Success Breeds Failure

Robert Samuelson finds a parallel between the BP disaster and the financial crisis: Our very success over a long period of time led to carelessness and complacency, which led to disaster. Every silver lining has its cloud!

One of the problems with human beings having the power to change the earth is that we really aren't very good, by and large, at calculating probabilities and acting appropriately. There seem to be built-in biases toward optimism or pessimism which have very little to do with any objective measure of risk. This is, in large part, why the mass of investors buy at the top of the market and sell at the bottom. They aren't ready to change their behavior until there has been a long trend in one direction, which is actually an indication that the forces driving the trend are nearing exhaustion.

Another problem lies in the phrase "a long period of time." Humans don't do well at evaluating processes with time dimensions outside the human lifetime. One of the underlying drivers in the global warming debate is our inability to deal with time. On the one hand, I think we have too little data, over too short a time period, to be as certain as some people are of the consequences for the climate. Climate operates in cycles of hundreds of thousands of years. On the other hand, some people give far too much weight to a record cold day in their town as indicating that global warming isn't happening. There is a lot of randomness in the weather system.

This is sometimes called, I believe, the local fallacy. That is, people give far too much weight to proximate events, occurrences close to them in time or space, and far too little weight to more distant phenomena.

Global Warming - Again

There is a discussion thread at the Two Masters blog that those interested in global warming might find of interest.

There is, to state it briefly, a big space between the position that the magnitude and the effects of anthropogenic global warming are still uncertain, and the position that no real evidence exists for the phenomenon. My feeling is that many of the people who claim that there was a scandal at a lab in England, and that the evidence for global warming is faked, oppose the idea of anthropogenic global warming for a number of personal, political, and business reasons. Their desire to have the evidence go away doesn't mean that the phenomenon is not real.

If I owned a coal mine or a coal-fired power plant, I, too, might be reluctant to believe that my actions are leading to a disaster. But, if I owned a coal mine, I'd also be used to having my actions lead to disasters, and I'd be used to lying about it.

Time will tell. Do you have your liferaft?

Is Anti-Carbon also Anti-Human?

Anne Applebaum has gone all the way to Copenhagen to write an article about the downside of obsessing about climate change.

Robinson on Palin on Climate Change

Did you know that Sarah Palin used to believe in climate change? Yes, and that she thought that government action was needed to deal with it.

This article by Eugene Robinson provides a nice look at Palin then, vs. Palin now.

Well, as somebody once said, where you stand depends on where you sit.

The Pursuit of Shared Interests

The accompanying article by Scott Wilson of the Washington Post is a very good analysis of the principles underlying President Barack Obama's approach to foreign policy. Wilson provides a number of examples of cases in which President Obama has made the pursuit of shared interests the basis of his efforts to persuade other nations to join with us in various endeavors. The idea that international relations should utilize shared interests to build cooperative relationships is hardly a new idea, but it has been a productive source of policy initiatives in the past.

There are a few problems with the approach, however, and I would like to mention those that come to mind.

Problem one is that every nation has a particular set of interests. While some of those interests may coincide with ours, others may conflict. That means that one needs to make one's pitch to act in accordance with the shared interest in a manner which makes the interests we don't share less important. For example, China is a big importer of oil. The United States is a big importer of oil. Therefore, we both have important interests in the free flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf area and into the areas where it is to be consumed. So the Chinese might be expected to cooperate with us in clearing pirates out of the Malacca Straits.

We also see our interest in the free flow of oil as demanding that we oppose instability in the Middle east. We should be in favor of moderate democratic reform, while opposing Islamic extremists, violent revolutions, or the seizure of power by parties which might cut off the flow of oil. (See Kenneth Pollack's excellent book A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East for lengthy discussions of all the points raised in the last two sentences.) China, on the other hand, has based its oil policy on signing long-term contracts with countries will to sell cheap because no one else will do business with them. China has, for example, oil deals with Iran and Sudan, and has invested heavily in developing oil fields in Sudan. Therefore, the Chinese have not been cooperating in pressing the government of Sudan about Darfur or other human rights issues.

Problem two is that the interests of the leadership of some countries don't coincide with the interests of their people. Governments in the Middle East have consistently mismanaged their economies, partly out of fear of business becoming a competing power center in their societies. We can talk all day to Hosni Mubarak about the ways in which the long-term economic interests of Egypt depend upon a thorough-going reform of the educational system, and he'll block those reforms as too likely to produce a generation of young people ready to think for themselves and to defy authority.

Pollack suggests that, in some of these cases, we may have to provide incentives (subsidies, bribes) to induce the governments to do what is in their countries' interests. This should not be necessary, but we don't live in a perfect world.

Finally, there is the problem of cost. All nations, with a few exceptions, have an interest in at least slowing climate change. But this is a very expensive proposition, so they also have an interest in minimizing the cost to themselves. (Is this an example of the tragedy of the commons? I think it is.) So India may agree that carbon emissions need to be reduced, while also arguing that it is other countries who should bear the burden of those reductions.

Following shared interests to find agreement is a great idea, and it will produce results. But it will also encounter a lot of difficulties.

Geoengineering - An Answer or an Abyss?

In the March/April 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs there's an article by David G. Victor, M. Granger Morgan, Jay Apt, John Steinbruner, and Katherine Ricke called "The Geoengineering Option: A Last Resort Against Global Warming?" The article can be found linked to my title or here. It is a very interesting article, and the author's main concern is that we need some sort of international regime concerning geoengineering before some country goes off on its own and does something disastrous.

One of the problems is that geoengineering solutions to things like global warming are cheap enough, and technically accessible enough, that many countries would be able to apply them. For example, a number of countries would be able to launch a rocket into space to distribute sulfur powder, aluminum powder, or water, in order to increase the albedo of the earth. This would cause more solar energy to be reflected, which would counteract global warming. However, it wouldn't do anything about the acidification of the oceans due to increasing carbon concentrations in the atmosphere, and it might have side affects which would do great damage.

The authors acknowledge that much of the risk of the geoengineering approach is that a single country could undertake such an initiative, without even consulting its neighboring, which all of the measures required to limit and diminish carbon emissions require cooperation among many countries. About the ninth time China and the United States refuse to take effective action to reduce carbon emissions, the Netherlands - which is at real risk from rising sea levels - might be tempted to hire an Ariane from the ESA to put up some protective shield.

In discussing this concept with some of my friends, I find that most of them are really concerned about the unknown unknowns. That someone would undertake a measure which could have really unintended, and unanticipated consequences. After that, there's the concern that one man's meat is another man's poison - that is, a sudden increase in albedo, with consequent cooling, might slow polar ice melting, but it might also cause draughts in the Sahel or flooding in the Rockies.

There are, of course, other large-scale geoengineering projects, besides those aimed directly at global warming. Exploitation of tidal flows, or harnessing the heat of volcanoes might be examples.

However, even if these ambitious measures don't have evil consequences, it would be very easy for the public to perceive them as the causes of any destructive events which followed their implementation. You and I might know that post hoc ergo propter hoc is fallacious reasoning, but to most people it's just common sense. That is, after all, what most common sense is: fallacious reasoning. So I wouldn't want to be in the shoes of the guys who drill a thermal tap into the side of Mt. Rainier a week or so before an eruption wipes out Tacoma.

Treason!

It's bad enough when right-wing-nuts like Anne Coulter casually accuse a majority of the country of treason. Now Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate in economics, and a man who ought to know better, has accused the Congressmen who voted against the Democrats' climate-change bill of treason to the planet.

A copy was posted at this blog.

There is a response from the right, and this one involves some attempt at humor, or at least irony.

Treason is a strong word, and such accusations should be reserved for solemn occasions. Mr. Krugman has overdone it this time, and his critics are right to take him to task for it. Unfortunately, he has given them one more excuse to ignore the reality of climate change and its consequences.

Global Warming: A "Complete Hoax"

I was listening to the radio the other day. I was in my car, driving home from the office, and I had tuned into Rush Limbaugh. I listen more commonly to either my local classical music station, or the NPR affiliate station based at Colorado College, but I had decided to try AM radio. (I will even admit that I sometimes find Rush Limbaugh entertaining. He's almost always wrong on the substance, but he's pretty acute on some of the political personalities around.)

On this particular program, a woman called in from Oklahoma, as I recall, and they talked about this and that. But the main thing I recall, and about which I wanted to comment, was that Rush asked this woman what she thought of global warming. He said it pretty much that way: "What do you think about global warming?"

"I think it's a complete hoax," she replied.

I found that interesting because, while I can see a lot of ways for people to differ in their opinions about climate change, to characterize global warming as a complete hoax strikes me as unjustifiable. I should probably note that I have heard Rush Limbaugh, himself, attack Al Gore over the use the former Vice President has made of the issue, perceived exaggerations, and so on, but I don't think I've ever heard that Limbaugh has asserted that global warming is a complete hoax.

The first problem I have with this characterization is that, as I understand the terms involved, a hoax is a deliberate attempt to mislead and deceive. There can be honest mistakes; there can be honest differences of opinion, but there cannot be honest hoaxes. A hoaxer knows that he is making untrue statements and misrepresentations of facts, usually in order to induce some particular response from his audience. The "missile gap," so prominent in the 1960 campaign, comes close to having been a hoax. Hoaxes such as the Piltdown Man have involved not only lying about the evidence, but creating or faking evidence.

In general, although there could be exceptions in terms of people trying to use misstatements about global warming for personal or political gain, I don't detect a lot of falsifying of evidence in the climate change area. As I stated in a post over at the Two Masters blog, there are a lot a ways to interpret such evidence as there is, that evidence is pretty scanty compared to the timeline on which climate changes unfold, and a lot of the computer models may be open to methodological questions, but the same is true of stock market predictions (remember Dow 36,000?), without all such predictions constituting frauds or hoaxes.

Second, while it is true that, as I said above, the evidence can be interpreted differently through the use of different models and assumptions, it is really hard to contend that there is no evidence of global warming. National Geographic magazine ran a long piece - actually, a couple of pieces, in the June 2007 issue on the subject. One of the pieces was called "The Big Thaw." A lot of other publications, popular and peer-reviewed, have documented shrinking glaciers, warmer average temperatures, thinner polar ice, and so on and so forth. I, myself, have observed some species of birds appearing around here some weeks earlier than was the norm years ago.

A lot of this evidence is anecdotal. A lot of it is spotty. In the nature of the thing, we don't have a very complete dataset for the past 18,000 years, let alone the entire Cenozoic period. Accurate thermometers and barometers are quite recent inventions. But to deny that such evidence exists is to deny brute facts.

So, setting aside the idea that some group of liberal scientists are faking evidence in order to force the government to nationalize the oil companies, or in order to obtain huge grants to study wind-generated electricity, or whatever you might think their motive could be, and setting aside the idea that the various reports are all faked or grossly mistaken, there seems to be little doubt that something by way of global warming is occurring.

What I see as the real issues here are these:

I. How long will this warming trend continue?

II. How much will conditions (e.g., sea levels) change before the trend stops or reverses itself?

III. What could we do to slow or reverse this trend sooner, or with fewer effects?

IV. What could we do to avoid or palliate the effects of the warming?

As John Miller points out in QBQ! (The Question Behind the Question), asking "who" or "why" questions is not terribly helpful. To ask who caused global warming is to put on the defensive people and institutions whose help may be vital if we are to limit the effects of climate change. To ask why U.S. consumers use so much energy is to forego public support for efforts to find alternatives to our present consumption patterns. Rather, we should be asking what we can do to alleviate the problems, and how can we contribute to minimizing the social and economic consequences of whatever climate change is going to occur.

Sure, there are interesting scientific questions about how much of this warming trend is due to human agency, but that isn't a useful question from the political point of view. To state that global warming is a "moral" and not a "political" problem, as Al Gore has done, is to ignore the fact that all (that would be ALL) of the potentially useful approaches to the problem require action by the government. Maybe it isn't a political problem, per se, but its solution raises political questions all over the place.

Which brings me back to where I started. Why would someone have the (mistaken) idea that global warming is a "complete hoax?" Because she has been gone from hearing people who want to use global warming as a reason for making unwelcome (to her) social and economic changes, to concluding that they are concocting the idea of global warming in order to promote such changes. To put it the other way around, if she can believe that global warming is a hoax, then she doesn't have to concur in any of the policies - many of which will cost her money - that may be proposed to deal with the problem.