The Climate of Man

So far I agree with Mr. Rind


Here Rind, the climate scientist, loses touch with the state of technology outside his specialty, which actually has developed a process for making "a plastic version of water". It's called "seawater desalination", and with current technology and economies of scale, it produces potable water at 50 cents to a dollar per cubic meter (about 1.5-3 cents per gallon). That's still unaffordable for some third-world nations at this point, but for almost all nations on this planet it's much more affordable than a war. This puts a narrow limit on the "geopolitically destabilizing" that is likely to occur. And this is actually rather typical of scientists, myself included. When faced with a real-life problem, which is almost inevitably interdisciplinary, we chronically overestimate the part of the problem that falls inside our specialty. We then feel capable of making accurate snap judgments about the parts that fall outside our specialty, and which often seem trivial to us anyway. Sure enough our snap judgments are badly badly wrong, to a point that it ruins our judgment of the whole problem more than the experise we have inside our field improves it. Finally, a journalist interviews the scientist, doesn't notice how much science is about specialization, and quotes the juiciest soundbites. Inevitably, these are the confident snap judgments about fields where the scientist is incompetent, rather than his well-reasoned lectures on his field of expertise, which are typically correct but dull. Actually, this is a good example of what I had in mind when I made the point you were responding to.


Taken in isolation, I don't. But of all the things that can go wrong geopolitically, the side effects of climate change seem way down the list of problems to address. Compared to nuclear proliferation, or famines caused by incompetent dictators, or epidemics that could easily be prevented by drilling a few wells at $100 apiece, I don't think sealevel rises and such are the best investment of our resources even for the purpose of promoting geopolitical stability.

I should have continued this sub-thread of the conversation, but didn't, so I'll do it now. The problem with unfalsifiable hypotheses is that they undercut the peer-review process and nolens volens turn its participants into quacks, even when they don't have a quack mindset. As a fellow admirer of Richard Feynman, maybe you remember his story about the length of the emperor's nose. It's either in Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman or in What Do You Care what Other People Think? In this story, China debates how long the emperor's nose is. (I don't remember why this matters to the Chinese.) So students compile statistics about length-of-nose distributions, serious scholars debate different sides of the argument, while yet other academics are busy writing papers. The scientific machinery churns at full power. There's just one problem: Nobody has ever seen the emperor. The moral of Feynman's story -- whose details I am certainly getting wrong because I've last read it a long time ago -- is that all high-flying debates, conferences, and papers are pointless unless you have experimental data to check with.

The same applies to the global warming debate. To the extent that we have data about global warming, it confirms that there has been a 1-2°F temperature increase over the last 150 years, and that the effect of increased greenhouse gas emissions is a necessary part of the explanation. (Probably not sufficient though.) That's why no scientist with a reputation to lose in the field doubts the existence of global warming anymore, nor that further greenhouse gas emissions will cause further global warming. But simulations of climate change decades and centuries out are intrinsically unfalsifiable. So in academic practice, somebody runs a simulation and submits its outcome to a journal with no way of knowing whether the results are realistic. Five referees then review it with no way of knowing whether the results are realistic. Because nobody can know what's realistic, peer review degenerates into a mostly meaningless beauty and popularity contest, almost as in the case of the emperor's nose.

And at this moment, in terms of academic quality control, there is much less to your distinction, "not quacks, but 630 refereed articles", than meets the eye anymore.

I do see what you're saying, Thomas. I think I'll go back and read the whole shebang in the context of our conversation so far.

It seems like the method itself (projections, etc.) must have a scientific and accurate aspect to it. For example, one thing that kept coming up is that the projections that were made in the past have in fact come true. That's a view of the emperor's nose (that anecdote is vaguely familiar, don't remember details.)

What I would like to see, and I don't think I have, is how horribly damaging it would be to the US to start actively attempting to curb CO2 emissions. For example, there was an aside about how cars have actually gotten 5% less efficient in [some time period], when expectations were that they would get steadily more efficient. Why? Is it really important for the economy that cars become LESS fuel efficient?

We can't KNOW for sure that bad things will happen with global warming, but does it really seem so unlikely to you? Why so much scientific agreement? Why these sober-minded scientists saying such strongly-worded things? That's another thing that kept coming up in the article, that usually lay people are more exercised than experts, that usually within the field people are less worried than outside the field, but over and over again it was the experts who are really worried. It could be the narrow focus thing, but that doesn't seem to explain it away to me.

No, that's not what's coming up. What's coming up is that the models of today, when fed with the data of yesterday, predict the reality of today with acceptable accuracy. That's not a view of the emperors nose, that's mostly selection bias of the programmers. The models of past IPCC reports have consistently overestimated the warming that would happen by 2005, and were continuously changed over the past 15-20 years to reflect that. More generally, there is an infinite number of hypotheses you can state about the future. Most fail to predict the present based on the data of the past, which proves them wrong. Of the rest, most hypotheses fail to predict the future based on today's data, which proves them false too. The remainder of the remainder -- those hypotheses that can tell us something we don't already know -- contains the few good truth candidates. The predictions of climate models have usually passed the first hurdle and haven't passed the second. That's better than nothing, but it's still a very weak basis for believing that the projections are true.


It wouldn't be horribly damaging at all. In Germany, we run a reasonably attractive society with gas prices at $5.50 per gallon. If this induces you to campaign for curbs on greenhouse gas emissions, fine with me. The reason this didn't induce me is because the same argument can be made about a lot of things. For example, if John Ashcroft can potentially prevent the next 9/11 that way, would it be terribly much to ask of you that you let him read your e-mail and your credit card statements? You have nothing to hide from him -- or do you? If George Bush can potentially prevent nuclear war in the Middle East by invading Iraq, is it really such a terrible crime of him to change their regime by force? And just in case there is indeed life after death, and agnostics do indeed fry in hell for eternity, would it be a terrible burden for you to go to church every Sunday? How about the Sozlet? You have made a conscious decision for yourself, but what kind of mother are you to potentially subject your daughter to eternal, excruciating pain? Would it be so much worse for her to go to Sunday school instead? No, it wouldn't -- but that's not the point. Speaking for myself, the point seems that to protect my own dignity, I must not let other people coerce me on the basis of scare stories, and must subject the peddlers of such stories to much stricter scrutiny than you seem to find approporiate.


Based on our current knowledge, yes it does. I think as highly of the warnings of catastrophic global warming as I think of those viral e-mails that purport to be virus warnings and spread because responsible people try to be helpful and forward them to their whole buddy list before they think. You want to keep in mind, though, that this is coming from the same scientist who told you in October 2002 that Bush was just saber-rattling about Iraq, and that he wouldn't really invade. (Back then, by the way, I think you mentioned a Republican friend of yours from the South-West who told you the same thing I said. Is he feeling as stupid about this as I do now?)


Perhaps the scientists you know have a different mindset than the ones I know. The ones I know are soberminded and responsible within their specialty. Outside their specialty, as a sweeping generalization, they are as prejudiced and opinionated as non-scientists, but more articulate so more likely to get their point through. They tend to have a pronounced whimsical streak and are more likely than non-scientists to have a taste for exploring radical and far-out political ideas. These tendencies tend to get amplified when they talk to non-scientists who admire how smart the scientist in question is. And when you re-read Kolbert's essay, you will notice that she never met a scientist whose authority she rejected, or even just accepted with qualifications. I can tell you from personal experience that I notice when someone puts my brain on a pedestal, and that I react with increased drasticity of of opinionating, usually unconciously. It's the reason I rarely hang out in the science forum myself, instead preferring the politics and legal forums where I'm kept honest by bright and well informed opponents such as joe, debra, nimh, yourself, and others.


I would have said it's quite common in the biological sciences, broadly defined. It was true for the eugenics movement; true for the school of chemists who, after discovering that nitrogen can be oxidized, warned of the Earth's atmosphere burning out from irresponsible chemical experiments; true for the "Homosexuality is an illness we have to cure with chemical castration" movement within the psychiatrist community, the movement that forced Alan Turing to grow tits before it drove him into suicide; true with several medical scares, like "we can't allow girls into sports as hazardous as soccer", or "we can't allow women to compete in longer distance runs than 800m." It was certainly true for the environmentalists who, in the 60s and 70s, peddled the overpopulation scare and the "we will run out of oil by 1992" scare.

The people who warn us of catastrophic global warming think they are responsibe and just erring on the safe side under uncerainty. But they are arguing in a long and dismal tradition, and the world is a better place for having dismissed their ancestors in this tradition.

Oh, strict scrutiny is the point of this thread. And why I'm happy you're here.

Will go ahead and re-read, and come back to this.

<dang, never went back, I knew I was going to do that!>

Well, it's nice to see you back now

I just re-read my last long post. And while I stand by the substance of it, maybe I have been a bit harsh in my tone. A pretty good summary of how I think about Mrs. Kolbert's article can be found in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776)


The important points, as I see them, are:

• The concern that mankind is going to hell (in a secular way) is very old. Usually the concern has been the ability of the earth to feed us. The new concern, that it may not be able to absorb our pollution, is a variant of this, but not fundamentally different.
  
• This concern isn't only voiced by think tank studies with an axe to grind. (Or, in Smith's language, "party pamphlets, the wretched offspring of falsehood and venality". Did I ever mention I love Smith's language?) They are frequently voiced by serious, competent, concerned people trying to do the right thing -- people we have good reason to trust based on their personality and motives. I believe Ms. Kolbert is one of the "very candid and very intelligent people" Smith had in mind, "who wrote nothing but what they believed, and for no other reason but because they believed it."
  
• Nevertheless, their concerns have proved wrong time after time after time. It is possible that cornucopians like me are wrong this time, and the predictors of doom are right. But based on the doom predictors' record, it strikes me as unlikely enough to leave my behavior unaffected.

I believe that Smith is basically saying the same thing I was trying to say, but he said it in a more appropriate tone than I did.

a question for Thomas-

You appear to be a scientist, may I ask which discipline you are in?

I'm a physicist, happyjil.

Hi -- I have read your exchange with interest. As a non-scientist (lawyer), I found the series incredibly compelling and scary. Actually, I found that particularly as a parent. I wish I could feel as sanguine as Thomas. I don't find de-salinization a particularly interesting adaptation technique when considering intense, persistent drought in, for example, the mid-west, where a lot of our (US) agriculture takes place and is pretty much entirely rain-dependent. The fact that the water managers in California (where I grew up) basically threw up their hands when presented with the drought guy's projections was telling for me. And what about the fact that our climate has been rather stable for the last however many thousand years, but that even if we get the low end of projected warming we will be into uncharted territory in terms of the average temperature and basically, all bets are off. I don't expect people to know exactly what will happen -- but doesn't it seem a little nuts to just hope it'll come out OK? To me, when we talk about 2050 or 2060, that's going to be close to the end of my troubles, but for my daughter, who was born in 2002 . . . not so much. I realize that people have predicted doom and gloom for the planet since time immemorial, but things seem to have reached a different level with the climate change issue. It's like a ozone-hole situation with far more sweeping consequences and no Montreal protocol. While I have been somewhat comforted by your (Thomas') statements that there is more uncertainty of a truly awful outcome than a lay reading of the articles might suggest, in general I feel like you are kind of nit-picking and the overall point holds true -- we are pumping all this CO2 into the atmosphere; it is warming up the planet, demonstrably already, and with delayed effects; and if we keep it up at this pace we are going to lose the lovely hospitable climate we are adapted to. And re: the idea we're better off drilling wells at $200 a pop -- did anyone read the NYT Science Times article a couple of weeks ago about the effect of warmer oceans on Africa? The subtitle was "hot and dry," which I think hints at the contents. As we know *$)! flows downhill, so the poorest of the world will almost certainly get the worst of this crisis too.

Hi Monica, and welcome to A2K.

Yes, all of this has been at the back of my mind all this time -- I agree with the nit-picking impression, but have wanted to come back with specifics. Especially, I've wanted to re-read the series while keeping Thomas' objections in mind, but I just haven't done it yet. Lots of reasons, including the fact that it totally freaked me out the first time and knowingly subjecting myself to freak-out material is not super-high on my list of priorities. But (assuming this is a serious issue), that's just the problem, isn't it? Nobody wants to think about it. Too complicated, too depressing.

I'll try hard to re-read -- what would make me even happier if a couple of knowledgeable people on either side of the issue would have it out (civilly) and I could read along.

But I'll see what I can do. <sigh>

Hi -- Now I'm worried I wasn't civil enough in my post! I really don't intend any disrespect at all. Part of my reaction to this discussion, I think, is my work with expert witnesses in my past environmental litigation work. The experts would say, for example, that bottom trawling was definitely harmful to the environment, but then all they would say in their papers were things like "the type and direction of the effects are predictable" or something like that. That kind of gave me the opinion that while experts may not be comfortable saying things with scientific certainty, their common sense informed by their observations led them to be far more concerned than their official, peer-reviewed papers would lead you to think.

Also I realized I should have said that I don't buy into one of Ms. Kohlert's overarching apparent conclusions, that is, that the whole civilization may crumble due to global warming. It certainly may if the worst of the predictions come true, but I don't think that's the standard we have to meet before taking pretty drastic action (as opposed to virtually none as is taking place in the US today). It seems to me highly likely that my daughter will reach the prime of her life to discover that the climate has been materially, negatively, and irrevocably changed by previous generations, including ours. I don't think that change has to be civilization-ending to be worth preventing. Maybe this is what people mean when they say that at some point science leaves off and policy begins. People in their capacity as citizens, parents, consumers, voters, what have you have to make their judgment as to what risks they are prepared to accept and which are worth moving on before they are proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.

A couple of other thoughts -- can you tell this has been much on my mind and no one I know has either read the articles or has the patience to listen to me! -- the irrevocability thing really got to me too. I mean, carbon lasting 100 years, that's not so tragic. If we finally woke up when the concentrations were really uncomfortable and we just had to wait it out, that's one thing. But I thought article one was pretty convincing that once we pass a certain threshhold -- which to all intents and purposes appears to be fast approaching -- things will become self-reinforcing and we can all drive priuses (priusii?) all we like and it won't make any difference.

Thomas, if you are reading this, I was most interested in your statement that they have had to revise the models repeatedly because they have been thinking that the warming would be worse than it has been. That's encouraging for the part of me that wants to keep ignoring this issue! Also, the notion that the validity of the Mt. Pinatubo "test" is not so great because all it shows is that they can predict the past, which means they have set up the biases based on past events, but not that they can predict the future. But what about the predictions of Arctic warming that seem to be coming true with a vengeance?

On things we can be doing now to not feel so powerless -- switch to clean power if your utility permits it, ask why not if not; sign on to the NRDC's virtual march on their web site; sign Environmental Defense's virtual petition on their web site; (if you're in the US and have voting representation in Congress, which living in DC I lack) push your elected representative to support the McCain/Lieberman climate protection act and the companion house bill; and pressure your locality (again in the US) to join the mayor of Seattle and others to voluntarily adhere to Kyoto in order to reduce emissions and get the message across to people up the political food chain that many of us at the grassroots level care about global warming and want it acted upon now. I'm sure there's tons more but that's what my research so far has turned up. Hope this is helpful or at least interesting! Thanks.

I'm really appreciating your posts, Monica, hope my generally dolorous tone was not taken to be directed at you -- it wasn't directed at anyone, just kind of a general "this is so depressing!" kind of thing.

I like your list of "what to do's."

That was not my position, and if I came across that way, I miscommunicated. My position is that

1) Global warming is happening, and human CO2 emissions have caused the largest part of it.

2) Given the basic physics underlying global warming, it is safe to predict that more of it will happen as humans emit more greenhouse gasses.

3) The conclusion that global warming will become a life-and-death issue on a global scale unless we stop it, is coming either from journalists or natural scientists, who are not experts on the issue. Agricultural economists, and economists in general, who are experts on that particular issue, predict serious but non-life-nor-death consequences, and suggest remedies that are much, much milder than Kyoto. I would have to look up if they prefer business as usual to Kyoto, but I'm fairly confident that they do. For reference, consult the work of Yale's William Nordhaus.

4) Nevertheless there is a constant increase in the alarm level as scientist talk about issues that are further and further from their specialty, and as they write for audiences of politicians and the general public, as opposed to audiences of fellow scientists. You can verify this assertion by going to the IPCC web page and comparing their full reports to their "technical summaries" and their "summaries for policy makers".

Based on these observations and others, I have become convinced that there is some merit to the moderate denominations of the religion of global warming concern -- but the more radical dominations, which are getting all the press including the New Yorker's, are nothing but a doomday cult. I have neither respect nor patience for them at all.

(Travelling at the moment, so not much time right now. More later.)

Thanks for your comments! Most intriguing. And thanks for your patience with my ranting.

You're welcome, and I've seen much worse "ranting" than yours. Nice to see you here!

bm

But none of this is a fact. If you look at the IPCC's "hockey stick graph", you will find that it shows a warming of 0.6°C since 1850, preceded by a line that looks constant but is surrounded by a large margin of error. That margin is about as large as the warming that has taken place since 1850, and it means that every trajectory within that margin is possible. We just don't know how constant yearly temperatures before 1850 really were. The IPCC's graphs honestly reflect that. But because nobody ever pays attention to error bars these days (self-righteous experimental physicist rant repressed), an honest and cautious statement about things we don't know has now become a confident manifesto about a Golden Age of constancy, and about how we have destroyed this Golden Age. The "hockey stick graph" and its interpretation nicely illustrates the dynamics of reporting on global warming.


I would have said that it nicely continues the series of environmental doomesday stories that have been coming between Thomas Malthus and the Club of Rome. What makes you think this time it's different?


That was indeed a correct prediction, but let me put this in perspective. Suppose you had a list of all regions of the world. You go down that list and flip a coin: heads you predict cooling, tails you predict warming. By sheer chance you will be right about half the time -- even if your coin doesn't know anything about climatology, as it may well not. The moral of the story is that to give me confidence in a climate model, you have to show me that its predictions are correct more often than those of a coin toss, or some similar placebo prediction. It isn't enough to point out that it makes any correct predictions at all.

That said, I would expect predictions like Arctic warming to be true more often than a coin toss. It is well established that the global warming trend is increasing temperatures more at night than during daytime, and more in cold regions than in warm ones. There was a straightforward physical explanation for this (which I have forgotten), and even Patrick Michaels confirms this point. (Patrick Michaels is a climatologist and Kyoto-opponent who publishes his popular writings at the Cato Institute. If he concedes a point to the prevent-global-warming lobby, it is very likely that the point is true.)

Thomas - the planet has been warming since the last ice age; that's not in dispute. Satellite pictures show Antarctica and Siberia to be locally cooling, btw, not warming, but as you know this is an extremely complex system and the warming has been by no means uniform either as to location or as to time sequencing.

For those who don't know this: CO2 is a completely harmless gas at current and projected concentrations and is at an historic low in our current composition of the atmosphere; more is needed if the rain forests are to be saved