Steal this blog

It's a been a long road, two years here at Kavanna. This blog has covered so much stuff, at length - sometimes too much length - that I can't remember everything. That's why we've put labels on all the postings. Click on a label link, and you'll get all the postings categorized under that label.

With all that climate craziness behind us, we'll be downshifting a bit here for the rest of the summer, and Kavanna will be updated about once every other day or so. We'll still be blogging on culture, religion, politics, science, popular culture, and anything else that strikes our fancy.

And be sure to visit our blogroll friends in the list to the right.

Climate and climate change: Envoi

And so we come to the end of the road we began 19 months ago. We've covered almost every aspect of Earth's climate, climate change, the "global warming" craze, basic physics, the nature of scientific theories and science as a culture, and the associated politics, policy, and journalism. Some points were only touched on, others explored at great length, with some tangents here and there. Friends tell me I need to turn the whole production into a book, and maybe I will one day.

On the blog, we'll continue to comment from time to time about climate trends, political trends, and related economic questions, which we haven't talked about much. This blog now has a significant list of climate-related posting labels that you can use to locate postings on particular topics. They include: climate, environment, geoengineering, global warming, polar, radiation, storms, thermodynamics. Some additional technical topics include: chaos, cycles, Fourier, statistics. And don't forget the excellent climate blogs to the right: ClimateAudit, CO2 Science, and World Climate Report.

The one-minute summary. Start with the Earth, its atmosphere and oceans, add the Sun and its heliosphere (solar wind and magnetic field). Add the most distinctive thing about Earth's climate, the presence of water and its astonishing repertory of possibilities. Radiation comes in from the Sun and is absorbed and re-radiated as infrared (IR) at a temperature of about 288 ^oK (56 ^oF = 15 ^oC). Carefully distinguish heat (some "thing" in a volume) from heat flow (some "thing" moving in some direction, with some magnitude). From the thermal point of view, the Earth is an open system; heat doesn't stop, but keeps flowing out, balancing what flows in. It's how it flows that determines the distribution of temperature and humidity.

Radiation (moving at the speed of light)
heat = heat flow

Matter (moving much more slowly): earth, water, air
heat ≠ heat flow

In matter, heat can:

• Flow through (conduction)
• Move with (convection)
• Transform phase (water)

The phases of water are:

Vapor ++evaporation/condensation++ Liquid ++melting/freezing++ Crystal (Ice) ++sublimation/deposition++ Vapor etc. *

From the mechanical and chemical points of view, OTOH, the Earth system is closed, if we draw the boundaries properly and include oceans, crust, air, and living things.

Heat flows upward through the atmosphere and, as radiation, back into space, determining its temperature, humidity, and cloud distribution by a mix of three types of flow: infrared-radiative, evaporation, and convection. The flow is not radiation alone, and the Earth's atmosphere is not a greenhouse, not even approximately.

Radiation is a steady flow, although it is strongly affected by clouds. Heat convection, an aspect of fluid turbulence, is chaotic and makes weather unpredictable beyond about two weeks ahead. On longer times, the weather exhibits fundamentally nonrepetitive patterns, in spite of the many aspects that do repeat. Atmospheric fluid turbulence is additionally complicated by the ceaseless transformations of water: liquid to vapor to condensed droplets (clouds) to heavier, falling droplets or crystals (precipitation), back to liquid or ice again. Fluid turbulence remains the hardest unsolved problem in physics. But not capturing the full nature and effect of clouds is probably the single largest failing in contemporary climate models.

Global warming as barely noticeable. The presence of IR-opaque gases in the clear air (water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane) directly modifies the outflow of radiation and indirectly modifies air and water temperatures, evaporation, clouds, precipitation, and convection. A "globally-warming" world would be one that looks a little more tropical, with the largest relative changes happening in the coldest regions (the poles) and during the coldest times (the winter). There's no evidence that this pattern is under way. The time scale is not decades, but a couple centuries, and on that scale and longer, plant and ocean absorption of carbon dioxide will have a major impact. It's very unlikely that a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration would have much of an effect, except perhaps for enhanced precipitation. A tripling would, but plant and ocean absorption might prevent that from ever happening.

Beyond doing nothing, the only justifiable countermeasure at this time is the easy and benign one of more and better plants, with CO2 emission taxes held in reserve in case of the problem is worse than foreseeable now. Scrap everything else, including cap-and-trade. Ignore Stern, Gore, and the other sanctimonious doom-preachers with wild, costly schemes.

I've never met anyone who hates trees, and there are plenty of places in the world that could use more of them.

Environmentalism, politics, and policy: My two cents. Another approach to the profoundly non-crisis nature of "global warming" is to take the cost and benefit estimates of a previous posting (Nordhaus), combined with the 2.5 kg of CO2 gas emitted for every gallon of gasoline burned. The estimated "global warming" cost (with the IPCC's too-high numbers) is about $8/metric ton CO2. A tax offsetting the cost would then be roughly (0.0025 metric tons CO2/gallon gasoline)*($8/metric ton CO2) = $0.022, or 2 cents per gallon. With a scaled-down estimate of the cost of "do nothing about CO2 emissions," we're below a cent per gallon.

Of course, you might say that such a cheap tax should not be objectionable, and, in a limited sense, you're right. If such a tax ever becomes necessary, our politicians would probably squander the revenue on some stupidity or other. But there's only one right place the money should go: to more trees and other plants. But that misses my larger point, which is the utter triviality of the issue compared to other, much larger, and far more pressing issues.

"Environment" and "energy production" are often lumped together, but they shouldn't be. Our economic and geopolitical need for a change to energy production (especially toward biofuels and nuclear power) is a real problem, right now, that needs addressing in the next few years, not the next couple centuries. The path forward is blocked partly by stupid and obsolete regulation. Pollution of the old-fashioned kind has not been much of a problem in wealthy countries for more than a generation. It is a major problem in "middle-income" countries undergoing rapid development, like China, Brazil, India, and Russia. Gases like carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapor are not exotic poisons from Planet Krypton; they're gases the Earth's oceans and plants have been processing for billions of years.

While I'm optimistic about the power of reason on such issues in the longer term, and especially on ordinary voters, I'm much less sanguine about our decadent political class (politicians, media, environmentalists), with their heavy investment in bad theories, misinformation, and guilt trips. Their unquenchable addiction to pseudo-apocalypses and pseudo-messiahs has become an active danger to our future. At the same time, they ignore real problems, especially ones they helped to create. The scientific case for "climate change" apocalypse, never strong, has disintegrated. The blind juggernaut of bad politics, bad journalism, and hollow Official Science rolls on. It's up to us to shut it down.
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* The atmospheric pressure is too high on Earth for ice to sublime directly from ice to vapor. But not on low-pressure Mars.

The polar bear disaster

A sidelight on the strange world of climate hysteria and what Official Science has done to us ....

The "endangered polar bear" fiasco is an example of the madness of manufactured ignorance. The new Bush administration position, putting forth polar bears as endangered but attempting to not invoke the full regulatory apparatus of the Endangered Species Act, is an incoherent piece of cynical political maneuvering. The decision should be rescinded immediately.

For one thing, the decision puts us in immediate conflict with Canada and other Arctic-bordering countries. Polar bear numbers are healthy, and there are more than a few decades ago. ("Endangered" means populations so small they risk not being able to reproduce themselves.) Instead, the new policy is based on speculative judgments about the Arctic ice shrinking, in spite of the facts: the polar bear population is growing, most of the Arctic ice is not shrinking, the Antarctic is cooling and icing up, and polar bears range mainly along shorelines. There's no scientific basis for considering them endangered.

Here's another case of the authoritarian mummery of Official Science putting science and scientists into conflict with policy. What do they say? What they know (polar bears aren't in danger)? Or, what they're supposed to say? Climate hysteria has loaded a wide range of scientific subjects, journals, scientists, and professional societies with this dilemma. Go with the politics, be a "player" - or stick to the science? As scientists, what do we traffic in: authority, or knowledge?

The Bushies seem to think this will mollify some people, but without giving the environmentalist wackos a powerful new legal lever to start demolishing industrial civilization in the US. Here again, we see a breakdown of governmental sovereignty, how government's power, especially under a weak president, becomes fragmented, taken over by narrow interest groups, and abused at the expense of society as a whole. The situation is frightening, opening up a limitless dictatorship over everyday life by environmentalist and legal fanatics.

Climate policy after Kyoto

The first thing to understand about the policy implications of abandoning the Official Science of climate is that we are, indeed, living after the Kyoto era. Many don't understand this yet.

In quick succession, the seeds of the "climate change" hysteria sown in the late 80s sprouted into the 1992 Rio "Earth" summit, followed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the UN, which started issuing regular reports in 1997. A pact committing signatory nations to significant reductions in CO2 emissions (back to 1990 levels) was negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, in 1996. Many countries ratified it. The US gave preliminary presidential approval. But a 95-0 advisory vote in the Senate rejected the treaty, and the Clinton administration didn't even bother to formally submit the treaty for Senate ratification.

The scientific case fails. The years since have seen two basic developments. One is that the case for current and recent warming, never more than ambiguous, underwent the rise and fall of the "hockey stick." For ten years, people were sent running around in circles by a manifestly wrong scientific claim. In the end, in 2007, the IPCC implicitly abandoned the "hockey stick" for the pre-1980s climate and implicitly acknowledged the long-term, four-to-five century warming trend (far too long to have anything to do with human activity), sticking to much more modest claim of post-1980 human-caused warming. Even this claim has fallen in the last decade, however, as mixed trends of the 1990s have been followed by a clear, decade-long cooling trend. The observational case for "global warming" fell apart. There was never any serious theoretical case.*

The Kyoto Accord fails. The other development is that, after a decade-plus of the Kyoto emission limits, the countries that ratified the Kyoto Accord have failed to come anywhere close to their quotas. They never will. The cost is politically unacceptable. In the last two years, the revolt against Kyoto has spread far and wide in the signatory countries, now that they're faced with "put up or shut up." The required reductions in CO2 emissions would inescapably shut down a noticeable chunk of industrial civilization. The people who devised and signed the Accord were, at least to an extent, aware of this. Always pious frauds, the Kyoto agreement and its regulatory system are dead.

Some economic comparisons. I'm fortunate in that Freeman Dyson, the last of those mid-century physics greats, has done most of the policy work for me in his recent and refreshingly honest article in the New York Review of Books. Couched as a review of two recent policy books on climate, Dyson lays out the issue with a scientific simplicity and clarity rare today. He summarizes the conclusions of economist William Nordhaus in considering the one- to two-century results of following various policies, given the IPCC's already exaggerated predictions.

Nordhaus estimates economic benefits and costs, both from climate change and policies designed to combat it and uses constant 2005 US dollars as his unit, with time discounting at 4% yearly. He estimates the absolute cost of "do nothing about CO2 emissions" at $23 trillion over a century, or about $230 billion annually. His figure of merit for comparing policies is a "net benefit," the total benefit relative to the "do nothing about CO2 emissions" baseline. (For comparison, the US annual economic output is about $15 trillion and constitutes about a quarter of the world's production.)

In rank order of "net benefit," the results are:

• Low-cost with technological breakthrough(s) (Nordhaus), +17
• Realistic and economically optimal policy (Nordhaus), +3
• Kyoto Protocol with (without) the US (Kyoto Accord), +1 (+0)
• Stern (Nicholas Stern^a), -15
• Gore (Al Gore), -21

^aStern is a British science advisor and was part of Tony Blair's government.

We must take the exact numbers with a grain of salt, since the inherent unknowns in such estimates are large. (Nordhaus assumes economic growth and inflation at the overall rate of the last century.) But the rank ordering, and the strikingly close results of the second and third policies, and the fact they are close to zero (that is, close to "do nothing about CO2 emissions") are very telling. $230 billion a year is about 1/65th (1.5%) of the annual US output, or 1/260th (0.38%) of global output. It's smaller than current interest rates, which can be taken as an overall social "discounting" rate incorporating risk and uncertainty.

From such results, "climate change" looks like, not non-existent, but still quite marginal. And the policies pushed by Gore and Stern, far more restrictive than Kyoto, are clearly lunatic and should not be considered further.

Dyson's article is also one of the few, outside of narrow technical forums, I've seen that discusses the effect of plants. That alone makes it invaluable, and I strongly recommend that you read the whole thing, as they say. To Dyson's lucid discussion should be added some additional points. The time scale for noticeable climate impact from CO2 emissions is one to two centuries. When we consider the smallness of the effect, scaling the costs of "do nothing about CO2 emissions" and the benefits of "doing something about CO2 emissions" down to account for the IPCC's exaggerations (at least a factor of two, probably three, in temperature change), the case for any but minimal countermeasures vanishes. Indeed, once you step outside the media- and environmentalist-saturated Western world, you run into much stronger skepticism about both the science and policy of "climate change." The reasons are no more than those presented here and in previous postings.**

Some important quibbles. I have only two significant points of disagreement with Dyson. The first concerns his characterization of "climate change consensus" as representing the large majority view of "climate change" among climate and allied scientists. This is simply false. The IPCC's scientific annexes alone, with their broad and large differences with the summary reports, demonstrate this. Consider as well organized protests by climate and other geoscientists against the Official Science of "global warming," such as the Heidelberg Appeal and Leipzig Declarations. The media generally capture the same group of self-appointed "true believers" over and over.

My other point of disagreement is Dyson's overly sanguine view of environmentalism, which he correctly acknowledges as the great secular religion of our time and the latter-day replacement for socialism, the last big secular religion. Disconnecting the "climate change" propaganda machine, starting at the governmental level and in the schools, is an essential step. The "climate change" hysteria has needlessly frightened both adults and children, warped and darkened their view of science, technology, and industrial civilization, and corrupted how science is taught and understood. The rampant runaway bad metaphors alone represent a new level of manufactured ignorance, something our society is getting better and better at.†

Slightly more than nothing. Dyson's article is a sanity tonic in a subject that, 15+ years ago, left scientific standards and protocols behind for the status of religious belief. The smorgasbord of policy alternatives he summarizes from Nordhaus, together with the other considerations presented here, leads to some natural policy conclusions. The phenomenon should be viewed on the time scale of a couple centuries, with at least a guess of cloud enhancement, plant metabolism, and ocean absorption taken into account. The IPCC's reports don't currently do this in a serious way, because the reliable science to do it isn't there.

Based on what we know now and what we don't know, there's no justification for any active countermeasures against CO2 emissions, beyond a mild form of geoengineering, which I've previously and cheerfully denounced as crazy. Here's my one exception: the most important geoengineering scheme, the one with the least risks, is more and better plants. Dyson reaches the same conclusion. The coming century will be one of biotechnology, just as much as the last was one of electronics and information. Superplants with enhanced CO2 metabolism are not at all impossible. Genetically engineered, or simply cultivated by the selective breeding that humans have been doing for millennia, such plants, spread wide enough, put the atmosphere's CO2 level under human influence no less than CO2 emissions form burning fuels do.

If a more aggressive policy toward slowing human emissions of CO2 and CH4 should ever prove necessary, the right approach is to tax them.†† Of course, politicians hate taxes for environmental purposes, because they hate putting the cost of their pet policies up front and visible to all. Complex and obscure regulatory systems are far more attractive to environmentalists, because they hide the real costs of the regulation. In any case, CO2 is not a poison or a pollutant in the classic sense. (Is π=3? Is the Earth flat? Why are courts involved in deciding such issues?) It's a naturally occurring gas respired and metabolized by plants and absorbed by oceans. If anything, it should be treated like water. No one thinks of water as a pollutant, even though people occasionally drown in floods, and clear-air water vapor is the main infrared-active gas at the heart of "global warming." At about 30 billion metric tons (Gt) of CO2 emitted per year and using Nordhaus' estimates, the external costs run to roughly $23,000 billion/100 years/(30 Gt/yr) = (US 2005) $7.80/metric ton.‡ The US is a relatively efficient burner of fossil fuels, by comparison with China, now the world's biggest CO2 emitter, or Russia and India. Their technologies are simply not as efficient or clean as ours: here's the world's real contemporary pollution crisis.

Finally, and always, keep in mind the crucial point made so effectively by Bjørn Lomborg: wealthy and technologically advanced societies have more means and choices at their disposal. There's no problem that we face, have faced, or will ever face made harder by better technology. (Whether we make good use of it is another matter.) Whatever the future holds for humanity and Earth's climate, there's no case for shutting down civilization or significantly impairing it. On the contrary, the better science and technology we have, the better we understand both the climate and the limits of our knowledge, the better decisions we'll make and the better off we and our descendants will be in facing whatever's headed our way.
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* Anyone who thinks otherwise has been fooled by fuzzy, runaway bad metaphors about "greenhouses" and a climate modeling science still in its early infancy.

** I've never met a Russian scientist who takes the "global warming" hysteria seriously or views the climate problem as anything more than marginal. And the Chinese aren't about to impoverish the next two generations of Chinese for marginal and uncertain benefits.

† It's not the natural ignorance we're all born with. We're an advanced society and have the means to "do" ignorance far better now :)

†† "Cap-and-trade" should be abandoned as soon as possible. It's easily corrupted and subject to confusing manipulation by all parties involved. Also see this by Megan McArdle. Work like that of Nordhaus provides a first answer to the question of "costing" the CO2. But there's no "natural and optimal" level of CO2; all we can do is compare scenarios and ask, "What do we want?" (BTW, it's carbon dioxide gas, not "carbon.")

‡ One gigaton (Gt) of CO2 would fill about 89 million Goodyear blimps. The CO2 emission control schemes of Gore and Stern imply costs of $300-1000/metric ton CO2, which shows in a different way how far out of line with reality their proposals are.

A metric ton of CO2 emitted in the US produces about $1850 of economic value. Compare with the Nordhaus estimate of external cost ($8) and, again, the marginality of the problem is evident. And remember, these Nordhaus numbers assume the IPPC's already exaggerated claims.

Climate science after Kyoto

With the Official Science monkey gone from our backs, what can we do with climate and climate science?

Over the last year, I've outlined on this blog a set of open questions that are frequently ignored and often not even seen correctly as questions, but that need to be answered if we're going to talk sense about "climate" and "climate change." Not able to predict weather beyond about two weeks ahead, we need a simplified and abstracted definition of "climate" whose "state" can be defined, analyzed, and predicted with some confidence. The fallacies of temperature averaging and "climate parameterizations" were a failed attempt to do this. Whatever notions of "climate," "climate state," and "change of climate state" we end up with will have to withstand - as temperature averages and the "hockey stick" cannot - probing criticism and emerge free of the hefty list of fallacies associated with the "global warming" hysteria.

In retrospect, the generational dead-end of climate and allied sciences with "global warming" and general circulation models (GCMs) can be viewed as an attempt to force a premature integration of theory and observation. It would be best for all involved if theory and observation were to remain aware of one another, but go their separate ways until such time as they have sufficient means to meet each other honestly. Until such a synthesis is possible, it's best to maintain a pluralistic and agnostic attitude about the Big Picture, resisting the forces bent on our "salvation" from the "evils" of industrial civilization or plying us with supposed alternatives to "knowing" nature.

What follows is a personal and partial view, informed by this failure to get a grip on these issues and by my own scientific experience along the edges of the problem and in related fields. It should not be taken as definitive or complete.

Theory: It's a really hard problem. The Earth's climate is the most complex scientific problem ever posed and almost certainly unsolvable in its full generality. Any progress we make with this problem will therefore necessarily involve approximations. The essential point is that, if we're going to attempt actual predictions, we need better and controlled approximations at every step. These are currently lacking.

Theory: Science is hypothesis and deduction. That is, it's not just a piling up of facts. Certainty of conclusions requires control of assumptions and reasoning.

There is thus an important role for mathematical deductive modeling, with simplified and controlled approximations applied at every step. The ideal should be to make these mathematically simplified and controlled models closer and closer, with each step, to the real climate. The failure of the "parameterized" GCM approach underscores the need to keep the modeling within controlled approximations at each step and not jump into the deep end of the pool right away.

Theory: Don't BS - simplify and smooth. A revealing way to look at the "climate state" problem is to grasp the motive behind "climate parameterizations": it was to "force closure" on the dynamical-structural equations of climate. In general, there are never enough equations to match the number of unknown variables. "Forcing closure" on the system means guessing or making up extra equations to close the gap.

But the gap could equally well be closed the other way: reduce the number of variables. A simplified "climate state," less complex than "the exact, instantaneous state of the whole atmosphere," is just such a proposal. It's also likely that such a state will not only involve flows and topology in space, but time and space integrals of the basic variables (equivalent to what statisticians call cumulants). Such integrals are usually better-behaved than the original variables.

Theory: Boil, mist, and trouble. Climate is chaotic, in the technical sense: exponential sensitivity to errors in initial conditions. Alternatively, climate is essentially nonperiodic, and not all climate disturbances die away. The atmosphere is a fluid, in the physicist's sense; its chaos is turbulence. Turbulence is the largest unsolved problem in physics. A partial or complete solution would have immediate impact on many areas of science and engineering, pure and applied, theoretical and practical - everything from understanding convection in planetary atmospheres and stars to improving your airplane or boat ride to reducing turbulence losses in your car engine.*

Climate needs new and better techniques for coping with chaos. Many such techniques have been developed in the last 25 years in various areas of science, but they haven't penetrated far into the climate world, partly because of the paralysis induced by Official Science. They include exceptionally relevant techniques like the following.

• Renormalization. This technique is a powerful generalization of the dimensional analysis we learned in school. (It's sometimes goes under the guise of "homology" or "rescaling.") It relates one mathematical problem posed at one set of space and time scales to a different problem at a different set of scales. Sometimes, impossible problems posed at one scales can be recast into other problems at different scales, and those different problems are solvable, either exactly or by controlled approximation.
  
  Renormalization for climate means imagining a scale at which decades, centuries, or even millennia seem modest and slow cycles like El Niño, say, wink by in rapid succession. On those scales, we can see more clearly the invariant and almost-invariant structure that must define, at a deeper level than everyday weather, what "climate" is.
  
  
• Dynamical reconstruction of phase space. This requires some contact with observed climate (see below), but the essential technique amounts to isolating the relevant degrees of freedom in the very complex climate system, the ones that operate on scales of tens to thousands of miles. Only a small subset of the possible changes in the climate system are actually important. Isolating them is a big step toward defining "climate" in a simplified sense. It will undoubtedly involve flows of heat, water, etc. (not local temperatures or humidities) and how they're connected in space (their topology).
  
  
• Non-Gaussian statistics, for extreme weather analysis. This is an application of the great progress that has been made in understanding how energy and other conserved physical quantities move through "open" systems, like the climate. Again, the issue straddles both theory and observation. People just have to stop assuming Gaussian (classical central limit or bell-curve) conditions in analyzing weather "events." There's never been any reason to do so.
  
  
• Pattern formation. This is an intersection of renormalization, non-Gaussian statistics, and "complexity," as an earlier posting discussed. The locus classicus for these techniques is understanding the perpetually landsliding sand pile. (There's even a cute book on the subject by Per Bak.) In complex, open systems with "flow-through" of air, water, and heat (or sand grains for that matter), long-range patterns with "almost" (but never quite!) repetitive behavior form and dissipate over and over - just like the weather: cyclones, storms, fronts, and so on.
  
  Pattern formation is especially germane to understanding clouds - their nature and lifecycle - better. Clouds are the most important feature of climate not easily captured by simplified models; convective turbulence is actually secondary in importance, at least for heat flow, although it's still crucial for the complete picture. And the big, difficult pieces of climate - clouds, turbulence, water transformations - are all linked together. Convection doesn't just transport heat; it lifts water vapor to higher altitudes than it would otherwise go, making clouds form more often and last longer than they would otherwise.
  
  The presence of clouds in turn transforms the climate by changing how radiation flows into and out of the atmosphere and providing a greatly enhanced form of upward heat convection. The main source of IR-active gas in the clear air is not CO2 or CH4, but the feedback effect of enhanced, clear-air water vapor. But even limited condensation of the enhanced water vapor into clouds changes the radiation flow drastically.

Observation: Go forth and squint hard. In the end, a chaotic system is its own best computer: no model we devise or limited set of observations we make can ever capture every aspect of its behavior. But observation nonetheless remains essential for understanding climate. Modern scientific observation of the atmosphere, increasingly detailed since the 18th century, has a lot to tell us about the repertory of possibilities.

In understanding actual climate, we must always keep in mind the proviso that chaotic systems feature an unending stream of unique events. We also have to face repetitive trends that repeat on time scales longer than the modern scientific record captures. Climate is, in this sense, a unique problem, in that we're inside the system being studied, and we're myopic observers with only hints and partial clues about the long term. Although laboratory experiments are essential for isolating general physical laws, the actual conditions of climate do not constitute a laboratory experiment. It's not controlled, and we're not outside the system in a position to aspire to know and control everything about it.

Observation: The Sun will have its say. It always does. It's the ultimate factor in charge of Earth's climate. Like other stars, the Sun is variable, at a small but measurable level. What limited observations have been made of our Sun already strongly hint at important solar modulations of Earth climate. The more basic solar physics in control here, and how the Earth responds to solar changes, are still poorly understood, and the whole problem remains at the frontier of research. But the base of raw data needed is now available in a way not true 20 or 30 years ago. Studying other planets' response to the Sun's variability will help.

Observation: All things green and blue. Plants and oceans need to be understood better as well. Over scales of decades and longer, they play a critical role in absorbing and recycling carbon dioxide. Current climate models capture the ocean part only imperfectly and plants barely at all. Yet there's a 0.2/0.00038 = 530 ratio of diatomic oxygen (O2) to CO2 in the air, which large ratio is made entirely possible by plant metabolism.** The annual plant-driven variations in atmospheric CO2 concentrations are about eight percent of the total. Since 100/(8/year) ~ 12 years, every CO2 molecule in the atmosphere gets captured by a plant in a little more than a decade.

What's not understood is how plants are responding in their annual cycle of growth and decay to increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. With more "food," there will be more and bigger plants. How much is unknown, although the Ice Age results give a very rough idea. What little research here has been done so far has been strongly tainted by people out to "prove" that plants aren't important - even though they clearly are. It's an obvious place for Gaia-philes to speak up. One of the few geoengineering ideas with any merit involves humans enhancing an already old and thoroughly proven means for removing CO2 from the atmosphere: more plants, bigger plants, maybe even über-plants. More on that next.
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* Indeed, the wild claims made by the IPCC for GCMs and "climate parametrizations" can be put into sharp relief when we consider that, were these results actually definitive answers for climate, we would also have a solution to fluid turbulence.

In fact, we don't. Over at the Clay Institute web site, you'll see there's a Clay Millennium prize for solving turbulence (Navier-Stokes equations) - and it remains unclaimed. Given the true state of affairs (turbulence remains an unsolved problem in physics and engineering), we can then rightly reason backward and conclude that the climate problem remains unsolved as well, since the turbulence problem is embedded within it.

** Without constant plant replenishment, the O2 would rapidly disappear from the atmosphere by oxidation weathering and water absorption. Animal metabolism would be impossible without plants, although plants can and, long ago, did do fine without us and our animal relatives.

Abandoning Official Science

Junk science has several warning signs: It advocates a cause, pays little attention to the investigative process, ignores contrary evidence and advertises a high moral purpose.

- Ron W. Pritchett, "Recognizing Junk Science," The Professional Geologist (December 1997)

For its two-decade history, the "global warming" craze has been an outstanding case - perhaps the supreme one in our time - of something I've called Official Science. It's not quite the same as what some people call "junk science," although it includes a fair amount of that. But it has something else: an authoritarian mummery that looks like science, but isn't. I've called this "para-science." In the case of climate, the key elements - the IPCC and its false "consensus" - are political in nature, not scientific. Blame it on Rio: they were enshrined in the policy world by the 1992 Rio "Earth" summit, a party to which scientists, for the most part, were pointedly not invited. The summit was a jamboree of environmentalist politics and activism, not ecology, climate, or any other science.

The kernels of Official Science are the pet theory and the politically, ideologically, or theologically predetermined conclusion. Science, among other things, is mostly bottom-up and inside-out knowledge. In areas where many open questions remain, it's stimulated by surprise discoveries and unexpected insights. Basic research is especially important here because it tries to frame questions and find answers with potential for wide-ranging impact, both in theory and application. Official Science is the opposite: top-down and outside-in. Non-scientists (politicians, political intellectuals, journalists, activists), often in alliance with ex-scientists either cynical, ambitious, delusional, or all three, apply the pressure from the outside. Blow-ups, dilemmas, and intellectual corruption begin where the two cultures - science and "para-science" - collide.

Cultures in collision. This is origin of the unusual social phenomena associated with the "global warming" craze. They include the misrepresentation of an actually non-existent "consensus" about "climate change," which consensus is then repeatedly invoked to isolate and demonize "deniers," skeptics, and fence-sitters (who, all told, actually make the up the majority of climate and geoscientists). Environmentalists attempt to smear scientists with often false or misleading "reports" detailing alleged "secrets" about funding sources.* Quasi-official institutions (bureaucratic leaders of government and academia, scientific journal editors) create an echo chamber where otherwise normal skepticism and criticism are silenced. Publications once noted for their high standards (like Scientific American) degenerate into politically correct propaganda outlets, with scientific reasoning playing less and less a role in their arguments. In its place are invocations of authority, something having no place in science. In fact, in no other area of science are such non-scientific procedures so routinely made use of. The mere existence of an "official panel" on climate (the IPCC) is far from scientifically kosher.

Follow the (public) money. Scientists in climate and allied areas have protested, repeatedly, against the fake "consensus." The protests are ignored by the IPCC and the non-science media. But the situation is more subtle and disturbing than a simple black-white opposition. Incentives both positive and negative have been applied to reshape the sociology of the field (and don't doubt that this reshaping is a conscious political effort.) Public funding has moved from open-ended basic research, in which questions are paramount, to a situation where the larger answer is assumed and research proposals have to be tailored to "get with the program." Professional societies (American Geophysical Union, American Physical Society, American Statistical Association, etc.) leave the provinces and move to Washington, where their staffs shift gears and become political players in a politically- and journalistically-shaped arena, leaving scientific questions far behind. These societies - or at least their headquarters staff - then join the "consensus," often over the protest of their scientific members.**

The IPCC itself offers a particularly insidious temptation for scientists, the IPCC reports' scientific annexes, which are produced by a large body of "working groups" (a couple thousand scientists) routinely confused in the media and by politicians with the the much smaller IPCC staff (a couple hundred). To compare the working groups' annexes and the IPCC's summary report is to compare two apparently different planets. The couple thousand scientists in the working groups become, in effect, wittingly or not, ventriloquists' dummies.

The folks back home. So why the scientific annexes to the IPCC reports? Essentially, to impress the rubes. Nothing else can explain why the scientific reports keep getting included, yet contradict what the Summary report says. The gap has not closed in 16 years of these reports. The rubes are politicians, journalists, even other scientists, and you and me. It makes the reports look authoritative, while allowing the IPCC and "global warming" fanatics to ignore scientific criticism and demonize and isolate individual critics as "skeptics" or "deniers" (as if skepticism is out of place in science, instead of being its daily bread). Meantime, outside of their respective scientific disciplines, few actually read the scientific reports. (I've read parts of the 2002 and 2007 reports.) Under the baleful influence of Official Science, scientists amongst themselves and individually express one view, but assembled "officially," express a very different view. That's a sure sign of arm-twisting and Official Science overriding of scientific criticism. It's no road to knowledge: science makes more progress through criticism, by demolishing bad ideas and disproving wrong hypotheses, than through converging on correct ideas. Not that these processes are separate: converging on the right conclusion requires a lot of clearing away first.

Official Science equals bad science. Under the usual circumstances of scientific practice, the extravagant claims of the IPCC - being able to predict future weather; denying or selectively "cherry picking" the behavior of the current, recent, and paleoclimate - would be laughed out of the room, so to speak. Specific instances of sloppily done or simply mistaken scientific embarrassments, the "hockey stick" above all, would have been ripped apart through the usual process of criticism, counterproposals, and so on. Without an externally enforced preconceived and dogmatic conclusion, progress would result, as it usually does when scientists work on something in their usual mixture of cooperation and competition.

But with the "boundary conditions" changed, so to speak, and an externally imposed, preconceived conclusion forced on the issue, something very different happens. Badly done science, embarrassing fallacies, and outright fraud start to win, no matter how horrifying, because they fit the dogma. Really good science, superb insights with clear implications (for example, the ice core results), are disallowed, rejected for publication, ridiculed, or otherwise ignored and languish in a narrow specialty in a way that doesn't threaten the dogma. When editors of leadings journals (like the editors of Nature and Science in the 1990s) undergo conversion and baptism in the Cause of "global warming," excellent work contradicting the official line doesn't get published, at least not their journals.† Mistakes that would be marked wrong on a test or homework assignment, or corrected by a graduate research advisor, instead get perpetuated in prestigious venues.

Official Science must go. There's a lot of positive progress that awaits climate and allied sciences, once they're freed from this monkey on their backs. But before anything positive happens, the big negative has to be cleared away first. There's no "reforming" Official Science, or "making it responsive." The spirit animating it and the spirit animating science are in direct conflict and can't be reconciled. The right thing to do with Official Science is to abandon it.

In the case of climate, the IPCC should simply be scrapped. It keeps committing the same crime over and over, providing the fanatics of "global warming" in the political, environmentalist, and journalistic worlds more clubs (or hockey sticks) to beat up their designated targets simply for practicing science in public. The IPCC carries on under the auspices of the UN, but is rooted in a multinational convention that grew out of the 1992 Rio summit. It's true that this convention, the IPCC, and the Kyoto Treaty that resulted are not in America's interests. But they're really not in anyone's interests. The US should withdraw from any official involvement in or funding of the IPCC and strongly encourage other countries to do the same. What private individuals and institutions do on their own time and nickel is their business. It's become everyone else's business just because ways have been found to force it on everyone else.

That's a first big step in the right direction for the science and scientists and frees them to look at positive possibilities. Such a step also has a whole set of separate implications for policy.

SPOT THE FALLACIES! I ran across this item recently in Physics Today, flagship publication of the American Physical Society. It's a not a refereed technical journal, but a magazine at a high level for physicists and scientists in related areas, as well as students and interested outsiders, with the main articles and much else written by scientists. PT has high standards, so the item came as a shock, if not a complete surprise. It commits at least four climate fallacies in two paragraphs. See if you can spot them.†† (Disclaimer: I don't meant to criticize anything about the research article discussed in this news item. I haven't read it.)
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* Sorry: even if these reports were correct, "funding sources" is not a scientific argument.

** The American Statistical Association, in the past a reputable professional scientific organization, recently announced its endorsement of the already debunked "hockey stick," creating some shock in the scientific world. Important members of the ASA were involved in the earlier debunking and were not consulted in this change of "official" view. Apparently, the ASA is working hard to "get with the program," a political, not a scientific, imperative. The problem is not that the "official" view needs to be changed; the problem is rather that there is an "official" answer to the question at all. This is the essence of what's wrong with Official Science.

Disaster results from such trends: good people leave the field or shut up; good students don't enter, and so on. This has now gone on for almost a generation, and climate and allied scientists are waking up to the cold truth of how much damage this crusade has done to their science, their research, and their teaching. (How do you teach this stuff to students with a straight face, when there are so many things so obviously wrong with it?) These are the sort of dilemmas faced more and more over the last 15+ years by natural scientists in geosciences, climate, and neighboring subjects.

† Then these same editors have claimed - with a straight face! - that their journals don't have many papers that conflict with the fake "consensus."

†† The fallacies I spotted are:

• Solar radiation is not reflected from the Earth's surface, but absorbed and re-radiated. That's why the Earth's surface warms up. Reflected, radiation can't warm anything.
  
• Extra warming does not occur because IR-active (misnamed "greenhouse") gases absorb the IR radiating from the surface. These molecules are good at IR absorption; they're also good at IR emission. They're a more efficient IR "bucket brigade." The "extra warming" is not a retention of heat, but actually a steepening in the slope, or lapse rate, of the radiation temperature.
• A greenhouse doesn't work like this.
• The Earth's climate isn't a greenhouse anyway.

Official Science does rot your mind.

The odyssey continues

Here's a review of Keir Dullea's appearance two Thursdays ago in Boston and the screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey for its 40th anniversary.

Celtics rule!

The Celtics finally did it this past week, clinching the NBA championship for the first time in 22 years.

Kangaroo au Canadien

Friends have asked me about the Kafka-esque proceedings going on next door in Canada concerning Mark Steyn, accused of "intolerance" towards Muslims for excepts published from his book, America Alone. I haven't blogged about it because I don't have much to add.

The case is frightening. Canada has ludicrously misnamed "human rights" commissions (originally formed to investigate prejudice in employment and housing) that have been spending the last few years issuing "gag" rules against public figures whose statements are deemed "hate speech." They aren't real courts of law, they have none of the usual legal procedures for protection of the accused, and so on. But their rulings have the force of law nonetheless. In a next-door, supposedly democratic country, free speech is a light that is going out. The commissions have a 100% "conviction" rate, so it's unlikely Steyn has any future journalistic career in Canada. Fortunately for him, he lives in the US and can still publish here.

Nothing could illustrate better the difference between PC "tolerance" and "human rights," on the one hand, and human rights on the other. The case was originally brought by the Canadian version of the same Islamic front groups familiar (although less powerful) here, like CAIR, all sponsored by big money from the Persian Gulf. In Britain and other countries, lawsuits and bureaucratic rulings of a similar type and with similar motives and goals have been brought against truth-tellers.

Americans should count themselves very lucky to have the First Amendment speech protections that they do. Even other democracies have generally weaker (sometimes much weaker) protections. Legalized harassment and repression have already come to a country next door - let's hope they don't land here too.

If the generally boobish American news media had anything serious to say, they'd be all over this stunning threat to free speech. But the media, for the most part, is no longer interested in free speech - they're interested in suppressing the free speech of others and generally acting on the side of the powerful. Many of them today are no longer journalists, but would-be court flunkies.

Jihadi groups can't win except through force or the threat of force. We've proven we can match force against their force, even if we can't seem to aim straight at times. But conflicts like this are ultimately and always political at bottom. Court victories, "human rights" commissions harassing journalists, speech suppression, all on behalf of jihad, are just as much defeats for us as some idiot blowing himself up on a subway or killing "deviant" Muslims. The means are different, but not the end.

It might be time for some Canadians to consider emigration or civil disobedience. Normally, we associate "Canadian" with being nice, not thuggery like this.

Don't ask

That Pentagon policy of "don't ask, don't tell" from the 90s is still in force. By itself, not such a problem, but the military is still discharging servicemen who are "outed" somehow, sometimes through their own inadvertence.

The policy isn't just silly, but since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, actually harmful. Gay service members with critical skills are being discharged when they're needed most. In some cases, the Defense Department rehires them as civilians. But still -

Here's Deroy Murdock in the Boston Herald explaining what's wrong with this policy. The Pentagon has released a new report on this subject. There's no real excuse for this. If serving in a conservative Muslim country means gay soldiers can't be open about it, the solution is a little discretion. Female soldiers have to observe some rules along these lines as well.

Murdock is right: it's a Clinton-era relic, like Monica's kneepads and other talismans of 90s frivolity. "Don't ask, don't tell" can't be defended.

Our energy mispolicy

If you can make sense of our energy policy, let me know - I'm more and more baffled.

We don't think twice when China starts to search for oil off the coast of Cuba, pretty close to US shores. We won't let additional American drilling happen on the same continental shelf.

One of the reasons gasoline prices have risen in the US is because gasoline sold here has to be refined in such a way as to meet US pollution standards. To the best of my knowledge, only US refineries can produce such gasoline from crude oil. No new refineries have been built in the US for about 30 years. Want to guess why?

Although we keep hearing about Brazil's growing use of biofuels, the main thing Brazil has done to improve its energy situation is to allow off-shore oil drilling.

While almost all other wealthy countries have revved up their use of nuclear power, the US is still stuck somewhere around 1980 on this issue. The main hold-up is disposing of the waste. But it's not a technical problem, merely a political one (i.e., Harry Reid).

Congress wants lower energy prices - so they say - but they will do nothing that would allow such an outcome. Instead, they talk about suing OPEC (!) and absurd "carbon caps" to stop the non-existent crisis of "global warming." They refuse to do anything to ease restrictions on coal-to-gasoline conversion, although the process continues to be greatly improved in both efficiency and cleanness.

Is the United States still a serious country?

Thoughts on the environment

Tout commence en mystique et finit en politique.

- Charles Peguy

Thinking about pollution as a public health problem and selective conservation of the natural world, for the sake of present and future generations, are in no way new endeavors. They arose toward the end of the 19th century, led by a variety of people who never dreamed of reading humanity out of nature or expressing hostility toward scientific understanding of nature, then emerging from its infancy. One of the best-known representatives of this movement - which predates the modern environmentalist movement by almost a century - was Teddy Roosevelt, who experienced raw nature first-hand, exploited it by hunting, wrote about it - and then created parks so others could taste the same experience. He was our first, and so far only, "environmental" president. There was nothing coffee-table-ish or armchair about his views, and he made his forays in the wilderness before cell phones, waterproof matches and tents, and other hi-tech paraphernalia were available. Today's environmentalist movement has moved far that orientation, representing a very different and basically mistaken view of nature and of humanity's relation to it. Environmentalism is a movement, not a science. The science is ecology, as practiced by ecologists. That hasn't prevented a long-standing and pervasive confusion between the two.

Born during the period that saw the breakdown of liberalism and its turn towards punitive and backward-looking guilt, the environmentalist movement started as a piece of counterculture and absorbed the older conservation and public health movements, usurping popular acceptance of the latter for its own ends. These ends are motivated by a hatred of technology, science, and modern civilization and bring in train all the classical fallacies of Romanticism: pre-existent "natural harmony," "noble savages," and the evil corruption of civilized humanity. Only once American civilization had reached a certain level of material development could such thinking take hold among more than a tiny number of the unbalanced. It's had a longer run in Europe, where it arose in the late 18th century in reaction to the rise of modern science, industry, and commercial society. The Germans gave a special twist to this thinking, one that merged nature-mysticism with reverence for the Volk and pre-industrial life.

The environmentalist movement has raided non-Western cultures and creatively invented bogus quotes about their attitudes toward the natural world. As shown by Dan Botkin and others, almost all of the supposed wisdom the movement peddles about natural "harmony" and "balance" comes from pre-modern and pre-scientific thinking within Western history, precisely the thinking that has been abandoned by modern science. (It wouldn't be modern or scientific otherwise.) The "pre-existent harmony" or "balance of nature" metaphor is the most common of these fallacies. Such discoveries as organic evolution and chaos (in the technical sense of the word) have forced ecologists to give up "equilibrium" pictures of ecosystems and face the reality of their ceaseless and usually messy change. Ecosystems come and go, start from a little, grow into a lot, mature into a period of glory - then fall apart and are replaced by something else. For example, it's precisely because the chaotic atmosphere and oceans have only a limited "invariant" structure that pinning down what "climate" means is so hard. So it has been throughout the 3.5 billion-year history of life on Earth; human activity just adds some more twists to the mix of permanent chaos.

But the "harmony," "balance," and "equilibrium" metaphors have, since the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries, taken on a life of their own, now divorced from scientific thought and philosophical criticism. They continued to be sustained by religious feeling and the rise of counter-Enlightenment Romanticism. It helps that the core of Western religious thought since the rise of Christianity has been the template of Paradise-Fall-Redemption, with perhaps an apocalypse in there somewhere. The relationship of environmentalism to this paradigm and the related concept of Original Sin is too obvious to require comment. So is the environmentalist hope that humanity's supposed trashing of the planet demonstrates that humans are still at the center of things, if only in a negative way. High German Romantic thought of the 19th century (with echoes and variations from the American Transcendentalists) recommended withdrawal from both human society and the five senses as a preliminary to communing inwardly with Nature - not the thing you can perceive, but a "telephone from the beyond," as Nietzsche wittily once put it.*

This is the paradigm of Thoreau's time living alone at Walden Pond, a Romantic exercise if there ever was one. He wasn't scientifically studying the ecosystem at Walden, getting his hands dirty. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was staring at his navel.** The root of environmentalism lies in a restless search for a new religion to replace older faiths no longer believable or relevant.

After the fallacy of pre-existent balance, the most powerful bad metaphor reigning over environmentalist thinking is its misplaced and often childish anthropomorphism and zoomorphism. Wild animals are not pets or farm animals, which are selectively plucked out of "wild" nature and bred by us to heighten characteristics that fit into human domestic and food needs. (After all, the wild ancestors of dogs could have been selectively bred to heighten other characteristics and turned into mean predators with no socially redeeming features.) Ecosystems and, indeed, the whole planet lack the integrated purposive and functional unity of individual animals and humans. It's a gross mistake to take metaphors like "Gaia" as more than fanciful poetic usages; the Earth doesn't think, feel, remember, or command anything.

But environmentalist literature and discourse are thoroughly polluted with such language and the concepts behind it. "Charismatic megafauna" (such as polar bears and baby seals) are projected as quasi-pets (instead of, respectively, hungry predators and their tasty, blubbery lunch). Gorgeous nature photography (itself a selective and superposed human art) is twisted into a "picture-window" or "don't-spoil-my-view" environmentalism that is really little more than middle- and upper-class kitsch. Debate about the human and non-human environments is mired in superstition and dishonesty if it assumes that nature would remain frozen were it not for our interference. It becomes enlightened and honest when the question shifts to, "Well, what do we want it to look like?" Not that we always get our wishes - but they're our wishes, not nature's. Nature has none.

If we're interested in a scientifically-informed view of nature and our relationship to it, we must abandon any notion of pre-existent "harmony" or "balance" that we are violating, restoring, or revering as an authoritative command. Nature commands nothing and speaks nothing. Or - better - it speaks many contradictory things: it's prodigious, wasteful, and hidden; beneficent and poisonous; abundant and barren; peaceful, aggressive, and indifferent - all at once. It is relentless change, on all scales of space and time, with incessant destruction, creation, and overturning. Any harmony or balance we bring to our relationship with nature is a balance or harmony strictly of our own devising. We're not even "managing" nature, except in a limited way. In limiting and modifying how we use nature, we really managing nothing but ourselves.

That is why environmentalism is not science, but a political and religious movement. It is why this movement so frequently turns tyrannical: there's nothing so satisfying to a fanatic than "managing" other people as a vehicle of righteousness.† Perhaps this is the unwittingly ironic sense in which Job urges his friends to "speak with the Earth, and she will teach you." She will teach you all right: she'll teach you that she has no trite moral lessons to offer. Equilibrium, balance, and harmony are not the norm, but temporary and local. Indeed, at the center of Job's encounter with the divine is, not a garden or a zoo, but a whirlwind.

In absorbing and condescending to the older public health and conservation movements, the nearly forty years of modern environmentalism have done our society a large disservice. It is the most potent social force today in attracting the general public away from science. Scientists involved in ecology themselves often lead mentally conflicted lives, caught between knowing and believing. People now routinely use meaningless or wrongheaded concepts to misunderstand the world around them and how human activity affects it. Recycling is often more harmful than just throwing things out. No one has a "carbon footprint," unless they've rubbed graphite on the bottom of their shoes. The Earth's climate is not a greenhouse. Nuclear power plants are not bombs, any more than a coal-fired power plant is a firearm. Runaway metaphors and bad policies motivated by them are the fallacies of the Boomers - history's first mass over- and miseducated generation - and now constitute the brainwashing of the next generation. Led by their delusional gurus, currently starting with Al Gore, they have injected a potent revulsion against modern technological and progressive civilization into our politics.†† But that passion proves nothing about the rightness of their cause, which is essentially romantic, pessimistic, and reactionary.‡

POSTSCRIPT: For an example of what I'm talking about, consider M. Night Shyamalan's embarrassing new movie, The Happening, "the most morally abhorrent film ever made" - but still, important for laying bare the logic, which pervades conventional environmental politics in a watered-down form. Or just read this New Republic blog posting and skip the film itself :)

POST-POSTSCRIPT: Everyone interested in this problem, whatever their opinions, should read Wallace Kaufman's No Turning Back: Dismantling the Fantasies of Environmental Thinking. Published 14 years ago, it is more relevant than ever, and a blog posting cannot do it justice. In related vein, consider as well the two books by Alston Chase, In a Dark Wood and Playing God in Yellowstone.
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* While not able to speak English, Nietzsche could read it and counted an edition of Emerson's works as one of his prized possessions; he annotated it, heavily in places. His famous Übermensch, or Overman, probably owes something to Emerson's Oversoul. I don't know if Nietzsche read any Thoreau.

** That said, I like Walden Pond as it is now and try to swim it at least once every summer. There's been no attempt to "freeze" it in some mythical past, and it is accessible by car. It was pretty accessible in Thoreau's day, and he was never more than an hour walk from the center of Concord and medical and food supplies. Thoreau even took his laundry home to his mother for washing periodically. The old railroad line, already in existence when Thoreau spent his two years there, still runs right past the pond, behind some trees. Even more than in Thoreau's day, the setting now is as much a product of human artifice as it is of nature and a perfect example of the older conservation movement - but not of modern environmentalism.

† Thoreau himself said it: a man feels a disturbance in his bowels - and he sets off on a crusade to save humanity.

†† Using "progressive" again in the right sense.

‡ The absolute weirdness of our political vocabulary strikes me more and more. Opponents of environmentalism are usually called "conservative" - are they, really? And is environmentalism really "liberal" and "progressive"?

Thoughts on pollution

"Pollution" can mean different things in different contexts. Here it means something in the human environment that causes harm to humans. Since that can include both natural and manmade things, let's narrow it further to manmade. Finally, to exclude the obviously different situation of someone deliberately trying to poison someone else, let's narrow it further to the inadvertent, the "side effect" of otherwise beneficial activities. Economists call these "external costs." It's what happens when I throw a party on my lawn, pay for the party, but leave my party trash on your lawn for you to clean up. If it's a result of routine, repeated activity, we have what people usually mean by "pollution."

There are four ways to deal with pollution:

• Harmed party takes harming party to court after the fact. This works for something that happens once or very occasionally. Otherwise, it's pretty cumbersome.
• If it's a routine occurrence, government regulates the level of emission of the pollutant. This often works, but depending on the type of pollutant and available technology, it can be difficult or very expensive to continue the polluting activity and limit the polluting side effect.
• If it's a routine occurrence, restrict the use of the pollutant or ban it entirely. This is sometimes feasible, occasionally desirable, but again often expensive or difficult if the underlying polluting activity is to keep going. If that activity is otherwise beneficial, this is hard to justify.
  
• Tax the emission of the pollutant and leave it up to the polluter to figure out the best way to limit the emission. Unless something should be tightly restricted or banned, this is usually the best approach, because it's the least cumbersome and most flexible. Ask an economist how to deal with pollution, and that's most likely the answer you'll get.
  

Governments around the world have spent more than a century coping with the side effects of modern economic development in these ways. In pre-industrial societies, there was pollution too, of course: think of all that horse manure in the streets. But it was on a generally smaller scale and, crucially, no one cared or understood enough to do anything about it. The modern public health movement started in the second half of the 19th century to deal with these side effects of development, because the understanding was there, for the first time, and the scale and concentration of the problem were bigger.

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When a pollutant (defined in this way) is around us, how do we gauge its potential for harm? The essential answer is concentration times exposure. The more concentrated it is, the longer we're exposed to it, or both, the more harm. The exact concentrations and exposure times vary from pollutant to pollutant and, to a lesser extent, from person to person. Concentrations in the environment generally fall with time, if the pollution source is stopped.

Some important conclusions follow.

The first is that the most harmful things we are exposed to are the things we do to ourselves. After all, we're exposed to ourselves all the time, and the things we put into our bodies ourselves are generally the most concentrated things we encounter in everyday life. The most obvious, and deadly, is smoking, whether it's tobacco or something else. The smoker is getting a certain pleasure out of it, but the harmful side effect is large and cumulative. Living as we do in a society that likes to think of itself, at least, as free, we inconsistently allow people to do some harmful things to themselves, but not others. It's usually a bad idea to try to stop people from doing such things by force, because force rarely works over time. But that doesn't mean we can't nudge people in the right direction. And it means governments have no excuse for, say, subsidizing growing tobacco.*

The second is that home, school, and workplace hazards are the next on the list. These are the places we spend the most time and often have limited control over and knowledge of what we're exposed to. If the hazards are routine, there's a good case for legal regulation. But where and when we do have control, there's an even stronger case for exercising common sense.

The third is that everything else is generally less important. The reason is that, whatever the exposure times, the concentrations are much lower. Cut off from its source, chemical pollution disperses and transforms over time. Of course, if you live next to a smokestack that's going all the time, say, then you're closer to the "workplace" situation. And occasionally, nature itself mixes in with manmade pollution to concentrate the problem, instead of dispersing it. The classic "smogs" that used to form over industrial cities (smog being a mix of natural dust and water vapor with manmade smoke) are one example. Another familiar to residents to Los Angeles and Mexico City is vertical atmospheric temperature inversion (remember that from last year?), which can trap smoke and other aerosols that would otherwise disperse.

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Dividing the world up into the categories of "harmful, neutral, and beneficial" to us is completely separate from dividing it up into the "natural" and the "manmade." Nature has lots of harm out there is store for us if we're not careful. Bacteria blindly doing their thing can sometimes kill a baby or an adult. Insects, snakes, and plants sometimes have deadly poisons. Floods and storms can destroy what we've built and kill us. Certain plants have dioxin-like chemicals no different in their harm from the harm done by artificial ones. There's no malintent involved, although much of what's true about manmade pollution harming us is also true about an insect bite or allergen harming us. Our bodies themselves have defense mechanisms against the harm, at least up to point. How are bodies react to these things is a function only of our bodies and the harmful agent - whether or not it was manmade, whether or not it was the product of evil intent.

Until around 1970 or so, such distinctions and commonalities were taken for granted, and much of the time, they still are today. The rise of the modern environmental movement around 1970, however, changed how we think about these issues, deeply confusing them together, blocking out simple truths about nature that our ancestors had no problem seeing, and injecting agendas into our politics that are superficially about one thing (public health, say, which wasn't discovered by the environmentalist movement) but are really about something else entirely (like stopping economic development, no matter what the harm to humans, or punishing private economic activity simply for being private). The independent distinctions of "natural-manmade" and "beneficial-harmful" were merged. Side effects of civilization, and ultimately civilization itself, were demonized as the results of harmful intent. Since about 40 years ago, such thinking, the groups that promote it, and the politicians who pander to and depend on it, have done real harm in the most advanced countries, especially in the ultra-litigious US. More recently, environmentalist groups and politicians have tried to confuse the subject further by peddling the wishful thinking that regulation (of any kind, beneficial or not) has no or minimal costs. That can't be true; otherwise, people would implement the practice themselves. Even beneficial regulation has costs, but we enjoy the benefit (if it is actually beneficial), and its cost can often be offset by economic progress elsewhere. In poor countries, those options are often not available, and terrible harm has been inflicted there, by denying them (for example) pesticides and, more recently, selectively bred crop seeds that reduce the need for pesticides. The cumulative effect of such abuse of government power is major and persists if nothing is done to reverse it. Such a movement is not about public health, clearly. And it is a movement, not a science.

Economic valuing is based on benefits, costs, and harms to someone. It's meaningless to discuss benefits and costs outside that framework; there are no "intrinsic" costs and benefits without a party benefited or harmed. Since nature as a whole has no "body," no intentions, and no "health" the same way an individual human or animal has, the environmentalist movement has to operate on a metaphysical plane, even as it abuses political and social mechanisms designed for strictly human use. While it claims to speak for "nature," it really speaks for no one but itself.

"According to nature" you want to live? O you noble Stoics, what deceptive words these are! [Stoicism was an ancient philosophical school that exhorted its followers to "live according to Nature."] Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power - how could you live according to this indifference? Living - is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature? Is not living - estimating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? And supposing your imperative "live according to nature" meant at bottom as much as "living according to life" - how could you not do that? ....

In truth, the matter is altogether different: while you pretend rapturously to read the canon of your law into nature, you want something opposite .... Your pride wants to impose your morality, your ideal, on nature ... you demand that she should be nature "according to the Stoa," and you would like all existence to exist only after your own image - as an immense eternal glorification and generalization of Stoicism. For all your love of truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, so rigidly-hypnotically to see nature the wrong way, namely Stoically, that you are no longer able to see her differently. (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 9)

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* While trying to discourage its use. That means that the tobacco has to be exported to other countries. Which it is, and that's government-subsidized too.

Yet more revisionism and conspiracism about Iraq

Congressional Democrats, in spite of the recent Senate Intelligence Committee report, are continuing their campaign to rewrite history and avoid responsibility for their decisions and statements in 2002 and 2003 regarding Iraq.

Via Instapundit, read James Kirchick in the Los Angeles Times, then view this on YouTube. Circle back to Fred Hiatt's piece in last week's Washington Post. It says something - something really revolting - about the current Democratic leadership in Congress and their enslavement to the "permanent campaign" - in this case, permanent fundraising mode with the wealthy and ultraliberal wing of the party.

Meanwhile, historian Victor Davis Hanson is beating off another outburst of ignorant bullying from Pat Buchanan and his paleocon allies at the American Conservative. Hanson and I don't agree about the Iraq war, but that's neither here nor there: Buchanan is loaded for bear, recycling mythology stretching back to the pre-Pearl Harbor isolationist right. He's been doing that since the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

Of course, none of this would be necessary if we had a White House more communicative and forthright than the current one. Lots of people out here, both allies and critics of the Bush administration, are doing what the White House itself should have spent the last five years doing. But I guess you go to war with the White House you have.

Iraq, five years later

What people, including historians, in the future will think about the Iraq war is anyone's guess. The answer will depend in part on events that have not yet happened and things we cannot now know. But it has been more than five years since the US-led invasion of Iraq, and the operation seems to be coming to a conclusion. US troop levels will start dropping even before the election and drop faster afterwards.

The most important thing about the Iraq war is not how it started, but how it is ending, with the so-called "surge" that started late last summer - essentially, concentrating a large number of the best combat troops in and around Baghdad. It reflects classical counterinsurgency doctrine, with its origins in previous wars (El Salvador, Vietnam, Algeria, Philippines, etc.) only dimly remembered by most today, but carefully studied by the military. However, the "surge" only became a reality after the Republican defeat in the 2006 elections and Bush's relinquishing of operational control of the war. Instead, a civilian, Defense Secretary Gates, and a military officer, General Petraeus, were put in charge, with the civilian as the senior partner, the optimal approach. At the urging of the military and members of Congress (including McCain), Bush was forced to accept the policy, having nowhere else to go. His dogmatism and incompetence had left him in a deadend.

The surge has led to two large positive results: a sharp decline in violence and the decisive defeat of al Qa'eda in Iraq, reflective of its apparent larger disintegration. (See the articles by Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker and Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank in the New Republic.) Al Qa'eda's mistake was the most obvious one that can be made by any guerrilla movement or insurgency, choosing or being forced to fight an organized professional army in the open. Contrary to widespread myth, no guerrilla movement alone has ever won a war, and such movements cannot survive a direct fight with an army.

But the US has also had a large bit of luck here. To be defeated, an insurgency has to lose its cover among the civilian population, while the civilian population has to feel that casting its lot with the counterinsurgency is the lesser risk. In 2004, 2005, and 2006, al Qa'eda seemed on the way to winning in Iraq, because they had cover among Iraq's suddenly powerless and angry Sunnis. But al Qa'eda made the fatal mistake of imposing its harsh version of Islam on those Sunnis, who then turned on them in 2007 and 2008. Al Qa'eda had nowhere to run. It's a scenario that has played out before in the Arab and Muslim worlds: a population attracted to a radical Islamic movement, only to be totally alienated by it. Al Qa'eda took the lives of about 50,000 of their fellow Muslims to prove this, again.*

All of which demonstrates a perennial truth about war: it often ends in a place far from where it started.

The price of the surge. Like any such sudden turnaround, the success of the surge has come at price. There's the large amount of cash (bribes, essentially) doled out to Sunni tribal chiefs to cement their shaky loyalty to the Baghdad government. The US is now following a policy of no interference in purely internal Iraqi conflicts, which means that such conflicts and the mix of corruption and violence surrounding them evolve in their own way, without American attempts to shape them, so long as they do not become connected with jihadis.

Those changes reflect a larger change in American policy, the de facto abandonment of the democratization strategy. This policy lies in tatters elsewhere in any case, by the very forces that the Bush policy never came to grips with: jihadis from Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia; the persistence of powerful tribal-sectarian divisions in the Middle East; and the sharp rise in the price of oil, which provides these forces with more material resources.** Restoration of democratic sovereignty has failed in Lebanon, thanks to Syria and Iran. Where elections do occur, they fragment populations into religious and tribal shards and open the way for jihadist groups. These forces threaten the democratically elected governments currently in charge in both Baghdad and Kabul, which could not survive in their present form without the presence of Western (mainly American) troops.

Military transformation collides with nation building. By making do with the troops available, rather than vainly wishing for the much larger number needed for a traditional occupation and "nation-building" effort, the "surge" has reasserted a more conservative and realist conception of military force and succeeded in making lemonade from lemons.

But why the lemons to begin with? The immediate cause was the push for "military transformation" which began after the Cold War and entered a heightened phase under former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld in 2001. The essence of "military transformation" was to continue to shrink US troop levels, while improving their ability to fight hi-tech conventional wars against other states. The idea is to be ready to fight another army - as in Korea or World War II - but with the newest technology, moving the US forces even further in the direction of an agile, light force capable of defeating conventional enemies quickly, but even less able to act as an occupation and nation-building force. The quick defeat of the Iraqi army in the spring of 2003 demonstrated "military transformation" perfectly. It was a faster, cheaper, and less deadly version of the 1991 Gulf war.

But that was merely three or four weeks, of toppling Saddam, out of more than five years, of "now what?" The Rumsfeld doctrine of military transformation has been harshly criticized by both neocons and liberals as sacrificing "boots-on-the-ground" in favor of a shiny, hi-tech military future. Rumsfeld, like Colin Powell, was shaped by the Vietnam era and the rejection by American society in general, and the officer class in particular, of "nation building." Following this powerful prejudice of senior American military officers, its forces are prepared and equipped for wars only, in the narrow sense, like the 1991 war. The failure of preparation for a post-Saddam Iraq led to a spectacular collision of the military transformation doctrine with the reality of occupation and has put unprecedented strain on the American army.† Given that Rumsfeld was completely out of tune with what would be needed in Iraq, it's surprising he stayed as long as he did. He was originally opposed to the war and tried to resign at the end of 2003 and again in the spring of 2004. But Bush leaned hard to keep him from leaving. Here we get to another difficult puzzle, the strange effect of Bush's obsession with loyalty on the people around him.

The failure to foresee what post-Saddam Iraq would look like is at the heart of the depressing story told by the best books on the 2003-07 period. They include George Packer's The Assassin's Gate, Larry Diamond's Squandered Victory, Thomas Ricks' Fiasco, Bing West's No True Glory, and Ali Allawi's The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace. Where a realistic guess of a post-Saddam Iraq should have been was a void, eventually filled by Bush and White House staff with wishful thinking of the neoconservative type.

The neoconservative failure. Fallacious neocon theories about democratization and the Middle East are the core of the failed Bush policy. Similar intelligence was available to both Clinton in 1998 and Bush in 2002 about Saddam's weapons programs and stockpiles. One difference in 2002 was, obviously, that the 9/11 attacks greatly raised the stakes. Bush determined to prevent future attacks, not just respond to them. But the injection of neocon theorizing also made a decisive difference, because it transformed a narrow debate about terrorism and unconventional weapons into a fuzzier and open-ended fantasy of regional and political transformation. This thinking could have been taken seriously by someone who thought that the Middle East as a whole and Iraq in particular were like eastern Europe or Latin America in the 1980s, or Germany and Japan in 1945. Only conservative and libertarian critics and skeptics strongly objected to this once-liberal, now-neocon "well-intentioned" and "fuzzy-minded" thinking. (See here, here, and here for George Will's corrosive skepticism and steely-eyed, classic foreign policy realism.) But such criticism had little influence: the Republican party, led by Bush, had rearranged itself to exclude precisely such objections. Centrists and liberals took the ideas for granted with no coherent answer to the neocon theories. The far left became consumed with its own kooky counterreality of "American empire" and "Bushitler."

In this verbal snapshot, Bing West described the state of Basra at the start of the invasion:

In March 2003, I accompanied the Marine battalion and British engineers who seized the pumping station just north of Basra that facilitated a multibillion-dollar flow of oil. The engineers were appalled to find open cesspools, rusted valves, sputtering turbines, and other vital equipment deteriorating into junk. Heaps of garbage lay outside the walls of nearby houses. Yet inside the courtyards, tiny patches of grass were as well tended as putting greens. That defined Iraq: a generation of tyrannical greed had taught Iraqis to look out for their own, to enrich their families, and to avoid any communal activity that attracted attention.

It's not the sort of thing that can be changed with the snap of the fingers. This is a larger failure of "intelligence" than just misjudging the scope of Saddam's WMD programs (which were real, if small) and the size of his stockpiles (which were non-existent).

The intelligence failure. The continued obsession with WMD distracts most people from seeing this truth. The fact is, if Saddam had had such weapons or a large weapons program, the long-term results of the Iraq occupation would not have differed except in details. Al Qa'eda would still have itched to turn Iraq into a showdown. The gross inadequacy of the number and type of troops deployed; the almost complete lack of planning for a post-Saddam Iraq; the radicalization of the Iraqi Sunnis, enraged by their loss of exclusive minority rule over Iraq - none of these would have been any different. The comprehensive failure of the Bush strategy for thinking beyond the first few weeks after the invasion and the apparent fantasy of the administration neocons - that Iraq would just snap into place as a functioning civil society - remain the grand mistakes of the Iraq war. After all, there were good reasons to think that, after ejecting weapons inspectors in August 1998, Saddam had restarted his weapons programs and produced some for use. He had used chemical weapons in the past.††

That's not to say that the intelligence failure isn't important. But its importance is not what Democratic politicians, having supported the war and now running for political cover, want you to believe. If the "Bush lied, people died" trope is a little too familiar as a cliché, consider the recently released Senate Intelligence Committee report on the pre-war Iraq intelligence situation. It mostly confirms what everyone already knows, or should know: not just the CIA, but virtually all foreign intelligence services believed that Iraq had restarted of its advanced weapons programs. There is a very serious problem here, but it's not with "Bush lied" - there's no evidence that he did. In fact, Bush and the people around him fervently believed in what they were saying, and there lies the real failure: they believed too much and too well.

Midnight at the oasis. A long-running deficiency has plagued American intelligence in the Middle East since the late 1970s. We used to be able to collect our own Middle East intelligence, largely thanks to the relatively free country of Lebanon, the Arab world's previous and failed democratic experiment. When the Lebanese civil war started in 1975 and Western diplomats and spies there started being kidnapped in the early 1980s, that venue vanished, and the US began to rely on proxies for intelligence: first the Shah, who fell in 1979; then Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan.‡ This is not to let the Bushies off the hook - a failure of such long standing, including the failures that let to 9/11 - should have been dragged out front and center in 2002 for thorough scrutiny. The problem is that changing this dependency would require a complete overhaul of US alliances and, even harder, the policies and interests controlling our relationships with Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

If there is a specific thread that keeps popping up again and again in this history, it is the long-term degeneration and failure of the CIA. This failure is evident from the recent Senate report, the Kay report on Iraq's weapons programs, the 9/11 Commission report, and the CIA's repeated public misjudgments of the Middle East. The "work" (if it can be called that) of former CIA people gone public (Michael Scheuer, Valerie Plame, Joe Wilson) makes it clear that the CIA's mindset is so far off base from what's needed that the agency is probably beyond saving. It should just be shut down: if "empty suit syndrome" means anything, the CIA is it.

This large and costly lesson about intelligence should never be forgotten: decisions of war and peace should be made only on public and obvious things. Intelligence has been used, both successfully and unsuccessfully, during wars. But decisions to step from peace to war, and from war to peace, should only be made on something more reliable than guesswork. It doesn't preclude military action in the future; it does preclude the doctrine of pre-emption, unless the threat is sitting on someone's lawn, so to speak. It means the end of the distinctive mix of mistaken neoconservative ideas that went into the Iraq war: connecting secular dictators with jihadi terrorists, "regime change" with poor prospects for functioning replacement governments, pre-emption based on intelligence trusted as more certain than it can ever be, the belief that Middle Eastern democratization improves American security in any but marginal and costly ways.

A moment of silence. It is far from the first time soldiers have died for the strategic mistakes of their leaders, far from the worst instance, and probably won't be the last. I know that's small consolation to those who lost relatives and friends in Iraq. The intervention does have positive achievements: the overthrow of a cruel dictator, and the crushing defeat and apparent dissolution of al Qa'eda outside its home territory.

But these have come at too high a cost and taken much too long. While falling apart elsewhere, al Qa'eda is regenerating on its home turf, the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Supposed allies like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia continue to play a thoroughly ambiguous game with radical Islamic groups in no way in keeping with Bush's famous "you're with us or you're against us." In the wake of the debacle of neoconservatism, the big strategic issues are again up for grabs. In our present hyperpartisan hysteria, there's little hope they will be addressed, at least while we live under the evil sway of the "permanent campaign."

POSTSCRIPT: Listen here for a podcast interview with Douglas Feith, about his book War and Decision, the Iraq war, and more. What Feith says and documents in his book, and also what he does not address, are as important as the books mentioned above.
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* The civil war in Algeria, which led to the same result, ran for a decade after 1992 and took the lives of over 150,000. The Lebanese civil war (1975-1990, although it's never really ended) killed between 50,000 and 100,000. Iraq's 2003-08 civil war falls into the same class.

** Of course, it also provides them with more to fight over as well.

† An army of half a million would have been necessary to implement a traditional occupation, rather than the 150,000 deployed. To sustain that over time, with normal troop rotations, would have required a larger base of 2.5 million. Even the larger Cold War military of the 1980s, about 1.6 million and double the size of the post-Cold War military, could not have done it. The American military has not had an army that size since the earlier stages of the Vietnam war, when there was a draft. While most combat troops in Vietnam were volunteers, contrary to myth, draftees did free up volunteers to serve in combat roles.

†† Actually, the evidence is that Saddam thought he restarted his programs and had stockpiles - the people running these programs were evidently doing something else, like stashing money in European bank accounts - and his chemical weapons program ended up in Syria. It's not clear how much Saddam knew about his own regime. That's what dictatorships are like in their final stages. Think of the drug-addled Hitler in his bunker in the spring of 1945.

‡ Not accidentally, every president since Carter has had a misintelligence/misadvice-enabled Middle East folly. Carter had the fall of the Shah, the assassination of Sadat after the Camp David treaty, and the first US security guarantees to the Gulf kingdoms. Reagan had the Marines in Lebanon and the Iran part of the Iran-Contra affair. Bush Sr. had American troops in Saudi Arabia for the long term. Clinton had the Oslo process and not taking al Qae'da seriously (except briefly). Bush Jr. had not taking al Qae'da seriously (at first) and the Iraq war. The list of failures over thirty years is long and striking.