Sceptical
Bjorn Lomborg’s false dichotomies
July 2, 2006 39 comments
In a comment piece for the Observer, “Climate change can wait, world health can’t”, Bjorn Lomberg argues once again that it’s not worth doing anything about global warming, and that the world should spend money on AIDS, famine, and, er, “free trade” instead. To bolster the argument along these lines put forth by his 2004 “Copenhagen Consensus” report (the “consensus” was that of a group of neoliberal economists), he says that last month at Georgetown University, “a distinguished group of UN ambassadors”, including those from “the US, China, India and Pakistan”, reached a “surprisingly close” conclusion. Should we be surprised that China’s ambassador to the UN, for example, is not much interested in reducing fossil-fuel emissions? Should we suppose that this has nothing to do with China’s rapid industrialization? Apparently we should.
Lomborg’s article contains nothing that has not already been widely rebutted. However, since its appearance is timed as part of the concerted anti-Al Gore backlash set in motion by Gore’s film about global warming – Lomborg claims smugly that his own argument is “the really inconvenient truth” – it may be worth taking some time to re-examine the misleading form of his arguments.
A section in Unspeak deals with a species of structurally misleading rhetoric called the “false dichotomy”. This article is a perfect example of it, which should come as no surprise, since it is designed by a man whose notorious book, The Sceptical Environmentalist, was in its very title a virtuoso case of Unspeak . . .
First, the false dichotomy. Spending money on AIDS and famine relief (as the Bush government is laudably doing to a much greater extent than its predecessors), are unarguable goods. However, this is evidently not an either/or problem. A habitable climate is a precondition for humanity’s being able to address other problems. Global warming is an infrastructure problem, which cannot be lined up on an equal footing with others. Say you own an old office building in Tokyo that requires reinforcement to meet earthquake-safety standards. It also needs new elevators, because the old ones creak and might fail soon. The elevators are arguably the more pressing safety problem in the immediate short term. Even so, you do not decide to replace the elevators and do nothing about reinforcement, because if the building falls down at the next tremor, the fact that it has dodgy elevators will be moot.
Similarly, to divert all current resources to disease and hunger, while shrugging one’s shoulders about the possibility of hundreds of millions of people starving and being rendered homeless in a few decades through flooding and the reduction of arable land, as well as likely increases in malaria through the expansion of areas hospitable to mosquitoes, is plainly not rational.
Of course we should spend money on all these things. The exact proportion of resources we should allocate to each problem is a real and difficult question. But Lomborg’s article, in pretending to answer this real and difficult question, actually ignores it. The rhetorical trick is in the example sum of money chosen by the so-called Copenhagen Consensus: “How could you spend $50bn to achieve the most good possible?”
The argument runs thus: a $50bn worldwide spend would not solve global warming, indeed would actually accrue fewer benefits in dollars that it costs. Therefore, rather than spend more, we should spend nothing at all. Now, the precise ways in which Lomborg and his friends decide on the dollar values of various costs and benefits have themselves been much criticised, among many others by economist John Quiggin, and lately by the Royal Society. But even if they were reliable, it is arguable that the priorities have been rigged by the nugatory sum (in global spending terms) assigned to the problem.
Try an analogy with food. If I gave you $2 and told you to buy the most delicious and filling meal you could on that budget, you would not even consider a whole grilled lobster at a local restaurant, because it would be out of your price range. Even if you could persuade the chef to sell you a single leg of the grilled lobster for $2, that would be a silly decision, in terms of maximizing nutrition, in comparison to a $2 cheese sandwich from a street stall. But if I offered you a budget of $50, you might well choose the lobster. So by only offering you $2 to begin with, I have effectively ruled out lobster from your potential menu. Similarly, by proposing an artificially tiny budget, Lomborg may have discounted in advance any really substantial contributions to mitigating the harms of global warming.
This point was put forcefully in 2004 by Columbia economist Jeffrey D Sachs in Nature:
By choosing such a low sum – a tiny fraction of global income – the [Copenhagen Consensus] inherently favoured specific low-cost schemes over bolder, larger projects. It is therefore no surprise that the huge and complex challenge of long-term climate change was ranked last […] Annual income in the world is currently about $40 trillion, of which some $30 trillion is in the high-income (donor) countries. So the project looked at investing a measly 0.03% of annual donor-country income to address the planet’s greatest challenges […] The United States alone now spends almost $450 billion per year on the military.
An alternative analogy might be one with medicine. Suppose you go to the doctor and he says: “I’m afraid you have a brain tumour. However, if I only had $50 to treat you, I could only pay for a session of shiatsu massage, which would make you feel good, but it wouldn’t cure your brain tumour. So I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do.” Would you perhaps seek a second opinion?
You might indeed be sceptical of that doctor’s expertise. And Lomborg cleverly touts himself as “the sceptical environmentalist”, which is a superb bit of Unspeak salesmanship. At last, a sceptical environmentalist – someone who cares for the planet but doesn’t indulge in all this green fearmongering!
Well, for a start, Lomborg is not an environmental scientist. He studied and taught in the political-science department of Aarhus University. His one academic paper applies game theory to politics. He is now director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, part of the Copenhagen Business School. The only sense in which he is any kind of “environmentalist” is his (much-disputed) claim in TSE that he was “an old left-wing Greenpeace member” before he, so to speak, saw the light.
His avowed “scepticism”, meanwhile, is not scepticism, because it is asymmetrical. He is “sceptical” only of the higher end of estimates of global-warming damage in the confidence intervals of predictions by bodies such as the IPCC, consistently preferring the low end for no explicit scientific reason. It is consistently argued by a wide range of environmental scientists, indeed – by, for example, E O Wilson on extinction, who speaks disgustedly of “the Lomborg scam”, by Stephen H Schneider on climate, by Devra Davis on health, and in a general survey, also including population issues, in Scientific American – that Lomborg systematically misrepresents scientific findings so as to prefer his own conclusions. In a January 2006 interview [German] with Neuen Zürcher Zeitung, Lomborg said: “The fact that I already knew the conclusion while I was writing the book may have influenced many of the things that I wrote.” You never know – it might have.
Lomborg’s Unspeak self-description is clever, though, because it contains, as all good propaganda does, a tiny grain of truth. There are plenty of reasons to be sceptical about particular models or particular predictions in climate science. Science, indeed, progresses exactly by means of scepticism, by repeatedly trying to disprove hypotheses and find new ones that better fit the data.
When your “scepticism”, on the other hand, is consistently biased in one direction – towards attempting to trivialize the vast planetary scientific consensus on the dangers of human-caused global warming – it is no longer scepticism, any more than the Competitive Enterprise Institute may be called a “sceptical” institution.
It is well known that prominent global-warming “sceptics” who appear to talk about the issue on the media, so as to give debates a spurious semblance of “balance”, often turn out to be paid shills for the fossil-fuels industry. I do not mean for a moment to suggest that Lomborg is a paid shill for the fossil-fuel industry. But the disingenuous grabbing of the rhetorical territory of the “sceptical”, an adjective more properly applied to the scientific method of self-falsification and peer review, works the same way in both cases. Be sceptical of “sceptics”.
Thanks to John Quiggin and Anna Richards.
Hello Steve
I sort of concur with the general thrust of your analysis, but I think you gloss over one very crucial aspect of this question. Allow me. Fossil fuels are of course finite resources. So, granted (at least in the case of crude oil) that we already hit peak oil consumption sometime ago and are now almost certainly heading in the not too distant future towards the end of the “oil era”, can we not therefore safely assume that the worst effects of global warming are surely behind us? And, moreover the problem of “global warming” (BTW an interesting linguistic curiosity for you) will not be one that will forever haunt us. So perhaps it’s not such a bad idea to spend on money on other stuff. And perhaps the real question we need to be exploring is how the world might look in ten years time with worryingly dwindling oil reserves.
One thing is for sure: global warming will be among the least of our worries.
Best
Sohail
It is “climate change” that is “the interesting linguistic curiosity”, given that, as explained in my book, the US, Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing states specifically lobbied at the UN in the early 1990s to replace “global warming” with that vaguer and less frightening phrase.
Your other speculations are without merit. World oil consumption rose by 1.2 million barrels a day in 2005. Peak oil production has not yet arrived. You could try going here if you want to be at all informed.
Well, what I meant to say of course was peak oil capacity. :-) There’s of course a lot of controversy over this with the Gulf oil producers tending, understandbly so, to overexaggerate their oil reserve capacities. In any case, what should be obvious to anyone with minimal critical insight is that any official incontrovertible declaration about peak oil would of course be catastrophic for the world economy.
If you want ot be at all informed, I suggest you check out: http://www.peakoil.org/
The link you gave is hardly unbiased. I mean what’ “real climate” if that’s not unspeak. There’s surely a plainer way of putting this.
In short, the point is still valid, namely that our capacity in regard to climate change is bound to decline.
Bestest
Sohail
No, it isn’t valid. Evidently you haven’t heard of a thing called coal; nor do you know that there is a lag of decades in the global climate system; nor have you read the recent literature on unstoppable feedback effects that may already have started; and so forth. Really, you are talking uninformed nonsense.
“Real climate” is real climate science, by real climate scientists. What would you prefer them to call it?
Coal? Now how do you suppose I should fill my car up with coal next time round? I had no idea that BMW, Renault or General Motors did coal-steam engines too! I fear the uniformed nonsense is entirely on your side!
And please do lighten up. :-) After all I did say I agreed with the gist of your argument. So I really can’t see the point of setting up a false dichotomy here between you and me in this argument.
And as for your:
“Real climate” is real climate science, by real climate scientists. What would you prefer them to call it?
Oh, really?
Best
Sohail
PS: I still insist that the point I make has validity at least insofar as oil is concerned. And please do drop the self-righteous tone as if you’re the only bloody person on the planet that cares about the environment!
Uh, burning coal causes 37% of global carbon emissions.
Even so far as oil is concerned, the point you make is nonsense. You also misunderstand the concept of “peak oil”. It does not mean that when that point is reached, suddenly there’ll be less oil to burn every year. It is just the point at which there is less oil left in the planet than has already been sucked out over history.
Dear Steve
Look if it makes you feel emotionally secure that I misunderstand you, that’s perfectly fine by me.
But it makes absolutely no sense to compare oil with coal. The point is we live in an oil economy. Coal will never replace oil in that respect – irrespective of the carbon emissions you refer to. That’s a totally bogus point. Put simply, the end of the oil era is pretty much the end of suburbia.
Now, with all due respect this business about “peak oil” is not exactly rocket science. If your need to explain it to me makes you feel like some sort of intellectual heavyweight, that’s fine too, but I’m totally lost as to where on earth you got the idea that I suggested that oil would suddenly run out. However, I will repeat the point again for you:
(1) Oil is a finite resource.
(2) The amount of tappable oil reserves will invariably begin to decline at some point. In actual fact it began to do so in the mid 90s.
(3) It follows from all this that the climate problems directly related to oil will also subside.
Now, which bit of this are you having difficulty with?
Sohail
it makes absolutely no sense to compare oil with coal.
Uh, burning coal causes 37% of global carbon emissions.
That’s a totally bogus point
Uh, not if we’re talking about global warming, it isn’t. Are we talking about something else?
I’m totally lost as to where on earth you got the idea that I suggested that oil would suddenly run out
It’s not that far up the thread:
we already hit peak oil consumption sometime ago and are now almost certainly heading in the not too distant future towards the end of the “oil era”
Now, let’s return to your initial question. It was:
can we not therefore safely assume that the worst effects of global warming are surely behind us?
The answer is: no, we can’t.
It’s also not very far up the thread when I suggested very clearly we’re living in an oil economy and so comparing oil in this sense to coal is a total non sequitur. If everything (i.e. modern oil-driven industrialisation) comes to a halt, then coal isn’t going to have much use either. It seems reasonable to assume that all modern oil-driven industriaisation is integrated. What I suspect will happen (when oil production reaches some critical point) is we will all return to a pre-WW1 level of industrialisation. Yes, there will be coal but the climate risks will not be anything on the same scale. Now you could argue that this is speculative, but no less so than anything else on the table. What is certain however is that this WILL happen? When, is a much trickier. And certainly giving cocksure answers to how “you know” the climate or economy will respond to an eventual decline in oil consumption is pretty glib to say the least.
Also just for record, “not too distant future” does not by any stretch of the English language imply “suddenly”. I fear you’re engaging in a mischievous play of unspeak! ;-)
Sohail
What I suspect will happen (when oil production reaches some critical point) is we will all return to a pre-WW1 level of industrialisation. Yes, there will be coal but the climate risks will not be anything on the same scale.
You do not understand that, by virtue of oil and coal already burned, we are already committed to 20-30 years of increasing warming and sea-level rise from right now. This is the lag in the system I told you about. The question among population scientists, for example, is how best to minimize the coming destruction and havoc to be wrought on coastal cities. By the far-off time you fantasize about, once we have burned all the oil we can get at, if we are so stupid as to do so, the “climate risks”, or catastrophe, will already have happened and will be irreversible.
Now you could argue that this is speculative, but no less so than anything else on the table.
Here’s what’s on my table. a) your uneducated guesses; b) a vast planetary consensus of climate scientists. I know which I think is more speculative.
It would seem rather optimistic to assume that once the oil and the coal run out, we will see a gentle return to a pre-industrial age climate and (one would hope) the re-surfacing of Holland, Calcutta and lower Manhattan, for example, from under the ocean.
I would point out: “Spending money on AIDS and famine relief (as the Bush government is laudably doing to a much greater extent than its predecessors), are unarguable goods.” Unarguable if that money is being spent on, say, abstinence programmes, or the purchase of US surplus for shipping as “famine-relief”? A nit-picking point, to be sure.
if that money is being spent on, say, abstinence programmes
Of course I don’t think abstinence programmes are much good. Luckily, the entire budget of PEPFAR is not devoted to them.
or the purchase of US surplus for shipping as “famine-relief”
Food is food. I agree there are arguments to be had about the best ways to spend money, once we have agreed what to spend it on.
Yes, I just think that whenever somebody says something is “unarguable”, they should be argued with.
“Science, indeed, progresses exactly by means of scepticism, by repeatedly trying to disprove hypotheses and find new ones that better fit the data . . . the “sceptical”, an adjective more properly applied to the scientific method of self-falsification and peer review . . .”
While I don’t savagely disagree, there is a slightly different, slightly broader perspective one might offer on how science progresses. It is that science progresses by the generation of hypotheses, which must be subject to sceptisism.
Sceptisism is generally satisfied by replication of data supporting the hypothesis, or rejecting the null hypothesis, when the data have been produced in a transparent way, with as much potential bias as possible removed and clear _expression of the limitations; attached to this is the understanding that elaboration or new evidence may refine, or indeed eventually disprove, the hypothesis. Disproof remains an ideal and _progress_ in science is not dependent on disproof alone. Furthermore, a measure of a scientific theory is not that it can be immediately disproven. First, it is not always technologically possible to do so; second, many hypotheses are tested by proxy, in particular by assumptions about cause and effect (whether observing photons or fevers and drawing conclusions about your hypotheses from them). “Self-falsification” is therefore nice in theory . . .
At some point, every scientist needs to shuffle off sceptisism – and in particular some golden mean “symmetrical sceptisism” – to pursue the data, to mash and mangle the data and the hypothesis to see how they might fit: it is the speculative side of science, a source of originality (probably the main source of originality in science other than some goofy error, which the scientist is attentive enough to wonder about, and which results in penicillin, etc.), and, permanently, a source of uncertainty within science. And it is why one must be sceptical about science itself and its limits.
On the one hand, in the present, the finality of “disproof” is more dreamed of than realised. On the other hand, there is so much that the scientific community can form a consensus on today that, twenty, fifty, a hundred years ago, four hundred years ago, the scientific community would have thought was bollocks-wrong, and vice versa.
Yes, I just think that whenever somebody says something is \”unarguable\”, they should be argued with.
Touché. :)
Your broader definition of the scientific process seems very good to me. I would only note that, as you imply, after this speculative, creative work has been done, it is the work of other scientists to be sceptical about it.
No, I quite agree. Sceptisism, which I wish were spelled “skepticism”, is vital. And again you bring up the role of “other scientists”. The peer review process, which you allude to in your piece, is sometimes seen as hostile, but I know of nobody who has said that their work is worse for having gone through the peer review process. Stop for a second on the term “peer review”: one’s paper is being peered at – an appropriately focused and penetrative optical relationship – while it is being “reviewed”, re-looked-at; and it is done by peers, i.e. colleagues, equals. Other than magnifying and self-reflecting the visual scrutiny at work, the use of “peer” tries to eliminate any hierarchy so that sceptisism is given free rein. But, peer review is also blinded – so reviewers do not know who authored the paper, and the authors do not know who has reviewed the paper. The goal is that what you see before you is subject to sceptical scrutiny without repercussion, by way of carefully modulated sightlines; and you have an extraordinary system where famous nobel laureates submit to review by . . . well, their peers. This system is designed so that scepticism can flourish. When it fails, it is not for lack of the opportunity for scepticism.
One might propose that scepticism is more than just a stance towards data, but a bedrock of science. As a stance, a posture, it is easily mimicked by people for whom scepticism is at once a concession of weakness (that is, uncertainty) on the part of science with which they can attack science, and, at the same time, no part of their own beliefs. So, perhaps scepticism alone is not enough: there has to be a system in which scepticism can work, one in which there are carefully positioned transparencies and opacities.
I believe it is spelled “skepticism” by Americans.
I agree with your analysis, also because as well as scepticism you need a structure in which stuff can be liberally proposed for people to be sceptical about. Pure philosophical scepticism, like Hume’s re cause and effect, is obviously no good if you’re trying to cure a disease or fly to Mars.
PS The reason I wrote all that, and perhaps I should have been more clear, is in response to part of your critique of Lomborg. You write: “His avowed “scepticism”, meanwhile, is not scepticism, because it is asymmetrical.”
The individual will always have an asymmetrical scepticism – in some cases, it is clear why the scepticism is so skewed, and in some cases, the scepticism itself is a charade. But equipoise in an ideal rarely attained by the individual. This is _why_ there is a systematic way for scepticism to flourish: partly accomplished by the scrutiny of peer review, and partly accomplished by the erasure of the individual through blinding.
This does not mean that questions cannot be asked of the individual and his or her relationship to scepticism, or that suspect patterns of “scepticism” cannot be pointed out. But it does mean that one has to be very cautious critiquing a geometry of scepticism, just as one has to be cautious about critiquing someone for not being “balanced” or “moderate” enough. It is far more concerning when the system is assymetrical than when an individual is. This is why the integrity of science is so important.
And here the problem comes back to the media, a system that seeks symmetry, balance and equipoise in a very different manner from science. I would not argue that the media requires the same system: that would hardly qualify as a free media. But it explains why the Lomborgs et al can find an audience they would never find in the scientific community. In some ways, this is a very good thing for the media, providing voice for dissent; in some ways, it is a good thing for science, holding scientists’ feet to the public fire. The drawbacks are also obvious (the destruction of the planet). It is an encounter assymetrically favoured against science, not only because the venue is the media, but also because these debates about science takes place in front a public wary of “nuance” and one that does not understand the difference between the media’s conception of symmetry, balance and equipoise and scientists’ conception of the same.
I think climate chaos is a more descriptive term that has been taken up by many progressive groups combatting it. Unfortunately ‘global warming’ still makes it into the media with ice cream cone graphics and sun hats. “Hooray!”
SW, I suspect you know that Unspeak talks a lot about spurious notions of “balance” and “moderation”. ;) However, I’m not sure I understand exactly what you mean by saying that “the individual will always have an asymmetrical scepticism”. Is there a species of asymmetrical scepticism that would not be invidious or inconsistent? Or do you rather, in noting that “perfect equipoise is an ideal”, argue that we will inevitably have asymmetries like we inevitably have prejudices, and should work to overcome them? If so, I concur with this.
In Lomborg’s case, the fact that he is sceptical of one end of estimates in a given confidence interval, but not of the other end, seems to be a red flag. I agree that asymmetry of a system in this regard would be much more troubling, though.
Yes, I agree with that.
You ask: “Is there a species of asymmetrical scepticism that would not be invidious or inconsistent?” Probably not – and you go on to answer what we should try to do. But, to continue to answer that question: a species of asymmetrical scepticism, which may be inconsistent, and at times invidious, but that is harnessed to a willingness to undergo systematic scrutiny, while playing by the rules of transparency and replicability, is at the core of science. Does it have to be “asymmetrical”? Yes, insofar as the complicated, expensive, time-consuming pursuit of a theory requires some sort of belief, or hope, in that theory: it would be silly if biologists were equally sceptical about evolution and ID and spent vast amounts of time, energy, finances, etc. investigating ID.
Nevertheless, I would also agree if you were to respond that a broad scepticism, one that remains critical and questioning even of one’s own precepts, and that seeks to use the technologies of science to demonstrate one’s own precepts and to understand how one’s own precepts fail if that experimentation fails, is a type of “symmetrical scepticism”.
The broader problem, though, really remains at the intersection of what you are examining here: how science gets interpreted, framed, explained by the media. Notably, fans of the New Yorker might enjoy this week’s Financial Page by James Surowiecki, in which he talks about the thoughtful uncertainty of the new chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Bernanke. He discusses Bernanke’s willingness to share his thinking about what the economy is doing: “These are reasonable statements by a policymaker adjusting interpretations to fit new data. But they’ve been read as the meanderings of a hopeless waffler . . . But acknowledging uncertainty doesn’t play well in the media or the market. Today, the Fed’s actions are subject to constant press scrutiny. And it’s easier to lure audiences by using labels like “hawk” and “dove” than be exploring the subtleties of forecasting an uncertain future.” Similarly, science works with uncertainties, which are inadequately conveyed in the media, largely because the media tries to erase uncertainty with “balance” (uncertainty about bias, uncertainty about the options, etc)
Interestingly, Surowiecki says, “As social scientists have long recognized, we prefer confident statements of fact to probabilistic statements, even when we know that the confidence is illusory.” This need for “confident statements of fact” is at odds with the “probabilistic statements” science can make, and people like Lomborg exploit this. I would note that although I am not a social scientist I suspect that a social scientist would not have written Surowiecki’s sentence as a statement of fact but as statements of probability, and might have written it thus: “As social scientists have long recognized, we tend to prefer confident statements of fact to probabilistic statements, even when we are aware that confidence is frequently illusory.”
I would also agree if you were to respond that a broad scepticism, one that remains critical and questioning even of one’s own precepts, and that seeks to use the technologies of science to demonstrate one’s own precepts and to understand how one’s own precepts fail if that experimentation fails, is a type of “symmetrical scepticism”.
That is how I would respond. ;)
I think you are being too hard on science to imply that it can only make “probabilistic” statements, though. Scientific statements such as that the speed of light in a vacuum is c, or that evolution happens, are quite a bit more reliable than that suggests. Scientists do not assign probabilities to them in the same way as they work with probabilistic expressions in quantum physics, or in the way they give probabilistic statistical confidence intervals in epidemiology or climate forecasting.
It would be better perhaps to say that science claims that such statements accord with all the available evidence studied in many different ways by many different people, and to treat them as true enables concrete results in the fields of physics/pharmacology etc to be achieved; nonetheless any evidence that appears to contradict them should be carefully examined and the theory if necessary adjusted or replaced to fit. That, I guess, is the kind of good “symmetrical scepticism” we are talking about.
I mostly agree.
You write: “I think you are being too hard on science to imply that it can only make “probabilistic” statements, though. Scientific statements such as that the speed of light in a vacuum is c, or that evolution happens, are quite a bit more reliable than that suggests.”
“quite a bit more reliable that that suggests”? What is something that is “quite a bit” more reliable than something “probabilistic”? “Quite a bit” is hedging. Either a statement is “probabilistic” or else it is a statement of fact that can be made, uninflected by doubt, rigid with certainty. Something “probabilistic” can be very, very sturdy, but remains, at least minutely, uncertain. It is probable that I will continue to breathe for the next few minutes – I am confident that this is >99.999999% likely, and I am living this moment as though it is certain – because if I knew that it was at all likely that I would stop breathing in the next few minutes, I’d probably not be writing this. But, do you see my point: what can be “quite a bit more reliable” than a “probabilistic” statement that is >99.99999% certain? Concrete fact. But you are wary of saying that. For good reason. We are prejudiced against probability, as something lesser than fact. But, rather than being prejudiced against probability, we should be, ahem, symmetrically sceptical about it.
You say “reliable” – “Reliable” in statistics is a measure of the consistency between observers in what they observe. Imagine that a group of scientists see a fluffy, long-eared animal bouncing towards them, and all of them call it “bunny wabbit”: the term “bunny wabbit” is reliable. It may not be “valid”, which is a measure of how well a term or observation correlates with what is actually there: they may be looking at a hare, or a hirsute kangaroo joey. So, when you say that the speed of light in a vacuum is “c”, that will almost always be “reliable”, because it is a definition that has been agreed upon. “Reliable” in this context remains subject to probabilities.
I really don’t know what to make of all this (so if I say something dumb please go easier on my than you did on Sohail; I’m just thinking aloud here in the vain hope some of it will be of interest).
I can’t help feeling that global warming campaigners do exaggerate their case, because that’s what people do when they’ve got a cause, and I think it’s weird the consequences are all bad (won’t Siberia or Canada become more habitable?). So that inclines me to sympathise with Lomborg’s biased scepticism. (I don’t mean to defend the specifics of what he’s said)
I can’t get a fix on the ‘consensus’ – because of articles like this and I am sympathetic to the idea that there’s only a finite amount of money to spend and it’s worth prioritising and the idea of cost-effectiveness in general (so sympathetic to Lomborg again). It’s a valuable exercise and not one that I’ve seen global warming campaigners undertake. But I don’t understand how spending money on funding research into hydrogen fuels, for instance, will reduce aid to Africa.
Neither do I quite follow your lobster analogy. If we had $1000bn to spend rather than $50bn, would we think oh, now we can afford that expensive anti-global-warming thing? How do you envisage money being spent to combat global warming? If it is funding technological research, is there a sense in which investment in R&D suddenly becomes more worthwhile when you spend larger sums? Have you read this article by the way? Would be interested in your thoughts on it. At what point does it become sensible to stop trying to prevent something, and to deal with its consequences instead? If global warming is inevitable now, and efforts at carbon emissions reduction will only have a marginal effect, what would we spend money on to deal with that?
SW,
I’m sorry, I thought you were using the term “probabilistic” in its technical sense, as in contexts where it makes sense for quantum physicists or statisticians and so forth to calculate probabilities. No one would waste their time calculating the probability of evolution being true: in fact, it couldn’t be done.
This is one reason why I objected to the term “probabilistic”. The other is that probabilities are usually (except for the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics) predicated on the insufficiency of our knowledge in predicting events. As in your loose use of “probabilistic” to describe the statement that you will continue to breathe. (Loose because there is no conceivable way that you could gather all the data necessary about your body and environment to be able to calculate a probability.) Scientific statements that are not predictions are not prey in the same way to our inability exactly to foresee the future.
So, when you say that the speed of light in a vacuum is “c”, that will almost always be “reliable”, because it is a definition that has been agreed upon.
I only wrote c because I couldn’t be bothered to look up the exact number. Please read as though it is replaced with the measured speed in km/h to how ever many significant figures you desire, so that it is no longer a tautology about an agreed-upon definition. Now, this statement is not “probabilistic” in that it expresses ignorance or lack of data. The speed of light in a vacuum (we can add other provisos like safely far away from any supermassive gravitational disturbances, etc) is not a future hypothesis about which we are ignorant, for it has been measured many times, and absent any radical Humean scepticism, we can safely assume that it will remain the same, at least on a human timescale (some people think the speed of light was different in the early universe). Indeed, if you wish, I am not shy about calling it a fact.
Luis,
The Washington Post column you link to is refuted here. Most egregiously, Samuelson says that we are “powerless” to do anything about global warming because even following various recommendations, atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations will still increase by a factor of between 6% and 26% by 2050. What he mysteriously fails to point out is that the very study he cites also says that if we do nothing, greenhouse gas concentrations will increase by 138%. In other words, by omission he is distorting the message of the study he is writing about. Nobody claims that we can halt the problem now: the question is whether we do our best to mitigate its harms.
How do you envisage money being spent to combat global warming? If it is funding technological research, is there a sense in which investment in R&D suddenly becomes more worthwhile when you spend larger sums?
It makes a bigger and more worthwhile difference if you can build a hundred wind turbines rather than one.
There are many proposals about how to spend money on the problem. Many economists propose instituting a system of tax credits by which rich countries (who pollute most) would be taxed on their emissions, the money going to poor countries. Thus there would be an economic incentive for rich countries to emit fewer greenhouse gases, and the poor countries could spend the proceeds on food and medicine. Lomborg, by the way, discounts this idea entirely on the grounds that it is not “politically feasible”, which rather contradicts his pose as a disinterested calculator of costs and benefits.
Also, as you say, R&D into alternative technologies such as hydrogen, wind, solar and so on. To develop and institute these technologies on the massive scale required will of course cost a lot more than $50bn. But the harms of increased desertification of arable land, rising sea levels, and perhaps a warmer Siberia but a freezing Europe (if the Gulf Stream is further degraded by melting icecaps) will cost us a lot more in the long run.
And anyway, as you say:
But I don’t understand how spending money on funding research into hydrogen fuels, for instance, will reduce aid to Africa.
Well, quite. This is why Lomborg’s false dichotomy is false. ;)
Yeah, I agree.
“we can safely assume” – I agree the assumption is safe, but it remains an assumption. You may dismiss an acknowledgement of this as “radical Humean scepticism”, but I have no doubt that some very clever people are doing some very hard thinking about exactly this assumption, and someone may utterly shatter that assumption. But for the time being, yeah, it’s pretty “safe”. I certainly pose no danger to it.
But, again, I mostly do not disagree. Let me turn this around: is there a way that scientists can speak to the media, so that they do not undermine the legitimacy of scepticism, uncertainty and probabilistic thinking, but nevertheless convey credibility and conviction? I’m not asking you to become a media advisor to the, ahem, “scientific community”, but to mull over the two different paradigms of resolving uncertainty in the media and science. There is, after all, an ongoing rhetorical war and I am not sure that those I would want see to win are either winning or going to win. As you have discussed, the ID-crew have effectively found a way of inserting a rhetorical crowbar into the necessary fissure of scepticism running through scientific knowledge (“teach the controversy!”); they manage to wind people up into “fact vs theory” pissing matches, etc. So, how will this be managed?
Oh, come on.
“we can safely assume” – I agree the assumption is safe, but it remains an assumption. You may dismiss an acknowledgement of this as “radical Humean scepticism”
You’ve just misread what I wrote. I said “absent any radical Humean scepticism, we can safely assume”. I knew what I was doing when I chose the word “assume”, thanks. I did not say that to acknowledge it’s an assumption, as I did myself by choosing the word “assume”, is radical Humean scepticism. I said that if we were being radically Humean sceptics, the assumption (for such it is) would not be safe at all.
Notwithstanding all this, to say right now that “the speed of light is c” is not a “probabilistic” statement. If you want to concede this point, you can do it with better grace.
On the more interesting question:
is there a way that scientists can speak to the media, so that they do not undermine the legitimacy of scepticism, uncertainty and probabilistic thinking, but nevertheless convey credibility and conviction?
I don’t know. I think there is such a way. I think Richard Feynman used to manage it pretty well, but that was partly because he was blessed with enormous amounts of charisma and verbal skill, which it would be unfair to expect of all scientists. I suppose informed science journalists as intermediaries are also important. And the media ought to have some kind of reliable system of checks and balances so that things like Samuelson’s apparently wilful distortion of a report are swiftly corrected. In this sense I guess the media should be as sceptical of its own work as science is.
Thanks for the ThinkProgress link.
You can buy a lot of R&D with $50bn. A lot of money is being spent on alternative energy R&D as it is, without it costing anybody but private investors (check out news letters like New Energy Finance). If the primary tool of emissions reduction is to be taxation, with the money being spent on aid, then it really is daft to present a trade off between emissions reduction and aid.
Luis,
Note, though, that most scientists do not think that we can just dump some money into R&D on alternative-energy technologies and meanwhile carry on burning fossil fuels as usual. The urgency of the problem, they say, is such that things need to be done now.
An interesting recent book in this regard is Kicking the Carbon Habit, by William Sweet. Sweet argues that we should stop burning coal right now – apart from contributing to global warming, he says that it kills 30,000 people in the US every year through the respiratory harm of its particulate pollution. He also recommends spending money on more wind farms, as Germany is currently doing, and building a new generation of nuclear power stations. This last one is a very divisive issue, but James Lovelock is another who thinks it necessary.
Dear Steve
I totally agree with you that the burning of fossil fuel needs to be curbed considerably as well ongoing deforestation projects. The big question of course is: HOW? The Kyoto Protocol – as I see it – is a total joke albeit a step in the right direction. So is the idea of setting up wind farms. I don’t dispute that they are well intentioned but cannot see this as having a significant impact. As for nuclear power, it seems a potentially far greater risk to humanity and the environment than the current situation of fossil fuel burning.
It’s a very grim situation, and yes it’s totally irrational on the part of the world’s major policy planners. Money is not going to fix it – if so I’d be interested to hear how.
The only solution – as I see it – is a radical restructuring of modern industriasled society. The unfortunate truth is that our entire existence as modern industrialised communities is ENTIRELY built on fossil fuels, which no less grimly in the case of oil and gas will run out at least before the end of the century. All this it seems to me implies a radical grassroots revolution taking place in the rich and cosy industrialised west where the problem largely lies. So what do you do?
Sohail
the idea of setting up wind farms. I don’t dispute that they are well intentioned but cannot see this as having a significant impact.
Existing and planned wind-turbine installations in Europe will by 2010 represent the capacity of 240 coal-fired power stations. Germany is currently in the process of replacing all its nuclear stations with wind farms. Wind energy is not trivial.
Nor, by the way, is solar energy. Sweet points out that the entire current energy needs of the planet could be met by carpeting a small proportion of the surface of the Sahara desert with existing solar-panel technology. Of course, how you then transport that energy around the world is a very difficult technical problem. The question is whether we have the political will to try to solve such problems.
As for nuclear power, it seems a potentially far greater risk to humanity and the environment than the current situation of fossil fuel burning.
As I said, it’s a divisive issue, but people like Sweet and Lovelock appear to consider it by far the lesser of two evils, given their arguments that it is urgent to begin switching from fossil fuels to other available energy sources immediately.
Well, we could just put the radioactive waste on a shuttle and send it off into space.
Note to self: Five Earthlings on a space ship in the year 2109, returning from a mission to Mars; a fiesty woman helms the ship, accompanied by a by-the-book First Lieutenant with a chip on his shoulder, a very rational ship’s medic, and a mechanic with some sort of accent; also on board is a hunky anti-authoritarian, maybe a bounty hunter. Ship is hit with 75 year old blob of nuclear waste that was in orbit. Question: do they become superheroes? Go on a last heroic kamikaze mission, knowing that they will die from radiation poisoning? Or is this a claustrophobic, slow-death movie?
You read it here first.
Steve
Thanks. The point about wind and solar power is NOT that they are trivial as substitutes for energy. That much is not controversial. The point is they are virtually pointless as substitutes for driving the economies (and by extension lifestyles) of the industrialised western world. Fossil fuels are of course intimately integrated into virtually every aspect of modern urban society. Take for example our computers: the electricty that powers them is coal based, the plastic components they are made of are oil derivatives, the transport involved in putting together the different constituent components is powered by oil, the transportation of the manpower for assembling and distributing them is oil driven too and so on and so forth. It’s endless. Consider also that is was not very long ago when most people travelled only a few miles from where they were born until of course oil and the internal combustion engine came on the scene. Any significant disruption in fossil fuels would mean the end of vast urban communities and the livelihoods of millions.
Look, I’m not saying I disagree with the gist of (and serious and genuine concern in) what you’re saying but I can’t see money (one of your original points) making a significant difference. With all due respect, it’s not just political will that matters either; as I said what’s needed is a massive grassroots social movement that radically restructures modern urban societies. That’s an awesome task that demands a serious unprecedented human commitment with no historical parallel. And note also that while all this is going on, it should be no surprise to us that we’re witnessing the first of the last of the oil wars to grab the last remaining oil reserves. With all best will in the world, we couldn’t even get our supposedly democratically accountable governments to stop their invasion of Iraq – one of the key factors in global warming equation. It’s grim and I frankly can’t see any answers.
Best
Sohail
Take for example our computers: the electricty that powers them is coal based
Um, electricity doesn’t care how it’s generated, Sohail. If it was generated from wind turbines your computer would run just as well.
the plastic components they are made of are oil derivatives
Better to make oil into plastic than to burn it: far less CO2 is released into the atmosphere.
the transport involved in putting together the different constituent components is powered by oil, the transportation of the manpower for assembling and distributing them is oil driven too
Of course, the transport could run on hydrogen fuel cells instead.
I agree that converting to all these alternative technologies requires massive political will, but I’m not convinced it would require such radical restructuring of urban societies as you do. Of course, I don’t have all the answers.
You crucially misread me. The point about electricity is not electricity per se but that everything is integrated.
But if you must a lot of plastics end up getting burnt eventually anyway. Yes, you could recycle. And yes, wind power might replace some coal in some power stations. All this incidentally is a fantastic way of freeing up more oil for ever hungrier markets not least of course in China and India. The point is that the alternatives cannot simply be dissected from the broader picture, namely the need for massive restructuring. With all due respect, some of what you say is frankly not much different from your “brain tumour” analogy.
And if you say you don’t have all the answers, it sort of makes you less entitled – as I see it – to take an easy shot at Lomborg. It’s a bit like a TV technician who says I can straighten your antenna for you, but I don’t how to get you a picture – not much help of course in the practical world.
A couple of related questions:
(1) When do you suspect oil production will begin to drop?
(2) When do you suspect oil consumption will drop?
(3) What sort of economic world scenario do you envisage? 1929? Worse?
Sohail
You crucially misread me. The point about electricity is not electricity per se but that everything is integrated.
Uh, people in Denmark and Germany and Britain are running their computers on wind-generated electricity right now. Did they have to dismantle their infrastructure to do so? They did not.
And if you say you don’t have all the answers, it sort of makes you less entitled – as I see it – to take an easy shot at Lomborg. It’s a bit like a TV technician who says I can straighten your antenna for you, but I don’t how to get you a picture – not much help of course in the practical world.
Yeah, whatever. You’re welcome to stop reading. Really.
He studied and taught in the political-science department of Aarhus University. His one academic paper applies game theory to politics
thanks very much for this Steven; Lomborg continually allows people to claim on his behalf that he is a “statistician” and this is most annoying.
Yes it is. As far as I could find out, this derives from the fact that he used to teach some statistics to undergraduates: that’s about the extent of it.