Simply green

[I wrote this post quite some time ago but never put it up.]

Grim has up a post with some thoughts about Elisabeth Badinter. Grim is objecting to the use of the word “forcing” in the title and sub-title of the Telegraph’s article on Badinter’s views:

French feminist warns green movement forcing women to stay at home
Elisabeth Badinter, a leading French feminist, has warned the green movement is threatening decades of improvements in gender equality by forcing women to give up their jobs and become earth mothers.

and his thoughts on guilt are will worth reading.

Once you get into the article, however, Badinter’s view are characterized a little differently:

a "holy reactionary alliance" of green politicians, breast-feeding militants, "back to nature" feminists and child psychologists is turning Frenchwomen into slaves to green "fads" like re-usable nappies and organic food.

In her new book, Conflit, la Femme et la Mere (Conflict, the Woman and the Mother), Mrs Badinter contends that this politically correct cabal is burdening mothers with intolerable guilt unless they stay at home and breast-feed for as long as possible.

We can have a lively discussion about whether turning women into “slaves” is the same as “forcing” them but my interpretation of Badinter’s view is that women are experiencing great societal pressure to mother in a particular way. I’ve never had children but it seems to me that it is almost impossible to overestimate the extent to which women are susceptible to being told they’re parenting wrong, they should be doing it this way or that way or any other way than the way they’re doing it.

Interestingly, Badinter’s view reminded me of something I read years ago: a couple of brief essays on the Andrea Yates tragedy in the Newsletter of the Evangelical & Ecumenical Women's Caucus, an organization whose stated mission is to “support, educate, and celebrate Christian feminists from many traditions.”

[I feel compelled to stop and state the obvious: Andrea Yates is an extreme case and I do not in any way consider her typical of most women or most mothers. A series of bad decisions and vicious people cascaded down on her with monstrous results. I don’t seek to excuse what she did but neither do I believe she was cold and calculating or a vengeful wife. She was a very seriously mentally ill woman, if not when she met her husband, then certainly by the time she had her third child. The medical establishment, her family, and most especially her husband failed her miserably - and failed her children unforgivably.]

One of the EEWC essays echoes some of Badinter’s points. In discussing how Andrea Yates became so mentally ill that she committed a crime almost incomprehensibly horrible, Anne Eggebroten lists a number of factors. One is the decision to live a “simpler” lifestyle. Andrea and her husband Russell moved with their four children into a bus; six people living in 350 square feet. They eventually moved out of the bus but only because Andrea’s parents insisted. As Eggebroten puts it (emphasis mine):

The big attraction of the bus to Russell was that it represented a simpler lifestyle ... Russell's goal was to "travel light,"... "We just kind of lived," Rusty said to him. "We took it easy" (p. 46). Maybe this life was easier for him -- no lawn to mow -- but living with four toddlers in a bus was not easy for Andrea. When they were back in a normal home, Andrea confessed to Russell that "she felt she had 'failed' at the simple life in the bus" (p.47). Christian churches need to warn their members that simple living must be done in a context where both husband and wife are making choices and sharing the work. Otherwise it becomes just one more impossible ideal for a mother to live up to. [Ed. note: When the fledgling Evangelical Women's Caucus first met in 1974 (as a task force at the Second Thanksgiving Workshop of Evangelicals for Social Action), we drafted a list of proposals which included this statement: "We also urge that changes in economic lifestyles not be designed so that women are forced to make greater sacrifices than men."]

Eggebroten’s concerns echo those of Badinter: changes in lifestyle that are decreed to be better in the eyes of God or better in the eyes of Gaia often end up placing heavier burdens on women than on men. Women need to understand that an approach that urges them to sacrifice for the greater good while the men doing the urging skate is an unacceptable approach, regardless of how wonderful someone is saying that greater good is. If it’s that wonderful, the people doing the urging can do the sacrificing - or at least their fair share of it. There is a particular cruelty in taking someone’s desire to nurture, to help, to do what’s best for others, to make the world a better place, to live up to a higher ideal, and using that desire as a means to make her - or his - life worse.

The second EECW essay addresses Grim’s statement that:

Guilt comes from the inside. Someone may wish to make you feel guilt, but all they can actually do is bring the guilt you already feel to your conscious attention. If it isn't there, they can't create it.

What Grim is describing is how it should be; unfortunately, it’s often not how it is and it seems that it is particularly not how it is for women. Pat Gundry talks about Andrea Yates’ inability to say “No”, her inability to stand up for herself. Gundry believes there is something we can do to help make sure other women don’t end up where Andrea Yates did:

We can teach our girls, and all the girls we meet, to say no. We can teach them how to decide when to say no and when to say maybe and when to say yes for now, but it's open to change. We can give them practice saying no and making it stick. We can model saying no and making it stick, without remorse, without guilt. We can teach all the ways to say no graciously--and the few they'll need to say it not so graciously.

I don’t know if learning to say “No” could have saved Andrea Yates and her children. Maybe it could have. Maybe she would have said “No” to marrying Russell or “No” to having child after child or “No” to being left alone when she knew it was dangerous. Or maybe she was too emotionally and mentally ill even before she met Russell to protect herself.

Be that as it may, learning to say “No”, to stand up for themselves can help women who are encouraged to doubt their own wisdom, their own knowledge, their ability to stand on their own two feet. Learning to say “No” is crucial if women are going to stand up to the kind of societal pressure Badinter is talking about and decide for themselves the best way to raise their children and the best way to live their lives.

Majestic equality

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. - Anatole France

And to drive gas guzzlers.

Jeff Jacoby has written a critique of last year’s Cash For Clunkers program. There were a number of problems with this program but the one that stands out for me is the one caused by the environmental aspect of Cash For Clunkers. In order to help the environment, the program required the destruction of the (perfectly usable) cars traded in when new cars were bought. This has reduced the supply of used cars and driven up the price for people who want to buy one. According to Jacoby, there should have been no question who would benefit and who would suffer as a result:

No great insight was needed to realize that Cash for Clunkers would work a hardship on people unable to afford a new car. “All this program did for them,’’ I wrote last August, “was guarantee that used cars will become more expensive. Poorer drivers will be penalized to subsidize new cars for wealthier drivers.’’

I have written before about a government program - outlawing incandescent lightbulbs - that is saving the environment on the backs of those who can least afford it. As I said then, I do not think either Michael Crichton or Aaron Wildavsky would be surprised at yet another example of the truth of Wildavsky’s conclusion that:

resilience is a better strategy than anticipation, and that anticipatory strategies (such as the precautionary principle) favor the social elite over the mass of poorer people.

(Via Greg Mankiw)

Great minds

A few days ago, I said I wanted climate change scientists to provide the world with:

Raw temperatures for all land measurements for as long as we have them broken out into individual measurement stations. ... The next column in the spreadsheet should contain the adjusted temperatures. The next column in the spreadsheet should explain how the adjustment was calculated.

Prompted by a Times (UK) article headlined, “World may not be warming, say scientists”, TigerHawk is calling for the climate science community to:

hit the reset button on the whole project. Post all the raw data, then post all the adjustments with the explanations therefore. Do it in bloggy form, allowing for comment fields. Post the software used in the models, and use change control (which requires ex ante justification for any change), just as one would require for any mission-critical software. Use open-source programmers, when appropriate, who might well produce better code for a given routine. Harness the distributed power of the web, act in the open, and see what the data look like and the models predict then. Do all of that, and many more people will believe the result.

The additional step of posting and improving the model software is valuable but before we even start considering what the models predict for the future, we need to know for sure what the data are telling us about the past and the present. Thus I believe posting the data is the first step and should be done immediately rather than making it part of a package deal with the software - which could take forever to get up.

This seems even more urgent given the recent surprising interview with Professor Phil Jones. According to the Daily Mail (Via Watts Up With That), Professor Jones:

agreed that there had been two periods which experienced similar warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but said these could be explained by natural phenomena whereas more recent warming could not. [snip]

admitted that in the last 15 years there had been no ‘statistically significant’ warming, although he argued this was a blip rather than the long-term trend. [snip]

said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.

If the report of the interview is accurate, this all seems like kind of a big deal and even more reason to make the data available.

On a completely unrelated topic, Megan McArdle has given sort of a throw-away endorsement of the idea of government-provided catastrophic health insurance:

The problem with both sets of plans [Republican and Democrat] is that the [Republican] voucher cap would never withstand the assault from angry and frightened seniors, while the [Democratic] provider caps and treatment disallowals would never withstand the pressure of various other interest groups. That's why I want to turn the Federal government into an income-based catastrophic insurer, for expenses that exceed 15-20% of AGI. I don't think there's much hope of controlling cancer treatments or heart surgery. But I think we could eliminate a hell of a lot of unnecessary day to day expenses--the ER visits of convenience and CYA tests for diseases there's no indication the patient has. But the only way we'll do that is by making the consumer responsible for those costs. Short of that, we're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

I don’t remember her writing about this before although it’s possible I just missed it or she wrote about it before I began reading her regularly. If I could figure out a way to search just the text of her posts and not the comments, I’d try looking for earlier posts by her on the topic. Unfortunately, a Google search turns up 252 hits; I checked out the first few and all the references to catastrophic insurance are the comments. It would be interesting to see if she’s fleshed out her thoughts, taken a look at the costs, and so on.

Unpremeditated Global Warming

(This is a slightly cleaned up version of part of an email I sent to a friend. Since I wrote him there has been a dust-up about the China temperature stations which makes what I want even more important so I keep thinking I should take what I wrote to him, clean it up, insert the appropriate hyperlinks, and post it. That’s not happening anytime soon so I decided to just post my raw thoughts and spiff them up later if I have the time and inclination. Voila.)

Although I find the dumped East Anglia CRU emails discomforting, my real problem is with the Harry_Read_Me document and the code files. I did not slog through all of them and my Fortran days are far behind me but my heart bleeds for this poor programmer. At the same time, if his comments are accurate there is no way the data at East Anglia can possibly be the basis for anything. Never mind what the climate models are doing in predictive terms - the data are clearly being tortured to make them confess to the crimes of which their jailers suspect them.

I've never had any problem with adjusting raw temperature data. The usual example justifying it is the problem of the urban heat island: a temperature station near a growing metropolis will show higher temps just because there are more people, there is more concrete, there are more cars, buildings, etc. So of course any reputable scientist would attempt to control for that by adjusting temps downward as the urban sprawl sprawls. However, there are three problems with what I'm now reading about the raw temp adjustments.

First, a fair number of them appear to be adjusted up. I know there can be good reasons for this but I'm now very curious about how many temps were adjusted up and how many were adjusted down.

Second, I keep hearing that temp stations are disappearing from the world temp averages. I read more than a year ago that most of the interior of Canada was gone. Russia seems to fade in and out. In California, I read that the temp stations moved to the beach. I would very much like to see how much difference inclusion of the disappearing stations makes in the current numbers. (I'm giving the GWists the benefit of the doubt by assuming that if a temp station is no longer included in today's global temp calcs it is also excluded from the calcs on temps 50 years ago. If not, we should really just shoot them all and be done with it.)

Third, I always figured there was some formula for making adjustments to raw temperature. Population growth of x% means we adjust temps by y degrees. A temp station moved x meters higher means we adjust temps by y degrees. And so on. However, based on the info coming out of the data dump plus such distressing matters as the unseemly fight over the Darwin Airport adjustments, I now fear that there is no formula for adjustments but rather they are done based on the whim - or, if you prefer, gut level feeling - of the adjuster.

So here's what I'd like to see:

Raw temperatures for all land measurements for as long as we have them broken out into individual measurement stations. And by individual, I mean one station, no moves, no physical changes. If the station in Sydney started at the harbor, that's Sydney-1. When it gets a little sunscreen it becomes Sydney-2. When it moves 300 meters higher up, that's Sydney-3. And so on. The next column in the spreadsheet should contain the adjusted temperatures. The next column in the spreadsheet should explain how the adjustment was calculated. I would be overjoyed if that column always said, "Reference Rule #x for the algorithm".

My understanding is that atmospheric temp measurements are also adjusted so I'd like to see the same thing for those. And although I haven't paid much attention to them, if the ocean measurements (Argos?) are adjusted, I'd like to see the same thing for them. This should all be trivial to do and would go a long way toward reassuring people like me about what's going on inside those black boxes that claim the earth has gotten warmer. The greatest tragedy of the East Anglia data dump will be if the the most alarmist AAGWers turn out to be right and yet their own idiocy destroys their credibility.

That's funny

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...' - Isaac Asimov

Deafening Silence has up an excellent post on ClimateGate, examining the parallels - and divergences - between climate science now and the study of physics at the turn of the last century. And, like me, she’s wondering about ghosts.

Go, read.

The specter of ClimateGate

I miss Michael Crichton. A lot.

And in my more whimsical moments I wonder if perhaps the East Anglia Climate Research Unit had a ghost in its computer.

ClimateGate

[Updated November 25, 2009, at about 4:30pm to add extra Reading.]

Deafening Silence is doing her usual excellent work on ClimateGate, providing a brief narrative, some key points, info on major players, what each side says about the data dump, and links to other sites where more information - including the emails and data themselves - can be found.

I’ve been wandering around reading about this for the last few days and I think the most telling exchange occurred at RealClimate, the Website run by some of the “working climate scientists” who are in the forefront of the research and advocacy that supports the idea of Apocalyptic Anthropogenic Global Warming. Here you will find AAGW luminaries like Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann and here you will also find Schmidt’s response to ClimateGate. Called “The CRU hack”, this post is a RealClimate masterpiece and well worth reading. As is usually the case at RealClimate, the comments are worth your time also - - although I freely admit I have not made it through all 1,092 comments on the post much less the 502 comments on Schmidt’s follow-up post.

If I may digress briefly, I have often thought there must be a word for writing that is an example of what it is discussing. An easy on the beauty of the English language that uses English beautifully. A piece bemoaning poor grammar that is itself filled with grammatical errors. A paean to courage that required great courage to write. A childish refutation of accusations that the writer is childish. A rant about rants. Onomatopoeia writ large, so to speak. Schmidt’s original post, written in response to charges that science comes far down on the priority list of the AAGW establishment; that said establishment is knowingly making dubious claims; and that said establishment slurs and marginalizes those who disagree with it, would deserve pride of place in any list of such writings.

Back to the post. Schmidt writes:

Clearly no-one would have gone to this trouble if the academic object of study was the mating habits of European butterflies.

Commenter lgarvin replies in part:

That depends on whether or not people were trying to re-order the global economy on the basis of those butterfly studies.

And that, of course, is the crux of the matter. I am willing to accept that most scientific disciplines seethe with personalities, politics, pettiness, and personal attacks. (Hey, I went to grad school.) I am certainly aware that older software often suffers from ugly code, indecipherable routines, an excessive need for manual intervention, and - shall we way - hinky data sets. But most scientific disciplines are not insisting that we need to immediately radically alter the entire basis of our way of life or face cataclysm.

If you’re prophesying the end of the world then - unless you're speaking directly with God - you should be sure both your data and your programs are clean; you should be not merely willing but eager to provide your data and your programs to the whole world for verification; and you should be delighted that people with expertise in related fields like statistics are interested enough in what you’re doing to dissect it. Most important, you should make clear to those who lives you want to at best upend and at worst pretty much destroy that you are, in fact, sure, eager, and delighted. Making it clear that you uncertain, recalcitrant, and scornful is not a good way for you to convince me that you know what you’re talking about, much less that my world is safe in your hands.

*****

Reading:

Deafening Silence points out that the Climate Audit site is difficult to get into due to increased volume. This problem now seems to be resolved but posting is occurring at a Climate Audit mirror site here.

Watts Up With That is posting on Climategate. The oldest post is here.

A stand-alone Website has a searchable data base of the CRU emails, organized somewhat differently from the one Deafening Silence links to.

The emails sound bad but much of what is in them can be explained or spun or is understandable to anyone who has ever written an exasperated email. Not all, but much. I think the state of the computer software code and databases is much more interesting:

L'Ombre de l'Olivier looks at some of the code. He has a link to his copy of HARRY_READ_ME.txt. This is apparently a log kept by the poor programmer who inherited the software at the East Anglia CRU when the original developers left. The programmer (Harry) documents the problems he encounters while trying to figure out what’s going on. You don’t need to read code to follow what’s going on - Harry’s comments tell the story.

HARRY_READ_ME is both agonizing and hysterical. (Be sure to visit Item 17 for a look at squared numbers going negative.) I haven’t read through the whole thing yet but so far my favorite line is in Item 27:

Oh GOD if I
could start this project again and actually argue the case for
junking the inherited program suite!!

Amen, brother. Amen.

*****

Updated November 25, 2009, at about 4:30pm:

This post from the CBS News blog is a must-read. It provides more background thus complementing what Deafening Silence has up. The post concludes with:

The irony of this situation is that most of us expect science to be conducted in the open, without unpublished secret data, hidden agendas, and computer programs of dubious reliability. East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit might have avoided this snafu by publicly disclosing as much as possible at every step of the way.

I found this via Megan McArdle although I’d seen references to it elsewhere. Please do also read McArdle’s post in which she draws an interesting conclusion about the value of any cost-benefit analysis based on the East Anglia CRU software and points out that if - as appears to be the case - the East Anglia CRU itself “cannot now replicate its own past findings” then:

Obviously, this also casts their reluctance to conform with FOI requests in a slightly different light.

Job creation

Greg Mankiw has linked to an article by Steven Davis about how to spur employment in the United States. Davis presents four ideas for improving the unemployment picture in the United States:

1) do away with or circumvent State mandates for employer-provided health insurance

2) suspend the Federal minimum wage or allow States to do so

3) make it crystal clear that the Employee Free Choice Act will not pass

4) do a quantifiable study of the success of various attempts to lower unemployment.

The issue of the minimum wage interests me not at all. I can see both sides of the argument and I think fighting over a minimum wage is a waste of time so long as there are no effective bars to employers hiring illegal aliens for less than the minimum wage.

Of Davis’ other three ideas, the fourth seems pointless and the first seems unnecessary. I’ll look at those and then have more to say about Davis’ third idea.

In presenting his fourth idea, Davis argues that we should:

Experiment with how best to put the unemployed back to work and assess the results. [snip] Some programs focus on job search assistance and interviewing skills. Others provide counseling about education and training opportunities. Yet others rely on re-employment bonuses for job losers or financial inducements to hire the unemployed. There is much potential to learn from these programs about which approaches are cost effective, and which are not.

The programs Davis discusses break down into two categories: helping people get jobs (job search assistance, interviewing skills, education and training opportunities) and persuading employers to create jobs (re-employment bonuses and financial inducements). If unemployment is high because jobs exist but job seekers are not qualified for them then the former methods will be effective. Yet Davis himself seems to say that the problem is not that we have jobs and lack qualified applicants; the problem is that we lack jobs:

The job vacancy rate is mired at 1.8% of employment, the lowest level in the history of the series.

If I understand this correctly it means there simply are not very many open jobs. If that’s the case training workers who used to be in the Widget industry how to complete for jobs in the Doodad industry isn’t going to help: not only are the Widget jobs gone, there aren’t any Doodad jobs either.

The second approach - persuading employers to create jobs - seems to be more what we need. Yet Davis begins his article by claiming that paying companies to hire workers is a fool’s game:

Another proposal circulating in Washington would offer tax credits for employers to create new jobs. Under one version, an employer receives a tax credit of $8,000 in the first year of a new job and $5,000 in the second year. But this proposal is even more costly than the proposal for unemployment insurance benefits. [snip]

Plans to whittle down the cost by restricting eligibility for the new-jobs credit would inevitably favor some employers and harm others. Eligibility restrictions would also inject greater complexity into our already-byzantine tax code.

Davis himself is thus arguing that these tactics will do more harm than good in the long run. It also seems to me - independent of anything Davis said - that providing an employer a financial incentive to hire a worker can’t possibly be that effective.

Let’s say an employer could really use another Shipping Clerk but his revenue numbers don’t quite make him feel comfortable hiring that clerk for the $30,000 salary his other Shipping Clerk is getting. The Feds pop up and offer him $8,000 to hire the clerk and suddenly he’s happy to do so. My question is: why didn’t the employer just advertise for a Shipping Clerk at a salary of $22,000?

This would almost certainly be impossible in a unionized business but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

In 2008, union members accounted for 12.4 percent of employed wage and salary workers, up from 12.1 percent a year earlier, the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The number of workers belonging to a union rose by 428,000 to 16.1 million. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent, and there were 17.7 million union workers.

It’s pretty clear that most businesses are not unionized and it is therefore not written in stone that all Shipping Clerks must make the same amount of money. So why is the government’s offer of $8,000 so persuasive? Maybe the employer is so thrilled at the idea of being able to hire a $30,000 Shipping Clerk for only $22,000 that he can’t resist but I would think that in a recession those $30,000 Shipping Clerks would be a dime a dozen (so to speak) and a job offer at $22,000 would find several takers.

I have the same objection to Davis’ first idea: his call to circumvent or do away with State mandates on health insurance coverage. Davis argues that the “high cost of health insurance acts as a drag on job creation and wage growth.” He therefore wants State governments to make it cheaper for employers to offer health insurance by doing away with mandates that require insurance policies to cover treatments like “... acupuncture, alcoholism treatments, chiropractors, fertility treatments, marriage counseling....” Even better he wants the Federal government to allow companies to buy employee health insurance across State lines in order to avoid State mandates because “employers in states with onerous benefit mandates are stuck with high-cost health insurance.”

I’ve said before that I think State mandates are the States’ business. If a particular State wants to impose onerous mandates and pay the price in higher insurance costs and (if Davis is right) higher unemployment, that’s up to the State; the Federal government should stay out of the matter.* So I obviously consider his idea about the Federal government allowing interstate health insurance shopping a bad one.

I have no such principled objection to the individual States doing away with requiring certain medical services be covered by health insurance if that’s what the citizens of the State want. I do, however, think his idea is unnecessary. Assume businesses want to hire workers - or raise wages - but cannot do so because employee health insurance is so expensive. They don’t need the State or Federal government to help them out of this mess. They can simply not offer health insurance to new hires.** Employers could also presumably stop providing health insurance to their current workers, thus freeing up more money to hire new workers. This would probably have a devastating effect on morale - particularly if the employers did not provide a raise or at least a one-time “bonus” to make up for some of the loss - but presumably employers can get away with this sort of thing in a tight job market: the employees have nowhere else to go.

If you think Davis’ idea to eliminate or undercut mandates is a good one but you cringe at the idea of hiring new employees without health insurance benefits, consider that withholding health insurance benefits from new workers is far less draconian that what Davis proposes. Under Davis’ plan, employers will be able to shop for the cheapest possible health insurance plan with few (possibly no) rules as to what it must cover - and all employees will have to live with that plan. Those who favor this approach tend to emphasize the ability to drop mandates like alcoholism treatment and marriage counseling while ignoring the ability to drop mandates like regular mammograms, prostate screening, and well child care. On the other hand, I will freely admit that an employer deciding to take existing health insurance away from current employees is quite extreme. However, even that approach might appeal to the current employees if the choice was between all employees losing their employer-provided health insurance and some employees losing their jobs. After all, those rising unemployment numbers are swelled by people who once had jobs so it’s a good idea to help people keep the jobs they have while we’re scrambling for ways to help people without jobs find work.***

So there is no need for either State government or the Federal government to bigfoot themselves into the issue of employer-provided health insurance to improve the employment picture. Employers can simply choose to stop providing health insurance, either to new employees or to all employees, in order to free up more money to hire more employees. Similarly there is no need for the Federal government to pay companies to hire new workers. The companies can simply offer those jobs at whatever salary they could afford without government intervention.

Davis’ third point is his most interesting:

It's unclear whether the [Employee] Free Choice Act [EFCA] and card-check provision will become law. Fears that the act might become law are enough to chill investment by firms that could be targets of card-check union certification. To allay these fears and remove the chill from investment, President Obama and congressional leaders should forcefully renounce the act now. If they won't, moderate Democrats should step forward and publicly announce their opposition to the act. By taking this step, they would help restore business confidence and set the stage for more job-creating investments.

This makes sense. A business that is likely to be targeted by unions if EFCA passes has to consider that when thinking about whether to hire new employees - especially if those new hires will be stretching the company thin. It’s one thing to hire five new workers if you can pay them low wages and you know you can fire them if they don’t work out or if your business takes a turn for the worse. It’s quite another thing to hire five new workers if you fear that six months from now you’re going to be unionized, the new guys will have to start getting union wages, and you’ll be operating under an arbitration-imposed contract that prevents you from firing them. In the latter situation, wait and see is the smartest move for any company considering hiring.

The situation would be the same if the legislation hanging fire was good for employers. Let’s imagine the Union Retention Act. URA requires that all union employees must continue to be treated as their union contract specifies but that new employee cannot join a union and are not covered by the contract. Now employers will hesitate to hire because it will benefit them far more to do their hiring after such legislation is signed into law.

The issue is not whether the pending legislation is good or bad for employers; the issue is whether the legislation will change the employer-employee relationship in a significant way. If so, then as long as the legislation is neither passed nor clearly dead employers will wait and see.

Davis focuses on EFCA but I don’t remember a time when so many large potential policy changes were hanging around. EFCA is one. Climate change legislation is another. We’ve got Waxman-Markey but it hasn’t gone anywhere and now I gather someone else is putting together a different bill. We’ve got n+1 iterations of a health reform bill. Every so often someone mumbles something about regulation of the financial industry then disappears for a month. Limiting executive compensation - for companies that took TARP, for all financial companies, for insurance companies, for everyone? - drifts in and out of focus. As far as I know, even poor old PPIP doesn’t actually have a stake through its heart.

If the government wants companies to hire and the best hope of persuading them to do so is to make the business climate as certain as possible then the Administration’s efforts should be focused on getting everything and everyone settled down. Instead it’s as if Washington is doing everything in its power to make the business climate as unsettled, uncertain, and insecure as possible. The problem is not that the government is passing laws that are bad for business nor that the government is passing laws that are good for business. The problem is that the government is hanging fire on an armful of policies that will change the business climate - whether the change will be better or worse for business is irrelevant. So long as businesses do not know which way that cat will jump, they’re paralyzed. Anything they do now as far as hiring or salaries or promised bonuses or health insurance might - a month from now or a year from now - turn out to have been the wrong decision.

I understand that there are issues the Administration and the Congressional leaders believe need to be addressed: climate change; health care/insurance; EFCA; executive bonuses. But those issues should have been addressed and settled rather than allowed to drag on and on. Obama came in with a solid victory in the November election and a Democratic Congress. We would be in much better shape today if Obama had used his pre-inauguration time and team to write bills addressing each of these issues; had demonstrated his commitment to transparency by posting those bills at WhiteHouse.gov on January 20; and had flexed his popularity - and Congress’ abysmal approval ratings - by announcing he wanted an up-or-down vote on each bill within, oh, say, 100 days. If they were passed we’d know what the rules were. If they weren’t passed, Obama should have made it clear that the issues were off the table for the rest of his first term.

For example, Obama should have been able to get a simple carbon tax with revenues used to offset the additional cost to families making under $250,000. Any revenues over that could have been used to bring down the deficit or fund health care reform or whatever. Especially if the tax started small and went up gradually this should have been doable.

Similarly, Obama should have pushed for an up or down vote on single payer. If it didn’t pass, he should have had a fallback position that simply insured the uninsured. Once that passed - and I think it would have - the issue should have been tabled until after his re-election.

EFCA should have been voted on way back in February - it’s not like this is some new idea. If it passed, we’d live with it; if it didn’t, Obama should have declared the issue dead. By the same token all the other ideas floating around out there - new financial regulations; limiting executive compensation; PPIP - should have been addressed by now. Either new laws should have been passed or the issues should have been packed away so businesses would know the rules wouldn’t change for at least the next three or four years.

Is that a lot to have gotten done in 100 days? Sure. But remember the legislation didn’t have to be as complicated as it’s gotten. A carbon tax bill would have been much, much simpler than Waxman-Markey; the single-payer bill runs to less than 16 pages (in Arial 12); EFCA was already written.

Obama and those who call themselves “progressives” wouldn’t have gotten everything they want. But if Obama had been able to get make some progress on his big issues and had been able to stabilize the business climate enough to encourage companies to hire, he would have won himself a lot of credit for putting people back to work. Credit that he could have spent in his next term when a prosperous economy would make his larger plans look more affordable.

*****

“... anything that turns up in a footnote... takes on the character of divine revelation.” - Margaret Halsey

* The issue becomes more complicated because States which choose policies that cause higher unemployment are subsidized to some extent by States which don’t through mechanisms like Federal unemployment benefits. However, a disquisition on the pernicious effects of Federal funds on the issue of State responsibility is beyond the scope of this post.

** I am not aware of any Federal law that requires employers to provide health insurance. It does appear that Hawaii requires employers to provide health insurance to all full-time employees and California may or may not - I’ve found references to a 2003 bill but no discussion of it being currently in force. I have not seen anything indicating any other State has such a requirement although Massachusetts has its own thing going on.

*** This is actually how capitalism is supposed to work: when an employer is in a buyer’s market it can provide less compensation and still be able to hire and retain employees. As the employees receive less, the business frees up more revenue to lower prices, gain more volume, and expand. As the business expands it need more employees which means there are eventually more job offers than there are job applicants. At that point the business must begin offering better compensation to attract new workers and to retain existing ones. Now employees are in a buyer’s market so they demand more and more compensation to take a job or to stay in one they have. The business becomes less competitive as more of its revenue goes into employee salaries; layoffs begin - or the company fails - and the process cycles back to a buyer’s market for employers.

This process looks problematic to a country that increasingly wants security and stasis but I think of it as a variation on creative destruction - it is not industries that are being superseded but employees. I suspect that many people who abhor “creative destruction” when in comes to employees would be far more supportive of it when it comes to the large financial institutions that got themselves into hot water last year - even though allowing those huge institutions to fail would put thousands of people out of work. And vice versa: I suspect many captains of industry who can provide ten thousand reasons why their large companies absolutely needed to be saved by the government would also have ten thousand reasons why it’s preposterous for employees to expect their employers to save them from the normal ups and downs of a capitalist economy.

Sick and fired

Way to go guys. So the government - Democrats and Republicans - passed a bill that is going to phase out incandescent light bulbs and force us all to us to buy fluorescent light bulbs instead.* This, we are assured, will save the planet. Maybe so but it’s not doing much for the people who live on the planet: not only is this dim bulb of an idea destroying jobs in the United States it’s also poisoning workers in China.

The bibliography for State of Fear includes a description of Searching For Safety by Aaron Wildavsky (my hyperlink):

Drawing on data from a wide range of disciplines, Wildavsky argues that resilience is a better strategy than anticipation, and that anticipatory strategies (such as the precautionary principle) favor the social elite over the mass of poorer people.

I’m well aware that those who desperately want to save the planet sneer at Michael Crichton. I suspect, however, that neither Crichton nor Wildavsky would be surprised to discover that the light bulb legislation was supported by the Alliance to Save Energy - which includes such light bulb luminaries as Philips - and by General Electric. - the very company busy closing factories in Kentucky, Virginia, and Ohio while making fluorescents in China.

*****

* I feel compelled to quote Representative Ted Poe who, according to Wikipedia, contended “that the United States Constitution does not give the federal government the power to determine what light bulbs people are allowed to use.”

This sounds familiar

I just finished reading two books on obesity: The Obesity Myth by Paul Campos and Rethinking Thin by Gina Kolata, both via Megan McArdle. I strongly recommend both books. Campos’ is more advocacy and moral indignation - he’s a professor of law - which makes it a livelier read. (For my money, you can skip Chapters 15, 17, and 18.) Kolata’s is more strictly factual - she’s a science writer for the New York Times - which makes it more compelling. If you only read one, read Kolata.

There’s lot of interesting stuff in both books and I may revisit them in a future post. For now, though, I want to talk about something in Kolata’s book that sounded awfully familiar.

One thread of Kolata’s book traces the history of worry about overweight and the diets that were prescribed to overcome it from around 1800 to the present. In Chapter 8, The Fat Wars, she has brought us up to the present. The part of the story I’m interested in begins in 2001 with the surgeon general’s report entitled “A Call to Action to Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity”. Kolata quotes one political science who calls this “crisis and obsession” and continues:

We’d gotten all the cultural mileage out of blaming tobacco for our sins. The surgeon general’s report gave us a new sin, and it resonated, had a sense of truth.

According to Sander Gilman of Emory University:

The operative term is moral panic. There are moments when certain things become the focus of the society because they are believed to be ... a danger to the society, and it is believed that if you focus on it you will be able to avoid it or cure it.

Kolata goes on to describe studies done to determine “How many American’s die each year simply because they are so fat?” She cites two studies published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, one in 1999 and one in 2004, both by researchers from the Centers for Disease Control. The earlier paper claimed that between 280,000 and 350,000 “Americans die each year because they weigh too much”. The later paper claimed “obesity and overweight were causing an extra 400,000 deaths a year”.

After the first paper was published, however, Katherine Flegal, a statistician at the National Center for Health Statistics, and David Williamson, an epidemiologist at the CDC, took at look at the work and discovered problems with the data. The paper was not a new study but rather used data from existing studies. Some of those studies relied partially on self-reporting of weight and at least some were based on a population that was not a representative sample of the United States population. Furthermore some (or perhaps all) of the original studies:

also tended to remove people from their populations, excluding large numbers ... because the researchers thought they were sick. Such practices have become increasingly common in studies of obesity, although they are rarely seen elsewhere in epidemiology because there is no agreed-upon way to decide whom to remove, or when, and such a practice inevitably alters the results.

As if the data problems weren’t enough, Flegal and Williamson also discovered an error in how the data was manipulated. When trying to determine causality, researchers must attempt to control for other factors that can affect the outcome; in this case, other factors are ones that might affect mortality rates, such as age, sex, and smoking. The researcher on the 1999 paper assumed the data he was using had not already controlled for those factors so he controlled for them. However, the studies had already controlled for those factors so he overcontrolled, so to speak. Flegal and Williamson estimated the data manipulation problem would overstate deaths from obesity by 15 to 20 percent. The two wrote up a paper detailing the problems and attempted to get it published. It took four years and four rejections without review before the American Journal of Public Health accepted it. When the second paper attributing 400,000 deaths a year to excess weight appeared, Flegal and Williamson determined it used “the same problematic methods”.

After documenting the errors in the 1999 paper, Flegal and Williamson began to look for a way to do the “how many die because they’re fat” study correctly. They enlisted the aid of two statisticians from the National Cancer Institute to help. Although new to obesity research:

Barry Graubard and Mitchell Gail ... had developed highly regarded and sophisticated methods for estimating cancer risk ... The statistical challenge was the same as with cancer, and their experience with national cancer center data could carry over...

The foursome used data from the Federal Health and Nutritional Examination Survey which they considered both trustworthy - the subjects’ weight and height were measured as part of the data collection process - and representative of the United States population. Their results were very, very different from those in the 1999 and 2004 papers. What Flegal and her colleagues found was a U-shaped mortality curve. Those at the tails - the very thin and the very obese - had an increased risk of death; the normal weight and the overweight did not. In fact, the overweight people had a slightly decreased risk of death compared to those classified as normal weight.

Less than a year after the 2004 paper estimating 400,000 deaths from fat every year, Flegal, Williamson, Graubard, and Gail published their paper, also in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The response was swift. Those with no involvement in obesity research looked at the methodology and praised the paper. On the other hand, “[r]esearchers and organizations that had made a career out of sounding alarms about obesity and overweight” attacked in full force. The Harvard School of Public Health held a seminar to refute Flegal’s paper. They claimed it contradicted The Nurses’ Health Study which was true but that study suffered from the problems of being non-representational and of throwing out up to 90% of the participants for one reason or another. The seminar claimed Flegal’s group had failed to exclude people who should have been excluded. Not true, say the foursome, they analyzed their data with and without smokers and with and without the chronically ill: the results were always the same. In a further attempt to bury the paper, the critics claimed the foursome did not have the credentials to do the work they’d done because they weren’t physicians. Flegal and Williamson have Ph.D.'s in nutrition; Gail actually has an MD - from Harvard, no less - plus a Ph.D. in statistics; Graubard has a Ph.D. in statistics:

“I’ve published papers with most of our critics. and our credentials didn’t seem to be an issue then,” Williamson says.

Then Harvard issued a press release announcing that public opinion had not been swayed by Flegal’s paper:

Most Americans have not changed their minds about the seriousness of the obesity problem and do not believe that scientific experts are overestimating the health risks of obesity.

It went on to, in essence, congratulate the 41% of the American people who continued to believe being seriously overweight kills as many people as smoking and the almost 50% who continued to believe that even someone who was moderately overweight was likely to die too soon. In other words, for failing to give any credence to the ridiculous new study by Flegal, et. al.

Furthermore, researchers in the obesity field wrote editorials in and letters to the editors of their journals urging everyone to join in pushing back against Flegal’s paper. The editor-in-chief of Obesity Management directed his words to doctors. He told them that although few of their patients were likely to have read the Flegal article they had probably heard about it on the news and had gotten the message not to worry too much about being overweight. He continued:

I do not think this is the message you want them to have. It is difficult enough to get many people interested in addressing their excessive weight. Second, when we need more resources not just to study the problem but to begin to do something about it for the public, this provides ammunition for those who oppose this allocation of resources.

In summing up her experience, Flegal says:

Everyone thinks they already know the answer. Anything that doesn’t fit, they have to explain it away or ignore it. All these people who just know weight loss is good for you. It’s just taken for granted regardless of the evidence. [snip]

I expected people would get perturbed, but I really didn’t expect the way they did it. All those erroneous so-called fact sheets. And these misinterpretations and making up things we’d said. [snip]

It seems like some researchers say to themselves, “If the data don’t come out as strongly as we want, then let’s just work on these data until they come out the way we want them to.”

If all this sounds as painfully familiar to you as it does to me, then you are probably aware of the history of another moral panic: Apocalyptic Anthropogenic Global Warming. The Flegal paper sounds like obesity’s hockey stick controversy. The only researchers considered to have acceptable credentials are those who agree that obesity (or AAGW) is a crisis; that is, those who reinforce the moral panic. The refusal on the part of the obesity establishment to even consider Flegal’s findings echoes Al Gore telling Congress that the science of AAGW is settled. And the warning from Obesity Management about the dangerous impact of Flegal’s paper - and especially the concern that it “could provide ammunition” to those who don’t want to fund obesity research and obesity solutions - is within hailing distance of Paul Krugman insisting that those who don’t get with the AAGW program are committing “treason against the planet”.

In many ways, this is all normal at least in the obesity field. (AAGW, not so much since the “establishment” wisdom is so very new.) Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions explains the slow process by which scientific consensus is destroyed and reformed: evidence is presented that contradicts the existing paradigm; the evidence is ignored, explained away, or dismissed; more evidence is presented; and the cycle repeats until the weight of contradictory evidence brings down the existing view of the world and erects a new one in its place. Part of what is unusual about the obesity issue is that the struggle is more visible than usual, the data is more accessible, and it is much easier to compare what the science says to what we experience as individuals than is the case with more obscure fields . How many of us can explain the shift from (speaking very simplistically) gravity to relativity as the paradigm for understanding the rotation of the planets? And, equally important, how many of us must consider that shift in our day to day lives?

And that, of course, is a way in which the obesity paradigm does resemble the AAGW paradigm: the obesity paradigm is already having dramatic effects on our lives both personally and politically and is likely to have even more dramatic effects in the future. The interlocking elements of the obesity paradigm - being overweight causes early death; being overweight causes more illness and thus incurs more medical costs; intervening in children’s lives can reduce their weight; losing a few pounds can ward off Type 2 diabetes; and most of all, anyone who really tries really hard can lose a large amount of weight and keep it off - are informing our discussions of health care and health care costs; are deforming our funding of school programs; and are partially driving our massive spending on weight loss. (Think about how many of the uninsured we could insure for that money.). Yet reading Kolata and Campos reveals that all of these elements are of questionable accuracy and one - that any one can lose weight and keep it off - has been shown to be false for over a hundred years and has been repeatedly proven to be false in study after study after study in the 20th century.

In addition, the existing obesity paradigm almost certainly damages the health of the overweight. Most directly, there are concerns about the health effects of weight cycling, that is repeatedly losing and regaining weight. Beyond that, because it insists that being overweight makes it impossible to be in good health, the paradigm prescribes exercise solely because it will promote weight loss. When the pounds don’t come off, the overweight quit exercising, thus losing the benefits of exercise which are as helpful to the overweight as to those with more slender forms. Similarly, the existing obesity paradigm emphasizes eating for thinness rather than health which leads not only to calorie counts below those considered minimally necessary for obtaining vital nutrients but also to the adoption of all sorts of unbalanced diets. Even when a diet plan consists of a balanced menu, the emphasis is on the weight-reducing aspect rather than the healthy-eating aspect. Just as with exercise, when the healthy eating plan does not produce sustainable weight loss, it will be abandoned - often in favor of one of the unbalanced plans. Once again the only concern is with weight loss and so the overweight are never told that eating a more healthy diet can improve their health even if no weight loss occurs.

Even worse, the existing obesity paradigm may increase the number of overweight people through an insistence on diets that not only don’t work but could actually exacerbate the problem. This seems obvious to anyone who has ever dieted or been around someone who has dieted. The almost inevitable outcome is that any weight lost is regained and then even more weight is added. This outcome is implied by the studies of what happens to normal weight people who are placed on calorie restricted diets by researchers. These “dieters” obsess about food, dream about food, do anything to obtain food on the sly. When once again allowed to eat as much as they want, some of them consume food in huge quantities, eating 5,000-6,000 calories at a sitting, 8,000-10,000 calories in a day. They are driven to eat just as they are driven to breathe. Similarly when scientists examine “metabolic changes ... psychiatric conditions ... body temperature and pulse” in fat people who have lost weight they find that:

Fat people who lose large amounts of weight may look like someone who was never fat, but they are very different. In fact, by every measurement, they seemed like people who were starving.

Small wonder, then, that the usual reaction to a diet is to eventually eat everything that doesn’t eat you first. And even smaller wonder that so many “successful” dieters end up a short time later even heavier than they were before they started dieting. What is wonderful is that faced with long-term success rates estimated at between 1% and 5%, the obesity establishment continues to prescribe the same treatments - and the overweight continue to follow them, convinced that a 95-99% failure rate somehow indicates that they personally lack willpower. Even more wonderful are the suggestions that somehow “getting” people to lose weight can and should be one of the paths to reduced health care spending.

It is disastrous enough for the overweight individuals involved to go through the weight loss process over and over and over again when we have known for decades that failure is virtually assured. It would be even more catastrophic if we as a nation fooled ourselves into thinking that our health care spending could be slashed if only people would lose weight.

Reality based, my foot.

*****

Reading:

Megan McArdle has been doing very interesting writing on obesity, especially on how intransigent it is and how uncertain it is that the government can do anything about it. This is the most recent post I’ve seen by her on the subject:

A Rambling Response on Obesity

You can start here and work backwards - and possibly forwards if she keeps writing on the subject.


In the health care cost debate, the focus is on higher medical costs for the overweight rather than on higher mortality. This makes sense: if the overweight have the decency to die quickly they will require less health care. I’ve taken a quick look at two studies in this area.

One of them was cited in the Flegal paper and asserts worse health and therefore higher medical costs for the overweight. I cannot tell from the author’s description whether the study sample was self-selected; if so, I would have qualms about that. The other problem is Campos’ point: we do not know if obesity is a problem in and of itself or simply a marker for lack of exercise and unhealthy eating. That is, if a study finds the obese have more health problems, is that because they are obese or is it because they eat poorly and do not exercise?

The other study was cited by TigerHawk and asserts higher medical costs; it provides a dollar figure. I barely skimmed this one but found a problem on page 9:

This analysis has several limitations. One is the reliance on self-reported height and weight.

Thank goodness nobody ever lies about their height.

This study also shares the Campos problem (emphasis mine):

Finally, the regression-based approach allows for quantifying the spending attributable to obesity by payer and point of service, but it does not directly allow for apportioning spending across specific diseases or the underlying behavior that causes excess weight (that is, poor diet and inactivity). This should be an area of future research.

I disagree with the author’s claim that we know these factors cause excess weight but I agree they should be controlled for if we are to make any claims about the health costs of overweight. Imagine if we discovered that walking for a half-hour every day made people healthier no matter what their weight? As hard as it is to get people to exercise, I can pretty much guarantee it would be easier to persuade people to walk 30 minutes a day than to get them to lose 30 pounds and keep it off.

I would also very much like to see spending apportioned across specific diseases. What exactly are we spending extra money on when it comes to the overweight?

Destructive destruction

I haven’t thought much about the Cash for Clunkers program. I knew it was designed to reduce carbon dioxide levels by getting older, less fuel efficient cars off the road while simultaneously stimulating the automobile industry. I certainly understood why neoneocon felt she was getting the short end of the stick - again - for having prudently bought a high-mileage car while all those who bought gas guzzlers were being rewarded for their feckless behavior. (Although, as my husband pointed out, she’s been able to laugh every time she sailed past a gas station for lo, these many years.) Still, beyond that it didn’t really register. Our car doesn’t qualify and besides we certainly don’t want to get rid of it.

Now the program has been so successful it’s running out of money and the Administration wants the Congress to cough up some more. This time around I’m seeing articles about how the government is destroying the cars so that not even their spare parts can be used which means that not only will cheap used cars for poor people and students be harder to find, cheap spare parts to keep such cars running will be more expensive. Fair enough but I still couldn’t get too worked up about it. In the context of all the money the government is spending on projects I find useless at best, Cash for Clunkers seemed like a drop in the bucket.

Then I read the Wikipedia entry on Cash for Clunkers, looking to see if there is a requirement that the new cars bought under the program must be from an American company. (There isn’t.) While wandering through the entry I ran across this description of what is done to the cars that are traded in:

To ensure that vehicles traded-in under "Cash For Clunkers" will not be resold by dealers, the program outlines a procedure for destructively disabling the engine (and thus also precluding the possibility that any mechanical engine components might be salvaged to be used in the repair of any other vehicles): the oil is drained and replaced with a sodium silicate solution, and the engine is then started and run until the solution, becoming glass-like when heated, causes engine internals to abrade and ultimately seize. In addition, the salvage or scrap facility which acquires the vehicle cannot sell any powertrain components from the scrap vehicle. This includes the disabled engine (most specifically the long block components), the transmission/transaxle, and in some cases the axle assemblies. The salvage or scrap facility can sell any other component from the scrap vehicle until they are ready to crush and/or shred the vehicle. The salvage or scrap facility has 180 days to ultimately crush and/or shred the vehicle.

Reading what is actually being done made me realize how terribly sad this program is. We’re a nation deliberately destroying its own wealth. What sane society does this?

Fire burn, and caldron bubble

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.

For some reason, the news that the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill passed the House last night has made me feel very sad and very defeated. The bill is so huge - both page-wise and impact-wise - how can anyone possibly know what they’re voting for, much less what the impact will be? I find the size of the bill particularly distressing since I do not believe that human beings pumping CO2 into the air is going to result in apocalypse within a hundred years. Thus to me Waxman-Markey is a huge, expensive, unpredictable Rube Goldberg machine created to fix a problem that would be better addressed through case by case amelioration than through universal prevention. Passing this bill, creating this monstrous structure, is exactly like using an elephant gun to kill a mosquito - without knowing exactly who the elephant gun is pointed at.

You can read Maxed Out Mama and the links she provides for thoughts on what I guess we can call the first-order dangers of Waxman-Markey. I’m equally concerned about another kind of danger: a bubble. I first worried about this back in November. In discussing how the (in my opinion necessary) long, slow economic recovery could be cut short, I wrote:

The other possible interruption of the economic doldrums period is a new economic bubble. I’m not sure how possible this is since a bubble apparently requires the ability to take on lots and lots of debt. However, the government has pumped a lot of money into financial institutions and that money may be ripe for bubbling. One excellent candidate for a bubble is carbon trading.

It’s pretty clear that the Obama administration wants to address Apocalyptic Anthropogenic Global Warming. Leaving aside what I think of the basic idea of AAGW (not much), we have to decide how to address it. If the country is stupid enough to go with a cap-and-trade system rather than a simple carbon tax, the bubble won’t even need the money already pumped into the financial system: it can form itself solely from all the new government “money” handed out in the form of carbon allowances. (I find it hard to believe the government is going to auction those off given the sad financial state of most corporations; it’s more likely they’ll be given away.) The markets can go crazy bidding them up - heck, someone will probably even create derivatives - and we’ll have another bubble.

Like massive Federal handouts, though, a bubble is a bad idea in the long run. By definition, a bubble creates imaginary profits and fake productivity. That means there’s always a day of reckoning. Do we really want to concentrate our hopes and our efforts on pushing that day off on our children and grandchildren? We created this mess. I think we should take the hit involved in cleaning it up.

A bubble of any kind would be great for Obama and the Democrats, provided they could get it cranked up quickly enough and maintain it long enough. If they time cap-and-trade just right, the economy can begin to heat up prior to the November 2010 mid-term elections. Obama and the Democrats can take credit for the “recovery” and the Democrats can retain their control of Congress. If the CO2 bubble continues to grow through the end of 2012, the economy will look good for Obama’s re-election and the Congressional races and that should keep the Democrats in power. If the bubble can manage to stay intact through 2014, the mid-term elections could go to the Democrats yet again. That’s four years for the carbon trading bubble which seems a decent run so it could then pop and leave Obama’s successor with a mess that will have us all yearning for the economy of January 20, 2009.

There could, of course, be problems. If Waxman-Markey turns out to be more expensive than the $175 currently promised, people might get restless. Inflation might rear its ugly head. People might come to believe that AAGW is not really a threat. Still, an overheating economy can make increased energy costs and inflation look less serious than they are and if Waxman-Markey starts making the economy look good I imagine few people will even remember that the cap-and-trade boom was originally supposed to address global warming - and fewer still will care. Yes, I’d say Waxman-Markey looks like a winner for Obama and the Democrats.

Still, this is just one piece of legislation so it took me a while to figure out why I felt so sad about it. It’s because this bill, more than any other passed or contemplated, makes me think that before too long - 25 years, 50, maybe 100 - the United States is going to look exactly like a Western European nation. Don’t get me wrong: many of them are nice places. But they seem awfully tame, awfully limited and I suspect the reason for that is their financial constraints. The Western European nations have built good lives for their citizens within the terms of their current circumstances but I don’t sense in them a vein of daring, a sense of limitless opportunity, a belief that more is always obtainable - all the faith in ambition that has always been the hallmark of the United States.

With Waxman-Markey, this country is putting its economic engine in Park and - if things don’t go perfectly - in Reverse. There will never be more; the best has already been. What could be sadder?

True prophets

Nora Roberts’ Three Sisters Island trilogy is about a speck of land off the Massachusetts coast. The island is under a curse that, if not averted, will cause it to simply sink beneath the sea. In the second book, Heaven and Earth, an expert in the paranormal has come to the island. He is discussing the curse with a woman who lives on the island. She asks:

Do you believe, in that detail-filing brain of yours, that this island is doomed to fall into the sea? How can you buy some centuries-old curse? Islands don’t just sink like swamped boats?

He replies:

...let me just say there’s always room for less-than-literal interpretations. A force five hurricane, an earthquake...

There’s been some discussion of the apocalyptic prophecies of Larry Kroon who is the current pastor at the Wasilla Bible Church, Sarah Palin’s current home church, and of Ed Kalnins who is the current pastor at the Wasilla Assembly of God church, Sarah Palin’s former home church. Max Blumenthal, in a post I discussed earlier says of Pastor Kroon:

While Kroon has cautioned his parishioners against the mass marketed End Times prophecies of Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye, he has nonetheless invoked doomsday scenarios that mirror those on the pages of Lindsey and LaHaye’s bestselling tracts.

“It’s so very possible that God, instead of responding by granting spiritual renewal and sustained prosperity,” Kroon said in a sermon on July 13, 2008, “could just as easily…it’s conceivable that He could just as easily, for example, raise up a revived, prosperous and powerful Communist Russia with a web of alliances across the Middle East. And our gas pumps would go dry. The dollar would collapse. And the markets would crash. The kayak could go upside down. And it could happen in a matter of weeks. That could happen. It could happen by this fall.”

Certainly Pastor Kroon has gotten some details wrong but somehow the idea that Russia would revive seems less preposterous after the invasion of South Ossetia and the collapse of the Ukrainian government. And the idea that the dollar could collapse and the markets could crash doesn’t seem far-fetched at all as we celebrate the autumnal equinox.

Similarly, an article in the Huffington Post says of Pastor Kalnins:

In his sermons, Pastor Kalnins has also expressed beliefs that, while not directly political, lie outside of mainstream Christian thought.

He preaches repeatedly about the "end times" or "last days," an apocalyptic prophesy held by a small but vocal group of Christian leaders. During his appearance with Palin in June, he declared, "I believe Alaska is one of the refuge states in the last days, and hundreds of thousands of people are going to come to the state to seek refuge and the church has to be ready to minister to them."

Outside of mainstream Christian thought perhaps but directly in line with mainstream global warming thought. Somehow I doubt anyone at the Huffington Post would dismiss these comments from James Lovelock, the environmentalist who originated the Gaia theory (emphasis mine):

Climate change is more serious than we can possibly imagine, but neither the Earth nor the human race is doomed, said Lovelock. The good news is that the Earth itself is in no danger, with world climate likely to stabilize some 5 degrees C warmer than current temperatures - such stable 'hot' states have existed in the past, including some 55 million years ago when the world's own feedback mechanisms took 200,000 years to recover. During that phase no great extinction occurred, but life moved to cooler climes to survive.

Climate-induced migrations could, for example, see Europe's population concentrated in cooler regions such as the British Isles, Scandinavia and western France - and this could happen within the next century.

I have no use for apocalyptic prophecies no matter where they originate. But if prophecies prove accurate then the prophet should get credit. And if you honor your own prophets, how can you dishonor prophets of another God when they predict the same future?

Step by step to Global Warming: What is, was, and will be

In my earlier post, ”Troglodytes have feelings, too”, I explained that I’m a Global Warming skeptic and talked about a couple of feeling - as opposed to scientific and philosophical misgivings - that make it impossible for me to just believe in and accept Global Warming. (It looks like Penn Jillette is in a very similar boat. It’s always nice to have company.)

Now I want to lay out those scientific and philosophical misgivings about Global Warming. A big part of my problem is simply the number of separate beliefs I would have to hold in order to make it to full-blown Apocalyptic Anthropogenic Global Warming so I’ll examine each of those beliefs in turn.

Wikipedia defines Global Warming thus:

Global warming is the increase in the average measured temperature of the Earth's near-surface air and oceans since the mid-twentieth century, and its projected continuation.

There’s a lot of complexity hiding in that simple definition. Ask someone, “Do you believe in Global Warming?” If the answer is “Yes” there’s a tendency to think that implies belief in full-blown Apocalyptic Anthropogenic Global Warming. As in, humans are causing it, we’re all going to drown, and we better get busy doing whatever it takes to fix it. If the answer is “No” there’s a tendency to think that implies a lack of belief that the Earth is even getting warmer. Such a lack of belief renders any discussion of antecedent causes and subsequent consequences not just unnecessary but positively pointless.

In truth, however, there is a ladder of steps from someone like William Gray who doesn’t believe the planet is permanently warming to someone like Al Gore who holds the most serious view of the problem and advocates some heavy-duty solutions. Each of us can jump off at any point along the way which leaves the question of belief in Global Warming looking less like a binary problem and more like a sliding scale.

So what steps make up the ladder of Global Warming? I’m glad you asked. To be a full-fledged Global Warming believer you must believe:

1) The planet is getting warmer.
When I first outlined these steps a year ago in an email to a friend, if you wanted to dispute this you talked about measurement problems: urban heat islands, badly placed monitors, missing temperatures from cold countries, and so on. You can still do so - Climate Audit is doing yeoman work on these issues. Now, however, if you don’t want to wade through all that boring technical stuff, you can just point to graphs of the global temperature metrics which have been cool to Global Warming for about 10 years and downright chilly for the last year.

2) The warming is unprecedented in human history.
This is mostly what the Hockey Stick sought to show. It was prominently featured in the IPCC 2001 report. The first controversy swirling around it arose because it wiped out the Medieval Warm Period (and the Little Ice Age for that matter). Then questions arose about the data and the programming. Is the Hockey Stick valid? Depends on who you ask.

3) The warming is caused largely by human activity.
This means it’s not El Nino; it’s not a naturally repeating cycle; it’s not volcanos; and the sun isn’t doing it. Of these, the idea that the sun did it is taken the most seriously by Global Warming believers (although that means they just spend more time saying it doesn’t matter). Why does the sun get extra attention?

Well, remember the Little Ice Age that the Hockey Stick disappeared? That occurred during the Maunder Minimum. A Minimum in this sense is a period of very, very low sunspot activity; this particular Minimum was named after its discoverer, Edward Maunder. There are also Maxima and one of those coincides to some extent with the Medieval Warm Period. More sunspots, warmer earth; fewer sunspots, colder earth? Depends on who you ask. And the answer might be kind of important because although sunspot counts have been high since 1900, our current sunspot cycle (Cycle 24) is late, late, late.

4) The human activity that is causing the warming is the production of greenhouse gases.
In other words, it’s not just that there are more people and more cities making the Earth warmer. It’s a particular thing produced by those humans that is responsible.

5) The greenhouse gas responsible for the greatest part of the global warming is carbon dioxide.
Other greenhouse gases like nitrous oxide and fluorocarbons are not important enough to rate much concern. Methane is getting more attention but CO2 remains the 300-pound gorilla of greenhouse gases. (Water vapor is the by far the most prevalent greenhouse gas but is not considered in this context since it is not caused by human activity.)

These are the Global Warming beliefs that have to do with the past and present. They make up the picture of what Global Warming is and what causes it. They imply the future contained in that last little phrase in Wikipedia’s definition: “and its projected continuation.” Global Warmists believe that so long as humans keep producing enough CO2 to increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, the Earth will continue to warm.

Obviously, I have problems accepting some of these beliefs. But what if you don't? Fine, you say, I’m with the Global Warmists so far, believe it all, no problem. The Earth has gotten warmer and will continue to get warmer still. I like beaches, I hate shoveling snow. So why is this a problem? That’s the question I’ll address next in “Step by step to Global Warming: What lies ahead”.

Troglodytes have feelings, too

Since I’m going to be doing a series of posts on Global Warming, I want to make clear where I stand. I’m a skeptic. Yes, I'm one of those people who might as well join the Flat Earth Club.

I’m not really happy about this, of course. My life would be much easier if I could be a Global Warming believer. My friends wouldn’t think I'm a knuckle-dragging troglodyte. I could smirk instead of wince when someone says that the kind of people who don't believe in Global Warming don't believe in evolution either.

Plus there’s a part of me that feels awful about not being a fervent Global Warming believer. What if they're right and I’m wrong and it's my failure to harangue my Congressional delegation that keeps something from being done and the whole world floods and humanity dies out because those few breeding pairs of humans don't make it to Antarctica in time? How bad will I feel then?

At the same time, I keep thinking that's the way I'm supposed to feel and to tell you the truth, I really resent it. I feel the Global Warming believers are pushing my emotional buttons rather than my rational ones and I'm not the slightest bit happy about that.

Not that my rational side is as much help in this as I’d like. I do think there are problems with the science of Global Warming, that a number of scientific issues seem unresolved. Yet I have to admit that I lack the requisite knowledge of math, physics, paleoclimatology, and whatever else to resolve them to my own satisfaction. It’s very frustrating. I’m reasonably bright, went to a good college, did very well in my graduate level Econometrics course. But I read about Global Warming and my head hurts and my eyes bleed. And what keeps running through my head is that stanza from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door where in I went.

I know the conventional wisdom is that my confusion proves I’m not qualified to understand all this so I should simply accept that since everyone (well, almost everyone, but those other guys don’t count) believes in Global Warming, I should relax, admit my incompetence, and let them tell me what’s best for me and my planet.

I just can’t do it. I’ll talk about my scientific and philosophical misgivings in my upcoming posts about the steps to Global Warming. Here I want to talk about a couple of feelings that make it impossible for me to just believe and accept.

First, I really don’t like the attitude of many Global Warming advocates (by which I mostly mean “the guys who run RealClimate"). Specifically:

1) They're certain. The word "hubris" springs to mind.

2) They're apocalyptic. They remind me uncomfortably of the "Left Behind" guys.

3) They're eager to attack the supposed motives and agendas of Global Warming skeptics. I believe that if you're competent and convinced you're right, you're more likely to deal forthrightly with opposition, attacking ideas rather than people. If you're incompetent or suspect you may be wrong, you're more likely to launch personal attacks on your opponents while refusing to discuss their ideas.

The last point would be funny if this wasn’t all so serious. The Global Warming advocates are quite comfortable charging Global Warming skeptics with being lackeys of the big bad industries that want to keep pumping CO2 into the air but never quite manage to acknowledge that the whole Global Warming schtick is their own ticket to fame and fortune.

I'm far more comfortable with the Global Warming skeptics. They seem less certain and less apocalyptic and they seem to deal more gently with Global Warming believers than the advocates do with them.

Second, I simply do not accept that I am living in the End Time. I realize that is not a totally logical position but I don’t believe it’s a totally illogical one either.

So much for my feelings. Coming soon: “Step by step to Global Warming: What is, was, and will be.”