Tag: climate and religion

Climatic Climax

The last time I blogged about climate was in early 2018. Back then, I said that the climate scare was “primarily a media phenomenon“.

I was seriously wrong. I had underestimated the decline of conspiracy, the degree to which it is impossible in the modern age to sustain insincerity1.

I also ignored everything I knew about the Cathedral. The media is part of the ruling structure; if the media believes something, then by definition the ruling structure believes it.

My mental model, at the time, was that the media promoted the climate scare because it was good TV. The politicians went along with it because it was good politics. But at the end of the day, real action on the climate would be superficial, fake, or indefinitely postponed to the future, because the sensible people behind the scenes would never actually cripple our entire civilisation over something so silly.

What an idiot.

In reality the climate scare was and is primarily a political phenomenon — one of the non-partisan runaway manias I discussed recently, under the title Loyalists without a cause. As I tweeted, “Since the end of the cold war, the most damaging movements have been non-partisan: environmentalism, social justice, global democracy.”

In the modern system, where nobody is responsible for results, and everyone is responsible for tomorrow’s papers, it is just very much easier to support something that makes you seem selfless or kind than to oppose it. If it is actually a live partisan issue, then you can and should take your side, in order to appeal to your party, but only a few things can be live partisan issues at once. Those are the important issues, and if you weaken your position by taking an unattractive position on an unimportant non-partisan issue, you risk concrete losses on the important partisan issues. (You also risk your own personal advancement.)

I did touch on this, back in 2010 — the left-wing commentator Jonathan Hari claimed that 91% of Conservative MPs “don’t believe man-made global warming exists.” And yet, I emphasised, they ran on a manifesto commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

In late 2018, I pointed out that “It is a feature of any large movement that pretending to believe something is effectively the same as believing it.” If Tory MPs in 2010 did not believe that man-made global warming existed, that made no difference. They effectively did believe it. There were no sensible people behind the scenes, keeping the power stations open.

There’s also a generational effect. The 2010 parliamentary conservative party might have been pretending, but newcomers coming in weren’t in on the joke.

There’s also no absolute limit on how far things can go, as Sri Lanka is in the process of demonstrating. There is no fuel on the island, no money to buy any because the export industries have been crippled, and the mob yesterday stormed the presidential palace. Because of environmentalism.

At the same time, it isn’t actually inevitable. To take one of my favourite themes, the unthinkable can become thinkable very fast. This could happen tomorrow.

The German Green party just voted for more coal power 2

The European Commission and Parliament have agreed that Natural Gas is Green and sustainable

The easy way to save civilisation, without looking an idiot on climate change, is just to not talk about it. It all got going because the media would happily report the conflict between “nice” pro-environment politicians and “nasty” anti-environment politicians, and nobody wanted to appear nasty. If the left-wing media see that banging on about climate change is bad for their politicians, they will keep their mouths shut. The population will forget all about it in a matter of weeks. If it stays a non-partisan issue, then politicians will as always take whatever side of the story gives them better press.

Over a longer timescale, when the fanatics counterattack, then an actual counter-narrative will gradually be built. The dangers were over-hyped. Adaptation is feasible. Warm weather is actually good. Those of us who have been saying all of this for decades will be completely ignored, but our talking points, suitably laundered, will be everywhere. As I said before, decades from now the question will be recorded in history as a media fad that got out of hand.

A bunch of scientists will have funding dry up. But this was never really about science. The whole climate scare is fundamentally political, not scientific. Because of that, if the politics change everything else will just topple. In the early years of this blog, I wrote very frequently about the science, or lack thereof, of global warming. There is a small amount of very bad science making the case for a catastrophe. There is a truly vast amount of science explicitly taking that as a given, and wrapped in verbiage that seems to support it, but not itself adding any evidence. There are a lot of papers whose conclusions are phrased to give support to the dominant political narrative, but whose concrete findings are wholly compatible with “negligible effect”. Change the political incentives, and all these papers can be repeated, with identical results and “nothing need be done” abstracts. Again, history will not describe this as a scientific story.

The active propagandists of global warming always knew that this could happen. You can see that very clearly in the climategate emails that leaked in 2009 — they were desperate to keep control of the media narrative, even though to casual observers it looked like their opponents were very few and weak.

I’m not actually particularly confident that it is going to break like that now. Sri Lanka shows that it is not inevitable. But it could happen.

Politics and Ignorance

Tweetable link: https://t.co/7PSFTs8pdw?amp=1

We are at a very interesting stage in the Coronavirus crisis.

Most of the big important questions are still not answered.

How many people will it kill if left unchecked? Anywhere from about 0.1% to about 10% of the population.

How long until we have a vaccine? Anywhere from six months to never.

Will it die out once enough people are immune, or stick around for ever, or come back from time to time as it mutates? Don’t know.

How much effect does intensive hospital treatment have on the death rate? Definitely some. Maybe a lot. Don’t know.

Will we have treatments that will significantly reduce the death rates? Don’t know.

Will it have similar impact all over the world, or is its geographic range restricted? Don’t know.

What does it take to stop it spreading out of control? Can it be done by just being careful, wearing masks in public, and quarantining detected cases, or do all group activities need to be drastically curtailed? Not sure.

In spite of this, governments need to act. Policies need to be made, and, with all this democracy malarkey, people are getting attached to policy proposals and arguing very strongly for one or another. In fact, people often are getting more strongly and emotionally attached than usual, I assume because this more obviously is a life-or-death issue than most political questions.

I am not (yet) really attached. Given all this ignorance, policy choice is very sensitive to estimates of the probable answers to all the open questions, as well as being sensitive to all the values and principles that make other political questions controversial. With a few exceptions, I don’t think any government has acted in a way I can say is very bad. The exceptions are very widespread — all governments were caught underprepared. Most governments ought to have been quicker to impose restrictions on movement of people into the country — by far the most efficient way of protecting from any infectious disease is to stop it getting in. But once we hit the pandemic phase, I can see good arguments for any policy we have seen, from doing very little and letting it run its course, to temporarily shutting down all non-essential activity until we know more. It might even turn out that the optimal policy is to let it rip, falsify the statistics, and pretend that it’s gone away (as some are accusing the Chinese government of doing). Governments actively discouraging masks seems almost definitely a bad idea, and the tendency to let the perfect be the enemy of the good is obstructing execution of policy in the matter of equipment, treatments and testing. But beyond that most governments have responded in reasonable ways.

Where I am getting a bit excited is where people, in attempting to argue for one policy or another, are claiming that facts are established that really aren’t.

The big one is the impact on hospitals. I wrote on March the 12th that what we were expecting was:

The government view is that [Italy] is just the beginning. It is going to get that bad. And then it is going to get worse. And then it is going to carry on getting worse. What they are concerned with is just how much worse it’s going to get.

That’s still probably the most likely projection: currently the UK is getting about 6000 confirmed cases per day, that could well go up tenfold: we could have a million people sick at once and there’s no reasonable way to put them in hospitals and treat them, so mostly they will be on their own.

But we absolutely do not know that. No population we know of has reached that stage, not even the Diamond Princess cruise ship.

What is getting me upset is that some people are saying this is already happening. I’m pretty sure it isn’t. It’s a reasonable projection, based on our limited knowledge, but I’ve seen no evidence anywhere has actually got to that yet, and there should be evidence. I’ve had arguments on twitter with people claiming a few breathless TV news reports from Italian towns prove it, but TV news is always stripped of context and presented to give a strong impression. Certainly, a few hospitals have been reduced to states of chaos, but that actually happens from time to time. Britain’s health service is notorious, but I’m sure it’s not the only one where a much smaller shock than that which we are anticipating from the peak of the pandemic can temporarily throw a single hospital into chaos.

(I’m also getting upset by people saying “the pandemic is a nothingburger”, but that is not generally coming from people I otherwise respect).

This really does bring up the parallel with climate science. Because it was once in the same place. My view is that the original modelling of the greenhouse effect in the 1980s was good science, and the idea that rising CO2 concentrations could affect the climate in a very damaging way was very much worth worrying about. But by say 1990 that is where we were. We had some models, some very questionable historical data, and a threat that demanded we take precautions and find out more.

Then it got political. The oil companies, very unwisely, tried to get the idea dismissed. Anti-capitalists got very excited about a reason to suppress industrial civilisation. And everyone claimed the facts supporting their position were known. In reality, we still didn’t know anything.

Over the last 30 years, the alarming climate models have been completely invalidated, the paleoclimatology claiming that current conditions are unprecedented has been debunked, but none of it matters because it is now simply a political question. People lined up on one side or the other of the open scientific questions because their enemies were on the other side, and no new information would have shifted them. Most strikingly, there are people claiming that the climate has already changed by so much that it is obvious to direct personal experience, when the officially measured change in average temperature over a human lifetime is way below what anyone could actually notice.

That’s what the claim that COVID-19 is already causing health system collapse reminds me of. Now, if it does get to that point in the next 4 or 8 weeks, which of course is quite likely, then it doesn’t matter. Some people just anticipated it. But what if it doesn’t? How do we persuade somebody that it isn’t going to happen, when they’ve been defining themselves politically by the claim that it happened already? The big question in climate, the only one now that really interests me, is what it will take for the alarmists to give in. If the Coronavirus fizzles out, which as of today is still a possibility, what will it take for people to admit it?

Fear and Equality

Very insightful point by @mnwoodhouse on twitter:

the slatestarcodex post about masks points out that the “masks don’t work” propaganda goes back several years, so it can’t be entirely related to current supply concerns for medical workers. instead i think it might be an example of the notion in contemporary liberalism that any “fears” or risk/harm avoidance — with some specific exceptions — are necessarily irrational

You can see how this happened. Egalitarians do not want us to fear the other. The natural tendency of humans is to fear the other. Liberalism started in the 1700s (if you like) in the environment where there was exaggerated fear of people who were different. They argued that the fears were incorrect, that people of other countries, other races, other religions were not nearly as dangerous as people thought. They were right! Society became less fearful, more accepting, and saw concrete benefits as a result.

But in the late 1900s that process stalled. As reduced fearfulness came closer to actual equality, the concept that fears of the other were exaggerated ceased to be true, to the point that today, “FBI Crime Statistics” is a far-right slogan in its own right.

It was easy to argue against irrational fears. You used facts. How, though, do you argue against rational fear?

Well, I skimmed for arguments against John Derbyshire’s piece, but I couldn’t find any — just pointing and sputtering. And I think that’s the answer. You argue against rational fear by not even beginning to engage with it, but by ruling it out-of-bounds from the start. Derbyshire is wrong to tell his children to fear blacks, because it is bad to argue that some people are dangerous. We won’t even go into detail about exactly what is and isn’t bad to fear: we don’t want to get into tricky questions over FBI crime statistics, or anything, we will just say “stuff like that is bad” and leave it at that.

If Derbyshire is factually wrong, which he might be, that doesn’t actually change the argument. The important point isn’t that he is right, it’s that his critics do not dispute him on factual grounds, only on vague moral grounds. Everything else follows.

If someone had posted on Twitter that, in the fight against the novel Coronavirus, the World Heath Organisation had decided to take the side of the virus, I would have taken it as a joke, and a rather feeble and unfunny one. But I would have been wrong. The result of having a bucket of “ideas that are bad”, which you aren’t allowed to reason about in detail, is that “wear a mask to protect yourself from viral infection”, or “don’t let planeloads of people from an area with a dangerous epidemic land in your country” end up in the same bucket as “If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date”

Internationalists are literally defending the virus from prejudice in the same way they would defend minorities from prejudice. They are doing so in spite of the indisputable fact that the virus is dangerous, because you’re not allowed to get into facts when defending minorities from prejudice. They are doing so without having any actual desire for the virus to flourish, because you are not allowed to consider whether you desire specific oppressed minorities to flourish when combating prejudice. “You must protect yourself from this dangerous thing” makes liberals feel immediately uneasy, and they are conditioned to avoid even digging into that unease.

There is one exception. If the thing you are warning against is rich white people, or if you can at least claim it’s rich white people, you are safe. nobody is uneasy about that. So if you are in, say, the World Health Organisation, founded to fight infectious disease, your whole life is a little bit uncomfortable until you can shift attention to something where the only fear is directed at rich white people. Like, say, climate change.

WHO calls for urgent action to protect health from climate change – Sign the call

“The evidence is overwhelming: climate change endangers human health. Solutions exist and we need to act decisively to change this trajectory.”

Dr Margaret Chan, WHO Director-General

Climate change is the greatest threat to global health in the 21st century.

Climate Update

As I wrote in 2016, I don’t cover Climate Change any more, because it’s over. In the sense that Climate Change was ever “a thing”, it was primarily a media phenomenon, and now the media has lost interest, there really isn’t anything to talk about.
As a by-product of the media interest, there was a whole chunk of what passes today for scientific research going on, filling in details for the media to report. Like so much current science, it was basically worthless: a grinding out of suspect results from statistical analysis of big noisy data sets, and of computer modelling. It’s still there, but it’s declining, and will have pretty much died out in another decade.
It’s interesting to try to work out how the Climate Change phenomenon of the last quarter-century will be seen by history. I think mostly it will be just ignored. The fact that a large proportion of the most intelligent and educated people in a handful of western countries seriously believed that humanity was under threat from a warmer climate just won’t make it into popular history. I used to think that the internet made it hard to rewrite history, but I’ve had the experience a few times recently of trying to find news stories from just a few years ago, and it’s really difficult. They are there, in the main, but I don’t think doing a really thorough survey of what people were saying and thinking a few decades ago is going to be any easier than it was in the days of newspaper archives.
I was moved to re-address this dead subject because Ed West quoted from Stephen Pinker’s new book, which says

A recent survey found that exactly four out of 69,406 authors of peer-reviewed articles in the scientific literature rejected the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, and that “the peer-reviewed literature contains no convincing evidence against [the hypothesis]”

As I remarked, this causes no problems for history, because it has no relevance to the Climate Change media issue which is the real thing that happened in the 1990s and 2000s. The hypothesis that human CO2 emissions have a warming effect on the climate is reasonable, quite likely true, and fundamentally impossible to disprove. It is also of no practical importance. Climate change was an issue because of the idea that this warming effect would be large and self-amplifying — that is the question which was under serious scientific dispute. But both sides of that dispute were part of the “97%” who accepted that humans cause global warming. If it turned out eventually that the vast majority of scientists were wrong about the climate, that would be something difficult to explain away. But they weren’t and aren’t, at least in any kind of recorded formal way. If someone in 2040 were to claim, “Everyone in 2004 believed that we were under threat from Climate Change”, the answer would be, “no, no, there was a lot of hype in the press, but the science at the time was pretty cautious and sound, and didn’t imply anything of the sort. It was just a bit of media hysteria that some politicians made capital out of”.

Modelling Failures

Nothing really new here, but pulling a few things together.

Start with Joseph K’s observation:

This is a good point, and I added that the failure of financial risk models in 2008 was essentially the same thing.

The base problem is overconfidence. “People do not have enough epistemic humility”, as Ben Dixon put it.

The idea in all these fields is that you want to make some estimate about the future of some system. You make a mathematical model of the system, relating the visible outputs to internal variables. You also include a random variable in the model.

You then compare the outputs of your model to the visible outputs of the system being modelled, and modify the parameters until they match as closely as possible. They don’t match exactly, but you make the effects of your random variable just big enough that your model could plausibly produce the outputs you have seen.

If that means your random variable basically dominates, then your model is no good and you need a better one. But if the random element is fairly small, you’re good to go.

In polling, your visible effects are how people answer polling questions and how they vote. In social science, it’s how subjects behave in experiments, or how they answer questions, or how they do things that come out in published statistics. In finance, it’s the prices at which people trade various instruments.

The next step is where it all goes wrong. In the next step, you assume that your model—including its random variable to account for the unmeasured or unpredictable—is exactly correct, and make predictions about what the future outputs of the system will be. Because of the random variable, your predictions aren’t certain; they have a range and a probability. You say, “Hillary Clinton has a 87% chance of winning the election”. You say “Reading these passages changes a person’s attitude to something-or-other in this direction 62% of the time, with a probability of 4.6% that the effect could have been caused randomly”. You say, “The total value of the assets held by the firm will not decrease by more than 27.6 million dollars in a day, with a probability of 99%”.

The use of probabilities suggests to an outsider that you have epistemic humility–you are aware of your own fallibility and are taking account of the possibility of having gone wrong. But that is not the case. The probabilities you quote are calculated on the basis that you have done everything perfectly, that you model is completely right, and that nothing has changed in between the production of the data you used to build the model and the events that you are attempting to predict. The unpredictability that you account for is that which is caused by the incompleteness of your model—which is necessarily a simplification of the real system—not on the possibility that what your model is doing is actually wrong.

In the case of the polling, what that means is that the margin of error quoted with the poll is based on the assumptions that the people polled answered honestly; that they belong to the demographic groups that the pollsters thought they belonged to, that the proportion of demographic groups in the electorate are what the pollsters thought they were. The margin of error is based on the random variables in the model: the fact that the random selection of people polled might be atypical of the list they were taken from, possibly, if the model is sophisticated enough, that the turnout of different demographics might vary from what is predicted (but where does the data come from to model that?)

In the social sciences, the assumptions are that the subjects are responding to the stimuli you are describing, and not to something else. Also that people will behave the same outside the laboratory as they do inside. The stated probabilities and uncertainties again are not reflecting any doubt as to those assumptions: only to the modelled randomness of sampling and measurement.

On the risk modelling used by banks, I can be more detailed, because I actually did it. It is assumed that the future price changes of an instrument follow the same probability distributions as in the past. Very often, because the instruments do not have a sufficient historical record, a proxy is used; one which is assumed to be similar. Sometimes instead of a historical record or a proxy there is just a model, a normal distribution plus a correlation with the overall market, or a sector of it. Again, lots of uncertainty in the predictions, but none of it due to the possibility of having the wrong proxy, or of there being something new about the future which didn’t apply to the past.

Science didn’t always work this way. The way you do science is that you propose the theory, then it is tested against observations over a period of time. That’s absolutely necessary: the model, even with the uncertainty embedded within it, is a simplification of reality, and the only justification for assuming that the net effects of the omitted complexities are within error bounds is that that is seen to happen.

If the theory is about the emission spectra of stars, or the rate of a chemical reaction, then once the theory is done it can be continually tested for a long period. In social sciences or banking, nobody is paying attention for long enough, and the relevant environment is changing too much over a timescale of years for evidence that a theory is sound to build up. It’s fair enough: the social scientists, pollsters and risk managers are doing the best they can. The problem is not what they are doing, it is the excessive confidence given to their results. I was going to write “their excessive confidence”, but that probably isn’t right: they know all this. Many of them (there are exceptions) know perfectly well that a polling error margin, or a p-value, or a VaR are not truly what the definitions say, but only the closest that they can get. It is everyone who takes the numbers at face value that is making the mistake. However, none of these analysts, of whichever flavour, are in a position to emphasise the discrepancy. They always have a target to aim for.

For a scientist, they have to get a result with a p-value to publish a paper. That is their job: if they do it, they have succeeded, otherwise, they have not. A risk manager, similarly, has a straightforward day-to-day job of persuading the regulator that the bank is not taking too much risk. I don’t know the ins and outs of polling, but there is always pressure. In fact Nate Silver seems to have done exactly what I suggest: his pre-election announcement seems to be been along the lines “Model says Clinton 85%, but the model isn’t reliable, I’m going to call it 65%”. And he got a lot of shit for it.

Things go really bad when there is a feedback loop from the result of the modelling to the system itself. If you give a trader a VaR budget, he’ll look to take risks that don’t show in the VaR. If you campaign so as to maximise your polling position, you’ll win the support of the people who don’t bother to vote, or you’ll put people off saying they’ll vote for the other guy without actually stopping them voting for the other guy. Nasty.

Going into the election, I’m not going to say I predicted the result. But I didn’t fall for the polls. Either there was going to be a big differential turnout between Trump supporters and Clinton supporters, or there wasn’t. Either there were a lot of shy Trump supporters, or there weren’t. I thought there was a pretty good chance of both, but no amount of Data was going to tell me. Sometimes you just don’t know.

That’s actually an argument for not “correcting” the polls. At least if there is a model—polling model, VaR model, whatever—you can take the output and then think about it. If the thinking has already been done, and corrections already applied, that takes the option away from you. I didn’t know to what extent the polls had already be corrected for the unquantifiables that could make them wrong. The question wasn’t so much “are there shy Trump voters?” as “are there more shy Trump voters than some polling organisation guessed there are?”

Of course, every word of all this applies just the same to that old obsession of this blog, climate. The models have not been proved; they’ve mostly been produced honestly, but there’s a target, and there are way bigger uncertainties than those which are included in the models. But the reason I don’t blog about climate any more is that it’s over. The Global Warming Scare was fundamentally a social phenomenon, and it has gone. Nobody other than a few activists and scientists takes it seriously any more, and mass concern was an essential part of the cycle. There isn’t going to be a backlash or a correction; there won’t be papers demolishing the old theories and getting vast publicity. Rather, the whole subject will just continue to fade away. If Trump cuts the funding, as seems likely, it will fade away a bit quicker. Lip service will occasionally be paid, and summits will continue to be held, but less action will result from them. The actual exposure of the failure of science won’t happen until the people who would have been most embarrassed by it are dead. That’s how these things go.

Antidisestablishmentarianism

I wrote before, that while religion can be a force for reaction,
Religion, or at any rate Christianity,
should not be
the primary basis of a reactionary state. There are too many factions
(even within nominally hierarchical churches like the Catholic
Church). If the mechanisms for resolving religious disagreement come
to dictate government policy, that perverts religion and destabilises
government.
The liberal approach to this problem is to separate church and state —
to guarantee the church’s independence from the state. This can be
fairly workable, but it can reach absurd lengths: the currently
dominant interpretation in the USA is that the state cannot act in any
way out of religious motive. No genuinely religious person would
willingly tolerate that, and it has only come about because the
irreligious, or, more accurately, the adepts of a religion that has
managed to classify itself as a non-religion, have taken all power in
the state. (It also interprets a 220-year-old law in direct
contradiction to the way it was understood and followed for the first
150 years of its existence, which is an insult to logic and to the
concept of law, but that’s not important right now).
The problem with separation is that church and state become
rivals. Bishops can become a dangerous example of the kind of
over-mighty subject
I wrote about two years ago — people with substantial real power that
is not formalised within the state. My recommendation for other
“mighty subjects” is to require them to accept a state position of
honour which puts them under supervision by the sovereign. This is
problematic in the case of a clergyman who can properly claim to be
serving a higher power than the sovereign.
The solution that England found was to put the whole church under the
nominal control of the state. That doesn’t mean that the Queen is the
High Priestess, and she doesn’t routinely rule on doctrinal matters,
but it does mean that in the case of a serious disagreement between
church and state, state wins. If you don’t want an actual theocracy,
that is what has to happen.
In order to work, the relationship between church and state has to go
both ways. If the church is to survive under state control, the
sovereign, and the large part of the leaders of the state, have to be
supporters of the church.
There is still room for religious freedom, but that’s not the same as
all religions being treated equally. If you want to be high in
government, you should be a member of the established church, or else
be very exceptional. If your dissenting religion involves human
sacrifice, or advocates overthrowing the state or the established
church, then it will be suppressed like any other criminal or
seditious organisation.
It is in the interest of state and society for there to be an
established religion in which the majority of the population
participate. Normal behaviour should include regular religious
observance.
There might even be a case for small fines for non-observance. Or
maybe better, the state-backed social insurance / welfare system could
be run through the church — dissenting churches can go and set up
their own. There is great social value in giving the nation a venue of
shared ritual, and atheists can put up with sitting through an hour of
drivel once a week, particularly if they know they are not the only
ones just going through the motions. Just think of all the other
things you sit through for the sake of fitting in socially.
Note that, like many reactionary proposals, this one is targeted at a
particular people in a particular place. The Church of England would
probably not be appropriate for a small
research/manufacturing-oriented colony on a seastead. It is
appropriate for England. The principles underlying the argument are
more broadly applicable, and even the seastead should have some
established pattern of ritual.

Emergent Morality

Two independent links appeared today, reinforcing the same point: that you can’t discard moral laws in favour of reasonable utilitarianism. Not “you shouldn’t”, “you can’t”.
First, Charlotte Gore. Her workplace has banned electronic cigarettes. They haven’t given a reason, but the assumption is that the reason is that smoking is immoral. Smoking was not immoral 30 years ago, but a determined, rational, effort was made to dissuade people from smoking because it is unhealthy. The result of 30 years of evidence-based pressure is that people now have a mild superstitious revulsion of smoking, or in plainer words, smoking is immoral. Smoking in an office is particularly immoral, because it is something that has generally not been permitted for a long time, and has been actually illegal for a few years. Smoking an e-cigarette is not unhealthy*, and not illegal, but it is the same activity as smoking a cigarette, and so it is immoral. Giving up smoking is an act of willpower and self-denial, and is morally praiseworthy, and simply to change the way you smoke (to not be unhealthy), rather than performing the morally admirable act of giving up, is a moral weakness that should be deplored. This despite the fact that making smoking immoral was something that was decided, within my memory, purely for health reasons.
Second data point, via Razib Khan. He links to an article on Nature retelling the by now well established fact that the healthiest weight to be is what our expert advisers call “slightly overweight”. Khan understands the underlying dynamic well, though, because his own blog post is titled “Obesity as morality and health”. Again, public health educators are in the morality business, whether they want to be or not.
And while all this health advice is leaking into morality, and starting to become fossilised as moral standards independent of their original underlying health-advice origin, as in Charlotte Gore’s workplace, we are all absolutely required to remember one essential fact of morality: anal sex is not immoral. It is not immoral because people used to believe that it was immoral, and they were wrong. If, hypothetically, homosexuality had been approved by the Church for the last thousand years, and the sacrament of homosexual marriage had had special music written for it by Bach, Mozart and Rutter, I think we would by now be well down the road of anal sex being banned on health grounds by smug lefties. “Promoting homosexuality” would probably already be prohibited from state schools, along with cigarette machines in pubs and cheese-rolling competitions.
I don’t have strong feelings about homosexuality either way. (Well, I strongly don’t want to participate, but you know what I mean). My point behind the above is that the political weight behind gay rights, particularly now, is driven above all by the desire to hurt, piss off and humiliate conservatives and traditionalists. There is no other basis on which a person can, at the same time, support both encouraging people to have anal sex on the grounds of personal fulfilment, and banning salty sandwiches on health grounds. (Don’t miss the cartoon on that story!) I would tend to agree with Peter Hitchens that the tactically sensible course for conservatives when asked about gay rights is to shrug and carry on talking about important things instead.
*I don’t know if that’s completely true, but whether e-cigarettes are harmful or not, the real point is that it is felt they ought to be harmful
 

Basic climate question

While I’m on the subject of climate, is there anyone with background in system modelling who can tell me what’s wrong with the following. It  seems obvious to me, but I’m probably missing something important.

Take a global climate model, without human GHG emissions.

There should be no long-term climate trend, or at least none on the scale of what GHG emissions are supposed to cause.

Perturb the climate model in some way: maybe a major volcano, or a temporary solar variation, or something.

That perturbation, if it is big enough, will detectably affect the climate, including the global average temperature.

The perturbation is a one-off, so it will end. After the perturbation ends, does the global average temperature stay around its new value, or does it move back towards its old value?

My understanding is that the best current models of the climate exhibit positive feedback. That would mean that there are no forces that would cause the climate to move back to its old value. Block out the sun for a bit, the climate will get colder, and when the dust has settled (literally), it will still be colder than it was before.

For the temperature to return to “normal” after a perturbation, there would have to be net negative feedback: because the temperature is higher, something happens that removes the excess heat.

Therefore, without negative feedback, the climate would be a complete “random walk”. It could be pushed up or down by solar changes, vulcanism, vegetation changes, even freak weather, and every such perturbation would affect the future climate forever.

That just doesn’t seem remotely plausible to me. Surely such random events wouldn’t balance so well as to keep the climate roughly stable for so long as paleoclimate data indicates?

I feel I must be missing something. Is there some way that the climate can exhibit positive feedback in response to anthropogenic CO2 emissions, as we are told it does, and yet recover from other random effects?

Peter Gleick

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Just the other day I wrote in a comment at Samizdata:

It’s a bit cheap, given that there’s no evidence or even likelihood, that actual climate scientists are responsible for this hoax, to say that jumping to very firm conclusions on very little evidence, and indeed fraudulently improving the evidence that doesn’t quite show what you want it to, are characteristic of one side of this debate rather than the other. But there is a pattern here, at least in the political realm, of sceptics being, well, sceptical, and the warmists not.

This is me, eating those words. And let me tell you, they’re yummy.

Look at what the Heartland story tells us about the person behind it:

  • He believes it is justifiable to lie in order to advance the cause
  • He is not able to seriously consider the arguments of his opponents, even when trying to pretend to be one of them
  • He has no instinctive perception of scale — he thinks a couple of million spent by Heartland is significant compared to the hundreds of millions spent by Greenpeace, WWF, FoE, Oxfam, CAP, and the world’s governments.
  • He doesn’t think the morals he applies to others should apply to him. The major climate-related expense in the Heartland accounts is paying scientists to prepare papers and attend conferences —   something his own institute does at the same time, with the same sort of funding from the same sort of people.
  • His evidence doesn’t prove what he thinks it proves. If a piece of essentially information-free data fails to clearly contradict a piece of probably-bogus data, he says the former proves the latter. (That is essentially the story of the Hockey Stick condensed to a sentence).

Now, of course, if the leak was done by some dim environmentalist activist, it would still be unfair to smear actual climate scientists by attributing those same qualities to them.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Peter Gleick. Macarthur fund. Leading climate scientist.

Of course, that’s just one rogue scientist. They’re not all like that. I mean, they have ethics task forces and stuff.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Heartlandgate

I’ve been reluctant to engage with the arguments that climate scepticism is the product of massive pollution-industry funding, because I always felt that the truth – that the public climate scepticism movement relies on the work of a handful of amateurs operating on a shoestring – was more embarrassing to the sceptic cause than the “well-funded denial machine” fantasy.

Meanwhile, it acted as a useful filter: anyone who pushed the “massive funding” line, either knew nothing about the debate (which is not a fault, but is worth knowing when you’re discussing it with them), or else was incapable of recognising the very very obvious.

Thanks to the Heartland leak, the cat is now out of the bag: The NIPCC conference costs Heartland $388,000 a year to run, and the funding for the centrepiece of the whole sceptic campaign is a few back-office people to organise, and a few scientists to write papers. There’s no budget for advertising or publicity, other than the website, because there is no advertising or publicity.

Oxfam have had huge climate-alarmist posters, in a campaign carried out by RKCR/Y&R all over Luton for a couple of years (anyone have a clue what that costs?).  That is the sort of thing that sceptics don’t do, because they cannot afford to.