My dad:

Paul Krugman, in one of his more inflamatory statements, claimed that congressmen who voted against cap and trade were guilty of "planetary treason."

The bill contains substantial support for biofuels, including a five year moratorium on letting the EPA decide whether, on net, producing ethanol actually reduces carbon dioxide. Converting food crops into fuel drives up the price of food. Driving up the world price of food results in more people in poor countries dying. Krugman is, no doubt, opposed to world hunger in theory. But he has come out passionately in favor of it in practice.

Treason or murder, take your choice.

Ooh, treason! I want treason!

Freeman Dyson agrees with me on global warming, he must be a smart guy :). (Uh-oh, my inner Phil Hellmuth is showing!)

“The costs of what Gore tells us to do would be extremely large,” Dyson said. “By restricting CO2 you make life more expensive and hurt the poor. I’m concerned about the Chinese.”
“They’re the biggest polluters,” Imme replied.

“They’re also changing their standard of living the most, going from poor to middle class. To me that’s very precious.”
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Now came Arctic scenes, with Gore telling of disappearing ice, drunken trees and drowning polar bears. “Most of the time in history the Arctic has been free of ice,” Dyson said. “A year ago when we went to Greenland where warming is the strongest, the people loved it.”

“They were so proud,” Imme agreed. “They could grow their own cabbage.”

The film ended. “I think Gore does a brilliant job,” Dyson said. “For most people I’d think this would be quite effective. But I knew Roger Revelle. He was definitely a skeptic. He’s not alive to defend himself.”

“All my friends say how smart and farsighted Al Gore is,” she said.

“He certainly is a good preacher,” Dyson replied. “Forty years ago it was fashionable to worry about the coming ice age. Better to attack the real problems like the extinction of species and overfishing. There are so many practical measures we could take.”

In my defense of scientific contrarianism, I've blogged here about the differences between science (a method of reasoning and understanding the world), and Science (the current set of institutions, individuals, and incentives considered experts on how the world works). A recent post from Unqualified Reservations covers this in the context of global warming and some other issues.

Since it is UR, he uses the idea that there are some erroneous scientific ideas firmly entrenched in government-supported institutions (which I agree with) as evidence that the entire system of government and Science and the media is one giant interlocked parasite which cares only about itself and feeds on citizens. Which is going a bit far.

It's not like I disagree with the metaphor or chain of reasoning, I just think that it's an oversimplification and that it is wrong to view these systems as binary, black-and-white, either they promote truth & justice or they don't. To me, it's more like saying "You think democracy and publicly-funded science are 80% good and 20% waste, but I think you have massive blind spots and really they are 40% good and 60% waste. Hopefully these examples will move your evaluation of that balance". He seems to be saying "See, it isn't 100% good. Therefore, it is 100% evil."

But that aside, here we go:

The conventional explanation of why science, with miniscule s, works so well, is due to Karl Popper and his concept of falsifiability. Whole forests have been cut down over this issue, but here at UR we have a very simple interpretation of falsifiability, which we'll now share.

The unusual trustworthiness of science, despite the fact that scientists are humans and humans are not generally trustworthy, exists when (a) hypotheses are falsifiable, and (b) the professional institutions within which scientists operate promote, broadcast, and reward any falsification. We can trust a consensus of scientists on a problem for which (a) and (b) are true, because we are basing our trust on the fact that, if the hypothesis is false, a large number of very smart people has tried and failed to discover its error. This is not, of course, impossible. But it is at least unlikely.

So we have two definitions, and our $64,000 question: is Science science? That is: is the official truth of AGW, which claims the high credibility produced by Popperian falsifiability in a functioning system of critical feedback, in fact justified in claiming this credibility?

The answer is easy: no.

To understand the impact of increased CO2, we need to know the climate sensitivity. Q: how can scientists, at least Popperian scientists, evaluate the climate sensitivity? A: they can't. There is no falsifiable procedure which can estimate climate sensitivity.

To estimate climate sensitivity, all you need is an accurate model of Earth's atmosphere. Likewise, to get to Alpha Centauri, all you have to do is jump very high. The difference between the computing power we have, and the computing power we would need in order to accurately model Earth's atmosphere, is comparable to the difference between my vertical leap and the distance to Alpha Centauri. For all practical purposes, climate modeling is the equivalent of earthquake prediction: an unsolvable problem.

If you want to see this argument laid out in detail, read Pat Frank's article in Skeptic. To my mind, all this detail about error bars simply obfuscates the fact of an unsolvable problem. The GCMs that purport to simulate climate are interesting experiments, and it's not unimpressive that they can be made to produce results that look at least reasonable. But they model the atmosphere with grid cells 100 miles on a side, and attempt to use this to predict the state of the atmosphere - a chaotic system - for the next century. This does not pass the laugh test.

There is simply no scientific way to verify or falsify the accuracy of any such piece of software. It is not practical to perturb Earth's climate, perturb your model's climate, and test that they both respond in the same way. And there is no other way to test a model. In the end, all you have is a curve that records past temperature, and a piece of software that generates future temperature. Perhaps if we could watch the predicted and actual curves match up for a century or so, we could generate something like statistical significance. But we can't. And hindcasting - fitting the models to data from the past - overfits, and is completely worthless
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Besides the fraud, what's creepy about the hockey stick is that it implicitly argues causality by mere visual analogy. We see increasing temperature and increasing CO2, so the two must be related. WTF? This is not the kind of argument that appeals to a scientist. It is the kind of argument that appeals to a voter.

What we are looking at here, I think, is what Feynman called cargo-cult science. GCMs and paleoclimatology look - to your average voter - like science with a small s. They perform huge numbers of intricate calculations, they collect vast quantities of data, and of course they are Science with a big S. It's just that their efforts have no falsifiable predictive value. And what is much worse, they claim predictive value and are driving policy off it.

My favorite part was the global warming diss, where he says "Look, current projections are that over the next 100 years, global warming will make the seas rise a few feet and the temperature a few degrees Celsius. Many of the technologies I'm talking about could, in that same time span, quite conceivably wipe out the entire human race."

So...why we are wasting our time on it?

The Global Conference on Catastrophic Risk concluded the same thing. Global Warming may be popular, but as risks go, it's pedestrian. Not only is it limited in its impact, but it is pretty slow. A bio-engineered plague would give us days or weeks to respond. Even the fastest climate change scenarios (like the Ice Age I worry about) take years to decades.

Whether or not you agree with the statistical criticism, surely this is evidence of how politicized global warming science is. It's a summary of the McIntyre/Mann/Amman/Wahl controversy, from the point of view of a McIntyre supporter.

Given the enormous long-term variability, I don't see how it can be intellectually honest to use the hockey stick graph, which goes back a mere thousand years, to claim something about the meaningfulness of recent warming. If you go back a mere 4500 years, things look very different. If you go back a few hundred thousand years, things again look different.

This is not to say that human emissions of greenhouse gasses are not causing global warming. But the strikingness of the hockey stick graph and the emotional response it provokes, including worrying about climate change causing catastrophes, are based on the appearance that we are entering new, uncharted territory, with "record" temperatures and changes. Whereas over a longer period, we see much bigger swings, which the planet, and its primates have survived. Not that we shouldn't be worried about climate change - a big change either direction would have a big cost. But the idea of anthropogenic climate change being some sort of colossal disaster, bigger than what Nature does on its own, is dishonest emotional manipulation which depends on a carefully chosen and myopic time scale.

Eelco makes a good point in the comments to my previous post:

The only data that allows for any strong conclusions is the long term data as found in ice cores. What it tells us that our planet is a rather stable system. People correctly point out that CO2 lagging temperature does not rule out a causative link between CO2 and temperature. But the dataset as a whole does. If there was such a thing as net positive feedback it would absolutely definitely show in such a CO2/temperature graph. If a dynamic system has instabilities, they will manifest themselves, as anyone who has ever programmed a simple PID controller can tell you. Appearently the planet as a whole has negative feedback to both CO2 and warming. We dont need to study any clouds or athmosphere to draw such a conclusion.

The data does only reveal only one type of instability, and it is ice ages. Now that is something to be scared of in a civilisation threatening sort of way, especially since it is already overdue.

This argument is not without flaws - perhaps manmade CO2 is somehow different from historical CO2, or reaching unprecedented levels, and thus historical patterns will not hold. But still, doesn't the last 100K+ years of temperature & CO2 patterns seem like a far more reliable source of information about the chaotic dynamical system of planetary climate than computer models attempting to model the entire world? And doesn't that source of information tell us that there is no natural positive feedback which occurs often enough to have happened for hundreds of thousands of years?

Again, I certainly find it conceivable that we are in a new part of the state space. But I still think that a low order empirical model is way, way more trustworthy than our hand-tuned attempts to model a huge complex system.

From the historical data, it is very clear what we have to worry about. We have to worry about an ice age. We are long overdue. And they come fast (they used to think dozens to hundreds of years - ice core data now suggests 2-3 years!!!), and they are brutal. As this article puts it:

If you look at a globe, you'll see that the latitude of much of Europe and Scandinavia is the same as that of Alaska and permafrost-locked parts of northern Canada and central Siberia. Yet Europe has a climate more similar to that of the United States than northern Canada or Siberia. Why?

It turns out that our warmth is the result of ocean currents that bring warm surface water up from the equator into northern regions that would otherwise be so cold that even in summer they'd be covered with ice. The current of greatest concern is often referred to as "The Great Conveyor Belt," which includes what we call the Gulf Stream.
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Amazingly, the Great Conveyor Belt is only thing between comfortable summers and a permanent ice age for Europe and the eastern coast of North America.

I sure hope the Belt doesn't stop, that Al Gore keeps playing to packed houses, and people keep whining about how we need to burn less fossil fuels and drive more hybrids, and that we all don't find how how much nicer a little warm is than a lot of cold. My main concern about global warming is that Ice Ages may be the negative feedback to increased CO2 and warmth, and global warming may hasten the onset of the next one.

Fortunately, I think the solution is the same no matter what direction our climate is going to go. Get rich, learn things, and be prepared for whatever catastrophe occurs. Maybe the aliens will attack. Or a meteor. Or there will be an ice age. Or a world pandemic. I dunno. But the richer we all are, the better able we'll be to deal with it.

Climate Audit is an interesting site. It focuses on finding errors in a narrow niche of climatolog. I found the section on Data Archiving, Disclosure and Due Diligence most interesting, related to a comment Wayne made on my previous post.

Not only should the full text of journals be available for free, but if the authors want their studies taken seriously, the full data sets should be available too. If you are genuinely in the pursuit of truth, if you are doing real science, why would you be reluctant to make such data available? Doesn't it just add to the world's knowledge and reduce its cost by allowing other people to do analysis without having to collect their own data?

As the author says in a long and popular post about disclosure in climate science:

IPCC proponents place great emphasis on the merit of articles that have been “peer reviewed”‚? by a journal. However, as a form of due diligence, journal peer review in the multiproxy climate field is remarkably cursory, as compared with the due diligence of business processes. Peer review for climate publications, even by eminent journals like Nature or Science, is typically a quick unpaid read by two (or sometimes three) knowledgeable persons, usually close colleagues of the author.

It is unheard of for a peer reviewer to actually check the data and calculations. In 2004, I was asked by a journal (Climatic Change) to peer review an article. I asked to see the source code and supporting calculations. The editor said that no one had ever asked for such things in 28 years of his editing the journal. He refused to ask for source code; the author refused to provide supporting calculations. Out of my involvement, the journal ended up with a new data policy, which was all to the good. But there is nothing at the journal peer review stage in climate publications which is remotely like an audit.
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"I’ve found that scientists strongly resent any attempt to verify their results. One of the typical reactions is: don’t check our studies, do your own study. I don’t think that businesses like being checked either, but one of the preconditions of being allowed to operate is that they are checked. Many of the most highly paid professionals in our society — securities lawyers, auditors — earn much of their income simply by verifying other people’s results. Businesses developed checks and balances because other peoples’ money was involved, not because businessmen are more virtuous than academics.

Back when paleoclimate research had little implication outside academic seminar rooms, the lack of any adequate control procedures probably didn’t matter much. However, now that huge public policy decisions are based, at least in part, on such studies, sophisticated procedural controls need to be developed and imposed. Climate scientists cannot expect to be the beneficiaries of public money and to influence public policy without also accepting the responsibility of providing much more adequate disclosure and due diligence."

I actually had a similar experience with a code review at Google once. It was a long code review with code I was unfamiliar with, so I wanted to run the new code. The author (an old-timer) got huffy and said that no one had ever tried to run his code as part of a review before. I was brand new, so I acquiesced, but I must say I find it a bit of a strange attitude.

When you are dealing with a lot of money, there should be an audit trail for whatever you are doing. Seems like a simple concept. But when it's government money, and being spent for the Great Cause of Saving the World, well, even simple concepts get ignored.

P.S. This is exactly the sort of post it is against my New Years resolutions to write. Damnit.

pfrimshot points me at this month's IEEE Spectrum, which has an article about geo-engineering and various strategies to deliberately alter climate.

One possibility is to seed the upper atmosphere with sulfur, at an estimated cost of $130B (less than Kyoto). Their source for putting mirrors in orbit estimates a cost of $4T, much higher than what I'd seen before (but at least it doesn't involve deliberately polluting the atmosphere). They suggest various other strategies, as well as putting forth moral and practical arguments against "leave nature alone" and in favor of "turn nature into our bitch":

Our influence on climate may be inadvertent, but it is a milestone in civilization's progress. We have, for the first time, the technological capacity to noticeably alter climate on a global basis within a person's lifetime. History suggests that our expanding population and increasing technological ability will cause this capacity to grow with time, not decline. If not because of greenhouse gas emissions, it will be because of something else, such as changes in land coverage or the acidification of the ocean. The question now is: Should we strive to channel this capacity to our benefit, or should we struggle perpetually to avoid having any impact, for better or worse?

I believe the choice is clear. Whether we start today or in a decade, it is inevitable that we will begin to apply our newfound capabilities to actively manage—even engineer—climate. In fact, it could be argued that our limited efforts to reduce greenhouse gases through the Kyoto Protocol represent a primitive form of engineering. It may be many decades before we have sufficient confidence in our skills to apply them more broadly, but there are moral as well as practical reasons to begin doing so. We are wise to invest in technologies that will help us adapt to a changing climate. But by themselves, they will still leave us vulnerable. Engineering the climate could help transform the remaining risks into benefits: increasing global crop yields through longer and more predictable growing seasons, altering large-scale weather patterns to deliver rainfall where it is needed, and limiting the frequency and magnitude of deadly floods and other natural disasters. Such engineering might also mitigate the natural climate change that has been a large and sometimes destructive force in human history—such as the Little Ice Age that is linked to many famines in Europe between the 14th and 19th centuries. Providing food and water to a growing global population and shielding them to the greatest extent possible against the ravages of severe weather is both a moral and a practical obligation. If society has the tools to do this within acceptable risk levels, it should apply them.

I'm down with that.

steuard made a good long comment summarizing the conservative position on changing the Earth, sort of a general precautionary principle, and well worth reading.

He points out that our effect on the world is becoming large, and that we are moving into "uncharted territory" - as I would call it, a different portion of phase space. We don't know what effect this historically unusual concentration of greenhouse gases will have. It risks causing some unknown disaster. I agree with all of this, but I think it is missing something crucial.

That viewpoint identifies past portions of the phase space with "safe", which means that new portions are risky by comparison (this depends on assumptions about the distribution of something totally unknown, but I'm willing to buy those assumptions).

The problem is that past portions are not safe, not at all. Most of the Earth's time, as far as we can tell, is spent in ice ages, with warm periods lasting a couple millenia or less. We are in a warm period over 10,000 years long, which is the longest warm period seen in the period over which we have temperature estimates (several hundred thousand years, I believe). This warm period is so lovely that some people even believe that civilization arose because of it. And the return of an ice age would be awful - the Little Ice Age was bad enough.

If the known portion was safe, I would be willing to buy that the distribution of outcomes from the unknown portion probably includes some disasters and so we should avoid it. But since the known portion includes disasters, I don't see why I should believe that the distribution of outcomes from the unknown part is worse than that from the known part. I don't see what to do other than throw up my hands and say that they are all the same to me. And since the unknown part involves accumulating wealth, knowledge, technology, and population by burning fossil fuels, that gives it the edge.

(Actually, this may be over-conservative - one could argue that since the known portion involves spending the majority of the time in a crappy state, pushing into the unknown is worthwhile to see if we can get out of the ice age cycle. That is, that the distribution of outcomes from the unknown part of the phase space may well be better than from the known)

This also shows you how people's personalities come into play - because this argument hinges on priors, which come from god (or Nassim Nicholas Taleb, or evolution, or whatever). People who are generally worried about change will see the known part of the state space as good. People who generally like change won't mind the unknown part (me). But it's hard to get a rational handle on predicting the unknown, so hard to know which distribution of outcomes is better. All we can know is that we should be biased towards the unknown because it includes being richer and more prepared when/if disaster comes along. But of course if disaster is enough more likely from the unknown, it's still a bad place to be.

Anyway, I think the conservatives and the radicals here can all agree that when the stakes are this high and the knowledge is this weak, we would sure as hell benefit from more understanding of how climate works. I want to know how to avoid the next ice age.

(Note that none of this argument is meant to apply to global warming - that is a specific known bad, hence worth avoiding. I am merely referring to the general precautionary argument that, when in doubt, it's best not to change the planet)

Some people seem to have misunderstood my hastily dashed off and barely thought-out argument (no surprise), and pointed out all the negative effects of car exhaust. Let me rephrase things and make a narrower point:

Yes, driving has other externalities, like particulate matter pollution. But suppose we have a tax on gasoline which takes into account all those other externalities.

In a world where we are worried about global warming, we should have additional taxes to account for that negative externality. In a world where we want global warming, we should have subsidies to help encourage the positive externality. So gas should be a little cheaper, and people should drive a little more.

Now, I can see how one can believe "global warming is happening and bad and we should fight it", and not believe that we should subsidize gas if we think the ice age is coming. There are other ways besides subsidies to change incentives, and even for subsidies there are other goods besides gas for cars.

But I don't see how one can believe that we should tax gas (or other goods) to reduce global warming and not believe that we should subsidize gas (or other goods) if we are worried about global cooling. Sure, the goods may have other externalities - but those can be taken of with other taxes/subsidies. Ceteris paribus, if you want to tax things that hurt other people, and it turns out those things help other people, why wouldn't you switch to subsidizing them?

Poll #982374 global warming
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Suppose we discovered that the earth was cooling rather than warming, due to a natural cycle unrelated to human activity, and likely to last thousands of years. Would you encourage people to drive more and use more carbon-based energy as a way of warming the earth?

If no, why not?

The point of this, in case it's not obvious, is to separate those who are using global warming as an excuse to justify their anti-technology and anti-wealth beliefs from those who are treating it rationally. Rationally, if the earth was cooling, that would probably cause problems, and warming CO2 would be a public good, not a public bad, and thus worthy of subsidy and encouragement. If that isn't how you feel, perhaps you should just be an unabashed Luddite.

On the other hand, if that is how you feel, you're probably open to wacky strategies like blocking a little bit of sunlight with a giant object in space, as a much cheaper way to reduce insolation than slowing the engines of commerce.