February 16, 2007

Complex Phenomena

This is why I don't get too worked up about global warming one way or the other. Apparently scientists are not seeing the kind of warming in Antarctica they would expect based on the climate models they're using.

Does this mean that global warming isn't happening, or that the anthropogenic theories are wrong? Nope. It doesn't mean they're right, either. It means that the Earth's climate is unbelievably complicated, and that scientists are still trying to figure out how it all fits together. This is a laudable goal. It is also one that will take a great deal of time, in all likelihood. What this particular piece of data means will take some hard work to determine.

Which is why it's hard for me to get energized for either side of the global warming debate. The plain truth is that even climatologists are still working out what precisely is happening to our climate. And the vast majority of those who take a strong position on the issue are doing so out of faith, not science, because the number of people who have both the scientific chops and the time to actually review all the data out there are vanishingly small. Everyone else is just picking a position they happen to like and running with it. That's their business; I'm certainly not going to tell anyone else how they should live their life. But I'm not going to get all worked up about something I can't evaluate for myself, and I'm not too proud to admit that climate science is outside my area of expertise.

As an aside, before someone decides to declare me a 'climate change denialist' (a charge that tends to undermine the cause of global warming, for my money), I suspect that the consensus about global warming is correct. I simply am noting that I don't know enough about the issue to know; and neither do most of those most worked up about it, as far as I can tell.

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February 02, 2007

The Interesting Congruence

Perry de Havilland, as he so often does, hits the nail on the head regarding why global warming types make me nervous.

[L]et me get this straight... the fact one hundred states which exercise political power over people have endorsed a report that will be used to justify imposing even more political control over people, and that makes this more credible?

People who work in government generally have great faith in the importance of government. That's understandable. None of us want to say that the work we do isn't important. And government does do some pretty important things, if not nearly as many as they'd like to think. But when you think your job is important, that means you want to make sure you have all the power you need to do the job right. And so we've seen the ongoing growth of leviathan over the last century, growth that shows no sign of abating. And every solution that I've seen the global warming enthusiasts put out requires significant expansion of the powers of the state. Since the people who are most excited about global warming also happen to hail from the more statist end of the spectrum, it's hard not to wonder if the tail is wagging the dog here.

Does this mean I don't think global warming is happening? Not at all. I just wonder about the motivations of some of those most interested in declaring 'the debate over' and so on.

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Unintended Consequences

And speaking of global warming, one of our nominal solutions appears to be causing its fair share of problems. If the U.S. is doing anything to prevent global warming, it is pushing for the use of non-fossil fuels, and the king among these is ethanol. I'm no scientist, so I won't pretend to claim that I know if ethanol is a real solution to the use of gasoline or not. Suffice it to say there's some question as to how much energy we're really saving by using ethanol.

But there's one effect we know is caused by the various ethanol subsidies: rising corn prices. By subsidizing the production of ethanol, corn farmers get more money selling their product to ethanol manufacturers than to food producers. Which means that people who want to buy corn to make, for example, tortillas, have to pay more for their raw materials and therefore have to raise their prices. Which, as we see in our neighbor to the south, has caused some problems.

I'm not much for blaming America first, but I think that in this case, we don't have any way to avoid it. We are pushing ethanol hard in this country, partly because people want to see thye U.S. become energy independent (a tempting but chimerical goal), partly because people see ethanol as a means to reduce global warming, and largely because Iowa holds the first Presidential caucus in the nation and is packed to the gills with corn farmers who want more money for their product. And they're getting it, but as in all such cases, that money has to come from somewhere, in this case, from people who like to eat corn and corn-based products, many of whom are quite poor.

Granting that I don't agree with the global warming set on many issues regarding what we can and should do about the problem, I think there are some areas where we can agree. First among these should be that the actions we take to mitigate global warming don't exacerbate other problems unless there is compelling evidence that the benefits will outweigh the costs. Let me be clear in saying that I'm not arguing that we shouldn't do anything unless we're 100% certain that it will work. But for a situation like ethanol, where the gains are questionable and the costs are clear, it seems clear to me that we should eliminate the ethanol subsidies in favor of policies that, even if they're no more certain to help, at least won't have such negative impacts on the people least well-equipped to deal with it.

This is why government is so ill-equipped to deal with problems like global warming (while, conversely, also being possibly the only entity capable of doing so). Republican (small-r) government responds to its constituents, and it responds better to constituents who have the ability to effect their current or future job prospects. Because Iowa is seen as a necessary gate to the Presidency, any American politician who is thinking about a run for President is reluctant (at best) to take on the ethanol subsidy (or other farm subsidies) for fear of torpedoing any chance they have at higher office. Add to that companies like the infamous Archer Daniels Midland that stand to make a great deal of money from subsidies and it is hardly surprising that ineffective remedies are often the result of government reaction to problems. Add to that the unfortunate tendency of republican government to never eliminate old programs and the problem becomes clearer. Global warming is an extremely complex phenomenon. Changes made to try and mitigate will doubtless follow multiple paths: some will succeed, some will fail, and some will make things worse. So we're going to need metrics that allow us to determine which programs work and which do not, so we don't waste time and money on blind alleys (or worse, on making the problem worse). But government doesn't do a good job measuring its own results.

This is not wholly inevitable. If enough people notice the problem, it can be mitigated. But that's going to require people willing to take a critical look at programs they've agitated for. I'm not hopeful that we'll see much of that.

Posted at 01:12 PM · Economics • · Global Warming • · Politics · Comments (0) · TrackBack (0)

February 01, 2007

Good Effort

"A prerequisite for winning the Nobel Peace Prize is making a difference, and Al Gore has made a difference," according to a Norwegian lawmaker who has nominated Al Gore for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming. A more accurate statement, I suspect, would be that a prerequisite for winning is making the U.S. look bad, given the recent history of the award, but I suppose it's declasse to say such things out loud.

I know, I'm being terrifically cynical, but it's hard not to when Al Gore is being nominated for a Peace Prize. Did he negotiate a cease fire in the Sudan? Did he convince North and South Korea to get along? Nope. He just flies about the world to warn us all about the dangers of global warming. That may well be a good cause, don't get me wrong. But the idea of handing out a Nobel prize for talking about global warming seems silly on at least two levels. Most importantly, to me, global warming isn't a war, so I fail to see how a peace prize is an appropriate reward for raising the issue. Almost as important, with all due respect to the former Vice President, he hasn't actually accomplished anything on global warming yet. Had he managed to convince someone to do more than listen to his opinions of the topic, I could see giving him a reward. But thus far, as the media likes to remind us, the U.S. is not doing anything about global warming. So what, exactly, is the Nobel for? I think they used to mean something more than just 'nice try.'

I'm something of a global warming agnostic, myself. I think it's happening, and I suspect that a significant cause is human activity. But I'm not convinced we all need to do whatever it takes to stop it. One, we just don't know for sure just what the results will be. Two, whatever results there are will probably occur well into the future, which means we have time to learn to deal with them. And three, China and India aren't on board with the whole global warming thing anyhow, so our ability to stop it solo is pretty close to zero.

I respect the fact Gore thinks global warming is a big deal, and his willingness to try and get people to do something about it is somewhat admirable, even if it's little more than an outgrowth of his natural statist tendencies. But it seems to me that the Nobel Committee ought to find someone who has actually accomplished something if they're that excited about global warming.

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June 16, 2006

The Whole Truth

One of the reasons global warming adherents often are assumed to be exaggerating or even lying about the dangers of global warming is because they have an unfortunate tendency not to engage on all fronts. Elizabeth Kolbert's essay on why Americans don't subscribe to the global warming consensus offers a prime example of this. In the course of explaining that Americans aren't doing anything about global warming because they don't want to give up their luxuries, Kolbert throws out this observation:

The [United States] is one of only two industrialised nations that has rejected the Kyoto Protocol and, with it, mandatory emissions cuts. (The other is Australia.)

This statement is factually accurate, as long as we consider China and India non-industrialized nations. But factual accuracy aside, it is misleading in that it fails to address the elephant in the room: even if the United States reduces its carbon emissions to zero, economic growth in China and India will create far more CO2 than the U.S. currently does. If you're serious in your belief that global warming could be catastrophic for humanity and must therefore be stopped if possible, then American carbon emissions are only one part of the puzzle, and a part that will decline with the passage of time. While it's true that of those three nations, the U.S. is the only one that is currently likely to do anything about carbon emissions, the failure to even mention the rather significant problem that China and India pose seems curious at best.

Assuming the consensus on global warming is accurate, we have two options in front of us (and there is a continuum between the two, so it is not an either/or choice). We can attempt to stop global warming by eliminating our greenhouse gas emissions, we can attempt to prepare to mitigate the problems global warming causes, or we can do some combination of the two (reduce some emissions while concurrently taking mitigation measures to eliminate threats to human beings caused by global warming). Ms. Kolbert's preferred solution is clearly to try to eliminate the problem by eliminating greenhouse gas emissions, yet her essay says nothing of the fact that even if Americans do agree to her prescription of "many small-scale adjustments (no more heated towel racks) and also a great many more substantial ones: changes in energy consumption, energy production, patterns of land use, transportation systems, international relations."

Some people on the right believe that global warming is just an attempt to kneecap the American economy to drag us back to the pack, a kind of egalitarianism writ large. This isn't helped by the fact a lot of the people who are trying to sell global warming also are proponents of arguments about the unfairness of America using such a large fraction of the world's energy relative to populations (who, exactly, does that hurt? If I turn off a light switch in my house, will that electricity suddenly become magically available to some impoverished country?). If proponents of global warming really hope to convince the skeptics, they might begin by addressing all of the problem, and not focusing their energy on the United States as if it were the root of all evil.

Update: Ron Bailey points out similar phenomena in Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

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April 21, 2006

The Environment and the Economy

Kevin Drum raises a good point while preening about why conservatives refuse to accept the reality of global warming. According to Laura Turner, conservatives can't bear to accept the scientific evidence because that would require them to accept that Al Gore was right, and they can't do that. I guess you never really do leave high school behind. I only wish he could get the same righteous fury engaged over the Democrat's continued obeisance to trial lawyers and teacher's unions as he does about the Republicans being in the pocket of industry. I don't like Republicans' allowing industry to lead them by the nose either, but at least industry produces something of value.

In any case, Drum points out that some of the major objections to early environmental legislation were economic: that forcing businesses to clean up their byproducts would cripple the economy and leave us worse off than before. Clearly we are much better off materially today than we were when environmental legislation first passed, so those fears were exaggerated (although there can be no doubt that environmental legislation does have economic costs). Couldn't the same be true in the case of shifting our economy away from fossil fuels? On the face of it the two seem reasonable; environmental legislation, after all, affected most businesses at the time it was enacted, as we were a much more industrialized society then. It doesn't seem impossible that, if forced to move away from fossil fuel use, entrepreneurs might just find other means of providing cheap energy to fuel our economy. I'm not certain I'm comfortable with "and then a miracle occurs" planning, but Drum brings up a valid point. Our society is remarkably dynamic, and it's not unreasonable to think that the economic effects of CO2 reductions might be significantly less than we fear if it becomes clear there is no other choice (as there would be under legislative constraints). Something to consider.

Unfortunately, what Drum fails to address here (although he may have done so elsewhere; I try to keep up but he's pretty prolific over there) is the problem we would be left with if the U.S. moved to an economy that did not generate CO2 as a byproduct: China and India are going to be the real problems we face over the next century. So even if we were to go cold turkey and stop generating CO2 altogether, I'd be curious to see if that would have much effect on global warming. (Part of the problem the global warming fearmongers face: they're now warning us that we may have reached a tipping point. Well, if that's the case, then it's a little late to be worrying about CO2 emissions, isn't it?) In any case, I'm not prepared to endorse shifting the entire foundation of our economy to other sources of energy just yet, but I think Drum's point is well-taken. If we do end up going that direction, we will probably surprise ourselves with our ability to continue to grow our economy.

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April 16, 2006

The Nuclear Option

If the United States is going to do anything about the threat of anthropogenic global warming, it really only has two options: shutter the economy and move into an age where people are nostalgic for the Great Depression, or go nuclear. The first option is unacceptable, as it would cause as much loss of life as it could potentially save and, as any historian of democracy knows, democracies don't do self-inflicted pain, at least not when they realize what they're doing. (There's plenty of pain we inflict on ourselves under democracy, but there's rarely such a direct link between cause and effect as there would be with an attempt to eliminate a sizeable fraction of our carbon emissions.) That means that if we're going to do anything about carbon emissions, we're going to have to start building nuclear plants again.

That's the conclusion of Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace. Mr. Moore wisely lays out the reasoning for shifting our economy to nuclear power and takes on some of the myths about nuclear energy that render it such an unattractive option right now. He fails to note one important thing: that nuclear energy is only marginally cost-competitive with other fuels right now because nuclear plants face a whirlwind of legal and regulatory burdens often intended to prevent them from going on line by making nuclear power uncompetitive. If nuclear plants were protected from that burden, nuclear energy could not only be a cleaner source of power than coal, it could also be cheaper.

Mr. Moore deserves great credit for his turnaround on this issue. There are plenty of people carrying on about the dire threat of global warming, but very few have been willing to acknowledge the role nuclear power must play in fighting global warming effectively, instead preferring to simultaneously warn that global warming will kill us all and that nuclear power is unalterably evil. Mr. Moore will take a fair bit of heat from his erstwhile colleagues in the environmental movement over his words, because a lot of them would prefer to keep nuclear power bottled up as it is now, even if that means the U.S. fails to address the question of carbon emissions. He should be applauded for having the courage to take on his own allies by following the facts to their logical conclusion.

I should note here that I am not yet convinced that global warming is nearly as dire a threat as it is made out to be, nor do I know to what degree global warming is anthropogenic, but if you accept carbon emissions as a major factor in global warming and that global warming will have catastrophic consequences if not dealt with quickly and you're still not willing to shift power generation to nuclear, then you're not really interested in solving the problem. The logic is quite simple: if we accept the premise that global warming is anthropogenic and that global warming will have catastrophic consequences , then the conclusion we must take measures to mitigate global warming logically follows. The problem is that there are some other premises we have to accept as well, primarily that the government of the United States won't intentionally cripple its own economy in pursuit of carbon reductions. With that premise in place (and the 97-0 vote against Kyoto under President Clinton is pretty suggestive of that premise), our options are either to find massive economies in energy usage that will allow us to produce the same amount of goods with vastly less power or find another source of power to replace carbon-emitting sources like coal. The former isn't possible: we got the low-hanging fruit of energy efficiency in the 1970s. Can we use power more effectively? Sure, but not so much more effectively that we'll be able to keep our economy afloat while shutting down all our coal-fired power plants. That means finding another source of power, and until somebody can crack the code on cold fusion, that means nuclear power.

Why nuclear, and not renewables? Because renewables can't provide power in either the amounts we need nor with the reliability we need. Wind power is great, but when the wind stops blowing we have to have another source of power ready in the background to pick up the slack. That's the tricky thing about electric power: it's a zero-sum game. However much power I'm generating has to equal the amount of power I'm using, no more and no less. When you turn on your light switch in the morning, that power has to be generated at that time; we can't generate it at some earlier time and hold onto it until we need it. (Actually, we can in small amounts, but the amount of power lost in storage is huge, so if we want to go that route we're going to have to generate significantly more power than we do right now to account for losses in storage and transmission, not to mention the cost of building all those batteries.) Solar suffers from the same problem. Hydroelectric is more reliable, but we're already using most of the best locations for hydro power, and hydro power carries its own list of problems. We probably still have some low-hanging fruit available among sources of geothermal power, but that list isn't long enough to fill more than a tiny fraction of our energy needs. Ultimately, the only source of power that we have readily available that could fill our generation needs without emitting carbon is nuclear energy.

As I noted above, I'm not yet convinced that carbon emissions are something we should be worrying about. But I can easily find common cause with those who do when it comes to building new nuclear plants. Increasing our power generation capability can only do good things for our economy, and cutting back on coal-fired plants is good for the environment in other ways than simply trimming carbon emissions. So encourage your elected representatives, both local and national, to make building new nuclear power plants easier and cheaper, and let's encourage the private sector to do so sooner rather than later.

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April 12, 2006

Science and Incentives

McQ at QandO points to another issue that affects my discussion of global warming from yesterday: incentives. Scientists are rarely, if ever, just handed money and told they can use it to do whatever research they'd like to do. Instead they are expected to approach donors with proposals for what they intend to look for and what they expect to find. This leads to problems.

When someone is looking for a particular result, they tend to find it. This has been observed in studies where graduate students are asked to observe a particular activity. Some students are told that they should see a certain phenomonon, while others are told only to record what they see. The students who are told what they will see inevitably see more of that phenomon than those who are sent in without any preconceived notions. It will therefore come as no surprise, then, that scientists tend to find precisely what they expect to find when they conduct experiments. This is why peer-review is so important, and why consensus is so damaging to science. Part of what helps science forward is humanity's perverse need to prove other people wrong, something scientists get to do and even pretend to be helpful by calling it peer-review. But when everyone agrees that you're supposed to find X when you perform experiment Y, we can miss out on errors. (Please note that there is no evidence of which I am aware that this process is a conscious one: the vast majority of scientists set up their experiments and observe them with the intention of recording what happens even if it doesn't concur with what they expect to see. Finding what they're looking for is a result of the subconscious, not proof of venality.) So when a scientist comes to a source of funding and says he wants money to see if, as he expects, secondhand smoke causes cancer, the odds are pretty good he'll find what he's looking for.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact donors will not keep paying money for science that doesn't produce the results they're looking for. The American Lung Association is not going to give you money if your last study showed that cigarette smoke may not be as dangerous as is commonly believed, and Phillip Morris isn't going to pay you a dime if you're in the habit of noting the hazards of secondhand smoke. There is therefore a rather significant fiduciary incentive for scientists to find certain results if they want to continue to be paid for their research. Combine this knowledge with the above-noted tendency to find what you're looking for, and the tendency of the press to note when scientific studies are released by interest groups is seen to be a wise one. Although it would be wiser if they were to note it every time a study was released, and not only when studies are released by organizations the press considers suspect (the American Lung Association has the same tendency towards bias as Phillip Morris albeit in the opposite direction).

We find other problems with how the government tends to fund much scientific research, as John Stossel notes in the article flagged by McQ. If something is a big problem, it's easy to get funding for it. If a scientist using government funds discovers that there really is no need for government to get involved with an issue, that means bureaucracies don't get to expand and people don't get extra powers for dealing with the threat. As Emory University psychologist Claire Coles notes in the article, "If you go to an agency and say, 'I don't think there's a big problem here, I'd like you to give me $1 million,' the probability for getting the money is very low." Again, that doesn't necessarily mean that any one piece of government research is incorrect, only that the incentives run in only one direction: to find problems that government can then fix. This is not a good way to incentivize science, because sometimes there really are situations where government intervention is not warranted.

Again, I want to emphasize that none of the above proves that any particular piece of science is good or bad. Scientists generally are honest people trying to come up with the right answers. But people respond to incentives, even without realizing it, and the incentives for science in this day and age are to find bad things, from nuclear winter to global warming and a host of lesser subjects. That is a good thing to keep in mind when evaluating science, not to debunk it, but only to view it with the proper degree of skepticism.

Posted at 04:55 PM · Economics • · Global Warming · Comments (0) · TrackBack (0)

April 11, 2006

Global Warming Skeptics Strike Back

So, a few weeks after ABC News and Time take global warming scaremongering to the next level, a paleoclimatologist in Australia tells us that average global temperatures have been steady over the past seven years, despite ever-increasing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere during that period. Professor Carter points out that periods of warming and cooling over the past century have not tracked with periods of increasing CO2 emissions and suggests that global warming is just another way for government bureaucrats to increase their power base by creating an emergency that they will have to be given extensive powers to fight.

I am sympathetic to such an argument due to my tendency to prefer as little government as is humanly possible, and the news the temperature hasn't actually changed over the past seven years is certainly interesting. But as I've noted in the past regarding such complex scientific matters, the climate is simply too intricate a system for this data to really prove anything to us. Just because CO2 buildup in the atmosphere may cause global warming, it does not necessarily follow that we will see a precise relationship between levels of CO2 and average global temperatures. It may be that the temperature increases require certain threshold levels of CO2, which would produce just what we're seeing now, a long increase followed by a steady-state situation for an indeterminate time until CO2 levels reach the next threshold, at which point we may see temperature increases again. On the other hand, there may be feedback loops we're not yet aware of through which the Earth's climate adjusts to the warming conditions. The possibilities are effectively endless, and the only way we're going to know for sure is probably through a lot more research and may well happen after the fact.

Don't get me wrong; I am not suddenly endorsing the consensus view of global warming in an attempt to remain contrarian. I am no less agnostic on the question of global warming now than I was before, this is just one more interesting data point. My position remains one of patience. If anthropogenic global warming is occurring, then I suspect we will be far better prepared to deal with it by continuing to grow our economy than by crippling ourselves and condemning millions to death by shutting down the global economy in hopes of preventing something we can't be sure of. If there are ways to switch to energy sources that do not generate CO2, or that generate less CO2, then I have no objection to making those changes if and when they're economically feasible, but I'd prefer to avoid the market-warping effects of government intervention. In fact, I would truly love to see a ten-year moratorium placed on any government action regarding global warming, if only because the only way I think we're likely to see the science placed ahead of the politics of global warming is by removing global warming from the political debate. As long as global warming remains a political question, we'll continue to see each side use whatever science they can find to support their position and to attack any science supporting the other side, without regard for the evidence as a whole. None of us are served by that argument.

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