Justified Skepticism

I got a chuckle out of this post by Dilbert-creator Scott Adams on his blog:

When I heard that Osama used his own wife as a human shield, I assumed I was hearing a CIA-concocted story. It smelled wrong because it was too movie-like. Portraying Osama as a coward was the perfect way for the CIA to put a damper on Al Qaeda recruiting. We've since learned that Osama didn't use a human shield.

When I heard that our plan was to capture Osama alive if practical, I chuckled to myself. I'm not a Navy SEAL with a hundred operations under my belt, and even I would have blown Osama's head off if I thought he had enough moisture in his body to spit in my general direction. The last thing the United States needed was a trial. Now we know Osama wasn't blazing away with a machine gun in each hand. It was more of a "reaching for something" situation. And as you know, the very best time to consider reaching for a weapon is about half an hour after your secret lair has been attacked.

When I heard that Osama's hideout was a luxurious million-dollar villa, I kept wondering why the only video footage I kept seeing was a Pakistani crack house full of garbage. Since then we have learned that a better estimate for the home's value is $250K. I assume that's mostly for the land. The original story of the million-dollar mansion was probably a CIA invention to make Osama look like a hypocrite.

When I heard that waterboarding gave our intelligence folks the information they needed to eventually connect the dots and find Osama, I thought that seemed a convenient defense for past deeds. Now it seems that there's no way to know if other methods of interrogation would have yielded the same results.

When I heard that the SEALS endured an intense 40-minute fire-fight while sustaining no casualties, I wondered why the terrorists were so bad at aiming. Today we learn that there was only one armed combatant.

You might wonder how all of these rumors got started. My guess is that the lies were concocted in advance of the mission. The original plan involved killing or capturing everyone at the site who might have been a witness. Had we done that, the CIA could have controlled the story long enough for the fake facts to become common knowledge around the world. The lies would have been entirely justified, militarily speaking, if they had the impact of making Al Qaeda look bad and the United States look good. That's exactly the sort of thing we pay the CIA to do. I hope that was the plan. If it wasn't, it should have been.

Perhaps where things went wrong is that after losing a helicopter, the SEALS couldn't evacuate all of the witnesses. Remember the famous picture of the President in the Situation Room with all of his top advisors. Imagine how busy they were right after the mission, and how many people would need to talk to how many other people to come up with one unified story of events once the original set of lies became infeasible. It would have been nearly impossible to coordinate all the stories. I imagine that one faction in the government favored going with the original fake story, perhaps because the witnesses would not be credible. Maybe another faction assumed the truth would get out, so it was better if it came from the government first.

Given the slow leak of truth, I wonder what other surprises are in store. Remember that all of the fake facts so far had a whiff of hard-to-believe and a bit too convenient. None of the revelations have been complete surprises. So what do you predict will be the next fact we learn wasn't exactly true?

There is more. Go read the full post.

I remember the summer of 1964 when I had my first realization that the government manipulates "the truth". I had been a church camp when the Gulf of Tonkin "incident" occurred. The story was mangled so when I heard it there report was that US ships were given the OK to blow up Russian ships on sight. So I wandered in a daze for a day or two thinking I would see mushroom clouds on the horizon. When I got back to civilization I read every newspaper and news magazine to find out what "really" happened.

What I discovered was that the "news" didn't make a whole lot of sense. I had missed the wave of excitement so I wasn't swept up in the "they attacked us!" hysteria. Instead, I read the accounts critically and realized there wasn't much "attack" and there was a hell of a lot of "retaliation". Over time as more "truth" came out it was utterly obvious that this was a manufactured event to justify mass bombing of North Vietnam to try and slow the advance of the Viet Cong and NVA in South Vietnam. I realized I had been lied to.

Since then, I try to be skeptical about "the news". But I find that I get swept up in the initial hysteria. And only over time do I realize the story is "bigger" than what was presented. Often that means I end up opposing government policy. I feel like a sucker because I got manipulated.

I have no answer. Democratic governments, since they rely on the consent of the governed, should be required to be honest. But sadly, they aren't and there really is no mechanism other than a free press and the rights of citizens to question their leaders that ensure that the truth ever sees the light of day. But usually that is too late to stop "official" government action which we, the taxpayers, have to pay through the nose to clean up after the fact. Tragic.

I enjoy Scott Adams' blog. I don't agree with his political philosophy -- he's a libertarian -- but I do enjoy his point of view. We agree on individual freedom, but we disagree on social policy. I see government as the glue to hold us together and ensure a fair playing field. He hates government and wants to shrink it down small enough to be drowned in a bathtub. (Oh, to be fair, he isn't that extreme a libertarian, but that is what his buddies in the movement think.) To be honest, we probably agree on a lot of things, but we disagree on others. A democratic society is one in which people respect other people's opinions and seek to find common ground so they can have an effective civil society.

What I find utterly repellant about the US these days is that fanatics have taken charge. The Republicans have no interest in compromise or cooperation. The libertarians seek no compromise. I used to laugh at Nixon's so-called "silent majority" but I sure hope there is a "silent middle ground" in the US that will wake up from its slumbers and toss out the fanatics and revive good government and traditional American can-do attitudes and revive a pragmatism independent of the political ideologies.

Canada is famous for compromise, but we tend to catch "the American disease" 3-5 years after the States so we have our own right wing nut in power and he isn't interested in compromise. In fact he wants to remove "Government of Canada" from all documents and buildings and replace it with "the Harper Government". Any day I'm expecting posters of Harper to be hung like portraits of Stalin or Saddam Hussein. Where is the good old Canadian political accommodation and finding a happy compromise? How do we free ourselves of the ideologues?

Credo

Here is a bit from a statement of principles by Ross McKitrick. From his web site we get his statement about the WWF's Earth Hour:

I don't want to go back to nature. Travel to a zone hit by earthquakes, floods and hurricanes
to see what it’s like to go back to nature. For humans, living in "nature" meant a short life
span marked by violence, disease and ignorance. People who work for the end of poverty
and relief from disease are fighting against nature. I hope they leave their lights on.
Here in Ontario, through the use of pollution control technology and advanced engineering,
our air quality has dramatically improved since the 1960s, despite the expansion of industry
and the power supply. If, after all this, we are going to take the view that the remaining air
emissions outweigh all the benefits of electricity, and that we ought to be shamed into
sitting in darkness for an hour, like naughty children who have been caught doing
something bad, then we are setting up unspoiled nature as an absolute, transcendent ideal
that obliterates all other ethical and humane obligations. No thanks. I like visiting nature
but I don't want to live there, and I refuse to accept the idea that civilization with all its
tradeoffs is something to be ashamed of.

Count me in. I enjoy brief visits to "nature" but I don't want to be one of those half million in northern Japan having to forage for food and warmth and a place to sleep. I'm pretty sure that hundreds are dying each day because the "natural conditions" are just too harsh.

BBC on Global Warming

Here is a BBC program that argues for the validity of the science of "global warming". It uses the new president of the Royal Society, Paul Nurse, to sell the orthodox view. Before you get too deeply into watching these videos, see my criticisms below this set of videos.

This video is in 6 parts, Part 1:


Part 2:


Part 3:


Part 4:


Part 5:


Part 6:


But I find this video insulting. It sets it up as if rejecting global warming is on all fours with believing that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, that GM foods are "frankenfoods", and that vaccines cause autism. I reject global warming while I'm not guilty of any of the other three heresies. So it is outrageous that Paul Nurse puts up the ad hominem argument that rejecting global warming is just another anti-science view like these other three. (I accept that some deniers are politically motivated, but not myself and not those who I follow.)

I was particularly floored to watch Paul Nurse, who knows no climatology, being hoodwinked by the NASA centre that showed him the side-by-side actual weather with the modeled weather. Nurse is blown away. Proof! The model matches data so it must be good. He doesn't ask any critical question like "this model was a prediction how many days/weeks/months/decades/centuries in advance of the data you are showing me? Looking at it, it is pretty clear to me it is a "model" that is at most 48 or 72 hours in advance of the data. Look, weather forecasts are solid for 3 days, a bit flaky for 5 days, unreliable for 7 days, and hopeless for anything like 2 weeks in the future. But climatologists are claiming their models are good for decades and centuries into the future! And Paul Nurse doesn't know enough to recognize this and so in duped by the canned demo from NASA. Sad.

Paul Nurse ends his program by saying that "scientists must argue the case". But wait a second. In this video Nurse attacks global warming skeptics without any "arguing the case". He simply treats them as a lunatic fringe. But there are reputable scientist who aren't part of the consensus that "global warming is caused by CO2": Roger Pielke Sr., Roy Spencer, Richard Lindzen, Freeman Dyson. (The links let you jump to their view as stated by Wikipedia.) These are the ones I know about and follow their criticisms. These are not lunatic fringe people. These are not anti-science people. They have solid reasons for their claims.

In the normal discourse of science, skeptical views must be addressed and not simply swept under the carpet with the claim that "there is a consensus". In the late 19th century there was a "consensus" that physics was at an end and was expressed by Lord Kelvin in 1900 with:

There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.

But that ridiculous view was blown apart at the start of the 20th century with entirely new physics. Consensus isn't science. Science is theorizing, experiments to establish facts, and presenting your case to your peers to convince them. Only time will reveal what the "real science" is. It is completely preposterous to try to stop argument by saying there is a "consensus". It is completely outrageous that the new head of the Royal Society would take the view that "consensus" means real debate is over and all that is left is "scientists arguing the case" to those benighted souls who don't "get it". He sees climate science as complete and perfected with all that is left is a project to communicate "the truth" to the unwashed masses.

Update 2011jan30: There is a critical article by Christopher Booker in the UK's Telegraph newspaper. Here is a bit:

Horizon’s “Science Under Attack” turned out to be yet another laborious bid by the BBC to defend the global warming orthodoxy it has long been so relentless in promoting.

Their desperation is understandable. The past few years have seen their cherished cause crumbling on all sides. The Copenhagen climate conference, planned to land mankind with the biggest bill in history, collapsed in disarray. The Climategate emails scandal confirmed that scientists at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had distorted key data. The IPCC’s own authority was further rocked by revelations that its more alarmist claims were based not on science but on the inventions of environmental activists. Even the weather has turned against them, showing that all the computer models based on the assumption that rising CO2 means rising temperatures have got it wrong.

The formula the BBC uses in its forlorn attempts to counterattack has been familiar ever since its 2008 series Climate Wars. First, a presenter with some scientific credentials comes on, apparently to look impartially at the evidence. Supporters of the cause are allowed to put their case without challenge. Hours of film of climate-change “deniers” are cherrypicked for soundbites that can be shown, out of context, to make them look ridiculous. The presenter can then conclude that the “deniers” are a tiny handful of eccentrics standing out against an overwhelming scientific “consensus”.

Monday’s Horizon exemplified this formula to a T.

There is much more in the article with specific criticisms how how the BBC set up a straw man to knock down.

Hysteria vs Truth

Here is an interesting bit of fact digging by Nigel Calder in his blog Calder's Updates. He documents the dramatic difference between what a doom-and-gloom fanatic said and the down-and-dirty truth. Who wins? Fact. The fanatic's hysteria was way overblown!

... an ecologist Philip Fearnside declared in 1982 that the Amazon forest was vanishing at an accelerating rate, with more than 40% to be gone by 1988. I told the tale in my 1991 book about remote sensing, Spaceship Earth, after visiting INPE in São Paulo.

During the 1980s Brazil found itself at war on two fronts. At home, the government tried to moderate the rate of clearances in the Amazonian forest, and police a frontier region as gun-happy as the old Wild West of the USA. Internationally, they had to deal with a rising chorus of criticism about the rate at which the forest was disappearing. In 1982, on the basis of INPE’s figures, predictions by an American scientist P.M. Fearnside amounted to a forecast that 44 per cent of the Amazonian forest would be lost by 1988.

The Brazilians greeted such estimates with frank disbelief. There then followed a contest between calculation and remote sensing to try to establish the true facts. …

In 1989, the World Bank published estimates indicating that 12 per cent of Legal Amazonia was already deforested by 1988. This was based on calculations from the state of affairs in 1980. By this time the Brazilians were growing very angry. Although the figure was far less than the Fearnside estimate, the fact that it came from the World Bank secured it a place in international environmental folklore. The Brazilians appealed again to the umpires in space: the unblinking instruments of the remote-sensing satellites.

At INPE, Roberto Pereira da Cunha decided to make a ‘wall-to-wall’ assessrnent of the deforestation in Legal Amazonia. As he remarked, ‘No one wants to do the dirty work of gathering the data. It is a very trivial task for scientists.’ Trivial, but not unlaborious. Pereira’s team assembled 234 Landsat scenes and selected for close interpretation 101 images that showed evidence of deforestation. From colour composites of three wavelength bands the scientists outlined the deforested patches, and used a grid to measure their areas. Images for different years established rates of deforestation.

The most important conclusion was that there was no acceleration: deforestation was proceeding at a more or less steady rate. As for the total recent deforestation up till the end of 1988, INPE’S answer was 5 per cent of the area of Legal Amazonia. Meanwhile, Fearnside had changed his forecast. His new figures indicated 7 per cent deforestation of Legal Amazonia by 1989 – a far cry from his 44 per cent figure of just 7 years earlier, and almost in line with INPE’s figure. In 1990 Jim Tucker and Chris Justice of NASA broadly confirmed the Brazilian result by a similar large-scale use of Landsat imagery, but with a different technique, using only a single infra-red channel.

So what do the umpires in space say now, two decades later?

The latest official figures from INPE cover 1988-2009 (see the Butler references). They show that deforestation in Amazônia Legal amounted to 377,000 sq. km. from 1988 to the end of 2009, out of a recently forested area of about 3,700,000 sq. km. That puts the loss at 10 % over 22 years. When added to the earlier INPE data they suggest that from 1970 to 2009 about 15 % of the forest has been cleared. Not good, but not catastrophic either, except for some indigenous people of the forest.

A briefing paper just out from Chatham House reports that actions by governments and businesses over the past ten years have cut Illegal logging by between 54 and 75 % in the Brazilian Amazon. Compared with ranching and farming, logging legal or illegal is a very small direct contributor to deforestation.

Even so the overall deforestation rate, according to INPE, has fallen from a peak of 29,000 sq. km. per year In 1995 to 7000 in 2009. That low rate of 0.2 % per year must be more than compensated by natural forest regrowth in some of the cleared areas. If it can be maintained, the shrinkage of the Amazonian rainforest will have been halted.

Supporting an optimistic view is a factor that environmentalists prefer to ignore – the fertilizing effect of the increasing carbon dioxide in the air, which all plants love. In 2008 Oliver Philips of Leeds and his colleagues reported a remarkable increase in rates of growth in the Amazonian trees, and concluded, “The only change for which there is unambiguous evidence that the driver has widely changed and that such a change should accelerate forest growth is the increase in atmospheric CO2.”

Fanatics of all stripes shoot themselves in the foot by constantly over-blowing their case. People get disgusted when the wild-eyed claims fail to come to fruition. Only the diehard fanatics stay on board to keep beating the drum for the fanatical claims. And like religious zealots, the true believers silently change their claims to cover their tracks while still making future claims that are over-inflated. They somehow think that making end-of-the-universe-as-we-know-it claims is the way to garner attention. Sure it gets attention. But it turns them into idiots.

Any claims that "the end is nigh" deserves a heavy dose of skepticism.

Michael Crichton on Doom-and-Gloomsters

Here are some interesting bits from a talk that the author Michael Crichton gave at Caltech in 2003. I love the way he takes down a number of these doom and gloom predictions:

I also expected science to banish the evils of human thought—prejudice and superstition, irrational beliefs and false fears. I expected science to be, in Carl Sagan’s memorable phrase, “a candle in a demon haunted world.” And here, I am not so pleased with the impact of science. Rather than serving as a cleansing force, science has in some instances been seduced by the more ancient lures of politics and publicity.

He attacks pseudo-science:

In 1960, Drake organizes the first SETI conference, and came up with the now-famous Drake equation: N=N*fp ne fl fi fc fL
[where N is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy; fp is the fraction with planets; ne is the number of planets per star capable of supporting life; fl is the fraction of planets where life evolves; fi is the fraction where intelligent life evolves; and fc is the fraction that communicates; and fL is the fraction of the planet's life during which the communicating civilizations live.]

This serious-looking equation gave SETI a serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses-just so we’re clear-are merely expressions of prejudice.

...

Now let’s jump ahead a decade to the 1970s, and Nuclear Winter. In 1975, the National Academy of Sciences reported on “Long-Term Worldwide Effects of Multiple Nuclear Weapons Detonations” but the report estimated the effect of dust from nuclear blasts to be relatively minor.

In 1979, the Office of Technology Assessment issued a report on “The Effects of Nuclear War” and stated that nuclear war could perhaps produce irreversible adverse consequences on the environment. However, because the scientific processes involved were poorly understood, the report stated it was not possible to estimate the probable magnitude of such damage.

Three years later, in 1982, the Swedish Academy of Sciences commissioned a report entitled “The Atmosphere after a Nuclear War: Twilight at Noon,” which attempted to quantify the effect of smoke from burning forests and cities. The authors speculated that there would be so much smoke that a large cloud over the northern hemisphere would reduce incoming sunlight below the level required for photosynthesis, and that this would last for weeks or even longer.

The following year, five scientists including Richard Turco and Carl Sagan published a paper in Science called “Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions.” This was the so-called TTAPS report, which attempted to quantify more rigorously the atmospheric effects, with the added credibility to be gained from an actual computer model of climate.

At the heart of the TTAPS undertaking was another equation, never specifically expressed, but one that could be paraphrased as follows:

Ds = Wn Ws Wh Tf Tb Pt Pr Pe etc
(The amount of tropospheric dust = # warheads x size warheads x warhead detonation height x flammability of targets x Target burn duration x Particles entering the Troposphere x Particle reflectivity x Particle endurance, and so on.)

The similarity to the Drake equation is striking. As with the Drake equation, none of the variables can be determined. None at all. The TTAPS study addressed this problem in part by mapping out different wartime scenarios and assigning numbers to some of the variables, but even so, the remaining variables were-and are-simply unknowable. Nobody knows how much smoke will be generated when cities burn, creating particles of what kind, and for how long. No one knows the effect of local weather conditions on the amount of particles that will be injected into the troposphere. No one knows how long the particles will remain in the troposphere. And so on.

And remember, this is only four years after the OTA study concluded that the underlying scientific processes were so poorly known that no estimates could be reliably made.

Nevertheless, the TTAPS study not only made those estimates, but concluded they were catastrophic. According to Sagan and his coworkers, even a limited 5,000 megaton nuclear exchange would cause a global temperature drop of more than 35 degrees Centigrade, and this change would last for three months.

The greatest volcanic eruptions that we know of changed world temperatures somewhere between .5 and 2 degrees Centigrade. Ice ages changed global temperatures by 10 degrees. Here we have an estimated change three times greater than any ice age.

Here's a doomsday prediction that didn't come true:

I remind you that in the lifetime of most scientists now living, we have already had an example of dire predictions set aside by new technology. I refer to the green revolution. In 1960, Paul Ehrlich said, “The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”

Ten years later, he predicted four billion people would die during the 1980s, including 65 million Americans. The mass starvation that was predicted never occurred, and it now seems it isn’t ever going to happen. Nor is the population explosion going to reach the numbers predicted even ten years ago.

In 1990, climate modelers anticipated a world population of 11 billion by 2100. Today, some people think the correct number will be 7 billion and falling. But nobody knows for sure. But it is impossible to ignore how closely the history of global warming fits on the previous template for nuclear winter.

Just as the earliest studies of nuclear winter stated that the uncertainties were so great that probabilities could never be known, so, too the first pronouncements on global warming argued strong limits on what could be determined with certainty about climate change.

Here Crichton takes "the science is settled" crowd on and points out they aren't doing science. They are doing religion:

We can take as an example the scientific reception accorded a Danish statistician, Bjorn Lomborg, who wrote a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist.

The scientific community responded in a way that can only be described as disgraceful. In professional literature, it was complained he had no standing because he was not an earth scientist. His publisher, Cambridge University Press, was attacked with cries that the editor should be fired, and that all right-thinking scientists should shun the press. The past president of the AAAS wondered aloud how Cambridge could have ever “published a book that so clearly could never have passed peer review.” (But of course, the manuscript did pass peer review by three earth scientists on both sides of the Atlantic, and all recommended publication.)

But what are scientists doing attacking a press? Is this the new McCarthyism-coming from scientists? Worst of all was the behavior of the Scientific American, which seemed intent on proving the post-modernist point that it was all about power, not facts.

The Scientific American attacked Lomborg for eleven pages, yet only came up with nine factual errors despite their assertion that the book was “rife with careless mistakes.”

It was a poor display, featuring vicious ad hominem attacks, including comparing him to a Holocaust denier. The issue was captioned: “Science defends itself against the Skeptical Environmentalist.”

Really. Science has to defend itself? Is this what we have come to? When Lomborg asked for space to rebut his critics, he was given only a page and a half. When he said it wasn’t enough, he put the critics’ essays on his web page and answered them in detail.

Scientific American threatened copyright infringement and made him take the pages down. Further attacks since, have made it clear what is going on. Lomborg is charged with heresy. That’s why none of his critics needs to substantiate their attacks in any detail. That’s why the facts don’t matter.

That’s why they can attack him in the most vicious personal terms. He’s a heretic. Of course, any scientist can be charged as Galileo was charged. I just never thought I’d see the Scientific American in the role of Mother Church.

Is this what science has become? I hope not. But it is what it will become, unless there is a concerted effort by leading scientists to aggressively separate science from policy.

Go read the whole speech. He walks you through other eras where "scientific opinion" got things ghastly wrong. As Crichton points out:

Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.

As Crichton points out: science is based on fact and not consensus. Who care how many people in 1530 thought the sun orbited the earth. Science is defined by theory & fact. Copernicus proposed the theory and over the next century the facts bore him out. Taking a tally of "scientific opinion" in 1530 has nothing to do with science.

I like all the points that Crichton makes. It is my opinion that too many scientists are mixing politics and science. And they are mixing their own "hopeful" thinking with science. And worst of all, too many are publicly making statements in areas in which they have no expertise. They are using their credentials to shout down alternative viewpoints.

Seeing Patterns Everywhere

Here is a talk by Michael Shermer on how we are evolved to see meaningful patterns everywhere.



Ignore his "politically correct" obeissance to "global warming". Sadly, he claims to skepticism don't extend to the outrageous claims of the IPCC. But this simply proves that you can't subcontract your opinions to others. Even people who claim to be skeptical can have blind spots.

Despite this gaff, the above presentation by Michael Shermer is well worth watching. And... to get the full benefit of this lecture, make sure you stick it out to the last couple of minutes when the principles that Shermer is espousing are put to the test!

Scientific Consensus and Skepticism

Here is an interesting bit from a speech by Michael Crichton at CalTech in January 2003:

In past centuries, the greatest killer of women was fever following childbirth . One woman in six died of this fever. In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes, and he was able to cure them. The consensus said no. In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compelling evidence. The consensus said no. In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his management. The consensus said he was a Jew, ignored him, and dismissed him from his post. There was in fact no agreement on puerperal fever until the start of the twentieth century. Thus the consensus took one hundred and twenty five years to arrive at the right conclusion despite the efforts of the prominent "skeptics" around the world, skeptics who were demeaned and ignored. And despite the constant ongoing deaths of women.

...

Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.

The above is a warm-up exercise for the real point that Crichton wants to make about scientific "consensus" and skepticism:

As the twentieth century drew to a close, the connection between hard scientific fact and public policy became increasingly elastic. In part this was possible because of the complacency of the scientific profession; in part because of the lack of good science education among the public; in part, because of the rise of specialized advocacy groups which have been enormously effective in getting publicity and shaping policy; and in great part because of the decline of the media as an independent assessor of fact. The deterioration of the American media is dire loss for our country. When distinguished institutions like the New York Times can no longer differentiate between factual content and editorial opinion, but rather mix both freely on their front page, then who will hold anyone to a higher standard?

And so, in this elastic anything-goes world where science-or non-science-is the hand maiden of questionable public policy, we arrive at last at global warming. It is not my purpose here to rehash the details of this most magnificent of the demons haunting the world. I would just remind you of the now-familiar pattern by which these things are established. Evidentiary uncertainties are glossed over in the unseemly rush for an overarching policy, and for grants to support the policy by delivering findings that are desired by the patron. Next, the isolation of those scientists who won't get with the program, and the characterization of those scientists as outsiders and "skeptics" in quotation marks-suspect individuals with suspect motives, industry flunkies, reactionaries, or simply anti-environmental nutcases. In short order, debate ends, even though prominent scientists are uncomfortable about how things are being done.

When did "skeptic" become a dirty word in science? When did a skeptic require quotation marks around it?

To an outsider, the most significant innovation in the global warming controversy is the overt reliance that is being placed on models. Back in the days of nuclear winter, computer models were invoked to add weight to a conclusion: "These results are derived with the help of a computer model." But now large-scale computer models are seen as generating data in themselves. No longer are models judged by how well they reproduce data from the real world-increasingly, models provide the data. As if they were themselves a reality. And indeed they are, when we are projecting forward. There can be no observational data about the year 2100. There are only model runs.

This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynmann called it a disease. I fear he is right. Because only if you spend a lot of time looking at a computer screen can you arrive at the complex point where the global warming debate now stands.

Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?

Here is an excellent prescription by Crichton on how to move forward with a real research agenda in global warming (and other "hot button" topics):

Sooner or later, we must form an independent research institute in this country. It must be funded by industry, by government, and by private philanthropy, both individuals and trusts. The money must be pooled, so that investigators do not know who is paying them. The institute must fund more than one team to do research in a particular area, and the verification of results will be a foregone requirement: teams will know their results will be checked by other groups. In many cases, those who decide how to gather the data will not gather it, and those who gather the data will not analyze it. If we were to address the land temperature records with such rigor, we would be well on our way to an understanding of exactly how much faith we can place in global warming, and therefore what seriousness we must address this.

Good News from Energy

Geoffrey Styles' blog Energy Outlook reviews the energy news from 2009. It ends with this positive note, a note of compromise and realism, a step back from hysterical doom-and-gloom while being pragmatic and exercising a modest precautionary principle:

Neither Copenhagen nor Climategate spells the end of action on climate change, but they might just mark a turning point toward a more pragmatic and less dogmatic set of responses, perhaps along the lines of a compromise being floated in the US Senate that would consider the contributions of all forms of energy to a more secure energy future with lower emissions. That aligns with the gradual replacement of a narrative of oil scarcity by one of natural gas abundance and the deft use of renewables, with a much stronger emphasis on efficiency and conservation, which still look like the low-hanging fruit for both energy security and climate change.

Now... if only more people step down from their soapboxes and look realistically at things with an eye to cost/benefit and jobs and the well being of working people, then maybe a corner has been turned and the future will be better.

Global Warming Verified (for large cities)

Here is research at the cutting edge, as sophisticated as anything coming out of the fraudsters at Hadley's CRU (Climate Research Unit). Sure enough, they discover "global warming" but it only shows up in the large urban areas, the heat islands created by human activities...



Notice the disclaimer at the end. This father and son effort did not benefit from millions from subsidies by big energy corporations (or from government largesse which the Hadley CRU swills in great gobs).

How to Read the Media

Here is an excellent example by Dean Baker in his Beat The Press blog of how a reader has to "read between the lines" and think critically when reading the press:

Inflation, Warren Buffet, and You

Warren Buffet is a very shrew investor. His oped in the New York Times today warning of the evils of inflation was likely one of his best. Mr. Buffet tells readers that we must quickly get the budget deficit down or risk becoming a "banana-republic economy."

To help make his case on inflation, Buffet quotes Keynes, the great guru of all depression fighters everywhere: "governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens." The problem with this quote, as Keynes well-knew and often talked about, is that not all citizens stand to lose wealth from inflation.

Most citizens in fact stand to gain wealth from inflation. Most citizens are debtors, primarily as a result of a home mortgage, but also due to student loans or other forms of debt. These citizens will stand to gain from moderate rates of inflation. For example, if the inflation rate is 3 percent annually over the next five years, then someone who owns a $300k home can expect the price to rise by roughly 15 percent to $345k (this ignores compounding, which would make the increase somewhat higher). If the person has a mortgage of $270k, then their equity will have more than doubled from $30k to $75k, even before counting any payoff of principle.

By contrast, if the economy has zero inflation over the next five years, then this home will still be worth $300k in five years, giving this homeowner no additional equity. In fact, there is probably no better way to rebuild household wealth and restore balance to the economy than to sustain moderate rates of inflation (3%-4% annually), just as the country did through most of the post-World War II period of rapid growth. By rebuilding wealth, consumers would be able to consume more and businesses would be able to invest more.

It's fine that Mr. Buffet differs with this view, but it might have been worth noting that he is someone who does stand to lose "an important part" of his wealth through inflation. Mr. Buffet is heavily invested in the financial sector, owning large amounts of insurance companies and major banks, such as Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo. The financial sector will be hurt by inflation because the mortgages and other loans that it has issued will be worth less money.

In other words, Mr. Buffet has a direct personal interest in preventing inflation, just as the CEO of a health insurance company has a direct personal interest in preventing a robust public insurance option. Most people would recognize the latter, unfortunately they may not recognize the former.

Remember, Warren Buffet is a very shrewd investor.

This reminds me of Deep Throat telling Woodward & Bernstein to "follow the money". You have to try to figure out why people are telling you what they are telling you, what they are leaving out and why, and who is likely to gain or lose from this "news". It is hard work, but nobody ever said life would be easy.

Sadly I'm into the phase of my life where I'm trying to live off my savings, so having inflation will cost me because it eats away at my nestegg. Meanwhile, young people should be cheering for inflation because, as the article points out, they can buy a house and watch inflation run up their wages and make it easier and easier to pay off their mortgage. Winners and losers. But I keep remembering the losers from German hyperinflation, they helped elect Hitler. Bad things can happen when one segment of the population "wins" at the expense of another segment of the population.

Critical Thinking

The most important skill anybody can have is thinking for themself. This manifests itself in many ways:

• skepticism


• critical thinking


• independent thinking


• insisting on working things out for oneself from first principles

Here's a video by Michael Shermer that covers the basics:



Funny thing... Shermer calls cold fusion "baloney" and he calls skepticism about global warming "baloney". For me, this just proves that you can't take anybody as an "authority". I reject Shermer's claims on both of these. There are credible scientific experts who will tell you that cold fusion is real and that global warming is overblown. The bottom line: you have to find your own way through the world. You have to do the hard thinking. You can't let somebody else tell you what to think. Not even Shermer who is trying to teach you critical thinking.