Unforced Busing

 

One day last week, my city made all transit free in honour of “Clean air day.” The buses were packed.

Which made me think. The city is spending an enormous amount putting in new bicycle lanes, in hopes of decreasing our carbon footprints. Cyclists I know are not impressed. They say it is suicidal to ride a bike on them. I hear being a bicycle-based delivery person in a large city is one of the most dangerous jobs on record.

Add to that the fact that our city is under ice and snow for four to five months of the year, making cycling difficult.

Wouldn’t it be cheaper, simpler, and quicker to just make public transit free, to get people to leave the car at home? Pay for it out of general taxation, like the streetlights, or medicare, or the roads themselves? After all, transportation is almost a basic human need.

Perhaps not completely free; then people might use the buses for unnecessary trips. But keep fares quite low, perhaps $1 per ride; and free for seniors and students.

Two birds would thereby meet their maker: you would be cutting down on carbon, and you would be helping out the very poor. And, for that matter, giving a boost to local business.

Why not?

The Revolution Has Begun

Things are coming unglued for the ruling elites. People no longer trust them. This is largely due to the growth of social media: they can no longer force discussion and information within prescribed bounds. This is of course why they have been censoring so openly recently. But that has always been a rear-guard action.

We saw a somewhat similar ungluing back in the 1960s, prompted I think by the nuclear threat and the Kennedy assassination. People began to suspect that idiots were in charge. Or dark forces.

And that, for those of us who remember, was a time of chaos. Reagan, Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II put things back together.

But this is bigger.

The evidence coming out that the establishment and establishment media lied about everything during the Covid pandemic seems to have been a watershed. Yes, it did leak from a government lab. Yes, it was lab-created. Yes, it was funded in part by the US government. No, wearing masks was not effective. No, social distancing was not effective. No, the vaccines did not stop the spread. No, they were not safe and effective. Yes, ivermectin did work against the virus. Yes, the jump in mortality rates since is due to the vaccine.

Even at the time, the pandemic seemed to me like a flash of lightning showing us all where the zombies were.

Who will ever trust government again?

Now all heck is breaking loose. The woke are waking up.

Mass immigration used to be a third rail issue. Nobody dared object, because they would be called racist. Trump broke the seal with regards to illegal immigration in 2016. Now it has spread to legal immigration as well. It is a key issue in Europe, looking as though it will bring down the governments of the UK and France within the next few weeks. In Canada, Pierre Poilievre has finally calculated it is worth saying, in French and in Quebec, that he will lower immigration levels. Until now, he had been sidestepping the issue. 

“It's going to be much lower, especially for temporary immigration. It is impossible to invite 1.2 million new people to Canada every year when you build 200,000 homes. That's impossible. There is no room. Quebec is at the breaking point.”

People are now also speaking openly against multiculturalism, defying the inevitable accusations of racism. Only a few years ago, Don Cherry was fired for saying everyone should wear the poppy. Now Rishi Sunak is being condemned everywhere for leaving D-Day ceremonies early. How could he? That is some measure of how much how quickly the political climate has changed. 

Even though, awkwardly, disastrously, multiculturalism is enshrined in the Canadian constitution.

“Climate change” is the next likely pin to fall. It was always an improbable claim. It was always based on “computer modelling,” not scientific evidence. Thirty years ago, when the average member of the public still imagined computers were magical, this sounded compelling. We are more sophisticated about computers now. The general public is also realizing that “fighting climate change” through ever growing taxes and regulations is costing a lot of money with no visible results, in a difficult economic time. It increasingly looks like it always really was: a power and money grab by the government bureaucracy.

I think the edifice of feminism is crumbling fast as well. It is now unfashionable on the left, who want to sacrifice it to trans rights, with which feminism conflicts. Others are seeing the effect of feminism in declining birth rates, declining marriage rates, men opting out of all relationships, and growing legions of bitter middle-aged women feeling deceived. There is worse yet to be uncovered.

Confidence in the public school system is already gone. Confidence in the academy is crumbling. Confidence in the objectivity and reliability of science itself is going. Peer review, we discover, does not work. Only certain areas of investigation get funded. Experiments are never reproduced, and when someone tries, they can’t be. Scientists are no longer looked on as semi-divine beings and moral examplars above suspicion of ulterior motives.

I suspect most importantly, atheism, which had become increasingly fashionable over the past 150 years or so, is crumbling. Darwinism, its modern intellectual underpinning, is crumbling. Freud and scientific psychology, religion’s intended “scientific” replacement, has already been pretty well discredited. This is the biggest and most far-reaching revolution currently underway.

Or maybe it is just me.

Guyana's Argument Applied to Canada

 

Jordan Peterson and Bjorn Lomborg

 

A sobering assessment.

Is Climate Change Real? These Prominent Scientists Say the Science Is Not Settled.

 

"The theory of anthropogenic climate change has no reliable scientific basis."

It's not about science. It's about grabbing more power.

That's why they're targeting the truckers and the farmers: the occupations most able to resist government control.

On Climate Change in Ontario

 

Breaking wind.

Following is a response to a question on climate change asked at the recent Beaches-East Yortk all-candidates meeting.

The best thing Ontario can do for the environment is to kill the carbon tax.

It is economic suicide to increase the price of everything at a time of rampant inflation and economic stagnation. It kills the post-Covid recovery. 

It also makes global warming worse.

The atmosphere does not respect provincial or national boundaries. 

If we increase the costs of doing business in Ontario, manufacturing moves to places like China or India or Russia or Brazil, where they must burn dirty coal for fuel, and have fewer environmental controls. The net effect is more greenhouse gases and faster climate change. 

Not to mention risks to the supply chain, and to our national defense.

So long as we do not have one world government, the only practical solution is improved technology. We must develop more efficient and less expensive ways to produce energy. 

Elon Musk seems to be showing the way. 

Not just by developing electric cars, but he has offered a $100 million US prize for new technologies for carbon capture. The Ontario government might sponsor a similar program.

Wind turbines are not improved technology. 

If wind was an economical and reliable source of energy, we would still see ships under sail. 

New Blue wants to end the wind turbines. Because they are uneconomical, they drive electricity costs up and industry away. And they are not so great for the environment. They kill birds, they cause noise pollution, they mar natural vistas. 

We need no charging after windmills.

You know the “dark satanic mills” in the hymn “Jerusalem?” Those were windmills south of London. Blake wrote before the age of steam.

We need to look at nuclear. 

Nuclear sounds scary, but it is almost pollution-free, and much safer than it once was. There are recent breakthroughs in nuclear fusion.

In a country like France, they must build the nuclear plants relatively close to large population centres. Here in Ontario we have the luxury of wide open spaces. We can make nuclear safer still by building far from population densities, and running wires south, just as we do for Churchill or James Bay.

I’d like to voice support here for one plank of the Liberal platform. I think their plan to reduce transit fares for a couple of years makes sense, to encourage public transit as an alternative to driving. I would support that too. 

For that matter, the PCs deserve credit for improving public transit throughout the province. I look forward to the Eglinton line, if it is ever finished. I do not expect to live to see the Ontario line.

COP26

 

The biggest news from the conference is that Biden allegedly farted. Next biggest is that he fell asleep...

Comrade Xerxes complains that the recent COP26 climate conference got too little accomplished.

I agree that COP26 was just a circus and accomplishes nothing.

The problem is the tragedy of the commons. Because the atmosphere is a shared resource, there is incentive for each country to grab what they can before the other guy does. It takes great altruism—or naivite--to cripple one’s economy for the sake of the group, knowing as soon as you do the next country will just grab whatever is left on the table. 

No such summit is ever likely to accomplish anything, and it is no surprise that none has. Surely the leaders know it. Surely Greta Thunberg knows it. They’re all conning us.

Xerxes goes too far in lamenting that “no nation” has reduced emissions. The US, the UK, and the EU all have. The problem is, this is because manufacturing has been relocating to China and other developing countries. Great stat to cite to get re-elected, but the real net effect is a rise in global emissions, because the finished goods must now be transported long distances. And energy production is less efficient in these countries. The move is also suicidal should war ever come with China.

Any further restrictions on carbon emissions in developed countries will have the same effect: more industry moves to countries with cheaper energy, and emissions rise.

The only real way to fight greenhouse gases is with improved technology. If world leaders were serious about the problem, they would fund promising scientific research: nuclear fusion, producing fuel with algae, more efficient solar cells, and so forth. Not including subsidizing solar and wind installations or electric vehicles, so long as these are not economically viable on their own merits—because this raises energy prices, and again drives industry to more polluting regions. 

And, realistically, the problem probably can be solved this way: by developing a better energy source. We probably already have the technology to move to safe nuclear power. There is no value but graft in wasting money elsewhere.

The conference’s agreement to end deforestation is another bit of empty virtue-signalling. Deforestation is going to end regardless of government action. It ended decades ago in the developed world, as marginal farmland, no longer needed, went out of production. The movement of communication online has reduced the demand for pulp and paper, and this decline will probably continue.

Xerxes has a different solution to all: depopulation. I am surprised anyone any longer believes in it. 

To begin with, depopulation by government action is unethical. I think we established with the defeat of Nazism that governments cannot legitimately tinker in the reproductive rights of citizens. Forced abortion or sterilization is not okay.

Ethical government means seeking the greatest good for the greatest number. Denying life itself to future generations is denying them the most self-evident good, and their most fundamental right. To deny life to some so that others can have more material comforts is patently unjust. It is a violation of Kant’s categorical imperative, that people must always be an end, not a means.

Even if that equation made ethical sense, it is fairly clear from the evidence that people’s happiness does not improve with more material goods. So it’s all downside.

It is not even clear that a larger population means less for everyone. Every new person is both a producer and a consumer. He or she will, on average, add more to the common wealth than they take out. Some of the richest countries are also the most densely populated: the Netherlands, South Korea, Japan, Germany, Switzerland. As the population of the world has been growing rapidly, the rate of poverty and of hunger has been declining rapidly. 

But, you may argue, we could run out of resources.

We could; but this is pretty theoretical. The price of commodities in general has also been declining. Over history, the individual human footprint keeps shrinking. The point of technology is that it allows us to do more with less.

So long as the politicians don’t mess us up.

Global Warming Is Global

 

Nigel Farage argues that the impressive reduction in carbon emissions that the US, UK, and Canada boast about is actually due to moving manufacturing to other countries, notably China. The probable result is a net rise in global carbon emissions, as we must now also burn fuel to transport the goods to more distant markets.

What we have is a classic example of the tragedy of the commons. Nobody is ultimately responsible for the atmosphere, and so we will never get coordinated action.

The only real solution to the problem of global warming is improved technology. I expect it will come: nuclear fusion, generating fuel with algae, carbon capture technologies.

The most useful thing the Canadian government could do, perhaps, is to offer funding for such research.

Facing the Heat

 

I have been recently asked on a Mensa discussion list to comment on climate change. Can we all get it together before we fry?

Long-time readers of this blog may know my position on this.

The concept of global warming, or climate change, is based on expert predictions of the middle to distant future, using computer models.

The important thing to understand about computer models is that they are only as good as the data and assumptions: GIGO, as computer programmers used to warn the overly-reverent.

The important thing to understand about expert predictions of the middle to distant future is that they are usually wrong. Studies show they are less reliable than random chance, than flipping a coin, or than asking the average man in the street.

There are reasons for this. In the real world, most times, things go on as they have been going on, in more or less a straight line on a graph, or with regular oscillations, without changing radically. But if an expert says this, it has no news value. Nobody will be very interested, and nobody will see much use in their expertise. If, on the other hand, they forecast a dramatic change coming soon, it attracts attention—it attracts business.

Better yet if they forecast a pending catastrophe, that can only be averted by strenuous investment in their special expertise.

So there is a built-in incentive to forecast outcomes that are worse than what is likely.

This is reinforced by the human tendency to forget any dramatic predictions that did not come true, and only remember those surprising ones that did. So experts can afford to be wrong, repeatedly. Astrology works the same way.

Back in the Sixties, the experts were telling us we were going to run out of food and clean water within twenty years. In the Eighties, we were less than a decade away from “peak oil,” and a collapse of the world economy from a lack of energy. Also in the Eighties, we were all going to die of AIDS. Remember the hole in the ozone layer? The sky has been falling for a very long time.

The really dire predictions about global warming may be true, but what are the odds?

The thing we call “climate change” or “global warming” is a set of assumptions, not just one. At least, if you reject any one of them, you are a “climate change denier.” We do not have the expertise nor access to the data to evaluate these for ourselves; we must rely on experts.

1. That the earth is getting warmer year by year.

2. That this is on balance a bad thing.

3. That human beings can realistically do something about it.

4. That the cost of doing something about it is less than the cost of letting it happen.

5. That we, as individuals or as a nation, can realistically do something about it.

6. That some technological advance will not eliminate it without government intervention.

Now let’s put aside the observation that expert predictions are usually wrong, and just give them all fifty-fifty odds. Then, for all of them to be true, the odds are 1.5 out of a hundred.

How much money are we prepared to invest on a 1.5% chance of coming out ahead?

Is Environmentalism Extinct?

Popularity per capita of maps featuring the colour red. Not to scale.

Folks are saying the world is going to change. Things will never go back to normal after the coronavirus. Globalism is dead. 

I think maybe environmentalism too.

To be fair, my friend Xerxes joins Pope Francis in declaring the opposite: that the pandemic somehow reinforces the environmentalist argument. It is nature taking revenge.

But that is not how it looks to me.

Reports say the canals of Venice now run clear; you can see the fish. They say the skies are clear above Beijing. You can see from satellites.

Xerxes says this shows how much our actions affect the Earth. I think the opposite. It seems to me this reveals our “environmental footprint” is lighter than we imagined. Turn things off for a few weeks, and nature seems to forget we were ever there.

I think of Shelley’s "Ozymandias."

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Was environmentalism always an expression of hubris? Supposing we humans were in control of nature, that we could calibrate the global temperature a hundred years from now right down to a degree or two, like adjusting the thermostat in our home?

Were we arrogant in supposing nature was a maiden so fragile that she needed us to do so? Weren’t we really seeing ourselves as godlike?

The coronavirus reminds us we are arguably not the dominant species on earth. We are definitely not the top of the food chain. Microbes feast on us.

Nature also looks less lovable and benevolent than it did a year ago, doesn’t it?

The coronavirus reminds us that our best-laid plans as men gang aft agley; the epidemic caught us off-guard. Ten years ago, the experts were warning of “peak oil.” Suddenly the price of oil is less than zero. During the crisis, expert advice, expert predictions, expert models for the virus death rate, the rate of hospitalization, the rate of respirator use, have been consistently wrong.

All the computer models and charts and graphs that showed what the global temperature is going to be in 2090, much further in the future and with many more possible variables, are looking quaint and naïve now. Relics of a bygone day when things seemed much simpler. Rather like the 1950s’ confidence that science had a solution for everything.

Environmentalism was always a cheap substitute for religion. It was an amoral creed with man at the centre. A wise and merciful God might even have sent the virus to destroy it, as he did the human sacrifices of Canaan, or Ninevah, or Tyre.

The Sky Is Always Falling

The well-educated will recognize the story illustrated immediately.

My columnist buddy Xerxes argues that the experts have been warning us of dire global consequences, from overpopulation, climate change, and the depletion of natural resources, for centuries. Since the time of Malthus. Just the other day, a new battalion of 11,000 scientists warned of dire imminent consequences from global warming. “Planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.”

He suggests it is high time to start listening.

He is right: we have been hearing this for decades, centuries. When I was finishing high school, our Biology teacher made us all buy and read Erlich’s The Population Bomb. It warned us of a catastrophic world famine coming in the 80s. Since this was our own near future, we had better be prepared for it. Time magazine was warning, at about the same time, of the impending Ice Age. My best friend’s life plan was to emigrate to New Zealand. He figured that would be the last place for the global cataclysm to reach. For we would soon all be killing each other over access to water.

Cut to the chase: every single such prediction of pending doom precise enough to be scientifically tested, since the time of Malthus, has been proven wrong. Instead, the world is substantially wealthier, on the whole, than it was in Malthus’s time, or even Erlich’s.

So why would we believe the experts?

The problem is the problem of the boy who cried wolf.

Heard a podcast from Levitt and Dubner, the folks who wrote Freakonomics, a while ago. Highly recommended podcast. Studies they cite find that expert predictions in any field are usually wrong. They are less accurate than chance, and less accurate than if you asked the average man in the street.

The reason for this is explained in Aesop’s fable. Most times, for most things, in most ways, the future is going to be continuous with the past. Dramatic change is rare; if it were not, it would not be dramatic. But more of the same is not interesting or newsworthy. And it is hard to convince us that we need experts to tell us things are fine as they are.

So every expert has a vested interest in predicting dramatic change; ideally, a doomsday scenario, requiring their urgent help. If they do this, they get the media, they get the grants, they get the academic chair, they get fame and fortune. If they do not, they risk losing their livelihood.

You would think over time expert advice would be discredited for usually being wrong. But here’s another little psychological quirk: people tend to forget false predictions, and remember successes. Again, predictions of dramatic change that did not come true are not very newsworthy or exciting. Predictions that did, if of some dramatic change, are memorable and striking. Astrology, fortune telling, and witch doctoring have succeeded for millennia on this basis.

The moral: we need to spend less time listening to the experts, and more time reading the ancient wisdom.

For example, “Chicken Little” might also apply here.

Steve

The Resurrection of the Left

My left-wing friend Xerxes has chosen the occasion of Easter to declare his belief that our civilization is in need of a resurrection.

I find it fascinating that we both think our civilization or culture is in crisis, both left and right think so, but for completely different reasons.

What alarms me is an apparent growing lack of faith, values, morals, growing totalitarianism, and an aggressive attempt to shut down civil discourse. What frightens him is growing income inequality and global warming. Both of which strike me as non-issues.

As for income inequality, it is inevitable, if everyone is getting richer, that income inequality is going to grow. If, for example, everyone’s income goes up by 20%, the result will be greater income inequality. Income inequality is reduced, conversely, so long as everyone is getting poorer. And an economy that is not growing is almost surely shrinking. So you really have only two choices: either growing income inequality, or growing poverty.

In addition, if any new advancement is found, improving prosperity generally, those who invent, discover, or first adopt it will see their incomes shoot ahead. It will take time for this to spread to everyone. By that time, with any luck, something  else new has been invented. Accordingly, the better everyone’s life is getting, the more income inequality you will get.

And what exactly is the problem with income inequality? So long as everyone is getting enough to meet their needs, how does it harm A if B is doing better? To object is surely simply the sin of envy: I am coveting my neighbour’s goods. This is sometimes presented as the worst of all sins. It was the sin of Cain, that brought murder into the world. Some make it the sin of Eve, and of Lucifer as well; the Quran does.

As for global warming, the full proposition we are required to accept is not just that the earth is getting warmer. To avoid “denying,” you must embrace a sequence of assertions: 1. That the earth is getting warmer. 2. That this will not be corrected by any natural processes or upcoming technological improvements, without conscious large-scale human intervention. 3. That the earth getting warmer is, on balance, a bad rather than a good thing. 4. That we can meaningfully do something about it, and 5. That the costs of doing something about it are less than the costs of letting it happen.

Each of these proposition is clearly in dispute, including the first, that the earth is getting warmer. Just do a web search. Some say it is getting colder. The computer models that assert global warming have so far been consistently wrong whenever they have made a prediction specific enough to be tested. Given that we do not know whom to believe, and have no personal expertise in the area, we should rationally take them all at 50/50 odds. Each requires the previous one to be true, so this is cumulative. We end up with a 3.1275% chance of the “global warming” dogma being true and large-scale government action being justified. That’s not good odds for putting down a lot of money. And that is without factoring in whether the given solution proposed is going to be the proper one, if there is more than one option, and whether you can convince all the governments of the world to adopt it.

The Sky is Falling and We Are All Doomed

Deserts of the World

This is one of the phrases I had to teach today—in an English class:

“As the earth gets warmer through global warming, and climate change makes life harder for plants, animals, and people to live, we need to find ways to make our world a better place.”

It is hard not to gag. Yet I am forced to teach this, no doubt like millions of other teachers of every conceivable subject all over the globe.

Let’s assume that the climate is indeed changing, and that the globe is getting warmer. Let’s assume this is primarily because of what mankind is doing. Fine. Those are both debatable, but fine. Even so, how clear is it that this will make life harder for plants, animals, or people? Surely at least the case must be made. We ought not to be teaching kids to take everything on faith, and not to think about it.

Fundamentally, the argument is that global warming is being caused by more carbon dioxide in the air. Right? Carbon dioxide is essential food for plants. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere should make life easier for plants.

Animals, then, live on plants. More plants should make life easier for animals.

Humans live on plants and animals. More plants and animals should make life easier for humans.

Plants also live on warmth. The warmest part of the earth is the tropics. The tropics are also the lushest part of the earth, where there is the greatest abundance of plant and animal life and plants and animals grow fastest. There is no part of the world that is too warm for plant life. The warmer it gets, the more plant life. The coldest part is at the poles, and this is the part of the earth most barren of plant and animal life. Cold enough, and there is no plant or animal life, as at the South Pole.

Accordingly, if the colder parts of the planet get warmer, we should have more plant and animal life, not less. At the same time, if the tropics get warmer, we will again probably get more plant and animal life. There seems no risk of getting too warm.

Aha! You will say; what about the deserts?

The earth’s deserts are not at the equator; not at what should naturally be the warmest places on earth. Deserts are not caused by excessive heat, but by a lack of precipitation, by a lack of moisture. They also become desperately hot, true, but this is caused secondarily, by the lack of precipitation, cloud cover, and vegetation.

Now consider: with global warming, we are all warned, the ice caps are supposed to melt, and the sea level to rise. There will be a lot more water for the evaporation cycle, the process of evaporation should be faster, and so there should be more rainfall on balance everywhere. Hence, fewer and smaller deserts.

Hence, more plant life. Water is also food for plants. And more animal life, as the animals live off the plants. And more human life.

I’m sure it will all be terrible, and the world will end as we know it. It is just hard to see how.

The End is Near

The tunnel at the end of the light.

I have a leftish friend, a distinguished editor and journalist, who, in retirement, still writes a regular column. It is a window on what the left is thinking, at least in Canada.

His latest column clarifies something. It is titled, “DENYING THE EPIDEMIC OF DEMENTIA.”

That is the main premise: that there is a current epidemic, dementia, and we are foolishly doing nothing about it.

“It’s hard to call dementia an epidemic. Epidemics typically involve infectious diseases. But when one in every 11 Canadians over the age of 65 has some form of dementia, some 700,000 Canadians, it’s hard to call dementia anything but an epidemic. Every year, about 25,000 new cases are diagnosed.

Apply those figures to any other illness -- measles, cancer, AIDS -- and you’d have not just an epidemic, but panic.”

In pointing out our folly, he lists other matters about which we seem to be willfully blind:

“ So we deny climate change. Even though the figures are clear. Global temperatures are rising. So are sea levels. Polar ice is melting. Storms, floods, and fires escalate in violence. But we’d rather debate it than fight it.”

“ We deny the massive extinction of species. As with climate change, we’d rather argue about possible causes than acknowledge the problem.”

“ We haven’t even begun to consider the effects of living in a bath of wireless transmissions, relying on safety standards drafted before cell phones and Bluetooth even existed.”

“ And the topic of over-population is utterly taboo. We humans are already the most invasive species on earth. No other species has had such a devastating effect on other species, or on the environment. But we can’t talk about it, because we consider all solutions unthinkable.”

In a superficially unrelated remark, a reader responds to the immediate past column with the comment:

“Look into the future, . What do you see for us? The Tyee, which is a decidedly left wing newspaper, took a poll of its readers regarding their prognosis for the coming year. Over 80% said they view the future as hopeless.”

And that, it seems to me, is an apt summary of the movement that currently calls itself “progressive.” far from believing in the possibility of progress in any sense, it seems convinced that the sky is falling. One way or another, these are the last days. The world is about to end.

This view is not realistic. Start with dementia. A smaller proportion of people than ever before, at every age group, are getting dementia. That is not characteristic of an epidemic. What is also happening, of course, is that with the improvement in life expectancy, more people than before are living long enough to risk dementia.

But this then seems an effort to put the most depressing spin possible on good news. It is as though either the left wants to believe the world is going to Hell in a handcart, or they are somehow traumatized and cannot get past negative thoughts.

Quickly, on the pressing danger of climate change: to avoid being called a “climate change denier,” it is not enough to believe just that the earth is getting steadily and significantly warmer. Although there is already room enough to doubt that. You must also believe that man is the principal cause, that this will be a bad thing, that it is realistically possible to stop it by government action, that the actions proposed will cost less than the eventual damage from climate change, and that there are no more pressing problems on which the money might be better spent. 

Bertrand Russell, public atheist, leads "ban the bomb" march, 1961.

Buying all that takes quite a leap of faith. It is a complicated dogma, and improbable on its face. Most improbable is the idea that climate change, if real, means impending universal doom. At its core seems a conviction that man is evil, and must somehow repent, to avoid the imminent wrath of an angry God.

So too with the idea of an impending imminent mass extinction. There is no hard evidence of it, only predictions based on computer models. Again, a leap of faith that violates the scientific sine qua non of skepticism and demanding evidence rather than relying on authority. It does not come from science; from whence does this conviction come?

The ultimate concern mentioned, revealingly, is overpopulation. That perhaps gets to the nub. The problem is too many people; with the self-contradictory assumption that too many people by their existence will kill all people. In other words, the problem is with the sinful nature of people. People are bad per se; people are evil in their essence.

Far from ignoring or refusing to discuss the problem, it has been done to death. When I was in high school, back in 1970, our biology teacher required us all to buy and read The Population Bomb. This nagging negative thought has been pervasive ever since, for at least 50 years now. It is, granted, at last apparently fading. Because all the predictions of “overpopulation” turned out not to be true. Scientific evidence did not support the theory. Instead of running out of water, food, and everything else, poverty has declined worldwide. Famines have become much more rare. And the world population is, on present trends, soon to level off on its own.

As men are evil, anything made by man is also evil. That is, civilization is bad. Hence the concern with “pollution.” And new inventions like cell phones or Bluetooth must necessarily be somehow poisonous. The idea that they might be has in fact been studied again and again; and no significant harmful effects have yet been found. The concern seems based on irrational fear, not science.

To be fair, a lot of the present pessimism on the left is connected with the fact that their girl lost the recent US election. Still, they do seem generally to be taking an apocalyptic view of that too. It’s Hitler? Trump is going to send them all to concentration camps! And that has been their attitude for fifty or sixty years, hasn’t it? Since the “ban the bomb” movement in the fifties. The world will end soon from global cooling, or global warming, or overpopulation, or peak oil, or nuclear holocaust, or pollution, or if not that, surely something. There is always a nagging sense of threatening epidemic.

The four horsemen of the apocalypse: overpopulation, dementia, global warming, and Donald Trump

Granted, the right can be apocalyptic too, on a smaller scale. They worry about the decline and fall of civilization, or at least “Western” civilization. But in this is an original optimism and hope In progress: that civilization is worthwhile and that mankind has indeed built something over the years.

What we seem to see on the left is an obvious pervasive sense of free-floating guilt. The human conscience is acting up, and disturbing our sleep.

What happened? What is driving the left, literally, crazy?

This comes from turning away from God.

Political Climate Change

... we have at least to consider the possibility that the scientific establishment behind the global warming issue has been drawn into the trap of seriously overstating the climate problem--or, what is much the same thing, of seriously understating the uncertainties associated with the climate problem--in its effort to promote the cause. It is a particularly nasty trap in the context of science, because it risks destroying, perhaps for centuries to come, the unique and hard-won reputation for honesty which is the basis of society's respect for scientific endeavour. 

 --Garth Paltridge, former chief research scientist with the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research

I think he is right about the stakes involved: science's current prestige rests on an unshakeable public faith that scientists are utterly honest. Because scientific papers and scientific results can easily be falsified, and non-scientists would usually never know the difference.

That unshakeable public faith is very much at risk now, and a large ivory castle could come suddenly crashing down.

Global Warming for a Greener Future

Heat is not the problem.

To accept the general concern about global warming, aka climate change, you need to believe five things: 1. that the Earth is getting warmer, 2. that humans are causing it, 3. that it is a bad thing, 4. that we can stop it, and 5. that it makes economic sense to stop it. Bjorn Lomborg, for example, is a “denier” for accepting all but point 5. 

But an obvious weakness is point 3. After all, the “Medieval warm period” seems to have been a time of relative prosperity. 

Basically, CO2 is food for plants. It is a powerful fertilizer. Therefore, the rising CO2 concentrations that supposedly cause global warming are also certainly boosting crop yields and greening the planet. This may be considered separate from the global warming issue; but any plan to reduce CO2 emissions is also, automatically, going to reduce plant growth (and hence animal habitat) worldwide. Isn't this what we were claiming to avoid?

In general, heat from the sun is also a powerful fertilizer. There is a reason why it is called the “greenhouse effect.” A longer growing season in the temperate zones also means more vegetation and more food.

Is there a tradeoff, conversely, in the tropics? No—even at the equator, it is not “too hot” for agriculture. Flora and fauna are simply much more abundant, and crops come in year-round.

Ah, you are thinking deserts, perhaps? Look on a map. Deserts do not occur at the equator. They are not caused by excessive heat from the sun. They are caused by a lack of moisture, caused in turn by prevailing wind patterns. 

So, would global warming increase the size of deserts? Warming, per se, will not, so we have to guess at collateral effects. I ain't no climate scientist, but it seems to me the effect of CO2 promoting plant growth will work to reduce, not expand desert areas. And increased heat should lead to increased evaporation, therefore increased cloud cover, and increased precipitation. Result: less desert worldwide.

However, the bad news is that recent data seem to refute climate change point 1—the Earth has not gotten warmer since the 1990s.

Of a Climate of the Mind

It is odd that views on global warming are so consistent with political leanings: left-wingers always believe in it and want something done; right-wingers usually doubt it and want to wait and see. It should not be so; it should be based on the science. But most of us are not climate scientists; yet we must all make the judgement, since huge sums of public money are involved.

So here's my take, as someone who is emphatically not a "climate scientist." Leave aside science: here's my simple math. The value of protocols like Kyoto or Copenhagen depends on a string of unproven assumptions being true. 1) First, the world must indeed be warming. 2) This warming must indeed be unprecedented in speed and scale. 3) Its overall effects must be harmful, not helpful or neutral. 4) It must be possible for humans to do something to prevent it (whether or not they have caused it). 5) The cost of doing something to prevent it must be less than the cost of the event if it occurs. And 6) the particular solutions agreed upon in such a conference must be the most effective means to prevent it, or reasonably close to the most effective.

None of us who are not scientists have any real data to address any of these claims. So, in the absence of evidence, what are the odds that proposition 1 is true? There are three possibilities, a warming earth, a cooling earth, or an earth staying at about the same temperature. So our odds are 33.3%. Cut that in half to represent the odds of thesis 2, which seems to be a yes/no proposition. We're at 16.65%. There are three options again for the third thesis: we're at 5.5%. Halve that again for proposition 4: 2.775%. Again for proposition 5: 1.3875%. Option 6 seems to be less than a real 50/50 proposition, given the known unscientific nature of politics, but let's give it the benefit of the doubt: the overall likelihood of money spent for Kyoto or Copenhagen being money well spent stands at 0.69376%. Put another way, there is a 99.30624% chance we are wasting our money.

I don't like them odds. They'd be worth pitching in for if the prize were big enough and the price of entry cheap enough; like lightning insurance or a ticket on the lottery. But not much more.

But this is precisely the calculation that all of us who are not climate scientists should be making. Even if there were a consensus among climate scientists—and this is not at all clear—those of us who are not climate scientists could not trust it, since asserting the reality of global warming is clearly in any climate scientist's self-interest.

Indeed, that being the case, we should probably chip a bit more off those odds. Make it 0.34688%.

On top of that, I have one further caveat. Consider, if you will, that we are in effect talking here about the weather. That's all climate really is, so far as I can see: long-range weather prediction. Now, any one of us knows from our own common experience that we are not very good at this. We can do reasonably well in forecasting a day ahead, a lot less well for a week ahead, and are notably unreliable once we get much beyond that threshold. The Old Farmer's Almanac does as well as anybody at a year's distance.

So how likely are we to be accurate in any forecast of climate a hundred years hence?

“Chaos theory” was invented by Edward Lorenz in 1961 specifically to explain our inability to predict future weather patterns.

Here's Wikipedia on Chaos theory:

"Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems, _rendering long-term prediction impossible in general_."

Emphasis mine.

"... [Lorenz] wanted to see a sequence of data again and to save time he started the simulation in the middle of its course. He was able to do this by entering a printout of the data corresponding to conditions in the middle of his simulation which he had calculated last time.

To his surprise the weather that the machine began to predict was completely different from the weather calculated before. ... The computer worked with 6-digit precision, but the printout rounded variables off to a 3-digit number, so a value like 0.506127 was printed as 0.506. ... Lorenz had discovered that small changes in initial conditions produced large changes in the long-term outcome.[35] Lorenz's discovery, which gave its name to Lorenz attractors, proved that meteorology could not reasonably predict weather beyond a weekly period (at most)."

Just to double-check Wikipedia's veracity, here's "Whatis.com" on the same subject:

"Poincare proved mathematically that, even if the initial measurements could be made a million times more precise, that the uncertainty of prediction for outcomes did not shrink along with the inaccuracy of measurement, but remained huge. Unless initial measurements could be absolutely defined - an impossibility - predictability for complex - chaotic - systems performed scarcely better than if the predictions had been randomly selected from possible outcomes."

So “climate science” is perfectly positioned as a distant canvas on which we can project anything we want or can imagine: including mankind's eternal fantasy of the world coming to an end in some great catastrophe of water or fire. “Here be monsters.”

And now, we also have the intriguing evidence of “Climategate”...

The whole affair strikes me as almost laughable. It probably belongs in a newly-revised edition of “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.”

Science is Dead, Not God

I have a strong suspicion that the current “Climategate” affair is a bigger deal than we can yet imagine. Polls are already suggesting the death of “climate change” as a marketable political issue. But I think it has implications beyond the “climate change” issue itself; it speaks to the public prestige of science. In the past several centuries, that prestige has been so great and growing that “Scientism” has become, overwhelmingly, our true majority religion, worldwide. “Scientism” is the belief that science has a unique claim to truth, produces final answers, and can, at least potentially, “explain everything.” From this, “scientists” and those who claim to be “scientists” have derived an odd moral prestige, as if they were a priesthood supernaturally protected not just from error, but from sin.

Bad enough; it produces a class system, and an unregulated, very powerful, elite. But “science” has also been invoked as an authority in areas where it is of no value, with absurd and harmful results: most notably, the “social sciences.” Marxism, feminism, Fascism, Freudianism, all have had a good run on an absurd claim to be “scientific,” killing and destroying lives in incalculable numbers. Most recently we have the “new atheism,” scientism reaching the apotheosis of arrogance, demanding the elimination of all competing forms of belief.

However, just as the invention of the printing press lifted the veil on the sources of Christian doctrine, letting every interested layman see it for themselves, with rather dramatic results in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the Internet is lifting the veil on the sources of scientific doctrine, letting every interested layman get a good look. The results are likely to be similar. The united and unchallenged authority of Scientism is likely to crumble. And, just as Christianity was eventually replaced with “Scientism” as the de facto religion as a result, now Scientism in its turn is likely to be replaced as the dominant religion.

Perhaps, with luck, by a return to true religion. Scientism was not just “a religion like the others,” but a false religion: a religion of materialism, with no morality, no God, no spirit, no philosophical validity, no concept of man's inner being. It blocked the path to true religion, while offering no alternative. I doubt it will survive public scrutiny nearly as well as Christian doctrine did.

Global Warming Update

Some good comment on global warming from the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

The Sky Is Falling! No, Really! This Time It's For Real. No Kidding.

This could be useful: an attempt at a complete list of the things caused by global warming.