conflict between libertarian and authoritarian world views. This is only part of the problem. Those nuturing either bias would have to reach different conclusions if they simply considered the data available. It clearly contradicts the authoritarian view while also revealing that there are insufficient mechanisms in place for a libertarian solution. It may be that either approach could "fix" things, though that is improbable. Eric, the debunker, did a nice job of grounding the discussion in reality. According to this article, "Starting in the 1920s, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation drained most of Tule...
June 10, 2007
Creeps and Cranks
One of the fascinating threads of reaction to the politicization of climate change is on the hard left. One of the better known proponents of this view is Alexander Cockburn, a Scot with a socialist father, who grew up in Ireland and moved to America, and has worked as a journalist for numerous leftist publications. He describes himself as a muckraker with all the right enemies. He has an unusual combination of positions since he opposed the wars of recent decades and the "global warming myth", as he sees it. Dissidents Against Dogma. [via Catallarchy] We should never be more vigilant than at the moment a new dogma is being installed. The claque endorsing what is now dignified as "the mainstream theory" of global warming stretches all the way from radical greens through Al Gore to George W. Bush, who signed on at the end of May. The left has been swept along, entranced by the allure of weather...
June 07, 2007
American Way
Europe's knee jerk response to problems, such as climate change, is to hector businesses and individuals to "behave better". This is because their societies are stagnant, do not innovate and have no churn, no competition that allows newcomers entry, advancement and even dominance, however temporary. But in America . . . The open frontier view was captured by a Silicon Valley representative in the room. He stood up to announce that "clean tech" would be to this decade what high-tech was to the 1990s. The companies that would revolutionize our energy usage, he claimed, were now being funded by venture capitalists, and the Ciscos, Microsofts and Googles of the next decade would be the companies that solved the energy puzzle. We hadn't heard of any of them now, he insisted, but they would be huge. Is he right? Maybe. Who cares? It's his money, and the money of his colleagues in the Valley. The point is, if there's a...
May 31, 2007
Blowing Smoke
Lars Smith summarizes a Stratfor article. The realists are winning. In the EU they have been greatly strengthened by the demonstrated willingness of Russia to use energy for political blackmail. The idealists are in the impossible position of simultaneously arguing that climate change represents the possible end of the world, but that the situation is not so dire that we need to turn to nuclear energy or “clean coal” technology. From the article: On one hand are the idealists who have pressed for energy policies that dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, that work only toward renewable energy sources and that do not include either nuclear power or coal. They did not come all this way to see the revival of nuclear power, the perfection of “clean coal” technology or drastic subsidies for ethanol producers. Their activism was driven by a desire to spur a new economy. However, they are the ones who simultaneously say that climate change represents the...
May 12, 2007
Mental Rut
As noted in many previous posts I find agrichar to be very interesting, and applaud the work of researchers who are attempting to better understand how it improves soil, how to produce it most effectively and its relationship to soil microorganisms. But that doesn't immunize them from criticism when they go over to the dark side. Johannes Lehmann, writing in a Nature commentary, engages in some counterproductive rent seeking. To meet the challenges of global climate change, greenhouse-gas emissions must be reduced. Emissions from fossil fuels are the largest contributor to the anthropogenic greenhouse effect, so a reduction in fossil-energy use is a clear priority. Yet, because some emissions will be unavoidable, a responsible strategy also means actively withdrawing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Such carbon sequestration faces multi-faceted challenges: the net withdrawal of carbon dioxide must be long term and substantial, the process must be accountable and must have a low risk of rapid or large-scale leakage. One...
May 09, 2007
Piled Higher
The possession of advanced degrees, participation in institutions, and recognition do not necessarily indicate any useful knowledge or reasoning skills. Often it seems to merely indicate indoctrination. [A] high proportion of energy, industrial and transportation emissions is generated by urban areas. Although most of the electricity and fuels are produced outside cities, they are aimed at satisfying cities’ “thirst” of energy. Therefore, urban areas place a huge burden not only on the absorptive capacity of the local environment; Nonsense. Cities can be very energy efficient on a per capita basis, it's just that there are a lot of people jammed cheek by jowl into them. More importantly, energy use is an indication of a high quality of life, something that we should desire for all humans. The implied criticism of calling it a “thirst”, as if it was a vice or an addiction like alcoholism, is entirely mistaken. [U]rban centers concentrate a large proportion of coastal and other populations...
May 04, 2007
Expert Texpert
Don't you think the joker laughs at you-oo-oo? This week in Nature we have a news story on an attempt to follow up Frank Keppler's work on methane produced aerobically by green plants which we published early last year (news story | paper). The Keppler piece, which suggested that methane emissions from green plants were a significant but previously unappreciated factor in global methane emissions, caused quit a lot of fuss, understandably, in the media -- since methane is a greenhouse gas which, over short time horizons, is about 75 times more powerful than -- and quite a lot of befuddlement among plant scientists. If it were true, it would have significant implications for the way that people model methane production, and the levels of production that one might predict in a warming world. The debate rumbled on last year (another news report, this time by my colleague Quirin). The new work that Tom Dueck and colleagues have published...
April 22, 2007
Whacko Day
It's that time again, and this seems to be a plague year for environmental psychoses. Even the empty headed upper crust socialites have jumped on the tacky green bandwagon, yet again showing their total lack of style or grace. There are two main points I have been pressing about this disease: one is that the activists have no true concern for the environment - the real environment not the mythical one they agonize about, and the other is that the predictions of pundits and activists are simply laughable, yet we do not hold them accountable when their hysterical predictions are shown by the passage of time to be every bit as insane as wiser commentators noted when those predictions were made. It's not about the environment, it's merely politics. For a classic account of the idiocy of this quasi-religious political festival see this old Ron Bailey article from 2000. Earth Day, Then and Now. How did the doomsters get...
April 15, 2007
Military Intelligence
I know, it's an oxymoron, and we have a recent example of the problem. The effects of global warming, the study said, could lead to large-scale migrations, increased border tensions, the spread of disease and conflicts over food and water. All could lead to direct involvement by the United States military. The report recommends that climate change be integrated into the nation’s security strategies and says the United States “should commit to a stronger national and international role to help stabilize climate changes at levels that will avoid significant disruption to global security and stability.” "Stabilize climate changes". What are these folks smoking!? In March, a report from the Global Business Network, which advises intelligence agencies and the Pentagon on occasion, concluded, among other things, that rising seas and more powerful storms could eventually generate unrest as crowded regions like Bangladesh’s sinking delta become less habitable. One of the authors of the report, Peter Schwartz, a consultant who studies...
April 07, 2007
Dirty Secrets II
I'm out of touch, out of step with pop culture and consciousness. My social reader isn't well calibrated. One part of the problem (not the only part) is that I assume that common knowledge includes long known information about the state of things. Big mistake. Waterlog reported on this truly stunning finding. Shipping produces twice as much carbon as aviation, is growing faster, and was not even addressed by Kyoto. This has been known and talked about widely for over a decade. And it isn't just CO2 emissions from shipping that are a concern, their sulfur emissions are perhaps even more of a problem. That mindless hustles like Kyoto don't include either air or ocean transport is no surprise since they are not about reducing emissions, they are about authoritarian statist power grabs. These emissions omissions aren't the end of the drab story since the figures for transport don't include shipping on rivers and canals. That's not a big...
April 01, 2007
Just So
One of the sillier ideas that is being repeated around the net is that some object or species uses humans to perpetuate itself. The genesis seems to be in the selfish gene idea and its permutations - memes, cows, dogs, solar cells, whatever. Now someone has applied the notion to crops, not for the first time, specifically lucerne, as exploiters of humans. I’m abusing Smith’s point here, but I can’t help but marvel at the evolutionary success of the alfalfa plant. It started in Iran in the bronze age, and here it is, spread out over more than 4,000 acres of desert in the Middle Rio Grande Valley, making a good life for itself in this desert environment by exploiting our taste for milk and beef. First, the alfalfa’s got to tame the river. The annual runoff can flood the whole valley floor, so the alfalfa got us to build levees and a big dam upstream to hold back...
March 15, 2007
Greenish Brown
Smart money hedges its bets. Silicon Valley’s technology investors have taken to the ramparts, threatening to tear down the oil and gas industries’ dominance with innovations that use ethanol, solar and wind. . . For all the boasting in the region about investing in clean technologies, there have also been a smaller number of bets in companies set up to promote the development of fossil fuels — the source of many of the problems their other investments are meant to fix. . . “High prices of oil facilitate more oil discoveries and more innovations that get more money out of oil,” he said. In Silicon Valley, there’s a word for that kind of investment. "It’s called browntech," said Erik Straser, a partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures. One of that venture firm’s investments is in a start-up called Panasas, which has developed computer storage technology to help oil companies become hyperefficient at finding new places to explore. Mohr Davidow invests...
March 10, 2007
Buyer Beware
Let's talk more about the ideas discussed in Easy Mark that expose the deceits of food labeling and food fads in general. Here's an example of such deceits. When you think of agriculture as “co-evolution”, where “clever grasses get us to deforest the world and plant grasses,” agriculture looks very different. Pollan says he’d always thought of lawns as somewhat conformist and totalitarian, the mower reducing everything to the same size. But now he realizes he’s “a dupe of the lawn,” helping it fight its battle against the trees. He warns that the discussions we’ve had today about ethanol and biofuel shows that “ethanol is the ultimate victory of corn over us, corn bending us to its will.” hmmm, how did those grasses evolve in the first place? With no lawn mowers or people to plant seed the grasses still did a bang up job of evolving. In fact, humanity lives off grass - maize, rice, wheat, oats and...
March 09, 2007
Nobs and Yobs
You may have noticed a few earlier posts that referenced Frank Furedi articles. Some commenters (OK one, Tim) reminded me that he's, uh, an odd fellow with a checkered past. I know that of course, but still find some of his writings stimulating, and his arguments not easily refuted. Brian Micklethwait says something similar, but better. Living Marxism were one of those creepy outfits that then said you should only refer to them as LM, without saying what LM used to stand for. Sort of like BAT (who were absolutely not British American Tobacco you understand, definitely not, no relation whatsoever at all blah blah blah), only political. Then when that was greeted with the derision and contempt that it deserved, they dumped even the LM crap, and called themselves the Institute of Ideas. I do not trust them further than I can spit them. But, for their own bonkers cult reasons, they are very ambitious and worldly wise,...
March 08, 2007
Easy Mark
Let us review. A system designed to advise a captive audience about the features and quality of available products would look a lot more like Consumer Reports than the world of advertising we see. But this situation isn't especially puzzling - we understand that neither those who make ads nor those who watch them have product information as their primary goal. Ad makers want to sell, and ad watchers want to be entertained. For example: It is the same market flaw that gives us beautiful flawless large red apples in supermarkets - with no taste. To get the old intense flavour varieties that everyone loves when they taste, we would have to choose small bruised discoloured apples when we shop, and leave the flawless big red apples with no taste in the bins. But collectively we do not, and the market responds. So I am puzzled why seemingly bright and caring folks fall for these gimmicks and become shills...
February 21, 2007
Mind Killing
The notion that "people go funny in the head when talking about politics", from Politics is the Mind-Killer, has abundant support. We saw it, and continue to see it, in the Iraq war controversy as well as climate change non-debate. [W]e may . . . be in a situation where analysis is viewed as being more useful as a tool of persuasion than clarifying the consequences of a wide range of alternative courses of action. In such a situation policy analyses will be far less important than the political dynamics. A recent example of such a situation that will be familiar to most readers is when the Bush Administration decided to invade Iraq and then fixed the intelligence to meet the policy. Any analysis that supported invasion, regardless of its intellectual merits, then became "right" even if for the "wrong reasons." Sure, some policy analyses were still needed after that decision, for instance, to determine whether 110,000 versus 130,000...
February 15, 2007
Money Trees
There's been some talk about "green varnish". By this I mean the greening of the conservative parties of the Anglo-Saxon world. This strategy is a mainly PR driven restyling of conservative parties in the European fashion that has transpired over the last ten years or so. What Australia's, Canada's and America's political right is beginning to learn from their British counterparts (and have had to learn under pressure from political opponents) is the need for environmental camouflage - in more or less exactly the same mode socialist, labour and even traditional free market liberals have painted themselves in populist green varnish. Now that everyone is outdoing each other in green spin and rhetoric, now that every single government on the planet is clamouring for the green vote (left, right and centre), it has become increasingly frustrating for the political left to attack their opponents on environmental credentials. This is one of the reasons why the ostensible conversion of Presidents...
February 11, 2007
Interesting Grafs
It's been a long, hard work week, and in my line of work that means all seven days - week after week, month after month, year after year. I'm tired, sore, hungry and cold. Normal in other words. My poor old brain is tired too, so I'm going to cheese out today and just point at things that seem interesting, and that I may return to, and speak about, when less tired. Richard Posner, from a response to responses on comments he made about climate change. You follow the thought threads if you're interested. The global warming skeptics point out that there are natural climate fluctuations, that anticapitalists are enthusiastic beaters of the drum for action against global warming, and that global warming would have good effects on agriculture in northern climes. These points are correct, but do not support the skeptical position. The existence of natural climate fluctuations increases the risk from human-caused global warming, because increased atmospheric...
February 09, 2007
Burning Bruno
I start with the assumption that we are pathetically ignorant, seriously deluded and insufficiently humble. So, a new idea that contradicts common views is always welcome. It might be mistaken, but so are current views, as we will come to understand in due course. I've posted on this theme before. Eccentrics. One sandwich short of a picnic. A screw loose. History is littered with sometimes charming enthusiasts who go a bit over the top, following a line of reasoning beyond the pale, shocking, outraging or just titillating more sober and cautious types. Sometimes they are vindicated as knowledge increases over time and their musings are shown to have been prescient. Hannes Alfven, 1970 Nobel Prize winner in Physics, is one of my favorite examples of this. for much of his career Alfven's ideas were dismissed or treated with condescension. He was often forced to publish his papers in obscure journals; and his work was continuously disputed for many years...
February 05, 2007
Half Bath
It seems to me that scholars are often even more confused about climate change than non-scholars. Public attitudes about climate change reveal a contradiction. Surveys show most Americans believe climate change poses serious risks but also that reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions sufficient to stabilize atmospheric GHG concentrations can be deferred until there is greater evidence that climate change is harmful. This is push polling rather than evidence gathering. We see this all the time when confronted with some survey that asks confused questions and provides no sensible answer choices. "None of the above" almost always seems more correct than any of the choices given for the poorly formed question. In this case - yes, climate change is a risk - but we have no useful information about the causes. Emphasis on useful. Much of the hesitation to embrace policies for emissions reductions are that they aren't known to be effective. It's not clear that this is a...
February 04, 2007
Gaia Nostradamus
Lovelock is a hoot. He's way over the top but his rants are things of beauty. To save what it can, Lovelock believes, the world must embark on a completely different path. Most important, it must abandon the notion of "green romanticism." Lovelock has nothing but ridicule for environmentalists' favorite issues, such as "sustainable development" and "renewable energy," calling them "well-meaning nonsense." He is convinced that wind and solar energy will never be even remotely capable of meeting worldwide energy needs. In China alone, for example, a new large coal power plant is put into operation every five days, imposing additional burdens on the atmosphere. The only solution, according to Lovelock, is the massive expansion of nuclear energy worldwide. A reliable supply of electricity, says Lovelock, is the key issue when it comes to survival on a warmer planet. He loses no sleep over the risks of nuclear power. "Show me the mass graves of Chernobyl," he demands provocatively....
February 02, 2007
Extra, Extra!
Global Warming: The Missing Headline Talk about the danger of rising sea levels, at least in my experience, is usually accompanied by verbal images of Florida flooding, Manhattan and London under water, and similar catastrophes. If the IPCC figures are correct, the upper end of the range of what might actually happen is a rise of less than a meter over a century--considerably less than the distance between high tide and low. Popular talk about global warming, again in my experience, is usually put in terms quite a bit more apocalyptic than the IPCC's upper estimate of four degrees Celsius by 2100. So far the only report I have seen is on CNN, but I will be pleasantly surprised if any newspaper headlines the story with "Global Warming a Wet Firecracker? International Panel finds temperature and sea level effects over the next century real but small." Real but small? I suppose that a 3 foot rise in sea level...
February 01, 2007
Green B&B
There's been a lot of talk about strange coalitions - Baptists and bootleggers - pursuing a variety of policies lately. One is the joint effort of paleo-socialist ideologues (AKA Baptists) and CEOs of major corporations (AKA bootleggers) to increase minimum wages. The involvement of ideologues makes sense, not that their policies make sense, but the involvement of bootleggers needs some splainin. The thing is that the bootleggers wouldn't actually be harmed by the increase, since they already pay above the proposed new rates for the most part, but their smaller competitors would be harmed. When this is added to the perceived public relations benefits it makes sense too, not that their policies make any real sense. This isn't new or unusual - the Baptists and bootleggers coalition wasn't a one off thing - but democratic societies seems to be suckers for this sort of foolishness. It's the same sort of thing discussed in the earlier post Cheese Food where...
January 31, 2007
SOS, Again
Robin Hanson links an NYT article about the history of scientific prizes, as opposed to grants, as the funding mechanism for scientific invention and progress. Back in the 1700s, prizes were a fairly common way to reward innovation. ... Eventually, though, prizes began to be replaced by grants that awarded money upfront. Some of this was for good reason. As science became more advanced, scientists often needed to buy expensive equipment and hire a staff before having any chance of making a discovery. But grants also became popular for a less worthy reason: they made life easier for the government bureaucrats who oversaw them and for the scientists who received them. . . "Bureaucracies like a steady flow of money, not uncertainty," said Mr. Hanson, who worked as a physicist at NASA before becoming an economist. "But prizes are often more effective if what you want is scientific progress." ... These are the two essential advantages of prizes. They...
January 30, 2007
The Green Fairy
When you support "green" fantasies the green fairy leaves a present under your pillow - a lump of coal. It's a twisted cluster grope of several nonsense tales used to frighten or bribe children. Just a few years ago, politicians and environmental groups in the Netherlands were thrilled by the early and rapid adoption of “sustainable energy,” achieved in part by coaxing electrical plants to use biofuel — in particular, palm oil from Southeast Asia. Spurred by government subsidies, energy companies became so enthusiastic that they designed generators that ran exclusively on the oil, which in theory would be cleaner than fossil fuels like coal because it is derived from plants. But last year, when scientists studied practices at palm plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia, this green fairy tale began to look more like an environmental nightmare. Rising demand for palm oil in Europe brought about the clearing of huge tracts of Southeast Asian rainforest and the overuse of...
January 16, 2007
Whispered Out
This post began as an update to the previous but it grew too long. One of the topics in Tim Burke's post-holiday survey is the insufficiently nuanced nature of environmentalism in general and climate advocacy in particular. One of the things that frustrates me about the overall public discussion of global warming is that the factionalization of the debate leaves me feeling like I don’t have a team to cheer for. . . the dogmatism of a lot of environmentalist discourse about global warming drives me nuts in certain ways. Most notably, in the way that extremely specific public policy solutions to the problem get intrinsically coupled to the empirical documentation of the problem, often in a way that borders on dishonesty. . . Before I find any policy recommendations convincing, I need to have some sense that the recommenders are thoughtful about the nature of complex systems in general, and aware of the fundamental practical and epistemological problems...
January 15, 2007
Egg Walking
There seems to be an increasing number of voices gingerly speaking up about the crass exploitation of climate change by ideologues with ulterior motives. [via Prometheus and via Biopolitical -> The Reality-Based Community] People can easily see economic motives to bend the facts and abuse the science. Ideological motives are less readily apparent, but no less real; and, for quite a few people, environmentalism has become a matter of not just ideology but quasi-religious zealotry. . . Most journalists and pundits have limited knowledge of science; as a result, they tend to pick whichever science best suits their political prejudices. Both science and journalism deserve better. Perhaps we can start by remembering that an ideological crusade can be as strong an inducement to bend the truth as the profit motive. Sheesh. That's an understatement. Why does everyone tip-toe around as if they were afraid they would wake the baby? Ideologues have made a complete mess of this issue. Using...
January 13, 2007
Responsibility
Cap and trade approaches to climate change are irresponsible because they can't work. They are merely political ploys designed to deceive the public into granting broad powers to governments in return for illusory climate security. It looks increasingly likely that we will be fooled again. Under the proposed legislation, greenhouse gas emissions would be cut from 6,100 metric tons of carbon equivalent in 2004 to about 2,100 metric tons in 2050. In his remarks to the Senate on the bill, Senator McCain asserted that there are five essential elements to “any responsible climate change measure”: Rational, mandatory emission reduction targets and timetables. It must be goal oriented, and have both environmental and economic integrity. We need policy that will produce necessary outcomes, not merely check political boxes. The goal must be feasible and based on sound science. A market-based cap and trade system. It must limit greenhouse gas emissions and allow the trading of emission credits to drive enterprise,...
January 11, 2007
One Cheer
Daniel Sarewitz and Roger Pielke, Jr. have a new chapter in press that will be published in Controversies in Science and Technology, Volume 2, edited by Daniel Lee Kleinman, Karen Cloud-Hansen, Christina Matta, and Jo Handelsman. (prepublication version here in PDF) Their chapter, The Steps Not Yet Taken, has useful insights. Our central point is simple: protecting people and the environment from the impacts of climate is a different problem from reducing greenhouse gas emissions to combat global warming. The policies that have resulted from combining these two problems are, as a consequence, failing to meaningfully address either problem. Policies to reduce global warming must be pursued independently of policies to reduce climate impacts. Good point. Confusing these problems with one another, and then prescribing policies that address that confused muddle, has failed and must fail. First we explain why the Kyoto Protocol is not achieving its environmentally modest goals, a failure that has no connection to the refusal...
January 09, 2007
Dark Climate
Self-deception has been a topic of late, here and many other places, recently discussed here in Political Failure, which pulled quotes from a Cowen paper, Self-Deception as the Root of Political Failure. By self-deception I mean individual behavior that disregards, throws out, or reinterprets freely available information. Individuals frequently treat their personal values as a kind of ideal point, and assume that the pursuit of those values also yield the best practical outcome. Discussions elsewhere have parsed this a bit finer, making a distinction between non-scholars (i.e. stupid people), who simply avoid knowing anything of subjects about which they nonetheless have opinions, and scholars, who carefully select dollops of information that support their views and ignore contrary information. I suspect that we stupid people do some of each, and that scholars do so as well. For example, consider this: On RealClimate, Michael Mann has a good explanation of what is going on with North America’s unusual winter weather. He...
December 20, 2006
World Class
The earlier post Politics is Stupid commented on the self-defeating policies of the US regarding ethanol production. The quoted article noted that: Our current policy is absurd even by Washington standards: Congress is paying billions in subsidies to get us to use more ethanol, while keeping in place tariffs and quotas that guarantee that we’ll use less. To be really world class, stupid politics must be international. Even as hundreds of millions of dollars from the program are devoted to the refrigerant industry, countries in sub-Saharan Africa, which were originally envisioned as big beneficiaries of emissions trading, are receiving almost nothing. Just four nations — China, India, Brazil and South Korea — are collecting four-fifths of the payments under the program, with China alone collecting almost half. Two-thirds of the payments are going to projects to eliminate HFC-23. Those payments also illustrate conflicting goals under Kyoto and the Montreal Protocol, a 1987 agreement that requires the phasing out of...
December 14, 2006
Bull Dookey
I was going to ignore this muddled FAO article promoted by FuturePundit since it was so silly, full of nonsense I'd disputed and refuted before. But, since Instapundit snarked it maybe it's worth the effort to do again. Deforestation, greenhouse gases. The livestock sector is by far the single largest anthropogenic user of land. Grazing occupies 26 percent of the Earth's terrestrial surface, while feed crop production requires about a third of all arable land. Expansion of grazing land for livestock is a key factor in deforestation, especially in Latin America: some 70 percent of previously forested land in the Amazon is used as pasture, and feed crops cover a large part of the reminder. About 70 percent of all grazing land in dry areas is considered degraded, mostly because of overgrazing, compaction and erosion attributable to l |