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A major new study published in Nature Geoscience reports that future global warming is likely to be significantly less than many climate model projections have suggested. The authors cannot be characterized by opponents as climate change "deniers." Using recent data from the continued slowdown in global temperature increases, the researchers estimated new equilibrium climate sensitivity and transient climate response numbers.
As Phys.org explains:
The sensitivity of our planet to a doubling of the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration can be expressed using two different measures. One measure, the transient climate response, describes the immediate, short-term warming. This figure is the one that really matters to policy makers. The other measure, the equilibrium climate sensitivity, describes the long-term commitment once the climate system has come into balance with the enhanced level of greenhouse gases.
The new Nature Geoscience study found:
The most likely value of equilibrium climate sensitivity based on the energy budget of the most recent decade is 2.0 °C, with a 5–95% confidence interval of 1.2–3.9 °C. ...
The best estimate of TCR based on observations of the most recent decade is 1.3 °C (0.9–2.0 °C).
The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has consistently held to a higher estimate of climate sensitivity of between 2 to 4.5 degrees Celsius with a best estimate of 3 degrees. In other words, the new best estimate reported in Nature Geoscience is a full degree lower than the IPCC's.
The new study is something of a triumph for statistician Nic Lewis (who is a co-author) whose methods to estimate climate sensitivity were used in this new study. In a Journal of Climate study earlier this year Lewis calculated climate sensitivity at between 1 and 3 degrees Celsius. For those interested in delving deeper into the numbers, see Lewis' post at Watts Up With That.
Given this lower estimate, the popular science magazine New Scientist characterizes the new findings as "a second chance to save the climate" by which it means that the most draconian efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels will likely not be necessary to keep the eventual average in increase in global temperature under the 2 degrees Celsius threshold.
With regard to the transient temperature increase, Rational Optimist (and Reason contributor) Matt Ridley, is, well, somewhat more optimistic. He observes:
The most likely estimate is 1.3C. Even if we reach doubled carbon dioxide in just 50 years, we can expect the world to be about two-thirds of a degree warmer than it is now, maybe a bit more if other greenhouse gases increase too. That is to say, up until my teenage children reach retirement age, they will have experienced further warming at about the same rate as I have experienced since I was at school.
At this rate, it will be the last decades of this century before global warming does net harm. As the economist Bjørn Lomborg recently summarised the economic consensus: "Economic models show that the overall impact of a moderate warming (1-2C) will be beneficial [so] global warming is a net benefit now and will likely stay so till about 2070."
The new calculations are signficantly below earlier figures reported by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. As Climatologist James Annan from the JAMSTEC Yokohama Institute for Earth Sciences in Yokohama, Japan notes:
The results are described in rather strange terms, considering what they have actually presented. They argue that the new result for sensitivity "is in agreement with earlier estimates, within the limits of uncertainty". But of course none of the published estimates are inconsistent with each other in the sense of having non-overlapping uncertainty ranges - no-one credible has excluded a value of about 2.5C, that I am aware of. The contrasting claim that the analysis of transient response gives a qualitatively different outcome (being somewhat lower than both the previous IPCC assessment, and the range obtained from GCMs) is just weird, since both their ECS and TCR results are markedly lower than the IPCC and GCM ranges.
This looks like a pretty unreasonable attempt to spin the result as nothing new for sensitivity, when it is clearly something very new indeed from these authors, and implies a marked lowering of the IPCC "likely" range. Although the paper does not explicitly mention it, the "likely" range for equilibrium climate sensitivity using the full 40y of data seems to be about 1.3-3C (reading off the graph by eye, the lower end may be off a bit due to the nonlinear scale). So although the analysis does depend on a few approximations and simplifications, it's hard to see how they could continue to defend the 2-4.5C range.
It will indeed be interesting to see if the IPCC continues "to defend the 2-4.5C range."
]]>A new coronavirus similar to the one that sparked the SARS panic ten years ago is rumbling across the world. As Reuters reports:
A nurse in a hospital that held France's only confirmed case of the SARS-like coronavirus that has killed 18 people has been admitted to hospital in northern France on suspicion on being infected herself, French health officials said on Friday.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) raised the number of cases confirmed worldwide to 33 after Saudi Arabia said that two people who were admitted to hospital there in April had been determined by laboratory analysis to be infected.
There is no evidence so far of sustained human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus. But health experts are concerned about clusters of new possible cases of nCoV, which started in the Gulf and spread to France, Britain and Germany.
Earlier this week, George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen proposed in his New York Times column that governments should provide big grants to innovators to develop medicines and vaccines when a plausible deadly new communicable disease threat emerges. As Cowen writes:
Our current health care policies are not optimal for dealing with pandemics. The central problem is that these policies neglect what economists call "public goods": items and services that benefit many people and can't easily be withheld from those who don't pay for them directly.
Protection against communicable diseases is a core example of a public good, as is basic scientific research, which can yield new ideas that may be spread at very low additional cost. (In contrast, Medicare, which is publicly financed, has some elements of a public good, but any particular expenditure tends to benefit an individual receiving treatment, rather than being spread over a number of beneficiaries.)
One obvious step forward would be to exempt biomedical research from cuts of the current federal budget sequestration. Research and development grants are a way to pay potential innovators up front — an important move, as an innovator can't always charge high-enough prices for the value of its remedies when they're actually needed.
If a pandemic became a major issue in the United States, demand for remedies would surge far beyond the level associated with a typical seasonal flu outbreak, and permitting high prices would be unpopular — and perhaps unfair. The threat of contagion also makes it crucial to spread the net of protection as widely as possible, which again suggests low prices.
Yet it is crucial to have some reward system in place for medical innovators. Well in advance of a pandemic, research needs to be done, and vaccine capacity and drug distribution facilities need to be built up. In the H.I.V./AIDS crisis, for instance, the United States was caught flat-footed — and an appropriate response has taken decades, in part because we were not prepared. Without government financing for such public goods, the capacity wouldn't be there if a new pandemic produced a surge in demand. This would amount to an institutional failure.
The government could also take another, more unusual step: it could promise to pay lucrative prices for the patents on drugs and vaccines that prove useful in dealing with pandemics. The point of buying the patent is to distribute the remedy, if needed, as widely and as cheaply as possible. If the pandemic never occurs, the reward wouldn't have to be paid. But the very promise of such a reward might induce suppliers to take the risk of increasing capacity in advance....
OVER all, the American government seems to be turning its back on its traditional role of producing and investing in national public goods. If there is any consistent tendency in recent government spending, it is that spending on entitlements like Social Security and Medicare — which provide mostly private benefits — is rising and that investment and spending on national public goods is falling.
As a budget category, "government consumption and gross investment" is a proxy for many kinds of public goods spending. As a share of gross domestic product, it has fallen to less than 19 percent, from a peak of 24 percent in the 1980s, with no expected reversal in sight. Yet total government spending is expected to increase because of income transfers and entitlements. Neither political party seems able to halt that logic or even cares to make an issue of it.
Focusing government on the production of public goods may sound like a trivial issue, too obvious to be worth a mention. But, in fact, we have been failing at it, and the consequences could be serious indeed.
The whole Cowen article is well worth your attention.
For more background see my column, "Disease, Public Health and Liberty," in which I point out that the spread of communicable microbes is a case of the tragedy of the commons and conclude:
Until somehow we can all be held responsible for our own microbes, managing the medical commons by sometimes coercive means will be necessary.
That means quarantine or spending, as Cowen suggests, taxpayer dollars on public goods.
]]>Last week, Europe's carbon trading scheme experienced another of its periodic collapses, with the price of emissions permits falling to around 3 Euros per ton. The Washington Post has a good editorial about the manifold failures of Europe's carbon market, not least of which is that it has had essentially no effect on actually reducing the continent's greenhouse gas emissions. From the Post's "Europe is becoming a green-energy basket case," editorial:
FOR YEARS, European leaders have flaunted their unwavering commitment to fighting climate change — and chastised the United States for lagging behind. But last week brought yet more confirmation that the continent has become a green-energy basket case. Instead of a model for the world to emulate, Europe has become a model of what not to do.
...European governments have proved themselves to be incompetent central planners, counter-productive and wary of thinking pragmatically.
Germany is irrationally shutting its nuclear power plants — which produce lots of steady, reliable electricity and no carbon dioxide emissions — and promising that renewables will somehow pick up the slack. Perversely, that approach has led power companies to ramp up coal burning, the dirtiest fossil fuel, in a country that has also lavished its public money on the solar industry. Spain, too, has over-invested in expensive renewables. To its credit, France hasn't decided to shutter its nuclear plants, but it is one of many countries that refuse to open up natural gas reserves, a resource that could help wean the continent off coal.
Britain is comparatively better, developing its own carbon-pricing program and permitting gas development. But that hasn't kept Europe's carbon emissions from notching up in the last few years — even as those of the United States have decreased.
The Post concludes that for those concerned by the possibility of future catastrophic man-made global warming should basically endorse a carbon tax that puts...
a price on carbon emissions that is simple, predictable, aggressive and comprehensive, and then getting out of the way.
It is true that fully rebated carbon tax would be much preferable to the Waxman-Markey carbon trading scheme that failed in Congress back in 2009. And getting the government out of the way is critical - especially rolling back interventions like the automobile energy efficiency mandates, state mandates requiring that a percentage of electricity be produced using wind and solar power, bioethanol fuel mandates, building, appliance and building energy efficiency mandates, and so forth.
In any case, Happy Earth Day y'all.
]]>British researcher Robert Edwards and his collaborator Patrick Steptoe developed in vitro fertilization which brought the first "test-tube baby," Louise Joy Brown, into the world back in 1978. Since then some 5 milion babies have been born by means of the IVF techniques he pioneered. As I explained in my column, "From Yuck to Yippee" on the occasion of Edwards being finally awarded the Nobel Prize in 2010:
The public (and makers of public policy) initially reacted to Edwards' research with moral horror. However, once he and Steptoe had succeeded in producing a healthy baby girl, revulsion swiftly turned into wide approval and ethical acceptance.
In 2001, when Roberts was given the prestigious Lasker Award for medical research, biochemist Joseph Goldstein quipped, "We know that IVF was a great leap because Edwards and Steptoe were immediately attacked by an unlikely trinity—the press, the pope, and prominent Nobel laureates." Edwards' scientific career traces out the ethical arc that characterizes reaction to much technological progress during the last century—initial fear and loathing followed by a warm embrace. Yuck followed quickly by yippee.
Edwards was a warm, wonderful and witty man. I had the privilege of spending time with him at a conference put on by one America's leading IVF clinics, Genetics and IVF Institute in Fairfax, Va. When I introduced Edwards to my wife, she quipped, "I hear that you're the wizard." Edwards charmed back, "Well, I hope that I am a good wizard." As indeed he was.
Ms. Brown, the first beneficiary of Edwards' research, generously observed to the BBC:
"His work, along with Patrick Steptoe, has brought happiness and joy to millions of people all over the world by enabling them to have children.
"I am glad that he lived long enough to be recognised with a Nobel prize for his work, and his legacy will live on with all the IVF work being carried out throughout the world."
Let us mourn the death of a great and compassionate man.
]]>"People in this world today crave something real, and our society is lacking that and they could come to Yellowstone and see real nature unfolding in front of their eyes with this very unique personality of a wolf and they loved her. They thought it was great," said biologist Douglas Smith in December on a NPR program. Smith was mourning the death of the famous female alpha wolf 832F of the Lamar Canyon pack that had been legally killed by a hunter outside of the park. I, too, was thrilled when I got to watch members of that particular wolf pack wandering the landscape of Lamar Valley.
Smith's claim that people "crave something real" gets at the heart of PERC's recent Lone Mountain Forum, "Reconciling Economics and Ecology." Smith is asserting that wolves wandering the landscape of Yellowstone Park are more real than… what exactly? When it comes to nature and landscapes, what is real and what is fake? And what is the "real nature" that Smith believes people are craving?
Nature as a Social Construct
The Oxford Dictionary defines nature as "the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations." In his Metaphysics, ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle observed, "Of things that come to be, some come to be by nature, some by art." Regarding those objects produced by "art," which Aristotle called "makings," he asserted, "All makings proceed either from art or from a faculty or from thought." In contrast, according to Aristotle, natural entities have internal spontaneous sources of movement, whereas artificial objects are created by activity outside themselves.
Another oft-heard word in connection with nature and landscapes is pristine, which connotes an Edenic state of being "not spoiled, corrupted, or polluted." The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as "belonging to the earliest period or state." The idea is that an earlier state of nature, before humanity came along and ruined it, was somehow superior, and perhaps, to use Smith's concept, even more "real."
In her book, Rambunctious Garden, conference participant Emma Marris explains, "For many conservationists, restoration to a pre-human or a pre-European baseline is seen as healing a wounded or sick nature. For others, it is an ethical duty. We broke it; therefore we must fix it. Baselines thus typically don't act as a scientific before to compare with an after. They become the good, the goal, the one correct state."
Marris opened her session, "Can Ecology Guide Policy?," by observing that the science of ecology is telling us that ecosystems are dynamic, not stable. Thanks to climate change (glacial advances and melting) and anthropogenic alterations there are no ecosystems that have the same set of players they had even 12,000 years ago.
Nature Unbalanced
The dynamism of ecosystems has not always been recognized by ecologists. However, science has now resolved the great early 20th century debate between "balance of nature" ecologist Frederic Clements and ecosystem dynamist Henry Gleason in favor of Gleason. Clements believed that ecosystems developed through a deterministic and orderly sequence of serial stages until they reached a stable climax that, once achieved, was perfectly balanced unless disturbed. For Clements, each participant in the climax ecosystem fitted tightly into niches as a result of coevolving together.
Gleason countered that ecosystems were assembled by chance depending on what species got there first and were successful in competing with other species as they arrived. For most of the 20th century, most ecologists adopted Clements's balance of nature views. At the conference, biologist Daniel Botkin noted in passing that most ecologists still instinctively believe in the balance of nature. Scientific evidence, however, shows that Gleason was far more right than Clements—ecosystems are largely assembled by chance. For example, northern temperate forests are composed of an assemblage of species that mixed together as they raced northward out of various refugia as the glaciers retreated.
Instead of trying to force landscapes and ecosystems back toward earlier and notionally more Edenic states, Marris proposed that the right question is "What do we want for the future?" She suggested that since future generations will be richer than ours they might be able to afford and want more natural space. In addition, when thinking about modifying a piece of land, Marris suggested that a person should ask herself, what do you want this piece of land to be in 20 years, 200 years? At the conference table, a lot of the conversation about who gets to decide about the futures of landscapes turned on the pronouns, "we" and "you" in Marris's two questions.
Who Decides?
Just who "we" is can be problematic. Marris prefers what she believes to be a more democratic process in which stakeholders get to decide how landscapes should be managed and used. Thomas Bray, a former PERC board member, suggested that people who prefer an ecosystem to remain relatively undisturbed could buy a conservation easement. Marris rejected this proposal, saying, "we're broke."
As a counterpoint to Marris's implication that stakeholder democracy is a better and fairer way to decide the future of landscapes, George Mason University Law professor Henry Butler asserted that, in fact, the "we" more often than not turns out to be wealthy environmentalists who prefer to federalize environmental decisions because they don't trust local people. Given their greater access to distant bureaucratic decision-makers, environmentalists often succeed in imposing the costs of pursuing their aesthetic landscape preferences on poor people.
PERC's Terry Anderson neatly summarized the central dilemma of the conference when he asked, "Do humans impose costs on nature or just on other humans? Can we think of nature in any other way than imposing costs on other people?" For example, the return of wolves certainly imposed costs on local ranchers and hunters in the form of predated livestock and game animals like elk.
Since there is no goal or end state toward which any particular ecosystem is heading, who is to say that landscapes and ecosystems modified by human activities are somehow inferior, sick even, and in need of healing? In his 2001 BioScience article, "Values, Policy, and Ecosystem Health," Robert Lackey, a fisheries biologist at Oregon State University, pointed out that "ecosystems have no preferences about their states." How do we know whether or not an acre of land would "prefer" to be a swamp or a cornfield? As Lackey notes, either of them could be considered "healthy" depending on what human preferences are being implemented. "To a conservationist interested mainly in biodiversity, we have degraded nature, but to an agronomist, we have altered wild land to make it better serve humans," noted the Nature Conservancy's Peter Kareiva and his colleagues in their 2007 Science article, "Domesticated Nature: Shaping Landscapes and Ecosystems for Human Welfare."
Who Manages?
PERC fellow Daniel Benjamin made the salient point that for all landscapes and ecosystems "management is not the issue. The issue is who will do the management? Everything is managed." The fact of the matter is that in an Aristotelian sense nature moves less and less spontaneously. Instead, landscapes and ecosystems are shaped by human preferences and efforts and increasingly take on the character of Aristotle's "makings."
The Yellowstone wolves are a case in point. Wolves in the park were managed into local extinction by bureaucratic fiat (stand-ins for the omnipotent "we") in 1926 when park rangers deliberately killed the last two known wolf pups. Wolves were managed back into existence in the park when "we" decided they should be deliberately reintroduced in 1995. We may be saddened to hear of the death of wolf 832F, but her presence on the landscape was the product of human preferences, not a consequence of unprompted nature. And so was her removal from it.
Even if one grants the doubtful premise that humanity was sometime in the past separate from nature, the reality is that we no longer are. All landscapes and ecosystems have been shaped in accordance with human preferences. Scientific insights derived from ecology will certainly help us better manage ecosystems. But the central question remains: What institutions are best for balancing our conflicting desires and goals when it comes to the various realities we each may crave? However ecosystems will be managed, Yellowstone and all other landscapes are and will increasingly be artificial constructions created by human minds. That is as real as it gets.
Readers can go to PERC Reports here to read about other aspects of the Reconciling Economics and Ecology Conference including articles by Rational Optimist author Matt Ridley and biologist Daniel Botkin.
Disclosure: I want to thank PERC for inviting me to participate in the Reconciling Economics and Ecology conference and for paying my travel expenses.
]]>In 1948 Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, wrote an urgent letter to Walter Reuther, the president of the Union of Automobile Workers. Wiener warned Reuther that technologies that combined computing machines with production machinery would soon yield an "apparatus [that] is extremely flexible, and susceptible to mass production, and will undoubtedly lead to the factory without employees; as for example, the automatic automobile assembly line." Wiener ominously concluded, "In the hands of the present industrial set-up, the unemployment produced by such plants can only be disastrous."
The mass unemployment that Wiener predicted did not occur. As technology advanced, the number of employed workers in the United States increased from 59 million in 1950 to a peak of 146 million in 2007, and GDP grew from $2 trillion to $13.6 trillion (in 2005 dollars) between 1950 and 2012.
Now, two centuries after Luddites smashed then-newfangled weaving frames in northern England, predictions of permanent technological unemployment are being revived. In a December working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, called "Smart Machines and Long-Term Misery," the Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs and the Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff pose the question, "What if machines are getting so smart, thanks to their microprocessor brains, that they no longer need unskilled labor to operate?" After all, they point out, "Smart machines now collect our highway tolls, check us out at stores, take our blood pressure, massage our backs, give us directions, answer our phones, print our documents, transmit our messages, rock our babies, read our books, turn on our lights, shine our shoes, guard our homes, fly our planes, write our wills, teach our children, kill our enemies, and the list goes on."
Sachs and Kotlikoff are not alone in worrying how technological progress will affect employment. Last year, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT's Center for Digital Business published a small book, Race Against the Machine, that looks at trends in U.S. employment and wages. It concludes that the pace of progress "has sped up so much that it's left a lot of people behind. Many workers, in short, are losing the race against the machine." And in a 2011 article for the McKinsey Quarterly, the Santa Fe Institute economist Brian Arthur describes automation as "a second economy that's vast, automatic, and invisible." In Arthur's view, "The primary cause of all of the downsizing we've had since the mid-1990s is that a lot of human jobs are disappearing into the second economy. Not to reappear."
As evidence that American workers are losing to the machines, Brynjolfsson and McAfee point to falling real wages for unskilled workers in the United States. The Employment Policy Institute's 12th State of Working America report reveals that in constant 2011 dollars, the hourly wage for men with less than a high school education fell from $17.50 per hour in 1973 to $12.70 in 2011; wages for men with a high school diploma fell from $20.70 to $17.50 per hour; and even hourly pay for those with some college dropped from $20.20 to $19.50. In the same period, real wages for college-educated men rose from $28.50 to $31.80. Men with graduate degrees saw a gain from $31.70 to $41.30. In addition, Americans are leaving the labor force. Adult workforce participation peaked at 67.3 percent in 2000 and has now fallen to 63.6 percent. This suggests that had the labor force participation rate remained the same as it was in 2000 that the current unemployment rate would be around 13 percent instead of 7.9 percent.
Other researchers are less worried, pointing out that many of the alleged labor force dropouts are actually taking time out to upgrade their skills in school. And when you're comparing how workers fared in 1973 and 2011, you should bear in mind that the percentage of male workers without a high school degree dropped from 30 to 10 percent in the same period, while those with four years or more of college rose from 16 percent to 31 percent.
According to a recent study by the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank, labor's share of our gross national income has fallen from 65 percent in the 1980s to 58 percent now, with the result that a larger percentage of national income is going to the owners of capital, e.g., the owners of machines. The increasing rewards to capital particularly bother Sachs and Kotlikoff. "Machines, after all, are a form of capital, and the higher income they earn based on better machine brains may show up as a return to capital, not labor income," they worry. Sachs and Kotlikoff devise an admittedly simple economic model in which the current generation of skilled owners of smart machines reaps most of the benefits of increased productivity and economic growth. This competition with the smart machines depresses the wages of young unskilled workers that, in turn, limits their ability to save and invest in skill acquisition and smart machines. Thus arises a vicious circle in which each subsequent generation of young unskilled workers faces an economy in which ever less human and physical capital is available to them, which further hammers down their wages and so forth.
If it really is different this time, what should be done? To prevent "immiserizing" young unskilled workers, Sachs and Kotlikoff argue that the government should tax away some of the "windfall" that the owners of capital gain. The government would transfer some of the taxes to the younger generation, presumably so that they could invest in skills acquisition and smart machines. In addition, the government would itself invest a portion of the taxes in smart machines and then transfer the income from the government machines to the younger generations. "With the right choice of tax-and-transfer policies," declare Sachs and Kotlikoff, "all generations can benefit from the advance of technology, while under laissez faire, only today's older generation benefits, and at the expense of all other generations." That's the theory, anyway.
Brynjolfsson and McAfee make more concrete recommendations. First, they suggest more investment in education. That is a bit puzzling, since earlier in their book they note that the education sector "lags as an adopter of information technologies." Even more oddly they don't wonder why that might be. (Two words: government monopoly.) They do, however, recognize that the rise of online schooling could have a big beneficial impact on upgrading labor force skills. They also advocate reforms such as aggressively lowering the barriers to business creation, resisting efforts to regulate hiring and firing, decreasing payroll taxes, decoupling benefits from jobs, not rushing to regulate new network businesses, streamlining the patent system, and shortening copyright terms. Such sensible reforms should be adopted whether or not technological unemployment is a problem.
Brian Arthur looks at the longer-term implications of the second economy. Smart machines will boost economic and prosperity indefinitely, but such an economy may not provide jobs. Until now, compensation for labor is how people gained access to the growing prosperity that increasing productivity made possible. "The second economy will produce wealth no matter what we do; distributing that wealth has become the main problem," argues Arthur. Perhaps we will work less. After all, in 1900 Americans worked an average of 2,300 hours per year; now it's 1,800.
Or, as has happened so far, entirely new economic sectors could come into existence, providing work for future generations. In 1985, there were just 340,000 mobile phone subscribers in the United States; today there are more than 321 million. More broadly, increasing productivity lowers the prices of goods and services, leaving consumers more disposable income that they can instead spend on other goods and services. In 1950, American families spent 18 percent of their food budgets dining out. Today they spend 40 percent. In 1972, the U.S. had one restaurant for every 430 Americans. It's 1 for every 320 today.
Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that instead of racing against the machines, we should race with them. Of course, as rising productivity shows, that's exactly what we have been doing. In the industrial era, machines largely complemented and substituted for human brawn; now they are complementing and substituting for human brains. To better race with increasingly smart machines, we will become more intimate with them by incorporating them into our bodies and brains.
Already polls suggest that a majority of us suffer from nomophobia, fear of being without our mobile phones. Babak Parviz, head of the Google Glass project, suggests in Wired that digital displays will some day be incorporated in contact lenses. Such lenses would provide the wearer access to augmented reality in which information is overlaid on whatever she is looking at while also eliminating the need for displays on phones, computers, and televisions. Even stuttering first steps toward brain/computer interfaces are being taken today.
Our ever more productive machines will continue to reduce scarcities, thus lowering the relative prices of goods and services. If governments take the good advice offered by Brynjolfsson and McAfee, we can have a future in which tens of millions of micro-entrepreneurs provide ever more specialized goods and services to ever more discerning consumers. The resulting prosperity could well free people to employ themselves in tackling scarcities in other facets of life, such as liberty, love, and time. I wouldn't want to break the machines that would make that possible.
]]>How much the globe will warm depends crucially on how sensitive the climate is to additional atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, chiefly carbon dioxide emitted from burning fossil fuels. As I explained elsewhere:
The term climate sensitivity conventionally refers to how much warming can be expected from a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere...
With regard to climate sensitivity, in 2007 the Fourth Assessment Report of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated that "climate sensitivity is likely to be in the range of 2 to 4.5°C with a best estimate of about 3°C, and is very unlikely to be less than 1.5°C. Values substantially higher than 4.5°C cannot be excluded, but agreement of models with observations is not as good for those values." In IPCC parlance, likely means that there is a 66 percent probability that climate sensitivity falls between 2 and 4.5°C (3.6 to 8.1°F), with 3°C (5.4°F) as the best estimate.
Some researchers suggest that temperatures could in fact rise well beyond the IPCC's best estimates by more than 6 degrees Celsius (13 degrees Fahrenheit).
Over at the New York Times' excellent DotEarth blog, science reporter Andrew Revkin rounds up a bunch of recent studies that suggest that climate sensitivity is somewhat less than the IPCC's old estimate. In his post, "A Closer Look at Moderating Views on Climate Sensitivity," Revkin reports that for this ...
...one critically important metric — how hot the planet will get from a doubling of the pre-industrial concentration of greenhouse gases, a k a "climate sensitivity" — some climate researchers with substantial publication records are shifting toward the lower end of the warming spectrum....
But while plenty of other climate scientists hold firm to the idea that the full range of possible outcomes, including a disruptively dangerous warming of more than 4.5 degrees C. (8 degrees F.), remain in play, it's getting harder to see why the high-end projections are given much weight.
This is also not a "single-study syndrome" situation, where one outlier research paper is used to cast doubt on a bigger body of work — as Skeptical Science asserted over the weekend. That post focused on the as-yet-unpublished paper finding lower sensitivity that was inadvisedly promoted recently by the Research Council of Norway.
In fact, there is an accumulating body of reviewed, published research shaving away the high end of the range of possible warming estimates from doubled carbon dioxide levels. Chief among climate scientists critical of the high-sensitivity holdouts is James Annan, an experienced climate modeler based in Japan who contributed to the 2007 science report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Apparently, the best estimate of climate sensitivity is converging on a value a bit less than 2 degrees Celsius.
Revkin makes it clear that he nevertheless believes that even if truly catastrophic future warming can be ruled out that humanity should still make the transition to a low-carbon and no-carbon energy future to mitigate warming consequences like sea level rise, shifting weather patterns, and ocean acidification. He ends by observing:
I can understand why some climate campaigners, writers and scientists don't want to focus on any science hinting that there might be a bit more time to make this profound energy transition. (There's also reluctance, I'm sure, because the recent work is trending toward the published low sensitivity findings from a decade ago from climate scientists best known for their relationships with libertarian groups.)
Nonetheless, the science is what the science is.
Yes, it is.
For more background see my column, "The Sky is Falling Less?" and my post, "Man-Made Warming Likely Benign, Reports WSJ Columnist Matt Ridley."
Update: Revkin asks me to alert H&R readers to go click over to his post for an addendum response from the RealClimate folks.
]]>A new study in Science finds that global extinction rates of species has likely been exaggerated. As LiveScience reports:
Concerns that many animals are becoming extinct, before scientists even have time to identify them, are greatly overstated, according Griffith University researcher, Professor Nigel Stork. Professor Stork has taken part in an international study, the findings of which have been detailed in "Can we name Earth's species before they go extinct?" published in the journal Science.
Deputy Head of the Griffith School of Environment, Professor Stork said a number of misconceptions have fueled these fears, and there is no evidence that extinction rates are as high as some have feared.
"Surprisingly, few species have gone extinct, to our knowledge. Of course, there will have been some species which have disappeared without being recorded, but not many we think," Professor Stork said.
Professor Stork said part of the problem is that there is an inflated sense of just how many animals exist and therefore how big the task to record them.
"Modern estimates of the number of eukaryotic species have ranged up to 100 million, but we have estimated that there are around 5 million species on the planet (plus or minus 3 million)."
Good news indeed. Some years ago I testified at an oversight hearing before the House Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources. The topic of the hearing was on the impact of science on public policy. I focused on various failed apocalyptic environmentalist predictions, one of which was the allegedly imminent extinction of a huge percentage of the Earth's species. Specifically I reviewed a number of earlier such predictions:
Let me close with a brief tour of past predictions about species extinctions. Again the predictions by concerned scientists were way off the mark. In 1970, Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, predicted that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct. That is 75 and 80 percent of all species of living animals would be extinct by 1995. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich and his biologist wife, Anne Ehrlich, predicted that "since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it." It's now 29 years later and nowhere near 90 percent of the rainforests have been cut.
In 1979, Oxford University biologist Norman Myers suggested in his book The Sinking Ark that 40,000 species per year were going extinct and that 1 million species would be gone by the year 2000. Myers suggested that the world could "lose one-quarter of all species by the year 2000." At a 1979 symposium at Brigham Young University, Thomas Lovejoy, who is now the president of The H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment announced that he had made "an estimate of extinctions that will take place between now and the end of the century. Attempting to be conservative wherever possible, I still came up with a reduction of global diversity between one-seventh and one-fifth." Lovejoy drew up the first projections of global extinction rates for the Global 2000 Report to the President in 1980. If Lovejoy had been right, between 15 and 20 percent of all species alive in 1980 would be extinct right now. No one believes that extinctions of this magnitude have occurred over the last three decades.
What did happen?
Most species that were alive in 1970 are still around today. "Documented animal extinctions peaked in the 1930s, and the number of extinctions has been declining since then," according to Stephen Edwards, an ecologist with the World Conservation Union, a leading international conservation organization whose members are non-governmental organizations, international agencies, and national conservation agencies. Edwards notes that a 1994 World Conservation Union report found known extinctions since 1600 encompassed 258 animal species, 368 insect species, and 384 vascular plants. Most of these species were "island endemics" like the Dodo. They are particularly vulnerable to habitat disruption, hunting, and competition from invading species. Since the establishment of an endangered species list only seven species have been declared extinct in the United States. Four are freshwater fish: the Tecopa pupfish (1982), the Amistad gambusia (1987), the Cisco longjaw (1983), the blue pike (1983); a freshwater clam, the Sampson's pearlymussel (1984), and two small birds, the dusky seaside sparrow (1990) and the Santa Barbara song sparrow (1983).
Let me say clearly from a personal perspective that species extinction is undesirable and should be avoided when reasonably possible. Extinction really is forever. But to put it in perspective, Science magazine just published an article called "Prospects for Biodiversity" by Martin Jenkins, who works for the United Nations Environment Programme-World Conservation Monitoring Center that bears on this topic. Jenkins points out that even if the dire projections of extinction rates being made by conservation advocates are correct they "will not, in themselves, threaten the survival of humans as a species." The Science article notes, "In truth, ecologists and conservationists have struggled to demonstrate the increased material benefits to humans of 'intact' wild systems over largely anthropogenic ones [like farms]....Where increased benefits of natural systems have been shown, they are usually marginal and local."
I am very happy to report that there is now even more data suggesting that the extinction apocalypse has been greatly exaggerated.
]]>Last week, the U.S. National Climate Data Center declared that 2012 was the warmest year on record for the lower 48 states by a healthy margin. In fact, 2012 was more than 3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 20th century average and 1 degree warmer than the previous record year of 1998. In addition, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration flatly declared, in the draft version of its National Climate Assessment report, "Climate change is already affecting the American people" and it is "primarily driven by human activity."
The balance of the scientific evidence currently bears this out. So if it's true that man-made global warming will cause significant problems for humanity, what should be done about it?
Back in 1992, the Rio Earth Summit launched an international negotiation process under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) with the aim of preventing "dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system." In 1998, that process produced the Kyoto Protocol under which developed nations committed to cutting their greenhouse gas emissions (chiefly carbon dioxide) by an average of 5 percent below the levels they emitted in 1990. The goal was to ration carbon dioxide emissions through an international cap-and-trade carbon market.
The United States subsequently refused to join the Kyoto Protocol and only the European Union set up a carbon-trading market. As the recent U.N. climate change conference in Doha made clear, the Kyoto Protocol has failed. The nations of the world are now supposed to reach some kind of binding agreement on limiting greenhouse gas emissions by 2015 that would go into effect by 2020. Since Kyoto Protocol-style cap-and-trade schemes have failed, what other policies might gain international acceptance? One of the chief contenders is a system of carbon taxes.
Before weighing the merits of the carbon tax idea, it's worth considering whether limits on greenhouse gases (chiefly carbon dioxide) may be justified in the first place. In a persuasive 2009 article, "Taking Property Rights Seriously: The Case of Climate Change," Case Western Reserve University law professor Jonathan Adler argues that carbon dioxide emissions may be likened to common law nuisances. Under common law, property owners are not permitted to use their property in ways that damage their neighbors' property, e.g., you may not build a pond that floods your neighbor's field. In Adler's view, the people who benefit from producing, selling, and buying products and services that emit carbon dioxide should similarly be held liable for the damages caused to their neighbors as a consequence of emissions-induced temperature increases. Such damages might include flooding from rising sea levels and more intense rain events or crop losses due to changes in rain and temperature regimes.
In other words, carbon dioxide emissions generated in the production of certain goods and services likely impose costs on people, but those costs are not borne by the producers and consumers of those goods and services and are thus not reflected in their prices. Such costs are often called externalities because they are outside the market processes that would otherwise oblige producers and consumers to pay for them. Ideally, people could seek restitution in court for damages caused by emissions and the damages paid would be reflected in the price consumers are charged.
The trick is identifying those who are actually causing climate damage and those who are being harmed by it. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase argued in his seminal 1960 article, "The Problem of Social Cost,"[PDF] assigning property rights solves this sort of puzzle by enabling people to settle the issue of liability and payment for damages. Notionally, in the case of global warming, people would be assigned property rights to the atmosphere, leaving would-be polluters to negotiate payments with these owners for the right to emit carbon dioxide. But as Coase acknowledged, sometimes the transactions costs—meaning the costs of identifying who's harmed, the amount of the damages, and the costs of adjudication—would simply to be too great to be practical.
In the eyes of many people, it appears quite impractical to assign property rights to the global atmosphere, even though externalities are clearly being imposed upon third parties. In such cases, the conventional argument holds that government intervention is necessary to force market participants to take account of the damages—the externalities—that they impose on third parties. After the failure of the Kyoto Protocol, one such intervention getting the attention of both the public and policymakers is a tax on carbon dioxide emissions.
In his 1988 introduction to The Firm, the Market, and the Law, however, Coase countered this line of thinking. "The ubiquitous nature of 'externalities' suggests to me that there is a prima facie case against intervention," he wrote, "and the studies on the effects of regulation which have been made in recent years in the United States, ranging from agriculture to zoning, which indicate that regulation has commonly made matters worse, lend support to this view." So the question is: Would a carbon tax make matters worse?
Let's take a look. Most economists prefer a revenue-neutral carbon tax that would be imposed at the mine-head for coal, the wellhead for natural gas, and at the refinery-gate for petroleum products. Revenue neutral means the tax would not increase government revenues, but would replace other taxes. One often-heard proposal is a dollar-for-dollar reduction in taxes on labor (the payroll tax) and on capital (the corporate income tax). One significant upside is that reducing taxes on labor and capital boosts economic growth by encouraging people to work harder and invest more. Another plus is that carbon taxes would ideally displace top-down command-and-control regulations such as the Environmental Protection Agency's new rules on electric power plant emissions and subsidies to wind, solar, and bioethanol energy production.
One big distributional concern, however, is that a carbon tax falls more heavily on the poor since they spend a higher proportion of their incomes on energy-intensive goods and services than do the better off. One way to address the regressive distributional consequences is a tax-and-dividend proposal in which every American receives an equal share of the carbon taxes collected that is deposited each month in their bank accounts. While this idea addresses the concern about the regressive nature of carbon taxes, it lessens the incentives that offset taxes would provide for increased work and investment.
In terms of mitigating future climate change, a revenue neutral carbon tax would encourage producers and consumers to economize on energy produced by burning coal, natural gas, and oil that produce climate-damaging carbon dioxide emissions. Boosting the price of fossil fuels aims to enable actors in markets, not politicians and bureaucrats, to pick the least costly ways to cut emissions. Taxing carbon is also supposed to call forth innovation that would eventually create low-cost no-carbon sources of energy.
This is precisely what the European cap-and-trade carbon market was supposed to achieve. However, a 2011 report by the Swiss bank UBS found that the European Trading Scheme had cost European consumers $277 billion for "almost zero impact." This waste of money occurred because European countries issued far too many carbon dioxide emissions permits so that their prices were too low to encourage investment in energy innovation. In order to avoid the European mess, the folks over at Carbon Tax Center argue that a much higher carbon tax is needed. As an example, they point to a 2009 bill sponsored by Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.) which would impose an initial carbon tax of $15 per ton and then increase it every year by $10 t0 $15 per ton for the next 10 years. A carbon price of $120 per ton would add about $1 to the price of a gallon of gasoline and 5 cents per kilowatt-hour to the retail price of electricity.
It is likely that such a high tax would result in significant carbon dioxide emissions reductions. But what might a U.S. carbon tax by itself achieve with regard to altering the course of future man-made climate change? Not all that much, argues Chip Knappenberger, the assistant director of the Center for the Study of Science at the libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute. Knappenberger points out that the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects an increase in global average temperature of about 3 degrees Celsius by the end of this century. Assuming the projected trajectory of overall global emissions by all countries, if the U.S. were somehow to completely eliminate all of its greenhouse gas emissions now that would reduce future warming by only 0.2 degree Celsius by 2100. In other words, the globe would warm by 2.8 degrees Celsius instead of by 3.0 degrees Celsius.
So clearly if the projected damages caused by future man-made warming are to be mitigated, most countries in the world would have to adopt a carbon tax. A globally harmonized carbon tax would be collected and spent by each country—there would be no international tax financing any international agency. An advantage of carbon taxes is that they function much like tariffs, which are much more transparent than cap-and-trade schemes. In addition, countries that do tax carbon could impose tariffs on goods imported from countries that don't so that their home producers are not disadvantaged by high energy prices. But is it really feasible that most countries in the world would adopt a carbon tax?
To get at this question, University of Sussex economist Richard Tol has calculated what he evocatively calls the Leviathan carbon tax. Tol defines his Leviathan tax as the maximum carbon tax that is budget-neutral—that is, all other taxes are reduced to zero and replaced by a carbon tax. The Leviathan tax takes into account the carbon intensity of each country, meaning the amount of carbon dioxide generated by every dollar of growth in the economy. He finds that Nigeria and Liberia could finance their entire government budgets with a $1 per ton carbon tax. Any more than that would funnel more revenues into government coffers and grow the size of their governments relative to their private sectors.
Tol uses World Bank tax data that excludes taxes that directly finance social security programs to determine the percent of GDP paid in tax revenues to the U.S. government. Tol calculates that a tax of $223 per ton of carbon dioxide could replace all revenues derived from U.S. income and corporate taxes. To replace all tax revenues, China would have to levy a carbon dioxide tax of $29 per ton; India $45; Germany $267; Japan $450; and the United Kingdom $855 per ton. In each case, collecting more violates revenue neutrality and increases government tax revenues.
Tol then calculated what level a globally harmonized carbon tax would have to reach to limit greenhouse gas atmospheric concentrations (now 390 parts per million) to 650 ppm carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), 550 ppm CO2e, and 450 ppm CO2e. The IPCC argues that it will be necessary to keep greenhouse atmospheric concentrations below 450 ppm in order to have at least a 50-50 chance of keeping the increase in global average temperature below 2.0 degrees Celsius. According to Tol's calculations, that implies a global $149 per ton carbon tax imposed beginning in 2015.
Imposing such a steep carbon in tax in countries like China, India, Russia, and Indonesia would dramatically increase the percentage of their GDP that flows into government coffers, which, in turn, would greatly enlarge their governments. On the other hand, if those nations did not collect a $149 per ton tax, it would mean that other countries would have raise their taxes in order to keep greenhouse gas concentrations below the 450 ppm threshold. By the way, Tol calculates that a $149 per ton tax could replace two-thirds of current federal income tax revenues in the United States.
Assuming that man-made climate change is imposing damage and costs on third parties, there is a strong libertarian case they should be compensated. However, the preferred Coasean policy of establishing and allocating property rights and then allowing negotiations over proper compensation is impractical. If a carbon tax is to be the next best alternative to a property rights regime for mitigating harms caused to third parties by future climate change, it should be revenue neutral and globally harmonized.
History reveals that the prospect of government fiscal restraint in the presence of new revenue streams is not promising. For example, Thomas Pyle, the president of the Institute of Energy Research, has pointed out that the top rate of the new U.S. income tax in 1913 started out at 7 percent, but under pressure of World War I reached 77 percent by 1918. In addition, Tol's Leviathan Tax analysis suggests that it is unlikely that a globally harmonized carbon tax is achievable. One counter-argument is that if the U.S. and other developed nations were to adopt a high carbon tax this could spur more rapid technological development of cheaper no-carbon and low-carbon energy technologies that poorer countries could then adopt to leapfrog over further burning of coal, natural gas, and oil.
In 1988, Coase argued, "The fact that governmental intervention also has its costs makes it very likely that most 'externalities' should be allowed to continue if the value of production is to be maximized." Considering how well governments afflicted by political conflicts of interest, chronic corruption, and inherent incompetence can be expected to execute a carbon tax, global warming is likely just such an externality.
]]>As my colleagues at Reason 24/7 noted yesterday, Slate is running an article, "About That Overpopulation Problem," the subhed of which notes, "Research suggests we may actually face a declining world population in the coming years."Perhaps it's a bit churlish of me, but I can't help but observe that it's about time that the folks over at Slate caught up with the data.
The article cites projections from Austria's International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis that suggest that the global population will top out at 9 billion some time around 2070 and then begin declining. In fact, Slate notes, if fertility rates subsequently hover around the European average of 1.5 children per woman, world population will be cut in half by 2200 and drop to about 1 billion in 2300.
So why are fertility rates declining? Slate argues:
The reason for the implacability of demographic transition can be expressed in one word: education. One of the first things that countries do when they start to develop is educate their young people, including girls. That dramatically improves the size and quality of the workforce. But it also introduces an opportunity cost for having babies. "Women with more schooling tend to have fewer children," says William Butz, a senior research scholar at IIASA.
Well, yes. But Slate's answer begs a prior question: What causes countries to develop? Short answer: Liberty and the rule of law. In my 2009 column, "The Invisible Hand of Population Control" I reported:
Let's take a look at two intriguing lists. The first is a list of countries ranked on the 2009 Index of Economic Freedom issued by the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal. Then compare the economic freedom index rankings with a list of countries ranked by their total fertility rates. Of the 30 countries that are ranked as being free or mostly free, only three have fertility rates above 2.1, e.g., New Zealand at 2.11, the Bahamas at 2.13, and Bahrain at 2.53. If one adds the next 53 countries that are ranked as moderately free, one finds that only 8 out of 83 countries have fertility rates above 3. It should be noted that low fertility rates can also be found in more repressive countries as well, e.g., China at 1.77, Cuba at 1.6, Iran at 1.71, and Russia at 1.4.
In 2002, Seth Norton, a business economics professor at Wheaton College in Illinois, published a remarkably interesting study on the inverse relationship between prosperity and fertility. Norton compared fertility rates of over 100 countries with their index rankings for economic freedom and another index for the rule of law. "Fertility rate is highest for those countries that have little economic freedom and little respect for the rule of law," wrote Norton. "The relationship is a powerful one. Fertility rates are more than twice as high in countries with low levels of economic freedom and the rule of law compared to countries with high levels of those measures."
Norton found that the fertility rate in countries that ranked low on economic freedom averaged 4.27 children per woman while countries with high economic freedom rankings had an average fertility rate of 1.82 children per woman. His results for the rule of law were similar; fertility rates in countries with low respect for the rule of law averaged 4.16 whereas countries with high respect for the rule of law had fertility rates averaging 1.55.
Economic freedom and the rule of law produce prosperity which dramatically lowers child mortality which, in turn, reduces the incentive to bear more children. In addition, along with increased prosperity comes more education for women, opening up more productive opportunities for them in the cash economy. This increases the opportunity costs for staying at home to rear children. Educating children to meet the productive challenges of growing economies also becomes more expensive and time consuming.
Don't get me wrong: Educating women is vitally important. Unfortunately, it tends to be a following rather than a leading indicator of economic development.
In a 2011 column, "Trading Ferility for Prosperity," I reported research that shows that free trade (that liberty thing again) correlates with declining fertility rates:
Doces cites research [PDF] that shows "increasing international exchange and communication create new opportunities for income-generating work and expose countries to norms that, in recent decades, have promoted equality for women." As a result, trade-induced demand for human capital expands to include women, further cutting fertility rates even in poor countries.
Just as high fertility rates and rising population encouraged would-be global saviors to demand drastic interventions into the fertility decisions of individuals, I fear that falling ferility rates and population will do the same. Choosing to have or not have children is an intensely private issue and should be left entirely up to individuals without interference from governments.
Hat tip Marion Tupy.
]]>Earlier this month, I reported the satellite temperature trend data from University of Alabama in Huntsville climatologists John Christy and Roy Spencer who reported for the 48 contiguous U.S. states that 2012 was the warmest year in the 34-year satellite record:
The annual average temperature over the conterminous 48 states in 2012 was 0.555 C (about 0.99 degrees F) warmer than seasonal norms.
Yesterday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released their data for 2012 and also reported that 2012 was the warmest year on record for the lower 48 states:
2012 marked the warmest year on record for the contiguous United States with the year consisting of a record warm spring, second warmest summer, fourth warmest winter and a warmer-than-average autumn. The average temperature for 2012 was 55.3°F, 3.2°F above the 20th century average, and 1.0°F above 1998, the previous warmest year.
Most of the difference between the UAH data (+1 degree F) and NOAA data (+3.2 degree F) can be accounted for by differences in their baselines, 34 years versus the 20th century. All temperature records do show an upward trend in global average temperatures. See below:
Looking at the above five different global temperature datasets through 2010 from the Goddard Institute for Space Science (GISS), NOAA's National Climate Data Center (NCDC), University of East Anglia's Hadley Center (HadCrut), Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) and University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), one finds the following per decade trends:
GISS + 0.176 degree C
NCDC + 0.171 degree C
HadCrut + 0.169 degree C
RSS + 0.163 degree C
UAH + 0.141 degree C
The difference in the rate of increase between the highest and the lowest datasets is +.035 degrees per decade. Another way to cumulate the difference, assuming a linear rate of increase for the next 100 years, is that global average temperatures will have increased above the current average by between 1.76 to 1.41 degree C by 2113.
]]>One definition of the word epidemic is "a rapid spread or increase in the occurrence of something." The good news is that is not happening with cancer in the United States. To be sure, cancer remains the second leading cause of death in the United States, but a new report by the National Cancer Institute confirms that overall cancer death rates continue to decline and that the incidence of cancer continues to fall for men and holds steady for women. From the press release:
The decline in overall cancer death rates continues a trend that began in the early 1990s. From 2000 through 2009, cancer death rates decreased by 1.8 percent per year among men and by 1.4 percent per year among women. Death rates among children up to 14 years of age also continued to decrease by 1.8 percent per year. ...
Between 2000 and 2009, overall cancer incidence rates decreased by 0.6 percent per year among men, were stable among women, and increased by 0.6 percent per year among children (ages 0 to 14 years).
The report highlights the increased rates of cancer related to the human papilloma virus (HPV) which can be prevented by vaccination. HPV not only causes cervical cancer, but also mouth, throat and anal cancer. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that both girls and boys be vaccinated against HPV. It's just plain stupid for parents to refuse to have their children vaccinated against this disease.
]]>Somewhat to the discomfort of his green comrades-in-arms, British activist Mark Lynas has been evolving in his views on various environmental issues lately. For example, Lynas now admits that he was wrong when declared that biotech crops posed significant risks to people and the natural world. In a speech delivered yesterday at the Oxford Farming Conference Lynas declared:
I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.
As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.
So I guess you'll be wondering – what happened between 1995 and now that made me not only change my mind but come here and admit it? Well, the answer is fairly simple: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.
Discovered science? Well, better late than never. Lynas goes on to admit:
...in 2008 I was still penning screeds in the Guardian attacking the science of GM – even though I had done no academic research on the topic, and had a pretty limited personal understanding. I don't think I'd ever read a peer-reviewed paper on biotechnology or plant science even at this late stage.
Obviously this contradiction was untenable. What really threw me were some of the comments underneath my final anti-GM Guardian article. In particular one critic said to me: so you're opposed to GM on the basis that it is marketed by big corporations. Are you also opposed to the wheel because because it is marketed by the big auto companies?
So I did some reading. And I discovered that one by one my cherished beliefs about GM turned out to be little more than green urban myths.
I'd assumed that it would increase the use of chemicals. It turned out that pest-resistant cotton and maize needed less insecticide.
I'd assumed that GM benefited only the big companies. It turned out that billions of dollars of benefits were accruing to farmers needing fewer inputs.
I'd assumed that Terminator Technology was robbing farmers of the right to save seed. It turned out that hybrids did that long ago, and that Terminator never happened.
I'd assumed that no-one wanted GM. Actually what happened was that Bt cotton was pirated into India and roundup ready soya into Brazil because farmers were so eager to use them.
I'd assumed that GM was dangerous. It turned out that it was safer and more precise than conventional breeding using mutagenesis for example; GM just moves a couple of genes, whereas conventional breeding mucks about with the entire genome in a trial and error way.
But what about mixing genes between unrelated species? The fish and the tomato? Turns out viruses do that all the time, as do plants and insects and even us – it's called gene flow.
To some extent this old news. Last year, I wrote a column reviewing Lynas' new book, The God Species, in which I welcomed him to the "Reality-Based Community." If only somehow we could get Lynas' fellow activists to actually read science and accept the broad scientific consensus on the safety of biotech crops.
Via Slate.
]]>According to the polls conservatives have become less concerned about environmental issues than liberals. In 1992, reports the Pew Foundation, 93 percent of Democrats and 86 percent of Republicans agreed that "there needs to be stricter laws and regulations to protect the environment." In 2012, however, Democratic support for more environmental regulation hadn't dropped while Republican support had fallen to just 47 percent. The Pew pollsters concluded, "Views on the importance of environmental protection have arguably been the most pointed area of polarization." In another poll, the Pew Research Center reports that 85 percent of Democrats believe that there is solid evidence for man-made global warming whereas only 48 percent of Republicans believe so.
Why is the gap on environmental issues between liberals and conservatives growing? A new study in the journal Psychological Science, "The Moral Roots of Environmental Attitudes," by Stanford University sociologist Matthew Feinberg and University of California Berkeley social psychologist Robb Willer argue that, in part, it's because liberals and conservatives differ in their moral views with regard to the natural environment. Feinberg and Willer claim that liberals regard the environment in moral terms whereas conservatives do not. They then go on to suggest a rhetorical strategy for getting conservatives to moralize the environment.
The two researchers apply moral foundations theory developed by New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues to their analysis. Haidt proposes that most ethical thinking is intuitive and rests on six evolved psychological/emotional foundations: (1) care/harm; (2) fairness/cheating: (3) liberty/oppression; (4) loyalty/betrayal; (5) authority/subversion; (6) sanctity/degradation. (An earlier column of mine, "The Science of Libertarian Morality" reported some of Haidt's findings, and his article, "Born This Way," was the cover of Reason's April 2012 issue.) Feinberg and Willer apply an earlier version of moral foundations theory that does not include the liberty/oppression dimension.
Haidt's research finds that liberals and conservatives have different moral profiles when it comes to the five moral foundations. Liberals score higher on the care/harm and fairness/cheating dimensions whereas conservatives tend to score more equally on all five dimensions. Feinberg and Willer conducted five different studies to probe the salience of this insight. In their first study, nearly 190 subjects were asked about their ideological views ranging from extremely liberal to extremely conservative. Then they were read three vignettes about a person eating lunch. In one he recycles his plastic water bottle, in another he does not; in the control, the bottle is not mentioned. The participants were then asked how moral they thought the guy was. Conservatives basically didn't think he was any more or less moral in any version of the story, whereas liberals rated him significantly less moral when he chucks the bottle into the garbage.
In a second study, about 500 undergraduates again rated their ideology and then were asked how important it was to behave in an environmentally friendly way on a six point scale. Finally, they were asked to write a couple sentences explaining their answers. More often than conservatives, liberals used moral terms to justify concerns about the environment. Willer and Feinberg concluded that these studies "support our claim that liberals but not conservatives view environmental issues in moral terms and that this helps explain liberals' stronger proenvironmental views."
Why do liberals see environmental issues in moral terms? To find out, the two researchers conducted two studies. The first winnowed through professionally made youtube.com videos lasting no more than two minutes with at least 10,000 views using search terms global warming, pollution, climate change, environmentalism, environment, and environmentalist. The second study identified 402 newspaper op-eds printed from January 2009 through March 2011 in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today containing keywords environment, climate change, global warming, or pollution. Coders blind to the study hypothesis rated on a seven point scale the extent to which each video and op-ed was grounded in the five moral domains. "Content analysis of environmental rhetoric from both video and print media revealed that such rhetoric resides primarily with the harm/care domain," report the researchers. This (over)emphasis on the harm/care moral domain might thus account for "the stronger proenvironmental attitudes of liberals relative to conservatives."
So how might conservatives be persuaded to moralize the environment? In their final study, Feinberg and Willer next had more than 300 subjects score their ideology and then randomly exposed them to three different narratives. The control narrative was a history of neckties. The other two were crafted around harm/care and purity/sanctity moral concerns. The harm/care message focused on the damage humans are causing and emphasized the need to protect the Earth, accompanied by pictures showing a clear cut, a barren coral reef, and a drought-cracked mudflat. The sanctity/purity message described the contamination of the environment and stressed the importance of purifying the natural world, accompanied by pictures of air pollution, a person drinking contaminated water, and a forest covered in garbage. Participants then were asked about their attitudes with regard to how important it is to protect the environment; their support for environmental legislation; and their belief that humans are causing global warming.
Conservatives were significantly less concerned about the environment than liberals in both the control and harm/care conditions. However, there was no statistically significant difference in pro-environmental attitudes between liberals and conservatives exposed to the purity/sanctity message. The researchers found that the purity/sanctity message provoked the moral emotion of disgust in conservative study participants boosting their concern about the environment. Therefore, the authors conclude that their "results suggest that political polarization around environmental issues is not inevitable but can be reduced by crafting proenvironmental arguments that resonate with the values of American conservatives." They add, "The current research suggests that reframing environmental issues in different moral terms offers one way to improve communications between opposing sides."
The central question not answered by the study is why are environmental issues moralized in the first place? Moralizing issues takes them out of the realm of trade-offs, costs, and compromise and puts them in the polarized domain of right and wrong. For an environmental moralist, asking how much it costs to save the endangered Delhi sandfly or an old growth forest is like being asked how much it would take to sell their kids. It's a kind of blasphemy. Morality is meant to trump any considerations of trade-offs and costs. The background assumption of this study is that environmental issues are in fact moral concerns.
For example, study co-author Willer said, "Reaching out to conservatives in a respectful and persuasive way is critical, because large numbers of Americans will need to support significant environment reforms if we are going to deal effectively with climate change, in particular." This highlights the fact that the implicit goal of the research is to figure out how better to propagandize conservatives into accepting liberal environmentalist policy goals. Assuming that man-made climate change is a significant problem, trying to enlist people into a moral crusade to impose "significant environmental reforms" like cap-and-trade carbon rationing is not necessarily the best way to deal with it. Moral foundations theory is correct that we are all differentially motivated by moral intuitions, but I believe that real moral progress has been steadily made and more firmly grounded by the application of reason to facts.
Aware of the implications of his study, Willer told the SF Weekly, "I think this speaks to the dangers and promise of propaganda—that there [are] ways of presenting issues that are more effective. Strategically reframing an issue ... could be canny moral strategy or a dangerous political weapon."
Of course, what one person sees as a canny strategy is another's propaganda.
]]>People reason chiefly to persuade others that they are right, not to find out what is true.
So claim Hugo Mercier, a postdoctoral fellow in economics and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, and Dan Sperber, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at the Central European University, in their provocative 2010 article, "Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory," in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Now a new study by the Yale Cultural Cognition Project finds that people also use reason to convince themselves, in the face of evidence to the contrary, that they and those on their side are right.
For several years now, the Yale Cultural Cognition Project headed by Dan Kahan has been investigating how cultural values shape public risk perceptions and related policy beliefs. The group has issued a fascinating new working paper, "Ideology, Motivated Reasoning, and Cognitive Reflection: An Experimental Study" that seeks to explain the sources of ideological polarization over societal risks like climate change, gun violence, and nuclear power. This new study investigates three competing theories for why this ideological polarization exists.
The study investigates whether polarization over scientific and risk policy issues arises because people are (1) misled by an over-reliance on rules of thumb, (2) subject to distorting cognitive dispositions such as dogmatism, aversion to complexity, and need for closure, or (3) seeking to bolster and protect their sense of social identity. Kahan categorizes the relevant social psychological research theories into (1) the public irrationality thesis; (2) the Republican Brain hypothesis; and (3) the expressive rationality thesis.
One theory of how this polarization arises is what Kahan calls the public irrationality thesis. Nobel-winning economist Daniel Kahnemann argues that humans employ two different cognitive systems to evaluate new information. The first uses fast cognitive efforts such as rules of thumb while the second relies on slower, more effortful systematic reasoning. People adopt many of their cognitive rules of thumb, heuristics that are triggered by emotional reactions to new situations, from groups with whom they share cultural or ideological commitments. This theory implies that when challenged with new information or arguments, it's just easier for most people to believe what their peers believe. The downside of this knee-jerkism is that there is no tendency for public deliberation to converge on effective public policies to deal with societal risks.
Kahan's second theory is the Republican brain hypothesis. In this case, the supposed negative correlation between political conservatism with traits of open-mindedness and critical reflection means that conservative cognition asymmetrically relies on fast rules of thumb to make decisions with respect to salience of various societal risks.
Put more simply, this theory asserts that conservatives are less likely than liberals to engage in cognitive reflection and effortful systematic reasoning. Consequently, while liberals evaluate information with the aim of developing useful public policies, fearful, mule-stubborn conservatives will dismiss discomforting scientific facts and spend their time just "standing athwart history yelling stop."
The third theory investigated in this study is what Kahan calls the expressive rationality thesis. In this case, beliefs about issues like the riskiness of climate change or nuclear power constitute part of what it means for people to belong to specific groups. Shared beliefs form part of their identities. People assess new information so that their conclusions signal their trustworthiness and loyalty to social groups with which they identify and to which they wish to be connected. The upshot is that people go along in order to get along with members of the social groups that they believe will benefit them.
Kahan points out that both the public irrationality thesis and the Republican brain hypothesis claim that ideological polarization arises from over-reliance on cognitive rules of thumb. The case of expressive rationality is different. "If individuals are adept at using high-level, [systematic] modes of information processing, then they ought to be even better at fitting their beliefs to their group identities," suggests Kahan. In other words, people who have a greater tendency to engage in cognitive reflection will be better able to rationalize their beliefs in the face any contrary evidence. So, if liberals really are more inclined to cognitive reflection and systematic reasoning than conservatives, that would imply that they "are all the more likely to succeed in resisting evidence that challenges the factual premises of their preferred policy positions."
The Yale researchers set out to test these three hypotheses by surveying 1,600 Americans to determine their political party affiliations and ideological predilections. Participants were asked to put themselves on a scale including Strong Democrat, Democrat, Independent Lean Democrat, Independent, Independent Lean Republican, Republican, and Strong Republican. Next they were asked if the considered themselves Very Liberal, Liberal, Moderate, Conservative, or Very Conservative. Once sorted by partisanship and ideology, the participants completed a Cognitive Reflection Test consisting of three questions that aim to measure their dispositions to engage in higher-level systematic reasoning.
Kahan does not provide the questions in his study, but apparently he used something like the cognitive reflection test devised by Massachusetts Institute of Technology management professor Shane Frederick. That test asks: (1) A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? (2) If it takes five machines five minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? (3) In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half the lake? (Note: Answers below.)
Keep in mind that unlike the public irrationality and expressive rationality theses, the Republican brain hypothesis claims that there is an ideological asymmetry with regard to cognitive reflection. If conservatism is in fact associated with reasoning traits that lead to dogmatism, fear of complexity, and need for closure, conservatives should tend to score lower on Kahan's cognitive reflection test than would liberals.
Once participants had completed the cognitive reflection test, they were divided into three experimental groups. In the first group, subjects were merely told that "psychologists believe the questions you have just answered measure how reflective and open-minded someone is." In a second group, subjects were additionally advised that psychologists had determined that people who accept evidence for climate change tend to get more answers correct than those who reject such evidence. This result was characterized by pollsters as implying that those who believe in climate change are more open-minded than are skeptics (skeptics are more close-minded). And the third group was told the opposite; psychological research has found that people who reject evidence for climate change tend to get more answers correct than those who accept such evidence. In this case, the pollsters implied that research suggests that skeptics were more open-minded than believers in climate change (skeptics are more open-minded). Each group was then asked how valid they thought the cognitive reflection test was with regard to assessing open-mindedness.
Recent polling finds that conservatives are more likely to be skeptical about man-made global warming than are liberals. Thus the Republican brain hypothesis would predict that right-wing subjects would be more inclined to see the cognitive reflection test as valid when told it suggests that climate change skeptics are more open-minded. On the flip side, since left-wing subjects are supposed to be more natively reflective, their assessment of the validity of the cognitive reflection test should not differ much between the skeptic is open-minded versus the skeptic is close-minded conditions. The public irrationality thesis predicts that motivated reasoning, i.e., jumping to conclusions congenial to their social groups, will be higher among people who score low on cognitive reflection no matter their ideological biases. Unlike both the public irrationality and the Republican brain hypotheses, the expressive rationality thesis predicts that the higher that both right-wing and left-wing subjects score on cognitive reflection, the more their assessments of the validity of the cognitive reflection test will turn on their prior ideological commitments. The idea is that the ideologically motivated flatter themselves with the belief that people who share their views are more open-minded than those who do not.
So what did Kahan and his colleagues find? It turns out that conservatives and liberals score about equally badly on the cognitive reflection test: 64 percent of Republicans and 59 percent of Democrats got all three questions wrong. In fact, the difference between the two groups of partisans is less than the difference in scores associated with education, gender, and race. Recall that the Republican brain hypothesis predicted that cognitive reflection would be negatively correlated with right-wing ideology. "This hypothesis is not confirmed," concludes Kahan.
In addition, both liberals and conservatives displayed ideological bias when assessing the validity of the cognitive reflection test. When climate change skeptics were characterized as open-minded, Republicans thought the test was nifty. When skeptics were branded as close-minded, more Democrats found the test results convincing. Thus, the study finds that the experimental "results were more consistent with a finding of symmetry than one of asymmetry with respect to ideologically motivated reasoning." Ideology distorts both left-wing and right-wing thinking.
Do higher scores on the reflective cognition test temper political polarization? To get at this question, the study compared both liberals and conservatives who scored low on the reflective cognition test (the 62 percent of subjects who got no answers right) with liberals and conservatives scored higher (those who got an average of 1.6 answers right putting them in between the 80th and 90th percentile of the sample). In short, the researchers found that the higher either conservatives or liberals scored on the cognitive reflection test the more likely they were to judge the test as valid when its results supposedly confirmed their ideological views about climate change skeptics and vice versa. People skilled at systematic reasoning use that capacity to justify their beliefs rather seek out truth.
Kahan notes in passing that social psychological research has found that political independents and libertarians score better on the cognitive reflection than do liberals or conservatives (check your answers below). But before we libertarians and independents start patting ourselves on our collective backs for being the better systematic reasoners, could this simply mean that we are especially good at justifying our beliefs to ourselves?
The new Yale study finds that when it comes to thinking about policy-relevant scientific information that challenges their ideological views liberals, conservatives, and, yes, libertarians, are inclined to violate physicist Richard Feynman's famous "first principle." As the irreverent genius put it, "You must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."
And the smarter you are, the easier it is to fool yourself.
The correct answers to the cognitive reflection test are 5 cents, 5 minutes, and 47 days.


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Pro Zach McNair
Garrett built Sifter. Now, he's writing a book about the experience. This is a very small part of the book cover in progress.
Exploring other options that'd still match the Sifter brand.
...And yes. I've noticed the extra space added between "run," and "and". This is Dribbble, after all. :)
Pro Richard Gil
I prefer this style. The other option seems a bit stiff.
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I truly wish that I wish I could build furniture and cabinets for a living. In my heart of hearts I am just a joiner and a carpenter. To work wood from rough plank into a beautiful and useful object, used for generations, is so fulfilling to me. To watch something develop in my hands and made more beautiful from use is one of my great pleasures in life. It is called beausage and I am sure it is what a boat builder feels when a long ago project comes back to him for repair and he lovingly caresses the worn tiller, sees the worn deck, and pats the trim on the companionway . It is not to be. I have not yet found a way to make enough money with mallet and chisel to pay for my kids' college education, to travel with my lovely wife, and to have a comfortable retirement. Sure, I could open a shop or start a firm, but I would shortly be pushed away from crafting and into the realities of running a business. As a bandage for my longing, I build stuff for my home, for the kids, for my lovely wife, and as gifts. The slide shows and pictures below are a way for me to document this.
Adirondack yard furniture
Kitchen cabinet build and remodel (ongoing)
Glue-up process
Campaign and "Refined" Camping Furniture
Misc. and Past Projects
Breakfast nook table reconstruction
A"Moroccan" tea table
Daddy's Bookcase Re-make
Laurel's kitchen stool
Basement Built-in
View inside of Hutch top
A Hall Tree/Shoe Rack for Laurel
The whole thing is made from recycled wood and old trim. I spent a couple nights getting the door cut, the trim on and the shoe rack made.
The Never Ending Hutch
it took months of searching before I founf the correct crown moulding - MONTHS! It was not cheap...
The Super Over-Done Garden Boxes
Carlton's Shooting Bench
My tiny shop (ca. 2011-2012)