Random Variable

From a recent post:

The physicist told me not to worry at all–and not to worry about trying to be environmentally cautious. It’s already too late. Over a decade ago he worked with a Nobel prize winner who at that point said the situation was hopeless–and his estimates were more conservative than the optimistic ones today.

I don’t have any sources, so you’ll just have to take my blind assertion for it - but the “it’s too late” meme is one I’ve seen quite a lot in the run up to the publication of the IPCC AR4 Synthesis report. This is odd, because the synthesis report says nothing new - it is a summary of the 3000-odd pages that make up the three working group reports of “Climate Change 2007″. Also, claiming it’s too late already buys into the rhetoric of the denialists. Maybe we will see a change in strategy as the nobel-prize winning IPCC makes it harder and harder to deny basic physics.

…the only way to cope adequately with climate change is a collectivist, statist, approach that installs strict regulations on corporations, moves the US away from cars and oil, caps salaries and bonuses, and undertakes large scale planning.

I hope that means collectivist in only a Polanyiesque sense. That said, I have a strange feeling that we will enter a new age of capitalism (yet another realisation of its self-revolutionary potential) - one that has extremely low time discounts, i.e. “sustainable capitalism”.

Nevertheless, calling for caps on bonuses undermines the impact of ordinary consumers.

Now isn’t the time to give up.

I got myself into an annoying conversation with climate denialists on the overground train when a couple were pointing excitedly at Singer’s “Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years“. I found myself having to justify and defend the entire discipline of climate science against claims of lying to get research funding and secret edits made to IPCC AR2. Whenever I attempted to reason with physics they just argued “well, I don’t know physics, but I do know what this guy says…”

CO2 is transparent to visible light, opaque to infrared. How hard can that be?

They trotted out the usual nonsense about the medieval warm period and confused the global mean with local effects.

They argued about the use of the words “very likely“, so I had to explain how the UN assign probability in summary reports as well as confidence intervals. That fell on deaf ears.

They thought it was amusing that the UN produces executive summaries for policymakers, as if there’s something sinister going on there.

They didn’t like me arguing for doing something about climate change on libertarian grounds of an insurance.

Worst of all, they argued that the “consensus” wants to turn the clock back, and wants poor countries to suffer - completely ignoring the focus on supporting developing nations in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

They suggested that global warming would be great!

When I suggested multiple times that the poorest countries would be affected worst by climate change, they changed the subject each time until I pushed the issue - at which point I had to get off.

I had to defend an entire range of disciplines from crude attacks, but I didn’t once ask where Singer got his funding.

NB: RealClimate has more

My theory is that hybrids will be pretty much a fad thing. For the long term, look to bicycle technology for the state-of-the-art in carbon footprint reduction.

We all need relatively speedy transport these days. I believe we will see average bikes whose average speed for the average cyclist will be in excess of 40mph, and within the decade.

That were my thoughts the other day as I perused the racks outside work and noticed that all the cycles parked there were made of aluminium as opposed to my steel alloy rust bucket.

And here comes the news that mathematicians have finally worked out a model that explains ride stability at speed. That it’s 2007, and we only now know something that seems quite trivial should be some indicator of the growing market for cycles.

You leave this nonsense comment on my blog, and write this on yours:

Dr. Wall directed me to a YouTube video clip in which he debated Christopher Horner, author of ‘The Politically Incorrect Guild to Global Warming’ on Al Jazeera. Presumably the debate took place between Jihad beheading videos and Bin Laden tapes.

Since you don’t allow comments on your blog, here is a whole post devoted to you.

Presumably, you’re a racist. Definitely, you have never watched Al-Jazeera, the most cosmopolitan news channel currently broadcasting in the English language.

I was dissapointed to see Wasdell appear as an “expert” at the CACC meeting at LSE.

Monbiot also recently cites him as an accredited IPCC reviewer - when in fact the US government emailed the report to anyone who asked for it.

IPCC WG1 responded to the New Scientist editorial based on Wasdell’s accusations of political interference, which I also wrote about:

The article and editorial about David Wasdell’s review of the contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change contain several wrong statements and false claims (10 March, p 10 and p 5). As coordinating lead authors (CLAs) of this report we wish to correct these.

Wasdell appears to be ill-informed about the processes involved in drafting this report. According to established IPCC procedure this report went through several formal and fully documented expert and government review processes, where many thousands of comments were responded to. It assessed the peer-reviewed literature published prior to July 2006. At all stages, including at the final plenary in Paris, the authors had control over the text; all CLAs were present in Paris. Any draft versions of the chapters or the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) were just that, documents in which inconsistencies were rectified, gaps were closed, and complicated matters were explained more clearly and in more accessible terms.

The accusation that subtle changes watered down the report is plain wrong and indicates the ignorance of the details of the process leading up to the SPM draft and the proceedings during the Paris plenary. In particular, our co-chair Susan Solomon is robustly independent and has been determined to maintain the credibility of the science throughout the four-year process. A webcast by her to the US House of Representatives science committee illustrates this point. It can be seen at http://science.house.gov/publications/hearings_markups_details.aspx?NewsID=1264.

The entire SPM had wording which followed logically, or even verbatim, from the chapters and which was firmly rooted in the assessed scientific literature. The changes enumerated by Wasdell are largely minor corrections that eliminated items that did not stand up to scrutiny. A case in point is the removal of statements about acceleration of sea level rise. Based on available data, sea level has risen as rapidly during some periods in the past 50 years as it is rising today, so an assessment of “acceleration” would be premature.

The wide participation of the scientific community, the scientific accuracy and the absence of any policy prescription in this report are the characteristics that render this report so powerful. This is precisely why it serves a unique role in informing policy-makers, as well as others such as industry and the broad public.

Public understanding of the IPCC process is important. A legitimate criticism perhaps is the poor communication to the general public of IPCC procedures. For example, the drafting process was designed to identify incomplete or inaccurate scientific statements in the early drafts and keep them from entering the public domain. Another related misconception, promulgated by Wasdell, is that the Summary for Policymakers was written by and for the government delegations, and changes were made to the scientific conclusions before and during the Paris plenary for political purposes. In fact, the Summary for Policymakers was written by the scientists who also wrote the underlying chapters. The purpose of the Paris plenary was to make clarifications in order to more succinctly and accessibly communicate the science to the policy-makers. The scientists were present in Paris to ensure scientific accuracy and consistency with the underlying report.

Those of us also involved in previous assessments were pleasantly surprised that there were far fewer alterations made to the text at this final meeting, and that there were very few attempts at political interference. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report is currently the most comprehensive assessment of the scientific literature on climate change, and effectively and accurately communicates to policymakers and the public the state of human knowledge on this topic.

Leeds, UK
University of Leeds, UK

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?

Alex Tabarrok writes:

…if we think that our knowledge of the extent, cost, cause and solutions to global warming are increasing at a faster rate than the danger of global warming then delay of any major decision is a rational policy at the present time.

His approach is interesting, using the theory of options. However, it only works if we agree that we our knowledge is too uncertain. This is precisely why Latour writes in Politics of Nature that it’s the job of politicians to provide a sense of urgency to the debate, in order that action can be taken, since the sciences will always say there is some uncertainty.

I agree with the growing consensus amongst scientists and politicians that the uncertainty is now far too low to continue to do nothing.