Scientific Consensus or Religious War?

You say: “Movies are a propaganda medium, not an information medium.”

Consider the possibility that movies are becoming our PRIMARY locus of information exchange… partly because they are so effective at propaganda of every sort. By denigrating the nature of their impact we seem to largely exclude ourselves from the most powerful megaphone of our day.

If your children’s world is hugely governed by the information and attitudes they exchange with their peers… and their peers click into movies and video games as if their bodies were created for that very purpose….how long will you be able to hold on to the belief that propaganda and information travel in distinctly separate spheres?

I think consensus in economics is different than it is in the physical sciences.

Arnold,

Global warming is a rerun of the 1970’s scare/debate over running out of resources. The “Limits To Growth” is a circa @ 1973 book which should be required reading. There was no scenario in that book which permitted standards of living to remain the same for another 30 years (let alone increase). Disaster was imminent in about 10 years.

One of the deja vu aspects is that it’s another general apology for blaming capitalism and requiring government programs to reduce our standard of living because it is too costly.

The conclusion always seems to be Folk-marxism — the justification just seems to change every 35 years or so.

I suspect that underlying this is the notion of the “sinfulness” of capitalistic living standards — which MUST be controlled. I wonder if our puritan heritage of lifestyle conformity control is the real source. There’s a semi-religious aspect to all this which is beyond hope for reasonable economoic/scientific arguments.

AJ

Am I the only one who has noticed how Kling is so much the postmodernist, more a manipulator of language, creating his own personal mythologies, whether they be about Moses, Folk psychologies, or Type M/C arguments. It’s amusing, but like most analogies and rhethorical devices, not terribly accurate.

In the present case, a scientific consensus that he doesn’t like (because he doesn’t like the implications) is labelled “religious.” It is then compared with a science that is sometimes like a religion, namely economics.

All fallacious.

Global warming is not the 1970s end-of-resources argument redux. In case anyone hasn’t noticed, we’ve had 30 years of enormous advancement in computational physics. Yes, there are still uncertainties. But climate physics is NOT macroeconomics. The latter is the collective behavior of irrational or rational agents. Climate physics is just that: physics or natural systems.

There is a big difference. Comparing them is 100% meaningless.

The consensus right now is that global warming is occuring and that humans are contributing to it. That doesn’t imply that we can or should do anything about it. It’s not clear that we can or will. But it is happening.

Please don’t allow an economist like Kling to mislead you. There is almost no dissent within the scientific community on global warming.

Economics has never operated under much of a consensus. It is still a very rudimentary science. It’s a social science. Hence people like Caplan spend as much time looking at poll results and talking about politics and ideology as they do performing “science.” In fact, I suspect neither does much in the way of hard core economics these days.

Please don’t be fooled. Use your brains. Think.

Motive arguments and Consequence arguments.
or maybe the “Motive component” of an argument and the “Consequence component” of the same argument.
Your concepts of type C & M arguments are useful.

Two problems with the PK article:
First, PK’s lead-in paragraphs pound on Lee Raymond of Exxon for being overpaid but fail to tie him or Exxon DIRECTLY to an explicit act. Instead we get:

“A leaked memo from a 1998 meeting at the American Petroleum Institute, in which Exxon (which hadn’t yet merged with Mobil) was a participant, describes a strategy of providing “logistical and moral support” to climate change dissenters, “thereby raising questions about and undercutting the ‘prevailing scientific wisdom.’ ” And that’s just what Exxon Mobil has done: lavish grants have supported a sort of alternative intellectual universe of global warming skeptics.”

So there IS something of Consequence here and LR as head of Exxon is a party to it to some degree. The notion of a deliberate effort to raise doubts and thereby slow/cripple and render ineffective the efforts of the the Global Warming adherents is very unhelpful and should be criticized.

Overall PK’s use of the Mixture above left me cold.

Second, the issue of Global Warming.
IF we knew all the relevant facts and IF those facts pointed to continued warming and even the Single consequence of oceans rising by 20 feet we would stop bickering and act.

Are we being well served by the Media, the Experts and the Partisan Pundits?

PK wrote:
Over time, the accumulation of evidence removed much of that uncertainty. Climate experts still aren’t sure how much hotter the world will get, and how fast. But there’s now an overwhelming scientific consensus that the world is getting warmer, and that human activity is the cause.

I got 3 points out of this:
1. Certainty that the global temperature has been rising in recent years.
2. Uncertainty as to how much more rising there will be. [how high? for how long?]
3. that human activity is the cause.

Points 1 & 2 seem true enough. Point 2 seems to be the one related to most of the worries folks have. Most folks like me seem to extrapolate a short term trend with a straight line [gold 25 years ago, tech stocks in 1998, housing prices in 2004 – bad habit presuming a straight line].

The must-act-now folks are acting on this presumption.

Point 3 seems to be one where more research and scientific work needs to be done.

Agreed underlying contributors to temperature change seem to be:
A. CO2 levels rising and causing some of the increase
B. Global dimming (and now clearing). Airborne particulates are said to have contributed to a Lowering of the temperature which offset the warming effects (of CO2 and ?) through the 1960/70s. Now that many countries have cleaned their air of particulate pollution the temperature is rising. So here we have a case of human activity causing both filthy air and cooling. Then the cleanup of the airborne particulates contributes to a warming trend.

But this is not the complete story. We need to learn more and the players from both sides would help us all by aiming for pursuit of more facts.

Silas: Just so you know, I don’t always have the time to go back and read comments to my posts. Way it goes. Kling or Caplan make their comments. I comment. All opinions are heard once. I’ve not seen your responses or I would have responded to them.

Don: You are wrong about the primary issue. Macroecononmics is about the aggregate behavior of human agents. Climate physics is about the aggregate behavior of natural systems. The laws of physics upon which climate physics is based are well known and not in question. It’s the aggregation that is difficult.

Climate physics is based upon a solid understanding of basic physics.

Macroeconomics is a social science. Let’s not pretend that is a hard science. Kling provides us with an analogy. As Freud said, analogies aren’t true, but they make people comfortable.

In this case, I think it makes the choir feel comfortable, but the analogy is not true. It’s rhethorical. Not substantive.

I don’t know why people think that they are contributing to the debate by rejecting the science, but I guess denial is easier than an argument. They are only leaving themselves in the emperor’s new clothes. If you wish to argue with it, by all means do so, but denial is infantile.

The real questions are how big will be the effects, what can be done about it, what should we do about it, and what are we willing to do about it. We can actually do a lot that costs little and improves our energy efficiency anyway. Failure to do so is shortsighted. Will it be enough? It may not, but sticking heads in the sand doesn’t accomplish anything.

The only “rejection of science” in the global warming debate is the refusal of the high priests of Gaia to answer the question “how do you know your computer models are correct”? The best available models cannot predict accurately three days in advance, in one small column of air, whether the temperature will rise three degrees or fall four, much less why. How is one supposed to accept that such models can predict accurately for the entire earth within ten degrees a century from now? Experience shows that historic temperatures have no relationship – none – to future temperatures. I’ll go further. No one even knows what the “temperature of the earth” is or how one would go about measuring such a quantity. Piffle.

Spiers: You are proposing a false analogy.

Here’s an analogy:

E.g.: I cannot predict the path of a particular molecule in a gas but can easily predict the behavior of the gas as an aggregate of molecules.
If I apply this analogy to micro and macro climates, I would say that I cannot predict the microclimate but can predict the macroclimate. The macroclimate is much simpler to predict, as a matter of fact.

I agree that there is slop, or uncertainty, in many quantities, e.g. the amount of methane in the tundra and oceans or the reaction of plant matter to higher temperatures and increased wator vapor , but there just isn’t any question at all that if humans continue to pour CO2 into the atmosphere, the temperature will continue to increase. It’s established fact.

This is what I find annoying. The only reason Kling posts something on science, e.g. climate science, is that it disagrees with his ideology. He’s anti-science, in this case, because he’s at heart an ideologue.

I believe even the libertarian who wrote the Skeptical Environmentalist agrees that global warming is occurring and that humans are the cause. He’s looked at the science. And agrees. He just doesn’t think it’s worth doing anything about. That’s an entirely different consideration. It’s a cost/benefit analysis. That’s science.

But arguing that climate science is religion, throwing in loaded terms like Gaia and environmentalists as religious warriors, is pure ideological bunk.

Not worthy of deep thinkers.

PJ: I do want people to think. Two considerations for you to make: (1) you are comparing apples and oranges. Microclimates are chaotic. As is the path of a single molecule in a container of gas. Macroclimates are not chaotic in the same way. Similar to the lack of chaos in the macro-parameters of a container of gas. (2) Additional measurement of cloud behaviors is great. But the fact of the matter is that the relationship between CO2 and temperature is established.

Also, please note: I want people to think. Using scientific arguments. And you are right. There is still a great deal of uncertainty. But Kling is aruing loose analogies. And I understand. Humans largely think analogically. It’s a given. But comparing climate science to macroeconomics, one a hard science, the other a social science, is largely bunk.

An analogy. Makes people comfortable. Not much truth in it.

Sorry to introduce an inconvenient fact, but in the last 100 years average global temperature has risen 1 degree Centigrade. So past evidence does not support global warming.

All projections of global warming are from simulations, which are no better than their assumptions. Gargage in, garbage out.

The factual case for global warming has yet to be made.

T. R. Elliot: what argument? You’re saying that globalization is being “implemented poorly”. So what would “correct implementation” involve? My argument, which so far eludes you, is that whatever answer you propose, unionization ain’t it. A major factor in wage rates is not absolute productivity, but the risk factor. Remove this, and more capital flows in (or is created from saving) which drives up wages. Unionization will — as you have left completely uncontested so far — merely increase this risk factor and make the problem even worse. That is why the authors were wrong. Get it now?

Silas: If capital had nowhere to go but to union labor, it would go to union labor. To make at least some modicum of return.

Your argument is as follows: Condition X creates an element of uncertainty such that capital will go to location in which condition X does not exist.

Now, I can put postulate any condition X:

* X = Law Against Child Labor
* X = Pollution regulations
* X = Uncertainty caused by unions

Your argument is “capital will go wherever X does not exist” therefore X is not a solution.

But let’s take, as a case, a law that only allows product Y to be purchased if it is manufactured according to regulation X. Then you’ve leveled the playing field. The capital cannot run to a place in which regulation X does not exist in order to gain an advantage.

So again let’s consider supply and demand. If the global labor supply is increasing (it is), then capital will not be willing to fund local (US) labor for that which can be outsourced. Thus labor loses in that case. But for those services that cannot be outsourced, labor still has an advantage. If that labor unionizes, it will be more difficult for capital to outsource (because the demand for emergency care workers or suage treatment plan maintenance, etc etc will never drop to zero).

Therefore, unionization of domestic service (that which cannot be outsource) is a means to secure a greater percentage of profits for labor.

Pretty simple once you think about it and understand the argument. See, even physicists can do economics.

(1) Welcome to decision-making under uncertainty people. Hey, we don’t know what might happen. As Brian says “Guess”.

(2) I wish the contempt expressed by economists for those who doubt the benefits of free trade… oh, wait, hang on.

(3) Analogy Quiz: do the arguments of those who doubt the climate science consensus bear much resemblance to those of Friedman (solidly grounded theoretical model etc., well-defined alternative predictions based on said model), or do they more resemble those of the posters on this thread (“this is all very hard, and consensus has been wrong in the past”)?

Dezakin: That is exactly the point made by Bjorn Lomborg. He does not contest global warming last time I looked. He’s even agreeing that humans are contributing. He just says we need to look at cost benefit analysis.

Personally, I’m convinced that global warming is real. I know humans won’t do anything about it. I’m not sure whether we should try. But we shouldn’t come up with devious pseudo-analogies in order to make global warming science into religion simply because we don’t like the results.

Your argument is as follows: Condition X creates an element of uncertainty such that capital will go to location in which condition X does not exist.

That is not my argument, and your attempted refutation of it is false, right out of the gate. Referring to capital “fleeing” is a simplification. Capital can find other places to go, or it can just stop forming, i.e., instead of people investing their savings, they’ll just cash it in for present consumption. With people no longer investing in things that increase the return on labor, labor productivity will go down worldwide, and the market price of labor will go down worldwide. Giving capital “nowhere to flee to” is even worse. You ignore that the amount of capital available is itself flexible.

In turn, if labor value-productivity declines, all the laws in the world won’t increase their wages.

Your conclusion is, even independent of this critical flaw, a further non-sequitur:

Therefore, unionization of domestic service (that which cannot be outsource) is a means to secure a greater percentage of profits for labor.

The benefit you explained above came from regulating imports, not from unionization.

On top of this, you invoke another flawed premise about what “cannot be outsourced”. But in reality, there is no such thing. Given significant enough labor costs, any rote process can be automated, in essence, outsourced to a technology. If people in the service industry try to push for even more pay not justified by market conditions, businesses will just shift toward more self-serve operations. If you look a Japan, which is reluctant to take in immigrants, they’ve automated the low wage job you’d like to unionize called “nail salon worker”. There, machines have replaced them.

So, next time, please respond to the argument I actually made, not your distortion of it.

Silas: In case you didn’t notice, you are the one who referred to capital flows. I quote you: “more capital flows in (or is created from saving)”. Since you referred to capital flows, I used the same terminology. Now, I agree, if capital does not want any return, and instead is translated into consumption, then no capital will be available to improve productivity. But let’s get real. For example, I have a lot of capital. I personally don’t consume very much. I’m not going to blow my nest egg on consumption instead of getting at least some return on it. I’m going to realize some return. Your argument is marginally correct but does not negate the moral and economic arguments for labor to organize against capital.

Capital will continue to form.

Another thing you don’t point out: Workers are not partaking of current productivity gains. So more productivity gains won’t help them. They are losing ground even as productivity increases. Maybe they should try something else.

Regarding what can and cannot be outsourced, it’s all a matter of balance. True, everything can be outsource if I create a Star Trek transport machine. But I don’t have one. And in fact, energy prices are increasing. Arguing for (a) less outsourcing for items that require much energy to transport and (b) more outsourcing for product derived from natural gas, which is very short in the US (and will become much more scarce in the years to come) and very available in many stranded locations around the world.

The point is that labor has more negotiating power over that which is locally provided. That’s a fact, robots notwithstanding.

Finally, my argument about regulations and trade is entirely pertinent. What you don’t admit is that I’m making a simple supply and demand argument. Trade regulations can restrict the supply of object Z that doesn’t meet standard X. People will be willing to pay more if the supply decreases (or try to smuggle). It certinaly levels the playing field for those manufacturers of Z in the US, for example, that must meet those regulations. And similarly, if I can restrict the supply of labor (immigration laws, strikes, etc), I can increase the price for labor.

So I think I’m still treading water in this discussion. Sorry for not drowning immediately.

“Don: Can you provide us with the names of the scientists…”

No, I can’t, as I seem to have misplaced my copy of ExxonMobil’s employee payroll lists. To which scientists was Krugman referring?

More generally, please note: I define religion as belief in empirically unverified (and perhaps unverifiable) hypotheses, such as (for example) the existence of God. Anthropogenic global warming certainly qualifies as such now, to the best of my understanding.

Finally: You could do without the arrogance. You’re not the only bloke around here with a physics degree, but your arrogant assumption that you’re the smartest person in the room reminds me of just why I left that field. Frankly, your dismissal of alternative hypotheses, particularly in a field in which you have little apparent experience or training, causes me to be yet more skeptical of so-called Scientific Consensus. You may be a scientist, but you certainly don’t act like one on this forum.

Well, just to be argumentative, here’s a graph comparing CO2 and global temperatures for the last 25 years. I don’t see much correlation. As a matter of fact, it looks like temperatures really haven’t changed much over the last eight years or so. (Yes, the second link leads to my blog.) The lack of temperature change in the last eight years would lead most reasonable people to conclude that maybe the warming isn’t as man-made (or, for you people who aren’t smart enough to understand big words like “man-made”, just substitute “anthropogenic”. It means the same thing, but “man-made” makes me sound so much smarter.) as we thought it was. And maybe the best way to deal with it is to find a technological solution, rather than trying to destroy the world economy (except for China and India; they’re exempt, of course).

Actually, the possible global-warming emergency does not imply we should follow the policy prescriptions of the most fanatical alleged opponents of global warming. The most obvious solution is to have environmentalists tarred and feathered followed by increased use of nuclear fission.

Denying the possible global warming emergency is not analogous to backing price controls but rather denying the seriousness of unemployment. In the 1970s, the Left wing of the time frequently accused conservatives of denying that unemployment was a problem. The Right wing of the time would claim that anybody who wanted a job could get one.

Ah well, it looks like once again, T. R. Elliot doesn’t have an explanation why threatening to screw over your customer is a viable strategy for getting them to pay more for your services. That was to be expected. What wasn’t to be expected was that he/she would deny the existence of a difference between “producing more stuff” and “producing more value”. That caught even me by surprise.

Rosser: “Arguments should be judged on their own merits, not on who is funding those making them.”

Unfortunately, that’s not possible in the real world. Because with global warming (and also evolution, epideiology, and probably a lot of sound economic theories for all I know) it’s easy to make up hollow, but plausible-sounding counterarguments that take time to answer. They take longer to answer than they take to make, and those making them are often paid to churn out such arguments at an amazing rate. A lot of “Think Tanks” are really just sophisticated PR institutes.

To dispense with such noise, we have peer review systems. What peer review means is that every opinion is not equal. The person making an argument has to pass a certain reputation treshold to be listened to, and the more respect you have from your peers, the more unorthodox you can afford to be. Peer review systems can be good or bad, but compared to the peer-review system of economics, the peer review system of natural science has an immensely good track record.

And this system basically ignores the current set of global warming “critics”. For anyone not fundamentally distrustful of natural science, it should stop there.

If you are skeptical, however, and are genuinely interested in finding out stuff, or even make valuable criticisim (rather than ideologically effective noise), there are some people who take the time to answer both genuinely ignorant questions and well-crafted misinformation. You find a wealth of information on for instance realclimate.org, or A Few Things Ill Considered.

Elliot, You are simply wrong about climate not being a chaotic issue. At least half of the climate equation has to do with fluid dynamics, which we cannot model. The radiative portion of the climate equation is easy to solve, but it is the fluid dynamcial response that is important.

We are fairly certian that a doubling of CO2 would increase the global temperature by about a degree F, all else being equal. If this were the end of the story, there would be nothing to worry about. Climate alarmism arises from the fact that there is a fluid dynamical response to that radiative warming, which some believe enhances that warming to the point that we should be worried. But we simply don’t know what the feedback response is. Tiny changes to some of the parameterizations in the climate models can reverse the prediction from warming to cooling. For example, small changes to the lapse rate can have this effect.

The funny thing is, manmade greenhouse warming is already about 2.7 watts per meter squared, or 73 percent of a doubling of CO2, yet it has only warmed 0.6 degrees C. This suggests one of two things. Either that all else is equal, which extraordinarily unlikley, or that all fluid dynamical feedbacks are basically canceling each other out, with the negative feedbacks having a slight edge.

Finally, if chaos were not a factor in macro climates, then we’d see a very smooth warming over the last 100 years. Instead, what we’ve seen is very uneven warming, which is due to chaos.

Actually the religion is coming from Kling and other libertarian economists, not from the climate change scientists.

The problem with climate change and many other environmental/resource issues is that the implications for the future may imply the pure “free market” libertarian religion won’t work. Rather than adjust their dogma, Kling and others prefer to develop excuses to ignore the best that science can offer and focus on the uncertainties.

If resources run out or climate changes adversly then the “market” (without some intervention) may not guarantee an improved standard of living for future generations.

Don, my assesment on the peer-review systems of economics and natural sciences is necessarily qualitative. (As would be my assesment that the peer-review system of composers in the classical music tradition has broken down, for instance)

Judging judgement is a tricky business, but I sort of hoped you would agree with it on a common-sense basis, seeing that physicists’ predictions almost always agree with each other(although the theories behind them don’t), while the predictions of economists vary, and they are also more often wrong. That’s because it’s an inexact science, but this also limits how good/useful peer-review can be.

Don, you are essentially right. I’m using the term peer-review in an inaccurate way; I refer not just to moderation in journals, but the informal network used to decide what’s worth examining and what’s not. I have no reason to think that Econ journal editors don’t do their best, and that’s not what I meant.

What I meant could perhaps be better expressed as that because of the uncertainties (some which can’t be treated stochastically, since widespread beliefs about the variables affect the variables themselves), there are different “schools” of economics, which vary in their predictions far more than the different “schools” of for instance physics. This splits up the peer-review networks, both formal and informal, and make them less useful for each other.

Kling has posted a followup on this thread (reading a link I gave, wow!) and I will write more in the comments section there.