Global Warming Part III - The Case for Continuing Skepticism in a Nutshell

Part I - The Physical Science in a Nutshell
Part II - The Social Science in a Nutshell

So, if I think there is something to global warming, how can I still consider myself to be a skeptic?

First, my skepticism has always fallen on the alarmist tone taken by the true believers.

When John Christy's satellite measurements failed to align with the theory, the true believers were ready to dismiss the data. In one online debate I had with a global warming enthusiast, he responded by condemning John Christy as incompetent and by bizarrely declaiming the importance of satellite and balloon data because what was of primary concern were ground temperatures, not atmospheric temperatures. Now that the data have been corrected and are closer to the other predictions (though they are still lower than other data sets), they claim that this is as it should be. It's easy to gloat when the data get realigned to your preconceived view of the world, but what happens when they don't? In other words, what made them convinced of their rightness long before the data problems worked out?

Consider the example of the Premature Ice Age alarmism of the 1970s. Activists are quick to point out that the claims never showed up in scientific journals despite the 1971 Schneider and Rasool article, "Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate" (Science 173, 138–141) in which they claimed, "our calculations suggest a decrease in global temperature by as much as 3.5 °C. Such a large decrease in the average temperature of Earth, sustained over a period of few years, is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age." True, the Premature Ice Age scare was more of a popularization by news magazines, but that didn't prevent it from drawing policy makers into its orbit, did it? And now that everyone has agreed that was an unlikely outcome, the same alarmists that espoused it are dismissing it as irrelevant - not because they were wrong, but because the science was not published in scientific journals. Yet, they believed it and wanted immediate action, the same as they did with other manufactured scares. History is replete with such scares (opium, marijuana, Germans in the WWI era, Commies in the 1950s, there will be mass starvation and England won't exist by 2000, the saccharin cancer scare in the 1980s, the silicon implants scare in the 1990s, Y2K disaster, nucular (r) meltdown), but very few repenters.

More recently, people blamed the 2005 hurricane season on AGW and predicted more of the same. It escaped their attention that the problem was not the strength of Katrina (it was degraded from Category 5 to Cat 3), it was the fact that it hit a large population area with two unique characteristics: it was below sea level, and it was poorly protected by a set of water projects whose funding had been diverted by years of bipartisan corruption and ineptitude. Many seized on that opportunity to hype the idea that AGW means more severe hurricanes, but few if any publicly apologized when 2006 failed to yield even a single landfall hurricane; in fact, people still mistakenly use the Katrina/NOLA fiasco to support such statements as, "Extremes are non-linear in their effects." The dearth of hurricane landfalls in 2006 alone doesn't disprove AGW any more than 2005 proved it, but there should be little doubt as to which side gets the most press. They trumpet loudly when the data fits their theory, but fail to sound retreat when they don't.

Second, my skepticism extends not only to the abuse of the science models, whose expected outcome keeps becoming less in line with the extremists and alarmists each time they are updated, but to the supposed implications. Those include the assumption that if global warming is a fact, that (1) man must be responsible, (2) it must be reversed, and (3) only central planning can reverse it. I am unsure about the first of those claims, but I think it is probably true. Still, it concerns me that there have been drastic variations in the past that cannot be explained with human behavior.

The second is worth some examination. The idea that the warming must be stopped or reversed is predicated on two assumptions: that the ideal temperature is that which existed in the past, and that stopping or reversing is going to be less costly than adapting. There are lots of reasons to question which climate is best.

• More people die due to extreme weather events in the winter than in the summer.
  
• The recent Stern Review notes that crops will do better under a mildly warmer climate, though much worse under a substantially warmer climate. That suggests that the best climate may be slightly warmer.
  
• Plants grow larger in CO2-rich environments. Because the amount of nitrogen does not increase, all things remaining equal, they are no more nutritious (in fact, pound for pound they are less nutritious), but all things do not remain equal. Those plants require less water because of decreased transpiration, and since it is frequently water rather than fertilizer that is a limiting factor, this means crop yields may go up in the future. I note, for example, that dry-land cotton crops yield about 300-500 pounds/acre, whereas the same plants yield 500-800 pounds/acre when irrigated.
• As noted in Part I (linked at the top), CO2-driven warming means specifically warmer nights and winters. That means longer growing seasons with fewer crop freezes in the spring and fall. It also opens up more viable cropland to the North and at higher elevations. In fact, Greenland is seeing increased agriculture and decreased reliance on hunting, and Germany is seeing later eiswein harvests while other grapes are moving farther north and uphill, resulting in the increased consumption of red wines grown locally; that strikes me as a neutral to positive change, not a change for the worse.
  
• The climate has - all by itself, without human intervention - fallen into an Ice Age in the past and will likely do so in the future. Crop yield will definitely plummet when that happens. Should we do something to forestall it?

The third implication - that only central planning will fix the problem - is at least a little dubious. In fact, I believe that most AGW enthusiasts have been thrashing about for something to revive central planning ever since the collapse of communism, and global warming has provided it. This would certainly explain their rejection of any and all skepticism early on. AGW is a perfect problem for them: The bad outcomes are 100 years away, so planners have no need to show any progress now. If the predictions become more dire, they can raise the alarmist tone of their rhetoric; if the predictions become less dire, they can claim success as the result of existing policies. Heads they win, tails you lose.

I have no more faith in the government solving this problem than in solving poverty. The free market (or what there was of it) was arguably doing a better job of the latter prior to Johnson's Great Society (both income disparity and income-based poverty rates were falling until around 1968, and have been flat or increasing since then), and if anyone is going to find viable alternatives to carbon-based energy, it is going to be lots of scientists acting independently, i.e. not the government. If there is one thing the government can do, it's to stop supporting the existing paradigm through subsidy and regulation.

In fact, that is the lesson that we should be taking: the government is a contributor to the current situation, and there is bipartisan guilt, so why should we trust the government to remain neutral in the "new" era? Reducing our contribution to CO2 buildup is going to require changes in technology and product mix on the supply side, customer values on the demand side, and changes in social, political, and economic structures. There is no "right" answer to this, and planning arguably only works well when an answer is already known when all that remains is getting there from here. Here, Hayek is correct.

Halt in the Decline of Work Hours

I'm sure someone must have done more serious research on this, but I'm curious as to why the work week has been frozen at 40 hours. Going back 200 years, farmers worked sunup to sundown (and perhaps then some), 7 days a week. Through the 19th century, various laws in England, the US, and elsewhere were passed, sometimes following private practice, reducing the hours to 12, then 10, then 8, while the workweek was reduced from 7 to 6 and then to 5. So far as I know, with the sole exception of France, that trend stopped at the 5 x 8 = 40 hour week in the 1920 or 1930s. Yet productivity continues to climb, so why haven't work hours continued to follow suit?

1) Due to the passage of the 16th Amendment and then SSI legislation, taxes have eaten up all of the surplus since then.

2) Health care insurance has absorbed all of the gains.

3) The period in which it has become feasible to drop to 20-30 hours per week has coincided with the rise in globalization. The competition won't let us slow down.

4) It is a coordination problem: high income workers prefer to work longer weeks, and want/need someone to be on the other end of the phone whenever they call.

5) It is a different coordination problem: because of the explosion in labor legislation at the state and federal level in the Progressive and New Deal eras, it is simply too complex to change all of the relevant law.

6) There has been a realization that such legislation shackles those at the bottom who would like to get ahead by working longer hours.

7) The productivity gains have been apparent, not real.

8) Some of us *are* working less, it just isn't showing up. One way is by retiring early. The other is by switching to alternative work schedules (4 x 10) or work arrangements (telecommuting, comp time, better vacation and sick leave packages). Yes, 4 x 10 is still 40, but the off-book time to commute is less, and the one day per week to run errands without taking time off is significant.

I think 1 is overplayed. 2 is a strong contender, but doesn't explain all of it, especially outside the U.S. 3 might make a slight contribution. I doubt 4, 5, and 6; not the truthiness of them, but rather the strength of these arguments to dissuade a majority from obtaining the desired change; after all, the same arguments in 6 apply to minimum wage laws. I doubt the truth of 7. There might be something to 8, but probably not as much as we would like; the benefits described have fallen to high income workers, whereas previous work hour reductions helped those on the low end.

Why I blog

I agree with Brayden:

Heaven help us if the natural evolution of blogging is to turn all of us into walking Powerpoint presentations. I’m glad I don’t feel cursed in this way.

Even one of the commenters on Seth's post says, "My tolerance for reading something that doesn’t make its point in the first two sentences is now zero." I suspect that has something more to do with texting than blogging, and may be indicative of the PowerPointization of thinking. Edward Tufte must be a hollow figure of abject despair at this point.

Anyhow, I first became interested in doing this because I hated Molly Ivins' style (for that matter, I hate most editorial page columnists now) precisely because she substituted a few drive-by, snarky comments for any serious, in-depth treatment of serious ideas. So I thought I would vivisect each of her columns and simultaneously demonstrate the opposite style.

Unfortunately, the first article I took on is still only half-finished. It involved her saying that phone deregulation didn't work because we are now getting telemarketer calls during dinner, among other monuments of cleverness-masquerading-as-analysis. At one time, I actually enjoyed her until I noted that one week, she was crying that Newt cut off funding to the sweet little old nuns at Catholic Charities, and the next, in an article on the favorite reading materials of favorite groups, she was telling us that the Bible is for psychotic cult leaders like David Koresh (yeah, try radiocarbon dating those references). All without apparently any sense of irony. It was just bare rhetorical point-scoring.

So, yeah, I appreciate the occasional bit of brevity, but I also believe that far too many subjects in our culture that are worthy of serious consideration have been - no, distilled is not the right word - boiled down to thin, soundbitey gruel.

The Box II

"In the next post, I'll comment on The Box and its relevance to this argument. " Ooops, I forgot.

Anyhow, The Box was, for me, a thoroughly enjoyable history of the recent history of the shipping container. Yawn? Well, okay, for about 99% of the population. The approach was thorough, though, and it seemed that the author, economist and a former editor for The Economist Marc Levinson, tried to be as even-handed as possible.

The first thing that struck me about the impact of the shipping container was the public policy impact on it. Before the shipping container, shipping, trucking, and railroading were heavily regulated by the ICC. Rates were set not only according to weight and distance, but also according to contents. Thus, the cost of shipping 1000 pounds of tires would be different than, say, 1000 pounds of grain, and not just because of density differences. This apparently goes back to the complaints made by shippers in the late 19th century, and made sense to regulators in that era. Also, prior to the container, shippers were allowed to charge less than truckers because ships took longer. So if a ship already had a stated rate for, say, wheat, between two ports, truckers were not allowed to charge less (or something like that - Levinson didn't attempt to explain the intricacies of ICC regulation). Further, shipping between American ports was restricted to American flagged ships, and international shipping was heavily regulated and subsidized - to qualify for the subsidy, you had to use American built ships, and the subsidy supposedly helped make up for the more expensive American crew. One final government involvement in the era just prior to the shipping container's introduction: many of the ships currently in use in 1956 were WWII surplus ships, built on the cheap and available for next to nothing. It was relatively easy to get into the business, as very little capital was required, and ships could ply from port to port picking up freight as they went.

Enter the shipping container, ca 1956.

But wait: the container requires different infrastructure. The story of the shipping container is also the story of ports where governments chose to support the companies investing in the container. In New York City, the story is governed by the decision of the Port of New York Authority (now the Port Authority of New York), which was looking to expand its bureaucratic territory. The piers on the New York side had all the business they could want, and politicians to defend the turf. The only reason they remained viable was the fact that the ICC required railroads to charge the same for freight delivered on either side of the port, in effect a requirement to throw in the trans-Hudson part of the journey for free. That was not trivial, since it involved either removing freight from trains and loading it on barges, crossing, and then re-loading into warehouses to wait for a ship.

Much of the story revolves around boy genius Malcom (not Malcolm, he dropped the second l to differentiate from his father) McLean, who started in the trucking business. Shipping something from a factory via truck to a railroad and then (via truck again) to a port, loading it on a ship, and reversing the process at the far end cost plenty. It cost time in transit, storage, and management; it cost labor at each change of mode; it was extremely expensive because of pilferage and breakage because of the frequent handling and the subsequent insurance; and of course the shipping cost money. Malcom realized the problem and the potential money to be made from rationalizing the shipping process.

The first container ships required their own cranes because standard dock cranes were not capable of lifting the containers, much less taking advantage of their standardization and the potential savings in ship loading times. Thereafter, however, the cranes became part of the port infrastructure, along with rail sidings, truck terminals, deeper and wider ports, and computer controls. The industry, in other words, became more capital intensive, and some of that capital came from state and local governments. Those who made the commitment, such as the Port Authority in New Jersey and Port Elizabeth, became the winners, while those who didn't, such as New York City, did not.

The government did not only take sides in the wars between technologies and shipping companies. As it became clear that automation was going to cost not only cushy jobs, but real ones too, the various unions found themselves at odds not only with shippers, but with governments as well. The City of Los Angeles chose sides when longshoreman at first refused to unload Matson's shipping container ships by threatening to take over the port and make their jobs civil service, prevented by law from striking. The Federal government stepped in repeatedly on the side of shippers against the East Coast union strikes. Eventually, the Longshoreman's unions on both coasts struck deals with shippers, trading generous contributions to retirement and unemployment funds in return for acceptance of the technology and more productive work rules. I'm not sure which side I come down on in that dispute: yes, there were aspects of the trade that sound cushy, such as rules that allowed each of the two teams working a ship to take a half day off with pay, and the day laborer aspect meant that senior union members could work or take the day off as they desired. On the other hand, the corrupt day labor culture enabled organized crime and allowed rampant pilferage to persist, not to mention the fact that jobs were described as incredibly dangerous and literally back breaking. In the old paradigm, workers had to live in slums near the docks to make themselves available; today, the crane operators are guaranteed a regular 40-hour-per-week job, and can afford to live anywhere, but have to get permission to take off. In any event, government was neither impartial referee nor friend of labor in these struggles.

So this ends up being a very complex story in which government starts out standing against change in the status quo that had persisted since roughly the 1920s, and then steps in to tip the playing field toward the shipping container. Levinson argues that the shipping container may not have been the only factor, but it certainly was *a* factor in accelerating the globalization of the economy. Before the shipping container, it was extraordinarily expensive to ship anything overseas; today, it may be less expensive to ship goods overseas by rail and ship than across the state by truck. Remove time and distance as factors or advantages, and suddenly labor costs become the more important factor.

Two final factors radically altered the trajectory of shipping. The first was Viet Nam. The Army suddenly found itself in a situation where it needed lots of supplies shipped in to a place with no infrastructure or railroads. McLean was the man on the spot, winning the contract by offering to build all of the necessary port infrastructure. The remarkable increase in efficiency forced the federal government into the pro-container camp, but also had an unexpected effect. With the Army picking up the ship's entire journey, westbound and eastbound, but only shipping freight west, this left Malcom with a *pure* profit opportunity: ships returning from Asia in the late 1960s with no cargo. A stop in Japan for loads of televisions and automobiles solved that problem. Incidentally, by rationalizing shipping by making it predictable and fast, the container contributed to the development of the inventory-free manufacturing method of Just In Time.

The other final factor was the phasing out of the WWII surplus ships and the phasing in of dedicated container ships in the middle of the first oil embargo era. The shipping industry switched from labor-intensive to capital-intensive. The enormous ships, some of which no longer fit in the Panama Canal, have to keep moving just to keep paying for their own financing. The cost of shipping plummeted, and the size of ships continues to expand. The Molucca Straits have overtaken the Panama Canal as the limiting factor on size.

Because of the plummet in shipping costs, the resulting increase in dependence on shipping, the pressures of the oil embargoes, and the changes in finance and capital requirements, the shipping industries were "deregulated" in the late 1970s. That deregulation was, of course, not complete. Levinson notes some exceptions, and I found that some of the rules were still in effect when I tried to ship something to Hawai'i a few years back.

The argument in Part I, Railroads, The Box, and Scale, was that W. W. Rostow was either engaging in circular reasoning or deriving ought from is when he claimed that because railroads - especially government funded railroads - were an important part of the history of all advanced economies, they must be. Substituting the more generic term capital-intense transportation for the specific form (railroads), Levinson's history of the shipping container would seem to support Rostow's claim. Many of the Asian Tiger economies - Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore - invested heavily in port infrastructure to bring the shipping container to their shores; they were literal cargo cults. To the extent that it worked, they have reaped the benefits.

But Levinson provides some counterexamples. England adapted to the shipping container very poorly, and to the extent that they did, it was because of a private port at Felixstowe; England has arguably done quite well for itself in the past 30 years. Further, much of the investment in American ports was private, though government has also played a substantial role. And again, the Rostow argument only makes sense when you accept that people are unequivocally better off when they adopt capital intensity. Yes, the increase in measurable wealth is notable, but I am curious about the intangibles and the change in quality of life, pace, direct control of one's life that result from acceptance of the modern.

Global Warming Part II - The Social Science in a Nutshell

Part I

It is unfortunate that people think that Global Warming is exclusively a phenomenon of physical science. Activists tend to argue as if scientists have proven anthropogenic global warming (AGW) as an accomplished fact. By that, I mean that they believe that the outcomes predicted for 100 years from now are fully realized today. This is made odder when they insist that we do something about it - if it were already done, what point is there in "doing something about it"? It is the fact that global warming is something predicted for the future that compels us to make changes now in the hopes that we can alter that future.* However, there are two reasons why AGW is not exclusively the realm of the physical sciences:

On the one hand, all predictions of future CO2 content rely on estimations of the continuation of present patterns of energy and natural resource use. Those depend largely on social, political, and economic conditions and developments. This trend is unlikely for two reasons:

1) The first reason it is unlikely is that our energy use patterns are extremely likely to change. Going back 200 years, we depended mostly on humans, water, wind, whale oil, and wood for our energy needs. 150 years ago, we started making a transition to coal. 100 years ago, we started making a transition to oil (and the Anglo-Saxon whaling fleets collapsed). Today, our needs are met by a broad variety of coal (for electricity production, augmented with natural gas and to a lesser extent, wind), oil (for heating and transportation), natural gas (for electricity and heat), and nuclear energy, and the forests have been coming back, especially in North America. We are about due for another change, eh?

a) On one hand, there are some people that believe that we will be forced to change our energy sources by our own avarice. Citing the "irrefutable" research of M. King Hubbert, they claim that we are about to hit the peak production of oil, after which oil will become much more expensive. They may be right.

b) On the other hand, there are a number of us who think that there are other good reasons for transitioning away from fossil fuels regardless of Hubbert's predictions. Not only are those fuels ultimately physically limited in quantity, but they are inefficient in a number of other ways: they inherently cause pollution (spills, SOx, NOx, particulates, and CO2, all externalities); they are the funding source for despots and terrorists who try to gain control first of the resource and then of the markets (rent-seeking through violence and then cartelization); and they are politically unpopular and hard to find, extract, and distribute, leading to capital-intensive organizations that use unknowing political activists to gain control of markets, subsidies, and regulatory bodies (more rent-seeking via the Baptist-bootlegger method). Meanwhile, other entrepreneurs are searching for alternative energy sources and storage/distribution systems, including nuclear (both fusion and fission) and solar (including photovoltaic, thermal, wind-based, and biomass). When they succeed, they will begin pulling market share and then political influence away from the fossil fuels. Case in point: we learned just recently (NY Times article: Tech Barons Take on New Project: Energy Policy) that Solar Barons have decided to start lobbying for subsidies, displacing the Oil Barons. "The investors in recent years have poured billions of dollars into alternative energy start-ups in areas like solar and wind power or the production of fuel for cars from feedstock and crop waste. Many of these projects, they say, could stall without subsidies or government mandates for greater energy efficiency."

c) Meanwhile, other scientists are working on ways of averting forced warming, including using sulfates and other products to reflect solar energy back into space (the "smoke and mirrors" gambit) and sequestering CO2 in plants, underground, and in the ocean (plankton tend to consume CO2, so efforts to increase plankton populations may prove effective). A combination of these may be useful.

2) The other reason it is unlikely that trends will continue is that if it does in fact begin to get hotter, and the results are increasingly worse, there will definitely be a shift in the political, economic, and social structures to counteract the warming problem. These may be forced conversion to mass transit, urbanization, and so on, or it may consist of mass migration to cooler climates, wars, and so on, or possibly even mass starvation. I am obviously not endorsing these, but rather pointing out that these are possible responses that are clearly outside the domain of physical science or at least show an exchange between physical and social science.

Thus, the real question is not whether or not global warming is or is not real, but rather what the appropriate set of responses to the existing science should be. This lands the question squarely in the camp of economics, though I also think there will be questions of politics and sociology. I should note that I've previously suggested that the most promising means of dealing with CO2 concerns application of Coase via tradable permits, but this calls out two perplexing reactions: the anti-free-marketeers demand free trade in the form of Kyoto but otherwise oppose it on principle, and the free-traders who cite Coase refuse to accept the fact that a government is required to define those property rights and thus make that market work.


* Note this is different than Tyler's statement (and the claim made in the comments), "We already have wrecked our environment with global warming; the truth is, it is simply too late to do anything about it." I am turning that on its head and asking if it can be undone in the future by political means now, why do we claim that it is an accomplished fact? There can be no "before it's too late" if it is already too late.

Paternalist Slopes

I submit this in response to Glen Whitman's post by the same name. It's a topic that has had my interest lately.

I) There is a three step approach to policy-making:

1) Identify market failure (sometimes traditional, i.e. externality, but increasingly prevalently cognitive bias, bounded rationality, etc.)
2) Recommend and implement policy
3) Declare victory!

I first realized how badly the defenders of state action needed to be called on this approach in this exchange with Mike Huben. Mike thinks that state action in private, sexual matters is easily justifiable:

"Private sexual behavior has plenty of unintended consequences, most notably unwanted pregnancy and disease transmission. Both are important reasons for state action, although such action should be as little intrusive as possible. Thus, for example, we have sexual education requirements in schools. And required VD tests before marriage."

Unintended or not, these actions are not normally thought of as external. Assuming we are talking about normal adults, the actors know the risks for both, and the consequences will fall on them, not a third party. Absent an externality (I thought of at least two weak ones, but it isn't my job to provide Huben's argument), what is the real failure here? Yes, there is imperfect knowledge here, but that is true of *every* transaction, and hardly a compelling motivation since the authorities lack perfect knowledge themselves. There is also information asymmetry, but there are private means of addressing this: dating, gossip, reputation, etc. And even if we could identify a failure, do the policies address it? People have sex all the time without getting married and therefore entering the realm of VD test requirements. Further, some states don't require such tests, and others show their root in the legislative biases of bygone eras as they continue to test for syphilis but not AIDS. Despite increasingly common and frank discussions of sex in schools, teenage pregnancies remain high, much higher I believe than before the new openness (an era brought about, in part, by the pill). But no, merely identifying the problem and a policy that nominally addresses it seems to be enough. The 3-step process is a simplified but essentially correct version of what is formally known as Second Best Theory.

Why does the analysis of such policy go no further? We know that policy-makers (both legislators and the technical experts in the agencies directed to carry out policy) are subject to the same biases the rest of us are. Look at this history of marijuana laws presented by Charles Whitebread before the California Judges Association. At every step along the route, it was done for the benefit of the users themselves, but the evidence to support each piece of legislation was so flimsy as to defy rational explanation. Especially notable is the fact that at first, marijuana was demonized as being the drug morphine users would fall back on, and later the same people argued it was the gateway to heroin, without apparently blushing. Yet, here we are.

We also know that policies frequently have unintended consequences themselves; think of the effect of subsidizing sugar on the Everglades, or rent control on housing in NYC. We know government failure exists as surely as market failures do; rent seeking is as real as adverse selection, and bringing public good production under federal oversight does not make it less a public good. So it seems rational to me that instead of having, "3) Declare victory!", we should instead have an analysis of the policy, analysis of private alternatives to the policy, comparisons of the two, and a recognition that the least worst policy may be to fail to legislate proposals simply because we can create them without regard to their efficacy or the alternatives. As I wrote on the Becker-Posner Blog entry on Sunnstein and Thaler's Libertarian Paternalism, "The analysis rarely if ever proceeds to look for problems with the policy solution (both market and gov't failures may be present), possible secondary market solutions (e.g. Consumers Reports and Carfax in the case of lemons), or even whether the policy solution will actually address the failure rather than just intend to address it."

I do have reservations, however, about Whitman and Rizzo's vagueness argument: as I pointed out in my comment on Utilitarian Blindness (thanks to my wife for making me confront this), the simple fact that we cannot make all relevant calculations of utility does not mean we should not undertake a policy. I am here simply pointing out that perennial fans of policy-based solutions have not even identified all of the trade-offs, much less attempted to calculate and compare them.

II) There is also an implicit belief that people *should* be coldly and unrelentingly rational. Should they, really?

Despite Spock's faithful adherence to logic, Kirk could regularly beat him in contests. Who was the only successful Kobayashi Maru captain? This is entirely plausible because these were games of strategy where logic could either run you into an undesirable corner (think of the prisoner's dilemma) or fail to illuminate a potential successful but entirely non-linear direction (think Hofstatder's explanation of Godel's Theorem in Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid), and at very least fail to yield answers when they were needed because there were too many unknowns.

That last possibility is one which I think most important. When making time-dependent, strategic decisions, the information required to make a perfectly calculated, rational decision are frequently not available or not knowable. The human advantage is in having an evolved set of mechanisms for making decisions based on scant data, a process which we call, "gut feel", "instinct", or "intuitive". Think of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. Over time, these abilities may be developed to a high degree - chess grandmasters, extraordinarily successful athletes, and polymath entrepreneurs use a combination of calculation and intuition.

That mechanism may fail us when researchers have set up a game and are watching. They know the "unknowable", and are specifically trying to trick the subject's mechanism into taking the wrong tact. I wonder, however, if anyone has ever tried analyzing what happens when they show participants the outcome and then run the experiment again? My guess is that participants get better at overcoming their biases. I would also guess that now that we humans have identified the phenomenon of cognitive bias, over time this information and strategies for avoiding its problems will disseminate to the public at large. Those who successfully incorporate this knowledge will be successful in life, possibly more successful at breeding, and thus we may breed cognitive bias out over millenia.

If people won't be cold, calculating, automatons, then it is the intent of scientific planners that government take over their decision-making for them. How can this be anything but a slippery slope? Where, in the Scientism of Comte and Croly, the Progressives and New Dealers, in the central planners, is there room for arational or even irrational behavior? If there is none, then I think we can safely assume their descent down the slippery slope even if they don't intend it; if not now, then later.

Global Warming I - The Physical Science in a nutshell

When I was working on my Master's thesis, it suddenly occurred to me one night as I wrestled with ModTran that one aspect of it closely corresponded to the science involved in global warming. I was trying to calculate the effects of the atmosphere on light; light is electromagnetic energy; global warming is the result of what happens when energy tries to radiate from earth to space.

My problem had to do with what happens when light from the sun, which can be approximated as a black body of approximately 6600 K (or other values, depending on what you're doing), comes through the atmosphere. A black body emits light over a broad range of wavelengths in a manner first successfully described by Planck (his breakthrough that led to the development of quantum theory). Only three things can happen as energy moves from one medium (space) through another (the atmosphere): it can be reflected, absorbed, or transmitted. It turns out that there are several "windows" in the atmosphere that selectively pass light of certain wavelengths. The largest window happens to correspond to the wavelengths to which our eyes respond (roughly 0.4-0.7 microns), so it is called the visible window or band. This also happens to correspond to the peak wavelengths of the sun. Other windows lie in the ultraviolet spectrum (shorter wavelengths than visible) and the infrared (longer wavelengths).















Planck's curve for a 6600 K blackbody














Atmospheric transmission curve such as the one above are commonplace (this one from here)

When the earth warms, it also has characteristics of a black body, but it is considerably cooler than the sun (nearer 300 K). As a result of being cooler, the peak wavelengths are much longer (see also Wien's Displacement Law). Thus, the ability of the earth to radiate energy back to space depends more (though not exclusively) on the windows in the IR than those in the visible spectrum. The extent of those windows are governed by the gases in the atmosphere which selectively absorb in specific wavelengths.















Planck curve at 300 K, about room temperature (note the vertical scale has changed but the horizontal has not)

CO2 is mostly active in the 3-5 micron region called Midwave Infrared or MWIR, though it is also active in the extremely long wave IR (LWIR). Methane has two very strong spikes in the Short-to-Mid wave IR. CO, O2, and O3 are also active in a few areas. However, the number one most important gas is the vapor of dihydrogen monoxide, which is potentially lethal in its liquid form, has been found in many lakes in North America, and has been found in cancer cells. Also known as water vapor, this gas forms between 0 and 2% of the atmosphere depending on local conditions (as opposed to CO2's 0.04% and methane's 0.005%). That is, water is absent in very hot deserts and in very cold regions (such as the poles). Water vapor is active in every region of the electromagnetic spectrum, from light to long wave IR (LWIR). No other molecule comes close to water's ability to respond to incident radiation because of water's unique molecular shape. Whereas CO2 is laid out symmetrically on an axis, H2O is shaped more like Mickey Mouse's head. This gives it the ability to vibrate in many modes at many frequencies (think of the molecules as masses attached by springs, like John Belushi's bee antennae); since frequency is inversely related to wavelength, this means H2O interacts at many wavelengths.




















Each of the charts above shows where that gas by itself is active in absorbing energy, except the last which shows the cumulative effect. Note the similarity to the atmospheric transmission near the top (this one is inverted, since it is showing absorption rather than transmission). Also, note that the shape of the cumulative curve is far and away dominated by water's contribution. This curve comes from the excellent, 8 Volume The Infrared and Electro-Optical Systems Handbook, Joseph S. Accetta and David L. Schumaker, eds., specifically out of vol. 2, Atmospheric Propagation of Radiation.



Water is thus the greatest contributor to the Greenhouse Effect, though not to the phenomenon known as Global Warming, or more precisely, Anthropogenic (man-made) Global Warming (AGW) or "Forced" global warming (see also this from RealClimate) . Without the Greenhouse Effect, we would likely not exist. The Greenhouse Effect is what keeps Earth from being an icy ball in space; I have read that without the atmosphere, the average temperature of Earth would be about -18 degrees C. Using only the Greenhouse Effect, the average temperature would, however, be about +30 degrees C, way too hot. In fact, the average temperature is about +16 degrees C (average around the whole world, including the poles). I have read that the difference is apparently accounted for by convection and the energy required to melt and evaporate ice and water, respectively, (which was why I said that the the earth's ability to radiate back to space did not depend exclusively on atmospheric transmission windows in the IR spectrum), though that may overstate the case for convection and state change.

I have no doubt that the atmospheric content of CO2 is increasing. The Mauna Loa data (here) and even the difference between what we have sampled lately and the default ModTran values shows that.

Given just these facts, we can surmise that an increase in CO2 will make the most difference where its contribution are relatively greater than those of the sun and water. Those are at night (when the sun is not contributing) and in deserts and over poles (where water content is lower).