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Sunday, July 2, 2017

The Trump administration proposes a new scientific method just for climate studies

What could possibly go wrong?

[[Scott Pruitt]] is the former Oklahoma Attorney General who copied and pasted letters for pro-pollution lobbyists onto his letter head. Much of his previous work was devoted to suing the EPA. Now he works for the big money donors as head of the EPA. This Scott Pruitt is allegedly working on formulating a new scientific method to be used for studying climate change alone. E&E News just reported that this special scientific method will use "red team, blue team" exercises to conduct an "at-length evaluation of U.S. climate science."

Let's ignore that it makes no sense to speak of US climate science when it comes to the results. Climate science is the same in every country. There tends to be only one reality.

Previously [[Rick Perry]], head of the Department of Energy (DOE) who campaigned on closing the DOE before he knew what it does, had joined the group calling to replace the scientific method with a Red Team Blue Team exercise.

A Red Team is supposed to challenge the claims of the Blue Team. It is an idea from hierarchical organisations, like the military and multinationals, where challenging the orthodoxy is normally not appreciated and thus needs to be specially encouraged when management welcomes it.

Poking holes is our daily bread

It could naturally be that the climate "sceptics" do not know that challenging other studies is build in into everything scientists do; they do not give the impression to know science that well. In their Think Tanks and multinational corporations they are probably happy to bend the truth to get ahead. They may think that that is how science works and they may not able to accept that a typical scientist is intrinsically motivated to figure out how reality works.

People driven by greed are unable to comprehend any other motivation. Similarly, habitual liars assume everyone else lies just like they do.
— Joe Daniel (@Bikes4bacon) 1 July 2017

At every step of a study a scientist is aware that at the end it has to be written up very clearly to be criticised by peer reviewers before publication and by any expert in the field after publication. That people will build on the study and in doing so may find flaws. Scientific claims should be falsifiable, one should be able to show them wrong. The main benefit of this is that it forces scientists to very clearly describe the work and make it vulnerable to attack.

The first time new results are presented is normally in a working group seminar where the members of the Red Team are sitting around the table, ask specific questions during the talk and criticise the main ideas after the talk. These are scientists working with similar methods, but also ones who work on very different problems. All and especially the group leaders have an interest in defending the reputation of the group and making sure no nonsense spoils it.

The results are normally also presented at workshops, conferences and invited talks at other groups. At workshops leading experts will be there working on similar problems, but with a range of different methods and backgrounds. At conferences and invited talks there are in addition also many scientists from adjacent fields in the audience or scientists working with similar methods on other problems. A senior scientist will get blunt questions after the talk if anything is wrong with it. Younger scientists will get nicer questions in public and the blunt ones in private.

An important Red Team consists of your co-authors. Modern science is mostly done in teams. That is more efficient, reduces the chances of rookie errors and very easy due to the internet. The co-authors guarantee with their reputation for the quality of the study, especially for the part where they have expertise.

None of these steps are perfect and journalists should get away from their single-study fetish. But together these steps ensure that the quality of the scientific literature as a whole is high.

(It is actually good that none of these steps are perfect. Science works on the boundary of what is known, scientists that do not make errors are not pushing themselves enough. If peer review would only pass perfect articles that would be highly inefficient and not much would be published, it normally takes several people and studies until something is understood. It is helpful that the scientific literature is high quality, it does not need to be perfect.)

Andrew Revkin should know not to judge the quality of science by single papers or single scientists, that peer review does not need to be perfect and did not exist for most of the scientific era. But being a false balance kind of guy he regrettably uses "Peer review is often not as adversarial as intended" as argument to see merit in a Red Team exercise. While simultaneously acknowledging that "All signs point to political theater"

Red Team science

An optimistic person may think that the Red Team proposal of the Trump administration will follow the scientific method. We already had the BEST project of the conservative physics professor Richard Muller. BEST was a team of outside people have a look at the warming over land estimated from weather station observations. This project was funded in part by the Charles G. Koch Foundation. ~~the Heartland Institute, hard core deniers funded by Koch Brother organisations.~~

The BEST project found that the previous scientific assessments of the warming were right.

The BEST project is also a reason not to be too optimistic about Pruitt's proposal. Before BEST published their results mitigation sceptics were very enthusiastic about their work and one of their main bloggers, Anthony Watts, claimed that their methods were so good and he would accept the outcome no matter the result. That changed when the result was in.

Judith Curry was part of BEST, but left before she would have had to connect her name with the results. Joseph Majkut of Niskanen Center, who wrote an optimistic Red Team article, claims there were people who changed their minds due to BEST, but did not give any examples yet.

It also looks as if BEST was punished for the result that was inconvenient for the funders. The funders are apparently no longer interest in studying the quality of climate observations. Berkeley Earth now mainly works on air pollution. While BEST did not even look at the largest part of the Earth yet: the oceans. The nice thing of being funded by national science foundations is that they care about the quality of the work, but not the outcomes.

If coal or oil corporations thought there was a minute possibility that climate science was wrong, they would fund their own research. Feel free to call that Red Team research. That they invest in PR instead shows how confident they are that the science is right. Initially Exxon did fund research, when it became clear climate change was a serious risk they switched to PR.

Joseph Majkut thinks that a well-executed Red Team exercise could convince people. In the light of the BEST project, the corporate funding priorities and the behaviour of mitigation sceptics in the climate "debate", I am sceptical. People who did not arrive at their position because of science will not change their position because of science.

Washington Republicans will change their mind when the bribes, aka campaign contributions, of the renewable energy sector are larger than those of the fossil fuel sector. Or when the influence of money is smaller than that of the people, like in the good old days.

Science lives on clarity

As a scientist, I would suggest just wait and see at this time. Let the Trump administration make a clear plan for this new scientific method. I am curious.

Let them tell us how they will select the members of the Red Team. Given that scientists are always critiquing each others work, I am curious how they plan to keep serious scientists out of their Red Team. I would be happy to join, there is still a lot of work to do on the quality of station data. Scientific articles typically end with suggestions for future research. That is the part I like writing the most.

Because the Trump administration is also trying to cut funding for (climate) science, I get the impression that scientists doing science is not what they want. I would love to see how they excuse keeping scientists like me out of the Red Team.

It would also be interesting to see how they will keep the alarmists out. Surely Peter Wadhams would like to defend his position that the Arctic will be ice free this year or the next. Surely Guy McPearson would like to explain why we are doomed and mainstream science, aka science, understates the problem in every imaginable way. I am sure Reddit Collapse of Civilization can suggest many more people with just as much scientific credibility as the people Scott Pruitt would like to invite. I hope they will apply to the Red Team.

That is just one question. Steven Koonin proposes in the Opinion section of the Wall Street Journal that:

A commission would coordinate and moderate the process and then hold hearings to highlight points of agreement and disagreement, as well as steps that might resolve the latter

Does this commission select the topics? Who are these organisers? Who selects them? What are the criteria? After decades of an unproductive blog climate "debate" we already know that there is no evidence that will convince the unreasonable. Will the commission simply write that the Red Team and the Blue Team disagreed about everything? Or will they make an assessment whether it is reasonable for the Red Team to disagree with with evidence?

Clearly Scott Pruitt himself would be the worst possible choice to select the commission. Then the outcome would trivially be: the two teams disagree and Commission Coal Industry declares the Red Team as winner. We already have an NIPCC report with a collection of blog "science". There is no need for a second one.

The then right-wing government of The Netherlands made a similar exercise: Climate Dialogue. They had a somewhat balanced commission and a few interesting debates on, for instance, climate sensitivity, the tropical hotspot, long-term persistence and Arctic sea ice. It was discontinued when it failed to find incriminating evidence. Just like funding for BEST stopped and confirming the general theme of the USA climate "debate": scientists judge studies based on their quality, mitigation "sceptics" based on the outcome.

A somewhat similar initiative in the US was the Climate Change National Forum, where a journalist determined the debating topics by selecting newspaper articles. The homepage is still there, but no longer current. Maybe Pruitt has a few bucks.

"This is yet another example of politicians engaging in unhelpful meddling in things they know nothing about."
Ken Caldeira

How will Pruitt justify not asking the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), whose job these kind of assessments is, to organise the exercise. Surely the donors of Pruitt will not find the NAS acceptable, they already did an assessment and naturally found the answer that does not fit their economic interests. (Like the findings on climate change of every other scientific organisations from all over the world does not fit their corruption-fuelled profits.)

I guess they will also not ask the Science Division of the White House.

Climate scientist Ken Caldeira called on Scott Pruitt to clarify the hypothesis he wants to test. Given the Trumpian overconfidence, the continual Trumpian own-goals, the Trumpian China-hoax extremism, the Trumpian incompetence and Trump's irrational donors wanting to go after the endangerment finding, I would would not be surprised if they go after the question whether the greenhouse effect exists, whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas or whether the world is warming. Pruitt said he wanted a "discussion about CO2 [carbon dioxide]."

That would be a party. There are many real and difficult questions and sources of uncertainties in climate science (regional changes, changes in extremes, the role of clouds, impacts etc.), but these stupid greenhouse-CO2-warming questions that dominate the low-rated US public "debate" are not among them.

The mitigation sceptical groups are not even able to agree with themselves which of these stupid three questions is the actual problem. I would thus suggest that the climate "sceptics" use their new "scientific method" themselves first to make their chaotic mess of incompatible claims into something.

Red Team PR exercise

Donald Trump has already helped climate action in America enormously by cancelling the voluntary Paris climate agreement. Climate change is slow and global. Everyone hopes someone else will solve it some time and attends to more urgent personal problems. When the climate hoaxer president cancelled the Paris agreement the situation became more dangerous and Americans started paying attention. This surge is seen above in the Google searches for climate change in the USA. This surge was noticeable in Reddit where there was a huge demand for reliable information on climate science and climate action.

The Red Team exercise would give undue weight to a small group of fringe scientists. This is a general problem in America, where many Americans have the impression that extremist positions are still under debate because the fossil fuel industries bought many politicians who in turn say stupid things on cable TV and in opinion sections. These industries also place many ads and in return corporate media is happy to put "experts" on TV that represent their positions. Reality is that 97% of scientists and scientific studies agree that climate change is real and caused by us.

On the optimistic side, just like cancelling Paris made Americans discover that Washington is completely isolated on the world stage in their denial that climate change is a risk, the Red Team exercise could also lead to more American learning how broad the support in the scientific community for climate change is and how strong the evidence.

If the rules of the exercise are clearly unfair, scientists will easily be able to explain why they do not join and ask Pruitt why he thinks he needs such unfair rules. While scientists are generally trusted, the opposite is true for Washington and the big corporations behind Pruitt.

The political donors have set up a deception industry with politicians willing to lie for them, media dedicated to spreading misinformation or at least willing to let their politician deceive the public, they have "think tanks" and their own fake version of the IPCC report and a stable of terrible blogs. These usual suspects writing another piece of misinformation for the EPA will hardly add to the load.

The most tricky thing could be to make clear to the public that science is not resolved in debates. The EPA official E&E News talked to was thinking of a "back-and-forth critique" by government-recruited experts. In science that back and forth is done on paper, to make sure it is clearly formulated, with time to check the claims, read the cited articles and crunch the data. If it is just talk, it is easy to make false claims, which cannot be fact checked on the spot. Unfortunately history has shown that the Red Team will likely be willing to make false claims in public.

If the rules of he exercise are somewhat fair, science will win big time; we have the evidence on our side. At this time, where America pays attention to climate change, that could be a really good advertisement for science and the strength of the evidence that climate change is a huge risk that cannot be ignored.

Concluding, I am optimistic. Either they make the rules unfair. It seems likely they will try to make this exercise into political theatre. Then we can ask them in public why they make the rules so unfair. Don't they have confidence in their position that climate change is a hoax?

If they make the rules somewhat fair, science will win big time. Science will win so much, you will be tired of all the winning, you will be begging, please mister scientist no more winning, I cannot take it any more.

Let me close with John Oliver on Coal. Oliver was sued over this informative and funny piece by coal Barron Robert Murray who also stands behind Scott Pruitt and Trump.

Thursday, May 11, 2017

Trump's I-am-not-a-witch moment

Dear Director Comey,
...
While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.
...
Donald J. Trump

Donald, even if Comey were prime evil himself, you can not fire someone who is investigating you. (Even if Democrats did or do not like him.)

Donald, it would have been better not to talk about the FBI investigating you. (It only puts more focus on these investigations.)

Donald, you can not talk to Comey about ongoing investigations, especially investigations about yourself. (And there is no evidence that Comey informed you.)

Donald, do not write about your FBI investigations when your official reason for firing Comey was that he was not fair to Clinton. (And a many months old incident is not a good excuse for firing someone in a panic.)

Donald, you cannot write that refraining from investigating you would be a reason not to fire Comey. (The rule of law makes America a free country.)

Sunday, April 30, 2017

Red Cheeks Team

The idea has been simmering a few years, but now that their president is in office, the mitigation sceptical movement is increasingly pushing the idea of a "Red Team". In the last "hearing" of Lamar Smith in US House of Representatives, John Christy and Judith Curry repeated the claim that climate science needs a "Red Team". Roger Pielke Sr. contributes some tweets. In Murdoch's Wall Street Journal also Steven Koonin made this call on the opinion pages (pay-walled). This is the part of the newspaper the journalists of the news section are embarrassed by.

The [[Red Team]] should aim to destroy the results of climate science. This idea comes from the military and corporations. Monolithic strongly hierarchical organisations where dissent is normally not appreciated and there is thus a need to break this culture by explicitly ordering a group to show that plans may not work out. Many mitigation sceptics work in such organisations and this seems to guide their erroneous thinking of how science works.

Red Teams galore

Science is organised in thousands of Red Teams already. Every national weather service is independent. Some countries even have multiple ones. That makes about 200 Red Teams. I do not know of any weather service that does not find it is warming.

If you are a conspiracy theorist, thinking they are making up the warming, these 200 Red Teams would have to coordinate intensively to make sure that the weather variability is smoothly correlated from one country to its neighbours, that the climate modes (El Nino, North Atlantic Oscillation, etc.) look similar in a region, including [[teleconnections]] to other continents, including modes and teleconnections not known at the time, and make sure that the spatial pattern of the long-term warming fits to the physics and all the other observed variables.

Proof of how devious climatologists are is that no communications were intercepted showing this biggest coordination project in human history. Scientists may be too stupid to fool WUWT, but they are at least smarter than the NSA and HCSQ.

In Germany alone there are easily over a hundred university groups and research institutes (partially) working on climate and climate change. There are close collaborations with related fields, from statistics and physics to geography and economics. Also counting these there could be hundreds of Red Teams in a medium-sized country like Germany already.

Scientific progress

Every single of these groups would love to be the one to show there is a problem that needs attention. That is why scientists become scientist. No one has ever gotten funding saying: my field has solved all problems, but I would like to keep on doing what I have always done.

Many of these groups only partially work on climate change. Meteorology is a much larger field than climatology; Meteorology is directly needed to save lives and avoid economic damages, while climatology "only" produces politically inconvenient results about the future.

Thus for many of these groups it would be no problem whatsoever if they showed evidence for the most extreme case that the world is not warming or humans are not responsible. On the contrary, that would be an enormous boost to their reputations and they can use that social capital to work on related problems.

Explicit Red Teams are for organisation working like planning economies. Science is a free market system.

Climate “sceptics” sometimes give the impression that they think that a single study will vindicate their political battle and settle it once and for all. Reality is that there are many different lines of evidence that it should be warming, that it is warming (see graph below), and that we are creating the increase in atmospheric CO2 (see also additional arguments by Richard Alley) and the warming.

A challenge to one of these lines of evidence will have to refute a lot of evidence and this will normally take years. It would not be enough to disproof one line of evidence, but all of them should fall. Not only the instrumental temperature record would need to be wrong, but the melting of glaciers, the sea level rise, the start of spring, the decrease in Arctic sea ice and so on.

If I had the winning idea that something is fundamentally flawed, it would take decades of research until we again have a consensus on how the climate is (not) changing, just like our current understanding of climate change took decades to centuries to develop.

Science or PR?

John Christy:

One way to aid congress in understanding more of the climate issue than what is produced by biased “official” panels of the climate establishment is to organize and fund credible “Red Teams” that look at issues such as natural variability, the failure of climate models and the huge benefits to society from affordable energy, carbon-based and otherwise. I would expect such a team would offer to congress some very different conclusions regarding the human impacts on climate.

The benefits from affordable energy do not change the human impacts on climate. That kind of sloppy thinking hints at the Red Team being intended as a PR shop.

As an aside, the benefits of energy are naturally large and the energy sector used to be substantial, but it is nowadays just a few percent of the economy. Even if another energy source would be a lot more expensive that would nowadays hardly change the economy.

The idea that climatology does not study natural variability is ludicrous. I used to think I was not a climatologist because I had never computed an empirical orthogonal function ([[EOF]]) to study the North Atlantic Oscillation. The biggest group in the World Climate Research Program is CliVar, studying, hold it: Climate variability. What the mitigation sceptical movement knows about natural variability, from El Nino to the QBO, they know from the scientific community.

The "failure of climate models" presupposes models failed. If we assume they failed and cannot be used to assess the quagmire we are in, the uncertainties would be even larger. We would still have a lot of physics and observations of the (deep) past to make clear that climate change is real. Uncertainties can go both ways and mean higher risks. This should thus be a topic the Red Team should avoid.

The suggestion to only study the "failure of climate models" is a strange way of doing science. Normal science would be to study what the main discrepancies between models and observations are, try to understand what the causes are and then try to fix this. Sounds like Christy is more interested in the first step than in understanding and fixing.

This fits to his approach to his UAH tropospheric temperature dataset. Already in the 1990s when the UAH dataset still showed cooling and contained major errors (did not take the change of the orbit of the satellites into account, had a minus wrong in the software, etc.) he blamed models for the differences without first trying to understand the reasons.

Chinese calligraphy with water on a stone floor. Do not dig in, but let your position flow with the evidence.

The main reason for the discrepancy is that there is an amplification of temperature changes in the tropical upper troposphere. The stronger long-term warming this causes in models is called the "tropical hotspot". Christy's UAH temperature trends do not show it. It is seen in the stronger response to El Nino in the tropospheric temperatures, both in models and in observations. The hotspot is observed in the radiosonde winds and in a recent carefully homogenized radiosonde temperature dataset.

Christy seems to be happy with claiming that the models failed. I would not ignore the possibility that there are remaining errors in the UAH estimates, especially after all the errors that have already been found. Had I been Christy I would have tried to make my claim that the models are the problem stronger by trying to understand the reasons. Which processes are wrong in the models that produce this hotspot, but should not? That would then need to be something that does produce the hotspot signs in the winds and also shows the amplification for El Nino on shorter time scales. That sounds hard to me, but Christy had a few decades to study it.

A similar audit Red Team gave us the Berkeley Earth initiative, funded by the Heartland Institute funded by the Koch Brothers. Judith Curry was part of that, but got out before the politically inconvenient result was published. Anthony Watts, the host of the mitigation sceptical blog WUWT, claimed he would accept the results no matter what. That vow lasted until Berkeley Earth found the same result as any other global temperature dataset. Call me sceptical that this Red Team hullabaloo will have any impact on the US climate "debate".

I am sure it is a coincidence that the terms Red Team and Blue Team fit to the political configuration of country were the climate "debate" takes place, the United States of America. A country were the elite stays in power by pitting the Red Team and the Blue Team against each other. The main reason to support the Red Team is to at least not be the Blue Team. In Georgia the Republicans courted voters with the slogan: Make a liberal cry. Just the thing the coal and oil oligarchs would love to promote in the US climate "debate". Just the thing science should not want to replicate.

Scientists are humans, one of the main biases a scientists needs to fight against is not dig in and defend your own old studies, claims, methods or datasets. I respect scientists that developed good homogenisation methods and talk about their downsides and the strengths of other methods. I respect that because it is hard and promotes scientific progress. To force a scientist to take the Red or Blue position strengthens defensiveness and thus hurts progress. It is political thinking. In science the evidence determines your position. It is the end, not the start.

At least John Christy seems to mostly think of doing research, Judith Curry and Steven Koonin want to make jet another audit or report. This would an alternative IPCC report, following the example of the NIPCC report, the Nonsense IPCC, an embarrassing regurgitation of zombie WUWT myths authored by tobacco stooge Fred Singer. The NIPCC report is clearly PR. If the Red Team advocates think they have a scientific case, one would expect them to seek funding for science that would convince scientists, rather than bypassing the scientific literature and going straight to the public.

Red and Blue Team framing not only contributes to the politicization of science, it also promotes the false-balance media narrative of two equal groups. Judith Curry, John Christy and Steven Koonin should be debating Peter Wadhams, Guy McPherson and Reddit Collapse.

An important political strategy of the mitigation sceptical movement is to pretend that the science is not in yet. That is why they keep on claiming there is no scientific consensus, provoking consensus studies that find that nearly all scientists and articles agree on the basics. (And then complain that consensus exists.)

Once people understand that scientists agree there is a problem, they want solutions. Some extremists in the mitigation sceptical movement may claim that solar and wind energy spell the end of civilization, but that is a hard sell. Sun and wind have enormous and bipartisan support in the USA.

The 97% of climate scientists who agree on the basics include many conservative scientists. That there is a problem is not a partisan issue. How to solve it, that is politics. The Paris climate agreement was signed by nearly 200 countries and thus many conservative governments. They accept that climate change is a real problem. European conservative parties may be less active, but do not deny there is a problem.

In Europe only Trumpian racist parties deny there is a problem. That the climate "debate" is mostly an American problem shows that the problem is not conservative versus liberal, that it is not a lack of scientific evidence, it is not a problem of the communication of science. The problem is the corrupting influence of money in US politics and media. A Red Team will not solve this.

There is PLENTY of ROOM within the climate science to hold extreme views, both about the science and policy. However, there is no room for the lunacies of unicorns, for sun nuts, for folks who don't get chaos, for radiative physics deniers
Steve Mosher

Details please

ATTP asks very good questions on how this exercise should be organised. "Who would make up the team/teams?" Who are the organisers, the arbiters? Who selects them? What are the criteria? How do they want to prevent normal scientists from joining the Red Team? Scientists normally determine themselves what they work on. Should they be forced to waste their time on this? "How would this work be funded?" Is special funding needed because Red Team ideas do not have sufficient merit to be funded normally? "How would the programme be assessed?"

With all those Red Teams in science, I am curious how the Red Team advocates want to make sure their Red Team will be on their political side and stay there. Writing explicitly into the funding conditions that the applicant has to have a history of deceiving the public in the media and producing bullshit blog posts would probably be too much honesty.

Who would be in the Red Teams? Will they fund conspiracy theorists like Tim Ball and Christopher Monckton and corporate smoking shills like Fred Singer and Steven Milloy? That honesty would be a great sight.

Funding

The tension is clear when John Christy writes:

Decisions regarding funding for “Red Teams” should not be placed in the hands of the current “establishment” but in panels populated by credentialed scientists who have experience in examining these issues.

The people with experience and credentials are the "establishment" in science.

The mitigation sceptical movement could maybe organise a Red Team Blue Team exercise themselves and in that way figure out what their position is beyond the only thing they agree on: that climate science is wrong. That way they can demonstrate how enormously valuable this new scientific method is and it would have the added benefit that they waste their own time. I am curious whether they can come to an agreement about whether the Earth is warming or cooling and whether the greenhouse exists and CO2 can produce warming.

I look forward to a detailed proposal for Red Team research and would expect that it will demonstrate how ludicrous the idea is.

There is no real need for government funding of Red Teams whatsoever. Every large oil and coal corporation has a huge incentive to show climate science wrong. If they thought that there was a chance of one in a million that climate science was wrong, they would pour millions into studying that rather than in PR misinformation campaigns by networks of thoughtless tanks.

If John Christy was making the case that science funding should not only be based on scientific merit, but that part of the funding should also be based on what is politically important he may have a case. Already a considerable part of the funding goes to studies that inform (local) governments and companies on how to adapt to climate change. This is mostly a service to society and scientifically less inspiring. If it weren’t so hard to do, this would be a task for engineering firms.

Similarly, it would be politically important to study the tropospheric temperature trend in more detail for its importance in the American climate “debate”. It has nearly no scientific value because the tropospheric temperature series is so short and buggy. Each update there are huge changes in the trend estimates and the two available series show large differences, although they both try to take into account the currently known problems of the raw data. There is also no societal need for this dataset; no one lives in the tropical troposphere. Consequently only a few people at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and at Remote Sensing system work on these datasets once in a while. Occasionally there is some help in finding the problems with this data from external scientists.

More independent research in this field, leading to the development of new high quality tropospheric temperature datasets would be politically valuable. Maybe that should also be a funding consideration.

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Politics is not rational

Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election because people are not rational. Except for racists and millionaires it would have been in the best interest of everyone to have voted for Clinton. But we are not rational, we do not always look at our best interests. Real humans are not homo economii.

That includes me. As a scientist it is my job to keep a cool head. I hope you will excuse me for thinking I do my job reasonably well. I like to see myself as rational, but naturally I am not, especially learning about the ultimatum game shocked my self-perception.

It is a very simple and pure economic game. Reducing a problem to its essence like this has the elegance my inner physicist loves. In the ultimatum game, two players must divide a sum of money. The first player has to propose a certain division. The second player can accept this division or reject it. If the offer is rejected both players do not receive any money. In its purest form, the experiment is played only once and anonymously with players that do not know each other.

Time for a short thinking pause: What would you do? How much would you offer as player one? Below which percentage would you reject the offer?

Initially, I wondered why economists would play this game. Surely player one would would offer 50/50 and player two would accept. But that was my irrational side and my missing economic eduction. A good economist would expect that player two would accept any non-zero offer: it is better to get something than nothing, and that thus player one will make the smallest possible offer. Reality is in between. Many people offer 50%, but many also do not. These offers below 50% are, however, also regularly rejected. Player two is apparently willing to hurt himself to punish unfair behavior. This game and many variations and similar games lead to the conclusion: humans are not purely selfish, but have a sense of fairness.

As a student of variability, for me the key aspect of the ultimatum game is its non-linearity. You either get something or nothing. In case of nonlinear processes, such as radiation flowing through clouds, variability is important. A smooth cloud field reflects more solar radiation than a bumpy cloud field with the same amount of water. The variability of the cloud water is important because the flow of radiation through clouds is a non-linear process.

By sometimes rejecting low offers, player two gets better offers from player one. This is especially clear when the game is played multiple times with the same players. In the beginning quite large offers are rejected to entice larger offers later in the game. How humans evolved a sense of fairness to be able to also benefit from this in one-off games is not yet understood. Fairness is surprising because a cartoon version of evolutionary theory would predict that altruism is only possible among kin. But the empirical evidence clearly shows that fairness belongs to being human. (Just like competition.)

Knowledge will come only if economics can be reoriented to the study of man as he is and the economic system as it actually exists.
Ronald Coase

Fairness is but one emotion that it not rational, not "productive". It offers some protection against unfairness, such as wages going lower and lower. Offering and accepting jobs are yes-no decisions under uncertainty for both parties. If there is one term that is often used in labor conflicts it is "unfair wages" or "unfair labor conditions". All the while economists wonder why unemployment is higher than the friction unemployment of rational actors and blame anything but their faulty assumptions.

Anger is also not productive, but fear of anger forces the haves to make better offers to the have-nots. Amok runs are not productive, mass shootings are not productive, suicide attacks are not productive. I would venture that independent of the proclaimed rationalizations, they signal a lack of justice and fairness.

The American election was also seen as unfair by many. The two parties had both selected historically unpopular candidates. Had the historically unpopular Trump not run, Clinton would have been the least popular candidate since polling started on this question. The main reason to vote was not to get other candidate.

With both candidates and parties so unpopular, with the historical unpopularity ratings of Congress and Washington the enormous partisan tribalism in America is surprising. The main pride of both tribes seems to be that they are at least not members of the other tribe. The lizard people have managed to pit the population against each other, while they loot the country and drag the world down. Do help me in the comments how "they" did this.

Many felt the election was a trap. In such a case one can expect irrational behavior. Or as Michael Moore elegantly said: Trump is the human Molotov cocktail they could throw through the window of the establishment. I am afraid the voters will find it was the window of their own house.

One mistake the Democratic establishment made in their support for Clinton was to expect rational behavior. They learned about economics and its political counterpart [[public choice theory]]. Both theories assume rational behavior. The Democrat establishment assumed that the working class had no other options than to vote for them because the Republicans would make their lives even worse.

Nic Smith, a self-described "white trash hillbilly from the holler" from coal country, on Trump voters: They are desperate to believe in something.

In a rational world the establishment would be right and player two would take the non-zero Clinton offer, in the real world people are fed up with begin treated unfairly and seeing inequality and corruption jointly grow for decades. In the real world having to choose the lesser evil, election after election, over and over again, makes it ever more likely the voters will sulk. That the Democrat establishment had just put up their middle finger to half of their party during the primaries likely also did not help putting people in a more rational mood.

Last year's presidential election was an extreme example, but a two-party system invariably mean that many people do not feel represented and are dissatisfied. [[A transferable vote]] would do a lot to fix this and gives the voters the possibility to vote for their candidate of choice without losing their vote.

A two-party system is also much more prone to corruption. A large part of the politicians will be in save districts and do not have to fear the wrath of their voters. Where the voters do have some choice, the corporations only have to convince politician D that they will also bribe politician R and both can do so with impunity.

A corrupt two-party system is not much better than a one-party system. In a representative democracy with more than two parties there would be real competition and the voters could vote for another politician.

What can we do to break this ultimatum game? The rhetoric and tribalism in America is unique. Humans are social animals and our group is important to us, but the US tribalism in beyond normal. For example, 34% of Trump voters being willing to say Trump's inauguration was the biggest ever is not normal.

Tribalism and emotions are not good for clear thinking and needs to be fought. The only thing we can change is how we act ourselves, we should try to reduce unnecessarily antagonizing people. When you have to say something bad about the corrupt Republican politicians in Washington make clear you mean them and do not use the term Republicans, which also means every single member of the group, most of whom also reject corruption.

I am only talking about who you address. Please stand your ground, there is no need to keep on moving our position in the direction of corrupt unreasonable politics. That only signals you do not believe in your ideas. If there is one thing frustrating about US politics it is weak corporate Democrats continually moving in the direction of ever more corrupt Republican politicians in the name of appeasement and in reality because they have the same donors.

Given the lack of a real choice one can also not blame the voters for every character error of their candidate and for all policies. For fashion icon Ken Bone the election was a choice between his personal benefit as coal worker and the greater good. Many Trump voters voted for Obama before. Some people say they voted Trump expecting him not to be able to execute his racist plans because they are unconstitutional. That may be a rationalization and for me Trump's overt racism would be a deal breaker, but not all of his voters are automatically bigots, even if many clearly are.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Martin Luther King, Jr

Most people simply voted the party they always voted. There are people who have their health insurance via the Affordable Care Act who voted Republican and are likely to lose coverage. They thought the Republicans would not do something as barbaric as repealing the ACA without replacement. Thousand of people will die every year when that happens, but the repeal means that billionaires will have to pay less for healthcare and they own the Republican politicians, so I am less optimistic they will not do it.

Do not go around calling every Trump voter a personalized Donald Trump, make them an offer they cannot refuse. Especially the Democratic establishment should stop blaming everyone but themselves for not voting for their inevitable candidate. Rather than scolding their voters, they should make the left an offer they cannot refuse.

That offer would be a non-corrupt candidate. That would be an offer Democrat and Republican voters alike would find it hard to refuse. It is, unfortunately, the one compromise the Democratic establishment is least willing to make. The people in power are in power because they are good at selling out to corporations.

This video gives a good overview of the corruption in America and how it impacts normal people via politics and the media. Since corruption became worse the workers no longer shared in the increases in productivity and the politicians respond to the wishes of the donor class and not the working class. Readers from the USA may think political corruption is normal because it slowly and imperceptibly grew, but in its enormity it is not normal. It was much better before the 1970s it is much better in other advanced nations.

Fortunately several initiatives have sprung up after the Trump election debacle and after Sanders showing it is possible to campaign for the presidency without taking donor money. As an offspring of the Sanders campaign Our Revolution will run a large number of candidates under one political and organizational platform. Similar, but very clear in their wish to primary and get rid of corporate Democrats, are the Justice Democrats.

The non-partisan group Brand New Congress also wants to help (Tea Party) Republicans that do not accept money into Congress. I would love to see more of this on the Republican side. In Europe conservative parties are conservative, but not corrupt and not bat shit crazy. They are people you can have an adult conversation with and negotiate. They may prioritize the environment less, but do not childishly claim climate change does not exist. Getting non-corrupt Republicans into office may even be worth the time of US liberals.

The group 314 Action (inspired by π) work to get more Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) people into politics. If you love money and power, science is the weirdest career choice you can make. Thus I would expect the scientists that run for office to be mostly clean. The climate "debate" shows that nearly all climatologists are not touched by corporate corruption, while there are strong incentives for coal and oil companies to bribe them.

Let's work to end corporate rule, get the corporation out of politics and send them back to take care of the economy.

Following The Ninth: In The Footsteps of Beethoven's Final Symphony.

Saturday, December 31, 2016

Clickbait articles dividing an already divided country even more

Yougov and The Economist just published a poll on political conspiracy theories that was designed to produce outrage and clicks on stories how stupid the other tribe is and how we rational people are above that. Secular Talk, a popular high-quality YouTube pundit, made two stories out of it: "50% Of Dems Think 'Russia Tampered With Vote Tallies' To Elect Trump" and "Nearly Half Of Trump Voters Believe Hillary Is Pimping Kids."

In the poll Americans were asked: "Do you think the following statements are true or not true?". One of the conspiracies was: "54. Conspiracy Theories – Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President."

The problem was that people could only chose between: "Definitely true", "Probably true", "Probably not true", and "Definitely not true". There was no option: "I do not know". "I do not know" would have been the rational answer. "Definitely no evidence" would be another fine option that was not available.

Especially given the lack of audits of the votes and the undemocratic active resistance of some Republican politicians against audits "probably not true" is as wrong as "Probably true". As an aside, in a democracy there should be no doubt that votes are counted correctly, every citizen should be able to follow the trail from the filled in ballot the voter put into the ballot box to the final count and audits should actually count paper ballots by hand and naturally be free/automatic.

The strangest people are those that said "Definitely true" or "Definitely not true".

The article made the story more juicy by combining the 17% of Democrats answering "Definitely true" with the 35% answering "Probably true" to "50% of Dems".

Conspiracies do exist, if there was more than one person involved in making this poll, my personal conspiracy would be that the question was crafted to produce artificial outrage, clicks and revenue.

Another conspiracy question was: "52. Conspiracy Theories – Leaked email from some of Hillary Clinton’s campaign staffers contained code words for pedophilia, human trafficking and satanic ritual abuse - what some people refer to as ’Pizzagate’."

Most of the Pizzagate Republicans (40%) said "probably true" rather than "definitely true" (9%) and again had no way to say "I do not know". Most American likely should have answered "I do not know" because they do not follow the conspiracy media that closely.

Such pedophilia conspiracies naturally exist, but in case of Pizzagate there is no evidence for it. "Definitely no evidence" would be the right answer, but that could again not be answered.

The question is also badly phrased. The hacked emails did contained the word "pizza", which is claimed to be a code word used by pedophiles. Thus if you take the question too literally you could even answer that the question is true.

These answers are sad, but no way as bad as the headline "Nearly Half Of Trump Voters Believe Hillary Is Pimping Kids" suggests. The poll is the saddest part of this story.

Takeaways:
1. If you see a poll, check the exact formulation of the question and the answers, especially when it is not a standard question that is regularly asked and the poll is thus more likely intended to generate clicks.
2. Even reputable sources, like The Economist and Secular Talk, can be wrong.
3. large parts of the media make money manufacturing outrage. To reduce this do your due diligence before you spread an emotional story. If that means spreading less stories: fine. News is no longer scarce, quality is.

This polls was a way to produce clicks and divide an already divided country even more.

Saturday, November 19, 2016

Climate nightmares in America, dreams in Marrakesh

The voices of hate in this climate "debate" will be pleased to know that their enemy Michael Mann had "nightmares of a dystopian future — think Soylent Green or Mad Max". Mann told this Fusion for their story titled "These people are literally having climate change nightmares".

In the same story Dahr Jamail, a reporter who covers climate change, also recalls a quite dramatic nightmare: "It was simply a vision of a future Earth that was mostly barren of biological activity, one scarred by resource wars, and having seen a massive die off of humans, given we are already well into the sixth mass extinction event."

On Reddit a father wrote: "I have a 10 week old son and I'm terrified of his future. 4 years of actively ignoring climate change could mean never recovering. ... I'm just terrified." I prefer not to link to it, but someone even wrote to have suicidal thoughts because of climate change.

Climate change is a serious problem, but I see no need for such despair. We are on our way to solving the climate crisis. I do understand why people in America feel more despair being confronted daily with the most insane denial that climate change is a problem.

That is a classic nightmare. You are in a car sitting next to Lamar Inhofe behind the wheel. You see a cliff at the end of the road and try to warn Anthony Goddard that he should break. Instead Tim Delingpole speeds up because "gasoline is life", claims that cars are a product of the free market, that thus nothing can be wrong with them and Malcolm Nova turns the radio extra loud to make conversation impossible. You shout and shout, but the cliff gets closer and closer. You shout so loud that you lose your voice. The second part of the nightmare where you fall down an infinitely deep cliff is more relaxing.

Albeit it does move

My feeling is that many people are flipping out because they have the feeling nothing is done to combat the problem. Now already for over 3 decades. This is amplified by completely crazy people denying the most basic and solid facts as a way to avoid an adult conversation about solutions. If we would not act, the situation would become dire. Especially if we would react with the same denial, stupidity and anger to the problems created by climate change: New Orleans 2.0, climate refugees and conflicts over water. If that is your assessment of the situation, it is natural to be very worried.

I am more relaxed because I have the feeling we are acting. It helps that live in Germany were nearly all people are reasonable, including the conservatives. Even the people in my life who identify as climate "sceptics" are mostly reasonable. They just want so much climate change not to be happening and most are irrationally hopeful to one day find the "error", but they do not produce bullshit on an industrial scale like American blogs and think tanks.

Only the German racists deny there is a problem. It could always be even better, but Germany is part of the solution. That gives me a different perspective. I do not look at the continually increasing CO2 concentrations and temperatures, but at the enormous growth rates of renewable energy and the clear improvements in energy efficiency.

A lot is happening already. The last 3 years the emissions from industry and fossil fuels were stable, that used to happen only during world-wide recessions. That is a sign that renewable energy and energy efficiency policies and technology are starting to work. Most of the global new power generating capacity and investments are already carbon free. The next step is that also most new production is renewable, then we need to electrify the rest of the economy and use the market and technology to bring supply and demand together. It is still a long way, but I feel it is moving.

If anyone had a nightmare the last week, Donald Bannon likely had weird orange hair. Then it is important to realise that America is no longer that important. To quote myself:

The main question is whether America's refusal to act will reduce the willingness to act in the rest of the world. America by itself is no longer a major player and only emits 16% of all greenhouse gasses. Inaction in America is thus bad, but if limited to several years, and Trump is 70, a limited problem. The emissions should be zero in 2050. The danger is when this goes on for too long and when the rest of the world would be discouraged from acting or when international conflict makes global collaboration impossible.

Especially after the global climate conference in Marrakesh, we can realistically hope that the rest of the world will stay on course. The world is united to defy Trump's climate threat. The Marrakesh Action Proclamation says every country has an "urgent duty to respond". Many countries are fighting back. The French presidential candidate just threatened America with a carbon import tariff of a 1 to 3% on US goods. Sounds reasonable and ~~is allowed~~ likely to be technically possible by the international (WTO) trade rules. The Paris treaty can be updated so that the more climate-conscious economic power houses in the USA, such as California and New York, could join.

"We aspire to transform the #Kingdom into a solar energy hub" H.E. Khalid AlFalih said at the @UNFCCC High Level National Statement #COP22 pic.twitter.com/TkhOwEgXCf
— Saudi Arabia at COP (@KsaCop22) 16 November 2016

European Union Climate Commissioner Miguel Arias Canete said: "The world is on the brink of an energy revolution." The rest of the world may well see it as a great business opportunity that the USA is missing out on the technologies that will shape the next century in this critical moment. Maybe Trump will even speed up the international energy transition.

The oil companies ExxonMobile and BHP Billiton have asked Trump to accept the Paris climate treaty. Next to 360 other big businesses and investors. Even petrostate Saudi-Arabia has less problems with [[corporate capture]] than the US Republican party and welcomes the Solar Age.

Republican spokesman Bill O'Reilly seems to fear a backlash and said on his television show that Trump "should accept the Paris Treaty on climate to buy some goodwill overseas".

The state of the climate

But, let's take a step back. Some people worry about 4°C of warming or more with the justified nightmare scenarios that come with it. 4°C for 2100 and more afterwards is what science expects in case of no action. The figure from the IPCC report's summary for policy makers show no action in red and a very optimistic action scenario in blue.

The Climate Action Tracker expects a warming in 2100 of 3.6°C with current policies and of 2.6°C if countries stick to their Paris pledges (Intended Nationally Determined Contributions; INDCs). The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that the pledges would mean between 2.9 and 3.4°C by the end of this century. A recent study published in Nature projects warming between 2.6-3.1°C in 2100 with Paris pledges.

The big unknown is what countries will do beyond 2030. The Paris pledges do not go beyond 2030, but first countries have started defining their goals for 2050. The idea of Paris is that every 5 years the pledges become stronger if that is necessary. In that respect one should mainly look whether the next years are more or less on track.

Citizens of the world will have to demand of their governments to make these promises reality, but I feel it is fair to say that the worst worst-case scenarios are off the table. With Trump's election some of the best-case scenario's are unfortunately also less likely. I still have my personal best-case scenario where renewable energy becomes so inexpensive that the carbon bubble bursts and the Paris promises on energy are over-fulfilled without any further government action.

I might be too optimistic, but I think we already passed the point where solving the problem has become inevitable. It sounds like top economist and Bernie Sanders adviser Jeffrey Sachs shares my assessment: The transition to renewable energy has passed a tipping point. A positive tipping point.

Technological and organizational progress is going rapidly and makes energy efficient technologies and renewable energy much less expensive. The graph below shows the numbers for technological improvements from the US Department Of Energy (DOE).

And no, there is no price saturation in sight. It may look that way in the above graph because we will not get to zero; the same percentage gains at the end looks smaller because the costs themselves are lower. The logarithmic plot below shows prices keep dropping.

At the end of 2015, renewable capacity in place was enough to supply an estimated 23.7% of global electricity, with hydropower providing about 16.6%. Most important are likely solar and wind, they grow fastest and have the largest potential. At the moment they are at 1.4% of the world’s final energy consumption. That means that now the rest of the energy sector starts to notice their growth, which were the corporate resistance in the US comes from. Wind is growing by 14% every year and solar by 20%. 20% growth means doubling every 4 years, that is powerful growth. If we can keep that up that would mean: 1% (now), 2% (2020), 4% (2024), 8% (2028), 16% (2032), 32% (2036). It will likely gradually slow down, but it shows that it is possible to arrive at 100% soon, hopefully in 2050.

Mainstream environmental organizations such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth aim for zero CO2 emissions in 2050. The Paris treaty wants to achieve this in the second half of the century, while now in Marrakesh 47 developing countries have pledged that they would get all their energy from renewable sources before 2050.

The group Climate Mobilization pledges to fight for 100% reduction in CO2 emission in the USA in 2025. That would be fast and thus more costly. Personally I would be happy to pay that price, already for the clean air and to see less species going extinct. This mobilization could be a response to the insane radicalization of the US anti-environmental movement.

The picture on climate change is not quite as bleak as some claim, says @_richardblack https://t.co/ReciIWNfzS via @FT #COP22 pic.twitter.com/sP7YxUvBLS
— George Smeeton (@GSmeeton) 17 November 2016

Economist Jeffrey Sachs also expects that the U.S. will become a pariah state if Trump pulls out of Paris Climate Accord. That comes on top of the power loss from having an incompetent uninterested buffoon as president, a president that cannot give security guarantees because he likes to renegotiate deals, the damage to the US from cancelling the hard-fought global agreement on Iran's nuclear power program, and the transfer of power to China if the TPP is cancelled. Let's see if wrecking the climate is so dear to Trump that he is willing to pay that price. That is probably what Bill O'Reilly fears. That could mean less fresh and joyous wars and less dead Muslims. Let's see if Trump is willing to pay this price.

We had about 1°C of warming since 1900. Thus we are about halfway to the internationally agreed 2°C limit.

It will take time to transform the energy system, this is infrastructure that is build to work for decades, and the warming would continue for some time if we abruptly stopped emitting CO2. Because of the heat capacity of the oceans we are not at the equilibrium temperature yet that corresponds to the current CO2 concentrations; like it takes time until a water kettle boils because of the heat capacity of the water.

Combustion of fossil fuels produces tiny airborne particles (aerosols), which cool the temperature somewhat, once we stop with fossil fuels this would produce a little warming (~0.2°C).

If you take these delays into account, it will be work to stay below 2°C, but it is still possible to stay below it. One reason some people are freaking out is because some speak as if this 2°C level is a brick wall. This is not true. This limit is a political compromise. If changing the energy system were easy, we would have agreed on no more than 1°C or even less long time ago. It is a compromise between the costs of a fast transition and the costs of adaptation and the damages due to climate change.

I would personally have preferred a more ambitious compromise, but there is no brick wall or cliff at 2°C. Climate change will gradually become more risky. Similarly, it would reduce the risk if we could stay well below 2°C.

Climate change is a stressor. An important one because it stresses so many things that are important to us. Like climate change itself, these problems are solvable, we just need the political will to do so. What the impacts will thus be also depends on whether humanity gets its act together. If people like Trump are in power a Mad Max scenario is a much higher risk.

Another reason to freak out can be that the media, when they are not in denial, often over-hypes problems. A sane middle seems hard to find in the USA. To improve your information diet old fashioned books are the best place to start. RealClimate, a blog by actual climate scientists, and the information resources they point to, is also good start. To see whether current stories in the media hold up to scrutiny you can have a look at Climate Feedback, a collaboration of climate scientists fact checking stories in the media.

What to do?

Much anxiety comes from feeling helpless to do something. Thus being part of the solution reduces anxiety. Join an environmental group. If only to see there are like minded sane people. Very encouraging was that I have seen many people on Reddit asking what they can do. If enough people stand up, the net effect of the Trump shock could even be positive.

The US political system is a mess. We need to get money out of US politics. Trump will make this worse. He is already packing his cabinet with lobbyists. His tax plans and deregulation will further increase inequality, increase the power of the wealthy and give them more money to corrupt the political process. I like Wolf PAC, but there are many other groups working on this. Join the Democrat party (with some friends) and try to throw the corporatists out.

Banks are starting to worry about their influence on society. Bloomberg reports: "Rise of Populism Tops Anxiety List at Frankfurt Banking Meeting." They could stop bribing US politics and stop working for corporations that do this. Until they do so, join an ethical bank; their rates are competitive. I love mine.

When it comes to climate change itself, join 350 to divest fossil fuel companies. With the renewable energy age so close and the remaining carbon budget not allowing for new fossil fuel infrastructure, the economic case against fossil fuel investments is stronger than ever. New infrastructure that would need to be profitable for decades, well after Trump is dead.

Hopefully the states, cities, private sector and citizens will pick up the pace to compensate for the counter-productive behaviour of the federal government. It is likely more productive to focus on solutions and not climate change itself. Denying climate change has become part of their identity for many Republicans. There are no arguments that could convince these people to change their public position. However, renewable energy is, for example, immensely popular with everyone, also with Republicans. There are even green tea parties against attempts of state governments to help their cronies in the utilities and make it more difficult to install solar on the roofs of homes.

If you have money, investing in renewable energy (in the USA) now will be more useful than ever. It would decrease the market for new fossil fuel infrastructure and support solar and wind companies over the Trump bump. I would be surprised if anyone would start to plan for a new coal power plant at this time. It takes a long time until it is running and would need to run a long time. Trump is 70 years old and will not be around forever and after that the investment will make losses. Maybe even before that because of cheap gas and renewables.

The energy sector is nowadays only 6% of the global economy; it is thus easier than one may think to move it. Once wind or solar is running, nothing can compete with their marginal costs. The best way would be to join or start an energy cooperative with your friends and family. That gets more people involved.

Climate change is solvable and I am confident we will. The real problem, the big problem is not climate change. It is us, as Prince EA beautifully explains below.

Variable Variability