climate and religion – Page 2

Nothing To Envy

I’ve started to take more interest in North Korea. The reason for this is an embarrassment: I have argued that a possible route to a form of government closer to what I want to see is that a one-party state comes under the control of a single strong leader who is able to convert it into a hereditary monarchy, by concentrating power to himself so strongly that he is able to leave it to his heir. It later occurred to me that the country which has come closest to doing that is North Korea, now anticipating the succession of the third generation of the Kim dynasty.

Like I said, an embarrassment. Probably the one-party-state to hereditary monarchy thing isn’t such a good idea. But I’m amusing myself by studying my own reaction to this inconvenience to my theories. It’s interesting to play at being rather more attached to the theory than I really am, and look for cynical ways to rebut arguments based on the evidence of North Korea.

The most fun approach would be to argue that North Korea is actually really well governed, and the problems it is perceived to have are either falsified by the media, or are the results of steps taken against it by jealous republicans abroad.

It is the sheer ludicrousness of that argument that has induced me to look at the question at this “meta” level. North Korea is pretty much the poorest and most backward country in the entire world, while the part of Korea given a different form of government by an arbitrary line of latitute has become one of the dozen or so richest and most advanced. If North Korea had been merely bad, I might have seriously attempted a defence of its system, but as things are it is impossible to do so with a straight face. That situation makes some degree of self-examination inevitable: exactly how stupid does an argument have to be for me to reject it as I have the “North Korea is actually really well governed” line. And what does that say about me?

(This interesting point from Nathan Bashaw seems relevant).

Part of the question is how easy it is to dodge the problem. And here I can really do it. For one thing, we don’t really know who has the power in North Korea — for all we can tell, Kim may be an empty figurehead entirely under the control of military and party officials. In any case, the problem in North Korea is not who is in charge, it is that it is attached to a collectivist economic system. Kim is legitimate not because he is the annointed heir of Kim Il-Sung, but because he is the carrier of the flame of communism.

That gives us another data point: North Korea does not in fact convince me that hereditary government is a bad idea. Despite the problem that everywhere else in the world has dumped NK-style collectivism, with the possible exception of Cuba, which… is ruled by the brother of the previous leader. Hmmm.

I don’t think I can really draw conclusions about attachment to ideology here. But the question’s still open: I’m going to keep an eye on the process of my adapting judgement to ideology and vice versa. I’m well placed to do that, because I am not in a social group united by my ideology — other than a few other bloggers. Also the fact that I’ve recently abandoned ideological positions I held for most of my adult life gives me an extra reserve of cynicism to draw on.

I already started with yesterday’s post, where I deliberately went through the motions of drawing ideological conclusions from the undercover policing scandal.

Aretae has also been writing along these lines recently. One of his most important points is that there is no basis for anyone to be certain or even nearly certain about these difficult ideological issues. When he puts forward ideas, it’s all 60% this and 70% that.

That’s very sound. But is that the way anyone really sees things? The reason I’m able to take this detached approach to my royalist ideology is that I genuinely do have doubts. Again, that’s probably because it’s fairly new to me, and it’s out beyond the lunatic fringe in the public debate.

For a comparison, take the issue of climate change. I am persuaded by the evidence, and have written here, that there is considerable room for doubt of the pronouncements of the climate science experts. I claim that the evidence tends to support the position that dangerous climate change is not happening and will not happen.

That’s fine. But what I haven’t said in so many words is that I have a deep inner certainty that anthropogenic global warming is all rubbish. That certainty cannot be justified by a reasoned analysis of the evidence: in no way do I have sufficient knowledge or understanding of the science to achieve such confidence in any conclusion. Where does this certainty come from?

If it is simply overconfidence, that’s almost the least bad possibility. At least in that case, the direction of my conclusion is based on reason. What’s more worrying is the possibility that the inner certainty is totally independent of my reason, and the reasoned conclusions I have drawn are only rationalisations of my faith.

If that’s the case, where did the faith come from? I would have to have made some kind of intuitive, rather than rational, judgement on one side of a very complex issue. What is the source of that intuition? I don’t know, though I could take a few guesses. Is that intuition to be trusted? In general, absolutely not. There are too many cases of people reaching opposite certainty on the basis of intuition, and there is no basis for judging one person’s intuition against another.

Now maybe my intuition, unlike yours, is reliable. It does have a fairly decent track record. Also, I’m not in the habit of being certain: of all the other things I have written about on this blog, I don’t think there are any that I have the same inner certainty about that I have about AGW.

The Fukushima Dissenter

There is a very strong consensus among the sort of people I read (reg, Tim, Neil, isegoria) that the reporting about the nuclear reactor problems at Fukushima is a typical hysterical overreaction by ignorant greens, lefty ideologues, and sensationalist media.

I threw my own rotten tomatoes at the target, when I looked at deaths from other kinds of power stations.

There is just one voice among my hundred or so blogroll subscriptions saying that in fact a major disaster has occurred that will seriously affect Tokyo.

Well, it’s hard to score 100%, isn’t it? So one guy happened to fall for the bullshit. Big deal.

The thing is that the one guy isn’t a green, a lefty, or a journalist. He isn’t as a rule overly trusting of the MSM. And he knows a good bit about nuclear reactors. I’m talking about M Simon of the blog Power and Control.

He could still be wrong. I’m not bringing the question up now to guess at whether he is or not: I don’t have to do anything different either way, and we’ll know in due course.

I’m interested, though, in the shape of the argument. We know we’re surrounded by ignorant greens, lefty ideologues and sensationalist media. But what if, by coincidence, this time they’re right?

The situation reminds me of the Anthropogenic Global Warming argument in reverse. Mainstream western scientists know that “science is under attack from a well-organized, politically well-connected and, above all, well-financed opposition”, and that “The real war is between rationalism and superstition”, and if a small proportion of Richard Lindzens and Freeman Dysons are mysteriously on the wrong side, well, weird stuff happens in politics.

Mr Simon is so keen on fusion that he wants to get rid of fission generation. And he doesn’t like the Japanese. (I knew an old guy who was in the US Navy, and he didn’t like the Japanese. Stands to reason). Yeah, that will cover it, I don’t need to bother with his extremely detailed arguments.

Easy to do, easy to do… As I said, it doesn’t matter this time, because we’ll know one way or the other soon enough anyway. But I’m fascinated by how the story plays out.

Climate Roundup

Most of the commentary on the cold winter has been too stupid to discuss, so I haven’t. Certainly, cold winters do not prove that the climate scientists are wrong, though it does suggest that alarm is overstated: not only is weather not climate, but climate variability is so dwarfed by weather variability that it is not remotely possible to actually notice whatever climate variation there might have been over the last hundred years. The actual weather changes in any given place from year to year or decade to decade are vastly bigger than any global climate change we have seen. As I say, that doesn’t make climate change wrong, but it does make it less relevant.

But most stupid are the desperate attempts to claim that cold winters are caused by global warming. Not because that is impossible, but because there has been scant regard for facts. I have been informed by one earnest physicist that snowy winters here are to be expected, because global warming increases the amount of water in the air. That would be sound logic if English winters were normally cold and dry, but they are not – winter conditions here are normally that if there is a clear night, there is frost, but if there is cloud cover, that keeps the ground too warm for frost, and it rains. We have snow this year because it is colder, not because there is more moisture.

Some random genius on Twitter takes the biscuit for claiming that the cold winter is to be expected, because global warming has melted icecaps, changed ocean salinity, and diverted the Gulf Stream. Again, logically sound, but the ocean salinity has not changed and the Gulf Stream has not moved. Apart from that, good try…

Monbiot’s theory, that warming at the pole has disrupted atmospheric circulations, bringing cold weather down, is at least not obviously contradicted by the facts. It might be true. But there was certainly no consensus predicting it.

What has made this issue worth mentioning for me is the excellent collection of articles gathered by hauntingthelibrary, of the climate mainstream explaining that mild winters in Britain are the result of Global Warming. We are all familiar, I am sure, with the classic UEA “snowfall a thing of the past”, but he shows that that was not one random nutter.

* Less snow and rain for islands (Hadley Centre)
* Warmer and Wetter Winters in Europe and Western North America Linked to Increasing Greenhouse Gases (NASA,Nature)
* The recent warm winters that Britain has experienced are a clear sign that the climate is changing (James Hansen)

The point is not that they are wrong. The fact is that the climate system is so complex, and the climate signal is so faint against the weather background, that there is no possibility of being right. If global average temperatures really have increased by a degree or so over the last fifty years, and I cannot see that there is any way to tell whether they have, then what the results are is equally unknowable. Weather is just too big a thing to see around.

The other point is the sheer lack of restraint in putting forward ad-hoc climate theories without the slightest thinking-through in response to any weather. Journalists do journalism, but this kind of speculation is what scientists were traditionally so unwilling to do that, 25 years ago, there was a popular stereotype of the scientist who couldn’t commit himself to anything because “the evidence is not yet complete”. That change is the most significant element in climate science.

What they want to hear

There was another interesting point in the discussion at Hans von Storch’s that I brought up – an interesting comment by “Toby” on the earlier piece:

Lysenko told the politicians what they wanted to hear – a “short cut” to socialism. Which side of the current “debate” is telling politicians what they want to hear? The ones arguing that money must be spent and sacrifices made? Or the ones advocating that nothing be done?

That is a good question, and is the root of much of the political polarization of climate science.

Toby implies that politicians want to hear that nothing need be done – money need not be spent.

A right-winger – like myself – believes that what politicians want to hear is that their departments and budgets must be enlarged.

As I explained, the distrust of motives is enough by itself – without any actual dishonesty or malpractice – to mess up the scientific process in a field where unequivocal confirmation or rejection of theories is difficult to come by.

Lysenkoism

There has been some interesting discussion at Hans von Storch’s blog about Lysenkoism. Nils Roll Hansen wrote some posts.

I don’t agree with the conclusions reached.

Lysenko was not a politician, he was not a fraud, he was not an ideologue. Lysenko was a scientist.

Lysenko, like the majority of scientists today, worked for the government.

In the scientific controversy that involved Lysenko, he reported to his superiors (the government). That was his job as a senior member of the scientific establishment.

The scientific controversy was politically sensitive. Lysenko claimed that his scientific opponents were politically motivated: their science was based on bourgeois ideas of inherited superiority. That claim was not implausible, and Lysenko had no reasonable alternative but to draw the attention of his superiors to the possibility.

The politicians did their job – they reached a conclusion about how to run a government department based on the advice they received and their judgement of that advice.

When we tell the story of Lysenkoism, we tell it in the knowledge that Lysenko was wrong. What we look for are the indications that the process was bad – that the wrong conclusion was being reached.

My opinion is that there are no such indications. Yes, it was “politicized science”, but the main political force on the science was the belief that orthodox genetics was itself the product of the political assumptions of the Western scientists that developed it. That perception was probably exaggerated, if not totally erroneous, but it was a genuine belief honestly held.

The point is that for politics to mess up science, it is not necessary for anyone to let the political implications of a theory take precedence over the evidence. All that is necessary is for some participants to believe that other scientists are doing that. That is enough to cause theories to be suppressed, and thereby for the science to be systematically skewed.

It is not enough, either, to say that at the end of the day the evidence should speak for itself, and the trustworthiness of its spokesmen not be relevant – nullius in verba, and all that. That is all very fine, but it denies the fact that some science is difficult. It is so impractical to replicate every experiment, confirm every observation, check every calculation, that nullus in verba is the next thing to radical scepticism in the philosophical sense. You have to trust some scientists, and that means you have to choose who to trust, and that means you have to take into account politics.

In the very long run, you can learn who is actually trustworthy and who is not. But that is a painful bootstrapping process – you need a little trust to give you some facts, and then you use those facts to evaluate the trustworthiness of those who addressed them. That gives you a little more trust, to gather a few more facts, and so on.

To call, as Hansen does, for “independence” for science does not address the problem. It just means that scientists will be punished for scientific dissent rather than political dissent – which makes the situation worse. If science is run by politicians, you can probably advance whatever theories you like so long as you support the right policies. If science is run by scientists, you must support the authorized theories to succeed.

There is, then, no silver bullet to depoliticise science. There are, however, treatments that can make science work better. Since a small amount of distrust has such a catastrophic effect, the least dishonesty cannot be tolerated. This is behind the now dying attitude that Feynman talked about, of bending over backwards to draw attention to everything that tells against you theory, so that you cannot possibly be accused of concealing any of it.

Conservatives and Climate

According to Jonathan Hari, 91% of Conservative MPs do not believe in man-made Global Warming (via The Devil).

The problem is, that really doesn’t prove what he wants it to prove.

As an aside, he shows himself in the same article to have a very shaky grasp of numbers: he says “This oddball rabble are five times bigger than the Lib Dems, despite getting only 13 per cent more support.” What he means is that the Tories got more votes than the Lib Dems by an amount of 13% of the total votes – in fact the Tories got 56% more votes than the Lib Dems did. That is the only ratio that it makes any sense to compare with the sizes of the respective parliamentary parties. He could also say that the Tories got 38% more of the seats in the Commons despite getting only 13% more of the votes in the country. Using the correct 56% number rather than the irrelevant 13% wouldn’t have weakened the reasonable point Hari was making, but it proves he is either habitually dishonest even where it doesn’t help him, or very stupid indeed.

Back to the 91%, then, assuming we can in this instance trust Hari to report a percentage accurately. I have just checked the Conservative Manifesto: (archived pdf)

We will reduce UK greenhouse gas emissions and increase our share of global markets for low carbon technologies.
Labour have said the right things on climate change, but these have proved little more than
warm words. Despite three White Papers, a multitude of strategies and endless new announcements, the UK now gets more of its energy from fossil fuels than it did in 1997

If 91% of the candidates who successfully ran for election under that manifesto do not believe in man-made Global Warming, what it proves is that politicians’ positions on climate change bear no relation to what they actually believe to be true.

It further proves that man-made global warming is a politically convenient position – one that politicians find it advantageous to adopt, even if they don’t believe it.

This is tremendously important, because it is the positions taken by politicians that have set the public scene. It is politicians who have set up and maintained the IPCC, set the priorities of NASA and the Met Office, and form the context for any public debate. And those politicians are under pressure to pretend to believe in man-made Global Warming, even when they don’t.

Edit 2018: Johann Hari link dead, changed to archive.org link

James Lovelock

Apparently James Lovelock is saying that democracy will have to be “put on hold for a while” in order to deal with climate change.

I don’t need to write much, I can refer my readers to the answer I gave previously the last time this idea was raised.

I would just add that the idea that democracy is a good way of managing everything except the climate seems about as likely as the idea that it’s a good way of deciding everything except MP’s salaries.

The Hockey Stick Illusion

I’ve just finished The Hockey Stick Illusion. I bought it partly out of duty – I was doing my bit by buying Bishop Hill‘s book and adding to its circulation figures. I didn’t expect it to be so good.

One of the things that puts me off public debate generally is that, whatever the forum, it is always too shallow to reach any kind of conclusion. “I think X”. “Well, I think Y.”, “But X is true because of A”. “Ah but you’re ignoring B”. “Well, C means… oh dear, is that the time, I must be going”.

The Hockey Stick Illusion is not about climate. It is not about environmentalism. It is not about science. It is not about global warming. It is 482 pages about one paper published in 1998, criticisms of it, defences of it, attempted replications of and alternatives to it. As such, almost uniquely, it goes into sufficient detail and depth that having read it I feel that I’ve actually learned something. It’s exceptionally well-written, modest in its approach, and overwhelming in its conclusion. Halfway through, I got a little bogged down in the sheer overkill of the weight of damage the hockey stick suffers – did I really need to read any more? But then I read the Phil Jones interview. There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. That is an answer to the only question that Montfort’s book asks, and it is the right answer, and it is from one of those people who was most determinedly defending the wrong answer until last year. This is what a won argument looks like – gaze on it in wonder, for it is a rare thing indeed in the world of soundbites and opinion polls.

As to the wider debate, well, this was one small point. The hockey stick can be wrong, and every other claim of the warmists right. But it is immensely valuable, because of the context I have been describing recently. It proves we can be right, even when the warmists are at their most shrill insisting that we are utterly, insanely wrong. It is evidence that, even if we are wrong, we are playing the game, and are entitled to be taken seriously and not shouted down or excluded.

I strongly recommend this book.

Scientists' Fear

In my previous post on the future durability of the AGW scare, I mentioned the reason why scientists tend not to view climate sceptics as presenting a legitimate scientific viewpoint. I took the opportunity of a wild kick at my other favourite target, democracy:

“If scientists treat creationists and the like with respect, and argue honestly and fairly, they will be screwed by elected politicians.”

Because I was off on a tangent, and not giving the argument the separate post that it deserves, I didn’t provide any evidence that this attitude really exists among scientists.

As it happens, I picked up Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” from the library at the weekend. Imagine my smug self-satisfaction, then, when I read the following this morning on page 91

In parts of the United States, science is under attack from a well-organized, politically well-connected and, above all, well-financed opposition, and the teaching of evolution is in the front-line trench. Scientists could be forgiven for feeling threatened, because most research money comes ultimately from government, and elected representatives have to answer to the ignorant and the prejudiced, as well as to the well-informed, among their constituents.

Dawkins is putting that forward as an excuse for scientists to make public statements that they don’t believe – in this case for being overly sympathetic to Christianity, in order to keep moderate Christians as allies against creationists. He considers it an insufficient excuse – “The real war is between rationalism and superstition”, but he believes that some scientists are concealing their real views for tactical reasons in the war against fundamentalists and “elected representatives”. I think he is right.

The fundamental point, which I’ve touched on on a number of occasions, is that if you want to be a scientist in a democracy, where “most research money comes ultimately from the government”, as Dawkins says, then you have to be a bit of a politician. That comes through just as strongly in Phil Jones’ cri de coeur in today’s Times – “I am just a scientist. I have no training in PR or dealing with crises.”

I really don’t believe that more than one in ten of the warmist scientists would spin, lie and conspire in the way they have just to support their pet theory against scientific opponents – even with the stakes as high as they are in terms of funding and career opportunities. They would see that as a betrayal of science, and their consciences would not allow it.

But The Discovery Institute is not a scientific opponent – it is an anti-scientific opponent. Its dishonesty and ulterior motives disqualify it from participating in the normal scientific process according to the normal rules, and in dealing with it, scientists subordinate the scientific process to political tactics.

The key fact about the climate debate is that, because of where the initial scepticism came from, many scientists saw it in the same light as intelligent design. As I wrote yesterday, once they had made that assumption, they were trapped: if you believe your opponents are enemies of science, then stronger arguments from the enemy spur you not to greater doubt, but to greater determination. Also, since the more politically aware bodies in science closed ranks against climate sceptics, they found support largely among that minority more accustomed to working with the political right. The association of climate sceptics with minor right-wing think tanks and a Republican senator confirms in the mainstream scientists the view that they are dealing with a political enemy, not a scientific opponent.

I wrote in my giving-up-on-politics post, “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 problem that causes is that the arguments most likely to persuade the public that you are right, are likely at the same time to persuade the well-informed that you are wrong.

We are seeing the knock-on effect of that situation. In order to win over the ignorant and indifferent, prominent people on both sides of the dispute are employing arguments that are weak, irrelevant, or downright dishonest. Such techniques achieve successes, but at the cost, on both sides, of convincing the opponents more strongly of their own rightness. And, both convinced of their own rightness and dismayed by their opponents’ undeserved popular successes, each side becomes more unscrupulous still in response.

The really difficult question is; does all this mean that the scientists were wrong to ‘go political’ over evolution? Once they had arrogated to themselves the right to decide that evolution was true and they needed to do whatever was necessary to keep teaching it, was an overreaching such as is happening over climate inevitable?

I don’t have to answer that question – I can just blame the problem on democracy, the only system which makes convincing the ignorant and indifferent an essential part of everything from studying the climate to putting on a museum exhibition.

Views changing?

Via JoNova, there has been a large shift in opinion against global warming in the UK.

There has been a lot of triumphalism on the sceptic side – James Delingpole talking about the “imminent death of the AGW scam”, and so on – but I think it is misplaced.

I would guess that the surge in scepticism in Britain owes a lot more to the exceptionally hard winter than to the revelations from East Anglia or the antics of Pachauri, none of which have made very much impact on the public.

The cold winter is not insignificant, of course. It may be just normal variation, but the popular presentation of AGW has mysteriously ignored the fact that the temperature changes they are talking about are barely even measurable, and nowhere near enough to actually notice compared to ordinary year-to-year variation. Therefore, while a cold winter in Britain tells us nothing about climate change as described in the journals, it is a clear falsification of global warming as it has been presented by the media since the 1990s

That is why the media has been uncharacteristically open to both sides during the present kerfuffle. Various scientists are scrambling, not for sake of the movement, but for their own jobs. The movement itself can just sit this out and wait. The IPCC isn’t going away (even if Pachauri does), nor are the politicians who have made climate concern a key part of their image. They’ll wait until summer, and if they get a warm one in the USA and Britain, they’ll crank up the machine again. They won’t bother arguing the toss about tree-rings, Indian glaciers or Chinese weather stations, they’ll just brush it all off as petty troublemaking in the face of the overwhelming threat. And the media will take sides, as they always do, on the basis of which politicians they want to gain and which they want to lose from the whole process.

The exposure of climate science’s guilty secrets, then, will not stop the process in the short term. In the long run, it may have an effect. As I discussed before, it has allowed some people who never believed the exaggerations to say so in public. This in turn may persuade a future generation of politicians that global warming is not what they want to attach their reputations to. For the Obama/Cameron/Milliband generation, it is too late. In a democracy, being indecisive is worse than being wrong, and they cannot afford to change their positions now. But the next decade’s politicians are constructing their positions now, and the choices they make will drive the media landscape of the 2020s.

Ironically, one of the biggest causes of the original AGW error cascade, as Eric Raymond calls it, was George W Bush. For the rank and file in the world’s science departments, Bush was pretty much the most despised figure in history, because of his association with fundamentalist Christianity and the resulting policies, above all against Stem Cell research. To the typical scientist, the theory that the president was attacking climate science because he was in league with oil interests was so intrinsically likely that it wouldn’t make sense to even question it. This was the man who prohibited park rangers from denying young-earth creationism at the Grand Canyon. From that point on, any criticism at all of global warming was presumptively an attack on science itself on behalf of religion and commerce and was to be dealt with on that basis, not studied and reasoned with as if it was part of a real scientific debate. The controversy fell into the pattern of the evolution/creation controversy, rather than the pattern of arguments over Dark Matter or Psychoanalysis. That attitude still persists, and will be very hard to shift, because once it is established, then evidence which strengthens the deniers, while it might start to persuade some of the faithful, will produce in most of the faithful a renewed determination to defeat the anti-science enemy which has become more dangerous through the unfortunate developments which have increased its appeal. Thus the error cascade is perpetuated.

The difficult thing is that I sympathise with these people. I can understand why they are doing what they are doing, and I can’t see a way to shake them out of it. They have learned over the decades that if they treat creationists and the like with respect, and argue honestly and fairly, they will be screwed by elected politicians. And they are applying that lesson. If they didn’t just happen to be wrong, they would be doing the right thing.