In the course of my comment back-and-forth with Chris a thought popped up that I wanted to share.
Why hasn’t the AGW community lowered the claims to authority – moved the argument to behind-the-scenes work to clarify and improve the data and modeling behind their claims – and stepped forward from a policy point of view to find allies (people like me) who think we need to conserve energy for strategic, local environmental, or economic/financial reasons?
Why not take a partial win on policy?
I don’t get it. Any thoughts??
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Come on AL, they have no choice. If it turns out only 25% of their claims are true, their credibility is shot for a generation; and the technique of getting the press to conveniently “forget” previous failures is hardly possible anymore . Their only option is doubling up, and hope that the political class is equally scared that the star they hitched themselves too might fall to earth as well
The problem is that would be “political”, and would involve all the things that those who are convinced they’re the sole possessors of Truth hate about politics: horse-trading, compromising, and even deferring some of their objectives until they are in a better political position.
They see themselves as “beyond politics”. After all, the slogan is Earth First! (and nothing else matters…)
This is why I’ve quit calling them environmentalists and started calling them environists, with an intentional linguistic connection to Communists. Actual environmentalists fight for environmental goals. Environists are in it for themselves and maximization of power.
Type II problems in a Type I world. There are reasons why one might adopt AGW as the null hypothesis, but if you do that then the obligation is to find reasons and data that falsify it. That’s a Type II problem, as is the presumption that Iranian nukes would lead to relative certainty about a nuclear war. You adopt a Type II approach when the consequences of a “false acquittal” are enormous.
The public doesn’t think in terms of Type II problems, so their null hypothesis is that the future will look like the past. (It’s a Type I world for the most part.) This induces those who’ve adopted a Type II approach to “cheat” in order to ensure that everyone adopts their null. It’s a political dilemma.
But as you say, the appropriate way around this is to look for other reasons to adopt the desired policy. If worried about Iraqi nukes, you also argue that liberal democratic regimes are more stable in the long run, that we have an obligation to support human freedom from tyranny, etc.. In the environmental realm you point to long range benefits, greater convenience, less leverage from big oil producing nations, etc..
The problem with that, is that a “multivariate world” is only slightly more acceptable and less onerous to the public than a Type II world.
I hope I haven’t been too inscrutable. I’m a bit timid about making these points.
For a certain number of AGW-believers, the goal (of legally-enforced deindustrialization) was a good in and of itself.
Previous efforts to convince the world that industrial activity is the root of all misfortune have largely failed. The population bomb did not explode. We’re not dying crippling deaths from poisoning from pesticides, starving because of topsoil depletion, or choking on soot in the air.
AGW is a wonderful tool for proponents of deindustrialization. It promises nebulous but scary disaster scenarios for the future, but is quite difficult to falsify directly in the present; it’s easy to write off data to the contrary by pointing at a long-term trend (carefully ignoring that all the disaster scenarios rely on the assumption of positive-feedback loops that probably don’t actually work that way). It would take decades of contrary data to actually falsify AGW conclusively.
But the best part is that it DEMANDS ACTION NOW, in loud, bold letters. See, by the time we have a problem, it’ll be too late to solve it; only by sacrificing our advanced economies on the altar of Gaia can disaster be averted… far enough in the future that any proponents will have long since retired.
The reason why AGW supporters don’t cut their losses and work for the gains they think they can get is simple. (Of course this is an unfair characterization that really only applies to the most political of AGW proponents, but these are the people driving the debate…) They don’t want a solution that does not involve deindustrialization. If we can do a little bit of more-efficient cars and a little bit of increased nuclear plant use and muddle through, then we don’t have to abandon our standard of living after all! And for them, that would be a disaster.
Nah, Demo, it’s perfectly clear what a “Type II” world would be. It’s the one before “Type III” 🙂
Hopefully you have a link to definitions of these things…
You could ask the same question of the health care “reformers”. If you could get an honest answer, I think it would be that if they can’t have the authority they want, they’d rather be martyrs. Bitter, recriminating, vindictive-until-the-end-of-time martyrs.
Foobarista: Type I and Type II hypothesis testing is usually covered in any standard course on statistics and probability, but the best explanation on the internet is in an old post by “Dr. Rusty Shackleford” entitled: Acting Under Conditions of Uncertainty. Since I can’t really improve on it, I just direct you to that. (He is a real Ph.D., but “Rusty Shackleford” is a pseudonym.)
In my version above, a “Type I” approach is analogous to a presumption of innocence, where a false conviction has worse consequences than a false acquittal. You presume innocence and look for evidence that falsifies that presumption. If you find enough of it, you convict. If, however, the consequences of a false acquittal are greater you use a Type II approach. If, for instance, a falsely acquitted defender can then go out and blow up a city, or create enough CO2 pollution that the poles become like the tropics in twenty years. The Type II approach isn’t typical, so it presents some unique political dilemmas. The Pentagon Papers are a good example of that kind of political problem.
Demo, this is all the more reason for warmists to be a bit more “political”. If your argument is basically a bunch of squishy actuarial stuff with a whole bunch of heroic assumptions thrown in, you’d think some more concrete results would make a better “leading” political argument.
And it doesn’t help any to have the basis of the actuarial arguments be based buggy sims running on cooked data.
After all, if you really want to get squishy, my below sim must be used:
#!/bin/sh
INPUT_DATA=$1
cat $INPUT_DATA > /dev/null
echo “Results are…”
echo
cat hand_crafted_doom_results.txt
echo
echo “Earth turns into Venus – you lose”
exit 1
This is about the level of “sim” they were using for their “predictions”. And, after all, my sim may be “right”…
I always think of Type I as “if we are wrong, you may be totally screwed” where a Type II is “if we are wrong, you are totally screwed.”
I’ve always preferred to think in terms of false positives versus false negatives. The false positive here would be the TRUE of Anthropogenic Global Warming; what is the cost. And that cost is far from being nailed down. The difference between a centimeter and three centimeters of sea level rise is significant, and what could (or should) be done about it at the lower end is an issue.
The cost of a false negative (AGW=FALSE) is actually pretty easy to calculate, since that’s what the political class is trying to ram down the Guilty Europeans’ throats. (No, wait, the political class is made of the Guilty Europeans and their clients/proxies. The throats in question are those in the Don’t Give A Damn About Anything Except How We Pay Our Bills class.)
Personally, I believe humans are warming our client a bit. It may be through our coal consumption, but I’m more convinced that our love of tasty ruminants has a bigger effect. I also know Amsterdam isn’t under water (except potentially) and that humans are damned good at dealing with non-catastrophic problems.
So put me in the Category I group, and put me in the group who thing the Category II folks aren’t going down in anything other than a, well, catastrophic “defense” of their field. Which is a shame, because I know some scientists who are going down with that ship.
I’ve never been able to explain this well enough that a lot of people “get it,” which is why I thought Rusty’s explanation was so good. Foobarista, think of it like this… the fall back position of most people is what they know, not what they don’t know. So people always assume that a false conviction is to be avoided. You’re right that this would seem to suggest some other political route to get to the policy they favor. That was AL’s question. But people also assume it’s a univariate world. One causal variable, one result. They certainly don’t like to consider either multiple causes or multiple results (some positive and some negative). Politically, those arguments are tough. Consider the position of the UN on WMD in Iraq, or any large bureaucracy. They didn’t care that Saddam was a brutal murdering dictator, or that a liberal regime in Iraq would make the Middle East more stable. They were only interested in one variable, and the response to anyone who made a more complex argument was: “Well, make up your mind. Pick an argument and stick with it. You don’t sound very sure of yourself.”
Go not to the elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes… 🙂
And another favorite: give me a one-handed economist!
Anyway, I get it, and understood the concept even if I didn’t know the taxonomy. Anyone who’s ever run a business or done much engineering under deadline pressure knows that you have to make numerous decisions based on the best knowledge you have in-hand, since you can’t afford the time needed for perfection. What you try for are workable approaches, not perfect solutions, and you have to be willing to deal with your approach if it turns out to be bad.
But workable approaches and flexibility with an eye toward not blowing tons of money is not something a massive bureaucracy is able to deal with. Far more likely is Oil for Food to the 10th power, particularly if you get “bureaucratic entrepreneurs” such as Pachauri running the place.
Its always been a big red flag for me. As soon ask how you can believe AGW is an imminent, catastrophic reality and not be jumping up and down begging for nuclear energy. There is a incoherence between the claim and the implications.
Think about how the last 15 years of climate have (not) affected the claim. Before Chris chimes in, i’m not saying the globe hasn’t warmed- but I _am_ saying the globe clearly hasn’t warmed at the rate predicted 15 years ago.
When your data changes, shouldn’t your predictions change? Is it logical to instead tweak your models, not to extend out the level of warming over a longer time frame, but instead to ramp up future warming even more aggressively so it all ends the same as the original (dire) prediction? How come predictions never get ‘less dire’, only moreso?
And the implications of that are _huge._ If the world isn’t warming as fast as experts think, the actions we need to take today must be radically different. But if there is one thought that is absolute anathema to the climate movement, its that we may have more time than we think instead of less. Mitigation is antichrist of this movement, witness the apostasy of Bjorn Lomborg.
The problem with AGW is that it is little more than a superstition wrapped in guise of science; not unlike our President having people donning lab coats to pose as doctors supporting his health care grab.
The whole premise is based on computer modeling which would be fine if some form of validation occurred. Some may remember the brief media storm surrounding cold fusion until other scientists started revealing that they could not reproduce the results. AGW should have been subjected to that same level of scrutiny from the first.
As it stands, AGW modeling is unvalidated. The data set is ambiguous and corrupt at best. Proponents of AGW have been revealed to be “cherry picking” data to suit their hypothesis and ensure their ongoing funding. With the income of so many dependent on continuing the fraud, the facts have been “adjusted” to ensure continuing grants. My conclusion is that Big Science has only demonstrated that it can be every bit as corrupt as Big Government.
Demo’s argument re: Type I/ Type II makes perfect sense to me, but this situation here is pervasive and clear lying for money, not diverging interpretations.
The Cold Fusion analogy is apt – and I’ve concluded that the best thing to do is apply the same remedies. The field as it stands is fake. Demolish the careers of those who participated in the fakery, being as persistent in this as is necessary. Defund the field, and start again in 3-5 years, after the current crop have had to move on.
Europe is unlikely to do this, but America can clean house in its own territory, and perhaps countries like Britain, mired in a very serious fiscal crisis, will follow later. The message – and it’s a very needed message – will have been sent.
Since the people who have spent the last decade lying aren’t going to stop, I’m very happy with the maximalist AGW approach. It will make it much easier to end the bad actors.
There’s also some truth to the “De-industralizationts” take on many in the Envirohadi religion, but that does not apply to many of the scientists. And fixing the damage done to science as a whole would be my priority here. That fix needs to be very memorable, and used as a teaching moment about science and what “good” looks like.
If the charlatans are out of the field thanks to defunding, limited funding would resume 3-5 years out, with strict controls, on the grounds that something might be there, and if it is, it’s very consequential. Meanwhile, instruments and experiments used for other purposes will continue gathering data (weather satellites, arctic and antarctic ice investigations, etc.), so it’s not like there will be a major hole in key sets.
If the charlatans have just shifted their support to agencies like the UN, European governments, etc., then I’d remain opposed to funding any research in this discipline until they are gone, and bludgeon the field itself with the taint of their continued presence as the reason.
I’d also suggest taking about .01% of the potential graft from carbon trading, and use it to build a standardized, open surface global network of environmental sensors, and orbit any additional satellite sensors that would useful in cross-checking the readings. All outputs to be deposited in freely available databases in their raw form, and a ‘data-wiki’ for those who make derivatives to show their work.
It might or might not confirm AGW, but at least it would be good science, and we’d likely learn some useful things along the way.
And it needs to be in the hands of a private foundation, perhaps along the lines of the X Prizes, rather than the UN or another other governmental or commercial institutional with a stake in the outcome.
Tim (#16), I don’t think your approach is a bad one. It’s just that I’d rather see any monies go to other critical scientific/ environmental areas.
In terms of consequences, I’d rather spend on research that furthered our understanding of the collapse of high-level biomass in the oceans. In English: fishing statistics [NOTE: data, not models] show huge and continuing declines, despite better tech to catch things, and that’s really bad for a growing global population. That’s something we know for a fact is a problem, and straight-line projection shows consequences in the near term.
#2 would be investing in technology to solve the usable water problem. Again, those are declines that are mapped as known data, and have significant near-term consequences. Water treatment & purification tech is going to be as important as oil exploration in the 21st century. If we want to be ahead of the curve on a problem, this, and not fake AGW, is a good place to put investment.
But as long as the Envirohadis and their AGW fakery are sucking the oxygen out of the room, real environmental problems will go begging.
Hence the “Envirohadi” term – it’s not about the environment, it’s about a war of destruction in the environment’s name.