new Nature study on why the most knowledgable people disagree about ‘climate change’ issues
Seeming public apathy over climate change is often attributed to a deficit in comprehension. The public knows too little science, it is claimed, to understand the evidence or avoid being misled [1]. Widespread limits on technical reasoning aggravate the problem by forcing citizens to use unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk [2]. We conducted a study to test this account and found no support for it. Members of the public with the highest degrees of science literacy and technical reasoning capacity were not the most concerned about climate change. Rather, they were the ones among whom cultural polarization was greatest.
This result suggests that public divisions over climate change stem not from the public’s incomprehension of science but from a distinctive conflict of interest: between the personal interest individuals have in forming beliefs in line with those held by others with whom they share close ties and the collective one they all share in making use of the best available science to promote common welfare.
Sounds about right. Signaling, signaling, signaling. A sane analysis of projected climate changes would include potential benefits of such changes (and the potential costs of state interventionism great enough to effectively combat them) and would factor in the epistemic difficulties of prediction and the acknowledge the normative value judgements (e.g. intergenerational utility discounting), so why are economists prettymuch the only people even considering a cost-benefit analysis here? Because [of] signaling. That’s why. (and, of course, vested interests and the perverse incentive structure of state grants for research).
Tradeable pollution rights are like tradeable rape rights or tradeable murder rights or tradeable theft rights. In other words, pollution is a trespass, a violation of property rights. So to have tradeable ones is hardly a libertarian solution.
— Walter Block on the Chicagoan approach to free market environmentalism
(Source: self-ownership)
California's Public Transportation Boondoggle →
Thanks to labor unions and big-government activists, transportation has become another form of social engineering. …
[Government-directed] transportation… isn’t about getting around, but about creating government-funded jobs, [greasing palms, pleasing special interests,] and pursuing big-vision projects that have little correlation to how we actually get around [much less what we demand or would otherwise be willing to pay for].
Demise of Peak Oil Theory →
For at least a hundred years, people have repeatedly warned that the world is running out of oil. In 1920, the US Geological Survey estimated that the world contained only 60 billion barrels of recoverable oil. But to date we have produced more than 1000 billion barrels and currently have more than 1500 billion barrels in reserve. World petroleum reserves are at an all-time high. The world is awash in a glut of oil. Conventional oil resources are currently estimated to be in the neighborhood of ten trillion barrels. The resource base is growing faster than production can deplete it.In addition to conventional oil, the US has huge amounts of unconventional oil resources that remain untouched. The western US alone has 2000 billion barrels of oil in the form of oil shales. At a current consumption rate of 7 billion barrels a year, that’s a 286-year supply.Nine years ago, I predicted that “the age of petroleum has only just begun.” I was right. The Peak Oil theorists, the malthusians, and the environmentalists were all wrong. They have been proven wrong, over and over again, for decades. A tabulation of every failed prediction of resource exhaustion would fill a library.Related:
Short answer: No.
The question we should be asking is why are prices so high when supply is so abundant. And the answer is increasing government involvement through taxes, regulations and subsidies.
It Ain't Easy Being a Green Boondoggle Supporter →
If you’ve been revolted by the fact that every $40,000 electric Chevy Volt sold by Government Motors enjoys a $7,500 rebate at the expense of taxpayers, then better have some Dramamine before you read any further. James Hohman of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy has calculated that the total subsidies—direct and indirect, federal and state—poured into this white elephant could add up to $3 billion or $250,000 for every Volt sold to date. And this is not counting the 26 percent ownership that Uncle Sam still has in the company.
Also:
Weather, Not Climate →
[A]s of today it has been 2,226 days since the last major hurricane (Category 3 or higher) hit the US mainland. Unless a big hurricane hits this winter, it means we are on track to break a 100 year record for the longest gap between major hurricanes hitting the coast. (The last Big Calm was between 1900 and 1906.)
For those of you who are confused, let me remind you: the only meteorological phenomena that count are the ones that confirm the climate alarmist case. It doesn’t matter what it is — drought, flood, blizzard, heat wave — if it can be made to support fear about the climate, it matters and it needs to be thoroughly analyzed and widely publicized.
Meteorological phenomena that, to the unsophisticated, might appear to undermine the case that WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE if we don’t immediately pass a stringent carbon treaty, are meaningless and should be ignored.
A spate of hurricanes is climate; an absence of big storms is weather. The absence of any major hurricanes for six years is a meaningless phenomenon; should a couple of big ones hit in any given year, then every editorial page in the country will fill with hand wringing, dire warning and I told you so.
And remember, the science is settled. Anybody who asks how many of the climate change models predicted this absence of major hurricane events in the US six years ago is a vicious climate denier, is funded by the oil companies, and should be dealt with by the usual methods.
The future belongs to the efficient. Efficient energies are those naturally chosen by consumers who know their needs better than an intelligentsia and/or central planners. Government-dependent energies, ipso facto, breed crony capitalism under which rent-seeking by private companies corrupt the political process.
[W]e cannot “wean the world off fossil fuels” without compromising the global economy and risking mass energy poverty—and worse. Nor is there the need to, thankfully.
Before Solyndra, a long history of failed government energy projects →
Solyndra, the solar-panel maker that received more than half a billion dollars in federal loans from the Obama administration only to go bankrupt this fall, isn’t the first dud for U.S. government officials trying to play venture capitalist in the energy industry.
The Clinch River Breeder Reactor. The Synthetic Fuels Corporation. The hydrogen car. Clean coal. These are but a few examples spanning several decades — a graveyard of costly and failed projects.
Not a single one of these much-ballyhooed initiatives is producing or saving a drop or a watt or a whiff of energy, but they have managed to burn through far more more taxpayer money than the ill-fated Solyndra.An Energy Department report in 2008 estimated that the federal government had spent $172 billion since 1961 on basic research and the development of advanced energy technologies. …
[T]he history of government attempts to reach for the holy grail of new energy technology — a history that features both political parties — is not inspiring. “We’re making very large bets, and the decisions seem to be more grounded in politics and geography than in engineering and science…”
Government’s never-ending parade of energy boondoggles are merely crony corporatism and redistributive passions blanketed by the pretense of knowledge.
Indeed, even now, Solyndra is only the tip of the green energy iceberg:
The New York Times (Nov 11, 2011) has a revealing article on the massive amounts of subsidies that have been dumped into green energy ventures since Obama’s election. Using the Stimulus Package as a cover, the Obama Administration has funneled billions of dollars into speculative energy projects. Noting the subsidies to NRG Energy, which is building a solar eletricity project capable of powering a small city of 100,000 homes, the Times reporters write,
“The [NRG Energy] project is also a marvel in another, less obvious way: Taxpayers and ratepayers are providing subsidies worth almost as much as the entire $1.6 billion cost of the project. Similar subsidy packages have been given to 15 other solar- and wind-power electric plants since 2009.
“The government support — which includes loan guarantees, cash grants and contracts that require electric customers to pay higher rates — largely eliminated the risk to the private investors and almost guaranteed them large profits for years to come. The beneficiaries include financial firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, conglomerates like General Electric, utilities like Exelon and NRG — even Google.”
Many of the more viable projects would have happened anyway; it’s just the Stimulus money jump started them by providing easy money now. And in some cases, state and federal governments are imposing significant increases in rates to subsidize these investments. With government subsidies and guarantees covering almost the entire investment, massive failures like Solyndra are almost inevitable. Since much of the money was spent during a politically charged environment to “get the money out the door” for “shovel ready projects,” we can’t expect the same level of risk scrutiny for these projects that would have occurred normally. Soyndra is likely just the tip of the iceberg.
Scientific Heresy →
I was not always such a ‘lukewarmer’. In the mid 2000s one image in particular played a big role in making me abandon my doubts about dangerous man-made climate change: the hockey stick. It clearly showed that something unprecedented was happening. I can remember where I first saw it at a conference and how I thought: aha, now there at last is some really clear data showing that today’s temperatures are unprecedented in both magnitude and rate of change – and it has been published in Nature magazine.
Yet it has been utterly debunked by the work of Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. I urge you to read Andrew Montford’s careful and highly readable book The Hockey Stick Illusion. Here is not the place to go into detail, but briefly the problem is both mathematical and empirical. The graph relies heavily on some flawed data – strip-bark tree rings from bristlecone pines – and on a particular method of principal component analysis, called short centering, that heavily weights any hockey-stick shaped sample at the expense of any other sample. When I say heavily – I mean 390 times.
This had a big impact on me. This was the moment somebody told me they had made the crop circle the night before. For, apart from the hockey stick, there is no evidence that climate is changing dangerously or faster than in the past, when it changed naturally. It was warmer in the Middle Ages and medieval climate change in Greenland was much faster.
Stalagmites, tree lines and ice cores all confirm that it was significantly warmer 7000 years ago. Evidence from Greenland suggests that the Arctic ocean was probably ice free for part of the late summer at that time. Sea level is rising at the unthreatening rate about a foot per century and decelerating. Greenland is losing ice at the rate of about 150 gigatonnes a year, which is 0.6% per century. There has been no significant warming in Antarctica, with the exception of the peninsula. Methane has largely stopped increasing. Tropical storm intensity and frequency have gone down, not up, in the last 20 years. Your probability of dying as a result of a drought, a flood or a storm is 98% lower globally than it was in the 1920s. Malaria has retreated not expanded as the world has warmed.
And so on. I’ve looked and looked but I cannot find one piece of data – as opposed to a model – that shows either unprecedented change or change is that is anywhere close to causing real harm….
Meanwhile, I see confirmation bias everywhere in the climate debate. Hurricane Katrina, Mount Kilimanjaro, the extinction of golden toads – all cited wrongly as evidence of climate change. A snowy December, the BBC lectures us, is ‘just weather’; a flood in Pakistan or a drought in Texas is ‘the sort of weather we can expect more of’. A theory so flexible it can rationalize any outcome is a pseudoscientific theory. …
So what’s the problem? The problem is that you can accept all the basic tenets of greenhouse physics and still conclude that the threat of a dangerously large warming is so improbable as to be negligible, while the threat of real harm from climate-mitigation policies is already so high as to be worrying, that the cure is proving far worse than the disease is ever likely to be. Or as I put it once, we may be putting a tourniquet round our necks to stop a nosebleed.
Obama Fundraiser Pushed Solyndra Deal From Inside →
“An elite Obama fundraiser hired to help oversee the administration’s energy loan program pushed and prodded career Department of Energy officials to move faster in approving a loan guarantee for Solyndra, even as his wife’s law firm was representing the California solar company, according to internal emails made public late Friday. “How hard is this? What is he waiting for?” wrote Steven J. Spinner, a high-tech consultant and energy investor who raised at least $500,000 for the candidate before being appointed to a key job helping oversee the energy loan guarantee program. “I have OVP [the Office of the Vice President] and WH [the White House] breathing down my neck on this.” Many of the emails were written just days after Spinner accepted a three-page ethics agreement in which he pledged he would “not participate in any discussion regarding any application involving [his wife’s law firm] Wilson [Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati].””
(via jeffmiller)
In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?
The claim … is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.
— Dr. Ivar Giaever, a former professor with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the 1973 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics in his resignation letter to the American Physical Society after it officially stated that “global warming is occurring” and “the evidence is incontrovertible.”
(Source: talkstraight)
Obama's Crony Capitalism →
The president’s address on jobs last night included some soaring phrases, but it left out one crucial word that epitomizes his approach to economics: Solyndra.
Fourteen months ago, the president was using his sonorous baritone to deliver soaring rhetoric about how his policies helped launch that now-broke company, which made cylindrical solar panels. The administration fast-tracked Solyndra’s loan guarantee through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—i.e. the stimulus—perhaps because Solyndra’s principal backers just happened to have donated huge sums to the Obama election campaign. Washington guaranteed more than a half-billion in loans to Solyndra on the promise of 4,000 jobs.
“This new factory is the result of those loans,” the president said at the Fremont, Calif., facility—a facility The Washington Post termed a “signature project of President Obama’s initiative to help create clean-energy jobs.” The result of those loans now? Solyndra has shut its doors, its 1,100 former employees are jobless, and the taxpayers are on the hook for perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars.
Viewed in isolation, the Solyndra story is mildly troubling. But it is nothing Washington has not seen before. The late, great columnist Molly Ivins wrote some crackerjack pieces about the return on investment that corporate sharpies used to get from their campaign donations to Republican politicians. The Solyndra story sounds like the same old, same old.
Except it isn’t. The Solyndra story encapsulates a much bigger issue than mere crony capitalism, bad as that is. Because Solyndra is not alone. The Obama administration has sunk billions into loan guarantees for dozens of other renewable-energy companies as well.
And for those of you unclear as to why corporatism (crony capitalism) is not good, keep reading for a concise breakdown.
