Small-number statistical garbage
Back in 2005, the U.S. experienced the worst hurricane season in history, including Hurricane Rita, Hurricane Emily, and, most notoriously, Hurricane Katrina. At the time, this was widely heralded as stunning evidence for global warming, which according to many models should result in bigger and more frequent hurricanes. Indeed, Hurricane Katrina alone appears to have tipped the balance for public concern over global warming—thanks in part, predictably, to more dire warnings from Al Gore.
This is garbage of course—or, to put it more precisely, small-number statistical garbage. I’ve blogged before about global warming, and I’m on record saying it’s real, but there’s no way we can conclude from one or two hurricane seasons that global warming is the culprit. To wit: according to a recent report, over the last two years (since the record-setting 2005 season) the United States has experienced virtually no hurricanes.
I have a prediction: there will be no flood of articles retracting all the other articles, saying “Maybe global warming can’t be blamed for Katrina after all.” We certainly won’t have speculation that the lack of hurricanes is evidence against global warming. And I bet Al Gore won’t utter a peep about it.
N.B. You gotta love journalists:
Despite alarming predictions, the U.S. came through a second straight hurricane season virtually unscathed, raising fears among emergency planners that they will be fighting public apathy and overconfidence when they warn people to prepare for next year.
How’s that for a manufactured crisis?
Please force link underlining 2
Just a quick note to the web designers out there: like many people, I hate link underlining, so I disable it in my browser. This means that if you’re going to make the color of your links the same as the color of the surrounding text (or nearly so), you should use CSS to force link underlining. Sure, I could enable underlining, but that’s not my job. If your design requires underlined links, it’s up to you to make it happen. Luckily, it’s not hard:
a { text-decoration: underline; }added to your site stylesheet does the trick.
Quite a few sites fall into the rely-on-the-browser-underlining trap. Notable members of this dubious club include the otherwise excellent Economist website and, ironically, the “design and usability blog” Signal vs. Noise. I love Rails, but I curse those 37signals guys every time I have to enable link underlining just to read their damn blog.
Global warming 6
Humans have a peculiar penchant for eschatology, and I just realized that I haven’t yet sounded off on the doomsday scenario du jour, global warming. With one notable exception—namely, the risk of nuclear war—all previous eschatological angst has proven to be misplaced. So, is global warming another exception? In other words, are we all going to die?
I’ll end the suspense right now: the answer is no. But what about all the science? What about the conspiracy by conservative closet-homosexual Republican pedophiles to suppress the truth about global warming, as helpfully reported recently in Newsweek? (Perhaps I exaggerate a little.) And what about Al Gore? Please, for the love of God, what about Al Gore?
Part of the problem is that “global warming” is used in at least three distinct senses:
- global warming: Earth is getting hotter.
- global warming: Earth is getting hotter because of human activity.
- global warming: Earth is getting hotter because of human activity, and we’re all going to die.
Here’s the deal: #1 is indisputable. #2 is probably true, but that’s irrelevant as long as #3 is false, which it almost certainly is.
Unfortunately, these three usages often get conflated. Those who doubt #3 are accused of doubting #1, which makes them look like idiots. Furthermore, those who fret about #2 often implicitly assume #3, and treat those who doubt #3 as immoral assholes, because goddamn it, it’s our fault, so it’s up to us to do something about it! And here I’m looking squarely at Al Gore when I say: if global warming represents a calamity for humanity, it doesn’t fucking matter whose fault it is. When we discover a world-destroying asteroid on a collision course with Earth, nobody’s going to say “well, we didn’t put the asteroid there, and it’s not our fault, so we don’t have to do anything about it.” I’ve long admired Al Gore, and I wish he were President instead of W. too, but on this issue he is the biggest, most self-righteous, most sanctimonious sack of shit that I’ve ever seen in my life.
So, in the end, we should only be worried if “we’re all going to die”—i.e., if global warming is actually a looming disaster. Is it? It’s possible, of course, though even the consensus IPCC report hardly looks like Armageddon. But what about all those scary pictures of Manhattan under water in “An Inconvenient Truth”, you say? Go and watch it again and see for yourself: Al Gore never talks about how likely the scenarios are, nor how long they will take. These are crucial omissions, and it’s no coincidence, because as far as I can tell no reputable simulations show effects on that scale on any reasonable (say, less than two-century) timeline. Moreover, even the worst-case scenarios are based on delicate, complicated computer models, and anybody who has any experience with such models knows not to trust them any further than they can throw them (which is, coincidentally, usually the distance to the nearest journal willing to publish them). (Anyone so good at writing computer models that they can actually believe the results is probably making millions of dollars on Wall Street right now anyway. Why worry about global warming when you can just buy a yacht and sail around while the little people drown?)
Finally, climate simulations typically ignore the effects of technology—technology that will be vigorously pursued if the consequences of unchecked global warming prove dire. Even at current technological levels, we could probably swing something. Moreover, our technological capabilities are increasing exponentially; when people worry about the sea level rising a few feet by 2070, I think Jesus, there might be superintelligent robots by then! In this context, it’s hard to imagine how our posthuman civilization would have much trouble with a few melting ice caps.
None of this is to say that global warming isn’t a problem. It probably is. It may cost billions or trillions of dollars to avert its worst effects, though decisions about whether it’s worth making any particular change need to be based on a rational cost-benefit analysis (and the negative effects have to be considered against the positives, such as opening up Arctic shipping lanes and exposing billions of dollars worth of oil and natural gas under the Arctic seafloor). But, as far as I can tell, the idea that global warming represents an existential threat to humanity’s global technological civilization is utter bullshit, totally unsupported by the evidence. I’m a scientist; I could be convinced otherwise. But if the best you can do is show a graph with CO2 levels going off the chart and a few slickly produced movies of the World Trade Center Ground Zero underwater, it’s hard to take you seriously.
Global warming? Yes. Anthropogenic global warming? Probably. Global calamity? Show me the evidence, or, seriously, STFU(AG).
Time dilation & rock 'n' roll
By now many of you have no doubt heard that Brian May, best known as the lead guitarist of Queen, has received his Ph.D. in Astrophysics. Now that you know this, give a(nother) listen to ‘39 from Queen’s album A Night at the Opera. Written (and ably sung) by Dr. May, ‘39 tells the story of a group spacefarers who sail out to the stars “In the year of ‘39…in the days when lands were few”. They return to Earth, according to the crew, that same year—but arrive many years later according to those they left behind:
In the year of '39 came a ship in from the blue The Volunteers came home that day And they bring good news of a world so newly born Though their hearts so heavily weigh For the earth is old and grey, to a new home we'll away But my love this cannot be For so many years have gone though I'm older but a year Your mother's eyes from your eyes cry to me
That’s right—Queen wrote a song about time dilation. I’ve always liked Queen, but this takes them to a whole new level.
Speculators and peak oil 3
In my previous post on oil depletion, I claimed that markets are well-equipped to deal with the problem of peak oil. A common objection to this—typically made by those who favor a government solution to the problem—is that markets are not good at long-range thinking. Indeed, this is a common objection to markets in general. The argument with respect to oil goes like this: oil prices might rise as oil becomes scarce, but what if it doesn’t rise fast enough to cause solutions to be invented in time? Since we can see right now that it’s going to be a problem, we can use the government to institute a “Manhattan project” to come up with an appropriate alternative energy source. The central claim, in other words, is that government has better foresight than markets. The secondary claim is that government is better-equipped than markets to discover the solution. Let us examine these claims in turn.
Perhaps out of confusion with Wall Street’s reputation for focusing on short-term earnings, many people are unaware of how good markets are at long-range thinking. I’ll use oil as a concrete example, but the general idea should be clear. The mechanism is simple: if oil is running out, then it will be more valuable in the future. This means that if you buy oil now you can make a profit by holding the oil until its price rises. Of course, the future price is not the only relevant variable; it also matters how long until the price is reached, since money has time value. The higher the future price relative to the current price, the farther in advance it makes sense to buy oil and put in storage (or, more plausibly, simply leave it in the ground). Now comes the key: if many people buy oil in anticipation of its higher future price, this will increase its current price by restricting the current supply available. In other words, the current price is a reflection of its future scarcity. It’s through the price system that markets are able to anticipate the state of the world even in the far future. If there is an approaching apocalypse, it is already reflected in current prices.
The price system only functions if those who anticipate future scarcity are allowed to act on their beliefs; such people are called “speculators”. Unfortunately, those who underestimate the ability of the price system to anticipate future events are among the most likely to decry those who would buy oil in hope of future profits, maligning speculators as “hoarders”. Somehow, people’s intuition tells them that buying oil when it’s plentiful and then selling it when it’s scarce is morally suspect; after all, nobody likes a “price gouger”. And yet, as argued above, speculators perform a vital service; if you think about it, what they’re really doing is transporting oil from a place where it’s not needed to a place where it is. That these “places” are actually at different times is irrelevant. That their motive is (at least partially) profit is also irrelevant; as Adam Smith noted more than 200 years ago, as much as the baker might enjoy his work, it is not due to his better nature that we expect him to rise every morning to bake us bread.
Let’s consider now the preferred solution of many peak oil worrywarts: massive government action, sometimes called a “Manhattan project for alternative energy”. The analogy with the Manhattan project is utterly misleading, since not only did the quest for an atomic bomb require the utmost secrecy, but the drive to develop nuclear weapons was not motivated by a market need. For an energy Manhattan project, even the best possible scenario involves government-appointed “experts” allocating huge amounts of resources for alternative energy projects, with no real guide as to which sources of energy are the most promising—or, at least, no real penalty for guessing wrong.
The Manhattan project analogy is also based on the dubious expectation that the “answer” for our energy needs involves a single technology, or at most a few. And even if the experts were spectacularly lucky in identifying the right technology, the government has the wrong incentives for implementing it. With such a huge amount of money sloshing around, we could surely expect there to be massive political influence. It is depressingly likely that the most “promising” sources of energy would happen to involve large projects built in the districts of powerful congressman and in the states of powerful senators.
Markets, on the other hand, are more flexible, able to consider many different possible solutions in a massively parallel fashion. The penalty for guessing wrong is losing your investment or losing your business. If there is a single “solution”, the profits to be had from finding it would be enormous, so there is every reason to expect that the market would find it. If, as is more likely, there are many overlapping answers, involving reduced energy use and a spectrum of new energy sources, the market is well-equipped to find those as well. Indeed, saying “the market is the answer” is really simply an admission of ignorance—an admission that we don’t know the answer, or that there may not even be a single answer.
The solution to peak oil is simple: let the price system—with its heroic if greedy speculators—work its magic.
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