Archive for September, 2019
What is a climate denier?
Posted by Bill Storage in Sustainable Energy on September 25, 2019
Climate change denier, climate denial and similar terms peaked in usage, according to Google trends data, at the last presidential election. Usage today is well below those levels, but based on trends in the last week, is heading for a new high. The obvious meaning of climate change denial would seem to me to be saying that either the climate is not changing or that people are not responsible for climate change. But this is clearly not the case.
Patrick Moore, a once influential Greenpeace member, is often called a denier by climate activists. Niall Ferguson says he doesn’t deny anthropogenic climate change, but is attacked as a denier. After a Long Now Foundation talk by Saul Griffith, I heard Saul being accused being a denier. Even centenarian James Lovelock, the originator of Gaia theory who now believes his former position was alarmist (“I’ve grown up a bit since then“), is called a denier in California green energy events, despite his very explicit denial of being a denier.
Trying to look logically at the spectrum of propositions one might affirm or deny, I come up with the following possible claims. You can no doubt fine-tune these or make them more granular.
- The earth’s climate is changing (typically, average temperature is increasing.
- The earth’s average temperature has increased more rapidly since the industrial revolution.
- Some increase in warming rate is caused by human activity.
- The increase in warming rate is overwhelmingly due to humans (as opposed to, e.g. sun activity and orbital factors)
- Anthropogenic warming poses imminent threat to human life on earth.
- The status quo (greenhouse gas production) will result in human extinction.
- The status quo poses significant threat (even existential threat) and the proposed renewables policy will mitigate it.
- Nuclear energy is not an acceptable means of reducing greenhouse gas production.
No one with a command of high school math and English could deny claim 1. Nearly everything is changing at some level. We can argue about what constitutes significant change. That’s a matter of definition, of meaning, and of values.
Claim 2 is arguable. It depends on having a good bit of data. We can argue about data sufficiency, accuracy and interpretation of the noisy data.
Claim 3 relies much more on theory (to establishing causation) than on meaning/definitions and facts/measurements, as is the case with 1 and 2. Claim 4 is a strong version of claim 3, requiring much more scientific analysis and theorizing.
While informed by claims 1-4, Claims 5 and 6 (imminent threat, certain doom) are mostly outside the strict realm of science. They differ on the severity of the threat; and they rely of risk modeling, engineering feasibility analyses, and economics. For example, could we afford to pay for the mitigations that could reverse the effects of continued greenhouse gas release, and is geoengineering feasible? Claim 6 is held by Greta Thunberg (“we are in the beginning of a mass extinction”). Al Gore seems somewhere between 5 and 6.
Claim 7 (renewables can cure climate change) is the belief held by followers of the New Green Deal.
While unrelated to the factual (whether true or false) components of claims 1-4 and the normative components of claims 5-7, claim 8 (fission not an option) seems to be closely aligned with claim 6. Vocal supporters of 6 tend to be proponents of 8. Their connection seems to be on ideological grounds. It seems logically impossible to reconcile holding claims 6 and 8 simultaneously. I.e., neither the probability nor severity components of nuclear risk can exceed claim 6’s probability (certainty) and severity (extinction). Yet they are closely tied. Naomi Oreskes accused James Hansen of being a denier because he endorsed nuclear power.
Beliefs about the claims need not be binary. For each claim, one could hold belief in a range from certitude to slightly possible, as well as unknown or unknowable. Fred Singer, for example, accepts that CO2 alters the climate, but allows that its effect could be cooling rather than warming. Singer’s uncertainty stems from his perception that the empirical data does not jibe with global-warming theory. It’s not that he’s lukewarm; he finds the question presently unknowable. This is a form of denial (see Freedman and McKibben below) green activists, blissfully free of epistemic humility and doubt, find particularly insidious.
Back to the question of what counts as a denier. I once naively thought that “climate change denier” applies only to claims 1-4. After all, the obvious literal meaning of the words would apply only to claims 1 and 2. We can add 3 and 4 if we allow that those using the term climate denier use it as a short form of “anthopogenic climate-change denier.”
Clearly, this is not the popular usage, however. I am regularly called a denier at green-tech events for arguing against claim 7 (renewables as cure). Whether anthopogenic climate change exists, regardless of the size of the threat, wind and solar cannot power a society anything like the one we live in. I’m an engineer, I specialized in thermodynamics and energy conversion, that’s my argument, and I’m happy to debate it.
Green activists’ insistence that we hold claim 8 (no fission) to be certain, in my view, calls their program and motivations into question, for reasons including the above mentioned logical incompatibility of claims 6 and 8 (certain extinction without change, but fission is to dangerous).
I’ve rarely heard anyone deny claims 1-3 (climate change exists and humans play a role). Not even Marc Morano denies these. I don’t think any of our kids, indoctrinated into green policy at school, have any idea that those they’re taught are deniers do not deny climate change.
In the last year I’ve seen a slight increase in professional scientists who deny claim 4 (overwhelmingly human cause), but the majority of scientists in relevant fields seem to agree with claim 4. Patrick Moore, Caleb Rossiter, Roger A. Pielke and Don Easterbrook seem to deny claim 4. Leighton Steward denies it on the grounds that climate change is the cause of rising CO2 levels, not its effect.
Some of the key targets of climate activism don’t appear to deny the basic claims of climate change. Among these are Judith Curry, Richard Tol, Ivar Giaever, Roy Spencer, Robert M Carter, Denis Rancourt, Richard Tol, John Theon, Scott Armstrong, Patrick Michaels, Will Happer and Philip Stott. Anthony Watts and Matt Ridley are very explicit about accepting claim 4 (mostly human-caused) but denying claims 5 and 6 (significant threat or extinction). William M. Briggs called himself a climate denier, but meant by it that the concept of climate, as understood by most people, is itself invalid.
More and more people who disagree with the greens’ proposed policy implementation are labeled deniers (as Oreskes calling Hansen a denier because he supports fission). Andrew Freedman seemed to implicitly acknowledge the expanding use of the denier label in a recent Mashable piece, in which he warned of some green opponents who were moving “from outright climate denial to a more subtle, insidious and risky form.” Bill McKibben, particularly immune to the nuances of scientific method and rational argument, called “renewables denial” “at least as ugly” as climate denial.
Opponents argue that the green movement is a religious cult. Arguing over matters of definition has limited value, but greens are prone to apocalyptic rants that would make Jonathan Edwards blush, focus on sin and redemption, condemnation of heresy, and attempts to legislate right behavior. Last week The Conversation said it was banning not only climate denial but “climate skepticism”). I was amused at an aspect of the religiosity of the greens in both Freedman and McKibben’s complaints.: each is insisting that being partially sinful warrants more condemnation than committing the larger sin.
So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of My mouth. – Revelation 3:16 (NAS)
Refusal to debate crackpots is understandable, but Michael Mann’s refusal to debate “deniers” (he refused even to share his data when order to do so by British Columbia Supreme Court) looks increasingly like fear of engaging worthy opponents – through means other than suing them.
On his liberal use of the “denier” accusation, the below snippet provides some levity. In a house committee session Mann denies calling anyone a denier and says he’s been misrepresented. Judith Curry (the denier) responds “it’s in your written testimony.” On page 6 of Mann’s testimony, he says “climate science denier Judith Curry” adding that “I use the term carefully.”
I deny claims 6 through 8. The threat is not existential; renewables won’t fix it; and fission can.
Follow this proud denier on twitter.
Yes, Greta, let’s listen to the scientists
Posted by Bill Storage in Philosophy of Science, Sustainable Energy on September 22, 2019
Young people around the world protested for climate action last week. 16-year old Greta Thunberg implored congress to “listen to the scientists” about climate change and fix it so her generation can thrive.
OK, let’s listen to them, and assume for sake of argument that we understand “them” to be a large majority of all relevant scientists, and that say with one voice that humans are materially affecting climate. And let’s take the IPCC’s projections for a 3.4 to 4.8 degree C rise by 2100 in the absence of policy changes. While activists and politicians report that scientific consensus exists, some reputable scientists dispute this. But for sake of discussion assume such consensus exists.
That temperature rise, scientists tell us, would change sea levels and would warm cold regions more than warm regions. “Existential crisis,” said Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday. Would that in fact pose an existential threat? I.e., would it cause human extinction? That question probably falls much more in the realm of engineering than in science. But let’s assume Greta might promote (or demote, depending on whether you prefer expert generalists to exert specialists) engineers to the rank of scientists.
The World Bank 4 Degrees – Turn Down the Heat report is often cited as concluding that uncontrolled human climate impact threatens the human race. It does not. It describes Sub-Saharan Africa food production risk, southeast Asia water scarcity and coastal productivity risk. It speaks of wakeup-calls and tipping points, and, lacking the ability to quantify risks, assumes several worst imaginable cases of cascade effects, while rejecting all possibility that innovation and engineering can, for example, mitigate water scarcity problems before they result in health problems. The language and methodology of this report is much closer to the realm of sociology than to that of people we usually call scientists. Should sociology count as science or as philosophy and ethics? I think the latter, and I think the World Bank’s analysis reeks of value-laden theory and theory-laden observations. But for sake of argument let’s grant that climate Armageddon, true danger to survival of the race, is inevitable without major change.
Now given this impending existential crisis, what can the voice of scientists do for us? Those schooled in philosophy, ethics, and the soft sciences might recall the is-ought problem, also known as Hume’s Guillotine, in honor of the first writer to make a big deal of it. The gist of the problem, closely tied to the naturalistic fallacy, is that facts about the world do not and cannot directly cause value judgments. And this holds regardless of whether you conclude that moral truths do or don’t exist. “The rules of morality are not conclusions of our reason,” observed Hume. For a more modern philosophical take on this issue see Simon Blackburn’s Ethics.
Strong statements on the non-superiority of scientists as advisers outside their realm come from scientists like Richard Feynman and Wifred Trotter (see below).
But let’s assume, for sake of argument, that scientists are the people who can deliver us from climate Armageddon. Put them on a pedestal, like young Greta does. Throw scientism caution to the wind. I believe scientists probably do have more sensible views on the matter than do activists. But if we’re going to do this – put scientists at the helm – we should, as Greta says, listen to those scientists. That means the scientists, not the second-hand dealers in science – the humanities professors, pandering politicians, and journalists with agendas, who have, as Hayek phrased it, absorbed rumors in the corridors of science and appointed themselves as spokesmen for science.
What are these scientists telling us to do about climate change? If you think they’re advising us to equate renewables with green, as young protesters have been taught to do, then you’re listening not to the scientists but to second-hand dealers of misinformed ideology who do not speak for science. How many scientist think that renewables – at any scale that can put a real dent in fossil fuel use – are anything remotely close to green? What scientist thinks utility-scale energy storage can be protested and legislated into existence by 2030? How many scientist think uranium is a fossil fuel?
The greens, whose plans for energy are not remotely green, have set things up so that sincere but uniformed young people like Greta have only one choice – to equate climate change mitigation with what they call renewable energy. Even under Mark Jacobson’s grossly exaggerated claims about the efficiency and feasibility of electricity generation from renewables, Greta and her generation would shudder at the environmental devastation a renewables-only energy plan would yield.
Where is the green cry for people like Greta to learn science and engineering so they can contribute to building the world they want to live in? “Why should we study for a future that is being taken away from us?” asked Greta. One good reason 16-year-olds might do this is that in 2025 they can have an engineering degree and do real work on energy generation and distribution. Climate Armageddon will not happen by 2025.
I feel for Greta, for she’s been made a stage prop in an education-system and political drama that keeps young people ignorant of science and engineering, ensures they receive filtered facts from specific “trustworthy” sources, and keeps them emotionally and politically charged – to buy their votes, to destroy capitalism, to rework political systems along a facile Marxist ideology, to push for open borders and world government, or whatever the reason kids like her are politically preyed upon.
If the greens really believed that climate Armageddon were imminent (combined with the fact the net renewable contribution to world energy is still less than 1%), they might consider the possibility that gas is far better than coal in the short run, and that nuclear risks are small compared to the human extinction they are absolutely certain is upon us. If the greens’ real concern was energy and the environment, they would encourage Greta to list to scientists like Nobel laureate in physics, Ivar Giaever, who says climate alarmism is garbage, and then to identify the points on which Giaever is wrong. That’s what real scientists do.
But it isn’t about that, is it? It’s not really about science or even about climate. As Saikat Chakrabarti, former chief of staff for Ocasio-Cortez, admitted: “the interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all.” “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing,” he added. To be clear, Greta did not endorse the Green New Deal, but she is their pawn.
Frightened, indoctrinated, science-ignorant kids are really easy to manipulate and exploit. Religions – particularly those that silence dissenters, brand heretics, and preach with righteous indignation of apocalypses that fail to happen – have long understood this. The green religion understands it too.
Go back to school, kids. You can’t protest your way to science. Learn physics, not social studies – if you can – because most of your teachers are puppets and fools. Learn to decide for yourself who you will listen to.
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I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy — and when he talks about a nonscientific matter, he will sound as naive as anyone untrained in the matter. – Richard Feynman, The Value of Science, 1955.
Nothing is more flatly contradicted by experience than the belief that a man, distinguished in one of the departments of science is more likely to think sensibly about ordinary affairs than anyone else. – Wilfred Trotter, Has the Intellect a Function?, 1941
Daniel Kahneman’s Bias Bias
Posted by Bill Storage in Probability and Risk on September 5, 2019
(3rd post on rational behavior of people too hastily judged irrational. See first and second.)
Daniel Kahneman has made great efforts to move psychology in the direction of science, particularly with his pleas for attention to replicability after research fraud around the priming effect came to light. Yet in Thinking Fast And Slow Kahneman still seems to draw some broad conclusions from a thin mantle of evidentiary icing upon a thick core of pre-formed theory. He concludes that people are bad intuitive Bayesians through flawed methodology and hypotheticals that set things up so that his psychology experiment subjects can’t win. Like many in the field of behavioral economics, he’s inclined to find bias and irrational behavior in situations better explained by the the subjects’ simply lacking complete information.
Like Richard Thaler and Dan Ariely, Kahneman sees bias as something deeply ingrained and hard-coded, programming that cannot be unlearned. He associates most innate bias with what he calls System 1, our intuitive, fast thinking selves. When called on to judge probability,” Kahneman says, “people actually judge something else and believe they have judged probability.” He agrees with Thaler, who finds “our ability to de-bias people is quite limited.”
But who is the “we” (“our” in that quote), and how is that “they” (Thaler, Ariely and Kahneman) are sufficiently unbiased to make this judgment? Are those born without the bias gene somehow drawn to the field of psychology; or through shear will can a few souls break free? If behavioral economists somehow clawed their way out of the pit of bias, can they not throw down a rope for the rest of us?
Take Kahneman’s example of the theater tickets. He compares two situations:
A. A woman has bought two $80 tickets to the theater. When she arrives at the theater, she opens her wallet and discovers that the tickets are missing. $80 tickets are still available at the box office. Will she buy two more tickets to see the play?
B. A woman goes to the theater, intending to buy two tickets that cost $80 each. She arrives at the theater, opens her wallet, and discovers to her dismay that the $160 with which she was going to make the purchase is missing. $80 tickets are still available at the box office. She has a credit card. Will she buy the tickets and just charge them?
Kahnemen says that the sunk-cost fallacy, a mental-accounting fallacy, and the framing effect account for the fact that many people view these two situations differently. Cases A and B are functionally equivalent, Kahneman says.
Really? Finding that $160 is missing from a wallet would cause most people to say, “darn, where did I misplace that money?”. Surely, no pickpocket removed the cash and stealthily returned the wallet to her purse. So the cash is unarguably a sunk cost in case A, but reasonable doubt exists in case B. She probably left the cash at home. As with philosophy, many problems in psychology boil down to semantics. And like the trolley problem variants, the artificiality of the problem statement is a key factor in the perceived irrationality of subjects’ responses.
By framing effect, Kahneman means that people’s choices are influenced by whether two options are presented with positive or negative connotations. Why is this bias? The subject has assumed that some level of information is embedded in the framer’s problem statement. If the psychologist judges that the subject has given this information too much weight, we might consider demystifying the framing effect by rebranding it the gullibility effect. But at that point it makes sense to question whether framing, in a broader sense, is at work in the thought problems. In presenting such problems and hypothetical situations to subjects, the framers imply a degree of credibility that is then used against those subjects by judging them irrational for accepting the conditions stipulated in the problem statement.
Bayesian philosophy is based on the idea of using a specific rule set for updating a “prior” (meaning prior belief – the degree of credence assigned to a claim or proposition) on the basis of new evidence. A Bayesian would interpret the framing effect, and related biases Kahneman calls anchoring and priming, as either a logic error in processing the new evidence or as a judgment error in the formation of an initial prior. The latter – how we establish initial priors – is probably the most enduring criticism of Bayesian reasoning. More on that issue later, but a Bayesian would say that Kayneman’s subjects need training in the use of uninformative priors and initial priors. Humans are shown to be very trainable in this matter, against the behavioral economists’ conclusion that we are hopelessly bound to innate bias.
One example Kahneman uses to show the framing effect presents different anchors to two separate test groups:
Group 1: Is the height of the tallest redwood more or less than 1200 feet? What is your best guess for the height of the tallest redwood?
Group 2: Is the height of the tallest redwood more or less than 120 feet? What is your best guess for the height of the tallest redwood?
Group 1’s average estimate was 844 feet, Group 2 gave 282 feet. The difference between the two anchors is 1080 feet. (1200 – 120). The difference in estimates by the two groups was 562 feet. Kahneman defines anchoring index as the ratio of the difference between mean estimates and difference in anchors. He uses this anchoring index to measure the robustness of the effect. He rules out the possibility that anchors are taken by subjects to be informative, saying that obviously random anchors can be just as effective, citing a 50% anchoring index when German judges rolled loaded dice (allowing only values of 3 or 9 to come up) before sentencing a shoplifter (hypothetical, of course). Kahneman reports that judges rolling a 3 gave 5-month sentences while those rolling a 9 assigned the shoplifter an 8-month sentence (index = 50%).
But the actual study (Englich, et. al.) cited by Kahneman has some curious aspects, besides the fact that it was very hypothetical. The judges found the fictional case briefs to be realistic, but they were not judging from the bench. They were working a thought problem. Englich’s Study 3 (the one Kahneman cites) shows the standard deviation in sentences was relatively large compared to the difference between sentences assigned by the two groups. More curious is a comparison of Englich’s Study 2 and the Study 3 Kahneman describes in Fast and Slow. Study 2 did not involve throwing dice to create an anchor. Its participants were only told that the prosecutor was demanding either a 3 or 9 month sentence, those terms not having originated in any judicial expertise. In Study 3, the difference between mean sentences from judges who received the two anchors was only two months (anchoring index = 33%).
Studies 2 and 3 therefore showed a 51% higher anchoring index for an explicitly random (clearly known to be random by participants) anchor than for an anchor understood by participants to be minimally informative. This suggests either that subjects regard pure chance as being more useful than potentially relevant information, or that something is wrong with the experiment, or that something is wrong with Kahnemnan’s inferences from evidence. I’ll suggest that the last two are at work, and that Kahneman fails to see that he is preferentially selecting confirming evidence over disconfirming evidence because he assumed his model of innate human bias was true before he examined the evidence. That implies a much older, more basic fallacy might be at work: begging the question, where an argument’s premise assumes the truth of the conclusion.
That fallacy is not an innate bias, however. It’s a rhetorical sin that goes way back. It is eminently curable. Aristotle wrote of it often and committed it slightly less often. The sciences quickly began to learn the antidote – sometimes called the scientific method – during the Enlightenment. Well, some quicker than others.
The Multidisciplinarian 