Anti-science vs. questionable science

Before my break, over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin was having a go at John Tierney specifically and Republicans generally on their anti-science stance.

In some of the more hilarious comments, they seem to insinuate that agriculture policies are Republican driven; this may perhaps be the result of a number of non-Americans feeling informed enough to comment on American politics. The most egregious of these policies got their start during the Depression (though some pre-date it), and they grew much larger over the years. That roughly corresponds with the approximately 40-year unbroken period in which Democrats controlled Congress. And as Stephen Downes recently reminded us, the more enlightened Left actually prefers these policies because it maintains order among the Morlocks:

Speaking as someone from the left, I understand the need to provide these subsidies to rural and suburban regions. They are necessary because the free market, left to its own devices, would leave these regions completely unserved.

This would greatly exaggerate the 'time warp' effect, whereby rural regions would be decades behind urban regions, not only in technology, but also education and health care, and ultimately, attitudes and behaviours.

...

It turns out - and we have the empirical evidence for this now - that it is much cheaper to provide subsidies to these regions [rural areas in the US and Canada? Or Africa, Asia, and South America? He seems to have wandered around a bit by this point, so the antecedent is no longer clear - EH] rather than to take a 'law and order' approach. Responding to religious fanaticism, tribalism and the like by war and invasion costs hundreds of billions of dollars - a non-productive subsidy that amounts to thousands of dollars per resident. [I don't think he is still talking about Iowa ... but he does now seem to be implying that invasions are the necessary alternative to foreign aid subsidies! That is a false dilemma.]

Essentially, Downes is admitting that he and his enlightened fellows understand the need to do these things, but Republicans should nevertheless be blamed for actually doing them, and please ignore the history of New Deal farm policy. [1] I wouldn't let either party off the hook on this, though. Republicans took over Congress with the intent of rolling back some of these subsidies, and actually did so for a while (under a Democrat president), but then reintroduced them all under the Freedom to Farm Bill (under a Republican president). The Democratic Congress recently passed another horrific farm policy law with broad-based Republican support, and the silence over at DailyKos is deafening, except to continue to propagate the meme that the beneficiaries of the bill are Republican farmers.[2] As I said at CT, ag policy is non-partisan. Perhaps I should have said bipartisan?

There is a large group of people who tend to be unified by a mindset that is anti-Western, anti-industrial, anti-free-market. Not all share all aspects of this, and not all share the same level of venom, but they exist. At one end of the spectrum, you have the ignorant, violent kids who tore up Seattle and join ELF, who think that Hayduke was a pansy. At the other, you have the reserved lobbyists of the Sierra Club.

People in this group have a model of the world which is reinforced by pessimistic scientific claims. Anything which looks like an indictment of Western, industrial, modern society is immediately accepted on its face because it reinforces their moral views. This confirmation bias, however, goes unrecognized and unacknowledged because of the myriad of other biases that occur when looking back at it introspectively.

One of the biases which makes it difficult to identify past errors is hindsight bias, the tendency to believe that one's predictive abilities are better than they are. We tend to forget bad predictions and to remember good ones. Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for information that matches our preconceptions. Another is the winners' bias, in which we tend to examine hypotheses that actually turned out to be true in order to determine whether hypotheses are more frequently true, a bias which is in part selection bias and in part the Texas Sharpshooter's Fallacy. Selection bias is a distortion created by the manner in which data are collected, in this case resulting from limiting our selection of hypotheses to examine to after the fact rather than before the fact. The Texas Sharpshooter's fallacy is the determination of the hypothesis after the data have been collected. It would be far more constructive if we were to look at all of the hypotheses before the era which was being forecast and to look at which of those were true rather than looking at only the most memorable ones (recall bias?), which are inevitably the ones that eventually come true.

So, for example, we have the historical examples of epicycles, luminiferous aether, and phlogiston. Epicycles were introduced to try to explain the occasional regress of a planet in order to salvage the Ptolemeic or Earth-centric view of the universe. Luminous ether was the medium in which light travelled. Phlogiston was the element which sustained fire. These were important in their day, but are largely unknown today because they were, of course, wrong. These are just a few of the many now-discredited theories of how our world works.

More recently, we had the saccharin scare. Scarcely remembered today, the saccharin controversy was headline news in its day. Having determined that it caused cancer in rats, the FDA wanted to ban it as a carcinogen. They ran into tremendous popular and corporate opposition, since saccharin was the main sugar substitute in diet drinks at the time. They "compromised" by requiring the incorporation of warning labels. Years later, it was determined that saccharin has an effect particular not just to rats, but more specifically to male rats, in a way that does not effect humans. The entire controversy was completely misguided.[3]

Another example is the global cooling scare of the 1970s. It is still well-known that the Earth cooled during the 1940-1970 period, leading to concerns that the trend would continue until we entered a new Ice Age. Pollution was blamed, though it was noted that we are overdue for another Ice Age (in the literature, this is described as the end of the "interglacial period"). Bring this up on a climate change activist website and they will point out that the scare was largely created by articles in Newsweek and National Geographic magazines but was not predicted by scientists. While true that it was brought to the fore of public attention by the popular press, and that few scientists were predicting as opposed to positing the possibility of a new Ice age, the actual history at the time proves my point that these memes achieve some resonance in popular opinion despite the fact that they aren't true.[4] Afterwards, those who believed and advocated strong action claim to have never believed strongly.

It's almost a Lake Wobegon effect: all of today's environmentalists are above average in their ability to have picked only the true environmental scares of the 1970s. How did the belief in global cooling ever get so popular? Was there a die-off among environmentalists in the 1980s? That damn Reagan is probably behind it.

Finally, we have people who accept the claims of Paul Ehrlich:

"The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines . . . hundreds of millions of people (including Americans) are going to starve to death." [1968]

"I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." [1969]

Far from being ostracised for making a string (or two) of laughably wrong predictions, Ehrlich has received several awards for his "research". People want so badly to believe him that they continue to discount his way-off-the-mark predictions and accept his newer work at face value.
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Most scientists must necessarily be wrong most of the time, at least in published journal articles. This is the nature of science as a search for truth (truth which is as yet unknown): one must submit hypotheses to tests. Either most of those hypotheses must be wrong, or scientists are surprisingly good at guessing right answers, or publication bias is a factor. In fact, those are the findings of scientists researching the results of research: see this article by John Ioannidis and this article by Douglas Allchin for examples.

What is required is a substantial amount of skepticism, even for "accepted" conclusions. At one time in the not-so-distant past, ulcers were thought to be related to nerves, stomach chemistry, and diet. Not until 1979-1981, when two Australian researchers (Warren and Marshall) showed that most peptic ulcers were caused by a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, did we have the truth. It is fortunate that Warren and Marshall rejected the consensus on this. Howard Aiken's assertion that you shouldn't "worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats," summarizes the reception Warren and Marshall's ideas received from the medical community. Humans are not good at identifying truth that is at odds with their world view, or at identifying when falsehoods are confirming their world view.

We must be as skeptical of those who claimed that they always knew that Global Warming was true as of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) itself, even if (or perhaps especially if) we believe it to be true. Skeptical, not hateful, dismissive, and/or obtuse. Not skepticism because we "feel" it isn't true, but skepticism for its own sake. The doctors who doubted Warren and Marshall made them prove their claims; that's as good for all of us as is the skepticism of Warren and Marshall that led to the discovery in the first place. Those who claimed they always knew the truth of AGW (especially the non-scientists), even when the evidence was more scant than at present, likely believed (and continue to believe) every pessimistic prediction, but conveniently forgot those that later turned out to be false. They weren't prescient; they were and remain ignorant. They are also ignorant of their ignorance.

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[1] A while back, I said that the Left may not be in favor of the Police State, but they are in favor of a Police State. They build it and then feign surprise when the other side uses it. They refuse to believe reports that their own guys use it for anything less than righteousness.

[2] This continues to be a vexing problem about which I intend to post sometime in the near future. That is, a completely misguided application of demographics along with confusing correlation with causation. In this case, we have policies which benefit farmers. Farmers are known to live in rural states. Rural states tend to vote Republican. However, less than 2% of the population farms. Furthermore, it is well known that a small portion of farmers receives most of the subsidies. They alone cannot account for the number of votes received by Republicans. Believing that it is Republicans representing Republican farmers that managed to pass a bill 318-106 in the House, and 81-15 in the Senate, defies explanation on any grounds other than partisan blindness. When you further find out that of those 15 voting against it, only two were Democrats while 13 were Republicans, you really must examine your premises. In other words, it is time for Democrats to drop the sanctimony on farm policy.

In other news (and a demonstration of this same misguided approach to demographics), Democrats are the party of the wealthy and they emit most of the greenhouse emissions. More to come on this, eventually.

[3] Curiously, Quiggin's response regarding the saccharin scare was that it was driven by the USDA, which he sees as a Republican creature:

As regards saccharin, a quick look at Wikipedia reveals that the anti-saccharin push came from USDA. I don’t think it would be too hard to look behind the curtain to red-state sugar and corn producers.

In the first place, the Wiki article specifically points out that the USDA opposition was mostly one man acting in accordance with the law, a law written by the meat-packing industry, so I can't completely discount Quiggin's claim. But Quiggin's assertion that red-state farmers were behind it is typical of the partisan blind under which the subjects of this article labor. Yes, some of those farmers were Republican. Some are Democrat, but he is blind to them. The laws were all written, supported, and not repealed by the Democrats even though they have controlled Congress for most of the period since 1907, and the White House for about half of it.

In the second, this doesn't explain how the FDA came to attempt to ban it.

In the third, doesn't this illustrate exactly what many of us have been saying with respect to regulatory capture? Specifically, that the government mostly exists to defend corporations in the guise of defending the average citizen?

[4] In fact, this has become a new interest of mine: How do such ideas get created and transmitted to seats of power? It isn't always via the press, and the locus of power is not always popular opinion. Take, for example, the ideas of the German Historical school, which got mainstreamed under the name of Progressivism by a route that seems to have included Robert Ely, John Commons, Herbert Croly, Robert M. LaFollette Sr., Teddy Roosevelt, Louis Brandeis, and finally FDR's cabinet. Why that school of thought? Why that route? Pure chance?

My point here repeatedly escapes the comprehension of the pessimists. I am not saying, "Scientific consensus in the 1970s was in favor of global cooling and impending an Ice Age." I am saying, "Public opinion in the 1970s was tipping toward a belief in an impending Ice Age and a desire to do something about it." It therefore doesn't matter what scientists were publishing in journals, or that there was no scientific consensus predicting the end of the interglacial period. What matters is that a significant number of voters believed it. How did they receive the information? How credible did they perceive it to be? How strong were their beliefs, and how far were they willing to go to act on them?

Can you poke a hole in this argument?

Yes.

I came across this in the comments to a Scott Adams blog post. People are awed by it. The author asks people to poke holes in the argument. Everyone who references it implies that holes can't be poked in it. Usually, they are people who don't really want to poke holes in it. It's Taleb's round-trip problem: "no evidence of holes" has become "evidence of no holes".

The argument revolves around this chart:

Warming \ Action	Yes	No
False	Cost & Global Depression	8~)
True	Cost	Catastrophes - Econ - Political - Social - Environmental - Health

The hole: The upper left corner should be identical to the lower right corner, in the generalized sense it is presented.

Argument: Recall what happened during The Great Depression (and other similar experiences).

• Economic: Collapse, 25% unemployment, people selling apples and pencils, people resorting to subsistence farming. In the Soviet Union, millions died during state-imposed famines, while in China and Cambodia, people resorted to cannibalism during the massive shifts of the Great Leap Forward and the Khmer Rouge ruralization. As he correctly notes in a follow-up, the Great Depression wasn't triggered by abnormally high government spending (the rest of his comments regarding state involvement in that period strike me as naive). However, note that he changes his own rules of debate at this point: in the beginning, he was inviting us to imagine the *worst* possible outcome. Now, he's saying that we're going to compare the worst possible outcome of that which he would like to avoid (climate change) with the mildest outcome of that which he's willing to accept (unecessary expense incurred when climate change turns out to be false). Also, note the fundamental differences between something like Manhattan or Apollo project to which he is comparing, where the costs were limited to a relatively small scope within the economy, and his proposed project, which is a large scale transformation of the economy. He wants you to think this is a difference of degree when in fact it is so great as to be a difference in kind.
• Political: The Rise of Totalitarianism (Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, arguably the era prior to the Supreme Court shoot-down of Roosevelt's corporative NRA). The Vichy French were easily persuaded to become a German satellite. After the war, Eastern Europe easily gave in to the Communist model. States tend to expand during crises, and the people are only too willing to accept or even ask for it.
• Social: Germany, 1933. Italy, 1925. Read Zinn's accounts of the Depression, too. We came this close ---||--- to following the European models, especially the Communist model. Remember, his rule was to imagine the worst that could happen.
  
• Environmental: The Climate Change believers want so badly to believe that they are ready to accept anything whose justification is reducing global warming. They believe that if everyone said, "Yeah, let's do it," the outcome will be wholesale development and acceptance of sustainability laws. Unfortunately, politics is a little more complex. What we are likely to get is laws like those that subsidize ethanol production, followed by the planting of corn on marginal lands, necessarily accompanied by more petroleum-based fertilizers, irrigation, pesticides, and GM crops, and also accompanied by rises in the price of corn, followed by protests and socio-political unrest in places like Mexico. Further, compare the environment in the Communist Bloc to that in Western Europe: despite absolute state control, indeed because of it, they were far more wasteful and polluting. But, you protest, the modern US is different! Go back and read the short summary of our ethanol policy. Additionally, you might look around at the number of dams created during the Depression, or consider how the REA killed the nascent wind generation industry, etc. What seemed like a good idea then has turned out to be an environmental disaster today.
  
• Health: Health and income are closely related. People living in wealthier nations are more healthy than those in poorer nations, and wealthier people in a nation are healthier than poorer people in that nation. The science teacher in the video is willing to give up a little wealth; he just doesn't know or concede that is an implied concession of health.
  

In the general terms and using his own rules, the two blocks should be equal. In more specific terms and using something a little more realistic, we will be intentionally accepting more state intervention but possibly averting a more severe environmental outcome by taking the action he prefers. The question, which rides on discount rates and probabilities, is how much of one should be accepted to avoid the other. I believe the answer cannot be calculated.

There are additional problems which lie outside his argument.

• When should we take action? The theory implicit in his argument (made more explicit in one of the follow-ups) is that if we take action now, we avoid costs later. However, that leaves aside the important point that we will have more resources in the future with which to take action: more wealth, more knowledge, more technology. Thus, action taken later may actually be less costly.
  
• What about actions that are already underway? Some of them are being taken by the state, others by private actors. What he is really demanding is drastic, collective action, taken almost exclusively by the state. He explicitly asks you to support "policies" rather than goals; it is not apparent whether he understands how drastic they need to be.
  
• What is the optimal climate? It may be slightly warmer than the current one.
  

My response to his third installment, is located here. The bottom line: yes, climate scientists seem to be largely in agreement about AGW. But his argument that we are not qualified to judge whether or not climate change is occurring disqualifies the physical scientists from making policy recommendations since those fall to social scientists.

The entire series of videos is very entertaining, I would recommend the original and second response (linked above). I especially like his emphasis on civil debate.

Sustainability Conference II

Sustainability Conference I

The attention given to solar was completely unrealistic. I happened upon Kunstler's blog; he accused Democrats of as much "magical thinking" as Republicans in this post. WRT solar power, he's right. There was no realistic discussion of this: a few people were obviously interested in it, and a few had done enough research to know the reality, but did not seem to have been dissuaded.

1) The keynote speaker said the cost of solar is going down. Bzzt. As I noted earlier, it has been going up in lockstep with oil prices, though it seems to be plateauing. If each dollar buys less solar panel, given a fixed or declining amount of money left over after other purchases (which is what the End of Suburbia was preaching), you aren't going to be able to buy as much solar in the future. My suspicion is that there are two causes for the rise in price: increasing demand with flat or slowly increasing supply, and subsidies. The former was driven by the increase in fossil fuels in 2003-2006, and may eventually correct itself. The latter is self-fueling (see below).

2) How much power does the average user use? The US national average in 2001 was 888 kW-h/month. Mine is something like 600 kW-h per month. If I had a 1 kW solar array and got 6 hours insolation (direct solar exposure) per day for 30 days, I could generate 180 kW-h per month. That's 1/3 of what I need, 2/3 if I double the size of the system. And I live in New Mexico where we get 6-7 hours of insolation a day (and we have something like 260 cloud-free days per year); the calculus is much tougher if I live in NYC or Seattle where they get far less insolation.

3) Two costs were given at the conference. One was $16,000 for a 1.5 kW system (roughly $10/W). Another was that the typical system costs $0.25 - $0.40 / kW-h to operate. Someone asked if that included sell-back (net-metering). The answer was obscure (I don't think the speaker heard it correctly), but the proper answer should have been: no, but it doesn't matter much. You can only sell back at the rates you pay for electricity, which is about $0.10/kW-h, so it's still 2.5-4 times the cost of commercial supply, i.e. it's no free lunch. Also, you can only sell back to the electric company up to the amount you use. Look at it this way: if you are currently paying $60/month for electricity, you will be paying $90/month for the loan for the system after accounting for rebates and sell-backs. You will also still have that monthly bill from the electricity company, but it will only consist of the subscriber fee plus tax.

Note that these were for grid-tie systems. An off-the-grid system will run at least twice as much, and the batteries require extra care (a well-ventilated area to dissipate the hydrogen generated during storage) and replacement on a regular basis (10-20 years). Incidentally, "grid-tie" and "net-metering" means that the PV system produces more than you use through most of the day, produces just about what you need in the afternoon/evening, and you rely on the grid at night and in the morning; which means someone still has to run a power plant.

3a) Let's look at this. The 1500 W system will be operational in a location that gets about 6 hours of insolation per day. That comes to 65700 kW-hours in the 20 year lifetime of the system. That means the cost of electricity is about $0.24/kW-h, rather toward the low end of the other prediction. This doesn't take into account system degradation, line losses, and so on, which would all drive the cost per kW-h higher. Take the $6,000 tax rebate back and it still comes to $0.15/kW-h. This system was enough to cover the speaker's own daily use.

3b) One thing that occurred to me during the movie I discussed in the previous article (link at top) -- and was later pointed out by one of the builders in the panel session -- was that in the coming era of higher energy costs (remember, this is their basic assumption), the system would be more and more valuable. In other words, if electricity costs increased to something on the order of $0.20/kW-h, the system would be viable at the low end of the calculations above. It would definitely pay for itself quicker if energy costs rose above $0.25/kW-h. That's an interesting bet, especially if you switch to a plug-in hybrid.

4) One of the builders, a self-described long-time left-wing activist, made a point of saying how the Bush Administration had "hammered down" any subsidies for solar power.

4a) Let's review the Clinton Administration environmental initiatives:

• Signatory to Kyoto, never submitted to the Senate for ratification, never did anything about it.
• Some 11th hour rules made in 2000 (first directed in 1996) on arsenic in drinking water changing the maximum exposure level.
• Propose a “Million Solar Rooftop” program, but never pressed it. That's about it.
  

This chart from here shows that Clinton Administration funding for Climate Change programs basically increased from 603 million to 1.1 billion. Not impressive.

Funding for Technology Programs to Combat Climate Change (in millions of dollars)
1993	1994	1995	1996	1997	1998	1999	2000 Estimated	2001 Proposed
603	796	960	788	764	825	1,009	1,095	1,432

This isn't to say that the Bush Administration is exactly the Teddy Roosevelt Administration (or even the Nixon Administration) in terms of its environmental activity, but Clinton only topped him in rhetoric. However, from what I can find, current Climate Change spending is somewhere in the $3-4 billion dollar range. Clinton: 40% increase in 8 years, Bush 400% in 6 years. Of course, since you can't actually pin those numbers down to find out exactly what we're getting for the "investment", I'd guess we had a case of Clinton = Bush = 99% BS. I say that because I suspect that both administrations counted obvious boondoggles (such as ethanol from corn programs) as Climate Change remediation.

I also found that the Bush rhetoric has been a regular but undiscovered drumbeat. This article's author thinks the rhetoric is new, despite earlier press releases like this, this, and this. I think Kunstler is right to be cynical.

4b) Let's review the politics and economics of subsidies. Subsidies are sometimes known as "corporate welfare", which, as we all know, both Republicans and Democrats are against. It is a mystery how they keep getting passed, init? In the solar industry, the subsidies happen to help out little Mom & Pop companies like British Petroleum, Canon, Kyocera, Mitsubishi, Sharp, and GE Energy. Also keep in mind that the subsidies are not secret: the suppliers know about them, too. They know that the bargaining limit for prices will go up by the amount of the subsidy, so they can basically leave production levels where they were before the subsidy even as they raise prices by the amount of the subsidy. The subsidy is no benefit to the consumer when it all goes to the manufacturer, so this merely becomes transfer from taxpayers to PV manufacturers. This is probably one reason for the rise in PV prices, especially in Europe. Still in favor of them?

Conclusion:

I believe we would be much better off with fossil fuel energy prices that more closely reflected the social costs. That's what Mankiw's Pigou Club promises, but it's also what a cap & trade program would bring. Both Kyoto and the 1990 Clean Air Act contain forms of cap & trade programs; the SO2 program in the 1990 Clean Air Act is thought to be very successful (which Administration signed that?) at reducing Acid Rain (resulting in things like this). Raising the cost of production of coal-fired or natural-gas-fired electricity by requiring providers to buy CO2 permits does a much better job of encouraging alternative solutions for two reasons:

First, people might not choose solar. They might choose to cut down on energy consumption with, for example, more insulation, better house design, more efficient vehicles, and/or better urban design. This would be a much better way of balancing our needs with the supplies and AGW forecasts because it would stretch existing supplies. This is the soft energy path favored by Amory Lovins. It is also an example of the principle of substitution noted by Julian Simon, and an example of adaptation recently suggested by Roger Pielke in Nature. Cutting energy use could also be combined with the adoption of alternative energies, enabling us to get there easier. In other words, rather than replacing my entire 600 kW-h usage with solar, I could perhaps cut my energy usage by half and then buy a 1500 W system that meets all of my needs.

Second, making fossil fuels more expensive would not subsidize and therefore support the least efficient providers of solar energy. If there are, say, three providers, the most efficient (least cost) provider would sell all he could make at a price that the competitors could not match up to the point at which consumers would turn to the next least cost provider. Once demand rises that high, the least cost provider would raise his prices to those of the competitor and pocket the extra income because the only alternative consumers have is not the least cost provider. If demand is high enough that the two most efficient providers cannot meet it all, they will raise their prices to meet those of the highest cost provider. As demand continues to increase, the least cost provider will see higher returns, and can therefore command more investment to expand his facility to the point that he might put the least efficient (highest cost) provider out of business. In such an environment, the highest cost provider has an incentive to try to improve his processes to match those of the least cost supplier; either that or risk going out of business altogether (which is fine, since it leaves the two lower cost providers in business at the prices commanded by the second lowest-cost provider). The subsidy thwarts the entire scheme by allowing even the highest cost provider to raise prices in order to capture some of the subsidy from the consumer. It is thus an incentive to capture market share and a disincentive to do it by increased efficiency at using inputs. More investment will go toward marketing than engineering and production management.

Unfortunately, the default setting of people at these conferences is

Democrats good, Republicans bad (and libertarians evil embodied)

Or, alternatively

Command and Control, Tax and Spend, Policymaking Government Good, Market-based Reform Bad

If they could perhaps be bumped off their default settings, I think I could stand listening to the rest of what they had to say. Unfortunately, they wanted to start the second half of the conference worshipping Cuba as the example of the path we should take with another film called The Power of Community. Sorry, I am actually offended by cults of tyrannical, murderous, autocratic personalities.

NOTE: Now that I'm looking up the Cuba film, I'm sorry I missed it. Apparently, one of the responses to the loss of their patron, the Soviet Union, and the subsequent collapse of their system was to establish farms with property rights (property rights in a broad sense - it is owned by a local community) and private markets (at which said community trades). The same thing that brought China out of the Cultural Revolution. Private property saves the day again?

Still, it's limited freedom within an overall oppressive atmosphere. One rooftop farm has this description: "Running free on the floor are gerbils, which eat the waste from the rabbits, and become an important protein source themselves." Yummy, can't wait. Most reviews of the film are the same fawning fluff, but only in a picture caption on this did I find a reference to the private markets. And abelardlindsay comments on The Oil Drum post about the film that Cuba is much less efficient at turning energy into wealth than its neighbors.