Among the eco-fans

Where it's important to remember that "fan" is short for "fanatic".

First up, of course, has to be that demented ad for something called the "10:10 climate change campaign" in Britain. Apparently, it was thought that showing warmist believers in positions of authority blowing minority skeptics, including school children, to bloody bits would be funny. Which, in terms of the comedy of stupidity, it kind of is, but not in the way intended. Anyway, here's a link to the original (hastily taken down by the 10:10 campaign itself, but not hastily enough to prevent it going viral). And here's a re-mix, which nicely exposes the murderous rectitude at its base:

Thanks to Hot Air

---

The next stop doesn't have quite the impact of the previous, and at least doesn't pretend that it's "funny" -- it's a post by Doctor Science at Obsidian Wings, entitled "Of Stink Bugs and Men". It's point is simply that human beings, in coming out of Africa, are an "invasive" species, like, oh, stink bugs, kudzu, or cane toads. Never mind that the nasty examples mentioned are nasty only in a human-centered orientation in the first first place, nor that every single land animal is also an "invasive" species, nor that the "invasion" of new ecological spaces is a natural aspect of evolution for every species that ever existed -- no, what's intended by this particular observation is just a variation on the common theme in the large pathological wing of eco-ideology, that human beings are a "cancer on the planet". As the Doctor says:

The overwhelming factor, for H. sapiens as well as stink bugs, is that our native range is adapted to us -- humans or bugs become dangerously invasive when we can escape not just the limited space of our native range, but the constraints on our population that come from other co-native species: predators or parasites (including diseases).

Thanks to Megan McArdle 

If we strip the pathology from this, though, it becomes more interesting -- human beings became successful, in an evolutionary sense, when we escaped the constraints of our initial environment and began to colonize wider spaces, following retreating glaciers into environments that must have seemed impossibly harsh in comparison to our origins. The courage and drive of those early "invaders" can provide us with a good lesson now -- having spread to all corners of the globe, isn't it time that we start to look beyond it? Those who look upon humanity as a kind of stink bug or cancer, of course, would say no.

I'd say yes.

Tide going out?

It's looking that way -- the tide of statism, that is. There are signs that it may have reached its high-water mark sometime in the 70's of the last century, and has been slowly receding since -- lower marginal tax rates, privatization initiatives, deregulation, etc. And, of course, the momentous collapse of "actually existing" socialism in the early 90's. In the midst of history, as we always are, it can be difficult to see real turning points, and there have certainly been some big waves washing in to obscure the trend. But as we now watch even the welfare states of Europe begin to step back from the path they'd been following, as though from an abyss (to mix metaphors a little), it's increasingly difficult to avoid seeing what's before us. The latest example may be that Nanny State bellwether, Sweden, as an article by Duncan Currie, "Sweden's Quiet Revolution", indicates:

The broader story of the 2010 election is the collapse of Sweden’s old political order, which was dominated by the Social Democrats (who held power for all but nine years and a few months between September 1932 and October 2006). “There is a general change in Swedish society,” Stockholm University political scientist Jenny Madestam told the New York Times prior to the vote. “Social-democratic ideas are losing their grip on Sweden, and we are getting more and more individualistic.” Indeed, the country is a far more market-friendly place today than it was 20 years ago, thanks in part to reforms implemented by the Social Democrats themselves. Over the past two decades, it has been one of Western Europe’s most energetic liberalizers — cutting taxes, loosening regulatory shackles, and increasing competition.

This is what gives the left -- liberal, green, anti-capitalist, or "progressive" -- such willies. For some time now they've had to pin their dwindling hopes not on their ideas, which even they recognize as a bit old and stale, if not sclerotic, but on things like demographics -- more immigration! -- or, or, maybe a great big capitalist crisis! And so, when a great big capitalist crisis (GBCC) came along, as they routinely do, imagine the relief and even exhilaration of the left -- especially as, in the US, it coincided with not just the first black president but with the first black "progressive" President!

Little wonder, then, at their confusion, consternation, and bitterness now, when they see that even a GBCC doesn't seem to be able to turn the tide.

P.S.: here's an earlier take on the bellwether.

UPDATE: Oh, and for a little more on the greens (green being the new red for many old lefties who can't quite bring themselves to say the word "socialism" anymore), here's a piece by Johnathan Adler, "The Sorry Green Giant", showing how much of the politicized environmental movement has been taken over by an ideological rump of displaced anti-capitalists, with the result that that movement too is experiencing the ebbing of trust and interest we see in projects to expand the state everywhere:

The environmentalist love affair with big government leads to counterproductive policies and alienates large portions of the electorate. Americans may support environmental protection, but they don’t support a massive, overweening regulatory state. If the only Green answer to ecological concerns is yet more government control of private economic activity, many Americans will turn away.

This year the environmental movement suffered a tremendous political defeat — some would even call it a reckoning.

Pilgrimages of the left

Ed Driscoll:
Springtime for Algore: A Romantic Pilgrimage to Germany’s ‘Eco–Anschluss’

A nice, brief encapsulation of the history of various neuroses associated with the contemporary liberal-left, from bogus, pathetic religiosity to a fascination with whatever version of Big State power and planning is the current fad -- Soviet-style communism, Mussolini-style fascism, Nazi-style architectural theatricality, or the latest Green-style invasion of everyday life.The latter is displayed in the breathless prose of a travel piece in a glossy airline mag, on Berlin of all places, the city involved in every loopy utopian swamp of the century past -- an article that gushes about the city's "anti-consumption ethic", for example, adding that piquant hint of a moral sensibility for its affluent readers, amid the ads for dream trips, hot hotels, and ultimate travel picks.

Thanks to Kate at SDA

George Monbiot is down in the dumps

And no wonder -- here's a professional alarmist, who writes alarmist books and numerous alarmist columns, delivers alarmist speeches, and generally makes a good living* by striving to alarm everyone, who is now waking up to the fact that his ride is over. As the title of his latest effort says, "Climate change enlightenment was fun while it lasted. But now it's dead" (with accompanying tear-drop from melting ice -- not quite as aww-inspiring as the lost polar bear, but similar):

Perhaps we [environmentalists] should have made people feel better about their lives. Or worse. Perhaps we should have done more to foster hope. Or despair. Perhaps we were too fixated on grand visions. Or techno-fixes. Perhaps we got too close to business. Or not close enough. The truth is that there is not and never was a strategy certain of success, as the powers ranged against us have always been stronger than we are.

Pretty depressing stuff, no? A last ditch effort to stir up the remaining True Believers, do you think? Are the concluding words maybe hinting at some more drastic action?:

All I know is that we must stop dreaming about an institutional response that will never materialise and start facing a political reality we've sought to avoid. The conversation starts here.

Might George be turning revolutionary?

Oh, probably not. More likely, as the first comment on the column indicates, he's just casting about for a new bandwagon, another scare.  The comments themselves are interesting, by the way -- half seem made up of symbolic hair-shirt types who feel bad about their own wasteful ways and are frustrated that everybody else doesn't share their neuroses; the other half people fed up with Monbiot's Chicken-Little alarmism, and  basically telling him to get over himself.

Two additional points:
First, I got this link from Tim Blair, who does a better, more thorough job on Monbiot than I do. And second, for those sincerely and practically concerned about real climate change -- as opposed to those who are merely signalling their status as evolved, spiritual beings or whatever -- there are a large number of actions other than immediate emission curbs that can and will be brought to bear, without the hysteria, over time. One of the more interesting, for example, is the idea of carbon re-cycling, mentioned in this earlier post.

(* I don't actually know how good a living Monbiot makes, admittedly, but if it's any significant fraction of fellow eco-crusader AlGore, he's making out just fine.)

The eco-terrorist and the silence of the greens

James Taranto, "Best of the Web":

James Lee's Awakening

From the always-excellent Taranto, an even more excellent than usual piece on the latest eco-loon cum terrorist, and the curious silence, so far, from the usual lefty suspects on any connection between their "shockingly irresponsible", extremist rhetoric and the sad spectacle at the Discovery Channel yesterday.  To be contrasted with the media's repeated attempts to create links between any violent incident and, say, the Tea Party. And contrasted too with the "nothing to see here" approach of Jesse Walker, for example, at Reason's "hit & run" -- who may well be making a partially commendable effort to restrain from making partisan hay from the tragedy, but sometimes you have to whack a biased media over the head to get their attention, and this just puts them back to sleep.

Lomborg and climate change: what is to be done?

The Guardian:

Bjørn Lomborg: $100bn a year needed to fight climate change

The first thing to point out is that this story, which is all over the Internets, is false, as you can see from the description in the first sentence in the Guardian story above: "The world's most high-profile climate change sceptic". Here's what the "sceptic" has been saying from the start, according to the Guardian's own collection elsewhere:

Bjørn Lomborg in his own words:

"This chapter accepts the reality of man-made global warming." The Skeptical Environmentalist, 2001

"Global warming is real and man-made. It will have a serious impact on humans and the environment toward the end of this century." Cool It, 2007

In other words, he's explicitly and quite clearly a believer in man-made climate change. What he is skeptical about is what follows from that, namely the net costs of the warming itself and the cost-benefit analyses involved in particular mitigation strategies now -- especially attempts to suppress carbon emissions through various taxation schemes, enough to make a significant impact on climate. From what I can see, this skepticism too largely continues -- meaning that it's false in the first place to claim he was ever a climate change skeptic, and then doubly false, in the second place, to claim that he's now made a "u-turn".

What has changed is that he's now recommending a relatively modest carbon tax be levied, not as a means of suppressing carbon emissions (which was always either futile or dangerous, or both) but simply as a means of raising funds for research on alternate energy sources, geo-engineering, and adaptation. If you add carbon-capture and either sequestration or carbon re-cycling (see this) as research targets, then this makes sense. The only thing to add is that it's always made sense and doesn't require global circuses like Kyoto or Copenhagen to implement. In fact, it doesn't require carbon taxes either -- it can or should be funded just as any other research initiative is funded. So maybe Lomborg is just throwing the True Believers a bone.

"Avatar"-man backs down from showdown

See James Cameron backs out of debate with climate-change skeptics (HotAir)

I quite liked Avatar, by the way, which was simple-minded but in a nice way. Cameron's good at some things, such as telling a story, concocting pretty fantasy worlds. Not so good at reason and evidence, apparently. Or maybe, as Allahpundit says, he was just "busy".

UPDATE (Aug 26): Another report.

Upside down in Oz politics

Just a quick note about the recent, and still inconclusive general election Down Under -- I don't pretend to be any sort of expert on Aussie politics, but from this distance this appears like one of the strangest and most dramatic political episodes I've seen since maybe the 60's in America. To set the stage, there are two main parties, Labor and a Coalition of Liberals (larger bloc) and Nationals, plus the Greens (plus some independents, and maybe a smattering of odds and ends -- they have a preferential ballot). For a number of years early in the 2000's, the Liberal/National coalition had been in power, led by John Howard, who was as loathed by the Australian left as George Bush was by the American left. Finally, in 2007, the hated Howard was defeated, swept from office by Labor led by one Kevin Rudd -- triumphalist huzzahs on the left, and predictions of a long Labor dominance that would banish the sour memories of Howard's earlier 11 year stretch.

Two years go by, and the Labor Prime Minister, Rudd, proposes a version of cap-and-trade carbon Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). This initially has broad support in polling, so much so that the then leader of the Liberals, Malcolm Turnbull, signed on with at least apparent enthusiasm, giving the proposal the much sought "bi-partisan support" at least and seeming to assure its passage. But then reality bit, fairly hard, and the real fun began. I'm not clear on the exact sequence of events, but voices began to raised against the ETS, the Climate-gate uproar got rolling and couldn't be suppressed by the media, and opposition to Turnbull within his own party over the issue mounted. That opposition quickly became so powerful that Turnbull was forced to resign as leader and Tony Abbot, an ETS critic, took over. Then Rudd seemed to vacillate himself over the ETS, perhaps sensing an electoral loser in the making. As a general election loomed, polls indicated a sharp drop in support for Labor, at least some of which was due to the now controversial ETS. Hardly had the Aussie left begun to get comfortable in their anticipated dominance, in other words, when it started to look like it was all coming undone. So, in what appears remarkably like panic, just weeks before the election, Labor dumped Rudd, installing Julia Gillard in his place. And then, just as it seemed that the switch to Gillard might save the day, the people spoke at last in yesterday's general election, and it looks as of now that the Liberals received a plurality of votes (with a preferential ballot I doubt that any party ever gets an outright majority), and may have a plurality of seats in at least the lower House, though that's still unclear. In the land of Oz, they're calling it a "hung parliament" -- though we Canadians can tell them that minority governments are quite able to get along for quite some time. In any case, that's as rapid and confused an end to a heralded political dynasty as I've seen in a while.

So, all in all, a remarkable sequence of political surprises, much of it turning on a fateful piece of ill-advised anti-climate change legislation! There's a lesson there somewhere.

Here's a quick comment by Michael Barone: "Australia votes: rightward trend in Anglosphere democracies". And here's the latest post from a man on the spot, Tim Blair: "Election 2010 IV".

"an attitude of epistemic humility"

That's a quote from the end of a Jim Manzi article in TNR: "Confusion Reigns at TNR on the Stimulus ... For Good Reason". The confusion he's talking about has to do not just with differing opinions, Keynesian and otherwise, over the effectiveness of the "stimulus" itself, but also with a spreading recognition that there is no good way even to assess its effectiveness -- because however good or bad the results of a policy, you can always argue that they would have been better or worse if the policy hadn't been in place. As he says (quoting himslef in an earlier article), "we have no reliable way to measure counterfactuals".

Now, this may be a little too humble -- if a policy is implemented on the basis of some projection of its results, and that projection is then shown to be wrong, it's at least going to cast some doubt on the policy and the theory underlying its projection, which is what's happening now with the Stimulus and its Keynesian defenders (Krugman, e.g.). And often there are other ways of assessing than through counterfactual reruns of history -- such as by comparing different approaches to the same problem in different jurisdictions, as Josef Joffe, a colleague of Manzi's, does in "The International Stimulus Sweepstakes: Who Wins?". (See also this post by Megan McArdle, on "Hoovernomics".) But in general this lesson that we have a difficult time, even after a policy has been put in place and operating, much less before, in knowing whether and to what degree it was effective, should restrain the urge to make very large bets, using other people's money and lives, on theoretical/ideological premises.

Suppose, now, that we were to change focus, and apply a little of that "epistemic humility" to the climate debate. We'd see a greater recognition of the inherent uncertainties in long-range climate modeling in the first place, and much greater attention paid to the huge uncertainties inherent in efforts to model real economic costs and benefits inherent in any policy approach toward the issue, in the second place. It's the latter, of course, that should give pause to anyone not a zealot. When the situation is one in which any action, including no action, carries risks that are difficult or impossible to calculate, it's generally not a good time to make a large leap of faith/ideology. Instead, Manzi's proposed guidelines for policy in the face of this kind of uncertainty seem like a much more rational approach, to climate change as well as to economic crises:

... “boldness” in the face of ignorance should not be seen in heroic terms. It is a desperate move taken only when other options are exhausted, and with our eyes open to the fact that we are taking a wild risk.... We are walking into a casino and putting $800 billion dollars down on a single bet in a game where we don’t even know the rules. In general, in the face of this kind of uncertainty, we ought to seek policy interventions that are as narrowly targeted as is consistent with addressing the problem; tested prior to implementation to whatever extent possible; hedged on multiple dimensions; and designed to be as reversible as is practicable.

Carbon taxes as a means of forcing down global emissions to some early industrial level are an example of a policy too grandiose, too uncertain, and too premature to meet these criteria.

Those not busy being born ...

... are busy dying, as B. Zimmerman said.

I wanted to expand on a quick remark in a previous post, where I said "... without growth, this is not a civilization that will simply stagnate (much less settle into some bucolic steady-state) -- it will tear itself apart in a zero-sum war of all against all." Why is that?

Primarily because people have aspirations, material aspirations -- for themselves, obviously, but perhaps even more strongly for their children. As long as the economic game in which they're engaged is positive sum -- i.e. as long as the economy, over the long haul, grows, the pie expands -- there is at least the potential for those aspirations to be realized for everyone, and this is widely understood. But once long-term growth comes to a halt, the only way any one player can realize his/her aspirations is to deprive another of theirs -- the zero-sum Hobbesian hell mentioned above.

It's true that historically some civilizations have existed in a more or less steady-state for relatively long periods (e.g., Egypt, China), but of course this culture is not like those. What makes this culture distinct is precisely the inverse of what allowed those and other pre-modern cultures to persist so long with so little structural change: the absence of a systemic, politically enforced hierarchy. Steady-state cultures, in other words, must rely on some notion of "place" and must make an ideology out of keeping to one's "place" in this world, putting off hope of satisfying one's aspirations to the next (see also The Theme). Little wonder that modern thoughts of a steady-state society are always so associated with the political left and its project of a state-enforced egalitarianism, since, in the absence of that obsolete ideology of "place", they have to hope that they can at least minimize evidence that anyone could ever do better.

Unfortunately -- not just for them but for all of us, if we can't find a way to sustain growth -- even such a leftist totalitarianism will not obliterate human aspiration.

"Climate change" 3 - a solution?

In the first post in this series, I talked about the radical uncertainty, as well as the futility, involved in any serious effort, over the course of many decades, through any and all economic upheavals, and even as most of the world's people are still industrializing, to suppress global carbon emissions to some early 20th century level. In the second post, I talked about how the irrationality of current political moves in this direction might be better understood as the result, not of science, but of a kind of pseudo-science used to cover a quasi-religious belief system. You can see this manifested in the moralistic, even messianic terms so often used to talk about everything from "wasteful lifestyles" (SUVs being a particularly despised symbol) to "saving the planet".  Now, the adherents of such a belief system, particularly given its pseudo-scientific cover, will of course disagree that there's anything irrational about their fervent backing of carbon emission reduction schemes and will insist that they're really just concerned with the potentially disastrous, or at least very costly, effects of AGW. But the test of this is their reaction to alternative possibilities for atmospheric CO2 reduction, an obvious one being direct carbon extraction, as in the Scientific American article cited previously ("Washing Carbon out of the Air", June/10). Such projects typically involve some sort of sequestration of the carbon extracted. But another, and much better possibility, if economically feasible, would be to use the carbon to produce transportation fuel again -- no longer "fossil" fuel now, but re-cycled fuel. And that, as I understand it, is just what a new carbon extraction technology called "STEP" claims to offer -- see "Solar-powered process could decrease carbon dioxide to pre-industrial levels in 10 years":

By showing how to take advantage of both the sun’s heat and light for capturing and splitting carbon dioxide, the STEP process is fundamentally capable of converting more solar energy than either photovoltaic or solar thermal processes alone. The experiments in this study showed that the technique could capture carbon dioxide and convert it into carbon with a solar efficiency from 34% to 50%, depending on the thermal component. While carbon could be stored, the production of carbon monoxide could later be used to synthesize jet, kerosene, and diesel fuels, with the help of hydrogen generated by STEP water splitting.

“We are exploring the STEP generation of synthetic jet fuel and synthetic diesel,” Licht said, “and in addition to carbon capture, we are developing STEP processes to generate the staples predicted in our original theory, such as a variety of metals and bleach."

No doubt there are a lot of problems to be solved yet, and a serious decrease in atmospheric CO2 would in any case be a costly project even if and when they're solved.  But for eco-True Believers, a process like this isn't even a potential solution but a threat, since it seems like it would take away the biggest opportunity they've yet seen to have a serious impact on "wasteful lifestyles", "the consumer society", etc. -- why, SUVs might proliferate like rabbits! So there's the test: if you think there's a rational basis to be concerned about carbon emissions -- and I do, for example -- then a process such as this and/or other extraction possibilities both known or yet to be developed should give you serious hope. If, on the other hand, your real concern is this quasi-religious moralizing about waste, and the concomitant desire to impose a personal ethos on everyone (everyone else, as a rule, as we can see from Al Gore's mansion), then you'll want to give serious effort to finding ways to debunk and otherwise undermine such a hope.

"Climate change" 2 - fad and dogma

Before The Wisdom of Crowds, of course, there was Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Delusions of which the recent, but now hopefully fading, AGW excitement is but one example. The point here, as the previous post tried to make clear, isn't that AGW isn't happening -- it probably is. The point is simply that the certainties of costs and the uncertainties of benefits from proposed carbon emission reduction schemes make the drive to implement them inexplicable on a rational basis.

If, on the other hand, this drive has more the character of a cultural fad, driven by irrational forces, , then it becomes more understandable, and the clues that this is the case with the AGW issue are everywhere. Note, for example, how its adherents tend to elevate it above the level of scientific theory to that of dogmatic doctrine, to the point where some have suggested criminalizing "heretics" who question it. Note too the way in which its adherents will  refuse to countenance the possibility of any benefits to warming at all, as though the present climate is in such a Goldilocks condition of perfection that any deviation will lead to apocalypse. Or the way in which they refuse even to think about any other means of dealing with the potential problems of climate change -- e.g., carbon capture, geo-engineering -- than through huge forced reductions in global carbon emissions, regardless of the economic costs and questionable viability of such an approach. Or the way in which, at the first hint of rational skepticism, they lapse into irrelevant, moralistic rants about wasteful lifestyles, consumer societies, capitalist depradation, limits to growth, industrial civilization, technology, plastic, war, and humankind as a cancer on the planet, etc., etc.

So it's impossible to avoid the observation that, once we get beyond the immediate level of some degree of climatic warming resulting to some degree from human activity, we're in the realm of a quasi-religious belief system, defended with the sort of righteous intensity that we see in True Believers of all sorts. It's perhaps not surprising, however ironic, that we see this kind of phenomenon turning up in an age of supposed unbelief, particularly among those who tend to pride themselves on their freedom from religious superstition. We all need some source of meaning and value, after all, and in the absence of the old Gods, "going Green", "saving the planet", etc. can serve as well as any other New Age substitute. What's pernicious here, though, is the attempt to use science as cover -- that is, to try to make science serve one's religious and political ends. In attempting this, the Greens at one end of the political spectrum, including the AGW believers, make the same mistake as the creationists at the other end.

UPDATE: See the next post in the series for a test of whether AGW concern is rational or quasi-religious at base.

"Climate change" 1 - it's the uncertainty, stupid

In an earlier post, I'd expressed the hope that we were starting to see the winding down of "climate change", at least as a political hot button, and I see others are still of that opinion, in particular Shika Dalmia of Forbes ("The Death of the Global Warming Movement") and Paul Krugman of the NY Times (in a hilariously titled column, "Who Cooked the Planet?"). But then you get Tyler Cowan, of all people, endorsing a carbon tax because, oh, who knows, it might do something, and we need to tax something anyway, and.... Sigh.   

Having gotten into a couple of online debates in comments recently, though, (see this post, and this) it seemed to me worthwhile to summarize my general position here, and say why attempts at major policy decisions aimed at curbing carbon emissions are not a good idea -- not now, and probably not ever.

First, this has nothing to do with any skepticism regarding AGW -- though I should perhaps say it has almost  nothing to do with such skepticism, since a critical approach to any such claim is both rational and in the best traditions of science, and since any new evidence that AGW is not occurring would of course undermine attempts to mitigate it. But, on the whole, and despite the despicable behaviors of some climatologists revealed by Climategate, I think it's likely that AGW is a reality.

Second, this has nothing to do with how hard or complex it might be to get concerted global action to make the huge cuts in carbon emissions necessary to have any significant impact on AGW, given the above likelihood. It's not the difficulty, it's the uncertainty. When making policy decisions that are a) known to have serious immediate costs in themselves, but b) not known how successful or effective they might be, over an extended time period of 1 or 2 centuries, and c) not known how they might compare with even present policy alternatives not to mention others that might show up in the years before any significant effects of policy could be felt -- then "Just do something" is not a good motto. "First do no harm" is a better one.

The point here is that it's not just one source or level of uncertainty, but rather a concatenation of uncertainties, which when joined together reveal just how deeply irrational the "just do something" frenzy has been":

• First, of course, there's the lingering uncertainty regarding the warming trend itself. As I've said, despite Climategate and the "hide the decline" embarrassments, it still seems this is likely. The only point here is that there are numerous instances in the history of science where something that seemed highly likely, even obvious, at one point, turned out to be wrong -- and it's important to stay open to the possibility that this too may be wrong.
• Second, given the likelihood that there is a warming trend, there's also some remaining uncertainty around whether or not it's caused, or caused primarily, by human activity. Again, it looks as though this is also quite likely at this point, though there are certainly additional sources of uncertainty introduced here -- we're starting to see the problem when levels of uncertainty are stacked on top of one another.

Here's where the serious layers of guess-work begin:

• Third, given the above two likelihoods, there is considerable uncertainty surrounding the costs of this warming -- or even whether, balancing gains against costs, including the costs of adaptation, the result of a warmer world would not be a net positive (fewer deaths from cold, vast new areas of arable land, etc.) One reason the whole issue so often looks like fabricated alarmism is just the fact that you almost never hear even the possibility of any gains from warming, as though somehow the world is only now at some magical Goldilocks level of perfect temperature.
• Fourth, even if we knew the costs of warming, or even just knew that it would be a net negative -- i.e., that anything warmer must be worse -- there is a huge uncertainty around the costs and likelihood of success of any particular strategy of mitigation, costs and probabilities that would need to be added to the balance sheet before we could assess the cost/benefit of the strategy. This too has been largely ignored, as warmist believers have focused on only the most immediate, short-term objectives of carbon emission reduction, as in Kyoto. Those alone have significant economic impact, but everyone understands, even if they rarely speak it, that such objectives in themselves will have only a negligible impact on climate change a century or two from now -- the only thing that has the remotest chance of an impact would be massive emission reductions, even as most of the world is still trying to industrialize. Such reductions could only be realized by the most wrenching economic interventions, which would in turn have a serious impact on the chances of such policies ever being sustainable in the long time frames necessary.  And likelihood of success is particularly important here because if the strategy fails it simply adds -- perhaps greatly -- to the overall costs of the warming itself.

And the greatest source of uncertainty of all...

• Fifth, even if we could convince ourselves that we've got some sort of even approximate handle on the overall cost-benefit of both the warming and the chosen mitigation strategy, the very time frames involved here introduce insuperable uncertainties. To see why, consider just a range of 40 years -- enough to take us just to mid-century going forward, or to 1970 looking backward. That's not long in this case, where the anthropogenic warming is typically considered over a range of from one to two centuries, but, looking back, it's enough to take us into another world so far as environmental issues are concerned. In 1970, if climate was considered at all, it was as a source of worry about an approaching Ice Age; there was going to be a "Great Die-Off" in the 1980's that would kill 4 billion people; metal and mineral resources, not to mention oil, would be used up by the year 2000; survivors would be wearing gas masks in cities; etc. Needless to say, things look different now. Not only that, but in 1970 there were no cell phones, no digital cameras, no Internet, no personal computers, and little hint that any of that might be coming and might change the world and our sense of what's possible -- just 40 years ago. If, just 40 years from now, we find our sense of the world and its possibilities changed to a similar degree, then global economic/climatic engineering projects now will almost certainly look as antiquated and silly as those apocalyptic predictions of 40 years ago. In particular, possibilities of carbon capture and sequestration that are even now being looked at seriously -- see, e.g., "Washing Carbon out of the Air", Scientific American, June/10 -- may make it possible to reduce atmospheric carbon to below industrial levels much more quickly, cheaply, efficiently, and effectively, than any such politically and diplomatically fragile global emission-reduction schemes. 

So, in the context of such a stack of uncertainties, the recent media and political push to "Just do something!" seems much more a kind of over-excited fad, or one of those "end times" apoclyptic hysterias that occasionally sweep through whole populations, like a cultural contagion, rather than anything based on the actual science of climate change itself. In the next post, I'll look at these more irrational influences. But in the meantime, I'll end this one by noting again, as I said at the start, that it seems as though more and more people are already shaking themselves awake from this fixation, and many are starting to feel that maybe they've been had. Or so we can only hope.


UPDATE: next post in this series.

"Moral licencing" and the attractions of orthodoxy

An article in the Washington Post a few days ago goes a fair way toward explaining how "going Green" has become such a fad, particularly among what we might as well call the "liberal elite", or those who see themselves as such, or who would like to be seen as such, or who, at the very least, wouldn't like not to be seen as such: "Why going green won't make you better or save you money".

We drink Diet Coke -- with Quarter Pounders and fries at McDonald's. We go to the gym -- and ride the elevator to the second floor. We install tankless water heaters -- then take longer showers. We drive SUVs to see Al Gore's speeches on global warming.

These behavioral riddles beg explanation, and social psychologists are offering one in new studies. The academic name for such quizzical behavior is moral licensing. It seems that we have a good/bad balance sheet in our heads that we're probably not even aware of. For many people, doing good makes it easier -- and often more likely -- to do bad. It works in reverse, too: Do bad, then do good.

It's not mere illogic nor garden-variety hypocrisy at work here, in other words -- there are deeper moral problems:

University of Toronto behavioral marketing professor Nina Mazar showed in a recent study that people who bought green products were more likely to cheat and steal than those who bought conventional products. One of Mazar's experiments invited participants to shop either at online stores that carry mainly green products or mainly conventional products. Then they played a game that allowed them to cheat to make more money. The shoppers from the green store were more dishonest than those at the conventional store, which brought them higher earnings in the game.

"People do not make decisions in a vacuum; their decisions are embedded in a history of behaviors," Mazar wrote, with co-author Chen-Bo Zhong. "Purchasing green products may license indulgence in self-interested and unethical behaviors."

Thus, "going Green" performs much the same moral/psychological function that buying an indulgence had for many in the Middle Ages. And though the author doesn't get into more complex or nastier examples of the same phenomenon, it's easily observed in other areas as well. For example, as long as I'm a liberal -- and liberals are, by the accepted definition within liberal circles, Good -- I can't be an anti-Semitic bigot, despite a distaste for Jews that I express by joining in the routine, if over-the-top, denunciations of the Jewish homeland. In fact, being an overt liberal can give me licence to indulge in a wide variety of quite acceptable stereotypes, bigotries, and hatreds -- e.g., against Christians, country-music fans, or Sarah Palin. And even to slip into the occasional expression of unacceptable prejudices -- e.g., regarding blacks, women, or gays, say -- as long as it's just between us libs, or it's used incidentally to heap abuse on the acceptable targets.

Now, first of all, this goes beyond the more trivial examples of moral inconsistency that the author of the Post article sticks with -- understandably, since he doesn't want to make his readers too uncomfortable. We're talking now about people with political opinions, after all, as opposed to, e.g., dietary ones. But, second of all, though this kind of licencing works for anyone with a powerful sense of their own righteousness, it also works in the opposite direction, as the article suggests -- that is, it provides a powerful source of rectitude, in the absence of traditionally religious sources, for those who are anxious or uncertain as to their own moral status. So, third of all, then, political opinions of this sort are going to be quite immune to any sort of rational correction, and so will always have a special attraction to those inclined, for reasons of safety and ease,  toward orthodoxy, i.e., the bien pensant -- because you don't have to think about them. There's no point! Just sign on to the general doctrine, display the right opinions in public, and you're good to go -- to cocktail parties, book signings, gallery openings, etc. (Might need a little caution at NASCAR races, is all. But then you wouldn't be caught there anyway, would you?)

Mars IS the answer!

Now, okay, maybe the sing-song sounds a little funny at first, and the refrain gets a bit repetitive toward the end, but I still think this is inspiring:



(Notice the blue sunset at the 22 second mark? We're not in Kansas.)

A quick point: eco-people have been predicting dire events -- global catastrophe, apocalypse, etc. -- since at least Malthus (an early Greenie?), and have been proven wrong time after time after time. Hasn't stopped them from continuing to generate their "scary scenarios", and of course there's always a market for that sort of "End is Nigh!" sandwich-board advertising anyway. But it has at least helped many people see their proselytizing for what it is.

They do, though, have one ultimate point that rests on logic, not events: you cannot grow indefinitely given a finite resource. Mars -- and space generally -- is the logical answer to that logical point.

(The emphasis in the post's title, by the way, is just a result of a bumper sticker I remember seeing a while back, that had some allusion to the "limits to growth" and the line "Mars is not the answer". )

Tip to Speculist

Why did they hide the decline?

Much good clean fun has been had over one phrase in particular out of that sad email dump known as "Climategate" (someday we'll all get over Watergate, but not yet) -- "... Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline." But Taranto continues to derive some well-deserved amusement from the clumsy and tortuous efforts to explain away an obvious attempt to make data fit conclusions:

Climate Skeptics With Leaves 

Ho hum, a panel hired by Britain's University of East Anglia has cleared scientists at the University of East Anglia of wrongdoing in their global-warming "research," the New York Times reports. We especially got a kick out of this description of their work:

The issue involved an effort to reconstruct the climate history of the past several thousand years using indirect indicators like the size of tree rings and the growth rate of corals. The C.R.U. researchers, leaders in that type of work, were trying in 1999 to produce a long-term temperature chart that could be used in a United Nations publication.

But they were dogged by a problem: Since around 1960, for mysterious reasons, trees have stopped responding to temperature increases in the same way they apparently did in previous centuries. If plotted on a chart, tree rings from 1960 forward appear to show declining temperatures, something that scientists know from thermometer readings is not accurate.

Most scientific papers have dealt with this problem by ending their charts in 1960 or by grafting modern thermometer measurements onto the historical reconstructions.

It seems to us there are two possibilities here: (1) In 1960, the trees suddenly changed the way they respond to temperature increases, or (2) There is a methodological problem with the thermometer readings. It looks to us as though the people who claim to love trees are actually making them scapegoats to hide their own error or deception. What a stab in the bark.

They hid the decline, in other words, first and most obviously because it didn't fit the established narrative on climate change, but second because it threatened to expose the shoddiness of the data they were relying on to claim that the recent temperature rise was unprecedented.

The apologists for the "people who claim to love trees", of course, have twisted themselves into pretzels in their various efforts to "explain" the errors and deceptions, but, as we've seen, serious damage has been done and comments like the ones above in a report that sets out to repair it don't do much to help. This is the problem with trying to enlist science in the political wars -- the temporary advantage you gain comes at the cost of eroding the long-term credibility of the scientists themselves.


UPDATE: Now a British labour MP and member of the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology wants new hearings on Climategate, because (as reported by Lawrence Solomon):

... the Russell report failed to answer fundamental questions. Among these, Stringer told The Register: “Why did they delete emails? The key question was what reason they had for doing this, but this was never addressed; not getting to the central motivation was a major failing both of our report and Muir Russell.”

Although the Select Committee had stressed to East Anglia the importance of having open and independent inquiries, the hearings failed to oblige. The Russell inquiry, the last straw for Stringer, was held behind closed doors and heard only one side of the story. It failed to interview any scientist critical of the Climategate scientists; it failed to call witnesses who were the subjects of the emails, it failed to publish all the depositions, and its panellists could hardly be viewed as independent. One panellist, Geoffrey Boulton, was a climate change advisor to the UK and the EU; another, Richard Horton, had deemed global warming “the biggest threat to our future health.”

The abuse of science

Ann Althouse has a post linking to a Saletan article in Slate, about a little political editing job performed by the current Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan, on a document emanating from a medical association. It's creating a flurry, though I think it will likely blow over as far as Kagan herself is concerned. But it raises more general issues, as both Saletan and Althouse point out. Here's Saletan:

Judges have put too much faith in statements from scientific organizations. This credulity must stop.

Which Althouse generalizes:

We all need to be heighten our skepticism about the way politicians and lawyers use our embrace of the authority of science to scam us.

And I'll generalize again, with the whole global warming fad and eco-politics in mind particularly (taken from my comment to her post):

"We all need to be heighten our skepticism about ... our embrace of the authority of science", period. Scientists have become a kind of modern priesthood for too many, despite the fact that they too are human and are as susceptible to the temptations not just of money or career, but also of quasi-religious fads and cults.

Catastrophe losing its appeal?

So says Lawrence Solomon, looking over a number of recent developments re: that old favorite of the global doomsters, "climate change". Actually, in the wake of the recent G20 summit in Toronto, they'd be better described as non-developments:

The global-warming commitments of the G20 — which now carries more clout than the G8 — went from nebulous to non-existent: The G20’s draft promise going into the meetings of investing in green technologies faded into a mere commitment to “a green economy and to sustainable global growth.”

There were, though, some fairly dramatic political events that related quite directly to the whole AGW fad:

Kevin Rudd, Australia’s gung-ho global-warming prime minister, lost his job the day before he was set to fly to the G20 meetings; just months earlier Australia’s conservative opposition leader, also gung-go on global warming, lost his job in an anti-global-warming backbencher revolt. The U.K.’s gung-ho global-warming leader during last year’s G8 and G20 meetings, Gordon Brown, likewise lost his job.

Now, I don't mean to be too flippant about this -- AGW is pretty clearly a fad, but it's still likely to be a reality too. How much of a reality, though, what its real costs and benefits might be, what the economic costs of immediate mitigation through carbon reduction would amount to, and what future technologies might develop to allow us to manage things much more cheaply -- these are all such huge uncertainties that the current hubbub around carbon reduction seems explicable only as another example of the madness of crowds, and even of the strange attraction of apocalypse. Good, then, to see some political pushback, finally, as push really does come to shove.

Capitalism vs. corporatism: a meeting of left and right?

Here's a comment on a theme that needs a lot more attention than its gotten so far -- the distinction between capitalism, in the sense of free trade, free markets, and free enterprise, and what we might as well call "corporatism", in the sense of state support for, and involvement with, selected corporate favorites. Corporatism often hides under capitalism, and, on the left especially, is often mistaken for it. But, as the note makes clear, they are two very different political/economic entities, and corporatism has its proponents on both the left (as in, e.g., state control of the economic commanding heights) and the right (as in, e.g., using subsidies as a means of shifting tax money from one sector to a more favored one).

The meeting of cats and dogs left and right comes up in a reference to another post, by an environmental blogger named David Roberts, criticizing Newt Gingrich's advocacy of energy subsidies, and it has the better substance:

Says Gingrich, "a low-cost energy regime is essential to our country." That is one doozy of a non-sequitur. Surely a conservative ought to know that money government spends on energy subsidies is taken from elsewhere in the economy. The externalized health and ecological costs of fossil fuels are paid by the public, with money taken from elsewhere in the economy. Fossil-fuel subsidies don't reduce costs, they shift costs. The burden is moved from energy companies to the public. The result is what we have today: energy that looks cheap because most of its costs are hidden from view. ...

There is no plausible interpretation under which Gingrich could be characterized as pro-market. He is pro-business, or more precisely, pro-some-businesses, which is very different -- the opposite, even -- of pro-market.

via Instapundit

Versions of apocalypse porn: "Peak Oil"

There's no denying that apocalypse has its gothic appeal (witness the popularity of various world-ending sci-fi movies and books), but some renditions of it have so obvious a political agenda that it kind of makes you smile. E.g., here's Oxford researcher Jorg Friedrichs telling us "what will happen when peak oil hits" -- apparently "the outlook is not good":

His conclusions: the world will have a “slow and painful” adjustment to peak oil lasting a century or more with the inevitable collapse of industrial society and the disintegration of free trade. How cheerful.

And why might we think that last sentence isn't sarcastic? Well, maybe because:

If he were to guess which countries would be the most stable during the collapse, Friedrichs concludes that “Countries with a recoverable authoritarian tradition are likely to work better than liberal democracies.”

The U.S. would have a hard time resorting to Cuban style local resilience because of the Western lifestyle. “When social glue and traditional lifestyles have eroded, they are not easily recovered,” he said, comparing the Cuban and U.S. societies. “After several generations of individualism and affluence, Westerners will have a hard time accepting that they need to rely on communities and must revert to a sustainable lifestyle...."

 Yes, socialism may have failed everywhere it's been tried, but there's still hope, no? Y2K didn't do it for us, but if peak oil doesn't, there's still climate change, global pandemic, asteroid strike, ...