February 19, 2007
From the desk of Jane Galt:The post below also applies to behavioural economics, which the left seems to believe is a magical proof of the benevolence of government intervention, because after all, people are stupid, so they need the government to protect them from themselves. My take is a little subtler than that:
1) People are often stupid
2) Bureaucrats are the same stupid people, with bad incentives.
You've hit the problem on the head. Jerry Pournelle, arguably the first blogger, has his Iron Law of Bureaucracy:
"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions."
Just because you get a CS job doesn;t mean your IQ goes up 10 points.
Posted by: ech on February 19, 2007 8:11 PMRobert Conquest's two laws:
1. Any organization which is not explicitly conservative will become liberal.
2. The behavior of any organization can best be predicted by assuming it to be run by a cabal of its enemies.
Indeed. My students always seemed particularly fond of recommending government intervention on the ground that poor people are especially stupid, and therefore unable to evaluate schools, lenders, credit-card issuers, and the like. Yet none of them favored property qualifications for voting.
Posted by: Alan Gunn on February 19, 2007 8:50 PMRobert Conquest's Other Law, which I forgot to tell him about:
3) Any organization which is explicitly conservative is doomed anyhow.
Your comment code is using "uninitialized value in list assignment at lib/MT/App/Comments.pm line 71." This is a grave solecism.
Bob Conquest was a staunch opponent of solecism, was he not?
Posted by: JM on February 19, 2007 8:53 PMPredicted Liberal responses to your statement:
1) Intelligent liberal politicians will choose intelligent bureaucrats, thus avoiding that problem.
2) At least the liberal bureaucrats are well-meaning, unlike the conservative bureaucrats who hate black people.
3) Unlike the shamanistic Repuglicans, we'll listen to the scientific community and ensure that we only implement the most scientifically sound policies... scientifically!
4) There's no doubt that there will be friction from certain parts of the bureaucracy, but those parts can be removed if we just had democratic control of all three branches of government. Then, all will be well.
5) Every day, the Rethuglicans are wrecking this country, bit by bit. The real-world implementation of a liberal platform may not be perfect, but its infinitely better than Bushitler's, who, by the way, hates black people and gays.
Very good, but your forgot the third rule:
3) (Government) Bureaucrats work for organizations that can use deadly force to enforce their desires.
Posted by: Donut on February 19, 2007 9:08 PMMilton Friedman described 4 classes of spending
1. You spend money on yourself. You care about price, but also about value.
2. You spend money on a present for someone else. You care about price, but not so much about value.
3. You spend money on yourself, from an expense account. You really care a lot about value, but not so much about price.
4. You spend government money on someone else. You don't care about value, and don't care about price either.
Moral: If you get "market failure" with type 1 spending, you can only fail more spectacularly with type 2,3 or 4 spending.
Posted by: Don Meaker on February 19, 2007 9:21 PM"we only implement the most scientifically sound policies... scientifically"
Sometimes, listening to liberals demagogue on matters scientific, I am reminded of the Scientific People from Alfred Bester's novel "The Stars My Destination".
Posted by: pst314 on February 19, 2007 9:24 PMA great couple of lines. To take this thinking just a bit further I'd ask what good incentives are. They have to be more than just money.
Andrew Pass
http://www.pass-ed.com/Living-Textbook.html
I honestly think this hits upon the main reason most libertarian types are thought of as Republicans by politically minded people, and, to many, seem to be aligned with them as well. We simply do not believe that if we just get the right people in government, that everything will be rainbows and balloons. It also has to do with the tragic vs perfectible visions that Th. Sowell has written about, but that is connected to Jane's point as well.
Democrats are always going on about 'evil' Republicans, but go right ahead with their desire for government to do more. Libertarians believe noone should be handed so much power. Republicans sometimes, well, they used to often favor less government . . .
Posted by: Mike W on February 19, 2007 9:48 PMDemocrats tell you that they want to increase government spending.
Republicans tell you that they want to decrease government spending, then increase government spending.
Posted by: Ryan on February 19, 2007 9:56 PMIncentives could be any range of things - a nicer office, better working conditions, the chance to go on trips, a promotion, better work assignments, the chance to work with better people, more time off.
The trick is to tie them to a desired work output. There's an acronym that I don't fully remember - SMART - Simple, measurable, atttainable, etc.
With bureaucrats, this is all difficult because they and their mainstream media friends just don't believe in this stuff.
The Sun Sentinel here in Broward County Florida had an interesting editorial the other day in which they bemoaned merit pay for teachers because it wasn't shared equally among all teachers. If you didn't laugh, you'd cry.
Here's an incentive that we might apply to government buraeucrats in general - if they continue to refuse to distinguish the good performers and make efforts to keep them, then we the public will refuse to overpay for the dross left behind.
As an aside, it has always amused me to see op-ed articles by teacher-activists who want us to treat all teachers the same, but protest that merit pay based on standardised test results is not fair since not all student groups are the same.
I took Richard Thaler's class on decision making at the Chicago GSB. Richard is of course one of the leading lights in behavioral economics. And on the last day, he made much the same point. He was asked whether his work had caused him to be more politically liberal than he would otherwise be. He was coy (I suspect he is further to the left of the political spectrum than many of his peers), but pointed out that all of the decision making flaws and instances of characteristic irrationality he had found were found just as much in government workers as in private citizens and just as much in smart people as in dumb people.
Now, he did believe that there were opportunities for government to engineer better outcomes for society, but these opportunities largely came from playing around with default options - a point of view he has touted much in recent years as "libertarian paternalism."
For example, we know that the vast majority of people would be better off if they maxed out their 401(k). But in fact most people do not, because they are ignorant, short-sighted, irrational and poor weighers of options. And of course because at most workplaces you need to pro-actively opt-in to contributing to your 401(k).
The traditional liberal solution would be to require everyone to max out their 401(k). But this of course would amount to a mandate to everyone that was the right option only for most people (there are, after all, some people whose overall utility would not be served by maxing out their 401(k) - for example young workers with a reasonable expectation of making a lot more money in the future than they do today, and older workers with kids who are momentarialy barely getting by).
So Thaler's solution would be a law to require that when people start new jobs they would automatically be enrolled in the 401(k) plan up to the maximum possible contribution, but that they could opt-out to a lower level of contribution (or no contribution at all) if they so desired. This solution is fundamentally libertarian - nobody is compelled to do anything and perfect freedom of choice is maintained*. But it is also paternalistic - everybody starts out with a default option that is, in most cases, "good for them."
* Dim libertarians often object to this point, arguing that because the hypothetical worker who does not want to save would need to proactively opt-out of the 401(k) plan then he is unduly burdened by the government. This is of course no more the case than that the real world worker who does want to save today is unduly burdened by the government in that the standard regulatory default is that you must proactively opt-in to your 401(k) plan if you want to participate.
The genius of the libertarian paternalism approach is the recognition that there is ALWAYS a regulatory default, and that within reason it is no burden on liberty, and a significant improvement to utility, to be smart about where the default is set.
Posted by: sd on February 19, 2007 10:20 PMI once saw Robert Bork on C-Span explaining how he gave up on libertarian beliefs because they depended on a view of human nature which was entirely too sweet. I very much wanted to call the C-Span line and inform ol' Bobby that it was precisely the opposite; that one woud have to be a naive fool to think that a powerful state could be created, while ensuring it's levers would be operated by wise and moral people. What a dolt.
Posted by: Will Allen on February 19, 2007 10:38 PMI just wrote an ever so slightly longer post on the subject of govt problems titled: Why The Government and Big Companies Find It Harder To Get Stuff Done (SO LONG IT'S ALMOST LIKE WAR AND PEACE). Enyoy if you feel like it.
For sd and others, here's a pretty good post criticizing Sunstein and Thaler's "libertarian paternalism":
Posted by: asg on February 19, 2007 10:53 PMAs a former GS-14 ... dead on, and the comments are dead on, too.
1. For the true bureaucrat, there is The Position, which exists in a continuum beyond true or false or wise or stupid.
2. Advancing your agency's position is all-important. Not necessarily the position of the government overall. If you advance it by giving trouble to another agency, so be it. So it's not public service, nor even government service, it's agency service. That's for the average type. The more zealous types will do ANYTHING to advance their agency and its position, without even a bit of problem with their conscience.
I knew one of the last who (with regard to civil penalty proceedings) proposed to create a set of secret guidelines (forbidden by the Freedom of Info Act) that we would follow, but keep secret with the excuse that they were "draft" guidelines. That is, there would be standards where a person charged would have their penalty increased or reduced by a list of factors, but would not be allowed, in arguing against the penalty, to know what they were. And this proposal was from a career and senior government attorney.
3. As far as waste goes, the rule was that it is hard to get permission, but if you do the amount is no barrier. So you might as well ask for the most expensive item possible. You'll either get it or not. Conversely, the cheap items that were really useful were hard to get, so one guy fudged on taxi receipts to store up some cash to buy a $40 numbering stamp that was really vital, and then 100+ attorneys borrowed it from him when needed.
4. At one point we had a computer system that was incompatible with anything. It couldn't even format floppies (this was many years ago) ... just so you had to buy them from the vendor, at $10 each! All because the vendor was buddy of a certain official. All the photocopy machines were at the far end of the building... which was 2 blocks long ... because that made it easier for the people who ran the photocopy shop, to have 6-8 machines in one room and make everyone walk two blocks to make a copy.
5. BTW, every document was made in five copies for various files, not counting the one copy you made for yourself since you could never find it in any of those files. I am not kidding. And everything had to be vetted thru 1-5 layers of bureaucracy, during which it could be rejected (requiring another five copies) for any typo. I had an emergency legal recommendation sent back because there was one space between a period and the first letter of the next sentence, and the Govt Style Manual of the time called for two.
Posted by: David Hardy on February 19, 2007 11:05 PMasg:
With all due respect, the post that you link to is not "pretty good" in its criticisms of libertarian paternalism (lp). Its quite slipshod. Specifically, it makes the following arguments:
1) Cass Sunstein (Richard Thaler's sometimes collaborator) is not himself a libertarian. This is true, and completely irrelevant. The ideas behind lp should be critiqued on their own merits, not via ad hominem crtiques of some of the people who promote those ideas.
2 and 3) Sunstein and Thaler argue for non-choice preserving policies and they "don’t recognize any sharp distinction between choice and the lack thereof." In this case point 2 is just an example of point 3, not a separate argument.
So let's take on point 3 first - that Sunstein and Thaler "don’t recognize any sharp distinction between choice and the lack thereof." In fact, what S&T point out is that public policies can be constructed with many different degrees of choice allowed. This should be uncontroversial. They further argue that there might be a space for policies that partially restrict choice as an alternative to policies that fully restrict choice.
For example, NYC recently banned smoking in bars - a decidely un-libertarian and paternalistic move. If instead at the last minute the city council had passed a less draconian ordinance stipulating that bar owners would need to apply for a separate licence to allow smoking (and such licences would be given out with roughly the same level of scrutiny with which liquor licenses are given out today), and that they would in turn be required to post very large signs outside of their bars noting that smoking was allowed and that thus patrons were taking their health into their own hands upon entering, then this too would be un-libertarian and paternalist - compared to the pre-ban status quo in which smoking was not restricted. But this would have been quite libertarian and non-paternalistic in comparison to the law that was actually passed.
Now, there is a species of libertarian that sees a law requiring licensing of smoking and signage clearly indicating that an establishment allows smoking to be an inch shy of full blown Nazi tyranny. And to those folks I say: Godspead in your quest to convince your fellow citizens - who by the way vote for politicians who expand the regulatory and welfare state every single year - that you are right.
But for those of us for whom libertarianism is more about a desire to actually roll back the regulatory state where we can rather than a desire to prove the absolute purity of our Nozickian souls, lp is the most exciting idea to come along in a generation at least. Because we realize that the paternalistic urge has been around for a long time and ain't going away any time soon. That's partly because people seem hardwired to interfere in other people's business, and partly because sometimes (sometimes) paternalistic policies are attractive from a strict cost-benefit perspective (leaving out of course the intrinsic value of human freedom). And so given that this is the world we actually live in, any chance to co-opt that urge in the interest of preserving choice where it matters, is welcome.
Posted by: sd on February 19, 2007 11:53 PMDemocrats tell you that they want to increase government spending....Republicans tell you that they want to decrease government spending, then increase government spending.
Let us swing that back into logical equilibrium, shall we:
Democrats want increased government and spending at any price, but say they want fiscal responsibility when Republicans do it.
Republicans want increased government and spending at any price, but say they want limited government when Democrats do it.
Of the people criticizing bureaucracies and government programs, how many of you have actually worked in a bureacracy and know how one works?
I've heard lots of criticisms of bureaucracies and government programs but none of these criticisms ever goes into detail as to why some bureaucracies and programs fail (and why some succeed). When liberterians criticize government, they either base their arguments on vague assumptions ("people are stupid, and the government is run by people") or historical examples (look at Stalinist Russia and the Department of Homeland Security).
I find both arguments unsatisfying. Arguing by assumption is stupid, and arguing by example begs the question of counterexamples. For every dysfunctional bueracracy (or government program) like the Department of Homeland Security, there is a functional bueracracy like the Treasury Department. Why does one work and the other fail? Jane, that's the question that I'm intersted in.
Posted by: Zhong Lu on February 20, 2007 2:07 AMZhong Lu - if you can find it, try reading "Bureaucracy" by James Q Wilson. A very thorough study of how large organizations work (or not)
Posted by: phwest on February 20, 2007 6:24 AMThe post below also applies to behavioural economics, which the left seems to believe is a magical proof of the benevolence of government intervention, because after all, people are stupid, so they need the government to protect them from themselves.
And yet, the same leftists strenously deny that some people are poor because they make bad decisions.
Posted by: Justin on February 20, 2007 9:04 AMsd: I guess I am less optimistic about the ability of partial measures like what you describe to roll back the regulatory state (and its handmaiden, the tort system). Perhaps the approach you suggest provides a good scope for compromise between libertarians and hard-core paternalists, but it seems to me that while the paternalistic urge seems like it's always been with us, it's clearly stronger now than it has been in the past, and that's a cultural trend that perhaps can be reversed -- but not by unilateral disarmament.
Posted by: asg on February 20, 2007 9:15 AMBehavioral economics doesn't say that people are stupid. It says that they sometimes make choices other than the ones that efficient-market evangelists predict. The efficient marketeers then assume they're stupid, which seems to speak more to their arrogance than the lack of intelligence of the rest of us.
As for bureaucrats' incentives, Ms. Galt seems to assume that efficiency is the right--and sole--standard for judging for government agencies. And sometimes, it is. Consider subways or garbage pickup. But other times, it's not. I suspect most of us would take courts that are exhaustive and just over those that are quick. Just ask all those guys who've been freed from Death Row thanks to DNA.
Posted by: Tim Gray on February 20, 2007 9:54 AMBehavioral economics doesn't say that people are stupid. It says that they sometimes make choices other than the ones that efficient-market evangelists predict. The efficient marketeers then assume they're stupid, which seems to speak more to their arrogance than the lack of intelligence of the rest of us.
As for bureaucrats' incentives, Ms. Galt seems to assume that efficiency is the right--and sole--standard for judging for government agencies. And sometimes, it is. Consider subways or garbage pickup. But other times, it's not. I suspect most of us would take courts that are exhaustive and just over those that are quick. Just ask all those guys who've been freed from Death Row thanks to DNA.
Posted by: Tim Gray on February 20, 2007 9:55 AMLibertarianism is a sweet philosophy--humans are mostly reasonable and decent beings. While this might, might, might (I'm skeptical) be true in a Christ-centered civilization, its not true in a hedonism run wild group. In that second case, humanity's natural insanity and malice comes to the fore.
And so Bork sounds about right.
Which is not to say that limited government is not a good idea. It is. But its only the start.
As to why we have more paternalism today--see the libertine lifestyles. These lifestyles NEED more paternalism to pick up after their wreckage, and at the same time, the users of these lifestyles are less likely to have moral qualms about interfering in other's lives. So you get it coming and going.
Is it any wonder that Hollywood people support excessive gov't? They KNOW they need keepers, and at the same time, power and control of other people seems to fill the empty spots in their souls, or so I guess since I have little to do with that lot.
Posted by: Tennwriter on February 20, 2007 10:28 AMGovernment bureaucracies aren't innately any worse, in terms of stupidity or corruption, than private bureaucracies. The difference is that private bureaucracies have to, on a near continuous basis, convince individuals to voluntarily supply more capital, or purchase the private bureaucracy's goods and services. A government bureaucracy, in contrast, needs only to satisfy a small sliver of people who provide marginal electoral advantage to a politician, causing the politician to use the power of the state to compel everyone to supply more capital. Enron ceases to exist, while the Bureau of Indian Affairs continues on, decade after decade.
It is not a good idea to use a government bureaucracy to provide something that people want to widely use anyways, like delivering pieces of paper. Better to have government bureaucracies provide things that nobody really wants to use (aircraft carriers, judges, etc.), but everyone needs, and for which there would be a substantial free rider problem absent taxpayer funding. The reason I'm very suspect of the notion of government funded health care is that people want to use medical care far, far, more than they want to park an Abrams tank in their garage, and that demand for usage will drive costs in such a fashion that an inevitable reaction will take pace by which political bodies will seek limit suppply, with all the inevitable effects on innovation and quality.
I always find it ironic that people who rightly decry the often horrendous decision-making by the Department of Defense are often the same folks who most loudly assert that the state should be more heavily involved in providing health care, as if the political dynamic which results in billions being poured down rat holes on poorly designed weapons systems, for no other reason than a manufacturing facility being in a prominent Congressman's district, will somehow not drive decisions in the area of government controlled health care delivery.
Posted by: Will Allen on February 20, 2007 10:39 AMTennwriter is perhaps correct that libertarianism has over-stressed individual liberty at the expense of personal responsibility that goes hand in glove with making a libertarian society possible. David Bergland, author of "Libertarianism in One Lesson," notes however that the true utopians are not libertarians, but those who believe in the benevolence of all-powerful coercive systems.
Posted by: Creech on February 20, 2007 11:04 AM Tennwriter, please refer all those cases needing "keepers" to the ultimate Secular Libertarian Philosopher - Charles Darwin. "Nature red in tooth & claw" will provide a reasonable and just solution to your hollywood-people problems, one way or another.
Reference the Darwin Awards and stories described as being about "thinning the herd".
As I and many others see it, it's not the job of my government to protect these human lemmings from themselves.
Nature does fine all by herself, and should be allowed to take her course wherever possible.
mike
I have worked for a state agency. My husband worked for our County government. My dad retired from the Federal government. I can say, with absolute certainty, that government bureacracy is awful!
In my case, I saw people sleeping at their desks, surfing the net for porn, and all the typical stuff you'd expect from do-nothing bureaucrats. But what I did not expect were the dedicated, hard-working bureaucrats who were completely mired in trivial BS. My bosses, very smart, enthusiastic, competent guys, spent all day every day attending one meeting after another. There was no time do do work because they were too busy "coordinating" with other people.
My husband worked for the County's management and budget office right out of college. A young libertarian he thought he could reform it from the inside. How naive. Instead he quit after a year and a half because it became clear that actually doing work was incidental to success in government. He was doing the work of 3 people, because two of his co-workers were more interested in taking 2 hour lunches and schmoozing at the watercooler, but those two people were promoted over him, because they had MPAs and he had only his bachelor's.
My father worked for the Dept. of Energy at its inception, allocating fuel to domestic airlines. When he discovered that his counterpart for foreign airlines was accepting bribes he blew the whistle. My dad was an agitator thoughout his life, so he went so far as to write articles for the Washington Star, get congressmen involved and the whole bit. For his trouble he was forced into retirement and the other guy was merely transferred to another position.
So one can imagine, I'm EXTREMELY skeptical that government could be involved in health care with anything but dismal results.
Posted by: Christina on February 20, 2007 11:22 AMIt is long past time to get beyond "left" and "right," although this is liable to fall on deaf ears. The problem is not merely what bureaucrats may abuse by having government power. The problem is the continuous division of labor leads to a continuous atomization of intellect. This was adumbrated by Adam Smith. It's your job and your life. People know more-and-more about less-and-less, and some important information which ought to be common knowledge cannot be learned. So people don't always have enough knowledge to judge the information presented by market prices. A referral to Hayekian info-mysticism will not help you. The basis for choosing, for demand, is not complete. Sometimes it doesn't matter; sometimes it does. Sometimes you don't even know whether it should matter. There is not enough time in your life to find everything out. When you run into the grocery store, do you have enough time to learn whether the tuna boats killed dolphins? You do not. So we make a criminal law to prevent it. And at the same time, the complexity of some knowledge makes it easily gamed by vested interests. Look how long people who consider themselves to be educated, have denied the deleterious effects of climate change! Certainly not because they studied the first IPCC report (1990,) and then studied a few other things, like the effects on species extinction rates of wildlife fragmentation by human habitat. Unbelievable stupidity! Do economists have any idea how fatuous they sound when they weigh in on this? The capital will be freed for other development, so it's only a bump in the road. People being stupid, so are economists, socialists and libertarians. Of course we want markets. But the impossibility of total information is not be corrected by markets, and there will come crunches when that information becomes critical. Retirement security and environmental protection come to mind. It may be long-term or temporary, but we will need government institutions too, precisely targeted on certain problems. This pretty much refutes libertarianism for purposes other than cheerleading for personal freedom. We all want that, ho hum.
Posted by: Lee A. Arnold on February 20, 2007 1:33 PMActually, Hollywood people do not, as a rule, support excessive government. The award in that category presently goes to the corporate privateers, plundering at Interior and Defense.
Posted by: Lee A. Arnold on February 20, 2007 1:39 PMTennwriter,
With all due respect, it seems your argument addresses the libertarian critique by pretending it doesn't exist. The long-standing argument has been that the libertine behavior you decry results more from public subsidy than from human nature. Absent the subsidy, it's unlikely that the behavior would continue (at least to the extent that it does). One might argue that consequences might be an overly harsh punishment, but absent the public subsidy those horrible results would be a pretty powerful disincentive to bad behavior. Moreover, the civic sector has greater latitude in mandating changes in behavior than any public subsidy can ever justly enact.
Posted by: Bill Dalasio on February 20, 2007 1:47 PM>> Look how long people who consider themselves to be educated, have denied the deleterious effects of ...
...the New Deal policies.
...the welfare.
...the tax subsidy for employer-provided health insurance.
Two can play this game.
Tim -- "Ms. Galt seems to assume that efficiency is the right--and sole--standard for judging for government agencies. And sometimes, it is. Consider subways or garbage pickup."
Slightly pedantic, but very important, definition that needs to be clarified here. Given that most manufacturing, especially mass production systems, can increase their efficiency by increasing their speed, we often equate the two, but that's wrong.
Efficiency simply means increasing the productivity (and typically) while decreasing the waste. Speed isn't necessarily a factor.
Suppose I always drive the posted speed limit of 70mph on an interstate (hah), but my vehicle gets the maxiumum miles-per-gallon at 60mph. To increase my (fuel) efficiency, I would need to slow down.
And if we take the example you gave of the justice system, in a gross simplification, we could say that productivity is measured by acquittals of the innocent and convictions of the guilty. And if we found that by taking more time on cases those increased, then taking more time would actually increase the efficiency of the justice system.
It's all a matter of what your productivity measures are.
I wish people would critique my posts in my own comments section, so I wouldn't have to clog up Jane's! Ah, well...
ASG -- thanks for the link. SD -- I appreciate your points, but I think you misunderstood the purpose of my post. I was not trying to make the comprehensive case against libertarian paternalism (that's a much bigger project). Rather, I was responding to the narrower claim that libertarian paternalists care about preserving choice, as they assure us they are. This is important for deciding whether we ought to take the kind of political compromise you suggest, in which we accept soft paternalism as the vaccine to innoculate us against harder paternalism. If it turns out the leading advocates of libertarian paternalism don't really care about choice -- indeed don't even think about choice in same terms we do -- then we might not want to make political deals with them.
In that context, saying that Sunstein & Thaler are not libertarians is not an ad hominem attack -- it's simply a fact that I'm pretty sure both would admit if the question were put to them. That they are not libertarian is indicative of what they really think of preserving choice -- to wit, not much. Surely that conclusion should affect whether we should trust the political compromise they are offering us. The rest of my arguments -- in which I point out (a) their willingness to include clearly unlibertarian policies under the label of libertarian paternalism, and (b) their definition of choice in terms that make no reference to presence or absence coercion -- are further evidence that we should be extremely wary of taking that vaccine.
Finally, "libertarian paternalism" is NOT simply the idea that some policies are more libertarian than others. That's obvious: taxes are clearly less coercive than bans, and I hope every libertarian would admit that. The idea of LP is the idea that some policies are *fully* libertarian and still paternalist. Their paradigm case is changes in the default rules that still allow people to opt out. The problem is that they are using cases like these as the thin end of a wedge that can lead to more interventionist policies, some of which S & T are *on record* as supporting. Consequently, I think soft paternalism makes hard paternalism *more* likely, not less as you suggest. For the full argument, see Mario Rizzo's and my article on "Paternalist Slopes," linked in my post.
Posted by: Glen on February 20, 2007 4:13 PMThe evidence from behavioral economics that people are stupid is the result of cherry picking the results from a plethora of contrived, albeit informative, tasks. That is not to say that the evidence is not replicable that people can make poor decisions, but rather that there is an academic bias in finding and reporting cases in which people behave stupidly. Moreover, giving stupid people a different context can cause them to smarten up all of a sudden.
Posted by: Bart on February 20, 2007 4:34 PM"...the New Deal policies.
...the welfare.
...the tax subsidy for employer-provided health insurance.
Two can play this game."
Institutions have deleterious effects, so what. Institutions can also sunset, and sometimes do. What do you think, that "getting prices right" will fix all information problems? We can't even model the information in a little ecosystem, so you cannot correct those prices. Libertarianism, at least the Hayekian sort, appears to hope that people's free choices will lead to a healthy, sustained biosphere. Because "spontaneous order" is a godlike good for all the other systems too. This is nonsense.
As to New Deal policies, welfare, tax subsidies: they change too. But the lopsided distribution of wealth and income has been with us, in every society, capitalist and communist, since the dawn of time. Economics may have nothing to do with it, because the formal pattern of productivity is the same, starting all the way down in embryology. So social spending will always be necessary, and of course it's dangerous. At least Social Security is a redistribution closely targeted, not much moral hazard, very low overhead, transparent.
Posted by: Lee A. Arnold on February 20, 2007 8:56 PMLet's try again.
Technologies have deleterious effects, so what. Technologies also evolve, and some are replaced with others. What do you think, that severely restricting the use of fossil fuels will fix all environmental problems? We can't even model the atmospheric processes at a span of measly few years with a reasonable degree of precision so you cannot predict those rates of temperature change... ....At least current rates of economic growth provide some safety margin against this [global warming] and other environmental calamities that might threaten our civilization.
Posted by: ...Max... on February 20, 2007 9:07 PMWe're not going to severely restrict the use of fossil fuels, we're going to move away from them with deliberate speed. This will be a mere bump in the road, to the creative vibrancy of free markets. "We can't even model the atmospheric processes at a span of measly few years with a reasonable degree of precision so you cannot predict those rates of temperature change.. " -- this is lazy scientism lurking in an attempt at prose. The IPCC gives a specified range of degrees of precision. Although it hardly matters which temperature rate you choose. We are already likely to lose the integrity of almost all wildlife and sealife ecosystems, as global warming accelerates their loss of biodiversity into simplified "weed" ecosystems, a simplification already in progress by development and fragmentation. We better hope that this doesn't much affect the natural provision of ecosystem services such as water purification and pest control, or we will be spending lots more money than the "current rates of environmental growth" can even imagine.
Posted by: Lee A. Arnold on February 20, 2007 10:14 PMAnd at the same time, the complexity of some knowledge makes it easily gamed by vested interests. Look how long people who consider themselves to be educated, have denied the deleterious effects of climate change! Certainly not because they studied the first IPCC report (1990,) and then studied a few other things, like the effects on species extinction rates of wildlife fragmentation by human habitat. Unbelievable stupidity! Do economists have any idea how fatuous they sound when they weigh in on this?
Congratulations, you laid out and then took your own bait. Climate-change deniers aren't the only ones who have sucked down some special interest group's soggy pap and then regurgiatated a redwood.
Posted by: anony-mouse on February 20, 2007 10:55 PMI wouldn't bother to argue otherwise about interest groups. But your comment is unclear. Is your argument that climate change is not going to accelerate wildlife species extinction?
Posted by: Lee A. Arnold on February 21, 2007 12:14 AMLee -
If "Global Warming" were really the problem, we could solve it - the entire amount of projected rise in global temperature - with a few square miles of reflective mylar in orbit. Roughly 7-12 shuttle loads.
Call it $10 billion per year for 10-15 years. Trivial solution; end of problem.
"Global Climate Change" cannot ever be fixed, because global climate was never fixed. That's the beauty of unfalsifiable non-science. If it gets hotter, colder, wetter, drier, milder, more extreme, it's still change.
And the people who want to use it as a political club to get their vested interest (personal or corporate or country) policies implemented would scream bloody murder about a simple solution for what they claimed was the problem. Because the real problem is that they are not getting their way. Other people are allowed to have their own ideas and their own priorities, and that's just icky.
Luckily, we have a democracy and people still are allowed to have other priorities. Good luck on controlling the voters.
"4. You spend government money on someone else. You don't care about value, and don't care about price either."
As someone who spends government money, I care about price and value. The things I buy affect how well I do my job. How well I do my job affects my performance evaluations. My performance evaluations affect my pay.
Is that really so hard to comprehend?
Waste in government doesn't come from disinterest or stupidity. It comes from corruption, and the onerous measures needed to prevent corruption.
I deal with lots of beaurcracy in my job as a lawyer. I can state one rule:
- The more continuous contact people have with a beaucracy, the more eficient it will be.
For example, the tax office I dont find so bad, because many people have to deal with it day in day out and therefore (although the tax laws are very bad and complex), the tax office are under pressure from these people to keep things moving smoothly.
Hands down the worst beaucracies I ever have to deal with are the courts. This is because most people before the courts dont want to be there and will never be there again, and therefore do not take an active role in complaining etc to keep it efficient.
Just a thought.
Posted by: Dave on February 21, 2007 8:59 AMI struggle to see how a position that says "government intervention is bad because bureacrats are stupid and have bad incentives" is sublter in any appreciable sense that a position that says "government intervention is good because people are stupid and need government to help them". The first-order problem is that proclamations that lump all conceivable sorts of government intervention into one good or bad basket are likely to be pretty stupid to begin with.
Now, maybe your position is actually more subtle than that. But the one you expressed wasn't.
Posted by: conchis on February 21, 2007 10:42 AMHands down the worst beaucracies I ever have to deal with are the courts. This is because most people before the courts dont want to be there and will never be there again...
Dave, that makes no sense. The vast majority of people who actually deal with the courts are there because they're hired to deal with the courts, and are on a first-name basis with court employees. And the courts are likely to be unusually responsive to them vs. random citizens calling the IRS, because they have to deal with the same lawyers over and over, so blowing them off doesn't work.
Courts may be inefficient but it isn't because they don't deal with repeat players. More likely it's because 1) courts are staffed by generalists with wide responsibilities, so it's easy for stuff to slip through the cracks, and 2) everything has to be done in public and on paper, which prevents the quick resolution of small issues by the exercise of management discretion.
Posted by: Rob Lyman on February 21, 2007 11:50 AMTwill00, You can't put mylar in orbit because that would reduce the amount of sunlight getting to the green plant photosynthesis on land, and to ocean-surface phytoplankton -- the very start of the food-chains humans depend upon.
The "unfalsifiable non-science" of climate starts with physics and chemistry -- so you will have to explain why carbon dioxide does NOT trap radiative energy a while longer, increasing energy ("heat") throughout the biosphere; and you can start by refuting Newton, Boyle, Maxwell, and Lavoisier.
Yes, you are right, climatology is a complex system science, and so its predictions are hedged with probabilities.
How probable is this?: NONE of the previous episodes of global warming that we know about from the various geologic records, started with carbon dioxide build-up. Carbon dioxide build-up ALWAYS LAGGED behind global warming episodes by an average of 800 years. We have very little idea of what is next. I hope to god, nothing. But the evidence is pointing the other way. Last year a very great living scientist, Stephen Hawking, said he is "very worried about global warming." He said he was afraid that Earth "might end up like Venus, at 250 degrees centigrade and raining sulfuric acid." That may be extreme, I don't know, but you should go argue with him!
Certainly it is very likely that global "warming" will make some places much hotter for a while, OR COLDER, or rainier or drier, and at new and different times of the year -- because it is actually global "energy stay-around," and the thermal energy can transform into the kinetic energy of winds and ocean currents, and so redirect the warmth and moisture AWAY FROM continental land areas. So do not be misled by a severe winter.
Most of the voters feel differently than you -- according to a raft of different opinion polls over the last few years, 70 - 80% of them on all continents think global warming is a problem. Even in the US, they're no longer drinking the corporate think-tank propaganda kool-aid.
Of course you are right, global climate has never been fixed -- the question is, what happens when you accelerate change after the massive changes that industrial civilization has wrought. I don't think we need to give up the civilization, in fact I depend upon freedom and markets to help change our course in the best way. In complex-systems sciences, because they are not mathematically precisely predictable, the Precautionary Principle holds. Capitalism will remain creative in other ways. Most voters are there already.
Posted by: Lee A. Arnold on February 21, 2007 12:17 PMI'm posting this here, since you closed comments on the original post:
Lawmakers looking to force preteen girls to take Gardasil, a new vaccine against a virus that causes cervical cancer, are targeting the wrong age group, cancer data shows.
Middle-school girls inoculated with the breakthrough vaccine will be no older than 18 when they pass Gardasil's five-year window of proven effectiveness -- more than a decade before the typical cancer patient contracts the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus (HPV).
Infectious disease specialists and cancer pathologists say the incubation period for HPV becoming cancer is 10 to 15 years -- meaning the average cervical cancer patient, who is 47, contracted the virus in her 30s and would not be protected by Gardasil taken as a teen.
http://insider.washingtontimes.com/articles/normal.php?StoryID=20070221-123326-7587r
Any more questions?
Posted by: Greg D on February 21, 2007 1:41 PMBTW, when last I checked, immune cells last at most 20 years. The reason you maintain immunity is because you repeatedly get exposed to the problem-causing organism, and your body makes new immune cells specific to that problem with each exposure.
No exposure, no new immune cells.
Posted by: Greg D on February 21, 2007 1:50 PMSomething like the converse is also true:
People are sometimes smart, knowledgeable, caring, and dedicated to high ideals -- so much so that they can manage their perverse incentives.
Bureaucrats are some of the same people uniquely positioned in the formation and execution of public policy.
My own bumper sticker wisdom for this topic would be:
Truisms are falsisms waiting to be overgeneralized.
Mr. Arnold, what would advocate or oppose a huge expansion of nuclear electric power generation in the US, say from 20% to 70% over a ten year period?
-dk
Milton Freidman also said:
" I want lower taxes and less government"
Which, according to Milton's own research is impossible. The head of CATO later verified this fallacy. Milton waws forced to hide his real solution to government expansion, but the National Review crowd forbid him from mentioning the solutiopn. The National Reveiw crowd wanted government expansion, they are traditional American conservatives.
Check the numbers. Under Bush and the Reagans, the federal government always occupied 21-25% of the economy. Only under Clinton did this number drop to 18%.
The stupidity often mentioned is why do voters ever beleive conservatives about small government.
The competition is between the Dem progressives and the Republican conservatives. These are the two big government factions, American conservitism has always been about government expansion, ever since Alexander Hamilton.
Liberals do not want government expansion but after conservative rule, liberals are usually stuck with fixing the problems of big government.
Posted by: Matt on February 21, 2007 4:25 PMDarn right! Those who rule and would rule us have a low opinion of human nature, which should lead them to conclude that they themselves, being human, have no qualifications for the job.
And Matt? Please. The Republicans have certainly betrayed small government principles, but Liberals (or Progressives; both terms are misnomers)definitely seek to intrude government into every area of human endeavour they haven't already invaded. How do I know? I used to be one, erroneously believing that they stood for individual liberty, and heard what members of that faction say in private
Posted by: Brett on February 21, 2007 4:43 PMCheck the numbers. Under Bush and the Reagans, the federal government always occupied 21-25% of the economy. Only under Clinton did this number drop to 18%.
Nice use of arbitrary soundbite percentages to gloss over wide swaths of context. You should have bright future in somebody-or-another's polling organization, but you didn't really convey useful information there...
Posted by: anony-mouse on February 21, 2007 5:19 PMSometimes, listening to liberals demagogue on matters scientific, I am reminded of the Scientific People from Alfred Bester's novel "The Stars My Destination".
Quant Suff!
Posted by: ellipsis on February 21, 2007 5:56 PMI wouldn't bother to argue otherwise about interest groups. But your comment is unclear. Is your argument that climate change is not going to accelerate wildlife species extinction?
No, Meester Arnold, my problem with your argument is that it is fundamentally religious. There are only two things that are pretty much inarguable on the basis of all available evidence:
1. Earth is presently in the mids of some sort of warming trend.
2. Anthropogenic emissions have probably contributed toward, at minimum, accellerating that trend somehow.
And that's ALL that we know. The rest has its place but it is not hard knowledge. The prudent person keeps his or her thoughts on the matter tempered by the realization that s/he has neither an infallible knowledge on the matter, nor an idefinite capacity to make changes. Therefore, since all actions will involve tradeoffs, it is entirely sensible to, e.g., use economic principles to analyze those tradeoffs and consider the most sensible course of action based on what we DO know and what we ARE able to achieve within our means.
Unfortunately, your haughty dismissal of economists' opinions suggests you will not couch any such rational course of action, and therefore it is useless to try and refute your religion.
The history of science is littered with wrecked consensuses which were authoritatively asserted on the basis of real evidences, but rested on premises that were later demonstrated to be ignorant or inadequate. Yours is as likely as any to be next (particularly if that Danish research group should succeed in showing that solar activity cycles are dominant in determining earth's temperature trends).
Posted by: anony-mouse on February 21, 2007 6:06 PMIf it's mostly caused by solar activity cycles, then we had better stop CO2 tomorrow, because this ball is going to fry.
As to religion: I believe all wildlife ecosystems should be protected, now and forever.
But THIS argument is Science: we have entered the edge of a mass wildlife extinction that will be accelerated by climate change. It is a long argument so I will post it separately below. I wish it were wrong. Certainly ecologists (academic ecologists, not environmentalists) have been aware of it since the mid-1970's.
I love economics but the idea that there are "always trade-offs" is a little misleading. If there comes a new externality, we should deal with it. Productive individuals and corporations will use their capital somewhere else. There may or may not be a temporary hit on productivity, but I will argue that it's nonsense to extrapolate this out for a long time, because our first assumption is people are creative, and we'll take new histories into the future.
It is hard to credit your argument as rational when it ignores the status of science. Climatology will never have 100% certain probabilities like physics. Ecology is even worse. Your argument is that you will continue on your course, until probabilities approach Newtonian certainty. That appears to be impossible with complex systems, --and this has been understood, in these terms, for maybe a hundred years. But if you want a certainty, see the next post.
Posted by: Lee A. Arnold on February 21, 2007 11:09 PMEffects of climate change on fragmented wildlife ecosystems:
[i.] REGULAR CIRCUMSTANCE OF WILDLIFE ECOSYSTEMS :
(1) Ecosystems have at least a two-step-fractal CLUMPED distribution, local and regional, and at the regional level they are divided by ecotones or geographic features.
(2) “Wild genetic health” is some statistical description of regional-level species populations, usually pegmarked at over 500 individuals.
(3) (Unimportant supposition.) There is an “ecological genetics” which would describe how the condition of interacting with all the other relevant species in the rest of the ecosystem, affects the survival and thriving of wild genetic health in any single one of the populations.
(4) Normally, species populations go extinct all the time. Not the entire species, but locally or regionally an entire population. Why? A bad winter, no food, new disease, new predator, etc.
(5) The rest of the ecosystem frequently re-equilibrates to new sizes of the other populations, depending on the importance of the missing species to the food web, and other things.
(6) The missing species is returned by immigration. All ecosystems are throwing-off stragglers and adventurers always, and if a male and a female make it over the river or through the woods, --and they find each other,-- they will restart the missing species.
(7) The rest of the ecosystem will then re-equilibrate to what it was before,—although not after too much time, or if other different things have happened.
(8) Most plant and animal species thrive well only within small ranges of moisture and temperature. As the climate changes, the species move to other areas. It may take several seasons to initiate a noticeable response.
(9) In the previous rapid climate changes, we may assume that the wildlife ecosystems were spread out, continuous and contiguous,—enough for many fortuitous circumstances of species preservation, in the slow-motion tumult.
(10) If and when there is a massive extinction, then there are niches to fill, and the surviving “weeds” (tough plants and animals) spread-out to evolve and re-biodiversify the whole place. Among the smaller animals, new speciation takes a period of time somewhere around the order of ten thousand generations -- for each new species.
[ii.] WILDLIFE ECOSYSTEMS AFTER FRAGMENTATION BY HUMAN HABITAT:
(11) Human development now encircles all the wildlife areas, which are greatly reduced in size.
(12) This fragmentation of wildlife habitat effectively seals-off ecosystems, for many different species. They do not venture out into the human habitat due to conditions, or chemistry; or they are killed when they do so. This goes for both plants and animals. Some others are not affected at all.
(13) The Reduction in Size of the Ecosystem has an Immediate Consequence. One of the few truly reliable ordinal numerical relations in ecology is the species-area law, which finds that smaller areas have a smaller number of species, and bigger, bigger. There are different reasons for this. Consider the reason, that a fewer number of individuals in each population (fewer, because of less resources overall,) makes a local species population’s random extinction (always happening at 4) statistically MORE PROBABLE. The fact that it is more probable to lose whole species is called that area’s “extinction debt,” which gets paid in the number of species that eventually disappear from that area.
(14) The Isolation of the Ecosystem’s Borders has an Immediate Consequence. The blockage of migration, by human habitat, ends or greatly slows down the reconstitution of missing species (which would have happened at 6.)
(15) As the remaining ecosystem re-equilibrates over and over, in response to successive losses of species, larger oscillations of the simplifying food web serve to accelerate the local extinctions.
(16) The only way to correct this is to build and preserve wildlife corridors, land and river connections, between and among wildlife areas.
(17) In addition, many existing wildlife areas need to be greatly expanded. Why? Because AS THEY ARE NOW , they do not accommodate the pegmark number of individuals (at 2,) in a full interacting ecosystem (at 3,) for continued genetic health. Saving two animals in a zoo will not provide the ecological sharpness for species definition. Among many reasons for this, you can find: changes in the act of predation; density-dependent reproduction; etc.
[iii.] FRAGMENTED WILDLIFE ECOSYSTEMS DURING RAPID CLIMATE CHANGE
(18) As the plants and animals change their geographic places in response to the different moistures and temperatures (in 8,) many will be extinguished at the contact with human habitat (in 12.)
(19) This accelerates the extinction rate that is ALREADY ACCELERATED by the reduction in ecosystem size (at 13) and the isolation of ecosystems from each other (at 14.)
(20) The global warming hockey-stick graphs, whatever their cardinal inadequacies, all show a temperature change far, far beyond the comfort zone of many plants and animals. And realworld evidence abounds, that they are changing their ranges.
[iv.] CONCLUSION
(21) We have just embarked upon one of the greatest mass extinctions in history, and it is a profound and extra-millenial tragedy, and a spiritual disaster.
(22) Since humans are creative and economic growth could happen along many paths, it is an intellectual scandal, and needless.
The sky is falling the sky is falling!
Funny, just a decade or two ago, people that ran around saying that were laughed at.
The earth will be here for a long time. The plants will be here for a long time. The weather will change for a long time.
wow, this short post has earned a lot of attention.
andrew sullivan and gregor mankiw have recently paid their respects to it.
Posted by: jj on February 22, 2007 12:23 AMLee Arnold: "Twill00, You can't put mylar in orbit because that would reduce the amount of sunlight getting to the green plant photosynthesis on land, and to ocean-surface phytoplankton -- the very start of the food-chains humans depend upon."
Perhaps not mylar, but I suspect it would be fairly trivial (in terms of $$$ compared to launching it to orbit) to develop a mylar-like material that would allow visible light through and reject some of the longer wavelength light. Heck if you wanted to get "fancy" two transpart sheets with a very thin layer of air with water vapor in-between would do the trick...
Posted by: metis314 on February 22, 2007 1:25 AMNew today,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/21/AR2007022102095_pf.html
Posted by: Lee A. Arnold on February 22, 2007 2:24 AMWhenever I discuss poverty-relief programs with someone, I point out that government bureaucracies are run by rules and procedures, whereas pivate charities are motivated by an enthusiasm for people.
chsw
Posted by: chsw on February 22, 2007 9:37 AMChsw- Conclusions aside for a moment, I'm not sure I buy that particular line of reasoning. There've been some enthusiastic civil servants and well motivated programs. And there have been some private charaties that have quite sinister motivations. See Jane's post on PIRG.
Posted by: Ryan on February 22, 2007 3:18 PMRyan,
I believe the kind of charity he's talking about is the guy thats in a soup kitchen passing out bowls of soup.
I'd agree that a charity that does nothing but call you and ask for money and you rarely see them actually out there doing stuff is most likely a charity in name only. Why, that's almost as bad as taking your money at gun point, distributing it around to a few bureaucrats and then with what's left over giving it to people where a decent size chunk of them shouldn't even be getting it in the first place....
Posted by: cdub on February 22, 2007 3:56 PMAnony-mouse wrote:
The history of science is littered with wrecked consensuses which were authoritatively asserted on the basis of real evidences, but rested on premises that were later demonstrated to be ignorant or inadequate.
The history of economics is similarly littered with wrecked consensuses which were authoritatively asserted on the basis of real evidence, but rested on premises that were later demonstrated to be ignorant or inadequate.
I love the spectacle of social "scientists" lecturing natural scientists about how their science isn't good enough. It would help if economists would remember once and a while that their "science" is predicated on social behavior that is inherently malleable and therefore not as firmly grounded as the natural sciences.
Posted by: Immoralist on February 22, 2007 3:57 PMso you don't think that the physical sciences are malleable? or are you still working with your 3rd grade understanding of science that says, "if the text book says it's so, it must be true, no exceptions".
We can't even begin to model the climate or ecosystem without resorting to a lot of generalities or specifics. And anyone who claims to do so is someone I wouldn't trust.
The economists at least seem to know enough to talk about uncertainties and opportunity costs involved with action. Rather than just boldly plowing through opposition and labeling them "deniers"
Posted by: ha on February 22, 2007 4:44 PMI, on the other hand, find the spectacle of natural "scientists" insisting that good science comes from consensus, rather than from the scientific method. But what can one expect from people who confuse correlation with causation, anyway?
Posted by: ellipsis on February 22, 2007 4:46 PMWhich, presumably, is meant by Ellipsis to argue that the fact that most climatologists are now reaching the same conclusion is unimportant as probabilistic evidence. Right.
Posted by: Bruce Moomaw on February 22, 2007 5:28 PMThat a consenus can be reached about global climate change in as little as a decade or so shows the arrogance of those involved. I don't know how you can study something that is millions of years old for 20 years and claim to be able to completely understand it. The problem is many of these scientists aren't making such claim, but the people are using their science and twisting it for their agenda are.
I read somewhere a scientest using the analogy of climate change as the snowball affect. That it will just keep rolling along and getting bigger and badder and worse. How can he make such a statement? It's like these guys are just picking analogies for effect. Perhaps its more like a pendulum. Where it will swing one way, and then another and eventually come to a rest. Perhaps it's like brick wall, that it will come crashing against and stop. Pick your stupid analogy...the point is they are all worthless and fail to describe the complex systems that are involved. It seems to me like some people are simplifying the issues and dumbing them down to the point where the problems are being exaggerated...fortunately nature is not a "delicate" balance. It's actually quite resilient as the fact that the earth has been here longer than you or I will be proves quite nicely.
ha wrote:
so you don't think that the physical sciences are malleable? or are you still working with your 3rd grade understanding of science that says, "if the text book says it's so, it must be true, no exceptions".
Objective, natural phenomena is subject to a higher degree of predictability and objectivity than social phenomena. Sorry, but free markets and rational choice decision-making models have no corrolary in nature, libertarian protests to the contrary. They are social constructs that seek to describe and explain social reality, nothing more.
ellipsis wrote:
I, on the other hand, find the spectacle of natural "scientists" insisting that good science comes from consensus, rather than from the scientific method.
Which natural scientists are insisting that consensus and consensus alone proves the existence of global warming as they define it?
Posted by: Immoralist on February 22, 2007 6:45 PMWhatever the case, pointing out "consenus" seems pretty useless to me. If you have to run around frantically screaming "everyone agrees with me!" every opporuntity you get, which is how it sometimes seems with the global warming chicken littles, then clearly "everyone" doesn't agree with you.
Well, you can't win with this crowd can you. Concensus means there's been no science just agreement, so climate change is not a problem. Lack of consensus mean that scientists don't agree therefore climate change is not a problem. Put it in simple terms, and, whoa, analogies and models are inherently flawed, so climate change isn't a problem. Put in complex terms and they problematize things they don't understand, so climate change isn't a problem.
There are no conditions under which these folks will accept that a) the science is pretty sound (maybe economists and political philosophers don't like it because of the implications, but climatologists seem to be almost unanimously convinced) and b) taking action on this is in our interest. Nope. The whole discussion turns into a highschool debating contest that they try to rig to win. Ridiculous.
Posted by: dick loudon on February 22, 2007 7:45 PMThere are no conditions under which these folks will accept that a) the science is pretty sound (maybe economists and political philosophers don't like it because of the implications, but climatologists seem to be almost unanimously convinced) and b) taking action on this is in our interest.
Hmmm...except that I do accept that the science is pretty sound. As already explained once, what the science tells us is:
1. Earth is presently in the mids of some sort of warming trend.
2. Anthropogenic emissions have probably contributed toward, at minimum, accellerating that trend somehow.
The rest is heavily tainted with political objectives, and the huge unaswered question is whether it is even possible to significantly slow or reverse either of these in the context of feasible human means, and the present global political economy.
Posted by: anony-mouse on February 22, 2007 8:18 PMThe scientific consensus goes a lot farther than that at this point -- it's now also that the temperature rise will be at least several degrees C., which is rather important given that the last Ice Age involved a SMALLER drop in average global temperatures. I do get a kick out of the insistence of what might be called the Anti-Chicken Littles that since "the Earth and most life on it -- including most human life -- will survive, there's no serious problem." The vast majority of the human race survived WW II, too -- and would have survived a worldwide Nazi takeover -- but I don't recall any arguments that this made the war not worth trying to prevent or win.
As for what we should do about it right now, let me suggest 3 obvious possibilities:
(1) We spend a lot more over the next few years on the climate-observation satellites that will be necessary to nail down absolutely solidly whether or not serious man-made global warming will occur. The Bush Administration -- grotesquely, if typically -- has tried to seriously cut spending on even those. (See http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11820.html for a new National Academy of Sciences report on that fact.)
(2) We start spending a hell of a lot more money -- right now -- on resarch into the energy-production, energy-conservation, and carbon dioxide-sequestration technologies that will be necessary for humanity to make any major cuts in its CO2 emissions without impoverishing itself in the process. (These, after all, will also be crucial if the world really is running out of cheap oil -- and they would also allow us to deal with any serious NATURAL swing in climate. It's easy to dump more CO2 into the air if we start to enter another Ice Age: you just set fire to a lot of stuff. It's much harder to pull CO2 OUT of the air to cool down the planet -- the average CO2 molecule, after entering the atmnosphere, spends about a century hanging around before it's removed by natural processes.)
(3) You start seriously considering a carbon tax, and how to persuade the spoiled people of the highly developed countries to accept one.
Posted by: Bruce Moomaw on February 22, 2007 8:35 PMDick Loudon, of course, is bang on target in describing the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose philosophy of the Reverse Chicken Littles who have turned up on this thread.
Posted by: Bruce Moomaw on February 22, 2007 8:43 PMYou start seriously considering a carbon tax, and how to persuade the spoiled people of the highly developed countries to accept one.
It's that kind of superior attitude that makes people think the GW crowd cares more about punishign others for bad lifestyle choices than dealing with the science.
In the thread just below we had several people inform us that $400 for medical equipment to prevent/aleviate pain was a horrible catastrophe that required government intervention. Now it turns out we have to jack up the prices on every product sold in the "spoiled" countries, while leaving the enormously less efficient (BTU/$GDP wise) developing countries alone, as though somehow their tremendous emissions don't count...
But of course these actions are unambigously "in our interest," apparently, without any discussion of costs and benefits of both warming and the action required to stop it...
Posted by: Rob Lyman on February 22, 2007 8:57 PMThe conclusion of anthropogenic global warming was reached in the 1990's. The science still doesn't support it, but the scientific consensus does. Since anyone who doesn't go along with the consensus can expect to have difficulty getting research funding, difficulty getting published, difficulty getting tenure...it is no surprise that "most climatologists are now reaching the same conclusion". I'm no fan of Noam Chomsky, but what we are seeing is not that far from what he described in "Manufacturing Consent".
It still isn't science. It's something else...
Posted by: ellipsis on February 22, 2007 9:32 PMBruce Moonaw wrote:
The scientific consensus goes a lot farther than that at this point -- it's now also that the temperature rise will be at least several degrees C.,
No, it isn't. Even the UN doesn't make that claim any more. You must have missed a memo, or perhaps you are still tied to the "hockey stick" simulation, which generated the same output even with Monte Carlo inputs...
Bruce Moomaw wrote:
Which, presumably, is meant by Ellipsis to argue that the fact that most climatologists are now reaching the same conclusion is unimportant as probabilistic evidence.
Most climatologists have a simple choice: agree with the consensus, and get published/funded/tenured, or disagree with it and not get published, get no research money and not get tenure.
This doesn't explain why the Antarctica is not following the model, or why many glaciers not only aren't melting but are actually growing, but it does explain "consensus" very well.
However, it's not science...
PS: Correlation is still not causation. Although the AGW Chicken Littles do not seem to grasp that advanced concept in logic...
Posted by: ellipsis on February 22, 2007 9:43 PMTake a look at the Stern report. It says exactly the same thing the IPCC was saying before, only more forcibly -- which is why even Ronald Bailey has finally broken with the GW skeptics. The plain and simple fact is that the landslide majority of climatologists has agreed since about 1995 that the phenomenon is probably real and likely to be serious -- and that consensus has only grown with time, as you'll find from any stroll through both the articles and the news columns of the science journals. As for your argument that there's a filtering consensus going on that artificially exaggerates the majority of climatologists who agree with the idea: there have been at least 2 polls of climatologists in general on this subject since 1991. And your argument, taken to the extreme, would force very serious consideration of every crank, no matter how crackpot. Anybody who disagrees with the scientific consensus that the Earth goes around the Sun is likely to have trouble getting published, too. To quote Carl Sagan: "They did indeed laugh at Copernicus, Darwin and Einstein. But they've laughed a lot more often at Bozo the Clown." Are you going to argue that there will be no meaningful evidence that GW is serious so long as a single climatologist anywhere on the planet Earth disagrees?
As for the denunciations of the "hockey stick" that we frequently hear from the remaining GW skeptics, see , http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/10/hockey-sticks-round-27/#more-199 , http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2005/ammann.shtml , http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/02/dummies-guide-to-the-latest-hockey-stick-controversy/ ,
and the articles in "Science", 6-30-06, pg. 1854 (on the National Academy of Sciences' official appraisal of the Hockey Stick debate) and 6-9-06, pg. 1456 (on the latest paleoclimatic graph of Earth's CO2 levels vs. its global temperature over the last 400,000 years). I also urge everyone to take a look at the accompanying graphs, and decide whether it looks like a "Monte Carlo" phenomenon to them. There really does come a time at which one should stop playing Monty Python's Black Knight.
As for Rob Lyman: please. First, I DID say that an absolutely crucial part of any anti-GW strategy is trying to develop the technologies "necessary for humanity to reduce its CO2 output without impoverishing itself in the process." Second: why the hell SHOULDN'T there be a carbon tax at this point on the high per-capita income nations but not on the low per-capita income ones? The people of the former, of course, can tolerate such tax a hell of a lot better, which was my point.
Posted by: Bruce Moomaw on February 22, 2007 10:17 PMEllipsis wrote:
Since anyone who doesn't go along with the consensus can expect to have difficulty getting research funding, difficulty getting published, difficulty getting tenure...it is no surprise that "most climatologists are now reaching the same conclusion".
An assertion so naked and bereft of evidence that it's actually sexy. Undulate for me, baby.
Posted by: Immoralist on February 22, 2007 11:24 PMdick loudon,
Why that souds remarkably like, "the earth is getting colder"..."why, it's because you drive to the supermarket too often!"
"the earth is getting wetter"..."why, it's because you drive to the post office too often!"
"the earth is getting drier" ... "why it's because you drive to the golf course too often!"
"there are hurricanes" .... "why that's because you like to eat beef!"
Can you see where this is going? The weather has been profound unpredictable outside of very broad trends throughout all history...winter, spring, summer, fall.
We can't get what the weather will be like tomorrow in so many cases. I just sat on the roof with my contractor hurrying to fix the rough before it rains because the weather report said... rain at 6am...then later on it said, rain earlier than expected at 1am...then of course it rained at 6pm that night. At least it rained. Last week it predicted snow and we had blue skies.
The chicken littles are using scare tactics that combine some logic and wrap it up in a whole lot of emotion. That's what Al Gore's scare film does. It's a shame. But getting back to the main point. When you start with a faulty premise, it's no wonder you come to the same bad conclusion.
I imagine in a nice closed system C02 can cause warming. Problem is the planet is not a nice closed system and we don't even know the half of it. So how the hell are we jumping to these broad conclusions involving butterfly effects like driving to the post office is causing a hurricane in New Orleans?
I can understand science that says "if you poor this chemical in the river fish may die". But to take the next leap and extrapolate that those dead fish will be the death of us doesn't give the resilency of the planet and the people on it much credit.
Posted by: cdub on February 23, 2007 12:07 AMI wrote:
Since anyone who doesn't go along with the consensus can expect to have difficulty getting research funding, difficulty getting published, difficulty getting tenure...it is no surprise that "most climatologists are now reaching the same conclusion".
Immoralist replied:
An assertion so naked and bereft of evidence that it's actually sexy. Undulate for me, baby.
Your emperor's new clothes must look mighty good, I'm sure, to those pure enough of heart to see them. Sorry if I've offended your church, but I'll give you a place to start learning something: begin with Roger Pielke at Colorado State and work your way out. Have fun.
Posted by: ellipsis on February 23, 2007 12:09 AMPS to Immoralist: correlation is still not causation. Make a note of that, there will be a test later.
Posted by: ellipsis on February 23, 2007 12:11 AMellipsis wrote:
I'll give you a place to start learning something: begin with Roger Pielke at Colorado State and work your way out.
Yeah, so? He's a meteorologist with a refined take on climate change. He wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about the futility of segregating politics from science. He's written lots of peer-reviewed articles. Here's one from the Royal Society:
http://blue.atmos.colostate.edu/publications/pdf/R-258.pdf
And in the same article, he wrote that "the evidence of a human fingerprint on the global and regional climate is incontrovertible as clearly illustrated in the National Research Council report and in our research papers."
I'm not seeing how anything he's done relates to the alleged conspiracy of "global warming alarmists" to block NIH funding for "dissident" climatologists.
PS to Immoralist: correlation is still not causation. Make a note of that, there will be a test later.
Jesus, dude, I already passed Philosophy of Science 101, okay? Besides, I never expressed an opinion on global warming or climate change. For all you know, I might be as skeptical as you are. All I did was rightly call into question the wisdom of economists who try to attack natural scientists on their own turf.
Posted by: Immoralist on February 23, 2007 1:41 AMSince Ms. McArdle's blog ate my first reply to Ellipsis (maybe because of length), I'll try again.
Ellipsis: "This doesn't explain why the Antarctica is not following the model, or why many glaciers not only aren't melting but are actually growing,..."
It really shouldn't be necessary to point out to an adult that the fact that a single continent -- or rather, part of one continent, since the Antarctic Peninsula IS substantially warming -- doesn't count much as evidence against GW if most of the planet is warming. Which it is. Take a look at the chart of temperatures on all Earth's other continents on page 11 of the IPCC summary report ( http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf ), and see if it looks to you like coincidence.
Quoting http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=18 : "A rise in the global mean temperature does not imply universal warming. Dynamical effects (changes in the winds and ocean circulation) can have just as large an impact, locally as the radiative forcing from greenhouse gases. The temperature change in any particular region will in fact be a combination of radiation-related changes (through greenhouse gases, aerosols, ozone and the like) and dynamical effects. Since the winds tend to only move heat from one place to another, their impact will tend to cancel out in the global mean." And http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=234 : "Newer climate models generally also have very modest or no polar amplification over the Southern Ocean and Antarctica in hindcasts of the last century. The presence of a deep and circulating ocean component is key because ocean heat uptake increases most in the Southern Ocean as the climate warms (see Gregory 2000)." Some climatologists predict that something similar may happen as the unquestioned wholesale melting of Greenland's glaciers dumps a lot of buoyant fresh water into the North Atlantic and chokes off that heat-transporting convective current known as the North Atlantic Current, thus delaying Europe's warming and maybe even temporarily cooling it (as has happened before). If that does happen, though, the heat buildup in the lower-latitude Atlantic will be even greater.
As for the Pielkes (there are two of them), see "Nature's" 3-page profile on them at http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/announcement_files/1020-uploaded/announcement-1020-1906.pdf , and note the following passage: "Others say the row was about more than including a variety of perspectives. They say it reflects part of a larger tension in the climate community between those who do regional modelling, such as Pielke Sr, and those who work with global circulation models, which predict the planet’s temperature for years to come. 'The average global surface temperature is almost useless for what people care about — their growing season and where they live,' says Pielke Sr. He argues that regional climate models that include climate forcings other than greenhouse gases, such as land-use changes, provide more useful information than the commonly used global circulation models.
"In fact, neither father nor son thinks that predicting global average climate trends is possible or useful. Pielke Sr says that evaluating the sensitivities of local resources to climate change would be wiser — giving an idea of its effect on energy, water and the ability to respond to natural disasters, for example. Pielke Jr points out that it doesn’t take precise climate predictions to begin assessing societal and economic vulnerabilities to climate change. This may sound like common sense. But by questioning the global predictions that many climate scientists hold dear, the Pielkes often get MISLABELLED [my emphasis] as climate sceptics."
Yup. Read the comments of both Pielkes on their actual blogs -- and in their friendly exchanges with "Realclimate" -- and see if they sound to you remotely as skeptical of GW as Ellipsis makes them out to be. See also the Wikipedia entry on Pielke Sr. What the Pielkes really do is emphasize that it's very hard to predict the precise impact of GW on humanity in one particular place, which is hard to quarrel with. (In fact, the main objection to Pielke Sr. is his odd view that because LOCAL GW effects are so important from a policy point of view, GLOBAL data is "useless" -- see, for instance, the exchange at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=186 . He's also more skeptical that CO2 is the major human-related cause of GW, as opposed to such other things as methane and soot. This would be wonderful if true, since they're easier to control -- but he's definitely in the minority.)
What all this confirms yet again is that we badly need to Be Prepared for a wide variety of different problems and contingencies from GW, which meshes nicely with my own statement that what we very badly need to be doing right now is to (1) launch the near-future climate-observation satellites designed to nail down the likely severity of GW more firmly; (2) start spending like hell immediately on technological research into the wide variety of technological measures for reducing and/or coping with GW that we will need (which may well be crucial for other reasons as well); and (3) start bracing people politically in the developed countries for the strong possibility that they may have to pay more for energy in order to avoid a still more serious problem for the world in general. The one option that is NOT open to us is sticking our heads in the sand as Ellipsis cheerfully urges us to do.
Immoralist, I feel the same way about natural scientists invading the turf of economists: saying that we MUST do something about global warming NOW. But a thorough analysis of costs and benefits isn't really their specialty, and they don't seem inclined to do it.
Posted by: Rob Lyman on February 23, 2007 8:32 AMEven though I think we are warming the planet, those who believe that fossil fuel use can change course and start declining are seriously deluded. For better or worse, our entire civilization, and the 7 billion people living today, are completely dependent on the energy consumed in the present, and the energy consumption trends are upwards. Any alternative not only has to replace the energy production capacity of today but, also, the increases in energy production of tomorrow. It is a safe assumption that energy consumption will double this century alone (this is a sure underestimate, I know).
Unless we start building nuclear power plants on a crash program, it is a certainty that more fossil fuels will be used in the future than today. It is a near certainty that we will continue to use them in increasing amounts until we reach the limits of their production.
Posted by: Yancey Ward on February 23, 2007 9:45 AMCompletely off-topic, I know, but I busted a gut laughing when I saw the name of the doctor in the story below:
Circumcision Reduces Aids Risk to Men
Posted by: Yancey Ward on February 23, 2007 10:13 AMTo correct the record, Antarctica is LOSING ice mass, as gravimetric satellites confirmed in 2005; climatology is entirely a CAUSATIVE argument making extrapolations into the future with increasing uncertainties; economics proofs are accomplished almost entirely by statistical CORRELATION (see The Secret Sins of Economics by McCloskey;) and there is a typical scientific CONSENSUS that relativistic physics is correct, while Newtonian physics suffices for sublight speed.
Posted by: Lee A. Arnold on February 23, 2007 11:31 AMThe SBA recently released a study that government regulation in the US costs something like 1.1 Trillion a year.
Posted by: leon dixon on February 23, 2007 11:41 AMLee Arnold,
Since you did not see fit to attach a link to your claim about Antarctic ice mass, I will do it for you.
The study's authors acknowledge the limitations of their method, thus your bold claim that Antarctica is losing ice mass can be better evaluated. You highlight one of the issues discussed earlier in this thread: the science is never quite as conclusive as those outside the field often claim. Most of us scientists wisely hedge our findings with standard deviations and acknowledgement that our readings have their limitations.
Link with references within.
Posted by: Yancey Ward on February 23, 2007 12:12 PMcdub:
"Climate" and "weather" are different concepts, dude. That you appear to think climatologists are working on better 5 day forecasts for the Tri-state area suggests maybe you should get back up on your roof and stay there.
Posted by: corfu on February 23, 2007 12:43 PMMr. Arnold, you didn't answer this question last time I asked, so I'll try again. Other people may answer as well.
Would you advocate or oppose a huge expansion of nuclear electric power generation in the US, say from the current* 20% to 70% over a ten year period, replacing mostly coal plants?
-dk
* no pun intended
Since Ms. McArdle's blogsite ate my first two responses to Ellipsis yesterday -- apparently for being too long -- I'll chop 'em up. Part 1 here; next part retyped afer I eat lunch and go to a doctor's appointment.
(1) Ellipsis: "The UN doesn't claim [that man-made global warming will warm the planet by several degrees over this century] any more."
Bunk. Take a look at the summary of the IPCC's latest report: http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf , pg. 13-14. They're predicting a rise of about 2-4 degrees C (4-7 deg F), depending on how much greenhosue gas we continue to dump.
(2) E.: "The 'hockey stick' simulation, which generated the same output even with Monte Carlo inputs..."
The hell it did. See the summary of the National Academy of Sciences' official appraisal of the Hockey Stick controversy on page 1854 of last June 30's "Science" ("Yes, It's Been Getting Warmer In Here Since The CO2 Began To Rise"), the report on the House hearing on the Hockey Stick on pg. 421 of the July 28 issue, and the pieces at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=121 and http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=11
on how the evidence has further strengthened since then from additional analyses. Also, all readers are cordially invited to take a look at the accompanying graphs and see if it looks like a "Monte Carlo" phenomenon to them.
Part 2 coming up (on Ellipsis' errors regarding what's really happening in Antarctica, what the Pielkes are REALLY saying as opposed to what he thinks they say, and why in this particular case we've known for a century that "correlation is probably causation").
Posted by: Bruce Moomaw on February 23, 2007 1:49 PMI disagree. Bureaucrats can't be too stupid they usually have great retirement packages and vacation pay.
Danny L. McDaniel
Lafayette, Indiana
corfu,
Cool thanks wonderful clarification. That's a good way to refute things. Unfortunately it doesn't explain how everyone is jumping up and down based on the WEATHER and attributing every cooling, heating, drying, wetting pattern of the WEATHER is the result of "global warming". When really they should label it global climate change, and then point out that the climate always changes and leave it at that.
Its cute that you think you can fix the weather or the climate though. I'd wish you good luck with that and be on my way, except your solution to fixing it seems to be to tax the hell out of some of us, and then spend that money on...most likely more social programs and bureaucrats's paychecks.
No thanks.
Posted by: cdub on February 23, 2007 2:49 PMI also might point out that our society is reeping the benefits of catastrophic climate change every day. Floods in the Mississippi for thousands of years is what is feeding us. But to hear people complaining about flooding these days you'd think it was the end of the world.
Ice melting in the glaciers is what allows us to have Chicago.
A lot of catastrophic changes have occured and in the past we were more unaffected by them because we didn't have as large a footprint on the earth as we do now.
Call me crazy, but I think there have always been hurricanes, floods, storms, droughts, tsunamis, volcanoes, heat waves, cold fronts, etc.
For you to claim these things are now happening as the result of me and others driving around in their cars puts a VERY large burden of proof on you. Proof which I have not been satisfied by, and apparently neither have many intelligent and respected others as well since we are still debating this.
Posted by: cdub on February 23, 2007 2:54 PM"Call me crazy, but I think there have always been hurricanes, floods, storms, droughts, tsunamis, volcanoes, heat waves, cold fronts, etc."
Thanks for the tip. I'll pass it along. I'm sure the climatology community will be stunned by the revelation.
Look, the issue isn't whether there's a flood or a storm or rainy weather in February. It's whether we are seeing increasing instability in these weather patterns (climate change) as a result of warming, with the attendant likelihood that this instability will disrupt ecosystems and natural systems on which we depend.
And there are thousands of data points to suggest that this is occurring. Not on the basis of a single storm or flood, but on trends, and the deviation of current trends from observed natural cycles. The more marked the deviation, the more likely you're seeing evidence of human activity being a contributing factor.
For example, Atlantic hurricanes have increased in number and in power over the last decade. OK, well, that could be a natural phenomenon, so you look back a ways. What you can find is that the last decade's surge is well beyond any past cyclical trend. Proof positive? Some scientists think so. At worst evidence like this is powerfully suggestive. Everywhere you turn there is evidence of weather trends deviating markedly from natural cycles, strong links to these trends being driven by warming, and that warming is consistent with human activity. I'd suggest that there's enough circumstantial evidence like this that the standard of proof here is well beyond the balance of probabilities. 90% likely, the IPCC thinks.
But, OK, cdub sits on his roof and it's raining when the TV hairhat said it was supposed to be sunny so experts are idiots, and he sees the news and there's a flood, but he remembers a flood from 20 years ago, so this is nothing new, and there was an ice age a long time ago and that change was good so what's the problem?
As someone else alluded to the scale and rapidity of the change is beyond anything that's occured before. And the change will be disruptive in terms of the natural systems that we rely on. This will have tremendous economic consequences, far beyond paying bureacrats you loathe so much.
But saying the response to climate change has been coopted by a "political agenda" (as some have), then saying nothing can be done because any government activity is inherently bad seems a tad hypocritical. Seems like some would prefer to run the risk of economic devestation for the sake of a government hating ideology.
Dick King, sorry I missed you in the geneeral excitement, and the fact that my brain is turrning into swiss cheese. I would prefer global warming, if the alternative is radioactive waste storage ON THE PLANET. But then, the other side says we can wait, and it looks like solar voltaic will be competitive soon. I think we should keep on at fusion, build supercolliders to investigate subatomics a lot more, and sure we don't create too many black holes. I think there's lots of really amazing questions that could derive us energy, like can we control gravity. I want to cure global warming by antigravity levitation.
The thing about the WEATHER is that if a system goes haywire, you would expect it to oscillate to extremes. If my memory doesn't serve me incorrectly, weren't there very sharp and extreme winter episodes in the US NorthEast last year also? Or was that the year before?
Posted by: Lee A. Arnold on February 23, 2007 6:32 PMAt the Antarctic, it has been known for a while that big coastal ice shelves are moving faster; this of course was of some immediate concern, because all the penguins had to waddle faster, and the exercise was making them lose too much weight, but the Martian flying saucers brought them candy bars, and now everything is okay again. (yes they were Mars candy bars) The question remained, whether snowfall was exactly replacing the interior icepack. Your link is to a one-page note on the gravimetric satellite study at the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. It doesn't even explain the science. It manages to mention that there are now three studies saying the same thing, including two which closely match. Half of the note argues that the differences in the amounts of their numerical results, still counsel us to caution. Because we wouldn't have known. My favorite sentence is "..it would behoove everyone to "keep their cool" about Antarctica's possible contribution to global sea level change over the last few decades and not jump to any irreversible conclusions about the matter..." And that, friends, is science reporting! Indeed it is a minor masterpiece of subtle twist, and I heartily recommend it to anyone who enjoys same. ("...much less ominous," "host of potential errors," "as they readily admit..." --They've been caught red-handed doing proper analysis!) The link neglects to mention that the Center for the Study, etc., is funded by ExxonMobil, Scaife, and the Western Fuels Assoc.
Posted by: Lee A. Arnold on February 23, 2007 7:41 PMAnd there are thousands of data points to suggest that this is occurring. Not on the basis of a single storm or flood, but on trends, and the deviation of current trends from observed natural cycles. The more marked the deviation, the more likely you're seeing evidence of human activity being a contributing factor.For example, Atlantic hurricanes have increased in number and in power over the last decade.
One decade's worth of data doesn't prove anything about long term trends. Nor is it possible to prove that hurricanes are more frequent or more powerful in recent years than they were in the middle of the 20th century; the count of reported hurricanes is higher, but it's also quite clear that many hurricanes went unreported in the past. Posted by: markm on February 24, 2007 6:22 AM
Can you prove that there is not a 100 year cycle of hurricane activity? Is it beyond question? Can you prove that there is not a 100 year cycle of glacier retreat? Is it beyond question?
You can't. Anyone who makes definitive statements about overall weather patterns of the planet after observing it for only a decade or two is a fool.
The planet is old. The planet is riddled with examples of massive changes in weather. It's entirely possible, probable, and likely that we there will be more changes.
For you to say the pattern is changing shows your foolishness. For you to say because the perceived change in the pattern requires us to make major, life changing, economy altering, ability-to-put-food-on-the-table destroying changes for many of us is flat out dangerous.
If all you have to go on is circumstancial evidence and a decade or two of studdy, you can't factualy make the statements you are making.
The ultimate outcome of this dreadful state we are supposedly in is in question too. They've already admitted that the massive and expensive changes supposedly requiered won't affect the warming trend. They've ADMITTED THIS! So here yo are playing cheerleader for something that admittedly won't work by the people suggesting it as policy. What the hell is going on?
And if its possible within 30 years to bring the planet from the brink of a deadly ice age, to a swealtering fireball, I have full confidence that we can deal with the situation in the future.
Posted by: cdub on February 24, 2007 11:19 AMBecause we're dealing with it so well now?
Climate is the average of the weather. We know much more data about both than a mere "decade or two." Climatology is based on physics and chemistry, current observations and historical proxy data. Your arguments mean exactly zero, unless you become a climatologist. If you think there is a 100-year cycle of glacier retreat, you have to figure out the mechanism, and match it to the mountains of existing data: that is how science works. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of different, independent KINDS of evidence for anthropogenic global warming, in several scientific disciplines. The fact that someone else cannot disprove your baloney means nothing. Please prove that billiard balls are not pushed around by invisible little angels. As you wrote, "Is it beyond question?"
P.S. -- NO ONE (whoever "they" are) has "admitted" that "massive and expensive changes" won't affect the warming trend. This sounds like that corporate propaganda that recently washed through the newspapers. But there is NO scientific study of this. It's very odd that the denialists argued that global warming wasn't happening, and now they argue we can't do anything about it... Notice a trend?
Posted by: Lee A. Arnold on February 24, 2007 1:46 PMI was pointing to the hurricane example as something that should make you go hmmmmmmm. As I said, is it absolute proof? Some scientists have said yes, but perhaps, as you say, there's some other mechanism we don't understand. But Occam's razor applies. Additional CO2 in the atmosphere retards heat radiation from the earth. CO2 in the atmosphere has increased. Humans have released a whole lot of CO2. There are thousands of data points of increased temperatures in the past decade or so. Sea surface temperatures in the mid Atlantic have increased. So have the power and frequency of tropical storms. I think the links are pretty clear and follow fairly logically. If there's some other mechanism, and everything is hunky-dory, terriffic. I'm all ears. What is it? And there's many other examples of these hmmmmmmm type situations, which would strongly suggest that there's at the very least a huge huge risk that this is a reality.
"the perceived change in the pattern requires us to make major, life changing, economy altering, ability-to-put-food-on-the-table destroying changes for many of us is flat out dangerous."
No one is suggesting we starve ourselves back to the stone age. But I think the preponderance of evidence suggests that these "ability-to-put-food-on-the-table" changes will be forced upon us, no matter how skeptical you want to be. And it behooves us to at least TRY to do something about it. And certainly the effects can be minimized and managed. I can't believe how fatalistic and apathetic the "it's too late, don't bother" arguments are. We've got all the resources in the world to mobilize against a half-fabricated terror threat, and I'd imagine the response to this would cost far less than the occupation in Iraq, but somehow this threat meets with such denialist resistance and the war on terror meets with such enthusiasm. Why? Just 'cause the idea of limitations on human economic activity doesn't square with a simplistic libertarian philosophy?
Posted by: corfu on February 24, 2007 4:33 PMTwo days ago I sent a couple of very long responses to Ellipsis which Ms. McArdle's site ate, presumably because of their length -- and even when I chopped the first one up, the segments didn't go through either. He seems to have left the buidling by now; but on the chance that someone might fall for his arguments, I'll try chopping my reply up even finer. Part 1:
E.: "The UN doesn't claim any more" that the temperature rise will be "at least several degrees C." Bunk. The IPCC summary report ( http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf , pg. 12-14) pegs it at 1.8 to 3.6 deg C by 2100 -- compared to the fact that Earth's temperature dropped by only 5 deg C. in the middle of the last Ice Age.
Part 2 coming up.
Posted by: Bruce Moomaw on February 25, 2007 6:22 AM