Tag: climate and religion

The Scientific Mind

I’ve always – at least as far back as I can remember – considered myself a scientifically oriented person. When I was a child, the highlights of TV were the scientific and mathematical programmes or segments presented by David Bellamy, Patrick Moore, and, most of all, Johnny Ball.

These presenters made science seem, not just a collection of facts, but as connections and patterns that made sense. Their science you could see for yourself, and not just copy down out of a textbook. That’s also what drew me to computers – the stuff I know about computers I know not because I read it in a book or learned it on a course, but because I’ve done it and seen it for myself. That was as true of the 12-year-old me with his ZX-81 and his Think of a Number as it is today.

Science was about what could be demonstrated. I can’t imagine any science programme in the 1980s that talked about “consensus opinion” holding the same interest for me. And so I just wonder, is it a coincidence that all three of these people who led me into science are on record as not believing in global warming?

Climate and Democracy

The theory has been going around recently that dealing effectively with climate change is impossible due to democracy. I think it may have been triggered by an article in Der Spiegel, published in a translated form at Roger Pielke Jr’s blog.

As a sceptic of both global warming and democracy, I have no dog in this fight. If Climate Change means we have to ditch democracy, that’s OK with me; on the other hand, if democracy means we can’t do anything about climate change, that’s just fine too. Nevertheless, the intersection of the two obsessions that this blog seems to have settled on demands my attention.

So let’s take the argument, attributed to David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith, that democracy is incapable of taking the collective action made necessary by the threat of climate change. I haven’t read their book, so I am dealing with a summary of their ideas, for instance from these articles by Shearman.

The weakness of the global warming argument doesn’t necessarily invalidate the claim that democracy is unequal to the challenge it presents. To defeat it on that basis, you would have to show either that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is not just untrue, but impossible, or else that the determination of democratic governments to take any measures necessary short of action is primarily the result of well-founded doubts about the science.

Take these in order: first, is it possible that some such threat as global warming is claimed to be could actually be true? I would say that it is much less likely that some such threat would materialize than that a false threat would be promoted by opportunists, but I cannot say that it is impossible. The global warming scare itself cannot be dismissed out of hand (despite the attempts of some sceptics to to so), but can only be ruled out on the basis of a close look at the evidence.

So we can go on to ask the second question: if AGW or something like it were actually true, would the political structures that we have make it impossible for the necessary collective action to be taken?

It’s plausible, but, at least in the brief articles if not in his book, Shearman does not make that case. He relies on the fact that meaningful action has not, in fact, been taken by democratic governments. That might be, as he says, because they’re not capable of it, but it might equally be that the stalemate is the result of opposition from those who, in my view correctly, believe on the basis of the evidence that such meaningful action is not in fact warranted.

Assessment of this issue is complicated by a feature that global warming alarmism shares with other religions: many people even at an individual level say they believe it but act as if they don’t. I’m not sure it makes much sense, descending into familiar arguments about cheap talk versus revealed preferences, to ask what such people “really” believe, but I think one has to say that to some degree they are unpersuaded by the evidence, even if they say otherwise. Given that, there is still the possibility that the doubt which they have but deny is not reasonable doubt, but is founded on a psychological unwillingness to internalise inconvenient truths.

If this contradiction were limited to the common people, it would be a point in Shearman’s favour. The plebs are not fit to govern, therefore the wise must rule them. However, the inconsistency seems to me to be just as widespread among the powerful as among the mob – I have previously observed, for instance, that investors do not rate sea level rises as significant in their valuations of commercial property.

So for me, Shearman’s argument fails, unfortunately. I suspect that, despite its faults, our democratic governments (in the sense of old democracy, of course) would be able to take sufficient action on climate change, were it really necessary. The reason they are not taking such action is that it is not necessary. The reason they say it is necessary, while not actually taking it, is that they are are lying as usual.

The real link between democracy and global warming is quite different, and is adequately summarised by my guru Mencius Moldbug. In short, the global warming scare and its associated bureaucratic outgrowths are the sort of thing you would expect a democracy to produce – indeed, the kind of thing they always have produced.

The scare originated in democratic countries, spread through democratic countries, and has only been accepted by non-democratic countries after they were pressured or bribed to do so by democracies.

Climategate – sceptics come out

Damian Thompson says “I had no idea that so many mainstream politicians entertained doubts about the AGW thesis.”

That is why the event looks like it’s going to turn into a victory for the sceptics after all. It’s not that the leaked data and emails does all that much damage to the alarmists’ arguments. It didn’t need to: they weren’t that strong to begin with.

The case for global warming depends on positive feedback – in more ways than one. First, because the actual temperature change due to increased CO2 concentration is not worth worrying about, and can only be a problem if it produces weather changes that themselves create more warming – positive feedback. And secondly, because the electorate, reasonably, takes the scientists’ word about the seriousness of the problem, and responds by demanding that politicians demonstrate their concern about the problem, which they do by creating more opportunities for alarmist scientists, who then persuade the public even more of the need to demand more from the politicians…

So a key element in the forming of the AGW political consensus has been that people just accept what they’re told. That’s what anyone would expect – you’ve got to be a bit odd to start to delve into the details of atmospheric physics, weather station siting, dendrochronology, Regularized Expectation-Maximization calculations, just to check up the conclusions of the people who are actually qualified to talk about these things. If someone starts challenging the conventional wisdom by referring to all these technicalities, the only sensible thing is to ignore the technicalities and make a judgment based on the the trustworthiness and qualification of the competing authorities.

The leaked emails change that – not because the man in the street will say – “Oh my! There’s a perhaps somewhat disturbing compensation between indirect aerosol forcing and sensitivity across the CMIP3 models that defies the assumption of independence!”, but because he will see that the argument is not between robot white-coated paragons and a few scruffy nutters, but between two groups of real people, at least one of which must be wrong. That doesn’t change his mind, but it takes the pressure off, so that politicians who have not previously dared to express contrary opinions feel able to make themselves known. That in turn will stir up more doubt, and the positive feedback will move the issue back to being a legitimate debate, as it belongs to be.

ClimateGate and CSI

ClimateGate, as I wrote earlier, does not expose the evil machinations of the Knights Carbonic. It doesn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know (although it proves one or two things that were fairly obvious but previously had barely-plausible deniability)

It is important, though, for what it tells the wider public. Not what it tells them about Climate Science, but what it tells them about science generally. Climate Alarmism has been a beneficiary of a kind of CSI Effect. “There was also evidence of genetic material from a franklinia alatamaha on his shoe. The only known specimen in this area, outside a specialized botanical garden, was given to Senator Alan Corman as a gift.”

The truth of science is rather different. And I don’t say that because I’m anti-science, It’s just that science is a slow process, and, above all, a social process. It isn’t all “Hurrah, I’ve discovered Boyle’s Third Law.” What is unusual about climate science is not the science itself, but the relevance of public opinion and the relevance to politics.

Science that’s of particular interest to the public is usually bad. Usually what happens is that the Mail and the Express get all excited, and everyone else ignores it. What happened with climate science is that a scare story had stakes that were high enough that all the papers got involved, leading to irresistable pressure on politicians, leading to a whole industry being created on the scare.

A story which serves as a nice microcosm of the process is this one. Warning people of dangers is part of the HSE’s job. They ran a campaign, in cooperation with the TUC, to warn building workers about the dangers of asbestos. In doing so, they exaggerated the risk of death by an order of magnitude, by using a theoretical risk model with simplifying assumptions that were incorrect.

A lobby group complained to the Advertising Standards Authority, which ruled against the HSE. That could happen, because the issue was never big news, and no significant politicians had attached themselves to either side of the question. (Scientists dont politicise science, politicians do). Nobody at the ASA got a concerned call from David Cameron. So in this case, the error was corrected. It’s not bound to happen that way.

ClimateGate

When I announced I was giving up on politics, I was at a loss as to what do do with this blog. One option that I considered was concentrating on the climate question. I didn’t take that option, primarily out of cowardice. There has been a determined and deliberate campaign to make out that climate sceptics are not simply wrong but insane. This has been somewhat successful, to the point that I was seriously concerned for my professional reputation should I persist in arguing the sceptical case. This in itself is a remarkable state of affairs, given that the position I am nervous about admitting to holding, is, according to some opinion polls, that of the majority.

(As an anti-democrat, I cannot and do not claim much significance for the majority status of climate scepticism. I merely make the point that it is very strange that the majority view is not even respectable)

The leak of the CRU data has tempted me to stick my head over the parapet once more. The first thought when they appeared was that it was too good to be true, and that the emails must have been faked or planted. That fear faded, but what eventually emerged was that the emails, at least, are less compromising than they appeared at first glance.

To take the most quoted example, the “Nature trick”, it is at the very worst an attempt to spin the data in such a way that the headlines of articles point more in the direction of unprecedented modern warming. It might not even be that, but it doesn’t matter, because we already had proof that the data was being spun in that way, which I presented in April 2008.

The more I look at the documents the less bad they seem. I had set store by the “Rules of the game” presentation as evidence of excessive politicisation, but when I looked at it I saw it was produced by an advertising agency for the government. It is a shocking disgrace that it was produced and is being used, but one can hardly blame the CRU just for having a copy of it. It is nothing to do with them, and in fact the advice it gives is that the scientists’ work should be ignored or glossed over – even suggesting there might be scientific questions is something the politicians want to avoid.

Next, we had the “harry_read_me” file, and the contortions that had to be done to turn a heterogeneous heap of instrument data and adjustments into a presentable, usable gridded global temperature history. People who’ve never had to anything of the sort were shocked by the problems described – incompatible data sets, inconsistent data sets, code written by departed programmers doing things they don’t understand, corruption introduced by format conversions, ad-hoc fixes to cope with missing or corrupted data, mysterious factor-of-ten discrepancies, struggling with inappropriate out-of-date programming languages, success defined as getting data out at the end that “looks right” after nights and weekends of failure. I’ve worked on software producing summary reports of data from multiple sources, and I’ve seen all those things, and done many of them myself. It’s pretty much inevitable.

After that came the famous

valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,- 0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor

None of the blogs I’ve seen that seized on that actually traced the output of the code through to the papers where it was presented, to see if the adjustments were explained there, assuming the output was ever published at all, which has been denied

I don’t now expect the leaked documents to show deliberate fraud, but I never believed there was any in the first place. At least, since there is no reason for Phil Jones to resign and be replaced by someone else, one eternal truth can be upheld – George Monbiot is always wrong.

What the emails do show are two things:

Fact 1. That the researchers – Jones, Briffa, Mann, and others – see themselves as having a responsibility not just to do the science but to persuade the public of the seriousness of the problem and of the need for political action

Fact 2. That as part of this, they want to prevent sceptical research from being published or believed, and at least believe they have some power to do so

Neither of these this are actually serious accusations against the individual scientists. Today it would be thought very strange to argue that a scientist finding what he believed was a serious threat to humanity should not act on that belief by seeking to influence politics. When the government funds research, it wants to fund research that is relevant, and all that the scientists’ activism amounts to is arguing that their research is, in fact, relevant. And of course someone has to review and edit papers and decide which are good science and which aren’t – that’s what peer review means.

And that is the real point here. Because although both of these facts are just the result of Jones et al doing the jobs they’re employed to do, the result of the combination is that science is broken. It’s not their fault.

You can have partisan presentations of the evidence, provided there is opportunity to compare competing partisan presentations. And you need to have assessments of the value of scientific claims, but those should not be made or controlled by partisans of either side. What has gone wrong is that one side has been allowed to silence the other.

The analogy I like is to agency ratings – it worked well until it was made official. When the only asset a rating agency had was the trust that the market had in their judgement, they were extremely conservative. Nobody would pay the agency to give an instrument a rating that nobody else would believe. Once there were laws that many of the largest investors were required to invest in instruments that had AAA rating, that gave the ratings a value in excess of their credibility.

Peer review is the same – publication in the more prestigious scientific journals was valued because it was understood by other scientists as a recommendation that the work was of a high quality. The editors of journals were motivated not only to maintain but to improve the reputation of their journals. Now that review has gone from being solely a recommendation of quality directed at the scientist’s peers, to a stamp of worth directed at politicians and the public, the incentives in the system have been distorted.

Climate and Science

Patrick Crozier writes (a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve been distracted) that libertarians should actually talk about the economics of climate change, and that the best defence is rapid economic growth that can only happen through a freer market.

It sounds pretty reasonable. I think, as a practical matter, the association of libertarianism with climate denial is harmful to our public image. We would be better off accepting climate science, and, as Patrick says, dealing with the economics.

The trouble with that, as reasonable as it seems, is that I can’t do it.

At least it solves one thing. I used to worry that my view of the science was being influenced by my politics, that I was hostile to AGW because it was inconvenient to libertarianism, rather than because of its merits. But I find, that if it comes to a choice between libertarianism and climate denial, I’m more convinced of the scientific question than the political one. Libertarianism has bigger problems than Global Warming. (In a word, democracy)

Indeed, and this is yet another point due to Mencius, I would say that in the long run, the closed loop of “official science” is the biggest problem of the managerial state. I was trying to work up to this gradually before I got sidetracked.

Frankly, if I was to rely only on work produced within the last 50 years, I wouldn’t believe in evolution. It’s only the work done before the state took over all science that convinces me (and the fact that it’s simple enough that I can work through it for myself). By the time we finally give up on global warming (in 25 years or so), science will be so utterly discredited that it will be irrelevant – gone the way of theatre, or sittings of the House of Lords – something that is still done because the state funds it, but nobody can quite remember what the original point was.

AGW and Libertarians

Via DK, a good post at safeism.com :

It’s a source of considerable frustration to me that so many otherwise clear thinking, charming and eriduite chaps, like DK, seem to have it as an article of faith that climate change is all a big con.

I too tend to cringe when I’m with a group of libertarians and anthropogenic global warming is dismissed by the group with a sneer or a chuckle.  Don’t they realize how that makes us look?  Getting over our ideas on economics is difficult enough, particularly in the current environment, without making ourselves look like freaks by standing against such a widely-accepted fact as Global Warming.
As La Bete says, libertarianism doesn’t need to rely on Global Warming being false.  It is perfectly possible to argue in the normal way that state intervention will be ineffective or counterproductive, to argue for mitigation rather than prevention, even.
So in strategic terms — and as Giles Bowkett said, strategy matters — leaving AGW theory alone would be the best bet.  Concentrate our fire elsewhere: on the economy, on civil liberties.
The problem with that is that, even if I want to believe in Global Warming, I still can’t.  The temperature records are made up, the computer models are a joke, the political motivation behind it all is blatant.   I could pretend to go along with it if there was a real chance of advancing the wider movement, but I’d still have my fingers crossed behind my back.
And of course there isn’t a real chance of advancing the wider movement.  We’re fringe and getting more so by the year.  Libertarian activism to me is about keeping the ideas and the lines of communication alive, so if opportunities arise in the unpredictable future, there will at least be something to build on.  Whether it’s a bunch of us reading each others blogs, or LPUK putting up a few candidates, or the ASI proposing limited and arguably counterproductive policies to the mainstream, at least it’s the skeleton of a movement.
Putting it that way sheds a different light on the Global Warming issue.  There’s at least a decent chance that in two or three decades, the warmists will be discredited, and people will be asking “how did we ever get fooled by that stuff?”.   And old man Anomaly will push himself up on his walking stick and say “here’s how, and I knew it all along, and I tried to tell you.  Incidentally, here are quite a few other things that everybody knows which aren’t true.”
Maybe it’s a long shot, but compared to what?  Compared to the LPUK forming a government?  Compared to growing an economically viable society with a high standard of living on offshore platforms?  Compared to an organisation that controls a third of the population deciding by itself that it’s too big and powerful?  Long shots are all we’ve got.

Tierney on Holdren

John Tierney attacks Obama’s science advisor John Holdren.

Dr. Holdren is certainly entitled to his views, but what concerns me is his tendency to conflate the science of climate change with prescriptions to cut greenhouse emissions. Even if most climate scientists agree on the anthropogenic causes of global warming, that doesn’t imply that the best way to deal with the problem is through drastic cuts in greenhouse emissions.

There is some merit on Tierney’s criticism, but it is obviously the reverse of what’s really happening. Whenever I have talked to a scientifically literate person who accepts the AGW consensus, and I have challenged it, it is never more than a couple of minutes before they something like “well, maybe there is room for doubt, but the things we should do about global warming are all things we should be doing anyway, like reducing fossil fuel use”.

It’s fair enough to believe both of those things, but each proposition needs to stand on its own without support from the other. Both sides of the debate have a tendency to shift ground when presented with strong arguments – do point me back here if you catch me doing it.

Nappies and Religion

A bit of fun here – the department of food and rural affairs commissioned a report into the environmental effects of disposable nappies, and found that they were better for the environment than washable cloth nappies.

Why, then, did they hush it up?

Partly it was because they would feel stupid, having pushed the opposite line on the basis of no facts, as, for instance, in this from Westminster Council?

But there’s not that much disgrace, surely, in changing policy in response to new information? The real problem is that the environmental movement has nothing to do with the environment. It is entirely driven by the age-old myth that being rich and happy is morally wrong and punishable. It is based on the religious belief that austerity is a virtue. If science weren’t to tell people that, of two choices, the one that was more work was better for the environment, so much the worse for science.

To be fair, if we could actually see this report there might be problems with it. The Times accounts only for kg of CO2 emissions – CO2 is not the only pollutant, nor, in my opinion, is it even the most important. Of course it is likely to correlate well with other forms of pollution.

Here we go again – now for the bit I write after finding the facts.

The report has been “hushed up” in that, according to documents The Times claims to have seen, there has been a decision not to publicise it. But it is on DEFRA’s website

The study does look at environmental impact beyond CO2 emission, and the results are similar (which is not very surprising). In fact, the Times article is surprisingly accurate, except for the claim the report was hushed up, when in fact it was published in 2007.

I also found a speech by Ben Bradshaw, from 2006, where he referred to the study, saying he “feared” that the new study (the 2007 one we’re talking about) would not be able to give any “more clarity” (meaning, the desired answer) on the nappy question. Why is one answer desired and the other not? Religion.

The speech also mentions the Great Crusade of our time – the war on carrier bags – mentioning in passing that cutting down on plastic carrier bags is bad for the environment, as anyone with a brain would expect.

An important point in the nappy report was that, in the interval since the previous study, disposable nappies had become less bad for the environment. How could this be? They were 10% lighter than before, due to manufacturers cutting costs by improving design. Exactly the same thing has happened to other hate objects of the religious environmentalists – drink cans, for example, and our friend the carrier bag.

The supermarket carrier bag is a masterpiece of environmental design. It weighs less than 10 grammes, and can be reused afterwards. But its most beneficial aspect – its lightness and flimsiness – is what so outrages the pompous snobbish environmentalists. They say they are against harming the environment, but really they are against things that are cheap and tacky. But the cheaper and tackier a piece of packaging gets, the better for the environment.