I'd like to pose a question. Is "epistemic closure" anything more than a newfangled synonym for "narrow minded"? Is not accusing conservatives of epistemic closure equivalent to spicing up the tired chestnut that conservatives are old-fashioned fuddy-duddies unable to escape the past? This is not exactly an innovation in thinking so much as putting old wine into a new bottle. Conservatives, beginning, I believe, with Burke, have addressed the tendentious accusation a hundred-thousand times or so. As active verbs, there's not a farthing's worth of difference between "to narrow" and "to close." "Epistemic" also seems to me to be no more than a tarted-up version of "mindful." Dragging in a Greek root to replace a Germanic one may give an appearance of being an un-thought-of conjecture, while in fact owning little of substance that is new and exciting or even much worth pondering.
An alternative way of analogizing the matter might be that whereas invoking the spectre of epistemic closure pretends to be a tactical exercise in aid of improving Conservatism, it would be more accurate to characterize it as a strategic attack on Conservatism itself, a hackneyed polemical posture at that, which by stealth diverts the merits of any controversy into naked reconsideration of principle, to fruitless questioning of core conservative presuppositions, leaving, not incidentally, Liberalism's openness to novelty, which an incorrigible ideologue such as yours truly views as little more than a deplorable taste for nihilism, blessedly undisturbed.
In sum, for us navel gazing, while for the opposition, given the parlous state of their present political prospects, the considerable comfort of watching conservatives battling a wacky auto-immune disorder. What a godsend to the Jonathan Chaits and Paul Krugmans of the the world.
What ranckles is that Manzi seems to be too charitable to what appears to be a fraud of collossal proportion, that looks to be a
toxic assault on the American economy, for no good purpose
It's a lot more than that. It's an assault on the economic system of what used quaintly to be called the Free World, an offensive which has demonstrable roots in the migration of anti-capitalists into the Green movement in the 1980s, when, even prior to their de jure collapse, the abysmal failures of socialist command economies could no longer be chewed, swallowed, and digested quite so readily on the Left as had been the rule for the previous 65 years. The socialist avenue of criticism having been closed, it was then on to the environmental boulevard, as if to say "Let's see what havoc may be wrought in a more upscale neighborhood."
And Colin, Manzi's "'most important' argument" is meretricious, relying as it does on a wholly manufactured ambiguity in the meaning of a single word.
Also, your response to Margo seems to be hand-waving. The warmists made the predictions. No one forced them to. The question of the time scale of when the elevation of temperature might take place was addressed by them: the temperature increases would continue and not only would continue but would accelerate. How you can maintain straightfacedly that those were not scientific predictions is incomprehensible. That was what their computer models were telling them, in no uncertain terms, too, models based on the cited climate-sensitivity figures I supplied. Their figures built into their models yielding their predictions. Precisely how is that unscientific? How political?
Yes, certainly, now they're all over these hidden variables, as one might describe what clearly amounts to a series of after-the-fact rationalizations, such as oceanic acidification. When Keith Trenberth, a leading warmist, writes, as he does in one of the climategate emails: "The fact that global temperatures are not rising and that we have no idea why they're not is a scandal," it speaks volumes. Now Trenberth is on to the hypothesis that the heat is somehow hiding in the oceans. A desperate, easily refuted distraction, since ocean temperatures are not rising and infrared radiation cannot penetrate more than a fraction of a millimeter into sea water. So maybe it's hiding in his basement. Ridiculous ad hoc patches to a theory that is tottering.
Your complaint about my going on about AGW is noted. I can be prolix, Lord knows, but each item I introduced is aimed at refuting, either directly or indirectly, Manzi's objections. If Manzi needed more space to go beyond the strawman arguments he actually did present then perhaps he should have used a venue beside the Corner. You probably know the adage: a solid argument cannot be too long, nor a weak one too short. Manzi's brevity may speak to no more than that.
For Manzi to introduce a quibble over the word "catastrophic" is at best coy and at worst seriously ignorant (I don't think he's ignorant). We do not have to wonder at the definition of "catastrophic" at the center of the debate. And the prospect of out-and-out catastrophe is in fact the beating heart of the actually existing global-warming controversy. Warmists have helpfully spelled out the meaning of catastrophe in the most lurid terms imaginable: sea-level rises of a meter and a half with submersion of whole archipelagos and large portions of entire nations (picturesque Holland? just a memory), total desertification of sub-Saharan Africa, destruction of half the food-producing capabilities of enormous parts of the globe leading to the starvation of "hundreds of millions" of people, disproportionately in the Third World. Northern India and western China, home to a billion people, will to all intents lose their water supplies. Species extinction will occur on a scale not seen since the Precambrian. Simultaneously, social conditions will worsen dramatically, descending to a hobbesian state of nature, and, in historical terms, will do so practically overnight, spawning disease, war, and famine. In brief, we are asked to contemplate the Four Horsemen at full gallop, roaming the globe and pillaging like Huns. If there is a better word than "catastrophic" to describe the spectacle, please supply it.
And you know what? If the "climate sensitivity" proposed by AGW is in fact correct, which is to say, four-to-six degrees of warming per CO2 doubling per century, all those horrors likely will occur! Without such melodramatic prospects in the offing should we "fail to act," without such nightmares - a list that could with little effort be extended - soberly announced, there most likely would have been no Rio Summit, no Kyoto Protocol, and no Copenhagen Conference. The governments of the world would have been derelict in their duties in the extreme and possibly deserving of a visit by a firing squad had they ignored such predictions, which moreover were grounded in supposedly impeccable science.
If AGW didn't assert what it plainly does, who would much care that the earth has been warming (moderately) since about 1850, which no one "denies"? They would care about as much as people did before AGW entered the scene, definitely from stage left, that in the previous three centuries the earth had been cooling or that in the three centuries before that surface temperatures were rising, and so on, back as far as ingenuity may discover. Which government would concern itself over a secular oscillation one degree in amplitude?
Of course the scientists themselves - most of them anyway - do not speak of war, famine, and plague. That task has been delegated to eager and excitable flunkies in the media. No, Mann and Jones and Santer merely have to announce their pat four-to-six degree scenario and all the rest follows as the night the day. (A notable exception is Jim Hansen at NASA, by far the most influential alarmist in the United States, who has called for trying coal-company executives at the Hague for crimes against humanity.)
Earlier IPCC assessment reports (AR1 and -2, mid-to-late 1990s) had produced no great alarm. But that was before the AGW ball really got rolling, to be precise, before the Mann hockey stick (1998). That single, bogus* graphic electrified the climatological community and galvanized calls for immediate and draconian government intervention because it seemingly demonstrated for the first time that (1) previous oscillations in temperature were much smaller than had been believed and in any event were not global in extent, and (2) since the industrial revolution commenced in earnest, the rate of temperature increase has growed like Topsy.
For the first time (AR3, 2001), the IPCC included in its "Advice to Policymakers" chapter, the conclusion that "it has been determined that global warming is accelerating and that it is probably manmade." Lest there be further pointless quibbling, the meaning of "probably" is spelled out in the report's discussion of confidence intervals: "probably" means "with 95% confidence." The basis for the manmade part was, and still substantially is, a patent fallacy that scientists used to be taught to avoid as one would poison, i.e., post hoc ergo propter hoc. As temperatures have risen, so has industrial activity, and we blithely conclude that the one has caused the other! Putting aside the magnitude of the temperature anomaly at the heart of the controversy, industrial production is still rising, but the temperature curve is either flat or decelerating, aka cooling.
To resume, for signatories of the petition cited by Levin to reject the notion of "catastrophic " consequences is to reject everything about AGW theory that is not trivial, leaving only a climatological platitude: Now the earth's getting warmer. Manzi must know that, so I wonder if he isn't the one with some 'splaining to do as to just why he resorts to an equivocation on "catastrophic" that is really quite unnecessary. It has been defined for us in 72 point Boldoni Bold by those concerned.
As to the first objection to Levin imputed to Manzi, you are correct in saying that it is the weaker, but you do not do justice to its feebleness by that rather tame assessment. As Levin points out, 9000 of the signatories have PhDs in some field or other. But where in Manzi's criticism do we learn the following: that of the 2500 names appended to AR3 and 4, reports that wholeheartedly endorse AGW, only about 700 are even scientists, or that of the 700 fewer than 70 are climatologists, or that only 60% of the 70 - 42 scientists, count 'em - thought human activity was responsible to any appreciable extent, or that, when AR3 was being prepared, none of the dozen or so panelist drafts had concluded that the warming was "probably manmade"? That last particular and deliberately incendiary observation had been inserted, most likely by Ben Santer, after the final iteration of the chapter drafts had been circulated and without being resubmitted for vetting, in clear violation of the IPCC's own report-preparation protocols.
Given such textual manipulation, the impact of which on policymakers was both importunate and consequential, Levin's suggestion of some kind of conspiracy in operation is neither unreasonable nor an example of "wingnuttery." Manzi must have known or should have made it his business to know that that particular feat of report-writing legerdemain is no deep, dark secret. The President of the National Academy of Sciences was so concerned that in 2005 he submitted an op-ed piece to the WSJ (shamefully, the only newspaper that would run it) denouncing the insertion as tantamount to scientific fraud. The rest of the media yawned and ignored him. Don't you think that an occasion for raking Levin's petition and alleged conspiracy mongering over the coals might also have been the appropriate time to mention such blatant shenanigans? Open-minded is not how I would characterize an omission so pointedly relevant to his criticisms of Levin. In sum Manzi's argument can fairly be described, I think, as backhanded reinforcement of science-is-settled bromides that are more questionable today than ever.
The reasonable suggestion that it is vitally important to strengthen the weaker argument in any controversy was, so far as I can see, first urged by Protagoras (fl., 5th cent. BC). It may be only a coincidence that Protagoras is also the most famous and influential member of the school of Greek rhetoric today called Sophism. I for one am not sure that it is.
* We can be pretty sure that even the IPCC is now allergic to Mann's 1998 work because in AR4, which appeared after McIntyre's exposure of its methodological shoddiness, the graph doesn't appear at all! Think of it. The work that was easily the single greatest excuse for pandemonium breaking out after 2001, apearing all by its four-color lonesome on the cover of AR3, is buried in AR4 in a couple of footnotes. Mann et al. '98 had served its purpose, worked its damage, and henceforth could be scrupulously ignored.
I quite understand your reticence, Colin. Were the positions reversed, I might feel no differently. But to bring this discussion back into the context of your original post, why did you so uncritically sympathize with Manzi's position vis-a-vis Levin? You may try to evade this, but I don't think you can: to the extent that Manzi has a substantive criticsm of Levin is to the extent that Levin actually does or fails to do what Manzi claims unambiguously ("wingnuttery") that Levin does and fails to do, namely, he attacks the weakest AGW argument, not the strongest. But as I said above and repeat here, Manzi does so without even mentioning what that argument might be. So how on earth did you assess his persuasiveness with regard to Levin's inadequacy? It seems impossible to me, unless - and please don't take this the wrong way - you are sympathetic to Manzi because, judging solely from his attack on Levin's book, he appears to know no more than you do of the topic.
That is why I have been insisting that taking a sort of I-distrust-both-houses attitude, as you seem to, simply won't do. The substance of the scientific argument is all there really is to the argument. AGW is first of all a scientific dispute. A position with integrity must be staked out there, and not loftily eschewed or put to one aside, before one may even begin to grapple with the political side of things. The two approaches are not independent. They implicate each with each; but the scientific truth of the matter should, I'd argue, clearly must and should take precedent over the opinions of political casuistry.
As for strangelet, I don't much care. I thought the last lines were pretty funny though. And I can't believe you're really worried about sparing the feelings of someone who called Barbara a moron and a liar. Say, didn't she matter-of-fact-ly cretinize someone, too?
I don't have to be an authority nor you a physicist for you to grasp what everyone on both sides of the debate has admittted: AGW proponents have failed to forecast average global temperature for the past 15 years. Failed miserably. What more condemnation of a physical theory could be supplied? Surely you've heard of the law of indirect reasoning, which is no more demanding of the average intelligence than is elementary logic? Affirming A affirms B if and only if denying B denies A. A is AGW, B is increased average global temperatures. B has been falsified. Therefore A has been falsified. That is not a stretch. That is the heart of scientific reasoning. Other serious examples of modus tollens (indirect reasoning) falsifying the AGW hypothesis could be adduced. They are a bit more technical, but not very. For instance, every - and I do mean every - AGW model ever put forward unambiguously requires a suddenly elevated temperature at an altitude of 12 km and between the tropics. They have been searching for this thermocline break for going on 20 years now. They have used radiosondes and satellites. There is not a sign of it, not so much as a milli-kelvin's deviation from smoothness. The falsification of the theory here evidenced is as conclusive as can be imagined since this is one of the very few nonstatistical, basic-physics predictions that the theory of AGW makes. The natural buoyancy of CO2 demands that the "hot spot" must be there and only there, but it's not.
Furthermore, you do not, in your agnosticism, address the main line of my comment, seemingly fail to appreciate it an iota: AGW is not a theory of gravity or anything remotely like it. The proof of AGW is almost entirely statistical and thus suffers from all the attendant infirmities of such an approach and is more than usually open to abuse.
Jeff ID at Air Vent (noconsensus.wordpress.com) is definitely a political conservative, as he troubles to remind readers once in a while. He also rejects the term "skeptic" as applying to himself, describing himself as posssibly a "lukewarmist," a puzzled one, puzzled by how much bad science on the subject of AGW has been naively swallowed by governments and media.
Steve McIntyre at ClimateAudit.com is very guarded about his politics (for good reason, too). Before retiring, he was a mining engineer specializing in statistical evaluations of geological data (I think).
Tony Watts (wattsupwiththat.com) is a meteorologist, and is also, at least to my reading, pretty unforthcoming about his political views.
By the way, the reason that McIntyre is so significant - he's the man, along with Ross McKitrick, who thoroughly undermined (pun there) Michael Mann's infamous hockey-stick graph, which graced the cover of and appeared no fewer than seven times in the IPCC's Third Assessment Report - is that far more than most people appreciate, the proof of AGW, if you can call it that, is statistical.
Isolating what climatologists call a "temperature signal" in an enormous welter of disparate data, collected under maddeningly varying conditions (nothing like laboratory work at all), as well as a millennium in scope, is almost entirely a statistical exercise. Sure, there is a deterministic physics of an embarrassingly rudimentary sort lurking in the background. In fact, McIntyre some time ago challenged Mann and Hansen and the rest to present a physical argument, not a computer model that assumes CO2 forcing (warming), starting with first principles, that would proceed from any given concentration of atmospheric CO2 to the predicted and apocalyptic 4-degree-celsius warming in the next half century. No one has ever taken him up on it. For reasons I've discussed before, it cannot be done; and that can very nearly be known apriori.
The chief AGW proponents are not physicists, nor do they appear in their writings to be very much interested in physics even though the problem posed in AGW is at heart a radiative-physics problem. More pertinently, they are not statisticians even secondarily! They are trying to get a certain temperature curve that matches their motley data sets, and, shockingly enough, they use off-the-shelf statistical software packages for the most part, tweaking them and the data until the curve fits without really understanding or even much caring about - ignorance is bliss - the numerous mathematical restrictions on the use of the software, some of them very difficult if not impossible to do justice to. Even then, what they succeed in producing with their tweaking is a hindcast of the raw data, the same data that they have repeatedly massaged, homogenized, and adjusted! - the terms used are numerous - not a forecast, which is where the rubber meets the road. Their forecasts, beginning in 1998, as even warmists admit, have been next to worthless for at least 15 years, judged by surface temperature measurements, and even all the way back to 1979 if satellite data is admitted, namely, no evidence of statistically significant warming can be found. It required an expert statistican like Steve McIntyre to "take the cunning in their craft [Romans 3]."
The main point to take away from this, I am suggesting, is that if more people of responsibility understood just how deeply AGW arguments are statistical guesswork, I think they would be quite alarmed and wonder just what sort of train they're being urged to board.
Reading strangelet's provocations is like reading a tag cloud. She thinks, if the word may be abused in this way, in keywords and slogans. She writes ad copy, jingles. An extended argument with, you know, sentences one after the other is apparently beyond jingle girl's powers of concentration. But running together snappy phrases will no more illuminate a discussion than striking a series of matches will a room. Have I mentioned her cute-as-a-bunny experiments in typography?
"medhlevi sufist transhumanist," she scribbles in self-confession. Where are the long walks on the beach? Her resume is a perfect example of nothing masquerading as something. (Who is "medhlevi" by the way? If she refers to Rumi here, his name was Mehlevi.) To conjoin Sufism with Transhumanism is moreover quite obscene. Islamic Sufism has been around since the Seventh Century; but it is really much, much older. It likely represents what prior Persian religious philosophy and practice have contributed to Islam. As is the tendency among mystics, Sufis strive for face-to-face union with God, here and now and whilst still in the plain old human form we all currently share. I've read a good deal of Idries Shah, and what wee wee cummings thoughtlessly mingles is utterly foreign to Sufism, according to which we needn't evolve into some transhuman stage to achieve spiritual enlightment, "to pierce the black light," as Sufis have expressed it. We have all the equipment we need right now to achieve the end intended. Technology or technognosis has no more to do with Sufism in the 20th Century than it did when Rumi was writing in the 13th. Aiming to physically transform ourselves into something else altogether is a species of Satanism to an honest Sufi.
Transhumanism does have a lot to teach us about our little visitor, though, who, not unlike dysmenorrhea, arrives here every 28 days or so, bringing cramps and a bloody mess. Have any of you ever seen, let alone read, H+, the transhumanist movement mag? I remember seeing the cover of the first issue and mistaking it for a copy of Vogue. A strikingly banal image of what was supposed to be a woman, a transhuman woman, utterly indistinguishable from a manniken, a pathetic cartoon - but acne free! That is what jingle girl is really on about, the androgyne adolescent's fantasy of never having to grow old, of always being a size 4. That's right, the vampire fantasy. And of course, college and university attendance and affiliation, which these days has become an increasingly lengthy bout of extended adolescence, must loom large in the juvenile imagination as some sort of eden. So many smart people. So much to think about!
So naturally, such tastes invariably run to the eugenic, which the child seems to think is what happens whenever two people are attracted to each other and procreate. That special bit of nonsense she advanced earlier, in all seriousness it appears, giving every indication that she feels her definition is a model of concision. The term eugenics was only invented in 1883, so there's scant excuse for confusion in the matter. It had, and I believe still does have, a pretty straightforward meaning: deliberately incentivizing reproduction of superior specimens of humanity while discouraging the, ugh, less fit. It's all pretty disgusting and inhuman at core because of, well, all of the selecting and deselecting that has first to be got out of the way. Of course, as we know, it's been tried with some enthusiasm, but sadly with mixed results, here and there.
Those stunted obsessions lead to another: Sarah Palin. For all the obvious reasons Palin infuriates the jingle girl. Some of it has to do with Sarah Palin herself, and I think girlish envy of a beautiful woman should not too quickly be ruled out. More, much more, I'd bet, has to do with Trig Palin, a child with trisomy, whose mother knew its condition when there was plenty of time to prevent its dysgenic contribution to the race. Trig and Transhumanism? No way, Jose. Hatred and contempt is all that a loving mother of a trisomic child deserves, and jingle girl pitches in with a will, returning to Palin, bidden to or not, again and again, like a dog to its vomit.
Fittingly enough, her other specialty is fortune-cookie prognostication. She is eager to share with us what will happen in 20 years or 40 or 50 years, how this that or the other thing has to happen. Is there a more worthless form of argument?
Conservative efforts to alter this situation – American society with its head twisted ever further around at its neck – might begin with the understanding that belief or disbelief in the greenhouse effect, global warming, and other properly scientific matters cannot be a political issue in a free society: Only how we go about addressing scientific questions can ever be.
Here Colin has grasped the nettle. It is not, however, as if he is the first. The Danish writer Bjorn Lomborg has been saying since before the so-called climategate "ruction" that the critical issue to be addressed, even granting the alarmists' position, is how best to mitigate the effects of global warming (implied here is the sentiment "whatever its cause"). Is there, he's asked, some alternative to allowing the IPCC to dictate the solution, which is basically to subject every sector of a national economy to the quixotic goal of preventing the hypothesized four-degree rise in global average temperature? Lomborg thought there was a better use for our dollars, for which opinion - he was previously considered a moderate "warmist" - he was raked over the coals by incensed "Greens." In other words, it is not as if alternatives to "we're all doomed unless we act yesterday" have not been broached. They have simply gotten zero traction in today's media environment.
There is a more important point to be advanced here, a subtle form of question begging. Colin's remarks, quoted above, clearly imply that the scientific question of belief or disbelief in AGW and the political question of what to do about it are separable. As a matter of plain logic, that cannot be so. Unless one has already come to an opinion on the credibility of the science - pro-AGW, anti-AGW - why would one waste 10 minutes designing "solutions" that involve mind-boggling expenditures, to say no more? If there is no cause of action, then logically there need follow no action. The science must be settled first before embarking on plans to revolutionize the global economy. Therefore, the question of whether or not the science is "settled" is paramount. Open-mindedness or, which is worse, the wish to appear open-minded, is a radically insufficient reason for entertaining what may be, and in my opinion is, a load of crap. I have elsewhere given at some length my reasons for dismissing AGW out of hand, so I will not repeat them here unless asked to do so.
This controversy cannot be primarily about process. The substance of the argument for AGW must be addressed first. It's almost as if critics of just-say-no to AGW are befuddled or intimidated by the demands of assessing the scientific claims and so, perhaps understandably, feel more comfortable defaulting to an "if there's smoke there must be fire" posture. If an idea is radically unsound, however, nothing is gained by humoring its proponents. Indeed a great deal of actually existing damage must ensue if one does.
Having just read the Manzi NRO piece for the first time and Levin's response, I am baffled by the point Colin seems to take away from them. Manzi does not discuss any science anywhere, not a smidgeon, not an idea, not a shadow of a ghost of an idea on global warming, anthropogenic or otherwise. Yet weirdly, Colin actually sees Levin's riposte as evidence for Manzi's argument, namely, conservatives like Levin attack their opponents' weakest argument, not their strongest, and so discredit themselves. In this case at least, that is ridiculous. No scientific argument, I repeat, is even outlined by Manzi, not a strong argument for AGW nor a weak one against it. Nothing, zilch.
There is advanced, however, a pathetically gullible argument from authority. Manzi cites various national academies of science public positions on global warming. This may be incredibly difficult to follow, but hang on: such statements are not scientific arguments any more than Sense of the Senate resolutions are laws. The only scientists whose opinions should matter are the climatologists actually doing global-warming research for a living. But then that butts us right up against a nasty bottleneck problem: for the last 20 years the relevant departments, which are not that large to begin with, have been leading the global-warming charge. Their budgets have become critically dependent on the receipt of large amounts of money - global research is expensive - not to enrich themselves, but simply to keep their jobs lubricated. As a result, no AGW skeptic can get a position, much less tenure, in any university with such a research program, and that is no overstatement. Careers have ended abruptly for attempting otherwise. The notion that "big oil" or similarly situated whipping boys are supplying the money for basic climate research is preposterous. The sums advanced by governments and liberal foundations and international organizations like the UN's IPCC dwarf any private money by several orders of magnitudes, tens of billions of dollars over the past decade versus millions.
How on earth might one conclude that what is in Levin's book falls short with respect to AGW solely on the basis of Manzi's column? Which is what makes Colin's attack on Levin scarcely to be believed, since he simply repeats Manzi's claims and also makes no scientific argument, nor does he even attempt to. Does Manzi know what the strongest argument for man-made global warming is? The weakest? The strongest and weakest against? I don't know. He gives absolutely no evidence of it in his NRO piece, so why defend him as if he does? And why give the totally misleading impression that Manzi has bested Levin on substance anywhere beside his own mind?
@ Sully:
Well done!
In the next to last line, I suggest altering "rule" to "ruling." It scans better and strengthens the metaphor at "assize."
narciso wrote:
Not merely "a con." The same ol' con.
I'd like to pose a question. Is "epistemic closure" anything more than a newfangled synonym for "narrow minded"? Is not accusing conservatives of epistemic closure equivalent to spicing up the tired chestnut that conservatives are old-fashioned fuddy-duddies unable to escape the past? This is not exactly an innovation in thinking so much as putting old wine into a new bottle. Conservatives, beginning, I believe, with Burke, have addressed the tendentious accusation a hundred-thousand times or so. As active verbs, there's not a farthing's worth of difference between "to narrow" and "to close." "Epistemic" also seems to me to be no more than a tarted-up version of "mindful." Dragging in a Greek root to replace a Germanic one may give an appearance of being an un-thought-of conjecture, while in fact owning little of substance that is new and exciting or even much worth pondering.
An alternative way of analogizing the matter might be that whereas invoking the spectre of epistemic closure pretends to be a tactical exercise in aid of improving Conservatism, it would be more accurate to characterize it as a strategic attack on Conservatism itself, a hackneyed polemical posture at that, which by stealth diverts the merits of any controversy into naked reconsideration of principle, to fruitless questioning of core conservative presuppositions, leaving, not incidentally, Liberalism's openness to novelty, which an incorrigible ideologue such as yours truly views as little more than a deplorable taste for nihilism, blessedly undisturbed.
In sum, for us navel gazing, while for the opposition, given the parlous state of their present political prospects, the considerable comfort of watching conservatives battling a wacky auto-immune disorder. What a godsend to the Jonathan Chaits and Paul Krugmans of the the world.
narciso wrote:
It's a lot more than that. It's an assault on the economic system of what used quaintly to be called the Free World, an offensive which has demonstrable roots in the migration of anti-capitalists into the Green movement in the 1980s, when, even prior to their de jure collapse, the abysmal failures of socialist command economies could no longer be chewed, swallowed, and digested quite so readily on the Left as had been the rule for the previous 65 years. The socialist avenue of criticism having been closed, it was then on to the environmental boulevard, as if to say "Let's see what havoc may be wrought in a more upscale neighborhood."
And Colin, Manzi's "'most important' argument" is meretricious, relying as it does on a wholly manufactured ambiguity in the meaning of a single word.
Also, your response to Margo seems to be hand-waving. The warmists made the predictions. No one forced them to. The question of the time scale of when the elevation of temperature might take place was addressed by them: the temperature increases would continue and not only would continue but would accelerate. How you can maintain straightfacedly that those were not scientific predictions is incomprehensible. That was what their computer models were telling them, in no uncertain terms, too, models based on the cited climate-sensitivity figures I supplied. Their figures built into their models yielding their predictions. Precisely how is that unscientific? How political?
Yes, certainly, now they're all over these hidden variables, as one might describe what clearly amounts to a series of after-the-fact rationalizations, such as oceanic acidification. When Keith Trenberth, a leading warmist, writes, as he does in one of the climategate emails: "The fact that global temperatures are not rising and that we have no idea why they're not is a scandal," it speaks volumes. Now Trenberth is on to the hypothesis that the heat is somehow hiding in the oceans. A desperate, easily refuted distraction, since ocean temperatures are not rising and infrared radiation cannot penetrate more than a fraction of a millimeter into sea water. So maybe it's hiding in his basement. Ridiculous ad hoc patches to a theory that is tottering.
Your complaint about my going on about AGW is noted. I can be prolix, Lord knows, but each item I introduced is aimed at refuting, either directly or indirectly, Manzi's objections. If Manzi needed more space to go beyond the strawman arguments he actually did present then perhaps he should have used a venue beside the Corner. You probably know the adage: a solid argument cannot be too long, nor a weak one too short. Manzi's brevity may speak to no more than that.
For Manzi to introduce a quibble over the word "catastrophic" is at best coy and at worst seriously ignorant (I don't think he's ignorant). We do not have to wonder at the definition of "catastrophic" at the center of the debate. And the prospect of out-and-out catastrophe is in fact the beating heart of the actually existing global-warming controversy. Warmists have helpfully spelled out the meaning of catastrophe in the most lurid terms imaginable: sea-level rises of a meter and a half with submersion of whole archipelagos and large portions of entire nations (picturesque Holland? just a memory), total desertification of sub-Saharan Africa, destruction of half the food-producing capabilities of enormous parts of the globe leading to the starvation of "hundreds of millions" of people, disproportionately in the Third World. Northern India and western China, home to a billion people, will to all intents lose their water supplies. Species extinction will occur on a scale not seen since the Precambrian. Simultaneously, social conditions will worsen dramatically, descending to a hobbesian state of nature, and, in historical terms, will do so practically overnight, spawning disease, war, and famine. In brief, we are asked to contemplate the Four Horsemen at full gallop, roaming the globe and pillaging like Huns. If there is a better word than "catastrophic" to describe the spectacle, please supply it.
And you know what? If the "climate sensitivity" proposed by AGW is in fact correct, which is to say, four-to-six degrees of warming per CO2 doubling per century, all those horrors likely will occur! Without such melodramatic prospects in the offing should we "fail to act," without such nightmares - a list that could with little effort be extended - soberly announced, there most likely would have been no Rio Summit, no Kyoto Protocol, and no Copenhagen Conference. The governments of the world would have been derelict in their duties in the extreme and possibly deserving of a visit by a firing squad had they ignored such predictions, which moreover were grounded in supposedly impeccable science.
If AGW didn't assert what it plainly does, who would much care that the earth has been warming (moderately) since about 1850, which no one "denies"? They would care about as much as people did before AGW entered the scene, definitely from stage left, that in the previous three centuries the earth had been cooling or that in the three centuries before that surface temperatures were rising, and so on, back as far as ingenuity may discover. Which government would concern itself over a secular oscillation one degree in amplitude?
Of course the scientists themselves - most of them anyway - do not speak of war, famine, and plague. That task has been delegated to eager and excitable flunkies in the media. No, Mann and Jones and Santer merely have to announce their pat four-to-six degree scenario and all the rest follows as the night the day. (A notable exception is Jim Hansen at NASA, by far the most influential alarmist in the United States, who has called for trying coal-company executives at the Hague for crimes against humanity.)
Earlier IPCC assessment reports (AR1 and -2, mid-to-late 1990s) had produced no great alarm. But that was before the AGW ball really got rolling, to be precise, before the Mann hockey stick (1998). That single, bogus* graphic electrified the climatological community and galvanized calls for immediate and draconian government intervention because it seemingly demonstrated for the first time that (1) previous oscillations in temperature were much smaller than had been believed and in any event were not global in extent, and (2) since the industrial revolution commenced in earnest, the rate of temperature increase has growed like Topsy.
For the first time (AR3, 2001), the IPCC included in its "Advice to Policymakers" chapter, the conclusion that "it has been determined that global warming is accelerating and that it is probably manmade." Lest there be further pointless quibbling, the meaning of "probably" is spelled out in the report's discussion of confidence intervals: "probably" means "with 95% confidence." The basis for the manmade part was, and still substantially is, a patent fallacy that scientists used to be taught to avoid as one would poison, i.e., post hoc ergo propter hoc. As temperatures have risen, so has industrial activity, and we blithely conclude that the one has caused the other! Putting aside the magnitude of the temperature anomaly at the heart of the controversy, industrial production is still rising, but the temperature curve is either flat or decelerating, aka cooling.
To resume, for signatories of the petition cited by Levin to reject the notion of "catastrophic " consequences is to reject everything about AGW theory that is not trivial, leaving only a climatological platitude: Now the earth's getting warmer. Manzi must know that, so I wonder if he isn't the one with some 'splaining to do as to just why he resorts to an equivocation on "catastrophic" that is really quite unnecessary. It has been defined for us in 72 point Boldoni Bold by those concerned.
As to the first objection to Levin imputed to Manzi, you are correct in saying that it is the weaker, but you do not do justice to its feebleness by that rather tame assessment. As Levin points out, 9000 of the signatories have PhDs in some field or other. But where in Manzi's criticism do we learn the following: that of the 2500 names appended to AR3 and 4, reports that wholeheartedly endorse AGW, only about 700 are even scientists, or that of the 700 fewer than 70 are climatologists, or that only 60% of the 70 - 42 scientists, count 'em - thought human activity was responsible to any appreciable extent, or that, when AR3 was being prepared, none of the dozen or so panelist drafts had concluded that the warming was "probably manmade"? That last particular and deliberately incendiary observation had been inserted, most likely by Ben Santer, after the final iteration of the chapter drafts had been circulated and without being resubmitted for vetting, in clear violation of the IPCC's own report-preparation protocols.
Given such textual manipulation, the impact of which on policymakers was both importunate and consequential, Levin's suggestion of some kind of conspiracy in operation is neither unreasonable nor an example of "wingnuttery." Manzi must have known or should have made it his business to know that that particular feat of report-writing legerdemain is no deep, dark secret. The President of the National Academy of Sciences was so concerned that in 2005 he submitted an op-ed piece to the WSJ (shamefully, the only newspaper that would run it) denouncing the insertion as tantamount to scientific fraud. The rest of the media yawned and ignored him. Don't you think that an occasion for raking Levin's petition and alleged conspiracy mongering over the coals might also have been the appropriate time to mention such blatant shenanigans? Open-minded is not how I would characterize an omission so pointedly relevant to his criticisms of Levin. In sum Manzi's argument can fairly be described, I think, as backhanded reinforcement of science-is-settled bromides that are more questionable today than ever.
The reasonable suggestion that it is vitally important to strengthen the weaker argument in any controversy was, so far as I can see, first urged by Protagoras (fl., 5th cent. BC). It may be only a coincidence that Protagoras is also the most famous and influential member of the school of Greek rhetoric today called Sophism. I for one am not sure that it is.
* We can be pretty sure that even the IPCC is now allergic to Mann's 1998 work because in AR4, which appeared after McIntyre's exposure of its methodological shoddiness, the graph doesn't appear at all! Think of it. The work that was easily the single greatest excuse for pandemonium breaking out after 2001, apearing all by its four-color lonesome on the cover of AR3, is buried in AR4 in a couple of footnotes. Mann et al. '98 had served its purpose, worked its damage, and henceforth could be scrupulously ignored.
@ CK MacLeod:
I quite understand your reticence, Colin. Were the positions reversed, I might feel no differently. But to bring this discussion back into the context of your original post, why did you so uncritically sympathize with Manzi's position vis-a-vis Levin? You may try to evade this, but I don't think you can: to the extent that Manzi has a substantive criticsm of Levin is to the extent that Levin actually does or fails to do what Manzi claims unambiguously ("wingnuttery") that Levin does and fails to do, namely, he attacks the weakest AGW argument, not the strongest. But as I said above and repeat here, Manzi does so without even mentioning what that argument might be. So how on earth did you assess his persuasiveness with regard to Levin's inadequacy? It seems impossible to me, unless - and please don't take this the wrong way - you are sympathetic to Manzi because, judging solely from his attack on Levin's book, he appears to know no more than you do of the topic.
That is why I have been insisting that taking a sort of I-distrust-both-houses attitude, as you seem to, simply won't do. The substance of the scientific argument is all there really is to the argument. AGW is first of all a scientific dispute. A position with integrity must be staked out there, and not loftily eschewed or put to one aside, before one may even begin to grapple with the political side of things. The two approaches are not independent. They implicate each with each; but the scientific truth of the matter should, I'd argue, clearly must and should take precedent over the opinions of political casuistry.
As for strangelet, I don't much care. I thought the last lines were pretty funny though. And I can't believe you're really worried about sparing the feelings of someone who called Barbara a moron and a liar. Say, didn't she matter-of-fact-ly cretinize someone, too?
@ CK MacLeod:
I don't have to be an authority nor you a physicist for you to grasp what everyone on both sides of the debate has admittted: AGW proponents have failed to forecast average global temperature for the past 15 years. Failed miserably. What more condemnation of a physical theory could be supplied? Surely you've heard of the law of indirect reasoning, which is no more demanding of the average intelligence than is elementary logic? Affirming A affirms B if and only if denying B denies A. A is AGW, B is increased average global temperatures. B has been falsified. Therefore A has been falsified. That is not a stretch. That is the heart of scientific reasoning. Other serious examples of modus tollens (indirect reasoning) falsifying the AGW hypothesis could be adduced. They are a bit more technical, but not very. For instance, every - and I do mean every - AGW model ever put forward unambiguously requires a suddenly elevated temperature at an altitude of 12 km and between the tropics. They have been searching for this thermocline break for going on 20 years now. They have used radiosondes and satellites. There is not a sign of it, not so much as a milli-kelvin's deviation from smoothness. The falsification of the theory here evidenced is as conclusive as can be imagined since this is one of the very few nonstatistical, basic-physics predictions that the theory of AGW makes. The natural buoyancy of CO2 demands that the "hot spot" must be there and only there, but it's not.
Furthermore, you do not, in your agnosticism, address the main line of my comment, seemingly fail to appreciate it an iota: AGW is not a theory of gravity or anything remotely like it. The proof of AGW is almost entirely statistical and thus suffers from all the attendant infirmities of such an approach and is more than usually open to abuse.
@ CK MacLeod:
Jeff ID at Air Vent (noconsensus.wordpress.com) is definitely a political conservative, as he troubles to remind readers once in a while. He also rejects the term "skeptic" as applying to himself, describing himself as posssibly a "lukewarmist," a puzzled one, puzzled by how much bad science on the subject of AGW has been naively swallowed by governments and media.
Steve McIntyre at ClimateAudit.com is very guarded about his politics (for good reason, too). Before retiring, he was a mining engineer specializing in statistical evaluations of geological data (I think).
Tony Watts (wattsupwiththat.com) is a meteorologist, and is also, at least to my reading, pretty unforthcoming about his political views.
By the way, the reason that McIntyre is so significant - he's the man, along with Ross McKitrick, who thoroughly undermined (pun there) Michael Mann's infamous hockey-stick graph, which graced the cover of and appeared no fewer than seven times in the IPCC's Third Assessment Report - is that far more than most people appreciate, the proof of AGW, if you can call it that, is statistical.
Isolating what climatologists call a "temperature signal" in an enormous welter of disparate data, collected under maddeningly varying conditions (nothing like laboratory work at all), as well as a millennium in scope, is almost entirely a statistical exercise. Sure, there is a deterministic physics of an embarrassingly rudimentary sort lurking in the background. In fact, McIntyre some time ago challenged Mann and Hansen and the rest to present a physical argument, not a computer model that assumes CO2 forcing (warming), starting with first principles, that would proceed from any given concentration of atmospheric CO2 to the predicted and apocalyptic 4-degree-celsius warming in the next half century. No one has ever taken him up on it. For reasons I've discussed before, it cannot be done; and that can very nearly be known apriori.
The chief AGW proponents are not physicists, nor do they appear in their writings to be very much interested in physics even though the problem posed in AGW is at heart a radiative-physics problem. More pertinently, they are not statisticians even secondarily! They are trying to get a certain temperature curve that matches their motley data sets, and, shockingly enough, they use off-the-shelf statistical software packages for the most part, tweaking them and the data until the curve fits without really understanding or even much caring about - ignorance is bliss - the numerous mathematical restrictions on the use of the software, some of them very difficult if not impossible to do justice to. Even then, what they succeed in producing with their tweaking is a hindcast of the raw data, the same data that they have repeatedly massaged, homogenized, and adjusted! - the terms used are numerous - not a forecast, which is where the rubber meets the road. Their forecasts, beginning in 1998, as even warmists admit, have been next to worthless for at least 15 years, judged by surface temperature measurements, and even all the way back to 1979 if satellite data is admitted, namely, no evidence of statistically significant warming can be found. It required an expert statistican like Steve McIntyre to "take the cunning in their craft [Romans 3]."
The main point to take away from this, I am suggesting, is that if more people of responsibility understood just how deeply AGW arguments are statistical guesswork, I think they would be quite alarmed and wonder just what sort of train they're being urged to board.
Reading strangelet's provocations is like reading a tag cloud. She thinks, if the word may be abused in this way, in keywords and slogans. She writes ad copy, jingles. An extended argument with, you know, sentences one after the other is apparently beyond jingle girl's powers of concentration. But running together snappy phrases will no more illuminate a discussion than striking a series of matches will a room. Have I mentioned her cute-as-a-bunny experiments in typography?
"medhlevi sufist transhumanist," she scribbles in self-confession. Where are the long walks on the beach? Her resume is a perfect example of nothing masquerading as something. (Who is "medhlevi" by the way? If she refers to Rumi here, his name was Mehlevi.) To conjoin Sufism with Transhumanism is moreover quite obscene. Islamic Sufism has been around since the Seventh Century; but it is really much, much older. It likely represents what prior Persian religious philosophy and practice have contributed to Islam. As is the tendency among mystics, Sufis strive for face-to-face union with God, here and now and whilst still in the plain old human form we all currently share. I've read a good deal of Idries Shah, and what wee wee cummings thoughtlessly mingles is utterly foreign to Sufism, according to which we needn't evolve into some transhuman stage to achieve spiritual enlightment, "to pierce the black light," as Sufis have expressed it. We have all the equipment we need right now to achieve the end intended. Technology or technognosis has no more to do with Sufism in the 20th Century than it did when Rumi was writing in the 13th. Aiming to physically transform ourselves into something else altogether is a species of Satanism to an honest Sufi.
Transhumanism does have a lot to teach us about our little visitor, though, who, not unlike dysmenorrhea, arrives here every 28 days or so, bringing cramps and a bloody mess. Have any of you ever seen, let alone read, H+, the transhumanist movement mag? I remember seeing the cover of the first issue and mistaking it for a copy of Vogue. A strikingly banal image of what was supposed to be a woman, a transhuman woman, utterly indistinguishable from a manniken, a pathetic cartoon - but acne free! That is what jingle girl is really on about, the androgyne adolescent's fantasy of never having to grow old, of always being a size 4. That's right, the vampire fantasy. And of course, college and university attendance and affiliation, which these days has become an increasingly lengthy bout of extended adolescence, must loom large in the juvenile imagination as some sort of eden. So many smart people. So much to think about!
So naturally, such tastes invariably run to the eugenic, which the child seems to think is what happens whenever two people are attracted to each other and procreate. That special bit of nonsense she advanced earlier, in all seriousness it appears, giving every indication that she feels her definition is a model of concision. The term eugenics was only invented in 1883, so there's scant excuse for confusion in the matter. It had, and I believe still does have, a pretty straightforward meaning: deliberately incentivizing reproduction of superior specimens of humanity while discouraging the, ugh, less fit. It's all pretty disgusting and inhuman at core because of, well, all of the selecting and deselecting that has first to be got out of the way. Of course, as we know, it's been tried with some enthusiasm, but sadly with mixed results, here and there.
Those stunted obsessions lead to another: Sarah Palin. For all the obvious reasons Palin infuriates the jingle girl. Some of it has to do with Sarah Palin herself, and I think girlish envy of a beautiful woman should not too quickly be ruled out. More, much more, I'd bet, has to do with Trig Palin, a child with trisomy, whose mother knew its condition when there was plenty of time to prevent its dysgenic contribution to the race. Trig and Transhumanism? No way, Jose. Hatred and contempt is all that a loving mother of a trisomic child deserves, and jingle girl pitches in with a will, returning to Palin, bidden to or not, again and again, like a dog to its vomit.
Fittingly enough, her other specialty is fortune-cookie prognostication. She is eager to share with us what will happen in 20 years or 40 or 50 years, how this that or the other thing has to happen. Is there a more worthless form of argument?
Here Colin has grasped the nettle. It is not, however, as if he is the first. The Danish writer Bjorn Lomborg has been saying since before the so-called climategate "ruction" that the critical issue to be addressed, even granting the alarmists' position, is how best to mitigate the effects of global warming (implied here is the sentiment "whatever its cause"). Is there, he's asked, some alternative to allowing the IPCC to dictate the solution, which is basically to subject every sector of a national economy to the quixotic goal of preventing the hypothesized four-degree rise in global average temperature? Lomborg thought there was a better use for our dollars, for which opinion - he was previously considered a moderate "warmist" - he was raked over the coals by incensed "Greens." In other words, it is not as if alternatives to "we're all doomed unless we act yesterday" have not been broached. They have simply gotten zero traction in today's media environment.
There is a more important point to be advanced here, a subtle form of question begging. Colin's remarks, quoted above, clearly imply that the scientific question of belief or disbelief in AGW and the political question of what to do about it are separable. As a matter of plain logic, that cannot be so. Unless one has already come to an opinion on the credibility of the science - pro-AGW, anti-AGW - why would one waste 10 minutes designing "solutions" that involve mind-boggling expenditures, to say no more? If there is no cause of action, then logically there need follow no action. The science must be settled first before embarking on plans to revolutionize the global economy. Therefore, the question of whether or not the science is "settled" is paramount. Open-mindedness or, which is worse, the wish to appear open-minded, is a radically insufficient reason for entertaining what may be, and in my opinion is, a load of crap. I have elsewhere given at some length my reasons for dismissing AGW out of hand, so I will not repeat them here unless asked to do so.
This controversy cannot be primarily about process. The substance of the argument for AGW must be addressed first. It's almost as if critics of just-say-no to AGW are befuddled or intimidated by the demands of assessing the scientific claims and so, perhaps understandably, feel more comfortable defaulting to an "if there's smoke there must be fire" posture. If an idea is radically unsound, however, nothing is gained by humoring its proponents. Indeed a great deal of actually existing damage must ensue if one does.
Having just read the Manzi NRO piece for the first time and Levin's response, I am baffled by the point Colin seems to take away from them. Manzi does not discuss any science anywhere, not a smidgeon, not an idea, not a shadow of a ghost of an idea on global warming, anthropogenic or otherwise. Yet weirdly, Colin actually sees Levin's riposte as evidence for Manzi's argument, namely, conservatives like Levin attack their opponents' weakest argument, not their strongest, and so discredit themselves. In this case at least, that is ridiculous. No scientific argument, I repeat, is even outlined by Manzi, not a strong argument for AGW nor a weak one against it. Nothing, zilch.
There is advanced, however, a pathetically gullible argument from authority. Manzi cites various national academies of science public positions on global warming. This may be incredibly difficult to follow, but hang on: such statements are not scientific arguments any more than Sense of the Senate resolutions are laws. The only scientists whose opinions should matter are the climatologists actually doing global-warming research for a living. But then that butts us right up against a nasty bottleneck problem: for the last 20 years the relevant departments, which are not that large to begin with, have been leading the global-warming charge. Their budgets have become critically dependent on the receipt of large amounts of money - global research is expensive - not to enrich themselves, but simply to keep their jobs lubricated. As a result, no AGW skeptic can get a position, much less tenure, in any university with such a research program, and that is no overstatement. Careers have ended abruptly for attempting otherwise. The notion that "big oil" or similarly situated whipping boys are supplying the money for basic climate research is preposterous. The sums advanced by governments and liberal foundations and international organizations like the UN's IPCC dwarf any private money by several orders of magnitudes, tens of billions of dollars over the past decade versus millions.
How on earth might one conclude that what is in Levin's book falls short with respect to AGW solely on the basis of Manzi's column? Which is what makes Colin's attack on Levin scarcely to be believed, since he simply repeats Manzi's claims and also makes no scientific argument, nor does he even attempt to. Does Manzi know what the strongest argument for man-made global warming is? The weakest? The strongest and weakest against? I don't know. He gives absolutely no evidence of it in his NRO piece, so why defend him as if he does? And why give the totally misleading impression that Manzi has bested Levin on substance anywhere beside his own mind?