The UN Climate Report

Most readers are probably already aware of the report issued Monday by the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change. It predicts that we have only about 12 years before global warming will reach some critical "tipping points" that will accelerate the increase in global temperatures, and that we ought to strive to keep the global temperature rise to no more than 1.5° C. if were are to avoid the worst of the effects. This is much more ambitious than the 2° C. that was the goal in the recent Paris Climate Agreement.

Assume for the moment (a) that these predictions are accurate, and (b) that the technological fixes proposed  (reforest an area the size of Australia, cease using coal anywhere in the world, drastically reduce or eliminate the consumption of beef and dairy products worldwide, replace most cars worldwide with public transportation, heavily tax carbon emissions, drastically reduce the amount of energy used worldwide, etc, etc) would achieve this goal.  The report estimates that it would require approximately 2.5% per year of the world's total economic output (about $3 trillion per year) to implement these changes, though I think that is probably a gross underestimate when one looks at the steps proposed and thinks of all the follow-on ramifications.

The central question then becomes whether there is any practical way to actually make governments and populations agree to these profound changes in lifestyle, or to pay the costs involved. I doubt it. It is not just a question of the US making these changes; places like China and India would have to essentially give up their goals of modernization, and probably face massive internal problems as a result. Many, perhaps most, corporations would have to drastically change their business plans or even go out of business (think, for example, about the profound worldwide impact to car manufacturers, to chemical companies, to the agricultural sector) and produce massive unemployment.

Could any government, even if it had the political will to do so, actually enforce these changes on their populations without getting voted out of office or overthrown by revolutions? And could any political party, anywhere in the world, ever get enough political will to even attempt it?  Certainly I don't think either the Republican or the Democratic party in the US could do so. Oh, Democrats might talk the talk, but I doubt they would attempt more than token moves in that direction (like slightly raising the mileage requirements on some small subset of motor vehicles), and if they did do more than token moves I doubt they could hold political power very long.

Yes, it might be wise and rational to make these changes, even if there is a possibility that the predictions might be overly pessimistic, but practically I think we need to prepare to live with the climate change and accommodate to it, because human nature being what it is I doubt the world can summon the will to make the changes proposed in time to make a difference. Yes, if the predictions are even half accurate the results will be profound, and million or even billions of people will be displaced, economies will be profoundly changed, and food worldwide may get short. But getting humans to bear pain now for a future benefit that they can't really see yet is incredibly difficult.

Wars are incredibly destructive, as everyone can see, yet we haven't yet managed to eliminate wars. So why does anyone think we can get people to be rational about this issue?

The madness of crowds

Journalist Charles MacKay published his book “The Madness of Crowds” in 1841. Friedrich Nietzsche said “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” And we have always known that lynch mobs, once they form, will do things, horrible things, that no individual in the crowd would ever be willing to do alone.

I think of that as I watch the bitter liberal/conservative, religious/secular, rural/urban, etc etc battles in American’s current cultural and political wars.  We have had bitter divides in the nation before, and it even once led to the Civil War. But this is as bitter as I have seen it in my lifetime, and I keep wondering why.

One factor certainly is that we have no external enemy to draw us together as we had during the Cold War or World War II. So now that we aren’t facing outward to protect our nation against a common foe we have fallen to fighting bitterly among ourselves – a common enough occurrence in groups and nations.

But I am beginning to suspect another cause, the rise of social media. I find it interesting, and perhaps significant, that people on social media, where they are essentially anonymous, become so vituperative and irrational. Read any of the millions of flame wars going on at any given time to see what I mean. More significantly, notice that the comments section of a posting often only goes three or four comments deep before people begin to be uncivil to each other. (That is why comments are turned off on this blog).

It seems to me likely that the effect of social media is to facilitate the rapid formation of virtual crowds around an issue, which then blows up out of all proportionality and demonstrates all the irrationality and blind brutality of a lynch mob.  Of course the mainstream media loves it; it produces great stories and drives readership, but it also continues to amplify the echo chamber that is feeding the crowd’s frenzy.

The level of bitterness and irrationality, and yes, hypocrisy, evident on all sides in the recent Kavanaugh Supreme Court battle demonstrated all these symptoms of crowd madness. And for that matter the same effect can be seen on the #MeToo movement, the #NeverTrump movement, and dozens of other current “movements” being driven largely by social media.

Social media was supposed to be a boon to humankind. It may turn out to be a disaster for us.

Recommended: The Righteous Mind

Jonathan Haidt is a moral psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University. If you have never heard of "moral psychology" before it is because until recently it was a near-moribund field. Moral psychology is the study of how humans define and use morality. His 2013 book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divide by Politics and Religion is a profoundly important book in today's highly irrational, bitterly decisive political and religious atmosphere, not only to understand the current battles in America, such as the emotional fight over the recent Supreme Court nomination of Justice Kavanaugh, but also to understand larger issues such as the roots of the battles between the West and the Muslim world, or China, or Russia. To name just three important insights from the book (there are far more): (1)  there are far more dimensions to morality than the justice/fairness dimension that is almost the only dimension American culture focuses on, (2) Americans, and especially the educated middle-class Americans that are the group that most psychologist study, are highly atypical in the world as a whole, which calls into question much of our psychological research, and (3) not only are humans driven more by their emotions/intuitions than by reason (others have said this too), but in fact reason itself simply cannot operate without emotional/intuitions input.

Read this book. It will change your thinking and your perspective on lots of issues.

Supreme Court nominations

If one backs off from the highly polarized and divisive battles going on over this Supreme Court nomination, really nothing exceptional is happening. Democratic presidents tend, naturally enough, to nominate more liberal justices while Republicans tend, naturally, to nominate more conservative justices. Republicans (nominally, if Trump can be considered a Republican) hold the presidency at the moment, so of course more conservative justices are going to be nominated. If Hillary had won no doubt the nominated justices would have been more liberal. What is new here?

Justice Gorsuch, more or less a conservative, was nominated by a Republican president to replace Justice Scalia, also a conservative nominated by a Republican president (Reagan). Justice Kavanaugh, a conservative, has been nominated by a Republican president to replace Justice Stevens, a moderate but a bit on the conservative side, who was nominated by a Republican president (Ford). Seems to me more or less what one would expect. No one was surprised when Democratic president Obama nominated Justice Sotomayor and Justice Kagen, both liberals, and in fact while some Republican Senators grumbled a bit, none felt the need to do the sort of no-holds-barred down-and-dirty street fight battle that has met Kavanaugh’s nomination. In fact Sotomayor was confirmed by a vote of 68-31 and Kagan by a vote of 63-37, with some Republicans joining their Democratic colleagues.

There has been much made of the fact that the Republican-controlled Senate wouldn’t consider president Obama’s last nomination of Merrick Garland just before the election, That maneuver is actually called the “Biden rule” because it was (then) Democratic Senator Joseph Biden who in a speech in 1992 first proposed the idea.  Apparently it was OK for Democrats to use this maneuver, just not for Republicans to use it.

Of course some liberals don’t want so-called “conservatives” on the bench because they want the Supreme Court to be able to impose by legal fiat policies they can’t get enacted through normal legislative channels.  “Conservative” justices tend to rule based on the wording of laws and the Constitution, and not to “creatively expand” the meaning beyond what the wording implies on the basis of their own political or cultural biases. And frankly I agree with that approach. Of course things have changed since the Constitution was enacted, and so the laws must sometimes also change. There is a perfectly good system already in place to make those changes. For the Constitution, there is a process by which it can be amended, as it has been already a number of times.  And Congress can also pass or amend laws as it sees fit.

The founders of this nation never intended the Supreme Court to be a powerful force in government. It would have been anathema to them for a few unelected judges with lifetime appointments to impose on the entire nation by fiat laws or rules or cultural policies which were unable to get through the normal legislative process. Yes, I can understand the frustration with the dysfunctional Congress, but the solution is to fix Congress, not to bypass it or replace it with nine unelected justices.

As it happens, I agree with most of the liberal goals, if not always with their methods of achieving those goals. Permanent cultural changes in attitudes and behaviors require convincing people (actually talking and, more important, listening to those with other views), not mandating their behavior with an all-powerful central government. We can go live in China or Russia if that is what we want.

So despite the current hysteria in some quarters about this nomination, I see nothing exceptional going on here, except for the unusually vituperative behavior of some liberals.

Microsoft Windows rant

Trigger warning - if you are not a computer geek, this post may be of no interest.

(Yes, yes. I know this isn't quite the way "trigger warning" is generally used. It's use was meant as a bit of subtle humor, apparently too subtle for some....)

I have (had) Windows 10 on three of my computers, a desktop and two laptops. This week the "Spring Creators Update" version 1803 was rolled out - one of those forced updates we cannot avoid (though with some obscure register settings one can at least delay them for 180 days) .  This update thoroughly clobbered all three computers. It killed my antivirus (Kaspersky Internet Security), which had to be uninstalled and then reinstalled to make it work. It removed the HomeGroup sharing option, which is how I interconnected my computers. So now I was supposed to set up a whole series of new services, and the forums reveal that a lot of people were finding the new sharing services don't work dependably. And it removed several other application programs that I regularly use and which it claimed were "no longer compatible" with Windows.

After spending a whole day trying to "fix" my wife's laptop after the update I simply gave up and rolled all three machines back to Windows 8.1, which is the last stable version and to which Microsoft isn't "forcing" feature updates (with "features" I neither want nor need) twice a year. Window 8.1 is still under extended support until 2023, which means I can get security patches (when I ask for them) until then.

It is simply unacceptable to have an operating system on my computers that is destabilized twice a year by "forced" automatic updates when I am not looking. Microsoft is of course trying to force everyone onto Windows 10 so they can sell more subscription services, like Office 365. As of August of this year, about 40% of the world's Windows computers are still running Windows 7, and I know why. Corporations simply can't afford to have Microsoft screw up all their thousands of computers every six months with a buggy "Creators Update", And neither can I.

So I am staying on Windows 8.1 until at least 2023. I don't know what I will do after that, but perhaps Microsoft will have come to its senses by then and revised its update system, or perhaps some bright and adventurous young entrepreneur will field an acceptable replacement for the Windows operating system and give Microsoft some badly-needed competition. (and Mac OS, at just over 9% of the current market, probably isn't that universal replacement).