Category Archives: Media Criticism

Business, Economics, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

What To Do About Global Warming/Cooling

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I see a problem with this approach, I think, unless I’m missing something:

1. Are global temperatures warming?
2. Do the negative consequences of the change outweigh the positive consequences?
3. Can we do anything that will reverse the change?
4. Do the positive consequences of the action outweigh the negative consequences of doing nothing?

Notice, the steps have nothing at all whatsoever to do with whether or not global warming is anthropogenic. The climate’s “naturalness” is actually irrelevant. If a 10 kilometer-wide asteroid were hurling toward earth at 100,000 km per hour, it would be a completely natural event. However, just because the meteor wasn’t anthropogenic doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t take actions to deflect it.

Notice also, that we could change question 1 from “warming” to “cooling” and the four-step approach still works. And quite frankly, cooling is probably a more historically problematic situation.

If the answer to any one of the above four questions is “No,” then we should do absolutely nothing about a changing climate. If the answer to all of the questions are “Yes,” then, and only then, should we take any actions.

The first problem is in step 3. It doesn’t seem to account for cost. Suppose there is something that we can do (at least in theory) to reverse the change, but it would result in the loss of (say) a quadrillion dollars in global economic growth over the next century. And that points out the problem with Step 4. Rather than comparing the positive aspects of the action to the negative consequences of doing nothing, we need to compare the positive consequences of the action to their cost. For example, Wikipedia (FWIW) says that the gross world product is about seventy trillion dollars. If we were to get a growth rate of 4 percent over a century, that would mean that in 2113, the GWP would be (1.04)**(100), or about fifty times that amount, or about 3.5 quadrillion dollars. If by arbitrarily making energy more expensive with carbon taxes or caps, we were to reduce that growth rate by a mere half a percent (which is probably a conservative estimate — many of the proposals would do much more economic damage), that would reduce the factor of growth after a hundred years to about thirty, instead of fifty. That is, the world would be 20 times seventy, or 1.4 quadrillion dollars poorer over that period of time. You can buy a lot of mitigation against climate issues with that kind of money.

This is the kind of rational analysis that Bjørn Lomberg has been doing, and it’s why we need a real regret analysis.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Media Swoon

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Looking back at Michael Hastings’ campaign reporting from 2008:

I simply cannot imagine what it is about Obama that gets people going this way (and yes, I understand there’s a racial element of attraction to a cool black guy, but that doesn’t really explain the depth and weirdness of it, IMHO), except to say that it’s clearly something non-verbal. I believe it has been operating with Obama for virtually his entire life and has worked to his very great advantage. Quite a few people have always reacted to him as though his mere presence were almost supernaturally attractive, as if he exuded a kind of force field that made them—as Hastings so well put it—practically swoon.

It’s a dangerous phenomenon. I believe that Obama understands it and cultivates it, too. And no, I don’t think it’s actually hypnosis, although it works in some powerfully suggestive manner. It also takes advantage of the fact that so many journalists today are very young writers (like Hastings) who have done almost nothing else for a living, and so they seem especially susceptible. In the mid-20th century, reporters for major publications used to be uniformly older and to have had more varied prior experience in life and the world—more hard-boiled and hard-nosed, and less susceptible to swooning hero worship, although they were hardly immune to respect and liking.

In their childish emotionalism, they’ve helped usher in an era of massive wealth destruction, ruining millions of lives. And only now, with the revelations of the AP and Fox News, are they starting to realize the danger they should have seen with things like this:

That’s the way this White House works on the press: engender hero worship bordering on the hysterical, and then use the threat of withdrawal of the chance to be in the loved one’s presence to compel compliance.

Sick. Dangerous. And it explains quite a bit, doesn’t it?

Yes, and like an abused spouse, fearing the “war on women” and other chimaera, they’ll return to him in time for next year’s election, to unwittingly try to continue the destruction.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Global Warming

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When it’s a good thing:

Given that climate change is a mixture of curses and blessings, any policy addressing it is going to involve trade-offs. Slowing it down, for example, would hurt some, help others. It’s not clear why a cold, Arctic-reliant country like Russia whose economy is linked to the oil and gas trade would find a benefit in cooperating with efforts to stop climate change. It also appears that human activities like farming are better able to adjust to temperature variations than some pessimists would have us believe. Crops like soya, corn and wheat can be bred (or genetically modified) to grow in warmer and dryer conditions at a modest cost.

Greens, many impelled by emotional overreactions or a deep inner belief that unfettered capitalism is a terrible thing, have tried to simplify the discussion about the earth’s changing climate into a morality play. They’ve overstated the evidence that favors worst-case scenarios, argued for top down, bureaucratic solutions that don’t work, and when critics object to these policies they lash out at their critics as ‘science deniers.’

Because they have other agendas, and because for them, it’s a religion. You can pay for a hell of a lot of mitigation with all of the wealth that’s being opened up in the Arctic, but it doesn’t give them the requisite amount of control.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Cybershaming In The Science Fiction Community

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It can get very ugly when the Left starts to eat its own:

The virtually thoughtless piling on is perhaps the most appalling. So many of the criticizers whose comments I have come across admit they haven’t even read the columns in question. Once the ball of shunning and shaming got rolling, hundreds of onlookers, alerted by social media, jumped on the bandwagon, attracted by the enticing glow of participating in shared moral outrage. Moral preening is on overload; industry professionals and would-be professionals frantically signal to each other that they are right-thinkers. According to the mau-mauers, Mike and Barry did not merely misspeak (miswrite?); they did not have decent-enough intentions which were ruined by Paleolithic habits and blinkered upbringings; they are morally suspect, malign and vicious and evil. It’s burn the witch! all over again, but this time on a pyre of blog posts and Tweets.

I mentioned before that I completely understand the vehemence of Barry’s reaction to all this. One sadly ironic aspect of this brouhaha is that Barry is a lifelong man of the Left. He was staunchly antiwar during the Vietnam era (see early stories such as “Final War”), and his dream president was (and remains) Eugene McCarthy. I fully believe, based on his writings about Alice Sheldon and Judith Merril, that Barry considers himself a feminist, and an avid one. Condemnation from one’s “own side” always burns hotter in one’s craw than condemnation from “the other guys,” which can be easily rationalized away; just as criticism (especially when viewed as unfair) from one’s own family hurts much worse than criticism from relative strangers. Forty years ago (and in all the years since), Barry was a fierce advocate of the New Wave in science fiction, whose practitioners (with the sole exception of R. A. Lafferty) were all politically aligned with the Left, as opposed to old-timers such as John W. Campbell and Robert Heinlein. Now Barry must feel as though the children of the Revolution are eating their elders (as so frequently happens, it seems).

This is actually one reason that I don’t read anywhere near as much SF as I did when I was a kid.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Paula Deen

4 Comments

I’ve never been a big fan, but I really don’t understand what all the fuss is about (particularly since she seems to be a big Obama supporter). As far as I can tell she seems to be guilty of using the N-word (apparently long ago, in private, describing to her husband someone who had stolen from her), and of considering casting blacks as slaves at a recreation of an antebellum wedding party. I’m certainly not shocked that a woman who grew up in the south in the fifties and sixties would have that word in her vocabulary (which I presume is what she meant by her “yes, of course” in sworn testimony), or that she might deploy it under stressful circumstances. And as for the slavery reenactment, how does this differ from hiring actors for a movie about the period? It’s not like she proposed to actually enslave them. And as almost always, the reportage on this has been sensationalist and awful.

She made a mistake with her abject apologies, I think. She should have simply explained the circumstances, to pre-empt all of the nonsense.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

“If It Saves One Life”

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Some thoughts on the economic irrationality and political demagoguery of the phrase:

The problem with the “if it saves just one life” standard, other than being outlandishly stupid, is that it fails to take into account scarcity, which is fundamental to the human condition. Are 200 lives worth $2 billion? Of course they are; life is priceless. But scarcity is real. There are very good reasons that we do not require, for example, that all of the safety features found on the $100,000 Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedan be made mandatory on all vehicles. Would doing save even one life? Yes, it probably would save many lives: While President Obama attempts to derive political benefit from fear-mongering about violent crime, which has been in a long and steady decline, automotive deaths are a much more significant problem. Reducing automotive deaths by one-third would save as many lives as eliminating all murders involving firearms.

If you want to follow that line of thought a little farther down the rabbit hole, consider that the number of children killed in back-over accidents annually is less than the number of people struck by subway cars in New York City in a typical year. Should we retrofit the nation’s metros with barriers? It would save lives.

Someone should write a book about this sort of trade off.

In addition to the other critique, it’s also worth pointing out the ever-present hypocrisy of the Left. Banning abortion would save not just a single life, but millions of lives per year. What’s stopping them?

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Real Inconvenient Truth

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Over at The Economist, long one of the publications beating the drum for radical cuts in our carbon output, Will Wilkinson notes the cooling of the “consensus.”

Mr Cohn does his best to affirm that the urgent necessity of acting to retard warming has not abated, as does Brad Plumer of the Washington Post, as does this newspaper. But there’s no way around the fact that this reprieve for the planet is bad news for proponents of policies, such as carbon taxes and emissions treaties, meant to slow warming by moderating the release of greenhouse gases. The reality is that the already meagre prospects of these policies, in America at least, will be devastated if temperatures do fall outside the lower bound of the projections that environmentalists have used to create a panicked sense of emergency. Whether or not dramatic climate-policy interventions remain advisable, they will become harder, if not impossible, to sell to the public, which will feel, not unreasonably, that the scientific and media establishment has cried wolf.

Dramatic warming may exact a terrible price in terms of human welfare, especially in poorer countries. But cutting emissions enough to put a real dent in warming may also put a real dent in economic growth. This could also exact a terrible humanitarian price, especially in poorer countries. Given the so-far unfathomed complexity of global climate and the tenuousness of our grasp on the full set of relevant physical mechanisms, I have favoured waiting a decade or two in order to test and improve the empirical reliability of our climate models, while also allowing the economies of the less-developed parts of the world to grow unhindered, improving their position to adapt to whatever heavy weather may come their way. I have been told repeatedly that “we cannot afford to wait”. More distressingly, my brand of sceptical empiricism has been often met with a bludgeoning dogmatism about the authority of scientific consensus.

My emphasis. Those who have been hysterically advocating carbon reduction on the basis of computer models that are, bluntly, crap (I’m looking at you, Saint Al), completely ignore the very real economic consequences of their nostrums, particularly for the poorest for whom economic growth is essential. But the president continues to jack up our energy prices by fiat.