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?

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.

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.

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).

Time travel issues

I'm intrigued by the possibility of time travel, though I don't obsess on it (in other words, I probably haven't read all the books you have on the subject). However, it occurred to me the other day that most fictional accounts seem to either overlook or oversimplify one problem. If you are going to travel in time, you probably won't be traveling in space simultaneously (though some use space travel as the means by which time travel occurs). In "practice", as fictionalized, this becomes an issue of making sure that you don't place yourself inside a wall in the future, or possibly a glacier in the past.

That acknowledgment of the problem leads to yet another error that would be made by a non-physicist. They (the author/screenwriter/whatever) are assuming that your space displacement is zero ... but relative to what? The earth is both spinning and moving rapidly through space as it orbits the sun. If you move in time but not in space, you would find yourself in outer space, unless you timed your travel precisely so that you caught earth on another orbital path.

But that assumes that the sun about which we revolve is stationary, which it is not.

Oh well, 12 Monkeys is still a pretty good movie. And ST:TNG still sucks eggs.

How did they do that - BOINC!

I see that IBM and Sun are renting out supercomputer time (IBM on Blue Gene). $1/hour per processor used at Sun. A few years ago, I read an article about an oil company whose administrative and engineering desktop computers ran linux. At night, they rebooted to become a single beowulf cluster. Cool way to get double usage out of their hardware, no? Now I see there is a cottage industry for supercomputing based on beowulf, and I also see that Microsoft is getting into the act. Applications include analyzing sesimic data for oil deposits, atmosphere models for weather and climate prediction, genome data, and chemical compound data for pharmaceuticals.

But, I have to ask - is building a new supercomputer or renting time on one efficient?

Wouldn't it be cheaper to pay home users, say, $0.10/hour for them to participate in a distributed computing project? The infrastructure is already there: it's called BOINC (for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). There are several projects running on BOINC, of which the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is the most famous.

There are two barriers I can identify. One is that the BOINC program needs a billing mechanism, but that should be no problem. The other is that when you are sending out proprietary data to project participants, what keeps your competitor from participating and intercepting your data? That problem seems to be bigger for pharmaceutical companies than for oil explorers, who can after all hide the location of their data. Pharmaceuticals may be able to hide data (I don't know enough about it to know what is or isn't possible) or they may be able to insert misinformation. On the other hand, you can always screen the participants and sign them up to nondisclosure agreements, but that defeats one of the advantages of distributed computing, which is that you have low transaction costs so you can keep the volunteers coming.

What other public goods projects (like climate and SETI) could benefit from the distributed approach? Are there other private goods that could be produced this way? I know that Bill Gates proposed a while back that we consider adopting a system where every e-mail you send commits you to a certain amount of CPU time for such projects (say, a minute). That would be no burden to most of us because it could run in the background, but it would shut a spammer down. In a way, you would essentially be calculating the solution to a public good: the spam-free internet (it wouldn't matter if the calculations were just multiplication tables). If you also happened to produce a cure for Alzheimer's, that would be good, too.

Now that I've posed the question, I have to ask another: is $0.10 enough to induce participants? Or, is it too much because it will encourage people to use more electricity and therefore create more pollution? We may already have too much electricity wasted on electronics, won't this create more?