Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Stossel vs. Gore: Global Warming on "20/20” This Coming Friday

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So my own personal checklist of who stands where on global warming now goes something like this:

•My current employers, the American Council on Science and Health, have no official position, partly because it’s out of our personal-health bailiwick but also because our hundreds of scientist advisors are probably divided on the issue, and we tend not to weigh in on things unless it’s very clear that the overwhelming consensus of scientists agrees on something (not to be confused with the overwhelming consensus of scientists-one-likes, scientists-who-are-pithy-enough-to-get-quoted-a-lot, or scientists-vaguely-referenced-by-the-U.N., whatever their respective positions).

•My previous employer, John Stossel, is understandably skeptical of the whole climate change crusade — given how often environmental alarmists have been wrong about other things and how quickly they tend to seize upon increased government regulation as the answer to every problem real or imagined — and he’ll probably touch on that in his segment on global warming on ABC’s 20/20 this Friday (October 19), 8pm Eastern (9 Central and Mountain, 8 Pacific, I think — check local listings).

•My friend for two and a half decades, Chuck Blake, who I’m confident is more resistant to the politicization and moralizing of scientific thinking than anyone else I’ve ever known well — it wouldn’t be too terribly unfair to characterize his philosophy as: if you can’t reliably quantify it, it’s nonsense (or at least should be regarded as little more than entertainment and talk) — and who has long chastised me for even having political and moral positions at all, since they cannot be empirically verified in the laboratory-worthy sense, is a statistics expert, and he insists that global warming mania is absolutely insane, tiny trends that don’t amount to any clear implications, being talked up as sure signs of doom.

•I’m sticking with Chuck, even as some of my libertarian (or near-libertarian) acquaintances soften on the issue and, as a sort of fallback, turn their attention to the (perfectly reasonable) topic of finding cheaper remediation solutions than the ones the Al Gores of the world prefer, since the latter, if taken to their logical conclusions, would not entail mere solar panel deployment or weather-stripping but something more akin to destroying 25% of our current levels of production and rolling back standards of living to those of the mid-twentieth century.

Minuscule variations in climate conditions — easily swamped by the margins of error in the predictions or, in more concrete terms, by a typical higher-than-normal tide — are routinely used to make drastic long-term predictions, despite few of the climatologists’ old predictions ever coming true. We are expected to take action now, in very expensive ways, with limited and contradictory data, about the most complex and poorly-understood systems science has ever attempted to study, in order to deal with problems that may or may not seem important or hard to deal with a hundred years from now when sea levels may or may not have risen, say, an inch — if we’re still using oil a century from now (if that in fact is correlated to the problem [if there is one]) — and by which time we will surely have a better grip on both the science and the means of remediation unless something terribly, terribly strange happens to civilization in the interim (as some eco-apocalyptics would very much like you to believe it might).

ACSH may not have a position on the issue, but working at that organization certainly provides a daily education in how the human mind lights more easily upon scare-scenarios and apocalypse narratives than on more rational wait-for-better-data messages. And it has taught me how routinely the tragic telephone-game occurs in which weak science data, turned into soundbites by media, also turns into deafening moral pronouncements from activists and politicians. Most troubling, since we live in a flurry of complex data, the job has taught me how cherry-picking of data ceases to seem like cherry-picking if the pickers — whether for moral reasons or just for the sake of efficiency — think they already know what’s going on and can fit each new data point into a comfy little story or catechism they already know.

It happens not only with almost every health scare story in the news but, frankly, with almost every story in the news, as my six years at ABC (before my six years so far at ACSH) taught me.

The last thing a busy journalist wants to hear is that he’s got the whole story wrong. The last thing readers want to hear is that the real story is going to be complex, full of uncertainty, possessed of far more than two sides, and, yes, boring (the universe never promised you a rose garden that could “provide miracle cures!” nor one that will “kill someone you love!”). The last thing politicians want to hear is that increasing their power over the private sector may not be warranted. And the last thing committee heads, whether at the U.N. or at Nobel HQ, want to hear is that their imprimatur on a one-paragraph version of an idea does not sweep under the rug the countless little piecemeal uncertainties that went into producing the apparent party line (a Wall Street Journal op-ed today by a climate scientist notes just one of countless examples of how every climatic change now becomes the latest poster child for an implied single, monolithic “global warming” phenomenon: we aren’t sure what’s melting the snow on Mt. Kilimanjaro, but it appears to have something to do with direct sunlight, not atmospheric warming, since the air remains well below freezing atop Kilimanjaro).

Whenever you hear someone speak of “the consensus” that global warming is occurring, as if all scientists agree not only on the IPCC report basics but on their most dire-possible spin, it is as ridiculous and offensive — given the complexity of the science and the narrowness of most individual scientists’ specialized, tentative niche claims — as saying that all the contributors to (and all the footnoted individuals in) a multi-volume encyclopedia on zoology agree with the editors’ “consensus statement” about what must be done about the local feral cat problem.

Getting one thing right — which is rare enough in the fledgling science of climatology — doesn’t magically mean the alarmists have gotten every other prediction right (the climate is far more complex than people realize — ice sheets can be melting in one region while thickening in another, just for starters, and we’re not even always in agreement about how best to measure it). Similarly, corruption at the Department of Housing and Urban Development is not, by itself, sufficient evidence that government cannot work and must be abolished — much as I might wish (much as we all might wish) argument were that easy.

There’s never really a “last word” in science, but Friday’s Stossel piece should at least start some interesting conversations.

14 comments:

Jacob T. Levy said...

“We are expected to take action now, in very expensive ways, with limited and contradictory data, about the most complex and poorly-understood systems science has ever attempted to study, in order to deal with problems that may or may not seem important or hard to deal with a hundred years from now when sea levels may or may not have risen, say, an inch — if we’re still using oil a century from now (if that in fact is correlated to the problem [if there is one]) — and by which time we will surely have a better grip on both the science and the means of remediation”

Speaking as one of your libertarian friends who’s gone squishy– I just don’t see how you can have the kind of confidence you express here. How “surely?” Why need it be the case that a harm will be easier to remediate in the future after 100 years of compounding or snowballing effects then it would be to prevent now?

With a compounding problem, some of the usual rationale for punting problems down the field goes away. The money we don’t spend now compounds on one side of the equation, but the magnitude of the problem is busily compounding on the other side. If the expected value (including uncertainty) of doing nothing forever is large and negative, and the absolute cost of prevention is much less than the [expected value of the] absolute cost of [the as-yet-unknown forms of] remediation, then the pure the-future-will-be-richer argument doesn’t seem to me to hold much weight in this case.

Todd Seavey said...

You’re letting paranoia-inducing pure hypotheticals carry the argument — there is absolutely no evidence that we face the risk of a runaway “compounding” problem at all likely to outstrip technological advance, while we most certainly face a present paucity of solid data, a situation that will in all likelihood be alleviated by further study. None of the probable disaster scenarios entail anything “irrevocable” happening until decades out, if at all, precisely the time we need to learn what’s actually going on.

You veer dangerously close to the sort of “precautionary principle” thinking that leads panicky people to endorse virtually any regulatory action in the science realm: “There’s no evidence that we are facing an imminent upsurge in cancer rates from the mix of chemicals to which we are exposed…but if we _are_…and now _happens_ to be the pivotal time in which action is required…” Fear _always_ wins by that logic.

And there is no evidence — as a near-libertarian acquaintance of mine has worried — that we just happen to be at a massive “tipping point” that will fling us from (quite pleasant) Earth-like conditions to Venus-like conditions, unless you count the fear that that imagined scenario creates as evidence unto itself.

The science alone does not dictate a preference to ACT NOW! but the activist cant on every topic — not to mention the importance of ordering aluminum siding right away — always, always does. Don’t fall for it.

Jacob T. Levy said...

Hm. As a non-scientist but someone who does believe that research will out, I’m under the impression that we’re in a better position than “no evidence.” “No warming” may remain in the confidence interval, but it’s not in the middle of it– the likelihood seems to me to skew positive.

Matters are quite otherwise with a cell-phone scare, where a) the evidence typically really does center around the null hypothesis, and b) there’s no argument for compounding or snowballing effects. (If it turns out we’re wrong and cell phones are bad for us, we can stop whenever we figure that out– and it’ll be a shame for the people who died before the research was in, but that’ll be the end of it.)

Brain said...

The state of the American intelligentsia is in pretty bad shape when two political philosophers presume to have a serious rhetorical argument about the weather.

Now that I think of it, there’s probably a good screwball comedy in that premise! Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure meets Dumb and Dumber meets Real Genius. I look forward to the scene where John Stossel gets it on with a donkey, while moaning “It’s a free market, baby!” Al Gore breaks in on them, makes a video, and broadcasts it, all the while shaking his head saying, “That’s just not right.”

Now that, folks, is funny.

Funny said...

“we tend not to weigh in on things unless it’s very clear that the overwhelming consensus of scientists agrees on something”

…and that the “something” satisfies the right.

How many scientists would constitute an “overwhelming” number, and how close are we right now? Political preferences aside, do most scientists believe there is evidence of global warming, or don’t they?

By the way, walk outside today. Just saying.

Todd Seavey said...

The crack at ACSH is nothing better than libel — unless it’s born of sheer ignorance about the organization — but this isn’t the site for dealing with it, so I’ll move on.

One day does not a data set make, and — as with the zoology encyclopedia analogy — the only way political bodies like the IPCC manage to say with some grain of truth that many, many scientists “agree” there is global warming is by watering down what it supposedly is those scientists agree on to the point where it’s near-meaningless to say everyone agrees. _I, too, think we’re probably in a period of slight warming_, but that does not make me part of an imaginary consensus of people who believe said warming constitutes a crisis, must be tightly-correlated with sea levels and human industrial activity, etc., etc., down the whole Gore checklist, which is what is invariably implied when people — usually ones who have no idea what the underlying diversity of narrowly-focused individual studies on countless different climatological topics looks like — wave their arms and shout about the “consensus.”

Saying the overwhelming majority of scientists “agree on global warming” is, I promise you, about as absurd and meaningless an oversimplification as saying “half of Americans endorse the Edwards health plan” simply because half of Americans lean left or say they worry about medical issues.

Red Stapler said...

A reason-based take on Global Warming.

Note: I am as yet undecided. Four years in Rochester showed me the coldest winters I’ve ever experienced.

That being said, weather is just screwy, who the hell knows what’s going on?

Chuck said...

Well said on all counts.

I’d further point out the ambiguity that warming is even bad. Activists focus on very low probability disaster scenarios. If one takes such focus to heart, there are plenty of long-term cooling scares like comet/asteroids, a spike in volcanism, or a spate of nuclear terrorism…all conceivable at the

Chuck said...

…. sub-1% level.

In higher probability, more modest climate shift scenarios, it isn’t obvious that a longer growing season would be undesirable, anyway, you know, for the 30 billion irresponsibly reproduced homo sapiens mouths to feed. Yes, one can presume better food production technology, but if one allows similar similar presumptions about energy/reflection/CO2 management technology/chemistry…

A likely consequence of increased warmth is increased biomass. It is odd that this has come to mean “bad”? Short-term biodiversity dips might occur, but what is your metric of biospheric happiness, anyway, and why? Why should it be “exactly as if Man were never around!”. The earth is still and will remain quite cool in Geologic terms.

Future generations of both humans and fruit flies might thank their lucky stars for elevated CO2 due to our industrial activities, if those turn out to have been instrumental.



As for Jacob’s compounding and timeliness, the alleged “sale on weather insurance” does not end tomorrow. Buying such insurance by reducing emissions right now doesn’t amount to a net saving of money — if, as above, we even want non-negative insurance”. Lately, “tipping point” terminology has been getting used to feed “compounding fear”, when in reality CO2 is almost “reverse tipping” — there is gradual band saturation around a total 2X pre-industrial CO2 levels and we’re near 1.4X now. The heat trapping effect goes up *less* with time under constant emissions/linear level rises, not more with each added unit. Even increasing emissions rates/quadratic rises are suppressed in their actual temperature effects. So, at least in our current estimation, the core effects probably compound much less quickly than human money.

This is typically backed up by simple estimations. For example, you could see

http://www.reason.com/news/show/116401.html

but even much more detailed combination climate-economic models yield similar qualitative conclusions.

So, shocker…after a major 10..15 year fear campaign, one can get people to sign off on spending 10..100X more than they should on insurance that they, uh, might not even actually need. Meanwhile, elsewhere in our story, we are casting the purchase of said insurance in terms of “carbon credit” transfers of wealth from industrialized to poor countries in quasi-world welfare system with who knows who is “minting the money” of the credits by whatever standards and with who knows what regulatory perversions and inversions.

Funny said...

Chris Knight is not dead.

Excellent.

Brain said...

Well it’s a certainty that moneyed interests have piled on to the environmental band wagon as never before in the last few months. I get a kick when Corporations, being notoriously amoral entities, use saving trees as a great excuse to cut costs and get people to drop paper billing.

Some brilliant cad is probably, right now, buying a house in the Hamptons with the money he made selling “carbon offsets”.

Todd Seavey said...

Chris Knight? The country singer? The _Brady Bunch_ star? The anthropologist who wrote about strategic withholding of sex? Wha?

Sean Hastings said...

I am doing my part to combat global warming.

I wear my tinfoil hat whenever I go outdoors because it helps to increase the albedo of the planet. Unless everyone joins me NOW in this attempt to reflect more of that dangerous sunshine back into space, it will soon be too late!!!

It may also be necessary to apply silver paint to all the more heat absorbing portions of the planet. There are some incredibly large areas of the planet that are wastefully consuming all but the green portions of the visible light spectrum. Something must be done about this immediately!!!

Todd Seavey said...

Chuck informs me that the IPCC is now encouraging every scientist who contributed in any way to their massive, global report to consider himself a Nobelist. It’s as if, in some sense, everyone is a Nobelist now. But in another, more accurate sense, Al Gore is a Nobelist.

What pandering, biasing, and still self-congratulatory nonsense.

This year’s Seavey Award hereby goes to everyone who is not affiliated with the IPCC, and you can tout that distinction with pride.