The Deceitful Science

Well, dammit! Guess I’m gonna have to add a SWOTI tag after all. Obviously, I’ve been paying too much attention to bogus pronouncements by economists.

/rant on

Yet more fools stating confidently that climate change is not really a serious concern has me gasping in exasperation. Take, for instance, this astounding paragraph by Egon von Greyerz:

Yes, of course global warming has taken place recently as the effect of climate cycles. But the cycle has just peaked again which means that all the global warming activists will gradually cool down with the falling temperatures in the next few decades. The sun and the planets determine climate cycles and temperatures, like they have for many millions of years, and not human beings. [emphasis added]

So no climate change worries to disturb anyone’s dreams. Sleep soundly. I’m so relieved. All the effort expended over the past decades toward understanding climate change can be waived off with a mere three sentences by a motivated nonexpert. The linked webpage offers no support whatsoever for these bald statements but instead goes on to offer economic prophecy (unironically, of certain doom). For minimal counter-evidence regarding climate change, embedded below is a two-year-old video explaining how some regions are expected to become uninhabitable due to high wet-bulb temperatures.

The article ends with these brief paragraphs:

There is no absolute protection against this scenario [economic collapse] since it will hit all aspects of life and virtually all people. Obviously, people living off the land in remote areas will suffer less whilst people in industrial and urban areas will suffer considerably.

The best financial protection is without hesitation physical gold and some silver. These metals are critical life insurance. But there are clearly many other important areas of protection to plan for. A circle of friends and family is absolutely essential. [emphasis in original]

Ok, so I’m wrong: the guy’s not an economist at all; he’s a salesman. After placating one catastrophe only to trot out another, his scaremongering message is clear: buy gold and silver. Might not be a bad idea, actually, but that won’t protect against TEOTWAWKI. So whose eyes are deceiving them, Egon’s or mine (or yours)? He’s selling precious metals; I’m sharing the truth (best as I can ascertain, anyway).

The other idiotic thing to darker my brow was several actual economists asked about the economic effects of implementing Greta Thunberg’s dream world (sarcasm much?). If her dream world is spelled out somewhere, I haven’t seen it, nor is it provided (link or otherwise) in the article. Seems like the sort of invented argument attached to a trending name for the purpose of clickbait attacking the messenger and thus shooting down her message. However, let me be generous for a moment and suggest that efforts to stop climate change include, at a minimum, getting off fossil fuels, reforming Big Ag, and denying developing nations their quest to join the First-World Age of Abundance. Those are the three subjects discussed in the article. These economists’ conclusion? It will be, um, costly. Well, yeah, true! Very costly indeed. I agree entirely. But what of the cost if those things aren’t done? Isn’t that question implied? Isn’t that what Greta Thunberg has insisted upon? The answer is it will cost far more, though perhaps not in something as cravenly readily quantifiable as profit or loss. Referring again to the embedded video above, it will cost us the very habitability of the planet, and not in just a few restricted regions we can add to existing sacrifice zones. Widespread species dislocation and die-off will include the human species, since we rely on all the others. Some prophesy a human death pulse of monstrous proportion (several billions, up to perhaps 90% of us) or even near-term human extinction. Is that costly enough to think about the problem differently, urgently, as Greta Thunberg does? Might the question be better framed as the cost of not implementing Greta Thunberg’s dream world so that economists are sent off on a different analytical errand?

In the middle of the 19th century, Scottish satirist Thomas Carlyle called economics The Dismal Science, which description stuck. The full context of that coinage may have had more to do with slavery than poor scholarship, so in the context of lying or at least misleading with numbers, I propose instead calling it The Deceitful Science. Among the stupid habits to dispel is the risible notion that, by measuring something as a means of understanding it, we grasp its fullness, and concomitantly, what’s really important. I suggest further that most economists deceive themselves by performing a fundamentally wrong kind of analysis.

The issue of deceit is of some importance beyond getting at the truth of climate change. Everything in the public sphere these days is susceptible to spin, massage, and reframing to such a degree that an epistemological crisis (my apt term) has fundamentally altered sensemaking, with the result that most nonexperts simply don’t know what to believe anymore. Economists are doing no one any favors digressing into areas beyond their Deceitful Science.

/rant off

Fool Rushes In (redux)

Delving slightly deeper after the previous post into someone-is-wrong-on-the-Internet territory (worry not: I won’t track far down this path), I was dispirited after reading some economist dude with the overconfidence hubris to characterize climate change as fraud. At issue is the misframing of proper time periods in graphical data for the purpose of overthrowing government and altering the American way of life. (Um, that’s the motivation? Makes no sense.) Perhaps this fellow’s intrepid foray into the most significant issue of our time (only to dismiss it) is an aftereffect of Freakonomics emboldening economists to offer explanations and opinions on matters well outside their field of expertise. After all, truly accurate, relevant information is only ever all about numbers (read: the Benjamins), shaped and delivered by economists, physical sciences be damned.

The author of the article has nothing original to say. Rather, he repackages information from the first of two embedded videos (or elsewhere?), which examines time frames of several trends purportedly demonstrating global warming (a term most scientists and activists have disused in favor of climate change, partly to distinguish climate from weather). Those trends are heat waves, extent of Arctic ice, incidence of wildfires, atmospheric carbon, sea level, and global average temperature. Presenters of weather/climate information (such as the IPCC) are accused of cherry-picking dates (statistical data arranged graphically) to present a false picture, but then similar data with other dates are used to depict another picture supposedly invalidating the first set of graphs. It’s a case of lying with numbers and then lying some more with other numbers.

Despite the claim that “reports are easily debunked as fraud,” I can’t agree that this example of climate change denial overcomes overwhelming scientific consensus on the subject. It’s not so much that the data are wrong (I acknowledge they can be misleading) but that the interpretation of effects of industrial activity since 1750 (a more reasonable comparative baseline) isn’t so obvious as simply following shortened or lengthened trend lines and demographics up or down. That’s typically zooming in or out to render the picture most amenable to a preferred narrative, precisely what the embedded video does and in turn accuses climate scientists and activists of doing. The comments under the article indicate a chorus of agreement with the premise that climate change is a hoax or fraud. Guess those commentators haven’t caught up yet with rising public sentiment, especially among the young.

Having studied news and evidence of climate change as a layperson for roughly a dozen years now, the conclusions drawn by experts (ignoring economists) convince me that we’re pretty irredeemably screwed. The collapse of industrial civilization and accompanying death pulse are the predicted outcomes but a precise date is impossible to provide because it’s a protracted process. An even worse possibility is near-term human extinction (NTHE), part of the larger sixth mass extinction. Absorbing this information has been a arduous, ongoing, soul-destroying undertaking for me, and evidence keeps being supplemented and revised, usually with ever-worsening prognoses. However, I’m not the right person to argue the evidence. Instead, see this lengthy article (with profuse links) by Dr. Guy McPherson, which is among the best resources outside of the IPCC.

In fairness, except for the dozen years I’ve spent studying the subject, I’m in no better position to offer inexpert opinion than some economist acting the fool. But regular folks are implored to inform and educate themselves on a variety of topics if nothing else than so that they can vote responsibly. My apprehension of reality and human dynamics may be no better than the next, but as history proceeds, attempting to make sense of the deluge of information confronting everyone is something I take seriously. Accordingly, I’m irked when contentious issues are warped and distorted, whether earnestly or malignantly. Maybe economists, like journalists, suffer from a professional deformation that confers supposed explanatory superpowers. However, in the context of our current epistemological crisis, I approach their utterances and certainty with great skepticism.

The Rebellion of Trees

Periodically, I come across preposterously stupid arguments (in person and online) I can’t even begin to dispel. One such argument is that carbon is plant food, so we needn’t worry about greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, a byproduct of industrial activity. Although I’m unconvinced by such arrant capsule arguments, I’m also in a lousy position to contend with them because convincing evidence lies outside my scientific expertise. Moreover, evidence (should I bother to gather it) is too complex and involved to fit within a typical conversation or simple explanation. Plus, evidence relies on scientific literacy and critical reasoning often lacking in the lay public. Scientific principles work better for me rather than, for example, the finely tuned balances Nature is constantly tinkering with — something we humans can hope to discover only partially. Yet we sally forth aggressively and heedlessly to manipulate Nature at our peril, which often results in precisely the sort of unintended consequence scientists in Brazil found when mosquitoes altered genetically (to reduce their numbers as carriers of disease) developed into mosquitoes hardier and more difficult to eradicate than if we had done nothing. The notion that trees respond favorably to increased carbon in the atmosphere has been a thorn in my side for some time. Maybe it’s even partly true; I can’t say. However, the biological and geophysical principle I adhere to is that even small changes in geochemistry (minute according to some scales, e.g., parts per million or per billion) have wildly disproportionate effects. The main effect today is climate changing so fast that many organisms can’t adapt or evolve quickly enough to keep up. Instead, they’re dying en masse and going extinct.

The best analogy is the narrow range of healthy human body temperature centered on 98.6 °F. Vary not far up (fever) or down (hypothermia) and human physiology suffers and become life threatening. Indeed, even in good health, we humans expend no small effort keeping body temperature from extending far into either margin. Earth also regulates itself through a variety of blind mechanisms that are in the process of being wrecked by human activity having risen by now to the level of terraforming, much like a keystone species alters its environment. So as the planet develops the equivalent of a fever, weather systems and climate (not the same things) react, mostly in ways that make life on the surface much harder to sustain and survive. As a result, trees are in the process of dying. Gail Zawacki’s blog At Wit’s End (on my blogroll) explores this topic in excruciating and demoralizing detail. Those who are inclined to deny offhandedly are invited to explore her blog. The taiga (boreal forest) and the Amazonian rainforest are among the most significant ecological formations and carbon sinks on the planet. Yet both are threatened biomes. Deforestation and tree die-off is widespread, of course. For example, since 2010, an estimated 129 million trees in California have died from drought and bark beetle infestation. In Colorado, an estimated more than 800 millions dead trees still standing (called snags) are essentially firestarter. To my way of thinking, the slow, merciless death of trees is no small matter, and affected habitats may eventually be relegated to sacrifice zones like areas associated with mining and oil extraction.

Like the bait “carbon is plant food,” let me suggest that the trees have begun to rebel by falling over at the propitious moment to injure and/or kill hikers and campers. According to this article at Outside Magazine, the woods are not safe. So if mosquitoes, rattlesnakes, mountain lions, or bears don’t getcha first, beware of the trees. Even broken branches and dead tree trunks that haven’t fallen fully to the ground (known as hung snags, widow-makers, and foolkillers) are known to take aim at human interlopers. This is not without precedent. In The Lord of the Rings, remember that the Ents (tree herders) went to war with Isengard, while the Huorns destroyed utterly the Orcs who had laid siege to Helm’s Deep. Tolkien’s tale is but a sliver of a much larger folklore regarding the enchanted forest, where men are lost or absorbed (as with another Tolkien character, Old Man Willow). Veneration of elemental forces of nature (symbols of both life and its inverse death) is part of our shared mythology, though muted in an era of supposed scientific sobriety. M. Night Shyamalan has weak explorations of similar themes in several of his films. Perhaps Tolkien understood at an intuitive level the silent anger and resentment of the trees, though slow to manifest, and their eventual rebellion over mistreatment by men. It’s happening again, right now, all around us. Go ahead: prove me wrong.