Climate and Democracy

The theory has been going around recently that dealing effectively with climate change is impossible due to democracy. I think it may have been triggered by an article in Der Spiegel, published in a translated form at Roger Pielke Jr’s blog.

As a sceptic of both global warming and democracy, I have no dog in this fight. If Climate Change means we have to ditch democracy, that’s OK with me; on the other hand, if democracy means we can’t do anything about climate change, that’s just fine too. Nevertheless, the intersection of the two obsessions that this blog seems to have settled on demands my attention.

So let’s take the argument, attributed to David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith, that democracy is incapable of taking the collective action made necessary by the threat of climate change. I haven’t read their book, so I am dealing with a summary of their ideas, for instance from these articles by Shearman.

The weakness of the global warming argument doesn’t necessarily invalidate the claim that democracy is unequal to the challenge it presents. To defeat it on that basis, you would have to show either that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is not just untrue, but impossible, or else that the determination of democratic governments to take any measures necessary short of action is primarily the result of well-founded doubts about the science.

Take these in order: first, is it possible that some such threat as global warming is claimed to be could actually be true? I would say that it is much less likely that some such threat would materialize than that a false threat would be promoted by opportunists, but I cannot say that it is impossible. The global warming scare itself cannot be dismissed out of hand (despite the attempts of some sceptics to to so), but can only be ruled out on the basis of a close look at the evidence.

So we can go on to ask the second question: if AGW or something like it were actually true, would the political structures that we have make it impossible for the necessary collective action to be taken?

It’s plausible, but, at least in the brief articles if not in his book, Shearman does not make that case. He relies on the fact that meaningful action has not, in fact, been taken by democratic governments. That might be, as he says, because they’re not capable of it, but it might equally be that the stalemate is the result of opposition from those who, in my view correctly, believe on the basis of the evidence that such meaningful action is not in fact warranted.

Assessment of this issue is complicated by a feature that global warming alarmism shares with other religions: many people even at an individual level say they believe it but act as if they don’t. I’m not sure it makes much sense, descending into familiar arguments about cheap talk versus revealed preferences, to ask what such people “really” believe, but I think one has to say that to some degree they are unpersuaded by the evidence, even if they say otherwise. Given that, there is still the possibility that the doubt which they have but deny is not reasonable doubt, but is founded on a psychological unwillingness to internalise inconvenient truths.

If this contradiction were limited to the common people, it would be a point in Shearman’s favour. The plebs are not fit to govern, therefore the wise must rule them. However, the inconsistency seems to me to be just as widespread among the powerful as among the mob – I have previously observed, for instance, that investors do not rate sea level rises as significant in their valuations of commercial property.

So for me, Shearman’s argument fails, unfortunately. I suspect that, despite its faults, our democratic governments (in the sense of old democracy, of course) would be able to take sufficient action on climate change, were it really necessary. The reason they are not taking such action is that it is not necessary. The reason they say it is necessary, while not actually taking it, is that they are are lying as usual.

The real link between democracy and global warming is quite different, and is adequately summarised by my guru Mencius Moldbug. In short, the global warming scare and its associated bureaucratic outgrowths are the sort of thing you would expect a democracy to produce – indeed, the kind of thing they always have produced.

The scare originated in democratic countries, spread through democratic countries, and has only been accepted by non-democratic countries after they were pressured or bribed to do so by democracies.

Proof of the Impossibility of Democracy

There’s nothing new here, but I think I can put it more simply and clearly than I’ve managed to do before.

Obviously many “democratic” governments exist, and when we normally talk about democracies, these are what we mean. What I’m talking about here is the theoretical idea of democracy, where policy is controlled by the voters. This is the distinction I made previously in Two kinds of democracy.

Political systems can be changed, either by invasion, overthrow from within the territory but outside the government, or subversion from within the structure of the government itself.

All governments devote a large part of their effort and resources to protecting themselves against being changed. It can be assumed that any governments which do not do so, get changed.

To protect the political system, the government needs to correctly identify the threats that exist to it, and devote sufficient resources and attention to resisting them. The chief premiss on which I base my argument here is that this is hard.

If those inside the government structures do not have the freedom of policy to protect the system, they will be unable to do so and the system will be changed. Most commonly, it is subverted from within, until those within the system do have the ability to hold onto power.

If the system is truly democratic, office-holders within the system do not have freedom of policy. Policy is dictated by voters. This is the line I am drawing: I am not attacking some straw-man “perfect” democracy, but any in which the voters can overrule the elite on matters of policy. If they cannot, then it is an “old democracy” and potentially stable.

Voters do not have sufficient inside knowledge of the political situation to choose the policies that will preserve their democratic power. Further, they do not have sufficient interest in doing so – the value of having a vote is in being able to influence policy according to one’s preferences, and that is always likely to take priority over preserving the present system.

There are many examples of democracies voting to get rid of democracy – 1930s Germany and Italy being the best known. What I say is that democracies always vote to get rid of democracy, if not directly, then by not voting to prevent the system being subverted from within. That produces the “old democracy” I wrote about previously, in which the influence of voters is minor, and real power lies in institutions which are capable of perpetuating themselves

There could be an important exception to all this. If the franchise is limited in some way to a distinct minority of the population, then the chief threat to the system is from the disenfranchised. The voters will be well aware of this, and will have a clear and obvious interest in preserving the system which keeps power for their class. Such a system will be more stable than a true democracy with a universal or near-universal franchise.

This breaks down if there is no clear distinction between the ruling class and the disenfranchised. In that case, one faction or other within the ruling class can always benefit by a small extension of the franchise. The result is a ratchet causing the restricted franchise to eventually become universal.

Thus classical and 19th-century democracies were somewhat more stable than new democracies created today. The voters were aware that the current system was what kept them in a privileged position, and were very aware of threats to the system. From the point of view of a voter in a universal-suffrage “young” democracy, democracy just isn’t worth voting to defend.

This doesn’t mean that the fact of there being elections doesn’t have an effect – just that the actual opinions of the voters don’t.

Major threat to your email

I just came across this story, from a few months ago. I’m surprised it didn’t get more play, because it’s much more serious than the run-of-the-mill software vulnerability story.

PC’s are not secure, and never have been. For most of us, that hasn’t been a big concern. We try to keep viruses and bots off our systems, either by avoiding Windows or by more iffy and difficult methods. But that’s mostly due to a desire to keep our systems running and be good network citizens. But the risk of a personal attack on your system has always been a long shot, because, despite the fact there are many people who could read your email, there’s little reason any of them would want to. The sets of people who know how, and people who would care to, are small enough that their intersection is probably zero.

That calculation has now changed. If there is someone who has a grudge against you, or some other motive to want to read your email or impersonate you, and that person knows how to buy stuff on the internet, you are now at serious risk.

I’ve talked before about how to make your email secure, but it’s difficult to do reliably, and the advice in the article is probably best. If you want to keep stuff secret, don’t put it on a computer, unless you’re an expert.

Climategate – sceptics come out

Damian Thompson says “I had no idea that so many mainstream politicians entertained doubts about the AGW thesis.”

That is why the event looks like it’s going to turn into a victory for the sceptics after all. It’s not that the leaked data and emails does all that much damage to the alarmists’ arguments. It didn’t need to: they weren’t that strong to begin with.

The case for global warming depends on positive feedback – in more ways than one. First, because the actual temperature change due to increased CO2 concentration is not worth worrying about, and can only be a problem if it produces weather changes that themselves create more warming – positive feedback. And secondly, because the electorate, reasonably, takes the scientists’ word about the seriousness of the problem, and responds by demanding that politicians demonstrate their concern about the problem, which they do by creating more opportunities for alarmist scientists, who then persuade the public even more of the need to demand more from the politicians…

So a key element in the forming of the AGW political consensus has been that people just accept what they’re told. That’s what anyone would expect – you’ve got to be a bit odd to start to delve into the details of atmospheric physics, weather station siting, dendrochronology, Regularized Expectation-Maximization calculations, just to check up the conclusions of the people who are actually qualified to talk about these things. If someone starts challenging the conventional wisdom by referring to all these technicalities, the only sensible thing is to ignore the technicalities and make a judgment based on the the trustworthiness and qualification of the competing authorities.

The leaked emails change that – not because the man in the street will say – “Oh my! There’s a perhaps somewhat disturbing compensation between indirect aerosol forcing and sensitivity across the CMIP3 models that defies the assumption of independence!”, but because he will see that the argument is not between robot white-coated paragons and a few scruffy nutters, but between two groups of real people, at least one of which must be wrong. That doesn’t change his mind, but it takes the pressure off, so that politicians who have not previously dared to express contrary opinions feel able to make themselves known. That in turn will stir up more doubt, and the positive feedback will move the issue back to being a legitimate debate, as it belongs to be.

ClimateGate and CSI

ClimateGate, as I wrote earlier, does not expose the evil machinations of the Knights Carbonic. It doesn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know (although it proves one or two things that were fairly obvious but previously had barely-plausible deniability)

It is important, though, for what it tells the wider public. Not what it tells them about Climate Science, but what it tells them about science generally. Climate Alarmism has been a beneficiary of a kind of CSI Effect. “There was also evidence of genetic material from a franklinia alatamaha on his shoe. The only known specimen in this area, outside a specialized botanical garden, was given to Senator Alan Corman as a gift.”

The truth of science is rather different. And I don’t say that because I’m anti-science, It’s just that science is a slow process, and, above all, a social process. It isn’t all “Hurrah, I’ve discovered Boyle’s Third Law.” What is unusual about climate science is not the science itself, but the relevance of public opinion and the relevance to politics.

Science that’s of particular interest to the public is usually bad. Usually what happens is that the Mail and the Express get all excited, and everyone else ignores it. What happened with climate science is that a scare story had stakes that were high enough that all the papers got involved, leading to irresistable pressure on politicians, leading to a whole industry being created on the scare.

A story which serves as a nice microcosm of the process is this one. Warning people of dangers is part of the HSE’s job. They ran a campaign, in cooperation with the TUC, to warn building workers about the dangers of asbestos. In doing so, they exaggerated the risk of death by an order of magnitude, by using a theoretical risk model with simplifying assumptions that were incorrect.

A lobby group complained to the Advertising Standards Authority, which ruled against the HSE. That could happen, because the issue was never big news, and no significant politicians had attached themselves to either side of the question. (Scientists dont politicise science, politicians do). Nobody at the ASA got a concerned call from David Cameron. So in this case, the error was corrected. It’s not bound to happen that way.

ClimateGate

When I announced I was giving up on politics, I was at a loss as to what do do with this blog. One option that I considered was concentrating on the climate question. I didn’t take that option, primarily out of cowardice. There has been a determined and deliberate campaign to make out that climate sceptics are not simply wrong but insane. This has been somewhat successful, to the point that I was seriously concerned for my professional reputation should I persist in arguing the sceptical case. This in itself is a remarkable state of affairs, given that the position I am nervous about admitting to holding, is, according to some opinion polls, that of the majority.

(As an anti-democrat, I cannot and do not claim much significance for the majority status of climate scepticism. I merely make the point that it is very strange that the majority view is not even respectable)

The leak of the CRU data has tempted me to stick my head over the parapet once more. The first thought when they appeared was that it was too good to be true, and that the emails must have been faked or planted. That fear faded, but what eventually emerged was that the emails, at least, are less compromising than they appeared at first glance.

To take the most quoted example, the “Nature trick”, it is at the very worst an attempt to spin the data in such a way that the headlines of articles point more in the direction of unprecedented modern warming. It might not even be that, but it doesn’t matter, because we already had proof that the data was being spun in that way, which I presented in April 2008.

The more I look at the documents the less bad they seem. I had set store by the “Rules of the game” presentation as evidence of excessive politicisation, but when I looked at it I saw it was produced by an advertising agency for the government. It is a shocking disgrace that it was produced and is being used, but one can hardly blame the CRU just for having a copy of it. It is nothing to do with them, and in fact the advice it gives is that the scientists’ work should be ignored or glossed over – even suggesting there might be scientific questions is something the politicians want to avoid.

Next, we had the “harry_read_me” file, and the contortions that had to be done to turn a heterogeneous heap of instrument data and adjustments into a presentable, usable gridded global temperature history. People who’ve never had to anything of the sort were shocked by the problems described – incompatible data sets, inconsistent data sets, code written by departed programmers doing things they don’t understand, corruption introduced by format conversions, ad-hoc fixes to cope with missing or corrupted data, mysterious factor-of-ten discrepancies, struggling with inappropriate out-of-date programming languages, success defined as getting data out at the end that “looks right” after nights and weekends of failure. I’ve worked on software producing summary reports of data from multiple sources, and I’ve seen all those things, and done many of them myself. It’s pretty much inevitable.

After that came the famous

valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,- 0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor

None of the blogs I’ve seen that seized on that actually traced the output of the code through to the papers where it was presented, to see if the adjustments were explained there, assuming the output was ever published at all, which has been denied

I don’t now expect the leaked documents to show deliberate fraud, but I never believed there was any in the first place. At least, since there is no reason for Phil Jones to resign and be replaced by someone else, one eternal truth can be upheld – George Monbiot is always wrong.

What the emails do show are two things:

Fact 1. That the researchers – Jones, Briffa, Mann, and others – see themselves as having a responsibility not just to do the science but to persuade the public of the seriousness of the problem and of the need for political action

Fact 2. That as part of this, they want to prevent sceptical research from being published or believed, and at least believe they have some power to do so

Neither of these this are actually serious accusations against the individual scientists. Today it would be thought very strange to argue that a scientist finding what he believed was a serious threat to humanity should not act on that belief by seeking to influence politics. When the government funds research, it wants to fund research that is relevant, and all that the scientists’ activism amounts to is arguing that their research is, in fact, relevant. And of course someone has to review and edit papers and decide which are good science and which aren’t – that’s what peer review means.

And that is the real point here. Because although both of these facts are just the result of Jones et al doing the jobs they’re employed to do, the result of the combination is that science is broken. It’s not their fault.

You can have partisan presentations of the evidence, provided there is opportunity to compare competing partisan presentations. And you need to have assessments of the value of scientific claims, but those should not be made or controlled by partisans of either side. What has gone wrong is that one side has been allowed to silence the other.

The analogy I like is to agency ratings – it worked well until it was made official. When the only asset a rating agency had was the trust that the market had in their judgement, they were extremely conservative. Nobody would pay the agency to give an instrument a rating that nobody else would believe. Once there were laws that many of the largest investors were required to invest in instruments that had AAA rating, that gave the ratings a value in excess of their credibility.

Peer review is the same – publication in the more prestigious scientific journals was valued because it was understood by other scientists as a recommendation that the work was of a high quality. The editors of journals were motivated not only to maintain but to improve the reputation of their journals. Now that review has gone from being solely a recommendation of quality directed at the scientist’s peers, to a stamp of worth directed at politicians and the public, the incentives in the system have been distorted.

The End

I’ve been on holiday for a couple of weeks, and I expected to write quite a lot here in that time.
The reason I didn’t is that my political thinking has pretty much come to a conclusion. I don’t like it at all, but it’s a conclusion for all that.

When Adam Smith was writing, there were many theories, public and private, about what a business ought to do. Smith pointed out, [drawing from Darwin and Malthus] (edit, yes I really wrote that, oops), that whatever theory they believed, the businesses that survived would be those which aimed at maximising profit, or those that, by coincidence, behaved as if that was what they aimed at.
The situation in politics is that, while there are many theories about what politicians should do, those politicians will succeed that behave as if their aim is to achieve power at any cost. Perhaps historically many politicians had other aims, and the successful ones were those who happened to act as a pure power-seeker would, but now there is sufficient understanding of what path will gain and hold power that those who consciously diverge from the path least will be those who win.
To be clear, I’m not simply talking about electoral politics here. I’m talking about all politics, in non-democratic systems, in the electoral process, and in the wider and more important politics beyond elections, where power lives in media, civil service, educational, trade union and other centres outside the formal government.
The trivial fact – that power will go to those that want it – is reinforced by the more effective co-operation that pure power-seekers can achieve than ideologues. A large number of power-seekers, although rivals, will co-operate on the basis of exchanges of power. The result is a market in power, and that is the most effective basis for large-scale collective action. Those attempting to achieve specific, different but related aims will find it much more difficult to organise and co-operate on the same scale.

Is it not possible, then, to have significant influence, not by competing directly with politicians but by competing with the media/educational branches of the establishment by promoting ideas? The metacontext, as the folks at Samizdata say. It is indeed possible to influence politics by doing that, and that is what libertarians have done for the last half century or so. But I’m not sure it’s possible to have good influence. Certainly some good things have happened because libertarians have changed the metacontext to the point where the things have appealed to power-seekers. But some bad things have happened that way too. The fact is that while the “background” beliefs of the electorate and other participants in politics does have an effect, there is no reason to assume that correct background beliefs cause better policies than incorrect background beliefs.
One of the most depressing aspects of activism is that on the very few occasions when you get someone onto your side, either by persuading them or just finding them, more often than not they’re still wrong. They’re persuaded by bad arguments rather than good arguments. Activism would appeal to me on the idea that I will win out in the end because my arguments are good, but in fact not only do my good arguments not win against my opponents’ bad arguments, my good arguments do not even win against my allies’ bad arguments. The idea that truth is a secret weapon that is destined to win out once assorted exceptional obstacles have been overcome is an utter fantasy.
As a result, even if you do achieve marginal influence by working for policies or ideas that would be widely beneficial, your success is likely to backfire. The other players in the game are working for the narrow interest of identifiable groups and, as such, are able to mobilise far greater resources. They also are willing to trade with other power seekers, which improves their effectiveness further. The idealist is not able to do that, because the idealist obtains only the particular powers he wants to keep, whereas the politician grabs whatever power he can, even if it is of no use to him, and that which is of no use to him, he trades. The only way to do that is to get whatever power you can, which is my definition of a politician.
It still feels like there is something noble in working for better government, even if the project appears doomed. But there isn’t. After all, most utopians from anarchist to fascist to Marxist are working for better government, but we oppose them because their utopias are unachievable and their attempts to get there are harmful. Your ideas don’t work because they’re flawed, my ideas don’t work because politics is flawed. Hmmm. Why are my ideas better than yours, again?
And that is the final straw. In truth, I have never been an activist. I have neither appetite or aptitude for practical politics, which after all is basically a people business, but I used to believe it was interesting to look in isolation at the question of what those with political power ought to do with it, so as to make the government as good as possible, in a vaguely utilitarian way. What brings my political efforts to an end is the realisation that that is meaningless. A political theory based on the assumption that a government will act in the general interest once it understands how to do so is as useful as a theory based on the assumption that the world is flat and carried by elephants. Politics has given me some entertainment over the years, but not as much as Terry Pratchett has.
If I am going to assume that governments work in the general interest, once they understand how to do it, I might just as well assume that industrialists work in the general interest, in which case all my clever arguments about the value of private property rights for resolving opposing private interests are completely irrelevant.
It’s amusing that of all the posts on this blog, one of the most important turns out to be one that I thought at the time was unimportant: this one, originally driven by my musings on Newcombe’s Paradox.
Almost all significant propositions are, implicitly or explicitly, of the form IF {some hypothetical state of the world} THEN {something will result}. In politics, the hypothetical frequently involves some person making some decision. The proposition therefore needs to take into account whatever is necessary for that person to actually make that decision – and the other effects of those necessary conditions may well be more significant than the stated result.
I came very close to making all the connections back then, even raising the significance of my facetious “if I were Führer” form of putting political propositions. I am not Führer, and never will be, and neither will anyone like me, and all my political logic collapses on that just like any other proof premised on a falsehood.
Where does that leave me? I am no longer a libertarian – I find libertarian arguments just as correct as I always did, but they are of no relevance to the real world. I could continue to comment here on the stupidities that people accept from various politicians, but I would be doing it in the same spirit as if I were judging the team selection of a football club – in full awareness of my own impotence and irrelevance. Maybe I will. It would make more sense to take up something useful, like gardening.
I can also attempt to benefit humanity by encouraging others to detach from politics as I am doing. Someone has to have power, and if you think you can get it and you would be good at it, by all means go for it. If not, then leave well alone. Be one of the ruled, and pursue whatever aims you choose without the illusion that you have the right, the duty or the capability to change the policies of the rulers. Embrace passivism.

Dennis Wheatley

My Leader, Ian PJ, has dug up the “Letter for Posterity” written by popular author Dennis Wheatley in 1947, and tried to claim him as a Libertarian.It will hardly do. Wheatley was at the very least conservative, and I would happily claim him as a reactionary with only slight reservations.In particular, he had no respect for mass democracy. His letter (available in full as an 11-page pdf from the BBC) disposes of it in a couple of paragraphs:… But the voice [of the people] was stilled by the coming of the electro-machine age, as the new inventions enabled the professional politicians of all parties to get into direct touch with every community, however remote. First came the electric press, enabling a million or more copies of a newspaper to be run off in a single night — and enormously improved arrangements for distribution. Then came the wireless telegraph — which swiftly developed into radio, with a five times a day news service which, by means of a cheap receiving set, could be picked up in every home. And these were followed by the cinematograph which soon became one of the most insidious weapons for political propaganda. The result was that instead of forming their opinions by quiet thought and reasoned discussion, the bulk of the people took them ready made (from so called “informed” sources) …Quite.And before you ask, no, blogging doesn’t help. What led to the centralisation of opinion-forming was not the necessity of centralisation – such as has been attributed to the capital costs of printing and broadcasting – but the possibility of centralisation: the fact that the most immediately attractive ideas could reach everyone at once, unfiltered, and gain credibility from their momentum.(Do not imagine that I wish to reimpose the filters on the flow of ideas: it can’t be done, and it shouldn’t be done. I don’t want to control the opinions of the masses, I want to ignore them.)So, no, Ian, Wheatley would not think all the better of us for being “committed to peaceful change through the ballot box”. He would think we are wasting our time.Unfortunately, his prescriptions are not optimistic, unless you accept his assertion that when we are killed fighting for our freedom against the state, we will be reborn with “a finer, stronger personality” as well as being an example to others. (The problems of being an atheist and a reactionary are a subject I’ve been meaning to write about for a while).Back to Wheatley’s non-libertarianism; if we have any historical model of libertarian government, it is probably Whig Britain at the end of the 19th century. Here’s what Wheatley’s recurring hero the Duke de Richleau says about the classical liberal movement, in a scene set in 1906The main plank in the Liberal platform has for long been Free Trade, and with it they have won the votes of the masses in the towns because, on the face of it, their policy means cheap living. But go a little deeper into the matter and you will find that it has another altogether different aspect. The great strength of the Liberal party lies in the industrial north, and the money to finance industry comes from the rich manufacturers and the old Whig families who have invested their wealth in commerce. They are very shrewd people, and they know that if they can bring the cost of living down they will then be able to force down wages and derive bigger profits from their factories.

“Vendetta in Spain”, Dennis Wheatley, 1957 ISBN 0-09-004660-9 p.153

I mentioned slight reservations about Wheatley’s reaction – simply, he is too soft. In the letter, he defends Kings being answerable to an aristocratic class, and even to the will of the people when that was not short-circuited by mass communication.

An Enhanced Model of Zombie Infestation

It’s finally here! I have corrected what I saw as the major flaw in the zombie-infestation model I described earlier, and proceeded to draw a number of interesting conclusions about the effects of zombies on a human population based on my enhanced model.

I even went to the length of learning LaTeX so as to write it up properly.


Here it is! [pdf] (link updated Nov 2010)

There’s actually a lot more I could do, but I don’t have enough time at the moment. I have run a lot of simulations, implemented in Ruby, which guided me to the approach I took. It would be interesting to parameterise the difference between my model and the Ottawa one – they had zombies becoming corpses when killed by humans, whereas I have made them destroyed altogether – I could add another parameter γ which is the proportion of killed zombies which are destroyed. It would be zero in the original model and one in mine, and I could calculate how values less than one affect my conclusions.

There is a serious side to this. In accepting the approach taken by Munz, Hudea, Imad and Smith? I constrained myself, while improving the model, to using the same basic technique. If I could include some phenomenon in the model as a rate of change of a population variable, I did. If I couldn’t model it in that way, I didn’t include it. So including a natural decay rate of zombies would be easy, but introducing the effects of age on humans or zombies would be very difficult.

Most strikingly, I didn’t make any correction to an obvious error in the model, that humans and zombies do not achieve better “combat” results by outnumbering the enemy. I didn’t do it because the line I did take was more interesting. But Mencius Moldbug’s law of sewage applies – if you base a conclusion on N assumptions, and one of them is crap…

Of course, nobody would really rely on such crude mathematical treatments when planning for unlikely events, would they?

Would they?