Perhaps it’s a generational thing

Perhaps it’s a generational thing, but I see all these protests scheduled around the inauguration of Donald Trump as simply bad manners. I was raised in the generation that thought manners mattered, and thought that someone else’s bad manners wouldn’t excuse my own. My generation still thought that if two mortal enemies were about to dual to the death, it was still polite for them to salute each other with their swords before beginning the duel. My generation thought that the inauguration of a president – any president – was an important national ritual, an affirmation of the American democratic tradition of passing presidential power peacefully from one person to the next, whatever one might think personally of the new occupant of that office.

Yes, a lot of the country isn’t happy Donald Trump won the election.  I’m not particularly happy with him, but then I wouldn’t have been happy with Clinton either. That is almost always the case in an election; there are winner and there are losers. But he did win and he is our new president, and good manners would dictate that we respect the office even if we don’t particularly respect the occupant.

But then this is a generation that often doesn’t answer RSVPs or send “Thank You” letters for gifts. So maybe I am just out of date. Maybe acting like a boor, or like a spoiled child that didn’t gets its way, is the new norm. If so I am sorry for the state of the nation, and of American society.

The Russian hacking issue

Yes, Russian hackers probably hacked the emails of some of the Democratic party operatives. So, probably, did Chinese hackers, perhaps North Korean hackers, perhaps the hackers of a mafia ring or two, and even perhaps a few teenagers around the world. It was apparently so easy.  Why do I say this? Because hackers have been breaking into everything from corporate databases to the Pentagon computers over the past decade.  Even the venerable NSA, whom we trust to do our most invasive hacking of other nations, had some of their prize hacking tools stolen last year by hackers and put up for auction in the internet.

And no doubt, despite the desperate denials by her team, one or more hackers had a good look at all Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails, classified and unclassified, on her unsecured server.

Is this news? No. We know this sort of hacking has been going on for at least a decade.  And we ourselves do a great deal of it.

Yes, no doubt Russia tried to influence the election. Why not? America has tried to influence elections in Russia and in Russian border States. Indeed, over the past 50 years the CIA, among others, has actively tried to influence elections all around the globe, and even instigated some outright coups.  Next to that record, just releasing some embarrassing emails is hardly very serious, though it certainly showed the seamy side of Democratic operations. But there seems to be no evidence that the Russian meddling had any significant effect on the election, despite the media hysteria. After all, the only real effect was to give voters some more information about the candidates.

The real scandal under all of this is that government and Democratic Party computers apparently are so easy to hack into.  The Obama administration had eight years to do something practical about this, but apparently, from the available evidence, they either didn’t bother or were so incompetent that whatever they did was ineffective.

Let’s get real. Hacking is spying. Nations have always spied on each other, even on other friendly nations. We do it just like everyone else does it, and in fact we do a lot of it and put a lot of money into the effort.  So let’s stop all this hypocritical theatrical outrage about Russian hacking. This is the real world. It goes on. A competent government would do something practical to better protect its computers.

Putin and Obama

I have argued before in these blogs that Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly outplayed and outfoxed President Obama, especially in the Ukraine and in Syria. His latest move, deciding not to retaliate after Obama expelled a number of Russian diplomats, is a classic and brilliant move – once again completely outmaneuvering Obama and his national security team, and making Obama look petty and weak. Putin has consistently played a very weak hand brilliantly, and Russia continues to punch way above its weight.  The recently concluded cease fire in Syria, negotiated without any American participation, shows just how far we have been pushed out of that arena. Not that perhaps it wouldn’t be better for us to get out of that arena, but certainly not to be seen to be pushed out.

Obama once argued that his first foreign policy rule was “not to do dumb stuff”.  Expelling a couple of dozen Russian diplomats in his last weeks in office over alleged Russian hacking seems to me to fit squarely into the “dumb stuff” category.  Does anyone think this step will make any difference at all to the Russian (or Chinese, or mafia) hackers?

Common sense might tell any thinking person, after years of the government and major corporation being hacked repeatedly by everyone in sight, including teenagers in their family bedrooms, that perhaps a better approach would be to put some real money into developing computer systems that were not so easily hacked. If we can afford to spend almost $400 billion for a fleet of new F-35 fighter plane, or build new submarines at around $2.4 billion apiece, might we not find a little spare change somewhere to fund a really robust research effort to harden our computer systems before some enemy hacks them and brings down the entire economy?  Obama had eight years to do that, and it would probably be far more effective than kicking out a few diplomats.

Global warming summary – for now

I have done what study I am going to do for the present on the global warming issue. So as one who is not a climate scientist and lacks the training to critique some of the more esoteric analysis involved, what conclusions have I come to?

The consensus on global warming is not as uniform as green advocacy groups, the media or the Obama administration would like us to think. There is general agreement among most climate scientists that warming has occurred, and broad agreement that the warming is probably due, at least in part, to human activity. There is much less agreement about how much this effect is, or what contributes to it, or what the long-term prospects are, or what the best policy response would be.

Global warming predictions are much more tenuous and uncertain than the media or the IPCC (intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) or the more active green groups would have you believe. Nor it that so surprising, really, if one thinks about it. With all our weather satellites and Doppler radar and closely-spaced weather stations on the ground we still only have moderate success predicting the local weather in our city more than a week ahead.  Predicting global climate decades ahead is far, far, far more complex. There are thousands or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of processes involved, many probably not yet identified, all interacting with each other in very complex ways. Moreover the whole system is chaotic in the formal sense, meaning that very slight changes in initial conditions can produce wildly different outcomes. So it is not unreasonable to be skeptical about such predictions.

It seems to me fairly likely, but not absolutely certain, that the global climate has warmed over recent decades. The problem with being certain of this is that temperature data has a lot of noise (day to day variability), and there is a great deal of variability from place to place, so discerning a long-term global trend requires some complex time series analysis with a number of embedded assumptions (including assumption when one “adjusts” or “prunes” the raw data, as the IPCC has done with some of the data), and if one or more of these assumptions are wrong the result may be wrong. However, there do seem to be visible effects like melting permafrost and retreating glaciers and changing growing seasons that also seem to support a warming trend, so most likely there has been some global warming over the past century, on the order perhaps of half a degree Celsius.

Is seems to me possible that any warming that has occurred is at least partly due to human activity. The IPCC is fairly certain of this (always dangerous to be certain in science, because then one stops looking) and the media follows the IPCC.  But I rate it as only “possible” for two primary reasons:

1. There is some evidence that the parts of the climate were as warm or warmer during the medieval warm period (~950-1250 AD), and perhaps during the Roman Era (~0 AD) as well. These periods are of course long before the industrial age began pouring greenhouse gases into the air, so if they were as warm it suggests there are non-human causes of such warmings, which would challenge the IPCC’s assertions that human activity is the primary cause. The IPCC removed data for this period after their first (1990) report on the grounds that the measurements (all proxy measures, like tree growth rings, since no thermometers were around) were too uncertain.  I am not qualified to judge the validity of that decision, but it certainly was convenient for their argument to remove this period.

2. The establishment consensus has focused on human activity and carbon dioxide production in particular – it has become the mindset of a large proportion of researchers. That means that few people have looked at any other natural (non-human) possibilities. In fact, since belief in human origin global warming has become such a liberal litmus test, proposals to study alternative possibility have had trouble getting funding during the liberal Obama administration, and focus on alternatives is not a particularly good career move for a scientist in liberal academia. Or as one person put it, “you don’t get answers to questions you don’t ask.”

None of this is to say the Donald Trump or the politicians who don’t believe in global warming do so from any serious study of the issue, any more than the majority of the public who do believe in global warming base their belief on anything more than media stories and what their friends believe. But it does suggest that the issue is far more complex than generally portrayed, and justifies more skepticism than the public or the scientific community seems to be displaying, especially if we are thinking about spending billions of dollars and disrupting whole segments of the economy for remediation steps which may well be ineffective.  

Like almost every other right-thinking person….

Like almost every other right-thinking, intelligent, liberal, educated person I believe (a) that global warming is real, (b) that it is largely man-made, and (c) that there is almost complete agreement in the scientific community that both (a) and (b) are true. So clearly when someone like Donald Trump, or some conservative Republican oil-state senator says he doesn’t necessarily believe the climate change story, I discount them as simply ignorant, or in the pocket of the big fossil fuel corporations

But like most right-thinking, intelligent, educated people, I am no climate scientist, so what I am so sure of I have gleaned largely from dumbed-down press stories, popular mass-market books, and the opinions of those around me, which are also based almost entirely on the same dumbed-down press stories and popular mass-market books. And even if I read the original studies, without expertise in such arcane fields as dendroclimatology (determining past temperatures from tree rings) or time series analysis (reliably sorting a trend line from noise in a very noisy chronology of past temperature estimates) I wouldn’t be qualified to critique them.

So the preparation of a couple of my recent blogs on climate change has been an eye-opener for me. For one thing, a little online research reveals that there is indeed dissent among serious, well-trained scientists about both (a) and (b) above.  And even those scientists that agree with both (a) and (b) are widely split on how serious the issue really is, and what, if any, are the appropriate policy responses.

But climate change has become a major multinational industry providing billions in research money, a major source of new bureaucratic power (and increased budget) for agencies like the EPA, and a liberal litmus test issue. So of course the popular news is heavily biased, and in the scientific world it is hard for dissenting studies to get through peer reviews (by peers who would lose careers and funding if the dissents were proven accurate). Dissenters tend to get dismissed out of hand by “established” climate scientists, just as Stephen Hawking’s black hole theories were dismissed out of hand by “established” astrophysicists, until the evidence became too much to ignore. (Actually, the history of science is chock full of “established” theories held by the majority of scientists that turned out in the end to be completely wrong.)

Those of us who are old enough have seen this before, of course. The 1968 book The Population Bomb, by Paul Ehrlich, set off a similar frenzy over several decades about overpopulation, and became the liberal litmus test of its time.  Now, of course, we know that it was overblown, and in fact a substantial number of nations like Japan and Russia are depopulating themselves, posing entirely different crisis.

And then we went through several decades when everyone (except the oil companies) was sure that in the early 1970’s we had hit the peak oil point predicted by M. King Hubbard. It turned out the oil companies were right and we “politically enlightened” public were wrong.  New prospecting techniques and new extraction methods (like fracking and deepwater drilling) have greatly expanded the proven reserves (though of course we will someday run out).

It may well be that 97% of scientists believe that global warming is real and man-made (though no one seems to be able to find the original source of this widely-quoted number, and it may have simply been made up by some journalist, as such simple statistics often are), but widely-held belief is not evidence of truth, just evidence of widely-held belief.

So what is my conclusion here? I haven’t the climatology or statistical expertise to tell if the dissenters have valid arguments, but I can tell that there are more than a few serious dissenters, with serious studies based on widely available public climate data and thoroughly documented analysis methods, that disagree with the current liberal climate change beliefs.

More than that, there are critics who make a compelling case that some of the most prominent climate change researchers may have, either wittingly or through incorrect understanding of statistical methods, “manipulated” or “cherry picked” the data to get the answer they want, which actually wouldn’t be that surprising, considering the career pressures and funding at risk, nor  would this by any means be the first time research was “steered” toward a politically desirable result.                                                        

This experience has made me remember again Oliver Cromwell’s 1650 admonishing to the general assembly of the Church of Scotland: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” There are certainly people out there who reject climate change out of simple ignorance, anti-science sentiment, or ideology, but there are also others who reject it, or parts of it, out of well-considered thought and study.

If you are emotionally committed to believing in man-made climate change, you can just ignore this posting.  But if you actually want to be open minded and explore the other side of the argument, let me suggest the following sites as potential starting points:

Just Facts at http://www.justfacts.com/  Factual, evidence-based analysis of many issues, of which global warming is just one.

Manhattan Contrarian at http://manhattancontrarian.com.  Perhaps start with the posting How To Tell Who's Lying To You: Climate Science Edition. It will lead you to other relevant articles.

Roy Spencer’s site at http://www.drroyspencer.com/.  Perhaps start with My Global Warming Skepticism, for Dummies, which is a good summary.

The Business Insider article The 10 Most-Respected Global Warming Skeptics might give you some pause, since it even includes one Nobel Prize winner.  Wikipedia also has a list of scientists who oppose the mainstream global warming assessment.  It can be found here.  The list is no doubt incomplete, but it gives a starting point for finding articles and papers relevant to the discussion.

If you want to look yourself at raw climate source data, or examine climate model code in detail, or do some of your own analysis on the data,  go to RealClimate at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/

Unless you are trained in the right fields you may not have the tools to critically analyze these skeptic’s arguments and data, but you will certainly see that there are serious opposing views and arguments, and that despite the media claims, there is not unanimity at all in the scientific field about the extent or causes of global warming, and that would be a revelation for some.  It certainly was for me.

Do you agree?

Just a thought.  Would you agree with the following statement?

“Healthy debate is the lifeblood of American democracy, and global warming has inspired one of the major policy debates of our time. That debate is far from settled. Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind. That debate should be encouraged — in classrooms, public forums, and the halls of Congress.”

In particular, is the statement  “Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind” correct or not?  Is there absolute unanimity among scientists about the exact extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind? Indeed, is there any scientific field or any scientific issue in which there is absolute unanimity among scientists? (In case you are uncertain about your answer, see for example Five Things Climate Scientists Actually Disagree About by a climate scientist.)

 

Why am I asking this question?  Because it is on the basis of this statement alone, made in a National Review article you can read in its entirety here, that the New York Times on Dec 7  claimed that the newly-appointed head of the EPA. Scott Pruitt, was a “climate change denier”, a claim that the rest of the press promptly echoed. You can read the original New York Times article here.

Pruitt is certainly against using political pressure to stifle debate and dissent, which is the point of his National Review article. And he certainly thinks the EPA has on occasion exceeded its authority, a point which even the US Supreme Court seems to agree on. He may or may not be a climate change denier, but do you agree with the New York Times that the statement above is adequate evidence that he is? 

And if you don't agree that this is adequate evidence, how much trust do you now put in  the New York Times (and other liberal press) accusations against other Trump cabinet and administration appointments?

Two recommendations on climate change

As a follow up to my recent post on the climate change debate, let me suggest two more articles posted today:

In today's Wall Street Journal Holman Jenkins Jr has the piece Climateers Can't Handle the Truth, in which he examines the New York Times' claim, echoed endlessly by the rest of the liberal press, that Scott Pruitt, Trump's pick for EPA head, is a "climate denialist".  In fact, Jenkins argues, the claim is based entirely on one line from one Op Ed piece that Pruitt wrote this year that said “Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind.”  The statement is absolutely true; scientists do indeed disagree about the degree and extent of global warming, just as they debate and disagree about lots of other things in science.  This is a simple statement of fact, not the least bit unusual in science (in fact, lack of debate and disagreement about a scientific study would be far more unusual) , and not a denial of global warming.  It is another warning not to believe everything one reads these days, even from supposedly unbiased mainstream reporting.

My second recommendation is Francis Menton's piece in the Manhattan Contrarian, How To Tell Who's Lying To You: Climate Change Edition. It's always a mistake to listen to only one side of a debate. Menton gives a pretty good introduction to the other side of the debate.

Unfortunately, just when we ought to be having a rational, informed worldwide debate about just how much we expect the climate to change, and what would be the best course to mitigate the effects, the whole issue has become so politicized that no rational discussion is possible. Anyone who doesn't profess absolute belief in the doomsday dogma of the green movement is clearly an ignoramus. This is hardly a healthy way to deal with this subject.

(And, no doubt, The Times would argue that this post proves that I too am a climate change denier, even though I am not!)