Krugman on the Climate Change Conspiracy
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I don't know if Krugman is right or wrong about climate change but one thing is pretty clear to me: If you're arguing about science using words like treason and betrayal is out of line.
I'd be interested to know if someone who believes that global warming is something that requires our immediate attention can explain why arguing against it so dangerous.
Because the global warming hysteria is an ideology, not Science. You can't argue against über-dogmatic fanatics who know nothing about Science.
If they knew about Science, they would know that "global warming" is a meaningless, stupid name. Understanding the global climate is an infinite-dimensional problem, and one just can't reduce all that complexity to one single bit.
Moreover, "climate change" is also retarded. Call it "global climate crisis" or something.
About the naming though, I wouldn't say that 'climate change' is a retarded way of putting it, because it describes what is happening quite accurately, but I do like your way of putting it. 'Global climate crisis' seems to capture the problem much better.
If the weather is a dynamical system, it is (by definition) always changing. Moreover, "change" only means things are not static. It does not quantify how much things have become different. Better call it a crisis because the measures being proposed to fight the problem suggest that, indeed, this is a crisis.
What exactly is "silly" about what I wrote? Are you going to claim that the laws of fluid dynamics and heat transfer have changed?
“Climate” does not refer to basic laws of physics at all.
“climate: the weather conditions prevailing in an area in general or over a long period”
In other words, climate is just the type of conditions (in terms of temperature, rainfall, winds, storms, etc.) generally observed in an area over a long period.
“Weather” is the same thing, but over a short period (thus it does not surprise me that your language only uses one word for both).
Weather and climate can both change, drastically, without laws of fluid dynamics or heat transfer changing in the slightest.
"in terms of temperature, rainfall, winds, storms"
Temperature and precipitation can be measured. Windspeed can also be measured. One can't really measure a storm, but one can measure how violent the storm is, roughly speaking. If you discretize physical space and assign values of temperature, pressume, etc to each cell in the grid, and you log them over a certain period of time, then you obtain a microscopic description of the "weather".
The laws of fluid dynamics and heat transfer define the dynamics of the system. Knowing the inputs, we obtain a trajectory in a very high-dimensional state-space. This is too much information for humans to digest. Hence, the order of the model is greatly reduced, and instead of microscopic description, we have a macroscopic description which we call the "weather". After all, we need to know if it's gonna rain or how cold it will be, we don't need to know the temperature and pressure at every single point in space, nor do we need to know how fast each droptlet of rain is falling.
I agree with you. In my view, the dynamics are the same, and the "climate change" people talk means that the trajectories in state-space are approaching regions they usually don't go to. But since trajectories are inherently dynamic, I think the word "change" is weak. That is why I proposed the word "crisis".
I didn’t enter the argument of change vs. crisis in my post, though I do think crisis makes more sense.
Seems to me that either the temperature is rising or it is not. Perfectly suitable for one bit of information.
The reasoning for determining the value of said bit is another matter, but I think your argument does not make sense. Unless the climate is stuck in some sort of weird quantum entanglement.
Temperature of what??? Temperature is a function of space. If you fix the spatial coordinates, you can tell if the temperature increased at that point between time t1 and time t2. However, there are an infinite number of points, and thus you need an infinite number of bits. And to make it worse, all these bits only tell you what happened at time t2 relative to time t1.
No need to bring quantum entanglement to the discussion. If temperature is a function of space, it's an infinite-dimensional problem. You can discretize space and transform it into a finite-dimensional problem. Still, there are an enormous number of points at which you need to measure temperature.
Last but not least: the atmosphere is some 80 Km thick. You need measurement at high-altitudes, too. Measurements at the surface are easy to obtain, but they're only part of the picture.
I just assume climate researchers use a reasonable definition. Maybe "moving average of 100 years" or whatever (I don't know).
"However, there are an infinite number of points"
Not sure what you are saying? Seems to me a finite sample should be sufficient to get a statistical significant result. Are you saying "OK, the measurement at point x was 30°C, but how can you be sure that 1m north of it the temperature was not -10°C"? I think that would be a bit silly. Again, the average should be your friend. Maybe at some measuring spots you miss the temperature by 10°C. So what? On average, those errors should cancel out.
"Still, there are an enormous number of points at which you need to measure temperature."
As I said, I am not interested in the way to get there, just in the final information upon which to act or not. And that is one bit.
(Edit: although I also dispute your claim that there is an enormous number of points. To make up an extreme counter example, suppose you measure temperature in your home, and you notice it rising 10°C every year - would you really need other measurements to conclude that something is wrong? Like when it was at 100°C, boiling temperature for water, would you still say "but OK, it is still reasonably chilly at 80km altitude, so nothing to worry about"?).
"Last but not least: the atmosphere is some 80 Km thick. You need measurement at high-altitudes, too."
Again, I assume that climate researchers pick meaningful spots to measure. Maybe they measure at 80km altitude, maybe not. Maybe it is relevant to measure at 80km, maybe not. I don't see a point to argue about that kind of thing on a "popular science" level - that is up to the specialists. I suppose temperatures at 80km could be measured, why not? Maybe it can be done with telescopes or satellites - why do you assume it is not being done?
It just seems like a cop out to say "yeah, but it is so complicated we can never be sure". We are not 100% sure how the human body works, but we can still fix parts of it and detect some things when they are wrong.
Have you ever read about what that definition is on any discussion on global warming? I haven't. So they tell us the temperature is rising, but we don't know what temperature. What a joke...
"Seems to me a finite saple should be sufficient to get a statistical significant result."
"seems to me" is not very scientific, but you're right. Fortunately, physics makes it easy for us. We only need to sample every few hundreds of meters or so.
"Maybe at some measuring spots you miss the temperature by 10°C. So what? On average, those errors should cancel out."
The problem is that if you don't have enough information of the present state, you will not be able to predict the (near) future state reliably. A very coarse discretization is most likely useless for prediction purposes.
"As I said, I am not interested in the way to get there, just in the final information upon which to act or not. And that is one bit."
If you don't understand the process used to obtain the numbers, you don't understand how much the numbers can be trusted. Scientists study things and make predictions. It's not the scientists' role to decide what to do. That is the politicians' role. Funny how things seem to have been turned upside down.
Just because you haven't read it, doesn't mean they don't tell us. I may well have read it at some time, but I don't read such things frequently, so I forgot. I don't actually think you can write a scientific paper without giving a definition of the temperature you are talking about.
"We only need to sample every few hundreds of meters or so."
Why? What makes you think so? And what about your house that should be burning up by now? Is it not burning because the house 100m apart is not burning?
Also, maybe with satellites you can measure a lot of spots in one go - maybe even at 100m distance if that is the only thing that would make you happy.
Have you checked that they don't measure 100m apart? Because I get the impression that you just assume they only do bad science, without having checked that assumption.
"you will not be able to predict the (near) future state reliably."
Again, why not? Doesn't it entirely depend on the system and the circumstances? Like if you boil some water on the oven, and you want to know how fast it heats up, I am pretty sure measuring at one point is sufficient to predict the temperature rise for the whole pot of water (because you know it is a pot of water that is being heated from below with constant energy supply). Obviously climate is more complicated than a pot of water, but you still would have to supply better arguments for why you think current methods are insufficient.
What if you care about the ice in the arctic melting away - do you think it is impossible to measure that? (I don't know if it is possible, but for example it seems plausible that the area covered with ice is measurable from space to a high precision).
"If you don't understand the process used to obtain the numbers, you don't understand how much the numbers can be trusted."
Again, give examples of cases were you think the scientists did not do what was due. Naturally I can not verify their results directly (at least not without a significant investment of time). However, I can have a certain degree of confidence in the system that made them scientists, peer reviews and so on. (Edit: for example if they turn out to be merely popular fiction authors or philosophers, I am less inclined to believe them than if they are actually climate researchers)
Again, what makes you think they are all wrong - can you point out specific examples in major papers that are cited a lot in the debate?
Let's say you are a pilot in an airplane at 30,000 feet and the fuel gage reads 20 minutes from empty. For how long are you willing to debate with your copilot that we need to declare an emergency and land right now? What if the gage is just broken and you think you have 20 minutes of fuel left?
At some point people that feel there is a problem will want to act. And the global worming debate is 20+ years old.
PS: "IPCC First Assessment Report 1990" The panel was established in 1988. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a scientific intergovernmental body[1][2] tasked to evaluate the risk of climate change caused by human activity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_First_Assessment_Report
When bad things happen, people want to know more... And this in turn means more $$$ (or €€€) for the media companies.
The trick is to react soon enough that the change is minor without over reacting and that's hard. I would propose a ~1% carbon fuel tax which funds wind farms which are then sold on the open market. You end up with a huge change at a small cost.
Option 2, create an semi independent government agency like the post office which takes 1 billion and builds wind / solar / hydro power plants. Use the "profit" of electricity sold to build more power plants and let exponential growth take off. This depends on the expected rate of return and could be accelerated with some debt financing.
In 20 years we may find it was pointless but we will have built infrastructure which is useful. Compared to a 2,980 billion dollar annual federal budget you can get a lot done with a change that's hard for most people to notice.
I expect we will still have wind in 20 years and using infrastructure to turn wind into electricity seems obvious. The other real advantages to wind farms is you get energy sooner and it is simpler to scale exponentially. AKA 1billion wind farm = 50 mil profit and next year you have 1.05 billion wind farm which makes a 5.25 million profit so you now have a 1.125 billion wind farm next year... You can do similar things with debt financing, but that's higher risk.
Not to mention a smaller Not In My Back Yard problem. I consider oil mostly a done deal, we are going to burn most of the cheep oil because it's just so useful. But there is far more coal luckily it's far simpler to replace coal power plants than oil in cars / boats. We are also close to the tipping point where the free market is going to switch to wind on it's own, because it's cheaper.
This magnifies the amount of wind farm you can build today. If you had a billion and wanted to donate it to "clean energy" then you could get a loan for 5 billion in wind farms and use your billion to make up the difference. By the time the loan was paid off you would still have some money, but far less than if you had invested it well.
If on the other hand you a billion dollars and built a wind farm without borrowing money then you can keep expanding indefinitely. You would still have less profit but there would be little risk.
PS: With subsidy it is profitable today which is why we are building so many wind farms, but that's just the government handing out money.
If that were actually the situation, you'd land at the airport 10 minutes away. If you don't, I'd wonder about what you're telling me about the gauge.
If the folks who claim to be so concerned and informed about climate change were serious, we'd be breaking ground on a new nuclear power plant every week or so and we'd be completing them in 2 years.
Instead, we're thinking about breaking ground for some several years from now and the way the regs are set up, those won't get approved when they reach the decision point. The planned construction time also exceeds what could easily be achieved by someone who wanted power soon.
The US gets 20% of its electricity from nuclear. France gets over 70%. Moreover, if we had a huge surplus of electricity, we could start using it for more things.
Instead, we're passing out subsidies to the politically connected.
If you want people to think that climate change is a serious problem, you have to act as if it is. The AGW folks aren't and never have.
Sure, if you're just arguing about science. Once words like "hoax" and "conspiracy" are thrown about, however, we're not talking about the science anymore.
Debates just make both sides seem reasonable. Witness how many people in the U.S. take creationism seriously, for instance.
ETA: Robin Hanson once wrote about this effect: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/04/why-refuse-to-debate.h...
For example I felt it was sad when all new books by evolution researchers stared to be 50% arguing against the same old tired creationist arguments. I felt the energy would have been better spent advancing the science.
Virtually complete predictive failure over the better part of the last decade. How can anyone justify acting?
http://www.nimonik.ca/2009/05/global-warming-models-are-inhe...
thanks in advance.
The truth is the United States had been steadily making progress on reducing our impact on the planet all the way through the Clinton administration. It was only when the Global Warming nuts popped up that the Conservative side felt the need to throw on the brakes.
Now we have two irrational extreme's competing against each other.
But if you watched the debate on Friday, you didn’t see
people who’ve thought hard about a crucial issue, and are
trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were
people who show no sign of being interested in the truth.
They don’t like the political and policy implications of
climate change, so they’ve decided not to believe in it —
and they’ll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable,
that feeds their denial.
Has the free-market taken us to multiple wars over the past 20-years with countries that have large oil reserves so oil can keep flowing in our direction? Has the free-market kept interest rates far below reality, allowing us to go on a massive consumption binge?
Does the free-market regulate agriculture, discouraging small farms in favor of massive CAFOs? Does the free-market subsidize huge agri-business to produce more corn than we can possibly use?
It's these unchanging economic and foreign policies that encourage waste, consumption, and addiction to fossil fuels, which, in turn, have a negative effect on our planet.
I heard the hysterical arguments in college back in the early seventies about global cooling. This group is no more legimate, but much savvier politically.
Contrary to popular belief, the ice caps are not shriking all the time. Sure, they were shrinking really fast some years ago, and everyone went hysterical because of the rising sea levels and drowning polar bears. But when the ice caps started growing again, no one said a thing. If that isn't cherry-picking, I don't know what is.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/arctic_thinice.htm...
"Until recently, the majority of Arctic sea ice survived at least one summer and often several. But things have changed dramatically, according to a team of University of Colorado, Boulder, scientists led by Charles Fowler. Thin seasonal ice -- ice that melts and re-freezes every year -- makes up about 70 percent of the Arctic sea ice in wintertime, up from 40 to 50 percent in the 1980s and 1990s. Thicker ice, which survives two or more years, now comprises just 10 percent of wintertime ice cover, down from 30 to 40 percent.
According to researchers from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., the maximum sea ice extent for 2008-09, reached on Feb. 28, was 5.85 million square miles. That is 278,000 square miles less than the average extent for 1979 to 2000."
And yep, parts (but only parts) of the Antarctic ice cap are growing -- but guess why? Warmer air creating more snowfall.
You people are hopeless. Data, facts, evidence -- none of it sways you. It's like some religion.
"None of it sways you" -> please spare me of your attacks. They don't add anything to the discussion and they only weaken your point.
That's the problem, though -- people make these decisions based on emotions, vested interests, or what they wish were so, rather than the real evidence. If global warming/climate change is harmful to capitalist greed (and I don't think all capitalism is greed, or vice versa), then it prima facie must be incorrect, in some folks' view.
Not saying you are guilty of that, but so very many are.
People build computer models to simulate the weather. The physics is not the problem. The initial conditions and the assumptions are the problem. The atmosphere is vast. We can measure temperature and other stuff mostly at the Earth's surface. Some people are now building UAVs to fly around and collect measurements which will be used to increase the accuracy of the climate models. One problem: the climate is a chaotic system, i.e., it's highly sensitive to disturbances on initial conditions. Another problem: the models neglect the biosphere. Most carbon is in the biosphere, not in the atmosphere. Computer model says temperatures are going to increase 9 degrees Celsius. People panic. Wait. Does anyone know how to model the dynamics of the biosphere?! Short answer: no. It's a complicated problem. You can forecast CO2 emissions from industry, but no one has a clue how the biosphere will react to abrupt temperature variations.
One caveat: there are cycles. The Sun has cycles. The Earth also has cycles. The temperature in the middle ages was known to be a few degrees higher. Was it also due to CO2 emissions from the industry? Definitely not.
There was a time when there was no ice on the Arctic. There was also a time when most coastal areas we have today were underwater. There's no reason why that can't happen again, for sure.
An important issue: what does "global warming" even mean? Are the minimum / median / average / maximum temperatures increasing? Or is the variance increasing? Does this happen everywhere. What I read was that the cold, high-latitude regions were getting "warmer" (whatever that means), while the tropical regions were pretty much the same. This is too much complexity to be sold to the masses. The masses want entertainment, not information.
OK, suppose that temperature will increase by 9 degrees or so. Sea levels will rise and threaten us all. The U.S. can try to regulate emissions to counter this, but will the Chinese do the same? This is Game Theory 101. Moreover, what will people in the U.S. and Europe say:
"Sorry you Chinese, Indians and Brazilians. We destroyed the planet, and now we won't allow you to develop because of that. If you want to keep your houses warm in the winter and power your industry, we will accuse you of treason."
Last but not least: is regulation the best solution? What is the problem with global warming exactly? Rising sea levels? Increased CO2 concentration is good for the plants because they grow faster. I say, build a pipeline from the Arctic to the Sahara to pump fresh water into local agriculture. If the Israelis can grow tomatoes in the Negev desert, I don't see why the North Africans can't do the same.
The problem with regulation is that it won't work on a global scale. A politician would rather compromise the planet than tell his own people that they have to starve and freeze to reduce emissions. This is much more than capitalist greed. This is about human rights: people should have the right to consume energy to increase their standard of living.
Science is one thing. Policy is another. Let us keep them separate. Studying the climate should be decoupled from politics as much as possible.
If you're going to address the public, you should be honest. Krugman is an economist. He constantly sells half-baked, hand-waving arguments as absolute truths. And this is not because he's a "liberal". The same happens with all the "conservative" economists who also write dishonest articles.
Economics is hard. Very hard. An "expert" who tells the public he does not know will be frowned upon. But that's the point: experts don't know everything, and should not claim to know more than they do.
Greenspan himself wrote that when he ran the Fed sometimes they were completely "lost" and made decisions based more on gut-feeling than solid economic theory. Greenspan is pretty much retired now, so he can afford to be frank. Krugman still has a career, so he can't afford that.
At Hacker News we hold everyone to a higher standard. We are not trying to influence policy but to seek truth. We do not want the site to degenerate into the NYTimes or Wall St. journal editorial page.
This is the tension in science. You take all of that schooling, and for what? To admit you're as stumped as everybody else?
I mean seriously, when is the last time you saw a science show where they basically said "Beats me"? Instead it's all upbeat and glossed over.
The way we sell science and actual state of science are two completely different things.
I have had the priviledge of working with some truly top-notch scientists. A common trait among them is how honest they were on the limitations of their knowledge. They were not afraid to say they were wrong, or that they didn't know.
This was in their academic environment. I don't know if they would be that honest when addressing the public. The average person would probably not be able to understand how's it possible that an illustrious professor has spent his entire career studying elementary particles and is still baffled by them. That is due to the fact that the average person does not know what deep knowledge is, and does not need to know.
Could warming have caused ice to melt in the northern hemisphere and grow in the Antartic? It's possible, but the explanation starts smelling like a "just so story". The explanation by NASA that the loss of Artic Ice is caused by cyclical changes in global wind patterns seems to better fit the facts. (see http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/quikscat-200... and http://wattsupwiththat.com/2007/10/03/nh-sea-ice-loss-its-th... )
You people are hopeless. Data, facts, evidence -- none of it sways you. It's like some religion.
Please, let's stop with the personal attacks.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/whats-really-up...
"But scientists studying trends at both poles say there is nothing inconsistent with the intensifying greenhouse effect. William Chapman, who maintains the helpful Cryosphere Today Web site at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, sent me an email this morning reminding me of a 2005 study that projects more Antarctic sea ice (by volume) in a warming world."
And that's without even getting into the question of is the climate change anthropogenic or not. Given what we know about CO2, hard to see how it could be otherwise, but not worth arguing over. What will happen, will happen.
That doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong. But it is not evidence, nor is it conclusive. There is simply no reason to believe Powell's explanation over the explanation I cited in my previous comment. The NASA explanation is based on actual observation rather than computer simulations.
The climate is so complex that you can always come up with an after the fact explanation. The only way to judge science is either a) by the predictions it makes or b) following the chain of deductive reasoning. Predictions are not really possible with climate science in the short term because there are too many variables. So that leaves b). I have not studied the science behind sea ice changes closely. But many of the global climate models have been subjected to egregious tuning: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2475
Given what we know about CO2, hard to see how it could be otherwise, but not worth arguing over.
The effect of CO2 on temperature is both a) logarithmic and b) non-cumulative. For models to predict a levels of warming that are actually alarming, the models must include feedback loops. No one knows if these feedback effects are real. They are entirely speculative.