Scientific Basis

I recently read Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear”. As a thriller, it’s good but not exceptional. As a contribution to climate debate, I’m not sure it’s helpful – there’s an obvious problem with claiming the media is drowning out the real science in a novel. I assume (and hope) that the claim in the author’s postscript, “Everybody has an agenda. Except me.” is not meant to be taken seriously.

What is a useful contribution is the Appendix in which Crichton draws an analogy between the global warming movement and the eugenics movement of the early 20th century. You can read it on his website.

There’s one point in his argument which I think is interestingly wrong. He says, “there was no scientific basis for eugenics.” Perhaps I’m quibbling over words, but if we’re talking about the fundamentals, there was a very solid basis for eugenics. Evolution is real. Genetics is real. It is true that if a person who, for reasons stemming from their genes, would be unable to live and reproduce in a primitive society, is, in our advanced society enabled to live and reproduce, then the gene causing their inability will as a result become more common than would otherwise be the case. That’s basis.

The problem, of course, is in the details, and in what is built on the basis. To what extent is failure in society due to genetic reasons? To what extent is failure of a society or a race as a whole due to genetic reasons? To what extent is the spread of genetic problems restrained by ordinary individual behaviour in the absence of a concerted policy? How long would it take for a change in selection pressures to have a noticeable effect on the human gene pool – decades or millenia? What can we do about changes that occur? Who is to decide which genes are superior? What are we giving up in exchange for genetic improvement?

Global warming has a very solid scientific basis, as I understand the word “basis”. The greenhouse effect is real. Carbon Dioxide concentrations are increasing. The increase is almost certainly anthropogenic. The basis of the theory of global warming is completely sound.

And the details are less clear. What is the magnitude and speed of the change? How much climate variation is due to atmospheric constitution, how much to land use, how much to solar variation, how much to natural oscillation, how much is random, how much is due to causes we haven’t even thought of? What will be the effects, how can we deal with the effects? Who is to regulate atmospheric emissions? What are we giving up in exchange for a cooler climate?

Where Crichton really hits the nail on the head is in his title. This is all about fear. I have worried in the past about the suspicious way in which my assessment of factual issues such as global warming always seems to support my political views. But the issues I have addressed are not purely factual. Fear is always part of the question. The question I have been dealing with is not “what is the matrix of costs and probabilities associated with climate change?”, it is “how much fear should we have of climate change”. And fears are (or should be) relative to other fears.

I have an agenda. My agenda is freedom. To me, the ideas that 10% of our land area might fall below sea level, and that we won’t be able to grow the crops we currently grow, are worrying. The idea that governments could have the power to regulate CO2 is terrifying. When I disagree with the climate science mainstream, I’m not so much disagreeing with the science, I’m disagreeing with the fear. I have different fear.

And fear leaks into the factual assesments also. If science were done perfectly, it wouldn’t, but it does. I think actually the factual disagreements, though they do exist as a result of the leakage, are less significant than they seem, because when they are converted into something meaningful to people, the fear has to play a part in the conversion.

If my terror seems a bit extreme, let me explain. After all, pollution regulations have been around a long time, and have resulted in huge environmental benefits. The difference is locality. The Clean Air Act was a response to local problems. The people who benefited from the act were either the same people as suffered its restrictions, or else lived among them – and we always have to compromise our interests with those we live among.

But the core assertion of the CO2 issue is that my emissions have effect on others independent of their distance from me. It is not enough, therefore, for me to compromise my interests with those of my neighbours, I must compromise with the whole population of planet Earth. That is a qualitative change from any kind of politics that has ever existed. The Kyoto Treaty, by seeking to restrict the essential private activity of burning fuel, is the establishment of a world government in a way that the creation of the UN, which sought to regulate only relations between states, originally was not.

Humankind has always faced environmental threats and problems, and has a good and improving record of coping with them. We have no such comforting record in dealing with overreaching government and tyranny – as Milton Friedman said in the old TV interview that has been going around recently, tyranny and serfdom are the normal state of mankind, and freedom is the rare and precious exception.

The eugenicists sold their participation in a common humanity for a lower incidence of genetic illness. My fear is of selling the existence of a private sphere within which the individual or group can be free for better weather.

The best source for mainstream climate science is realclimate.org. Their criticism of State of Fear is here.
A good source of purely scientific challenge to the mainstream is Roger Pielke Sr
A more obviously political critic of mainstream climate science is Patrick Michaels, who writes at TCS
Michael Crichton’s main attack on global warming is Environmentalism as Religion

In the beginning was the 8`(@H

According to Pope Benedict XVI in his lecture on Tuesday (the one the Muslims are upset about).

The quote is on the Vatican website.

The HTML is rubbish. The line in question contains the text “8`(@H”, wrapped in an HTML font element with a face attribute of “WP Greek Century”.

The document is not xhtml – indeed there is no html version declaration of any kind. There is an http-equiv=”Content-Type” meta element specifying “charset=iso-8859-1”

In other words, the content is published as 8`(@H, in an 8-bit latin character set, with a font requested that would display those characters as greek letters. Since I do not have that font, I get the latin characters.

The file should have had a charset specified that included the proper Greek characters. I might still not have seen them, if I have no suitable font, but I would have been in with more of a chance. Also, the pdf file on the BBC website would probably not have perpetuated the error, since it can include fonts and handle more than latin characters. Since it was presumably produced from the bad HTML, it dutifully reproduces the 8`(@H.

If I were in charge of the Inquisition, the penalty for causing the Vicar of Christ to misquote the first verse of the New Testament would be pretty damn severe, I can tell you.

Update: They’ve fixed it.

[Insert "Short" pun here]

Daniel Finkelstein writes:

[Claire Short] assumes that a hung parliament will lead to proportional representation. This would only happen if a majority of MPs are willing to vote for it (or vote for a referendum on it). Yet many MPs are absolutely opposed to PR and would not support it in any circumstances.

A hung parliament means that a majority government would need support of the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems would (if remotely sane) give support to either party in exchange for PR. MPs “absolutely opposed” to PR might vote for it if it were a condition of being government rather than opposition.

It’s not a certainty, but a hung parliament would have a decent chance of producing PR, and the opinions of individual MPs towards PR is almost beside the point.

In a simplified model, it looks like a hung parliament would not produce PR:

Two main parties are P1 and P2. Balance of power held by D (Lib Dems).

If neither P1 or P2 offer D PR, then D will make a choice P1

If P2 offers PR, P1 can choose either

Offer PR : outcome is P1 in government, with PR.
Don’t offer PR : outcome is P2 in government, with PR.

P1 should therefore offer PR (since it will happen anyway) in order to get in government.

Therefore, for P2, their choice is:

Offer PR : outcome is P1 in government, with PR
Don’t offer PR : outcome is P1 in government, without PR.

So effectively, P2 (whichever party is not preferred by the LDs) has no chance of getting into government, but does have the choice of whether PR will be introduced.

I would guess that the LDs would be more inclined to go into government with Labour than with the Tories. If so, it is the Tories (P2) who would have the choice over whether to force Labour into offering PR or not. Possibly they would. If they can’t get a majority now, it is reasonable to ask whether they ever will. If not, then PR becomes less of a sacrifice.

Of course, my simplified model can be attacked. It makes the following questionable assumptions:

Perfect information
Major parties can commit to introducing PR with perfect credibility.
PR is a yes-or-no issue
LDs care more about PR than about whether Lab or Con get the government (that’s the “if remotely sane”) bit.

I have a non-rigorous feeling that in the real world the doubts and grey areas could drag both P1 and P2 towards offering PR to improve their chances.

That might be wishful thinking though. I am strongly in favour of PR, as it would split the main parties and allow voters the choice of a party that more closely represented their views.

Actually, there’s another move in the game. I was assuming the LD strategy was “Support the P1, unless P2 offers PR and P1 doesn’t, in which case support P2”. If the LD strategy is “Support P1 if P1 offers PR, otherwise support P2”, then, provided P1 would prefer to be in government than to keep out PR, P1’s best strategy would be “offer PR”, and that would be the outcome.

That’s really counter-intuitive. It’s saying that the LDs should say “We prefer Labour to Conservative, but we will only support them if they give us PR. Otherwise we will punish them by support the Tories, whether the Tories give us PR or not.”

I thought this game was solveable, but my limited grasp of game theory might not be up to the task. I’ll have to go away and think about it (and look up the proper notation).

H/T S&M

Sweeping up the fairy dust

More evidence that sprinkling private-sector fairy dust onto a public-sector project doesn’t actually work:

iSoft Plc is a software provider that’s been working on the huge NHS IT project.

Because the public sector is wasteful, the project was contracted to companies like iSoft. iSoft was to provide the software for a fixed price, so if it all went wrong that would be iSoft’s problem, not the government’s. Hooray, no more risk!

What rubbish. As soon as the contract was signed, iSoft became part of the public sector. The project had to be completed, therefore iSoft had to be able to complete it, therefore iSoft could not be allowed to fail.

Private Eye questioned iSoft’s accounts – they were accounting for payments to be paid under the contract, despite the fact that delivery was behind schedule, or something like that. iSoft’s solvency came under question.

Since the government needed the project, they had to make sure iSoft stayed in business. So they advanced some of the cash, for products not yet delivered. iSoft currently has £43.9m in advance payments.

You can’t blame the DoH for making the advance payments. They had to be made, because without them the project could not have gone ahead. The error was in ever believing that “public-private partnership” reduces risk.

There is one difference between this type of arrangement and a pure public-sector approach. If the project had gone exceptionally well, and cost less than expected, the government would not have seen the savings – the shareholders would have. To be completely fair, that’s not entirely a bad thing, because it at least creates some incentive for the job to be done efficiently. Of course, it also creates incentive for the job to be cowboyed, provided the letter of the contract is met. This is why there are two common outcomes of PFI projects:

1) Business as usual, job is done over budget and behind schedule.
2) Job is successful but a large proportion of the government expenditure goes to “windfall” profits for contractors.

The second is more common where it is easier to say what activities the contractor should perform than what end result they should deliver (because then the contractor can cut corners and deliver crap), the first where it is easier to say what should be delivered than how it should be done.

Human rights

While blithering about human rights in the previous post, I meant to mention Dave Kopel’s piece yesterday as a case in point. Since I went on so long it’s probably good that I forgot.

Kopel quotes a United Nations report saying that protection of human rights requires that governments “keep small arms out of the hands of persons who are likely to misuse them”

Equally, the US has traditionally seen it as a human right to be free to obtain firearms, as recognised in its constitution.

Neither approach is obviously stupid – one can make a reasonable case either way. But they are totally in conflict; they cannot possibly both be universal human rights. Thus, the outcome of any attempt to “establish” human rights universally could only be conflict between the two visions – a conflict that need not occur if countries recognise each others’ sovereignty.

I don’t mean to espouse any kind of moral relativism – one society’s vision of human rights need not be as good as another’s. In fact on this issue, unlike the gambling one, I agree with the Septics. But to say “my way is right and everyone must follow it” is to say “I must be world ruler”. I say “my way is better than your way”, but you’re free to do it wrong as long as direct effects on me are kept to a minimum.

Online Gambling

This is tricky because it’s about who has the right to be wrong about what.

I think gambling is generally a bad thing. It can be fun, but it can also be generally destructive. While I’m not sure its helpful to throw around words like “addiction”, it’s pretty clear that many people who gamble are behaving very strongly against their own interests.

Should gambling therefore be illegal? Absolutely not. The problems are threefold – you are stopping the harmless entertainment as well as the self-destructive behaviour; you are raising your (and my) judgement as to what is good for someone else over their own judgement*, and you are introducing the plagues of prohibition, including a criminal class and a corrupt enforcement bureaucracy.

However, despite these very strong arguments, the governments of the USA and many of its States have banned gambling (with various indefensible and illogical exceptions for State lotteries, etc).

One of my more eccentric beliefs is in National Sovereignty. If a foreign state (however constituted) wants to get stuff wrong, then unless it directly affects me, it’s really none of my business. They’re entitled to do stuff differently; that’s what being foreign is all about.

That proposition doesn’t flow easily from any theoretical statement of morality or justice. You could build up to it from a concept of democratic rights, but as I don’t restrict sovereign rights to democratic states, that doesn’t help me. For me, sovereignty is a pragmatic rule, a compromise which reduces the amount of conflict between countries – and conflict between countries is one of the major causes of human suffering and poverty. As such, the principle can be overridden in very extreme cases – such as the Rwandan genocide – but those familiar with this blog will be aware that I am very much more cautious than most regarding “humanitarian violence”.

Of course, since no-one is suggesting starting a war to protect the human rights of Americans to play online video poker, I’ve gone off on a slight tangent here. Mind, we did once fight a war for the human rights of the Chinese to take opium, but even those of us who favour drug liberalisation generally give less than wholehearted approval to that project.

There is a kind of consistency to my views: just as Beryl should be free to damage herself by buying lottery tickets (but I would prefer her not to), the USA should be free to damage itself by prohibiting gambling (but I would prefer it not to).**

Now we come to the tricky stuff. What if an American flies to Britain, walks into a bookmaker’s shop in Luton, and puts a bet on a horse.

Well, that’s OK, I think obviously. The US government might choose to deal with the visitor when he gets home (but in fact, according to current law, wouldn’t).

What if the horse race doesn’t run until the visitor has gone home. Can the bookmaker pay the visitor’s winnings, by sending him a cheque or crediting his bank account? The question is whether the bookmaker is simply settling a debt (and the fact that the transaction which gave rise to the debt would have been illegal if it had taken place in the US is beside the point, because the transaction didn’t take place in the US), or whether the payment itself is a transaction with someone in the US which is in breach of US law.

I think the US government is entitled to consider it the latter. Gambling is, after all, not much other than an exchange of money; if you send a cheque to America in settlement of a gambling transaction, you are gambling with someone in America.

Since you are outside US jurisdiction, you are safe, since the US ought to respect your country’s sovereignty.

But if you later travel to the US, their government can justly claim that you have been dealing with the US in a way that is against US law.

To take a parallel but less morally confusing example, if a Nigerian scams me out of a stack of money by claiming to to be MIRIAM ABACHA, and then later comes to Britain on unrelated business, he should be arrested. Exactly what country he was in when he conned me, and what the law is in that country, is beside the point.

When we come to the actual cases that are in the news, most recently Peter Dicks, another question arises. Was he knowingly dealing with the US? I think that matters: if, as far as he knew, he was simply carrying on a legal business, and unknown to him, some of his users were actually in a jurisdiction where the business was not legal, then he hasn’t done anything wrong – it is like my very first example of a bookmaker completing a transaction in Luton with an American visitor.

On the other hand, if he is knowingly transacting business with people in America, he is like the second example of the bookmaker sending a cheque to America – the transaction is taking place between two countries and is illegal in one of them. I would think that in the concrete cases existing, this is the case.

The structure of the internet makes it possible to not know the location or nationality of your customers. This makes the question really difficult. I suppose the US government is still entitled to make its own rules about how careful those who come within its reach should be to avoid acting, while abroad, in a way that it considers illegal. But if it does act against those who as far as they know are behaving totally legally within the jurisdictions they are working in, it is stepping over a line of what is generally considered reasonable behaviour of a state. Note it has not yet done that over the gambling question, as far as I can see.

What I’m really arguing against here is the idea that the internet changes the rules – that if what the server is doing is legal in the place where it happens to be sitting, then no other government should be able to do anything about it. It would be nice if it did, but I say that only because I am generally in favour of freedom, and that would bring more freedom. I can’t defend it in terms of logic or history, though. The internet isn’t the first mechanism to allow people in different countries to deal with each other, and governments have always held that they can restrict or prohibit such dealings according to their own policies.

*It is OK to make a judgement about someone else’s interests – as I have done. It is another matter to deny that person their own (bad) judgement
**That is an analogy – I do not claim that states and individuals should always be looked at in the same way.

How good is Wikipedia?

This has rumbled on for a long time.

I fall more in the pro than the anti camp, but with reservations.

I am not convinced by claims that Wikipedia is as accurate as Britannica, and it would be very surprising if they were true. The “latest snapshot” of Wikipedia cannot be authoritative in the way a managed encyclopedia or a textbook can be, and I am disturbed to see Wikipedia cited in scholarly articles or legal opinions.

However, to me those aren’t the main point. Wikipedia is not really in competition with premium encyclopedias or university-level textbooks – its easy availability and massive scope put it into a different category. It makes more sense to compare it with other casual ways of gathering information – conversations in the pub, the popular press, TV programmes, memories of junior school lessons.

In my opinion, we get most of our information about most subjects from sources considerably less reliable than Wikipedia. Take the question of of early-20th century history I mentioned last week. My first source of information was a historical novel – low reliability. Next was Wikipedia – surely more reliable than a work of fiction. Thirdly I discussed it with my wife – not in general a high-reliability source, but since I happen to be married to a history teacher, the source has a certain authoratitiveness. Less detailed, accurate, information, in fact, than Wikipedia, but, while it is possible that Wikipedia might be seriously misleading or incomplete, it is less likely that a history graduate, even one rusty in the particular subject, would be so.

But authority is a niche market, though an important one. When you need an authoritative answer, nothing else will do. Most of the time, you don’t. Unless you have a good reason to find an authoritative answer, you’re not likely to find one – they don’t grow on trees.

The other question is how much better Wikipedia will get. I think the answer is not much – it has grown rapidly to the limits that its structure puts on it. The organisers will continue to tweak the rules to balance new contribution, vandalism and editing, and it will continue to expand in scope, but the basic level of quality is probably about where it will remain. As I’ve said, that quality is very high for most purposes, but not high enough to displace truly authoritative sources of information.

A couple of asides on possible derivatives of Wikipedia: It might be possible to take a snapshot of Wikipedia as a starting point for producing a truly authoritative encyclopedia – it would probably be easier to check the articles there than produce authorititave ones from scratch. Such a product would compete with “real” encyclopedias, but would not compete so much with “live” Wikipedia, which gets much of its value from its currency.

Also, I’m not up to speed with current work on A.I., but I’ve tended to the view that a missing element is the very large amount of stuff you need to know to have any kind of ordinary conversation with a human being. I can’t help wondering whether the enormous database of “general knowledge” that is wikipedia might at some stage form a key part of the first natural-language speaking A.I.

Update: Tim Bray makes the point that Wikipedia’s popularity as a reference is partly due to the fact that those who could provide authoritative information in the public domain aren’t doing so in a sufficiently organised way.

NERON

NERON is a US project to cover the country with automatic weather stations – one every 400 square miles, measuring temperature and precipitation accumulation every 5 minutes. By my calcuations, that means about 10,000 weather stations.

Given how much we don’t know about weather and climate, and the importance, and given also how much we are spending on climate worries one way or another, this really looks like a good thing.

(H/T Climate Science Weblog)

The Long War

I’m scrabbling around trying to get a lot of my disorganised thoughts on the War on Terror into proper relation.

The “long war” rationale for the Iraq war is essentially a return to the Heinlein theory that in a world of nuclear weapons, potential enemies cannot be tolerated. The Middle East is a threat for the indefinite future, and therefore must be reshaped politically to remove the danger.

The problem with the theory for me is the scale of its ambition. The project aims at achieving a world, in the relevant 10-30 year timescale, where no medium-sized industrial nation capable of developing nuclear weapons will be hostile enough to be a risk of passing on the weapons to terrorists, or using them.

The strategy doesn’t necessarily have to be 100% successful to be worthwhile, if a partial success would reduce the danger. But a partial success, while reducing the pool of potentially lethal enemies, might well at the same time increase the danger from those remaining in the pool, mostly by increasing their motivation to obtain nuclear weapons as a deterrent.

This is why, in the division of long-term projects I made in the previous piece, the project falls on the “hubris” side. We can be reasonably sure that having more fertile land, or having cheaper energy, 30 or 50 years in the future will be a good thing. It’s difficult to say how good, but the beneficial nature of these things are robust with respect to all sorts of unpredictable developments.

It’s not obvious in the same way that having a military presence in the Middle East will be a good thing. It might well be, but it easily might be a bad thing – there are well-known downsides to empire. The rationale for undertaking the project relies on a number of assumptions about political, technological and economic developments over several decades. They are not silly assumptions, but in combination they are not at all reliable.

Against that objection, there is a “desperation” argument. That says that the long-run prospects as they stand are so bad, that even if an attempt to remove the nuclear threat has a low chance of success, it is a chance worth pursuing, because it’s the best chance we have.

Again, I think that’s too pessimistic. I don’t know how we will deal with the increasing nuclear threat over the coming decades, but as a statement of ignorance of the future, that is not particularly interesting. Something may well turn up. I’m not saying we should assume it must, but the “desperation” argument assumes that nothing will turn up, and I think that is invalid.

A brief history of Nuclear War

In 1945, one nation had nuclear weapons. By 1949, there were two. 1964, five. Today, probably nine.

By now, any industrial nation could develop fission weapons if not actively prevented. Any advanced nation could probably develop fusion weapons.

A matter of a decade or two, it will be possible for half the countries on Earth to make nuclear weapons. A while ago, I suggested that one day a kitchen device would be able to synthesize arbitrary chemicals; if nanotechnology fulfils its promise, then uranium enrichment could become a garage activity. Twenty-five years? Fifty? I can’t see it taking a hundred.

Since 1945, various strategies have been put forward to protect against nuclear attack.

One of the first suggested was world conquest. Robert Heinlein was very insistent in the 40s that the only sane course was for the USA to conquer the entire world before any potential enemy could develop nuclear weapons.

Disarmament was another widely recommended option – stuffing the genie back into the bottle.

The two strategies that were actually pursued were deterrence and non-proliferation. Deterrence worked – and innovations such as submarine-launched missiles reduced the first-strike threat. But as the number of nuclear powers increases, the reliability of deterrence falls, as the possibility of a concealed or deniable attack increase, and there is more chance of a foreign power being desperate or crazy enough to not care about deterrence.

Non-proliferation may have slowed down the spread of nuclear weapon technology, but in the long run, it is failing.

So how bad is the long-run outlook? It is seriously worrying. If, in 2060, the likes of Mohammed Siddique Khan and his associates (or Timothy McVeigh, or David Copeland) can produce a few atomic bombs in a house, it seems inevitable that sooner or later we would see a level of destructive nuclear terrorism which could totally destabilize our society – in the way that present-day terrorism – with home-made bombs, sabotage, and assasination – simply can’t.

What about the nearer future? Say 2025 – enriched uranium is still outside the reach of the hobbyist, but there are 100 or 200 potential or actual nuclear powers in the world. Some of them are politically unstable. Some of them are our enemies. How long can such a situation endure without a society-destroying state or state-sponsored-terrorist nuclear attack?

It’s very difficult to say.

Somehow, I’m just not too worried by all this. It’s just too hard to predict politics that far into the future with any confidence. You can pick one issue – nuclear proliferation – and project and speculate as to how it will develop, which is what I’ve done. What you can’t do is take all the other areas which might change the environment, and predict how all of them will develop over decades. What countermeasures might be developed? How will the world economy change? How powerful will satellite surveillance become? What totally unexpected technological, political or economic development will change the game beyond recognition?

That’s not a conclusive reason for letting the future fend for itself. I’m trying to draw a distinction between the forseeable consequences of our actions, which we must evaluate and include in our calculations, and the attempt to predict and manipulate the state of the world in the far future, which is hubris. Projects which will bring long-term benefits are certainly worthy of consideration, whether they be irrigating the deserts, or developing new energy sources, or anything else useful – we are not sure how valuable their results will be, but if, appropriately discounted, our best estimate is that they will pay for their costs, then they are worth doing. But projects whose value depends on particular assumptions as to the state of the world in the far future – that we will be allied to certain types of government, or that the balance of state versus individual power will move in a certain way – well, given the right assumptions almost any policy can be justified, including policies of “bringing forward” future and actually quite unlikely conflicts to the present.

Update: A more alarming assesment of the current nuclear threat from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists