Do dissenters like climate change?

Ronald McDonald enjoying himself after Hurricane Katrina.

The kind of "conversations" I am having in the so-called climate "debate" made no sense to me until I asked myself the question whether climate dissenters might like climate change? Maybe a strange question, but it would explain a lot about the debate.

Take Watts Up With That (WUWT), the largest climate dissenter blog. The mainstream opposition of the IPCC. Every post I have read there on a topic where I am knowledgeable contains serious errors. The other posts are likely not better. HotWhopper finds errors on WUWT that make one cringe every single day.

But almost no one at WUWT seems to care about these errors. If anything they cheer the loudest when Lord Monckton has a guest post. These posts probably deserve the prize for the highest error density. Or as Barry Bickmore eloquently writes:

Lord Monckton is a living symbol of the fact that many climate change contrarians will believe anything that seems to support their case, even if it’s coming from the most ridiculous source.

And it is not just that science is overtaxing these people, also very simple to check cases of misquotations of a paper on global water vapor or misleading statements about the web traffic of WUWT are accepted without critique. I informed the WUWT audience of the misquotation, but no one cared. If I may quote one of my last comments:

[N]o one here complained about being misinformed. No one said, I do not believe in climate change, but Forest Mims misinformed me and that is wrong. I do not like being misinformed and I feel that this gives our community a bad reputation.

They were happy to discuss any other typical climate ostrich meme or ask: "Do you feel any amount of shame for helping promote death?" The clear misquotation was not interesting, however. That is not what one would expect from a group that wants to develop an alternative to mainstream science.



In discussions with dissenters I get the impression that they make a determined effort not to understand what the others write. This is especially visible on twitter where you only have 140 characters and cannot be very precise. With colleagues and people that accept the science, this imprecision is no problem, they make an effort to understand you and normally manage to interpret the text in the intended way. I try to avoid such "discussions" on twitter, but see others try and end up in endless twitter streams that go nowhere. As an example, see this post by AndThenTheresPhysics about a discussion on twitter and elsewhere on whether greenhouse gases warm or cool :-) the Earth surface temperature.

I've now spent abt 2 weeks of my time trying to convince various pple that the greenhouse effect exists. I think that's enough now.

— There's Physics (@theresphysics) March 9, 2014

Such unproductive discussions are unlike anything I know and especially unlike anything I am used to among scientists. Climate dissenters, for example, often dodge the discussion by moving to new topics before agreement on first topic is made. That does not give the impression that the dissenter wants to understand the reason for the difference of opinion. And it does not show much confidence that one's opinion holds up to scrutiny. In the scientific community, you stay at one topic, try to find out where you agree, where you do not agree and why you do not agree. Until you arrive at statements that are so simple that rational persons can agree upon whether it is true or not or what research would need to be done to verify them.

This part of the rant is getting too long. Let me just state that I do not have the impression that the climate dissenters want to understand the climate better. They mainly seem to want to have some fake "arguments" for discussions, to have some fodder to annoy greenies.

This impression fits to the large differences in acceptance of the science between political groups. The rather remarkable consensus of the US Tea party supporters is that global warming does not pose much risk, for example. This suggests that people arrive at their opinion about climate science based on their political positions and not based on arguments. It could be that the dissenters just find science largely irrelevant compared to their political views and good relations with peers who hold similar views. However, it may go beyond that, I have the impression that the climate dissenters do accept the science and are just mocking opposition, because they do not trust themselves to say that they like climate change. Partially their liking may also be subconscious. Humans are complex.

Salmonella infection

Before I explain why climate dissenters may like climate change, I have to make a detour and explain how a Salmonella infection works. I do not want to compare climate dissenters with a disease, but I need the mechanism. If someone knows a similar evolutionary mechanism for cute fluffy animals with big eyes, please tell me so in the comments, then I will replace this part.

Evolution is a beautiful topic. Many people just think of survival of the fittest and in the worst case think that this fitness has to do with building as much muscle as possible in the fitness studio. The intricacies of evolution are well illustrated by the famous creed: "Evolution is cleverer than you are." Also the evolved behavior of Salmonella about with I learned a year ago via a Nature article (pay-walled, press release) is full of beautiful surprises.

Salmonella attacks the intestinal lining of the gut and thus provokes an immune response. What I had not realized is that this immune response actually helps Salmonella to reproduce. While the immune response also hurts Salmonella, it hurts the other bacteria much more and thus makes the niche for Salmonella larger. They are suffering, but the others suffer more. Relative suffering is their survival strategy. That is the mechanism that is important for this post.

Producing the proteins that provoking the immune system comes at a cost. Thus Salmonella bacteria that do not produce them can reproduce faster. Mutant Salmonella bacteria that are just as good in withstanding the immune system, but do not help in provoking it, thus have a fitness advantage. From the perspective of a sick human it is somewhat strange, but from the Salmonella perspective the active bacteria are altruists that help the other Salmonella and the passive mutant Salmonella are the parasitic free-riders.

Once the mutant Salmonella gain the overhand, the immune system goes down and the other bacteria again grow strong and remove the mutant Salmonella, which is the end of the infection.

Relative suffering

This mechanism was what made me wonder whether some people might like climate change. Yes, it will bring suffering over everyone, but they may think that others will suffer more than they will (and their children) and that climate change thus improves their relative fitness.

Is obesity bias evolutionary?

On the Huffington Post and on his own blog, David Katz, MD, asks the important question why so many people are obese nowadays. His answer does not sound convincing, he argues that there a bias toward obesity is an evolutionary advantage.

This might have been possible, but a simple calculation shows that this is unlikely. A man who is 100 kg too heavy and 50 years old, to a first approximation ate 2 kg per year too much. Two kilograms of fat is 1400 Cal and thus comparable to what one eats in 4 days to one week, depending on your, height, weight and level of activity. In other words, this man ate only about one or two percent more than he should have. You may increase this number somewhat to account for the fact that a larger body also needs more energy. Still the additional amount eaten by an overweight person is small and will be hardly noticeable in day life.

In the times that humans were hunters and gatherers, it should have been easily possible to eat a few percent more than usual. The year to year variability in the availability of resources is large; on the negative side think for instance of floods, droughts and grasshopper plagues. A human that is able to survive in a bad year, should easily be able to hunt or gather double his need in good years. One would expect the maximum amount of food a person can find is much more than a few percent more than the average needed. Otherwise, a human with a bit of bad luck would soon starve to death and be removed from the gene pool.

An idea to combat bloat in genetic programming

Introduction

Genetic programming (Banzhaf et al., 1998) uses an evolutionary algorithm (Eiben, 2003) to search for programs that solve a well-defined problem that can be evaluated using one number, the fitness of the program. Evolutionary algorithms are inspired by the evolution of species by natural selection. The main difference of this search paradigm, compared to methods that are more traditional, is that is works with a group of candidate solution (a population), instead of just one solution. This makes the method more robust, i.e. less likely to get trapped in a local minimum. These algorithms code their solution as a gene. New generations of solutions are formed using sexual (and a-sexual) reproduction. Sexual reproduction (crossover of genes) is emphasized as it allows for the combination of multiple partial solutions into one, thus using the parallel computations made by entire population, making the use of a population less inefficient as it would be otherwise.

Bloat and evolution

One of the fundamental problems of genetic programming (GP) is bloat. After some generations (typically below one hundred), the search for better programs halts as the programs become too large. The main cause of bloat is generally thought to be the proliferations of introns. Introns are parts of the program that do not contribute to the calculation that is made, e.g. a large calculation that is multiplied by zero in the end, or a section that start with: if false then. Additionally, bloat can be caused by inefficient code, e.g. two times x=x+1, instead of x=x+2.

In genetic programming, the linear genes are typically converted into trees or lists with lines of code. Some other coding methods are also used, see Banzhaf et al. (1998). Performing a simple crossover on the genes would almost certainly result in an illegal program. Therefore, crossover is performed on a higher level, e.g. two sub-trees are exchanged between the sets of genes, or sections of program lines are exchanged. This way the child-program is legal code, but still, it is often bad code, and its results are not very similar to its parents. As a consequence, evolution favors bloat at the moment that it becomes hard to find better solutions. In this case, it is better for the parents to get offspring that is at least just as fit as they are, as getting less fit children. The probability to get equally fit offspring is better in large programs (with a small coding part) than in small ones (most of which is useful code), as in large programs it is more likely that the crossover operator does not destroy anything. The problem of bloat is thus intimately linked to the destructive power of crossover.