climate change

Global Warming and Scholarly Conspiracies, etc. Part Two

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Religion , , , , , , , , ,

In Part One of Scholarly Conspiracies, Scholarly Corruption and Global Warming, I drew on my own experience as a scholar to describe how the scientific enterprise can easily become corrupted for anodyne, innocent reasons, for reasons that are not especially cynical. I argued, of course, that this can especially happen in connection with such big, societal issues as climate change. I concluded that the findings of scientists do not, as a matter of principle, merit the quasi-religious status they are often granted. It follows from this that the Left’s attempt to stop any debate on the ground that science has spoken is grotesque.

I should have added in Part One that at different times in my career, I may have benefited by the kind of corruption I describe as well as having been hurt by it. Of course, one thing does not compensate for the other. Corruption is corruption; it constitutes more or less wide steps away from the truth whether I profit by it or whether it harms me. These things just add up, they don’t balance each other out.

Once you open your eyes, it’s not difficult to find gross derailments of the scientific enterprise. To be more precise, the transformation of limited scientific results into policy often gives rise to abuses. Sometimes, they are gross abuses verging on the criminal.

A recent book describes in detail how the slim results of 1950s studies that were obviously flawed both in their design and with respect to data collection were adopted by the American scientific establishment as policy. They resulted in a couple of generations of Americans being intellectually terrorized into adopting a restrictive, sad, un-enjoyable diet that may even have undermined their health. The book is The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz .

For most of my adult life, I limited my own intake of meats because saturated fats were supposed to give me cardiac illness and, ultimately heart attacks. I often thought something was fishy about the American Heart Association severity concerning saturated fats because of my frequent stays in France. There, I contemplated men of all ages feasting on pork chops fried in butter followed by five different kinds of cheese also eaten with butter. Then, they would have a post-prendial cigarette or two, of course. None of the men I knew exercised beyond walking to shop for pâtés, sausages, and croissants sweating butter (of course). Every time, I checked – often – Frenchmen had a longer life expectancy than American men (right now, it’s two and half years longer.)

Yet, such was the strength of my confidence (of our confidence) in the official medical-scientific establishment that I bravely followed my stern semi-macrobiotic diet even while in France. In my fifties, I developed Type Two diabetes. None of my four siblings who lived and ate in France did. I understand well the weakness of a such anecdotal evidence. And I know I could have been the one of five who hit the wrong number in the genetic lottery. (That would have been the inheritance from my grandfather who died at 26 of a worse illness than diabetes, a German bullet, in his case.) Yet, if there are quite a few cases like mine where siblings constitute a natural control for genetic factors, it would seem worth investigating the possibility that a diet high in carbohydrates is an actual cause of what is often described as an “epidemic” of Type II diabetes. If there are many more cases than there were before the anti-fat campaign, controlling for age, something must have changed in American society. The diet low on saturated fats pretty much forced on us since the fifties could be that societal change.

I am not saying that it is. I am saying it’s worth investigating, with proper design and normal rules of data selection. I am not holding my breath. I think the scientific establishment will not turn itself around until its biggest honchos of the relevant period pass away. Teicholz’s book may turn out to have many defects because she is more a journalist than a scientist. I am awaiting with great attention the rebuttals from the scientific establishment, or – you never know – their apologies.

And then, there is the old story of how it took twenty years for the American Medical Association to change its recommendation on how to treat the common duodenum ulcer after an obscure Australian researcher showed that it was almost always caused by a bacterium. (The story was told about twenty years ago, in Atlantic Monthly, I think I remember. You look it up.)

The de facto scientific establishment is not infallible but it usually wants to pretend that it is. It’s aided in its stubbornness by the religiously inspired passivity of ordinary people who were raised with misplaced all-around reverence for science and anything that appears, rightly or wrongly, “scientific.”

The climate change lobby, wrapped in a pseudo-scientific mantle still thrives in several policy areas in spite of most Americans’ relative indifference to the issue. Two of its main assets are these: First it is well served by irresponsible repetition of a simplified form of its message that amounts to constant, uncritical amplification; second, even well-educated people usually don’t pay a lot of attention to detail, don’t read critically because they are busy.

Now, I am not going to spend any time denouncing the myriad airheads with short skirts who add their own climate change sage commentary to their presentation of ordinary weather reports. (I am a man of vast culture, I listen to the same tripe in three different languages!) As I keep saying, I don’t beat on kindergartners. Let’s take National Geographic, instead, that justifiably respected monument to good information since 1888.

The October 2013 issue presents another striking photographic documentary intended to illustrate fast climate change. One of the photographic essays in the issue concerns, predictably, the alleged abnormal melting of glaciers. The talented photographer, James Balog, contributes his own completely superfluous, judgmental written commentary:

We know the climate is changing…. I never expected to see such huge changes in such a short period of time.

The guy is a photographer, for God’s sake! He has an undergraduate degree in communications. His credentials to pronounce on long-term climate change are…? Even the National Geographic, generally so careful about its assertions, couldn’t resist, couldn’t bring itself to tell him, “This is outside your area of competence, STFU!” Why not let the janitor also give his judgment in the pages of National Geographic? This is a free country after all. Most people simply don’t have the energy to notice thousands of such violations of good scientific practice.

Now to inattention, still with the venerated National Geographic. The September 2013 issue, entitled “Rising Seas” presents a truly apocalyptic future in case global warming is not controlled. As is usually the case with N.G. the article is chock-full with facts from studies. The article is also tightly argued. N.G. is normally careful about what it asserts. To make things even clearer, it offers a graph on pp. 40 -41 purporting to demonstrate a disastrous future for the earth starting very soon.

Being a leisurely retired man endowed with an unusually contrary personality, being furthermore well schooled in elementary data handling, I did the obvious with the graph, the obvious not one educated person in 10,000 would think of doing, or care to do. I took my desk ruler to the graph itself. Here is what I discovered:

Between 1880 and 2013, there was less than a one foot rise in the oceans level according to National Geographic. Of course, those 123 years cover the period of most rapid rise in the emission of alleged greenhouse gases. Imagine if National Geographic had an article entitled:

“Less Than Foot-Rise in Ocean in Spite of More than 120 Years of Greenhouse Emissions”

Many citizens would respond by thinking that maybe, possibly there is global warming but it’s not an urgent problem. Let’s take our time looking into the phenomenon more carefully, they would say. Let’s try and eliminate alternative explanations to greenhouse gases if we find that there is indeed abnormal warming. After all, how much of a rush would I be in even if I were convinced that water rises in my basement by almost one tenth of an inch each year on the average?

This is not an absurd mental exercise. The business of science is to try to falsify and falsify again. When you get interesting results, the scientific establishment (if not the individual scientist author of the findings) is supposed to jump on them with both feet to see if they stand up. Instead in connection with global warming, scientists have allowed the policy establishment and those in their midst that influence it to do exactly the reverse: If you see anything you like in a scientific study, try hard for more of the same. If you find something that contradicts your cause, bury it if you can, ignore it otherwise. You will get plenty of help in doing either.

Scientists have become collectively a complicit in massive anti-scientific endeavor with many religious features.

I am finally proofing the print copy of my book:

I Used to Be French: an Immature Autobiography.

Scholarly Conspiracies, Scholarly Corruption and Global Warming: Part One

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Religion , , , , , , , , , ,

97 % of scientists, blah, blah…. Ridiculous, pathetic.

Thus challenged, some people I actually like throw reading assignments at me. Some are assignments in scholarly journals; some, sort of. Apparently, I have to keep my mouth shut until I reach a high degree of technical competence in climate science (or something). I don’t need to do these absurd assignments. I am not blind and I am not deaf. I see what I see; I hear what I hear; it all sounds familiar. Been there, done it!

A long time ago, I accepted a good job in France in urban planning after receiving my little BA in sociology from Stanford. I was a slightly older graduate and I had no illusions that I knew much of anything then. I had some clear concepts in my mind and I had learned the basic of the logic of scientific inquiry from old Prof. Joseph Berger and from Prof. Bernard Cohen. I had also done some reading in the “excerpts” department including the trilogy of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and Karl Marx. Only a couple of weeks after I took my job, my boss sent me to a conference of urban sociologists in Paris. Having been intellectually spoiled by several years in the US and conscious of my limited knowledge of urban planning, I asked many questions, of course.

In the weeks following the meeting, I became aware of a rumor circulating that presented me as an impostor. This guy coming out of nowhere – the USA – cannot possibly have studied sociology because he does not know anything, French sociologists thought. I had to ask how the rumor started. I was aware that I knew little but, but, I did not think it was exactly “nothing.” Besides, most of my questions at the conference had not been answered in an intelligible manner so, I was not convinced that my comparison set – French sociologists working in city planning – knew much more than I did.

Soon afterward, I wrote a “white paper.” It was about the eastern region where I had been tasked to plan for the future until 2005 (the year was 1967) as part of a multidisciplinary team. The white paper gave a list of social issues city planners had to face at this point, the starting point of the planning endeavor. As young men will do, I had allowed myself short flights of speculation in the white paper, flights I would not have indulged in a few years later. My direct supervisor, an older French woman who was supposed to be sociologist, read the whole ambitious product, or said she had, and made no comments except one. She took exception to one of my speculative flights in which I made reference to the idea that much societal culture rises up from the street. It was almost an off-hand remark. Had that part been left out, the white paper would have been pretty much the same. The supervisor insisted I had to remove that comment because, she said exactly, ”Marx asserts clearly that culture comes from the ruling class.” She told me she would not allow the white paper to be presented until I extirpated the offending statement.

In summary: The woman had nothing to say about the many parts of the report that were instrumental to the endeavor that our team was supposed to complete, about that for which she and I were explicitly being paid. She had nothing to say about the likely mistakes I exhibited in the report because of my short experience. Her self-defined role was strictly to protect what she took to be Marxist orthodoxy even if it was irrelevant. There was a double irony there. First, the government that employed us was explicitly not in sympathy with any form of Marxism. The woman was engaging in petty sedition. Second, Karl Marx himself was no lover of orthodoxies. He would have abhorred here role. (Marx is said to have declared before his death, “I am not a Marxist”!)

In any event, I was soon rid of the ideological harridan and I was able to do my job after a fashion. For those who like closure: I went back to the US to attend graduate school, at Stanford again. Two years later, my old boss called me back. He had come up in the world. He was in charge of a big Paris metropolitan area urban research institute. He begged me, begged on the phone to go back to France, and take charge of the institute’s sociology cell. He said that he understood not a word of what the “sociologists” there said to him. He added that I was the only sociologist he had ever understood. I yielded to his entreaties and I promised him a single year of my life. I interrupted my graduate studies and flew to Paris. In the event, I gave the sociologists at the institute one month warning. Then, I summoned each one of them to explain to me orally how his work contributed to Paris city and regional planning. (“What will it change to the way this is currently being done?” I asked.) They did not respond to my satisfaction and I fired all six of them. I replaced them with people who could keep their Marxism under control. My boss was grateful. I could have had a great career in France. I chose to return to my studies instead.

Three years later, having completed my doctorate, I found my self at critical juncture common to all those who go that course. You have to turn your doctoral thesis into papers published in double-blind refereed journals. (Here is what this means: “What’s Peer Review and Why It Matters“)

That’s a lot like leaving kindergarten: no more cozy relationships, no more friends assuring you that your work is just wonderful; the real world hits you in the face. The review process in good journals is often downright brutal. Anyone who does not feel a little vulnerable at that point is probably also a little silly. To make matters worse, the more respected the journal, the harder it is to get in and the better your academic career. As a rule, if you have not achieved publication in a first-rate journal in the first three or four years after completing your doctorate, you will be consigned forever to second-tier universities or worse.

Be patient, I am just setting the stage for what’s coming.

Much of my early scholarly work happened to take place within a school of research dominated by “neo-Marxists.” It was not my choice. I was interested in problems of economic development that happened to be largely in the hands of those people. My choice was between abandoning my interests or buckling up and taking my chances. I buckled up, of course. My first article to be published was innovative but a little esoteric. (Delacroix, Jacques. “The permeability of information boundaries and economic growth: a cross-national study.” Studies in Comparative International Development. 12-1:3-28. 1977.) I presented to a specialized journal and therefore not one that could be called “first tier.” It happened to contain nothing that would offend the neo-Marxists. It took less than six months to have it accepted for publication.

The second published paper out of my dissertation struck at the heart of neo-Marxists convictions. It demonstrated – using their methods – that the parlous condition of the Third World – allegedly caused by capitalist exploitation – could be remedied through one aspect of ordinary good governance. I submitted it to one of the two most respected journals (the American Sociological Review). All the reviewers who had the technical skills to review my submission were also neo-Marxists or sympathetic to their doctrine. The paper reported on a study conducted according to methods that were by now common. Having the paper accepted for publication took more than three years. It also took a rare personal intervention by the journal’s editor whom I somehow managed to convince that the reviewers he had chosen were acting unreasonably. (The paper: Delacroix, Jacques. “The export of raw materials and economic growth: a cross-national study.” American Sociological Review 42:795-808. 1977.) No need to read either paper.

Am I telling you here a story of conspiracy or a story of academic corruption? Yes, I faced a conspiracy but it was not a conspiracy against me personally and it was mostly not conscious. The only people – but me- who had the skills to pass judgment on my paper were not numerous. They were a small group that shared a common understanding of the reality of the world. It was not a cold, cerebral understanding. Those people formed a community of sentiment. They believed their work would contribute to the righting of a worldwide injustice, a “global” injustice committed against the defenseless people of underdeveloped countries. Is it possible that their ethical faith influenced their judgment? To ask the question is to answer it, I think. Did their faith induce them to close their eyes when others from their own camp cut some research corners here and there? On the contrary, were their eyes wide open when they were reviewing for a journal a submission whose conclusion impaired their representation of the world? In that situation, did they overreact to an uncrossed “t” or a dotted “i,” in a paper that undermined their beliefs? Might be. Could be. Probably was. Other things being equal, they may have just thought, it would be better if these annoying Delacroix findings were not publicized in a prime journal. Delacroix could always try elsewhere anyway.

So, yes, I faced corruption. It was not conscious, above-board corruption. It was not cynical. It was a corruption of blindness, much of it deliberate blindness. The blindness was all the more sturdy because it was seldom called into question. Those who would have cared did not understand the relevant techniques. Those who knew them shared in the blindness. This is a long way from cynical, deliberate lying. It’s just as destructive though. And it’s not only destructive for the lives of the likes of me who don’t belong to the relevant tribe. It’s destructive of what ordinary people think of as the truth. That is so because – however unlikely that sounds – the productions of elite and abstruse journals usually find their way into textbooks, even if it take twenty years.

Are the all-powerful editors of important journals part of the conspiracy? Mine were not but they tended to adhere to imperfect rules of behavior that made them objective accomplices of conspiracies. Here is the proof that the editor of the particular journal tried to be impartial. Only a month after he accepted my dissenting paper, the editor assigned me to review a submission from the same neo-Marxist school of thought that trumpeted another empirical finding proving that, blah, blah…. After one reading of the paper, my intuition smelled a rat. I spent days in the basement of the university library, literally days, taking apart the empirical foundation of the paper. I found the rat deep in its bowel. To put it briefly, if you switched a little thing from one category to another, all the conclusions were reversed. There was no imperative argument to put that one thing in one category rather than in the other. The author had chosen that which put his labor of love in line with the love of his neo-Marxist cozy-buddies. If he had not done it, his pluses would have become minuses, his professional success anathema. In the event, the editor agreed with my critique and dinged the paper for good. Nothing worse happened to the author. No one could tell whether he was a cheat. Or, no one would. No one was eager to. The editor was not in appetite for a fight. He let the whole matter go.

Myself, I came out of this experience convinced that it was likely that no one else in the whole wide world had both the skills and the motivation to dive into the depth of the paper to find that rat. It’s likely that no one else would have smelled a rat. It’s possible that if I had not still been smarting from three years of rejection of my own work, I would not have smelled the rat myself. The editor had the smarts, the intuition fed by experience, I would say, that he could put to work my unique positioning, my combination of competence and contrariness. He put it to work in defense of the truth. That fact is enough to exonerate him from complicity in the conspiracy I described. To answer my own question: Do I think that powerful scientific journal editors are often part of a conspiracy of the right thinking, of an orthodox cabala? I think not. Do they sometimes or often fall for one? Yes.

For those who like closure: My interests switched later to other topics. (See vita, linked to this blog’s “About me.”) I think the neo-Marxist school of thought to which I refer above gradually sank into irrelevance.

After that experience, and several others of the same kind, do I have something better to propose? I don’t but I think the current system of scholarship publication does not deserve anything close to religious reverence. Even if there were anything close to a “consensus” of scientists on anything, that should not mean that the book is closed. Individual rationalism also matters. It matters more, in my book.

What does this story of reminiscences this have to do with global warming, climate change, climate disruption , you might ask? Everything, I would say. More on the connection in part Two. [Update: Here is part 2, as promised! – BC]

Climate Change and Flat Earthers

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics, Religion , , , , , , , ,

“There has been no universal trend in the overall extent of drought across the Unites States since 1900.”

“Trends in severe storms, including the intensity and frequency….are uncertain and being studied intensively.”

Both quotes are from the fine lines in the 829-page quadrennial National Climate Assessment. That’s the report Pres. Obama flogged on national television recently for nearly an hour. The president insisted something had to be done right now.

I have not read the report, of course, why should I ? (See below.)

(The first quote is in the report according to a Wall Street Journal editorial on 5/9/14. The second is in the report according to my frequent reader and commenter McHenry. He is a young man who does, or used to, believe in the threat of man-made climate change. He has good scientific training.)

A few months ago, when the Great Lakes were 90% frozen, that great scientist, Secretary of State Kerry relegated me to the ranks of “Flat Earthers.” He did this because I am very skeptical (and growing) of the climate change thesis. (See definition below.)

Of course, anyone who has been observing him from his political beginnings knows that John Kerry has no scientific competences, no competences about anything at all, except windsurfing and marrying rich widows. (I don’t knock either, no sir!) It’s also possible that he knows some French. That would tend to contribute to his misinformation, I think.

I suspect, in fact, I am almost sure, that Mr Kerry’s self-assurance is based on the belief that 97% of scientists, blah, blah, blah…

The climate change thesis deconstructs as follows:

1 There is a global rise in temperature.

That’s from some undetermined date. Hasn’t been any for the last fifteen years according to federal government’s own reports.

2 It’s caused by human activity.

This includes the burning of fossil fuels, of course but yet, there is no call for an increase in nuclear energy production which is a reliable and lasting way to relieve worldwide reliance on fossil fuels. No reason is ever given for this absence. Sometimes, perfectly serious climate change partisans also include among the causes of man-made global warming belching and flatulence by the large worldwide cattle population. The latter “cause,” of course, calls for a quick conversion to vegetarianism. (That is where secret evangelists show their hand.)

3 The world, or parts of it, or us, or some of us, are in imminent danger of a variety of catastrophes that will be caused by climate change.

Note that the three propositions are logically linked: If there is no global rise in temperature, we don’t care about human activity. If human activity does nothing to the globe ( to what, exactly?) there is no emergency. If there is a global rise in temperature and it’s not man-made, there is not much we can do. If there is global warming and it is the result of human activities and it does no harm, there is nothing we should do. If it does both harm and good (longer growing seasons in the north, access to minerals near the North Pole) then, there is something important to discuss internationally.

As the evidence in support of the thesis becomes more complicated and contradictory, the alarmist cries are becoming shriller. This makes a sort of macabre sense. Simple rationality is getting lost along the way. What we are told about urgent policy requirements does not fit with the evidence that is presented by the same people who demand urgently a new policy of de-industrialization. The climate change book is like a novel whose cover would proclaim “Joe Is the Killer” while the inside pages would sow doubt on the idea that Joe has ever killed, or even harmed anyone, has ever so much as spat on the sidewalk.

Sometimes, downright fraud is also prominently involved. That’s the case for the “97% of scientists” that I think certified incompetents like Sec. Kerry rely on. Personally, I have always known and said that there was nothing to the number. There is no 97% of anything anywhere, except in some banana republics and in North Korea. Now, we have good evidence of fraud on this matter.

In past postings on the climate change or global warming, I have been at great pains to declare, even to prove my ignorance in matters of climate science. I did this because I wanted to step resolutely away from jargon-filled experts’ and pseudo-experts’ discussions that can only befuddle people who have to make a living, rear children, prepare their taxes, pay a mortgage, go to the gym.

In fact, I have fair general scientific training: I easily recognize a good study design. (They don’t grow on trees!) I can spot bad measurements from a mile away, like a jealous wife a single long hair of the wrong color on her husband’s lapel. I also possess a skill that is rare in the general literate population but common among those who have acted as referees for scholarly journals: a keen sense of studies’ formal conclusions that shout when the findings would only merit whispering.

Note that I don’t claim I have ever committed this last little sin myself when I was a scholar. It’s damned tempting though. How can you admit, “Yes, I and two colleagues worked hard on this study for three years and, frankly, what we found does not amount to a hill of beans.”

And then, there is the vertiginous, nightmarish situation where you would have to report, “The consensus is that X causes Y. Our study, carefully conceived in every way – go ahead and check everything – suggests that X does not cause Y.” This is like yelling, “Go ahead, don’t publish my study!” (I actually published two such studies in my time, one at the beginning of my career, one at the end. The last one took twenty years! See on my vita linked to this blog: Delacroix, Jacques. “The export of raw materials and economic growth: a cross-national study.” American Sociological Review. 42:795-808. 1977. Delacroix, Jacques and François Nielsen. “The beloved myth: Protestantism and the rise of industrial capitalism in 19th century Europe.” Social Forces 80-2:509-553. 2001.)

There is also a general, well known anti “negative findings” bias in all scientific disciplines. Few journals have the intestinal fortitude to publish articles that proclaim: “We did not find anything.” I doubt that the climate sciences constitute an exception. Do you?

Here is a fictitious but realistic example of such a conclusion:

“Humans have been pumping ‘greenhouse gases’ into the atmosphere with increasing intensity* for one hundred and ten years and yet, there is no rise in the frequency of droughts.”

How does this work for your career, do you think?

Here is an example of bad design, specifically.

Several years ago in one of the respected American scientific magazines there appeared an article authored by three Australian professors with impeccable scientific credentials. (I am very sorry I don’t have the reference. However, my memory forgets but it does not make up stuff.) The article purported to tackle the issue of long term global warming. It was an attempt to recoup after the disaster of the “hockey stick scandal”** which involved downright cheating.

The issue is this: If it was warmer in 1000 that it is today, it’s hard to argue that gases specific to industrial societies are an exclusive or even a primary cause of global warming. (It’s difficult but not impossible; it would involve heavy scientific lifting.)

Anyway, that article relied on one form of measurement of temperature, tree rings, I think, for the longest period, extending from about year 1000, to about year 1800. Then the authors switched to other, probably better, more sensitive measurements, based on other than tree rings, for the period extending from about 1800 to the present.

That’s impossibly bad scientific design, of course. Here are the reasons. If the first measurement somehow underestimates temperature then, it’s necessarily true that temperatures in the other period from 1800, will appear higher. If the second type of measures somehow overstates or simply detects more accurately high temperatures, the years 1800 to present will necessarily seem warmer. Both false effects would tend to be seem true irrespective of the real temperatures in both periods .

It tuns out that 1800 to present is the period of interest. If you are going to prove a sharp rise of temperature coinciding with industrialization, you have to demonstrate a big uptick for that period . The design is thus not neutral with respect to results. It favors some rather than others.

It’s such breathtakingly bad design that I had to read the article twice to believe it. (That’s what caused me to check the authors’ academic credentials. As I said, they were excellent.)

The alert reader will have noticed that the potential bias I describe above can work either way: If the measurements to 1800 overestimate temperatures while the measurements from 1800 to present happen to underestimate temperatures, you may find that you have demonstrated that there is no warming that corresponds to the industrializing period although one exists. You might even show that temperature has declined on the whole although it has actually risen.

Now, suppose that the study of reference showed precisely either no change or change in the “wrong” direction. That would be no change in global temperatures, 1000 to 2000, or a slight decline of temperatures beginning, say, in 1810.

My educated first guess is that, in the intellectual climate of the past fifteen years, the authors would not then have presented their research for publication. My second, also well informed guess, is that if they had presented it, the journal editor would have turned them down. He would have turned them down irrespective of his religion toward climate change. That’s because, journals don’t like negative results of the form: “Nothing happened.” See above.

That’s in addition to the fact that many editors are members of the same intellectual class that has lost its way on climate as it lost its way previously on communism and on Third World revolutions (another story I plan to tell soon on this blog).

In conclusion: Our current system of scholarly publication almost guarantees that there is little chance that scientific findings of high quality that contradict the belief in the thesis described above will see the light of day. It does not take a real conspiracy to arrive at such a situation, just the perpetuation of well-established bad habits.

How about the three credentialed Australian professors who committed the dramatically faulty research design? Are they scum? That’s were religion comes in. It’s helpful in pretending that the bad actions you commit are not really sinful. Did you know that the crusaders who captured Jerusalem in 1099 put all its inhabitants to the sword while shouting “God wants it”?

So, OK, I am a Flat Earther. It’s not so bad, really. One of these days, I will figure out the truth by noticing that no one ever falls off the earth, no matter how far he travels. I might even figure out why some get back home simply by moving in a straight line. Paying attention to negative evidence like this pays off. On the other hand, those who live inside a square box will never learn anything. Their blindness is dangerous for everyone.

* I don’t know the actual numbers but I would be surprised if we did not, collectively, burn one hundred times more than we did in 1800. One thousand times would not surprise me, not even 10,000 times.

**Look it up. Great story!

Australia may ban [more] boycotts…

Adam Magoon Economics, Liberty, Politics , , , , , , ,

Australia has been in the news quite often in the last year for its new Prime Minister’s controversial legislation that protest groups say put vast areas of Australian nature in threat of destruction.  Environmental issues are one of the more complex issues facing libertarians today.  The vast entanglement of property rights can make explaining those issues to non-libertarians quickly and clearly quite difficult.  Luckily for me the Australian government is currently attempting to assault a far more basic set of rights.  The right to organize, the right to persuade, and the right to spend your money and time how you wish.  We are, as the title implies discussing the right to organize a boycott of a product or products.

The Australian secretary of agriculture Richard Colbeck wants to “remove an exemption for environmental groups from the consumer law ban on so-called “secondary boycotts”.  These secondary boycotts are also illegal in the UK and the United States.  For clarification a secondary action “is industrial action by a trade union in support of a strike initiated by workers in another, separate enterprise”.  

Libertarians often find themselves on the wrong side of both environmental and union actions but it is important to remember that liberty also means the freedom to refuse to purchase a product for any reason you can imagine; whether it is because the company that makes the product is partaking in actions you disagree with or because their logo is yellow.

Even though libertarians disagree with the end goals of the hard-line environmentalist movements (namely government control of industry) we cannot forget to support situations like this on principle and also to remember that environmental issues are essentially property rights issues and thus core to libertarian ethics.

Thoughts on climate change

Rick Weber Current Events, Economics, Politics , , , , , , , , , ,

Last week I heard a sermon on climate change (no, it was an actual sermon). I’m roughly agnostic on the existence and degree of climate change, but I err on the side of assuming it is a large problem of externalities with no obvious property rights solution and will have costs. And I think that under those assumptions there is an important moral element to it. With that in mind, below are some of my thoughts on the weak points of the sermon:

1) Authority is only a starting point; we cannot defer ultimate responsibility to authority. If an expert or someone I trust tells me something about X, and I don’t have any prior knowledge about X, then I believe them. In the case of global warming there are two basic sorts of information you will get from information: a) diagnosis (temperatures could rise X degrees in the coming century), and b) prescription.

The climatology involved in a) is well above my pay grade, and so rather than undergo the costs of informing myself on the existence or importance of climate change, I just figure the truth is somewhere in the middle of what reasonably informed people say and instead focus my effort on my areas of comparative advantage. Now the actions in b) are typically about reducing waste and that’s well within the realm of economic thinking, so I’ll comment on that!

1b) Blindly deferring to authority to assuage your guilt is wrong and bad. Someone says you should drive an electric care to save the environment? Don’t do it before thinking through the matter, this is a big decision for most people. Where’s the energy coming from to power that car? (Coal. That is burned hundreds of miles away from your car… that’s like having a car with a hundred mile long drive shaft.) How much energy and material does it take to make the car? (Hint: look at prices.)

2) It’s called climate change, not climate universal and uniform worsening. If climate change means a warmer climate for Canada and Russia, that will come with extended growing seasons and savings on winter heating costs. Burma? It’s probably going to suffer a lot. Climate change will surely have the biggest impact on the poorest people in the world, and this is where I see the real moral issue because…

3) We can respond to climate change in a way to reduce suffering. Specifically, we can open borders. First off, that would increase human well being, with an enormous benefit to the world’s poorest people. Second, the effects of climate change won’t harm the poor as much as they could. Is climate change still a bad thing if we do this? Sure, but if a building is burning, why not help people get out?

Loose ends:

Should I recycle everything? Only if it will actually help. Recycled aluminum is chemically identical to virgin aluminum and uses fewer resources to produce (which is why it’s cheaper!). Recycling paper creates a lower quality product, uses a lot of energy and creates pollution.

Paper bags are brown, that’s good, right? Plastic bags are almost ethereal; they use a fraction of the material per unit of carrying capacity resulting in big savings. Yes, there are offsetting costs to using plastic, but it isn’t as simple as “this brown, it must be natural and therefore good!” And while we’re on the topic, brown M&Ms are stupid. There’s a layer of white sugar between that brown outer layer and the actually brown chocolate. Brown M&Ms are as unnatural as any of the other colors.

Should I buy local? Maybe if you live in California, but not if you live in Massachusetts. The biggest environmental impact of food is growing it; plowing fields, planting, watering (outside where the water could just evaporate!), and harvesting use a lot more energy than transportation. So if you live in a place with poor growing conditions, then buying local only does more harm. That said, fresh food tastes better, so by all means pay the cost if you value the flavor, just don’t delude yourself into thinking you’re reducing energy usage by doing so.

Consider opportunity cost and present value! So you’ve got a solar panel and now electricity is free for the next 20-30 years! Or you’ve installed new modern insulation for your home. Or you bought a car that costs less to run (and you’ve promised not to increase your usage). But at what cost? If your solar panel used 40 years worth of energy to build and install, then you’ve done more harm than good. And you’ve done that harm upfront. Even if one of these investments has a positive return (it saves more resources than it uses), you should still consider whether it’s a good investment. We don’t have unlimited resources, and that means that if you spend $10,000 on insulation that will give you a 0.4% ROI then you’ve given up the chance to invest that money into something that will generate more good.

Risks Of Regulation

Adam Magoon Current Events, Economics, History, Law, Liberty, Politics , , , , , , , ,

A bit dated but still very relevant.

Regulation; the four letter word of the business world.  Many people see regulation as a protective shield from the ‘dangers’ of the businessman; a way to protect people, property and the environment.  The oil industry is one of the most heavily regulated enterprises in the United States.  Despite being intended to protect us; these regulations failed catastrophically on April 20th, 2010 when the Deep Water Horizon oil rig suffered a mechanical failure resulting in an explosion which sank the rig two days later(1).  Yet, when the disaster happened, we were met with pleas for more government oversight and more red tape.  The regulations on that industry, both in the Gulf Mexico and throughout the country, helped cause the Deepwater Horizon disaster and removing them would help prevent similar disasters in the future.

Regulations in the Gulf of Mexico begin with the Minerals Management Service (MMS).  Created in 1982 due to the Federal Oil and Gas Royalty Management Act the MMS “both regulates the [gulf oil drilling] industry and collects billions[of dollars] in royalties from it”(2, 3).  The MMS’s responsibility to regulate includes monthly inspections, issuing safety documentation, and issuing safety citations(3).  Royalty collection is based on number of barrels of oil removed and varies from well to well.  The MMA also provides  “royalty relief“ to a number of rigs based on previous legislation. Until November of 2000 the royalty relief was issued based on the Outer Continental Shelf Deep Water Royalty Relief Act of 1995, better known as DWRRA.  This act “relieves eligible leases from paying royalties on defined amount of deep-water production”.  At depths over 2,526 feet oil companies did not have to pay the United States royalties on 87.5 million barrels of oil, between 1,312 and 2,625 feet the relief was 52.5 million barrels and between 656 and 1,312 feet the relief was only 17.5 million barrels.  While this act expired in the year 2000 it was replaced by an incentive program that allowed royalty relief to be “specified at the discretion of the MMS”(4).  This incentive program provides more relief if a drilling site is “more expensive to access” even if it is at the same water depth as another rig receiving less relief (2).  The royalty relief system provides incentives for Oil Rigs to operate in deep waters, especially those classified as “Ultra-Deepwater” by reducing the royalties paid on those sites(5).

While not specific to the gulf, there are a variety of moratoria on drilling throughout the country.  These moratoria take two forms.  The first set, known as “leasing moratoria” are general bans on drilling in select areas , the second set are temporary bans due to specific incidents.  Since   the fiscal year 1982 congress has denied funds to the MMS to “conduct leasing for the specified Outer Continental Shelf areas”.  Currently there is a “blanket moritorium” on leasing in effect “through 2012” that covers a large portion of both the East and West coasts( 2).  One of the largest bans on drilling however exists in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge(ANWR).  Located in the “northeast corner” of Alaska over ten million acres of land are off limits to drilling.  In this wildnerness it is estimated that there exists “between ten billion and sixteen trillion barrels of oil” that could supply twenty percent of U.S. demand for nearly thirty years(6).  The most recent temporary bans have been a result of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.  A “30-day pause in offshore drilling” followed the sinking of the Horizon rig(11).  This did not only cover BP’s rigs but all offshore drilling “based on water depth”(7).  That ban was removed by a federal court, but was replaced with a revised ban that will be in effect until November, 2010(7).

Beyond physical limitations on drilling there are also economic regulations.  There are a number of federal subsidies and tax breaks for the drilling industry.  David Kocieniewski says that “examination of the American tax code indicates that oil production is among the most heavily subsidized businesses”.  These tax breaks occur for a number of reasons.  Many are simply to lure oil companies to American shores, others were “born of international politics” or “date back nearly a century”(8).  Beyond that the United States government has put “Liability Limits” on drilling operations.  The Oil Pollution Act of 1990 limits an oil companies liability for damages to only $75 million dollars.  Any remaining damages, up to $1 billion, are payed through the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund.  This fund is “financed primarily through a fee on imported oil”(1).  Senator Robert Menendez from New Jersey recently introduced bill, S. 3305 which would raise that cap to $10 billion(9).

All of these laws and regulations have one thing in common.  They increased the probability of a catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  Each regulation increased the risk of such a spill in some way and when combined they resulted in the disaster that is causing massive destruction in the Gulf today.  The Minerals Management service was organized to be the overarching regulatory body for the Oil Industry.  Why did it fail in its duty?  Why did “spills from offshore oil rigs…in U.S. waters more than quadrupled this decade” despite the MMS’s oversight(10)?  This question was answered by economist Walter Block in his book The Privatization of Roads & Highways (12).  Quoting Cecil Mackey, former Assistant secretary of transportation, he says:

“As the more obvious regulatory actions are taken; as the process becomes more institutionalized; as new leaders on both sides  replace ones who were so personally involved as adversaries in  the initial phases, those who regulate will gradually come to reflect,     in large measure, points of view similar to those whom they regulate.”

Quite simply, the MMS adopted the views of the Oil Industry completely negating their ability to regulate it.  Congressman Nick J. Rahall confirms this saying “MMS has been asleep at the switch in terms of policing offshore rigs”.  Using numbers supplied by the MMS in the prior 64 months before the incident “25 percent of monthly inspections were not performed”(3).  Are we to believe another agency would be any more efficient?  Bureaucracy and corruption are not the only things to blame however; legislation played a vital role in this disaster as well.  DWRRA, for example, incentivized the risk to drill in deep waters.  Under DWRRA the greater the depth being drilled the greater the royalty relief amount.  These waters are inherently less safe to drill in.   It is easy to compare the difficulties in dealing with a site 5000 feet below the ocean against one 500 feet below the surface.  These incentives were made worse when DWRRA expired.  Under the new program “the most economically risky projects would receive the most relief”, safer projects on the other hand would receive “little or no relief”(4).

While acts like DWRRA incentivize the risk of deepwater drilling the greater incentive to drill in the Gulf of Mexico is simply that there are so few places to drill in the continental United States.  The United States Exclusive Economic Zone extends “200 nautical miles” from all of it’s shores(2).  Yet, much of this area is off limits to drilling.  The “blanket moratorium” issued by former President George H.W. Bush in 1990  restricts drilling in “all unleased areas offshore Northern and Central California, Southern California except for 87 tracts, Washington, Oregon, the North Atlantic coast, and the Eastern Gulf of Mexico coast”.  The Gulf of Mexico is the only economically viable offshore area left for them to drill.  This of course pales in comparison to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  Most of the 10-million-acre area is not even adjacent to the ocean, surely drilling on land or in shallow water is much safer than drilling 5000 feet under the ocean(6).  Beyond helping to cause the spill in the first place the government is increasing the risk of future disasters.  The temporary ban issued in response to the Horizon spill “neither improves safety nor mitigates risk”(11).  By forcing drilling to stop you immediately cause a number of problems.  Reentering a location is as dangerous, if not more so, than the original drilling operation.  Experienced workers have been fired, laid off, or relocated and will need to be replaced with less experienced ones.  Equipment in worse quality will be all that remains when the moratorium ends(11).

The economic regulations were the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.  A single tax break for the Deepwater Horizon oil rig covered “70 percent of the rent” or “$225,000 a day”.  Or, as policy analyst Sima J Gandhi describes it “We’re giving tax breaks to highly profitable companies to do what they would be doing anyway”(8).  These breaks are not only an unfair advantage, they incite these companies to make riskier choices.  If the potential cost of the Deepwater Horizon rig wasn’t offset by these breaks it may not have been economically viable to drill in such a dangerous location.  On top of the lower cost of the initial operation; the Liability Caps ensured that any potential risk was marginalized by the government.  The $75 million limit that has been in effect since 1990 was a message to the industry to attempt increasingly risky drills(1).

The oil companies should be liable for the full cost of any damages done by their rigs.  The worry that “operators and nonoperators in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico will be unable to obtain adequate protection from insurance” is totally unjustified (1).  If the site is not economically viable then there is no reason to drill there.  If BP and Transocean knew they would have been liable for all damages they would not have received a citation for “not conducting well control drills as required and not performing ‘all operations in a safe and workmanlike manner'”(3).  There would have been an incentive to spend money on safety, training and equipment instead of the incentive to take risks knowing they would be protected.  Or as one lawyer explained the situation “arbitrary liability caps are just not reasonable.  You cannot decide the expense of a disaster before it happens.  Liability caps allow companies like BP to avoid bearing the responsibility for the full cost of the damage they inflict”(9).

The oil has stopped flowing from the bottom of the Gulf; for now.  The question remains: How can we prevent this from happening again?  There, of course, is no easy answer.  Accidents, mistakes, and disasters can never be guarded against completely.  We can however mitigate the risk involved in those dangerous operations that are needed for the sake of humanity.  The best way to increase the safety of the oil industry is to remove the regulations that incentivize the risks involved in their industry.  Preventing drilling in safer areas, tax breaks, royalty reductions, liability limits; all these things make an already dangerous prospect that much more perilous.  We need to neither help nor hinder these companies, they must succeed or fail on their own merits.

Sources available upon request.

Nice Weather, Female Exhibitionism, and Scientific Research

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Religion , , , , , ,

Something interesting happened in Santa Cruz the past two or even three weeks. (I write on January 25 2014.) Or rather, something did not happened that should have. (I am alert to the dog that did not bark, as in Sherlock Holmes.)

For a long time now in the winter of 2013-014, comments on the weather have been in the national news much more frequently than is usual.

It’s been rather warmer here in Santa Cruz this January than it usually is in the middle of August. The Japanese cherry tree across the street has even been fooled into blooming! Although it’s a small city, I think Santa Cruz is a world center for warmism and for climatism (also for organic foodism, for vegetarianism, for nutism – it means eating only nuts – for deadly bicyclism,* for primitive feminism, for obligatory lesbianism, for residual Trotskysm, for holistic medicine, and perhaps also for holistic plumbing, I am not completely sure.)

Yet, yet, I never heard a peep through the local grapevine in the past few weeks about how the unseasonably warm weather was another proof of global warming. I only refer to the informal grapevine; I wouldn’t know if the local press had said anything. I don’t read it much; I have many unimportant things to do.

I have two explanations for this apparent surprising silence, one pretty sure, one tentative.

First, warm weather in January puts people in a good mood, even in California, even if they don’t want to be in a good mood. For one thing, the young women were walking around for days with the smug little look of nearly all women, everywhere, who get to show a bit of skin at a completely unexpected time. Their ebullient mood is catchy. The young men appreciate though they have been taught to avert their eyes lest they be accused of visual rape. The old guys frankly stare and smile, trying to remember why they do. (I know wherewith I speak!) The older women don’t seem to mind; it brings back warm memories, I would guess.

How about this: The strength of a national feminist movement is inversely correlated with mean winter temperatures?

My second, and tentative hypothesis about the lack of sententious comments about the warm weather in California is that ordinary people have finally caught on: You cannot argue that unexpectedly high temperatures in one fifth of the country are proof of global warming while maintaining that unprecedented low temperatures, at the same time, in three fifth of the countries do not contradict this view. You can’t have it both ways.

Of course, there is that other, newer beast, “climate change.” It goes like this:

If it’s warmer than usual, it’s because of man-made greenhouse gases. If it’s colder, it’s because of man-made greenhouse gases.

I laugh, I laugh stupidly but I could actually see this kind of argument made in a legitimate manner. You could try to show oscillations around a baseline. The baseline would have to be fixed. You couldn’t chose another baseline every time you did not like the weather facts. You would have to show that the oscillations have greater amplitude than was/is the case in some other test period or place (planet?). The greater amplitude oscillations would have to last for some reasonable period (not six years, for example). Finally, you would have to make a credible effort to show that high-magnitude oscillations are causally linked to greenhouse gas emissions. You couldn’t simply show two graphs looking a little bit alike and beginning and ending at times of your convenience, for example.

You would also have to publish prominently all the results of well designed research that indicated no greater oscillations than usual or no link between greater oscillations and the magnitude of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. Honestly, you would also have to explain which man-made emissions do what: car exhausts, air pollution from nuclear plants, cattle belches. (The seconds don’t exist, I am just toying with your minds; the third is not a joke at all; look it up.)

Note that I did not use at all the word “proof.” A reasonably objective demonstration satisfying all the above would give this denier pause. Also, climate scientists who, I am told, overwhelmingly “believe” in climate change would have to make an creditable effort to stop the irresponsible media bullshit spread every day in their names. (More on the last point another day soon.)

Not much to ask and a tall order!

* See my piece “Global Warming and Child Sacrifice” at Facts Matter

Seven Ways Libertarians Sometimes Run Off the Rails

Warren Gibson Economics, Liberty, Politics , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’m a dedicated libertarian but my first allegiance is to accuracy.  It pains me when I see libertarians making arguments that are inaccurate, irrelevant, or just plain wrong.  When they do so, they do themselves and our movement a big dis-service.  I list seven such arguments here.  More could be added.

  1. The Fed is privately owned. This is true only superficially. Member banks own shares of stock in one of twelve district Federal Reserve Banks and they receive dividends on those shares. But they have little in the way of genuine ownership privileges. They cannot sell their stock and their voting rights are very limited. The President of the United States appoints the Board of Governors. Just because a legal arrangement is given labels that suggest private ownership, that doesn’t make it so.

  2. The Bureau of Labor Statistics disguises the true unemployment situation by excluding workers who are “discouraged,” i.e., not seeking jobs. This is true of the U-3 unemployment figure which is the most widely cited figure, and the one the Fed says it is targeting. That figure is currently about 6.5%. The BLS also publishes its U-6 figure, which includes discouraged workers and currently stands at around 13%, down from about 17% at the height of the Great Recession. The BLS is not covering up anything here, although politicians may certainly choose to emphasize one figure or the other depending on what ax they’re grinding. Which is the “true” unemployment rate? There’s no such thing. The figures are what they are and observers can make of them what they will.

  3. “Chain-weighted” versions of the Consumer Price Index are politically motivated.  These adjustments are intended to recognize the substitution effect, the classic example of which is when the price of beef rises and the price of chicken doesn’t, people eat less beef and more chicken. Peoples’ cost of living rises less than it otherwise would. CPI increases as measured by a chain-weighted formula reflect this fact, and the resulting price inflation estimates come out lower than under the old approach. That flashes a green light to some conspiracy theorists. While these adjustments are tricky business, substitution effects are real and the attempt to compensate for them should not be impugned.

  4. The Consumer Price Index is politically manipulated by excluding food and energy. There are many versions of the CPI. One of them excludes food and energy because those prices are usually very volatile. That figure may be useful to economists who want to filter out volatile effects and focus on secular trends. Again, the figures are what they are, and politicians or for that matter we bloggers can use or misuse them as we wish.

  5. “Banksters” control the U.S. government. There is a grain of truth in this one. The big banks are both victims and beneficiaries of government dominance of banking and finance. The reality of government regulation is that regulated firms employ many very smart and very well paid individuals who are constantly finding ways to manipulate or sidestep the regulations to which they are subject. The fact is that the regulators and the regulated are very thick. Banking and finance are controlled by a cabal of government and Wall Street firms and individuals. It’s a mistake to say that either group totally dominates the other.

  6. Global warming is a myth and a scam. Ron Paul, whom I admire very much, blotted his copy book when he said on Fox News, “The greatest hoax I think that has been around for many, many years if not hundreds of years has been this hoax on […] global warming.” A few basic facts are beyond dispute: (a) carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, (b) CO2 levels are at an all time high, and (c) human activity is the primary cause of the increase. Beyond that, the evidence starts to get sketchy and incomplete. We do seem to have melting polar ice caps, record high temperatures in some places, droughts, etc. But overall there has been almost no temperature increase during the last ten years or so.  Projections of rising temperatures and rising sea levels appear to be too pessimistic. This is a very complex issue and one where biases can overwhelm us if we aren’t careful. Statists are prone to accept the global warming thesis because they see it as a way to increase state power. Libertarians want the issue to go away for the same reason. This would be a great time for all parties to step back an exercise some epistemic humility. There’s a great deal about this issue that we just don’t know.

  7. Let’s get rid of the state entirely, and all will be well. Given the present primitive degree of evolution of our species, a new state will pop up wherever an existing one is overthrown. The key to peace and prosperity is not anything so simple as abolition of the state, but to convince enough people, thoroughly enough, of the advantages of long-term cooperation. Good institutions will follow.

Global Junk Science: a Small Window

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , , , , , , , , , ,

I meet two young traveling Frenchmen at the coffee shop. I like the new French more than I liked the old. For one thing, they tend to know English fairly well. This helps them shed the monumental French parochialism (“provincialisme,” in French). Perhaps as a consequence, they are generally more friendly than the previous generations of French people I have known. And, by the way, I wish I had the power to end a tenacious legend once for all: It is not the case that the French “hate Americans.” They just don’t like anyone very much; they are not cordial to any strangers. I feel a glacial wind blow all over me whenever I land in France, that’s although my French is perfect, by the way.

OK, that was a digression. I was also well disposed toward these two young French men because they reminded me of me: It’s true that I itched-hiked across the country and back, at their age. One of them is helping his mother with two restaurants, one on the Riviera, one in Strasbourg; the latter is called, “le globe-trotter.” I like that. The other French guy, age 22, is studying engineering, engineering of “sustainable energy,” he specifies.

I am a weak man, I have trouble with temptation; I can’t resist this one, of course.

Why sustainable, I ask. Isn’t it true that we have more proven reserves of petroleum than ever before?

He readily assents but, he asserts, petroleum is very bad for the environment.

Interestingly, that young man is not especially eager to tell me about climate change. Instead, he affirms that the burning of fossil fuels causes holes in the ozone layer with deadly consequences for humans. This sounds like deja vu (as we say in English), something from ten years ago, but what do I know? It’s possible that the problem has come back and that I am not aware of it. I make a note to check into it.

What kind of alternative power producing methods do you favor? I ask him further. I am eager to avoid discussions of solar power because I live in Santa Cruz where I get more info about the topic than I can begin to digest, including a solid dose of mendaciousness.

Let me sum up my non-dogmatic position about solar power. First, I recently disconnected my old passive solar water pre-heating system because it did more harm than good. Perhaps, a better person, a more virtuous person (I was going to say a more pious person) would have obtained better results from it than I did. Me, I don’t have the time or the patience; I have many unimportant things to do. Second, every time I ask for estimates about installing a modern solar heating or electricity producing system in my house, I am forced to realize that amortizing it would take thirty years. It’s not worth the bother. Perhaps, if I were a twenty year-old home owner. Perhaps if I put a little religious zeal behind the project. Third, I think solar power is wonderful doing what it’s currently doing all over America. I mean providing power for emergency telephones on highways and keeping boat batteries charged during long lulls in boat use.

Incidentally, reliance on solar power in poor countries such as India is another topic altogether. I said nothing about it this time

More incidentally, my skepticism is not of the same nature as the faith of many solar advocates. It’s no symmetrical to it. I don’t “believe” that solar power is worthless. All it would take would be a single good technical innovation in solar energy production to erase my skepticism. It would not take a profound experience of the kind St Paul experienced on the way to Damascus, for example. If I became converted, I would still be the same person, with all the same few virtues and, I hope, the same vices.

What sustainable technologies do you favor? I ask the young man pretend-innocently.

Tide-activated power plants, he answers simply.

It turns out I have some familiarity with the topic. I lived near the first one ever built anywhere. It was in France, inaugurated in the early sixties. I skin dived and speared fished and collected shellfish both upstream and downstream of it. I have no objection to this technology. Forty years later, we know it does not do any serious damage to anything. Even sailors have become used to it. There is even a certain elegant simplicity in its design: Tide comes up, turbines activate, water comes back down, turbines activate again. That first tidal dam doubles as a bridge that was needed at that spot anyway. No problem, as far as I am concerned. I am pretty sure the tidal power technology must have improved in fifty years; it should have, yet….

I ask the engineering student: Why are there only four in the whole world? Does this indicate something wrong, impractical, uneconomical, or something with this technology?

No, he states with perfect self-assurance but with courtesy, you must be wrong; there are thousands of them worldwide.

So, if I looked, I reply, I would easily find hundreds of tide-powered plants?

Absolutely, he affirms.

I go home and I do the obvious, the easiest thing: I look it up in Wikipedia. I was wrong, it turns out; there aren’t only four tidal plants in the world in actual operation, there are eight (8). I was wrong by fifty percent or one hundred per cent depending how you count.

Then I turn to the Wikipedia entry on “ozone hole.”

It has an unfinished look. It seems much like a work in progress or perhaps, a work abandoned in mid-course . The only citation in anything resembling a scholarly journal dates back to 1985. It’s side by side with references to the Huffington Post and even to Mother Jones. There is also in the entry interesting and reasonable speculation about nefarious indirect effects of ozone depletion on melanoma (skin cancer). There is no real health study, not even a crude one.

My young French interlocutor seems wrong here too.

Is it possible that the a deeper search would shore up more sturdily the case for ozone depletion and human health? It’s possible. I think it’s frankly unlikely. There are enough English speakers on the globe interested in such issues for the Wiki entry to be reasonably well updated.

How about the tidal plants? Could there be many more? My answer is a resounding “No.” Power plants are easy to count and hard to miss. Perhaps Wikipedia is much out of date, perhaps there are twice more than it indicates. That would be sixteen (16). That is still a tiny number. My original question remains intact: What’s wrong with this superficially appealing technology?

Why did I find out in my conversation with this young hands-on environmental activist and through its follow-up?

1 The French educational system (or his particular engineering school) is very bad;

2 He does not care about facts. He does not care enough to check with ten keystrokes something important to him. Sounds familiar?

You decide.

From the Comments: Incentives, Academe, Science and Grants

Brandon Christensen Comments , , , , ,

In my experience scientists [including social scientists and including me] are incented to get more money for their research. The effects of funding on research can be worrisome. For example for reasons of politics and public opinion a disproportionate amount of money was devoted to HIV research. By disproportionate I mean that in my opinion there would be more bang for buck on bigger public health problems like malaria, certain cancers etc.

However does that mean that I should doubt the findings of the virologists, immunologists, and all the other -ists doing the research? I think not. Certainly not in the aggregate. Chasing the bucks might lead them to doing research in the ‘wrong’ area so to speak but it won’t lead them to falsify their results.

This is from Dr Amburgey (he’s real) and it comes from an exchange on climate change/global warming. I raised a concern I had about the incentive structure built into the scientific community of the West, but Dr Amburgey’s logic has put my skepticism to rest.

Somebody wake Dr Delacroix from his midday, wine-induced nap

Brandon Christensen Current Events , , , ,

For the first time in 112 years, snow has fallen in Cairo, Egypt. I haven’t been to that side of the Mediterranean yet. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to, but I can’t believe it’s snowing there. It seems like it’s been cold everywhere over the past couple of weeks.

Dr Delacroix, if he weren’t off somewhere sulking, would be ecstatic. (h/t Aliens in the Family)

Climate Change and the First Amendment

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Religion , , , , , , , , , , ,

Like nearly everyone in the world, I don’t have the training to judge directly the pronouncements of organizations that affirm that there is:

a) Serious temperature rise on a global scale (“global warming”).

b) That it is caused by human activity (such as burning fossil fuels or keeping too many belching cattle).

c) That human beings must quickly reverse manufacturing growth and driving (and growth in cattle) or suffer devastating consequences.

Instead, I have to rely on indirect evidence to judge the claims of specialists and to decide what the appropriate action would be (including deliberate inaction). This is not a new situation. We all do this all the time. So, I am unable to assess the talent of the surgeon who is going to open up my chest but I can sure smell the booze on his breath and make the logical jump that it’s not good news. Similarly, I know little about the care of automobile engines but when I see a car mechanic banging on an engine with the back of a screwdriver, I am alerted.

The quality of specialists is not the only way indirectly to gauge the quality of a viewpoint. It’s also legitimate to infer the seriousness of a claim by assessing the quality of its believers. Thus, I am leery of so-called “alternative medicine” and other “informal” health perspectives because many of their proponents seem to live in la-la Land in matters other than health. And if marathon runners kept falling dead at 39, I would have good reason to wonder if running is that good for you. (I said “if.”) If the proponents of Chinese traditional medicine turned out to be sick all the time, I would have to think twice (thrice) about its merits. (I know, there is a causation issue in this sentence. It’s not a solution; it’s part of the problem.)

The quality of its followers say something about the credibility of a creed, I believe.

Here is an anecdote about the credibility of climate change proponents, “ccprops.” It’s only an anecdote. It may be isolated. It may represent no one but those involved. Or, it may sound familiar. Think!

I live in the Green People’s Socialist Republic of Santa Cruz. My wife and I may be the only residents with anti-Obama bumper stickers. (There is a good chance we only get away with it because leftists can’t spell: “Obamination,” mine says.) Those residents who are not greenies or leftists of some kind tend to observe a discreet silence. The voice of rationalists like me who oppose big government and the myths that support it is muffled to the point of being mostly inaudible. I am not saying that I am a victim; I am suggesting a minor degree of heroism.

One ordinary day, I am peacefully drinking coffee at my downtown coffee shop. My daughter and my five-year old grand-daughter are with me. There is a demonstration on the other side of the street, yards away, of about 200 people, most young, a few of retirement age. They have placards and they sing slogans against pipelines, all pipelines, against global warming, for the environment. I notice that some of them wear what I think is a fairly witty t-shirt sign: “Don’t frack your mother.” The usual collection of Mother-Earth loving catastroph-tropic semi-educated Santa Cruz crowd, I think.

When the demonstration disperses because of rain (the environment does not cooperate), a group of five demonstrators comes to sit under an umbrella of my coffee shop. After a while, they start making ingratiating noises toward my attractive, impossibly cute grand-daughter. I tell them in a calm voice that they may not talk to the child because I think they carry a bad, morally objectionable message.

I am just tired of letting my enemies go unchallenged. I believe they have enough influence collectively to sap what’s left of the economic life of California. They are precisely endangering my grand-daughter’s future with their anti-economic mindless message. There is no reason to waste an opportunity to show some unkindness here.

They are stupefied. This is Santa Cruz, California, after all. It’s one of the world centers of foo-foo-headedness. By locals standards, these people are 100% virtuous. More importantly, in their parochial minds, they are 100% right. They have never encountered hostility before, not even opposition. No one has ever treated them that way. They did not know anyone actually could, even legally. They kind of believe that the First Amendment protects them against criticism. They don’t know that it only enjoins the government. (“Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press….”) They don’t know that the First does not guarantee against a private person making you cry with unkind comments. Nowhere does the First say or suggest: “Dr D shall not say hurtful things to silly Luddite greenies.”

Many young people are in the same state of ignorance nowadays. It may be because they don’t read much. It may be because they believe wrongly that they already know the Constitution. It’s the result of many years of left liberal education that is both biased and lazy. Even a friend of mine accuses me of “starting a fight.” I did no such thing. I was peacefully drinking my coffee while reading the WSJ. A bunch of strangers began yelling empty and offensive slogans near my face and I replied very moderately. “But they have a right….” Of course, they have a right; I did not say otherwise. I only instructed them to not speak to the child for whom I am responsible. I told them why in a brief and moderate way.

Immediately, the demonstrators start using religious-sounding language: You are “deniers” they say. Boy, that hurts! Boy, I am glad there is not much firewood handy! (I am not that stupid. I know well that they are trying to compare me to with theory of evolution “deniers.”)

A  frumpy woman in her forties presents herself as an expert because she is making a documentary on climate change, she says. This leaves me cold. Santa Cruz is full of self-declared, self-admiring artists. (I know this for sure, I am one.) I am thinking that if I worked on a movie about human female sexuality it would be no evidence that I know anything on the topic. Am I right?

For some mysterious reason, the film-making housewife insists on treating me as if I were a born-again Christian. Again, I have no idea what she would have done that. I don’t look the part in any way. I am sure I don’t act Christian, whatever that may be. I am absolutely certain I did not say anything leading to that kind of identification. I am an atheist of the calm, non-militant kind. Religion is not at the forefront of my preoccupations except sometimes, the silly Earth worshiping of her gang, precisely. As I said, the madness is close to the surface. The woman appears a little strange, a little twisted.

Temperatures have already risen by 1.4 degrees – the woman experts asserts in a loud voice.

Centigrade or Fahrenheit – I ask?

Yes – she says.

I ask again.

I don’t know – she brushes off my question.

In how long – I ask viciously – in what period?

I don’t know, she says with disarming honesty.

I am under the impression that her ignorance about the things she, herself, chose to evoke does not trouble her a bit.

Are you smarter than the 95.5% of scientists who believe in climate change – she challenges me with finality?

I refrain from answering out of humility. (Could well be that I am; I wouldn’t be that surprised; depends what you call a scientist; I have been reading for more than a half century; I read well; I retain better than most – not better than most at Harvard, better than most in the street. I went to an excellent or maybe just good graduate school, etc.) Also, I was seized like an overworked engine by this affirmation. I have encountered it for years with some variations in digits. I will just make again the obvious point the statement calls for:

If it were true that 95.5 % of scientists believed that there was man-made global warming that will have disastrous consequences, if it were true in reality, how in the world would anyone know this? Has there been a worldwide poll with strict definitions of who is a “scientist”? Was it conducted according to all the known intricate rules of polling including careful, neutral wording? What qualified pollster organization accomplished such a big difficult task? Why isn’t the pollster bragging about it? 95.5% is obviously a bogus number some one made up years ago and that keeps being repeated by believers. Its precision itself cries out, “Phony.” People who assert it are asserting that they don’t know what they are talking about, that they lack ordinary criticality. They are asking to not be believed.

The woman is joined by two younger people who appear to be her children. (Craziness might be hereditary.) A young man of about twenty is using the F word loudly five feet from my grand-daughter they all thought so cute three minutes ago. I am not a prude; I am not especially clean talking but there is no chance, zero chance that I would use such language in the presence of a small child. These people are insane. I don’t mean this figuratively. I mean literally. I mean that if they showed the same loud zeal in connection with say, parking, or house painting, they would risk being institutionalized.

In addition to factual waywardness and bad logic ccprops demonstrate their moral blindness in small ways as well as in big ones. They insist on their right to kill birds, for instance, including the legally protected bald eagle, in order to continue installing wind mills that contribute essentially nothing to the resolution of the imaginary problem of global warming (WSJ 10/11/13 “Fighting Climate Change by killing Eagles,” Robert Bryce.)

I listen to them calling the local talk shows. (I used to have a local talk show radio program myself.) They sound insane even if they are right. Most callers of talk shows are perfectly reasonable. Left-oriented ccprops are of a feather with rightists Bildeberg conspirators. Why do both kinds of callers sound regretful that it’s not yet technically feasible to murder over the airways?

Notice what I am not doing: They can go on demonstrating their irrationality, their lack of trustworthiness, their ignorance. It’s protected by the First Amendment. I will continue to try to make them cry every chance I get. It’s protected too.

More Dramatic News on Climate Change

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , ,

I am giving this link as a small public service. I am trying to do my little bit to counter the media swamping, the totalitarian endeavor by climate change proponents. I perceive the bulk of those proponents as totalitarian because they use various devices to silence their opposition. They are forever declaring the subject of the reality of man-made global warming that is also catastrophic closed.

I can hear them salivating about the fantasy of owning their very own gulag (a Russian word; look it up.) They are positively drooling (like me before a nice cheese tray).

I am unable to vouch for the scientific validity of the contents of the article of reference, of course. I am only able to recognize a calm contrarian voice and, in general, I respect the Cato Institute. (For those who don’t know, Cato is conservative, libertarian tendency.)

Climate Change Worse (No Matter How You Look At It)

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Links , ,

In some places, it’s much warmer than usual. That’s so many instances of climate change, of course.

I some places, it’s much colder than usual. That’s also evidence of climate change.

Good technical article in the Wall Street Journal of  5/8/13  to remind us that  CO2 is plant food. The more CO2 the more plants, and the more food for humans. It’s by NASA astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt and W. Happer, a professor of Physics at Princeton.

Liblogic

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , , , ,

Again (AGAIN) the Midwest is trying to operate in spite of a major snowfall. Its’ a snowfall of extraordinary magnitude for the season according to many of those who know.  And, I have not heard or read any meteorologist arguing that, on the contrary, it’s a normal snowfall for the first week of Spring.

Snow is cold. This cold wave is yet another proof of the reality of a global warming trend that threatens civilization and, beyond it, Earth itself. Of course, this trend is the result of noxious human activities. It’s a done deal that there cannot be any other cause.

If you don’t see that the more industry and cars, the more cold, and the more cold, the more  warming, you are just uneducated or stubborn, or both.

By the same reasoning, the unseasonal cold makes fuels, including natural gas, less essential to human happiness. The president, served by the supine press, must see the current snow storm in the Midwest  as a signal to  redouble its efforts to prevent the rational utilization of America’s abundant fuel resources.

Got it?

There is a pleasant-looking guy in his forties  who often suns himself close to my coffee shop at the beach. He admires my grand-daughter. Of course, I took this to imply that he is a man of taste and discernment. We fell into casual conversation recently about a book I was holding. The conversation quickly turned casually political.

He is an Obama supporter. This being the People Socialist Green Republic of Santa Cruz, it would be surprising if he were not. So, I pried a little.

It took my beach acquaintance a few minutes to fold to the default option that President Obama at least looked presidential. He couldn’t name a single Obama achievement of which he was proud or satisfied. (I had unfairly deprived him of the opportunity to mention Obamacare by designating it  a Pelosi victory.) This is not the fist time I hear Obamites refer to the president’s looks. It’s not clear how you turn such people around. Update: I don’t mean that I hope to turn all, or many around, just a small percentage would do, pehraps 3%..

Suntan Joe was seething with hatred of President Bush. This is remarkable five years later. Curiously, it did not seem to be about the Iraq War. I sense that the antipathy runs deeper, that it’s akin to what some chimps feel about a designated other chimp with an unusual facial expression perhaps. That is also hard to beat.

Since the Republican defeat last November, I have been perplexed by the post-mortem analyses of people I usually trust. I feel that they are off the mark because they are too obvious perhaps, too logical. I am not doing better myself.