Pat Allen: The View from Right Field

Climate Change and the Unintended Consequences of Being Green

Those worried about climate change (f/k/a global warming) want the world, i.e., the governments of the world, to spend hundreds of billions, maybe even trillions, of dollars to solve the problem. Which raises the question of what they propose to do and how effective it will be – and what the unintended consequences might be.

Earlier this week the Chicago Tribune reported that "[t]owns across Illinois and nationwide have switched to LED traffic signals because they burn brighter, last longer and save money by using 90 percent less energy than older incandescent bulbs."

Which sounds great – except. Except that "they also emit less heat, [which means] they sometimes have trouble melting snow. This has caused problems across the Midwest. In Wisconsin earlier this month, snow blanketed LED traffic lights in some towns, leading to ‘crashes at intersections where drivers aren’t sure whether to stop or go,’ The Associated Press said."

But don’t worry, if there is a problem in Kendall County, they will send a crew out to brush the snow off, though, obviously, it may take a while. In any case, according to an engineer in the Lake County Division of Transportation: "‘Maybe it takes longer to melt and you have to go and clean them off, but it’s part of the trade-off for years of energy savings.’"

But when you are talking about trade-offs, consider that an Oswego, Illinois, detective said a snow-covered, obscured LED signal was "‘a contributing factor’" in the crash that killed a woman last April. The driver coming the opposite way couldn’t see the signal, and he crashed into the woman’s car. It was, according to the article in the Tribune, "an unintended consequence".

Nasty things those unintended consequences.

The Models of Climate Change

The cover of the December 5 issue of The Economist read "Stopping climate change". Which of course can’t happen. The climate will change, and there is nothing mankind can do about it – or that we ought to do about it. Climate changes all the time for reasons that we only sort of understand. Trying to interfere with normal changes in our climate could cause problems greater than anything we can imagine from global warming.

But of course, that is not what The Economist was talking about, nor is it what the world leaders who are meeting in Copenhagen mean, either. What they are worried about is climate change caused by man, especially climate change caused by putting more and more carbon dioxide into the air. (Note: "Climate change" is the new name for what used to be called "global warming". Global warming worked as name until, in the last few years, average temperatures stopped going up.)

For years we have been told that all of the carbon dioxide that is going into the air is causing temperatures to rise, and that we are reaching a point where we need to do something or the earth will be in big trouble. The collapse of the real estate bubble put a lot of people under water financially. Climate change, we are told, will put a lot of people under water literally.

But several weeks ago there was a big brouhaha over a large number of either stolen or leaked e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. (Actually, there was a big brouhaha on some parts of the Internet; it was not that big in most of the mainstream media.) Some people felt that the stolen/leaked e-mails showed scientists at East Anglia threatening to prevent people who disagreed with them from publishing, talking about using statistical "tricks" to "hide the decline" in temperatures that did not fit their theories, etc.

Those who believe in climate change jumped to East Anglia’s defense: The problem is still real. The solution is still the same. The stolen e-mails were quoted out of context. Other databases give you the same information.

There is a logic to the idea that putting more CO2 into the atmosphere will cause things to warm up. As I understand things, that is what basic science tells us. And if the increase in CO2 was the only thing that affected the climate, if it was the only variable, the answer would be clear. But CO2 is not the only thing. There are lots of things that affect climate. To figure out what a big increase in CO2 is going to do to temperatures in the future, you have to know a lot of things. You have to know all of the other things that affect temperatures, too. You have to know how they are going to change in the future, also. As CO2 levels go up, what happens to these other things? Are they pushing temperatures up, too? If so, are they pushing temperatures up because CO2 levels are going up or are they going up independently, for some other reason? Or, alternatively, as CO2 levels go up, are these other things pushing temperatures in the opposite direction? And if so, are they pushing temperatures down independently of CO2 levels or are they pushing temperatures down in a reaction to CO2 levels pushing temperatures up?

In order to figure out what is going to happen in the future, you have to come up with a model (which is whole bunch of formulas all tied together). This model will tell you, for example, what will happen to global temperatures if CO2 levels go up by X or what will happen if they go up by 2X. It is the models that are the key to all of the predictions that are made about climate change.

Which raises a big question. Because while we can all understand the simple scientific explanation of why an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere would cause temperatures to go up if CO2 was the only variable, I do not know how many experts really understand all of the intricacies of the models and formulas that are used to predict the consequences of increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

The stolen/leaked e-mails from East Anglia may be more interesting, but what would be more useful would be an analysis of the models and formulas used by the scientists of East Anglia. Think about models in other areas. According to the Obama administration, their economic model told them that, if Congress did not pass the stimulus last February/March, unemployment would go to 9%, but if the stimulus was passed, unemployment would peak at only 8%. Oops. Something went wrong there.

Similarly, AIG had fancy financial models that told them how to calculate risk and protect themselves in all kinds of market situations. Banks had a model developed back in the 1990s called the "value at risk" or VaR model which told them how risky their portfolios were.* Oops again. Warren Buffet may have said it best, at least with respect to financial models, when he said, "Beware of geeks bearing formulas."

This is my concern with the arguments about climate change. It’s not just the proponents we are supposed to believe. It’s their models and formulas that we have to trust, and we have no way to test them. We have no way to know if the models are really considering everything or whether the formulas are set up properly so that everything works together even approximately right.

But the risk is too high, we are told. We can’t take a chance. We have to act. No, that is not the proper conclusion. The proper conclusion is that we can’t take a chance on spending all this money on something that could be a waste, especially when there are real things we can do today that would make people’s lives better now.

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* See L. Gordon Crovitz, "The 1% Panic," The Wall Street Journal, October 13, 2008, and "Behind AIG’s Fall, Risk Models Failed to Pass Real-World Test," The Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2008.

Facts Are a Transient Thing – # 4

In last Tuesday’s New York Times, Natalie Angier reported on some recent medical discoveries regarding the spleen:

"Scientists have discovered that the spleen, long consigned to the B-list of abdominal organs and known as much for its metaphoric as its physiological value, plays a more important role in the body’s defense system than anyone suspected.

Reporting in the current issue of the journal Science, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School describe studies showing that the spleen is a reservoir for huge numbers of immune cells called monocytes, and that in the event of a serious trauma to the body like a heart attack, gashing wound or microbial invasion, the spleen will disgorge those monocyte multitudes into the bloodstream to tackle the crisis. …

That researchers are only now discovering a major feature of a rather large organ they have been studying for at least 2,000 years demonstrates yet again that there is nothing so foreign as the place we call home.

‘Often, if you come across something in the body that seems like a big deal, you think, "Why didn’t anybody check this before?"’ Dr. Nahrendorf said. ‘But the more you learn, the more you realize that we’re just scratching on the surface of life. We don’t know the whole story about anything.’"

This is yet another example of how little we know – in spite of how much more we know today than we knew just a few years ago.

I would suggest that we should remember stories like this one when some group of experts tells us that the answer to a question is settled without a doubt or some group of politicians claims that they, and nobody else, know the only solution for some crisis.

Facts Are a Transient Thing – #3

The New York Times reports another example of the title of this post. Twenty years ago everybody knew that

"the young Earth was a hot, dry, desolate landscape interspersed with seas of magma and inhospitable for life. Even if some organism had somehow popped into existence, the old story went, surely it would soon have been extinguished in the firestorm of one of the giant meteorites that slammed into the Earth when the young solar system was still crowded with debris."

When Norman Sleep, a professor at Stanford, wrote an article in 1986 calculating the odds that life could have survived the impact of one those giant meteorites, it was rejected for publication because it was impossible. Nothing could have lived on the earth then.

Now, however, what was thought to be absolutely true just two decades ago has been shown to be wrong by new research and new discoveries. Instead, scientists now believe that

"by 4.2 billion years ago, the Earth was a pretty placid place, with both land and oceans. Instead of hellishly hot, it may have frozen over. Because the young Sun put out 30 percent less energy than it does today, temperatures on Earth might have been cold enough for parts of the surface to have been covered by expanses of ice."

Once again, we need to remember that some of what passes as today’s scientific truth will be tomorrow’s discarded theories.

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Note: Thanks to James Taranto of "Best of the Web Today" for a pointer to this story.

You Can't Fool Mother Nature and You Can't Beat the Big Muddy

There was an interesting point in last Friday’s Chicago Tribune about the flooding and water levels along the Mississippi River:

"After days of flooding, the Mississippi showed significant signs of losing steam Thursday. That's because in recent days the river hit record levels as it fanned out for miles around when it overran levees.

For urban areas in and around Quincy, the breached levees [upstream] were a blessing. Most of the land submerged along the river is farmland."

In other words, the fact some levees upstream broke, and some of the water was able to spread out over, i.e., flood, land around the river banks, means that the river will not be as high or as dangerous when it gets downstream.

Which means that the levees everybody builds to keep the water from flooding, raise the water levels, which mean the levees have to be built higher which pushes the water levels higher which mean the levees have to be higher and so on and so on.

I think there may be a lesson here.

Media Reports on Climate Change Skepticism – Sort Of

Yesterday’s Chicago Tribune had an article* on page 8 entitled "Summit warms the hearts of climate change skeptics". The only trouble with the article was that it told us very little about the substantive positions of the global warming skeptics. It wasn’t until the eighth paragraph that we were told what scientists at the conference were saying – which was after the pro-global warming side was discussed in the third and seventh paragraphs of the article, as well as in a little box next to the top of the article entitled "The case for global warming."

The article did ultimately tell us a little more about what happened at the conference – in the last three paragraphs of the article – and after more time was spent letting the global warming side say why they were right and the skeptics were off base.

If you are interested in a little bit of real substance about what happened at the conference, see this article in the London Sunday Telegraph or go to the Heartland Institute website.

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* I apologize for not linking to the article itself, but I could not find it on the Tribune website.  It was in the print edition, though.

Global Warming and Carbon Credits

The best comment I have seen about global warming appeared in a column by Jim Hopkins in The New Zealand Herald on September 28, 2007:

"Carbon credits are just the papal indulgences of a new religion. A way to keep sinning and still feel virtuous."

Facts Are a Transient Thing – #2

Following up on this post is an article in the March 26 issue of Newsweek: "Health: Can Exercise Make You Smarter?" According to this article, recent findings tell us that not only can aerobic exercise make you smarter, it can keep you smarter longer.

What makes this particularly interesting is that some of these discoveries are the exact opposite of what scientists thought just ten years ago. For example, the article notes that last week "researchers announced that they had coaxed the human brain into growing new nerve cells, a process that for decades had been thought impossible".

Similarly, "[u]ntil the mid-‘90s, scientists thought the loss [of neurons in the brain] was permanent – that the brain couldn’t make new nerve cells to replace the dead ones. But animal studies over the last decade have overturned that assumption".

This article reminds us how important it is to maintain a healthy skepticism when we are told that questions have been answered and nobody can disagree. The fact is what science "knows" today is some times wrong tomorrow.

Therefore, when it comes to acting on what science "knows," we need to be careful to stay within ourselves, especially when it comes to big programs over long periods with huge price tags. Money is not unlimited. We need to make sure the money we do spend does the greatest good for the most people at the lowest cost.

We need to remember that just because there is a problem does not mean we know the solution. While doing something may make us feel better, if the money is not spent wisely, other problems we know how to solve will go unaddressed because of a lack of money.

When we see a problem, it is not easy to not do something, to not rush off with a big solution to a big problem. But sometimes we have to. Global warming, anyone?

Thoughts on the Rehabilitation of DDT – and Global Warming

The recent decision by the World Health Organization to lift its ban on some uses of DDT in the fight against malaria was interesting in at least a couple or ways.

First, it is interesting because it was Rachel Carson’s attack on DDT in Silent Spring that helped start the modern environmental movement. Ms. Carson’s book led to a world-wide ban on DDT that, because other anti-malaria methods were not as effective, resulted in countless additional deaths from malaria in the Third World. This was particularly unfortunate because the science against these uses of DDT was never proven. (If Ms Carson had been a Republican, I am sure Democrats would have been saying by now, "Carson lied, people died.")

Second, it is interesting because it is another example, similar to the story of the comatose woman in my post "Facts Are a Transient Thing," of how often what we "know" turns out to be wrong.

Which brings me to global warming. Scientists tell us that global warming is irrefutable and that something must be done. Of course, environmentalists told us that DDT was bad and had to be totally banned. Doctors knew what was going on in the minds of comatose patients, except they were wrong.

This is my concern with the view that says we must do something about global warming because we know what causes it and we know it is a problem. Well, even if we "know" it now, will we still know it in the future?

But we are told that, even if we are not totally sure about global warming, we still need to do something because we cannot take a chance. The problem with this approach is twofold. Money is not unlimited (in spite of what those whose answer to every problem is to tax the rich might think), so the money we spend on global warming cannot be spent other things. As shown in the report of the Copenhagen Consensus 2004, it is not at all clear spending money to combat global warming is the best way to help the most people.

But even if money were not limited or if we had enough money to combat global warming plus do the other things we need to do, what if doing something actually hurts? What if doing something makes things worse? Maybe we will be interfering in something that we do not understand or that we have gotten wrong. Maybe we will stop the earth from naturally correcting the problem or maybe we will stop from happening what needs to happen.

We need to remember how often what we know turns out to be wrong. We need to understand how little we really know. We need to approach problems with a humbleness of spirit and intellect, and as we consider how to make things better, we must be sure we do not make things worse.

Facts Are a Transient Thing

Sharon Begley has a fascinating article in her Science Journal column in Friday’s Wall Street Journal (unfortunately, subscription required): "There May Be More To a Vegetative State Than Science Thought". Begley’s article discusses a report in the current issue of Science magazine describing a 23-year-old accident victim who suffered a severe brain injury. The woman fell into a coma and eventually "fit the medical criteria for being in a ‘vegetative state.’"

But tests of the woman’s brain activity show results quite unlike what is considered normal for people in such a state. The young woman’s "brain activity [is] consistent with conscious awareness." Begley goes on: "Although the woman fits the diagnosis of being in a vegetative state, her brain activity raises the intriguing (or disturbing) possibility that there is a fully conscious being locked in that unresponsive body after all."

But what I find most interesting about this article is not the woman herself or even what it might say about at least some people in comas. What is most interesting is what this says about what we "know" about things.

Before this study, medical science had some pretty clear ideas about people in comas or vegetative states. Now, it appears, we may not be so sure.

When I was growing up, only Saturn had rings. Now we know Neptune and Uranus have them, too.

In George Washington’s time drawing blood with leeches was proper medical practice. Now it was considered barbaric. I fully expect physicians in the future will someday consider our chemotherapy treatments as primitive as doctors today think of leeches.

The point is how often what we "know," what science "knows," turns out to be wrong. This is not a result of prejudice or deliberate misleading. These are honest mistakes, made by people doing their best.

But even though they are doing their best or trying their hardest, what they think they know as fact turns out to be wrong. We need to remember this when people talk about what experts "know," and we need to approach "facts" with a caution coming from an understanding that much of what we "know" is merely today’s best wrong guess.

[Update 9/9/06, 6:45 p.m.  An article in the Chicago Tribune on the report in Science can be found here.]