Random Variable

Six weeks later than promised, but hey.

Adam Kotsko has a great response to Hitchens’ latest on religion.

Likewise, I shall now describe the Hippie Two Step:

1. Someone points out that the particular conception of nature of another culture held by the doctrinaire hippie is not really held by anyone as stated.
2. Go on to blame the other culture for violating animal rights and the environment in general, so that their own beliefs are obviously superior and that one can’t be held accountable for detailed knowledge of the other culture.

Green Party of England & Wales Principal Speaker Derek Wall debated with Chris Horner of the ever-evil/Ebell CEI last night on Aljazeera’s Frost Over the World.

Sir Frost is no Paxman, but Derek does a good job of exposing Chris for what he is. There’s not a family-friendly word to describe Chris Horner’s lies, but hey-ho, watch the video for yourself:

It reminds me of Bill Hick’s comments on what would an audience think if he started doing advertising (ignore the video).

The New Scientist recently published an article based on the work of one David Wasdell of the Meridian Programme, who claims that the IPCC AR4 SPM has ignored the effects of water vapour – though not in the same way Lindzen would normally do. No, this is a leftist attack saying the IPCC doesn’t go far enough and is controlled by business interests.

I don’t know New Scientists’ vetting processes, but I’m not sure that I’d let the work of a psychotherapist and founder of the Urban Church inform an article on climate physics.

His articles have the distinct smell of psuedoscience (Beyerstein, 1995), and his work on water vapour feedback is just outright wrong.

The methodology is also similar to that described by Jodi Dean in her analysis of the “9/11 Truth” movement as a psychotic discourse. That this new mode of attack of the IPCC is gaining ground, has worrying implications for leftist politics, to say the least.

Update:

Gavin Schmidt (RealClimate/NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies) had this to say via email on the New Scientist article:

There is work that needs to be done on the general point, but this specific critique [by Wasdell] is worthless. There is nothing there [in the IPCC AR4 Summary for Policy Makers] that isn’t justified on the grounds of clarity.

A number of interesting posts this week.

Harry Brighouse reports on a new book discussing Basic Income Grants, a central tenet of Green policy. The book discusses BIGs against Stakeholder Grants, not entirely dissimilar to Labour’s baby bond:

I’ve been familiar with both proposals for a long time, and find both very appealing, I haven’t got a stake in the debate really. But I was surprised how much new and interesting stuff was in the book, so I thoroughly recommend it whether you are a newcomer to the debate or an old hand.

Tyler comments on carbon offsets:

…these carbon offsets shift back the demand curve for dirty power but they also shift out the supply curve for power as a whole. (The persnickety might argue the demand curve doesn’t even shift back, but if you have to buy all those offsets you will think twice about your next plane trip.) Competition from wind power forces down the price of the monopolistic dirty power company (electricity?), which means that other people buy more of it. The quantity of dirty power consumed might well go up rather than down.

Colin Farrelly comments on Dworkin’s recent Oxford lecture, in which he weighs in on the role religion should have in politics, a major gripe of mine with the “secular left”:

Dworkin then noted that the most powerful argument for establishing religion are not paternalistic. Rather it is the claim that the majority are entitled to a particular culture. So the important question is- Who gets to shape the culture with which we live? How do we decide to answer this question?
The 2 models give different answers. The culture could be shaped organically… millions of independent decisions about what to buy, what to make, who to talk to, etc. can shape the culture. Or the culture could be shaped through collective political/coercive decisions. Dworkin argued that it has OK to collectively shape the moral culture, but if we hope to take his second principle seriously- the principle of special responsibility- the culture must be shaped organically. And this then leads him to endorse model (2)- the tolerant secular state.

Larval Subjects discusses pedagogy from a Deleuzian standpoint:

A pedagogy of problems, a new dialectics, thus becomes the site of a politics– A site where false problems would be revealed and carefully criticized, and where the focus would consist in the articulation of genuine problems where new individuations might take place…

John Quiggin reports on the McKibbin-Wilcoxen plan for climate change:

It was a good presentation and Warwick made an effective analogy between the McKibbin-Wilcoxen plan for climate change which uses fixed prices in the short run and fixed quantities in the long run, and the bond market, where central banks set short-term interest rates but allow long-term rates to be set by the market.

One thing I hadn’t realised, though, is that the plan doesn’t allow for international trade in emissions permits, even in the long run. McKibbin sees this as an advantage, since there’s less of a reduction in sovereignty, but I see it as a big problem for two reasons. First, there’s an obvious efficiency loss in not allowing countries with low-cost offsets to trade with high-cost countries. Second, the biggest source of credits so far is China, the country that is going to need the most persuading to join an international agreement (contrary to Warwick, I’m confident the US will ratify Kyoto, perhaps extracting some concessions on timing and targets, as soon as Bush goes out, and that Australia will do so then, if not earlier). The possibility of gaining credits, combined with the threat of border taxes on exports from non-ratifying countries will be needed to overcome the obvious free-rider problems.

A new category of my blog entitled “Totalitarianism and Ecology”

Anthony Paul Smith explains:

According to Neocleous “the concept ‘nature’ is, of course, deeply problematical” and “an empty vessel to be filled with whatever meaning is politically expedient”. The context for this is not nature “within fascism” but necessarily in itself. That is to say, Neocleous doesn’t see nature as a concept that can be negotiated, but that holds within it an already reactionary character. It seems the main mistake that fascism makes in regard to nature is to think of it as a subject in itself. For Neocleous nature is culturally constructed and thus a kind of artifice attached to human subjectivity. This goes so far as to cause Neocleous to take a negative view towards political ecology and one can almost say he sees being anti-ecological as being on par with an anti-fascist position. He claims that green groups and philosophies, like Deep Ecology (with which I too have issues, though in a different register), make the same mistake concerning nature (that it is a subject in itself) and even aside from that totalitarian political structures would be necessary to carry out the environmental changes necessary.

So first off, here’s this from a mailing list associated with one radical green group:

Hi All,
Reducing Greenhouse Gases
…
Step Three, reduce the World’s population, Nature is already doing this with HIV/AIDS and may be about to do more anyway

Need I say anymore?

I’ve uploaded a segment from BBC Newsnight broadcasted on September 20th 2006 on climate change denialism. George Monbiot investigates the links between organisations currently spreading misinformation about climate change and those who spread misinformation about tobacco in the nineties.

Paxman then interviews Myron Ebell from the Competitive Enterprise Institute and John Mitchell, the Chief Scientist at the UK Meteorological Office and a member of the UN IPCC Working Group 1. I don’t Ebell quite understands that British media, particularly the BBC isn’t as susceptible to libertarian-inspired pseudoscience as US media clearly is. Myron’s argument soon falls apart after Paxman asks him the simple question “Are you a scientist?”

Paxman: Mr Ebell, you are not a scientist. It is clear that many people on your side of the fence are misrepresenting the arguments. You yourself described the government’s chief scientific advisor in this country of “knowing nothing about climate science”. He is at least a scientist. Now, do you see the problem that respectable scientists have with the sort of points made by organizations such as yours?

Partial transcipt courtesy of The Myron Ebell Climate.

Over the last few months, I have accidentally engaged in an ethnographic study of grassroots ecological direct action movements.

The result of my encounter with such a movement has resulted in a torrent of ideas which I will now try to write up over the next few months. My influences range from my obvious overused ones (i.e. Ulrich Beck) to some new characters, in particularly, Nathan Sayre over at Berkeley UofC.

Before I go any further, I have to say I encountered a wonderful bunch of people who I all wish to meet again when I move back to London.

I identified a number of problems within these movements, and I’ll go through each of them, one by one, in individual posts.

Today, I want to look at group polarisation, which seems to be a major issue.

What do we mean by group polarisation? It’s a well studied phenomenon by which members of group adopt a more extreme position through deliberation than they would otherwise hold individually.

Talking to individual members did reveal a disparity between the group’s aims and individuals themselves who on the whole appeared less extreme.

So what exactly did the group in question believe? Well, nothing short of an anarchic revolution to solve the climate crisis. In later articles I may discuss my opinion that this would be ecologically disastrous.

However, it is not the group’s aim to foster polarisation – quite the opposite, the structure of meetings is designed to prevent such phenomenon. Most groups adopt a “non-hierarchical” direct action approach – there are no leaders and everyone is equal. But this denies the weighting of individual nodes within the social network of the activist groups that actually occurs. To have a network where all nodes have an equal weighting would probably not function at all.

The main problem is not even that the group goes for the most risky position, or decides upon the most dangerous action – but the inability to incorporate differing views into their network.

I made it very clear from the outset that I was no anarchist, but solely concerned with the potentially ravaging effects of climate change. I stated that my reason for becoming involved in direct action was to increase diversity in the overall push for sustainability with the eventual result of political reform. This merely provided an excuse to more easily dismiss my other views which did not stem from my political leanings towards liberal cosmopolitanism – namely that of ensuring scientific accuracy and remaining self-critical to ensure that the groups eventual aims would not be counter productive in affecting the global climate.

There seems to be no easy way to fix the problem of polarisation.

In my final post, I will try to present some solutions to the problems.