TT's Lost in Tokyo — by TokyoTom

Last night I was Sleepless in Tokyo because Matt Ridley and one of his commenters rewarded, with nice words and questions, a comment I left there on his “Nuclear Crony Capitalism” post.

So naturally I wrote more.

Here’s the relevant comment thread, plus my excited scribblings at the bottom (now up; thanks, Matt!). Skip to the bottom if you’re in a rush:

Posted by, TokyoTom (not verified)

Matt, great post — but I think you’ve only barely scratched the surface on the ‘crony capitalism’ institutionalization of risk.

I’ve spent a bit of time delving into this at my blog that Ludwig von Mises Inst kindly hosts:

– Sorry, but I can’t resist asking: Feel Sorry for Tokyo Electric Power Co?, http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/2011/03/27/39-resist-feel-tokyo-electric-power/, a tribute to Lew Rockwell’s ‘Feel Sorry for BP?’)

– Institutionalized moral hazard: Fun with Nuclear Power in Japan, or, prepare for a glowing twilight, with scattered fallout in the morning:  http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/2011/03/26/institutionalized-moral-hazard-fun-nuclear-power-japan-prepare-glowing-twilight-scattered-fallout-morning/

– My posts exploring the ramifications of the state grant of ‘limited liability’ corporation status: http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/?s=limited+liability

 – The case of BP: http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/?s=BP+gulf

 – Not surprisingly, similar issues arise with respect to the rest of the Govt-licensed energy sector and climate: http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/?s=climate+liability

 Thus small things contribute to the Road to Serfdom: http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/2011/03/27/rot-core-prophetic-words-hayek-grim-threat-posed-erosion-quot-market-morals-quot/ and http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/?s=prophetic+words+from+hayek+grim+threat

I hope you’ll take your concern for nuclear crony capitalism even further.

TT

Wednesday 30th March 2011 – 04:39am

Posted by, Matt Ridley

Tom,

very interesting. Thanks. will follow up.

Matt

Wednesday 30th March 2011 – 04:54am

Posted by, Robin Guenier (not verified)

Matt:

This is an intriguing post …. If one agrees (and I do) that the moral hazard enjoyed by financial institutions is deplorable, then logically it’s impossible not to take the same view of crony capitalism and nuclear power. And, as j ferguson and Tom have pointed out, it doesn’t end there. For example, I’ve been involved with the UK defence industry and recently with the appalling NHS computer system – in both cases, I’ve seen huge overruns and vast sums wasted. Classic examples, I suggest, of “government and capitalists colluding against the market”: neither the government nor its suppliers are penalised; all the pain is passed onto the public. And, if that is unacceptable – and surely it is – it’s hard to dispute Tom’s conclusion that the state grant of limited liability may be the problem: “one of the key roots of snowballing corporate statism”.

And yet … and yet: the industrial revolution and the huge benefits it has provided to society were built on the foundation of limited liability. Moreover, many major projects that would not have been implemented without an alliance between capitalists and government have turned out to be widely beneficial despite seemingly inevitable delays and cost overruns.

Is there a distinction to be drawn and, if so, where?

Robin

Wednesday 30th March 2011 – 07:32am

Posted by, Matt Ridley

Robin,

Yes. I agree with both points you make and see what you mean about limited liability’s role and the importance of govt-driven infrastructure. Compulsory purchase for railways and canals springs to mind: easier in Birtain than in France.

Not quite on the same lines, but sometimes I get criticised for being too hard on government and I reply that if Carnegie and Rockefeller and Maxwell were bad, then they weren’t half as bad as Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot.

I hope to get time to dig further into this issue.

Matt

Wednesday 30th March 2011 – 10:59am

My follow-up thoughts (readers may be disappointed that I haven’t loaded this down to cross-references to relevant posts from this blog):

Robin, your statement that “the industrial revolution and the huge benefits it has provided to society were built on the foundation of limited liablity” is a statement of fact – not one necessarily of causation – but so has been our financial house of cards: banks are corporations, shareholders have limited liability (and megabanks are public cos in which shareholders are even further removed from oversight), and depositors are insured by Uncle Same. As a result, depositors don’t bother to check out what a crapload of risk that traders and execs are piling on in order to get bonuses, and Uncle Sam and his legions of wizards set up regulations that the smart boys at Goldman and lawyers figure out how to finesse to load up ever more risk at the lowest possible capital – BANG! And all thanks to the wonders of institutionalized misincentives!

Sure, we got wonderful things from complex organizations, all of which remain in check somewhat by competitions. But there’s been a lot of abuse, alot of risk-shifting, alot of Superfund sites, alot of barriers to entry raised by the very regulations whose purported intent is to rein in the bad behavior, massive statism, and a ball and chain of costly and intrusive IP legislation and enforcement.

I’ve given a very short summary of the dynamics at this post but it’s a fairly obvious and understandable game of whack-a-mole, where government and the big boys – with their unlimited lives, purposes, facelessness, deep pockets and revolving doors – always seems to benefit while ordinary citizens and smaller firms and potential rivals get whacked.

It is very clear that limited liability of shareholders is a gift from government at the expense of un-consenting creditors (‘victims’ IOW), and thus is a subsidy from the public as a whole to the wealthier classes who owned corporations and still by and large are the shareholder class.

Corporations used to be very rare – the grants have a very dubious history, typically one of false justifications of offering a ‘public good’ in exchange for monopoly rights. The owners of very limited life, limited purpose firms somehow always managed to get the special deal extended. So we got bigger firms and more corruption, and labor unions and then regulations and workers and citizens finally started to get fed up.

The widespread statism and government-provided social welfarism – now falling into cynical kleptocracy and fuelling a breakdown in initiative, integrity and other virtues Hayek saw are necessary for market-based wealth generation to works to work – we now see are part of the price we’ve paid. The other part of course is damage to peoples’ lives, property, communities and to whatever public or community property that corporations can get their hands on and strip, without have an owner’s incentive to balance possible revenues over the long run.

Is this kit and caboodle a necessary part of “capitalism”? I don’t think so. Wall street banks and investment firms were private partnership for most of their lives, Amex was a listed corporation who owners had UNLIMITED liability, and Lloyds of London itself was not a firm but a private MARKET of names who all had unlimited liability. Many firms used to have only partially paid-in shares, so that managers had a call in case more capital was needed for new projects or to pay off debt.

Just because we’ve democratized corporate formation by opening the floodgates of socializing risk to anyone doesn’t mean ways can’t be found to put an end to institutionalized moral hazard. Eliminating unlimited liability would shift risk and responsibility for oversight back to a conveniently truant shareholder class from government and the public at large. It would of course mean that people not in a position to evaluate risks would be less likely to invest, making firms work harder to earn trust and get capital. Credit evaluation, rating agencies and insurers would all compete to step into the breach and to lower and spread risk.

Better-managed firms are more profitable than the big Frankensteins we have lumbering around these days; while reform would not happen overnight, it is not only desirable but possible. Firms whose shareholders bear the risk that they may be held liable for damages can be expected to be more cautious and thus could be exempted from the regulations that have been found needed for the Frankensteins. Thus both risks and barriers to entry could be lowered, and consumers and could determine what works best. Other initial steps could be to encourage firms whose shareholders have only fractionally paid-in shares. In the US, at least, corporations are creatures on state law, so just one state is needed to start such an experiment (which would be possible and protectable under the Constitution).

Well I’ve run on quite a bit in my excitement. My sincere apologies! Let me toddle off for a wee bit of sleep.

Tom

Readers might have heard that Republican conservatives – who hope to retake control of Congress and the White House, head off/engulf TeaParty reformers, and thence to further drive the federal government into the ground – have joined together in announcing the “Mount Vernon Statement”. Daniel Larison at The American Conservative rightly notes that the Statement surely would have had Washington rolling in his grave.

As an alternative, I bring readers’ attention the more clear-sighted principles enumerated by the Campaign for Liberty. One wishes only that this statement paid a little more attention to (1) federalism and states rights as a check on the federal government, and (2) the need for states – which have been busy transferring power to the limited liability corporations that in turn desire a central pork/influence machine in Washington, DC – to start exercising their authority to limit limited liability and so to end the great moral hazard machines that corpoations have become.

Here are the Campaign for Liberty’s Principles; I hope readers will visit and register at the site:

Americans inherit from our ancestors a glorious tradition of freedom
and resistance to oppression.  Our country has long been admired by the
rest of the world for her great example of liberty and prosperity—a
light shining in the darkness of tyranny.

But many Americans today are frustrated.  The political choices they
are offered give them no real choice at all.  For all their talk of
“change,” neither major political party as presently constituted
challenges the status quo in any serious way.  Neither treats the
Constitution with anything but contempt.  Neither offers any kind of
change in monetary policy.  Neither wants to make the reductions in
government that our crushing debt burden demands.  Neither talks about
bringing American troops home not just from Iraq but from around the
world.  Our country is going bankrupt, and none of these sensible
proposals are even on the table.

This destructive bipartisan consensus has suffocated American political
life for many years.  Anyone who tries to ask fundamental questions
instead of cosmetic ones is ridiculed or ignored.

That is why the Campaign for Liberty was established: to highlight the
neglected but common-sense principles we champion and reinsert them
into the American political conversation.

The U.S. Constitution is at the heart of what the Campaign for Liberty
stands for, since the very least we can demand of our government is
fidelity to its own governing document.  Claims that our Constitution
was meant to be a “living document” that judges may interpret as they
please are fraudulent, incompatible with republican government, and
without foundation in the constitutional text or the thinking of the
Framers.  Thomas Jefferson spoke of binding our rulers down from
mischief by the chains of the Constitution, and we are proud to follow
in his distinguished lineage.

With our Founding Fathers, we also believe in a noninterventionist
foreign policy.  Inspired by the old Robert Taft wing of the Republican
Party, we are convinced that the American people cannot remain free and
prosperous with 700 military bases around the world, troops in 130
countries, and a steady diet of war propaganda.  Our military
overstretch is undermining our national defense and bankrupting our
country.

We believe that the free market, reviled by people who do not
understand it, is the most just and humane economic system and the
greatest engine of prosperity the world has ever known.

We believe with Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, and F.A. Hayek that
central banking distorts economic decisionmaking and misleads
entrepreneurs into making unsound investments.  Hayek won the Nobel
Prize for showing how central banks’ interference with interest rates
sets the stage for economic downturns.  And the central bank’s ability
to create money out of thin air transfers wealth from the most
vulnerable to those with political pull, since it is the latter who
receive the new money before the price increases it brings in its wake
have yet occurred.  For economic and moral reasons, therefore, we join
the great twentieth-century economists in opposing the Federal Reserve
System, which has reduced the value of the dollar by 95 percent since
it began in 1913.

We oppose the dehumanizing assumption that all issues that divide us
must be settled at the federal level and forced on every American
community, whether by activist judges, a power-hungry executive, or a
meddling Congress.  We believe in the humane alternative of local
self-government, as called for in our Constitution.

We oppose the transfer of American sovereignty to supranational
organizations in which the American people possess no elected
representatives.  Such compromises of our country’s independence run
counter to the principles of the American Revolution, which was fought
on behalf of self-government and local control.  Most of these
organizations have a terrible track record even on their own terms: how
much poverty have the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund
actually alleviated, for example?  The peoples of the world can
interact with each other just fine in the absence of bureaucratic
intermediaries that undermine their sovereignty.

We believe that freedom is an indivisible whole, and that it includes
not only economic liberty but civil liberties and privacy rights as
well, all of which are historic rights that our civilization has
cherished from time immemorial.

Our stances on other issues can be deduced from these general principles.

Our country is ailing.  That is the bad news.  The good news is that
the remedy is so simple and attractive: a return to the principles our
Founders taught us.  Respect for the Constitution, the rule of law,
individual liberty, sound money, and a noninterventionist foreign
policy constitute the foundation of the Campaign for Liberty.

Will you join us? Click here to sign up!

John Quiggin, a left-leaning Australian economist and professor at the University of Queensland, has noted my recent post on the penchant for bloggers
and readers at the Mises Blog to attack climate science – are “almost universally committed to delusional views on climate science“, as he puts it – though these are not words fairly put into my mouth.  Like me, though, Quiggin wonders why wonders why libertarians focus on climate science at the near-exclusion of policy discussions, since (1) he sees “plenty of political opportunities to use climate change to attack subsidies and other existing interventions” and (2) he supposes that the environmental movement`s widespread shift “from profound suspicion
of markets to enthusiastic support for market-based policies such as
carbon taxes and cap and trade” seems like a big win for libertarians.

Quiggin previously commented on “Libertarians and global warming” last June; this seems to be a follow up.

Quiggins posits that Austrians/libertarians exhibit a “near-universal rejection of mainstream climate science,” and asserts that:

we can draw one of only three conclusions
(a) Austrians/libertarians are characterized by delusional belief in
their own intellectual superiority, to the point where they think they
can produce an analysis of complex scientific problems superior to that
of actual scientists, in their spare time and with limited or no
scientific training in the relevant disciplines, reaching a startling
degree of unanimity for self-described “sceptics”
(b) Austrians/libertarians don’t understand their own theory and
falsely believe that, if mainstream climate science is right, their own
views must be wrong
(c) Austrians/libertarians do understand their own theory and correctly
believe that, if mainstream climate science is right, their own views
must be wrong

John concludes:

“Overall, though I, think that acceptance of the reality of climate
change would be good for libertarianism as a political movement. It
would kill off the most extreme and unappealing kinds of a priori
logic-chopping, while promoting an appreciation of Hayekian arguments
about the power of market mechanisms. And the very fact of uncertainty
about climate change is a reminder of the fatality of conceits of
perfect knowledge.”

While John asks a good question and reveals some appreciation of markets, it`s clear that he is still pretty much groping in the dark when it comes to understanding libertarians` concerns about climate policy, indeed, even as to libertarian aims and concerns generally. He also overlooks various cognitive/psychological factors that appear to be at play. Naturally, I appreciate the opportunity for discussion.

1. Before addressing his three possible conclusions, let me note that while “market-based policies such as
carbon taxes and cap and trade” may seem to John “like a big win for libertarians”, this is most definitely NOT the case for most libertarians in the context of climate change, as these “market-based policies” represent an enormous expansion of government that libertarians feel very strongly, based on past experience, will be profoundly porky, counterproductive and costly. In the face of the fight for favor in Washington and the choice of opaque cap-and-trade over a more open rebated carbon tax and other deregulatory options, there is good reason to believe that libertarians are right.

2. Regarding conclusion (a), let me first note that John reveals the self-same “conceit of perfect knowledge” that he accuses Austrians/libertarians of having: the “acceptance of reality of climate change” would undoubtedly be good for everyone, but just what is that reality, and how can a layman of any stripe confirm himself that climate is changing and that man is responsible? The very fact that this “reality” is nearly impossible to confirm personally (even over the course of a lifetime) means that even those whom John considers as having “accepted reality” have basically just adopted a frame of reference, on the basis of the consistency of the AGW frame with other previously established mental frames, a reliance on authority, peer-group acceptance, etc.

“Reality” in this case inevitably, for most people, has very large personal and social components; accordingly, both “acceptance” and “skepticism” of it may look like a group belief, which may help to explain why it is possible to perceive “a startling
degree of unanimity” of views on climate science, the contents of such views varying by group.

As for Austrians/libertarians, while I don`t think it is fair to conclude they (we) are characterized by delusional belief in
their own intellectual superiority, but that many do have a belief, not so much in the superiority of their intellect, but in the correctness of their views on political science and economics (this is common in other groups, of course). This may affect their views on climate science, for several reasons that I have noted to John previously, and may be related for some of them to his conclusions (b) and (c).

3. Concerning conclusions (b) and (c), these are both over-generalizations; libertarians are a heterogenous bunch. But if I may generalize myself, to me there appears no conflict whatsoever between Austrian views, which are primarily about interpersonal relations and the role of government, and climate science. “Mainstream science” has nothing to do with these views, so if Austrians are wrong about “mainstream climate science”, this does not imply that any Austrian views
must be wrong. So Quiggins` (c) is wrong.

Quiggins`(b) – that Austrians may not understand their own theory and
may falsely believe that, if mainstream climate science is right, their own
views must be wrong – may be right for some Austrians, but certainly not generally. Rather, what I suspect is going on is much more ordinary, as I previously noted to Quiggin as a comment on his related June post; that I need to repeat myself indicates that maybe John is having cognitive difficulties of his own (emphasis added):

John, thanks for this piece. As a libertarian who believes that
climate change IS a problem, I share some of your puzzlement and have
done considerable commenting
on this issue [see this long list]. Allow me to offer a few thoughts on various factors at
work in the general libertarian resistance to taking government action
on climate change:

– As Chris Horner noted in your linked
piece, many libertarians see “global warming [as] the bottomless well
of excuses for the relentless growth of Big Government.”  Even those who
agree that is AGW
is a serious problem are worried, for good reason, that government
approaches to climate change will be a train wreck – in other words,
that the government “cure” will be worse than the problem.

–
Libertarians have in general drifted quite far from environmentalists.
Even though they still share a mistrust of big government,
environmentalists generally believe that MORE
government is the answer, while ignoring all of the problems associated
with inefficient bureaucratic management (witness the crashing of many
managed fisheries in the US), the manipulation of such managment to
benefit bureaucratic interests, special interests and insiders
(wildfire fighting budgets, fossil fuel and hard rock mining, etc.) and
the resultant and inescapable politicization of all disputes due to the
absence of private markets. Libertarians see that socialized property
rights regimes can be just as “tragedy of the commons” ruinous as cases
where community or private solutions have not yet developed, and have
concluded that, without privatization, government involvement
inevitably expands. Thus, libertarians often see environmentalists as
simply another group fighting to expand government, and are hostile as
a result.

– Libertarians are as subject to reflexive, partisan
position-taking as any one else. Because they are reflexively opposed
to government action, they find it easier to operate from a position of
skepticism in trying to bat down AGW scientific and economic arguments (and to slam the motives of those arguing that AGW
must be addressed by government) than to open-mindedly review the
evidence. This is a shame( but human), because it blunts the libertarian
message in explaining what libertarians understand very well – that
environmental problems arise when property rights over resources are
not clearly defined or enforceable, and also when governments
(mis)manage resources.

I`ve discussed a number of times how we all easily fall into partisan cognitive traps, as summarized here.

A related piece of the dynamic is that some libertarians may feel that if they agree that AGW may be a problem, that this will be taken – wrongly – by others in the political arena as a conclusion that the libertarian message is no longer relevant.

4. Some support for these points can be seen in Edwin Dolan`s 2006 paper, “Science, Public Policy and Global Warming: Rethinking the Market Liberal Position” (Cato), in which Dolan suggests that many libertarian climate skeptics are acting quite as
if they are “conservatives” of the type condemned by Friedrich Hayek. 
Dolan cites Hayek’s 1960 essay, “Why I am Not a Conservative” (1960),
in which Hayek identified the following traits that distinguish
conservatism from market liberalism:

• Habitual resistance to change, hence the term “conservative.”
• Lack of understanding of spontaneous order as a guiding principle of economic life.
• Use of state authority to protect established privileges against the forces of economic change.
• Claim to superior wisdom based on self-arrogated superior quality in place of rational argument.
• A propensity to reject scientific knowledge because of dislike of the consequences that seem to follow from it.

Further support is provided by Jonathan Adler, a libertarian law professor at Case Western who focusses on resource issues, and who has concluded that climate change is a serious concern, and that man is contributing to it. His February 2008 post, “Climate Change, Cumulative Evidence, and Ideology” (and the comment thread) is instructive:

“Almost every time I post something on climate
change policy, the comment thread quickly devolves into a debate over
the existence of antrhopogenic global warming at all. (See, for
instance, this post
on “conservative” approaches to climate change policy.) I have largely
refused to engage in these discussions because I find them quite
unproductive. The same arguments are repeated ad nauseum, and no one is
convinced (if anyone even listens to what the other side is saying). …

“Given my strong libertarian leanings, it would certainly be
ideologically convenient if the evidence for a human contribution to
climate change were less strong. Alas, I believe the preponderance of
evidence strongly supports the claim that anthropogenic emissions are
having an effect on the global climate, and that effect will increase
as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere. While I reject most
apocalyptic scenarios as unfounded or unduly speculative, I am
convinced that the human contribution to climate change will cause or
exacerbate significant problems in at least some parts of the world.
For instance, even a relatively modest warming over the coming decades
is very likely to have a meaningful effect on the timing and
distribution of precipitation and evaporation rates, which will, in
turn, have a substantial impact on freshwater supplies. That we do not
know with any precision the when, where, and how much does not change
the fact that we are quite certain that such changes will occur.

“So-called climate “skeptics” make many valid points about the
weakness or unreliability of many individual arguments and studies on
climate. They also point out how policy advocates routinely exaggerate
the implications of various studies or the likely consequences of even
the most robust climate predictions. Economists and others have also
done important work questioning whether climate risks justify extreme
mitigation measures. But none of this changes the fact that the
cumulative evidence for a human contribution to present and future
climate changes, when taken as a whole, is quite strong. In this
regard, I think it is worth quoting something Ilya wrote below about
the nature of evidence in his post about 12 Angry Men”:

People
often dismiss individual arguments and evidence against their preferred
position without considering the cumulative weight of the other side’s
points. It’s a very easy fallacy to fall into. But the beginning of
wisdom is to at least be aware of the problem.

“The “divide
and conquer” strategy of dissecting each piece of evidence
independently can make for effective advocacy, but it is not a good way
to find the truth”

I  noted the following in response to Adler:

I think that there are many Austrians who understand WHY there might
be a climate change problem to which man contributes, as the atmosphere
is an open-access resource, in which there are no clear or
enforceable property rights that rein in externalities or that give
parties with differing preferences an ability to engage in meaingful
transactions that reflect those preferences. 

But, flawed human beings that we are, we have difficulty truly
keeping our minds open (subconscious dismissal of inconsistent data is
a cognitive rule) and we easily fall into tribal modes of conflict that
provide us with great satisfaction in disagreeing with those evil
“others” while circling the wagons (and counting coup) with our
brothers in arms.

Sadly, this is very much in evidence in the thread to your own post.

5. I have pulled together a post that indicates that a number of libertarians are trying to engage in good faith on climate change, and which may also serve as a good introduction for interested readers to libertarian thinking on environmental issues.

6. Finally, let me note that many of the problems that concern libertarians also concern progressives, chief of these being the negative effects of state actions on communities, development and on open-access (and hitherto local, indigenous-managed) commons.  This is the same concern that the Nobel Prize committee expressed when extending the prize in Economics to Elinor Ostrom, signalling their desire for a change in international aid policy.

You might find these remarks by Nicholas Hildyard, Larry Lohmann, Sarah Sexton and Simon Fairlie in “Reclaiming the Commons” (1995) to be pertinent; domestic cap-and-trade is an enclosure of the atmospheric commons, for the benefit of firms receiving grants of permits and costs flowing regressively to energy consumers, and internationally represents a vast expansion of state authority and bureaucracies, with attendant enclosure of local resources:

The creation of empires and states, business conglomerates and
civic dictatorships — whether in pre-colonial times or in the modern
era — has only been possible through dismantling the commons and
harnessing the fragments, deprived of their old significance, to build
up new economic and social patterns that are responsive to the
interests of a dominant minority. The modern nation state has been
built only by stripping power and control from commons regimes and
creating structures of governance from which the great mass of humanity
(particularly women) are excluded. Likewise, the market economy has
expanded primarily by enabling state and commercial interests to gain
control of territory that has traditionally been used and cherished by
others, and by transforming that territory – together with the people
themselves – into expendable “resources” for exploitation. By enclosing
forests, the state and private enterprise have torn them out of fabrics
of peasant subsistence; by providing local leaders with an outside
power base, unaccountable to local people, they have undermined village
checks and balances; by stimulating demand for cash goods, they have
impelled villagers to seek an ever wider range of things to sell. Such
a policy was as determinedly pursued by the courts of Aztec Mexico, the
feudal lords of West Africa, and the factory owners of Lancashire and
the British Rail as it is today by the International Monetary Fund or
Coca-Cola Inc.

Only in this way has it been possible to convert peasants into
labour for a global economy, replace traditional with modern
agriculture, and free up the commons for the industrial economy.
Similarly, only by atomizing tasks and separating workers from the
moral authority, crafts and natural surroundings created by their
communities has it been possible to transform them into modern,
universal individuals susceptible to “management”. In short, only by
deliberately taking apart local cultures and reassembling them in new
forms has it been possible to open them up to global trade.[FN L.
Lohmann, ‘Resisting Green Globalism’ in W. Sachs (ed), Global Ecology:
Conflicts and Contradictions, Zed Books, London and New Jersey, 1993.]

To achieve that “condition of economic progress”, millions have
been marginalized as a calculated act of policy, their commons
dismantled and degraded, their cultures denigrated and devalued and
their own worth reduced to their value as labour. Seen from this
perspective, many of the processes that now go under the rubric of
“nation-building”, “economic growth”, and “progress” are first ad
foremost processes of expropriation, exclusion, denial and
dispossession. In a word, of “enclosure”.

Because history’s best-known examples of enclosure involved the
fencing in of common pasture, enclosure is often reduced to a synonym
for “expropriation”. But enclosure involves more than land and fences,
and implies more than simply privatization or takeover by the state. It
is a compound process which affects nature and culture, home and
market, production and consumption, germination and harvest, birth,
sickness and death. It is a process to which no aspect of life or
culture is immune. ..,

Enclosure tears people and their lands, forests, crafts,
technologies and cosmologies out of the cultural framework in which
they are embedded and tries to force them into a new framework which
reflects and reinforces the values and interests of newly-dominant
groups. Any pieces which will not fit into the new framework are
devalued and discarded. In the modern age, the architecture of this new
framework is determined by market forces, science, state and corporate
bureaucracies, patriarchal forms of social organization, and ideologies
of environmental and social management.

Land, for example, once it is integrated into a framework of
fences, roads and property laws, is “disembedded” from local fabrics of
self-reliance and redefined as “property” or “real estate”. Forests are
divided into rigidly defined precincts – mining concessions, logging
concessions, wildlife corridors and national parks – and transformed
from providers of water, game, wood and vegetables into scarce
exploitable economic resources. Today they are on the point of being
enclosed still further as the dominant industrial culture seeks to
convert them into yet another set of components of the industrial
system, redefining them as “sinks” to absorb industrial carbon dioxide
and as pools of “biodiversity”. Air is being enclosed as economists
seek to transform it into a marketable “waste sink”; and genetic
material by subjecting it to laws which convert it into the
“intellectual property” of private interests.

People too are enclosed as they are fitted into a new society where
they must sell their labour, learn clock-time and accustom themselves
to a life of production and consumption; groups of people are redefined
as “populations’, quantifiable entities whose size must be adjusted to
take pressure off resources required for the global economy. …

enclosure transforms the environment into a “resource” for national or
global production – into so many chips that can be cashed in as
commodities, handed out as political favours and otherwise used to
accrue power. …

Enclosure thus cordons off those aspects of the environment that are
deemed “useful” to the encloser — whether grass for sheep in 16th
century England or stands of timber for logging in modern-say Sarawak
— and defines them, and them alone, as valuable. A street becomes a
conduit for vehicles; a wetland, a field to be drained; flowing water,
a wasted asset to be harnessed for energy or agriculture. Instead of
being a source of multiple benefits, the environment becomes a
one-dimensional asset to be exploited for a single purpose – that
purpose reflecting the interests of the encloser, and the priorities of
the wider political economy in which the encloser operates….

Enclosure opens the way for the bureaucratization and enclosure of
knowledge itself. It accords power to those who master the language of
the new professionals and who are versed in its etiquette and its
social nuances, which are inaccessible to those who have not been to
school or to university, who do not have professional qualifications,
who cannot operate computers, who cannot fathom the apparent mysteries
of a cost-benefit analysis, or who refuse to adopt the forceful tones
of an increasingly “masculine” world.

In that respect, as Illich notes, “enclosure is as much in the
interest of professionals and of state bureaucrats as it is in the
interests of capitalists.” For as local ways of knowing and doing are
devalued or appropriated, and as vernacular forms of governance are
eroded, so state and professional bodies are able to insert themselves
within the commons, taking over areas of life that were previously
under the control of individuals, households and the community.
Enclosure “allows the bureaucrat to define the local community as
impotent to provide for its own survival.”[FN I Illich, ‘Silence is a
Commons’, The Coevolution Quarterly, Winter 1983.] It invites the
professional to come to the “rescue” of those whose own knowledge is
deemed inferior to that of the encloser.

Enclosure is thus a change in the networks of power which enmesh
the environment, production, distribution, the political process,
knowledge, research and the law. It reduces the control of local people
over community affairs. Whether female or male, a person’s influence
and ability to make a living depends increasingly on becoming absorbed
into the new policy created by enclosure, on accepting — willingly or
unwillingly — a new role as a consumer, a worker, a client or an
administrator, on playing the game according to new rules. The way is
thus cleared for cajoling people into the mainstream, be it through
programmes to bring women “into development”, to entice smallholders
“into the market” or to foster paid employment.[FN P. Simmons, ‘Women
in Development’, The Ecologist, Vol. 22, No.1, 1992, pp.16-21.]

Those who remain on the margins of the new mainstream, either by
choice or because that is where society has pushed them, are not only
deemed to have little value: they are perceived as a threat. Thus it is
the landless, the poor, the dispossessed who are blamed for forest
destruction; their poverty which is held responsible for
“overpopulation”; their protests which are classed as subversive and a
threat to political stability. And because they are perceived as a
threat, they become objects to be controlled, the legitimate subjects
of yet further enclosure. …

People who would oppose dams, logging, the redevelopment of their
neighbourhoods or the pollution of their rivers are often left few
means of expressing or arguing their case unless they are prepared to
engage in a debate framed by the languages of cost-benefit analysis,
reductionist science, utilitarianism, male domination — and,
increasingly, English. Not only are these languages in which many local
objection — such as that which holds ancestral community rights to a
particular place to have precedence over the imperatives of “national
development” — appear disreputable. They are also languages whose use
allows enclosers to eavesdrop on, “correct” and dominate the
conversations of the enclosed. …

Because they hold themselves to be speaking a universal language,
the modern enclosers who work for development agencies and governments
feel no qualms in presuming to speak for the enclosed. They assume
reflexively that they understand their predicament as well as or better
than the enclosed do themselves. It is this tacit assumption that
legitimizes enclosure in the encloser’s mind – and it is an assumption
that cannot be countered simply by transferring what are
conventionbally assumed to be the trappings of power from one group to
another….

A space for the commons cannot be created by economists,
development planners, legislators, “empowerment” specialists or other
paternalistic outsiders. To place the future in the hands of such
individuals would be to maintain the webs of power that are currently
stifling commons regimes. One cannot legislate the commons into
existence; nor can the commons be reclaimed simply by adopting “green
techniques” such as organic agriculture, alternative energy strategies
or better public transport — necessary and desirable though such
techniques often are. Rather, commons regimes emerge through ordinary
people’s day-to-day resistance to enclosure, and through their efforts
to regain livelihoods and the mutual support, responsibility and trust
that sustain the commons.

That is not to say that one can ignore policy-makers or
policy-making. The depredations of transnational corporations,
international bureaucracies and national governments cannot be allowed
to go unchallenged. But movements for social change have a
responsibility to ensure that in seeking solutions, they do not remove
the initiative from those who are defending their commons or attempting
to regenerate common regimes — a responsibility they should take
seriously.

Might there be good reason NOT to rush into a vast expansion of government world-wide?

Elinor Ostrom awarded the Nobel prize in economics? Who? no doubt some of you are wondering.

Well, sharp-eyed readers will have noted that I have referred to her any number of times (which I will reprise later, as this post has gotten too lengthy).

I excerpt below some of the praise Elinor Ostrom has been receiving from Austrian economists familiar with her (emphasis added).

1.  First, though, from the press release:

Elinor Ostrom has demonstrated how common property can be successfully managed by user associations. Oliver Williamson has
developed a theory where business firms serve as structures for conflict resolution. Over the last three decades these seminal
contributions have advanced economic governance research from the fringe to the forefront of scientific attention.

Economic transactions take place not only in markets, but also within firms, associations, households, and agencies. Whereas economic theory has comprehensively illuminated the virtues and limitations of markets, it has traditionally paid less attention to other institutional arrangements. The research of Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson demonstrates that economic analysis can shed light on most forms of social organization.

Elinor Ostrom has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized. Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories. She observes that resource users frequently develop sophisticated mechanisms for decision-making and rule enforcement to handle conflicts of interest, and she characterizes the rules that promote successful outcomes.

The background explanation is useful and contains a pointed criticism of many centrally-directed approaches to common pool resources (emphasis added):

If we want to halt the degradation of our natural environment and prevent a repetition of the many collapses of natural-resource stocks experienced in the past, we should learn from the successes and failures of common-property regimes. Ostrom’s work teaches us novel lessons about the deep mechanisms that sustain cooperation in human societies.

It has frequently been suggested that common ownership entails excessive resource utilization, and that it is advisable to reduce utilization either by imposing government regulations, such as taxes or quotas, or by privatizing the resource. The theoretical argument is simple: each user weighs private benefits against private costs, thereby neglecting the negative impact on others.

However, based on numerous empirical studies of natural-resource management, Elinor Ostrom has concluded that common property is often surprisingly well managed. Thus, the standard theoretical argument against common property is overly simplistic. It neglects the fact that users themselves can both create and enforce rules that mitigate overexploitation.
The standard argument also neglects the practical difficulties associated with privatization and government regulation. …

There are many …. examples which indicate that user-management of local resources has been more successful than management by outsiders. …

[T]he main lesson is that common property is often managed on the basis of rules and procedures that have evolved over long periods of time. As a result they are more adequate and subtle than outsiders – both politicians and social scientists – have tended to realize. Beyond showing that self-governance can be feasible and successful, Ostrom also elucidates the key features of successful governance. One instance is that active participation of users in creating and enforcing rules appears to be essential. Rules that are imposed from the outside or unilaterally dictated by powerful insiders have less legitimacy and are more likely to be violated. Likewise, monitoring and enforcement work better when conducted by insiders than by outsiders. These principles are in stark contrast to the common view that monitoring and sanctioning are the responsibility of the state and should be conducted by public employees.

2.  Words of praise from libertarians:

Vernon L. Smith (2002 Nobel laureate for economics), Forbes, October 12:

For many of us she has long occupied our radar screen. Let me tell you why.

Relentlessly, Ostrom has pursued answers to two questions:

(1)
Since “everybody’s property is nobody’s property,” how is it that there
are so many cases where collectives of ordinary people with no
education and with none of the economists’ knowledge of “the tragedy of
the commons,” in fact discover ingenious rules (institutions) for
taking the “tragedy” out of a productive resource they hold in common? …

Numerous other examples include Japanese lands held by thousands in
common under governance structures that avoided “tragedy;” also ancient
solutions to communal water and irrigation systems that create
effective enough private rights conferring benefits and costs that
constrain use. This should not be too surprising, because “property
(originally propriety) rights” are about human rights and the challenge of defining them incentive-compatibly for mutual benefit.

(2)
As a distinguished political-economic scientist she will be the first
to tell you that there are also plenty of commons problems that
represent institutional failures and fragilities; she has asked why,
and what makes the difference between success and failure? The
fragilities include inshore fisheries and groundwater basins with
continuing commons problems; failures include salt water fisheries and
irrigation systems hamstrung by the complexity of the rules.

Success is associated with clarity in the definition of and
bounds on individual rights (and opportunities) to take action, and the
geography of the commons; details for monitoring, operations, sanctions
and mechanisms for conflict resolution emerge from within the
collective and out of motivated people’s direct experience with
environmental context and each other. When too many of these
problem-solving elements fail, the governance systems fail or require
continuing attention to their fragility characteristics. A fatal source
of disintegration is the inappropriate application of uninformed
external authority, including intervention to prevent application of
efficacious rules to political favorites. Also detrimental to good solutions is the OPM (other people’s money) problem.

Peter Boettke, The Austrian Economists, October 12:

I told David [Henderson] that she is amazing and well deserving of the Nobel award for her pioneering work on rational choice theory (as if the choosers were human) and institutional analysis.  I then bent his ear about her work on governing the commons, institutional diversity, and learning. …

What Lin’s work demonstrates … is how individuals can in a variety of settings work to find (or stumble upon) institutional solutions that promote social cooperation and human betterment.  It is about voluntary civic association, a subset of which is commercial life, that her works highlights; not the absence of individual choice.  … My blurb on the back of her book, Understanding Institutional Diversity reads as follows: “What emerges from Elinor Ostrom’s book is precisely what the title suggests — an understanding of the diverse nature of institutions that exist in human societies to promote human cooperation or to hinder it.”

She is both a methodological individualist (rightly understood) and a spontaneous order theorists.  In this regard, Lin Ostrom (and Vincent) have represented one manifestation of the research program in the sciences of man (praxeology) by Mises and Hayek in the 1940s.  Actors of limited cognitive capabilities are studied for how the[y] shape and our [sic] shaped by the social structures that emerge in a variety of situations to provide voluntary solutions to complex and difficult problems, and they do so in a way that promotes social cooperation under the division of labor.  Read Human Action, chapter VIII, and Individualism: True and False, pp. 11-14 (in Individualism and Economic Order), and then look at Lin’s work in Governing the Commons; Understanding Institutional Diversity; and the 3 volume McGinnis, edited volumes, Readings from the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis and I think you will see what I am talking about. She has done fundamental research on the central idea of Ricardo’s Law of Association as Mises termed it.  Humanly rational choice and institutional analysis combine to address the most pressing question in the social world — why do some institutional patterns produce societies of peace and prosperity, while others produce societies that suffer under violence and poverty? …

Lin Ostrom is firmly seated in the mainline tradition of economic scholarship from Adam Smith and David Hume to F. A. Hayek and James Buchanan …..  [H]er methods were chosen to be appropriate to the task she was pursuing.  Humanly rational choice, institutional analysis, field work, and experimental design were her tools for social understanding.  She did not limit her work to that of Max U notions of “choice” nor instituitonally antiseptic models of ‘markets’ nor one size fits all models of economic development.  Instead, she has been a major contributor to public choice economics, new institutional economics, and to our understanding of polycentricity and political economy.

[in comment] At the
home page for her institute — The Workshop in Political Theory and
Policy Analysis — they describe their work as a New Science of
Governance for a New Age. And they describe their task as follows: “The
betterment of humankind depends on the ability of fallible human beings
to make decisions, manage resources, and govern themselves. This is the
basis of democracy, and of civilization itself. It is also the basis
for more than 30 years of research and inquiry at the Workshop in
Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University in
Bloomington.

The Workshop’s teaching and research probes the inner workings of
human institutions—structures of rules used to govern people and
resources, in this usage—in order to better understand what works and
what does not. Institutions affect every facet of life, from public
services to family and community structures to natural resources and
beyond, and the Workshop’s research helps people design and adapt their
institutions so that they generate better outcomes.”

This is why the work is so intriguing. First, at the core is a model
of man as fallible — cognitively limited. Second, is a focus on the
emergence of institutions — not necessarily state-led institutional
impositions. Third, is a focus on governance, not government.

Peter Boettke, comment at Marginal Revolution, October 13:

She is a former President of the Public Choice Society, as was
Vincent. She uses game theory, she engages in institutional analysis,
she has conducted experiements in the lab, she has conducted field work
both in the US and abroad, she considers herself a political economist,
etc. Her presidential address to the APSA summed up her theoretical agenda as “A Behavioral Approach to the Rational Choice Theory of Collective Action.”

She
is most deserving of this Nobel, and she has made a unique contribution
theoretically and empirically to the study of self-governance. But
there is no need to pick a fight where one isn’t there. Her prize fits
nicely in a stream of recognitions ANALYTICALLY
by the committee to scholars such as Hayek (1974), Buchanan (1986),
Coase (1991), North (1993), and V. Smith (2002). These are all scholars
within the discipline of economics/political economy that recognize the
cognitive limitations of man, and focus analytical effort on
institutional analysis.

Lin Ostrom’s contributions come from
an analytical framework that grounded in rational choice theory (as if
the choosers are human) and builds to an institutional analysis (as if
history mattered). The distinction between “rules in form” and “rules
in use” means she studies in close detail the social norms that
underlie self-governance in the management of resources and the
management of social relationships.

It is amazing body of work.

Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution, October 12:

Elinor Ostrom may arguable [sic] be considered the mother of field work in development economics.  She has worked closely investigating water associations in Los Angeles, police departments in Indiana, and irrigation systems in Nepal.  In each of these cases her work has explored how between the atomized individual and the heavy-hand of government there is a range of voluntary, collective associations that over time can evolve efficient and equitable rules for the use of common resources.

With her husband, political scientist Vincent Ostrom, she established the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis in 1973 at Indiana University, an extraordinarily productive and evolving association of students and professors which has produced a wealth of theory, empirical studies and experiments in political science and especially collective action.  The Ostrom’s work bridges political science and economics.  Both are well known at GMU since both have been past presidents of the Public Choice society and both have been influenced by the Buchanan-Tullock program.  You can also see elements of Hayekian thought about the importance of local knowledge in the work of both Ostroms (here is a good interview).  My colleague, Peter Boettke has just published a book on the Ostrom’s and the Bloomington School.

Elinor Ostrom’s work culminated in Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action which uses case studies to argue that around the world private associations have often, but not always, managed to avoid the tragedy of the commons and develop efficient uses of resources.  (Ostrom summarizes some of her findings from this research here).  Using game theory she provided theoretical underpinnings for these findings and using experimental methods she put these theories to the test in the lab.

For Ostrom it’s not the tragedy of the commons but the opportunity of the commons.  Not only can a commons be well-governed but the rules which help to provide efficiency in resource use are also those that foster community and engagement.  A formally government protected forest, for example, will fail to protect if the local users do not regard the rules as legitimate.  In Hayekian terms legislation is not the same as law.  Ostrom’s work is about understanding how the laws of common resource governance evolve and how we may better conserve resources by making legislation that does not conflict with law.

Bob Subrick, Stationary Bandit, October 12:

Ostrom’s “Governing the Commons” develops Hayek’s theme of spontaneous order through numerous real world examples.  Non-market institutions solve collective action problems that the price mechanism cannot.  That is the point of Hayek’s later writings– non-market institutions coordinate behavior.  Also, her emphasis on the lack of a “one-size-fits-all” approach resonates with those who are sympathetic to Hayek.

Paul Romer, Charter Cities, October 12:

Elinor’s fieldwork, followed up by her experimental work, pointed us in exactly the right direction. To understand BOTH why we don’t need police officers in some cases AND
why police officers don’t follow the rules in other cases, we have to
expand models of human preferences to include a contingent taste for
punishing others. In reaching this conclusion, she arrived at a point
similar to that reached by Avner Greif (whom the Nobel committee
correctly cites.) They, more than anyone else in the profession,
spelled out the program that economists should follow. To make the
rules that people follow emerge as an equilibrium outcome instead of a
skyhook, economists must extend our models of preferences and gather
field and experimental evidence on the nature of these preferences.

Economists
who have become addicted to skyhooks, who think that they are doing
deep theory but are really just assuming their conclusions, find it
hard to even understand what it would mean to make the rules that
humans follow the object of scientific inquiry. If we fail to explore
rules in greater depth, economists will have little to say about the
most pressing issues facing humans today – how to improve the quality
of bad rules that cause needless waste, harm, and suffering.

Cheers
to the Nobel committee for recognizing work on one of the deepest
issues in economics. Bravo to the political scientist who showed that
she was a better economist than the economic imperialists who can’t
tell the difference between assuming and understanding.

Lynne Kiesling, Knowledge Problem, October 12:

Both Ostrom’s work on governance institutions and common-pool resources
and Williamson’s work on governance institutions and the transactional
boundary of the firm contribute meaningfully to our understanding of
how individuals coordinate their plans and actions in decentralized,
complex systems. …

Ostrom’s work highlights the ability of communities of
individuals, using their local knowledge and taking into account their
individual preferences and constraints, to develop governance
institutions that enable beneficial outcomes to emerge. As I put it in my book on institutional design in electricity,

Given the pervasiveness of incomplete property rights,
even in commercial transactions, how are we able to engage in so much
mutually beneficial exchange? We achieve it through the design of
institutions to govern the commons (Ostrom 1990, 2005). These
institutions can specify use rights, means for enforcing those use
rights, and penalties for violating those rights. Again, defining and
enforcing use rights is costly, but institutional design to do so
happens when its benefits are high enough, and the institutional form
varies depending on the environment and context.

The Ostrom works cited therein, Governing the Commons and Understanding Institutional Diversity,
are full of rich insights that can be applied to environmental policy,
regulation, economic development, and many other areas of economics and
political science.

David R. Henderson, WSJ, October 12:

… I think it’s a great choice. The reason is that mainstream economics
has become highly mathematical and increasingly independent from
reality. Many economists sit in their offices and derive proofs. Few go
out and do the time-consuming work of examining the institutional
structures that humans build to solve their own real-world problems.
Among those few are Ms. Ostrom and Mr. Williamson.

Both draw on rich data from outside the field of economics. Ms.
Ostrom draws much of hers from case studies of common-property
resources and Mr. Williamson from business historians such as the late
Alfred Chandler. Some have summarized their work by saying that
institutions other than free markets often work well. But that
statement can mislead you to conclude that government solutions are the
answer. Free markets are only a subset of free institutions. A better
way to sum up their work is that what Ms. Ostrom and Mr. Willamson
really show is that voluntary associations work. …

Most economists are familiar with the late Garrett Hardin‘s classic
article, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” His idea was that when no one
owns a resource, it is overused because no one can control its usage
and each person has an incentive to use it before others do. This
insight has helped us understand much human behavior and has led people
to advocate either having the resource privately owned or having it
controlled by government.

Not so fast, said Ms. Ostrom.
Examining dozens of case studies, she found cases of communal ownership
that worked—that is, that didn’t lead to the tragic outcomes envisioned
by Hardin—as well as ones that didn’t. Were there systematic
differences? Yes, and interestingly the ones that worked did have a
kind of property rights system, just not private ownership.

Based on her work, Ms. Ostrom proposed
several rules for managing common-pool resources, which the Nobel
committee highlights. Among them are that rules should clearly define
who gets what, good conflict resolution methods should be in place,
people’s duty to maintain the resource should be proportional to their
benefits, monitoring and punishing is done by the users or someone
accountable to the users, and users are allowed to participate in
setting and modifying the rules. Notice the absence of top-down
government solutions. In her work on development economics, Ms. Ostrom
concludes that top-down solutions don’t help poor countries. Are you
listening, World Bank?

In a 2006 article with Harini Nagendra, Ms. Ostrom wrote: “We
conclude that simple formulas focusing on formal ownership,
particularly one based solely on public [government] ownership of
forest lands, will not solve the problem of resource use.” …

Economists talking about real humans and not mathematical
abstractions and winning the Nobel prize for it? Good on ya, Nobel
committee.

John V.C. Nye, Forbes, October 12:

Oliver Williamson and Elinor Ostrom are both leaders in the growing
field of the New Institutional Economics. Both can be seen as pioneers
in understanding how markets work in the real world where transactions
costs are high, establishing smoothly functioning markets is costly,
information is incomplete, and hiring and production options are
limited. They show how firms, communities and organizations come to
solve these problems absent government regulation and how the choices
they make can be disrupted or worsened by bad state policy or sustained
by good rules that promote stable property rights and reliable contracts. …

Elinor operationalized the core insight of Ronald Coase that
creating and accessing markets is often quite costly and hence
organization, hierarchy and collective agreement can, under the right
conditions, serve as viable or even superior alternatives to market
competition. While the lack of private property often leads to the
tragedy of the commons, it is surprising how often tragedy has been
avoided throughout the world. The answer is that small groups with
tight social structures can substitute community monitoring and peer
controls for a market that is non-existent and private property that is
neither well-defined nor reliably enforced. Of course, such local
enforcement tied to community norms, moral suasion, and restricted
geographical domains does not scale well to the modern world of
extensive impersonal exchange. But she has studied areas as diverse as
police departments in Indiana to irrigation in Nepal.

But as
Elinor has demonstrated, ham-fisted reforms that attempt to bring the
illusion of modernity to the developing world by a naive adoption of
Western best-practice laws without the structures that support and
enforce those rules often leads to a destruction of indigenous practice
that works reasonably well without substituting a functioning and
reliable market of impersonal exchange. Much of the disaster that is
foreign aid can be tied to the blunt importation of best-practice rules
without understanding how their implementation interacts with existing
practice.

Her work centers on a variety of case studies of
private associations throughout the world but is tied to the mainstream
methodologies in the social sciences through her use of game theory
and related analysis. She also tests her hypotheses in various
laboratory experiments designed to isolate the core behavioral
assumptions and in so doing continues in the tradition begun by
Nobelist Vernon Smith. Moreover, her work on real-world institutions
and the rules that sustain efficient outcomes is a natural complement
to the work of laureate Douglass North who also draws upon the ideas of
Coase and Williamson in understanding how political and social
institutions promote or retard growth.

Greg Ranson, Taking Hayek Seriously, October 13:

Peter Boettke, Lynne Kiesling, Peter Klein, Vernon Smith, David Henderson, Don Boudreaux,
and other Hayekian economists are all applauding the award of the Nobel
Prize in Economics to Lin Ostrom and Oliver Williamson. …

In many ways Ostrom & Williamson are very much contributing to an
intellectual tradition championed by Hayek and other leading
“Hayekians” like James Buchanan and Douglass North.

Henry Farrell, Crooked Timber, October 12:

[T]his is also a very interesting statement of what the Nobel committee see as important in economics.

Lin’s work focuses on the empirical analysis of collective goods problems –
how it is that people can come up with their own solutions to problems
of the commons if they are given enough room to do so. Her landmark
book, Governing the Commons, provides an empirical rejoinder
to the pessimism of Garret Hardin and others about the tragedy of the
commons – it documents how people can and do solve these problems in
e.g the management of water resources, forestry, pasturage and fishing
rights. She and her colleagues gather large sets of data on the
conditions under which people are or are not able to solve these
problems, and the kinds of rules that they come up with in order to
solve them.

This is … a vote in favor of detailed, working-from-the-ground-up, empirical work, which doesn’t rely on
sharply contoured theoretical simplifications and flashy statistical
techniques so much as the accumulation of good data, which reflects the
messiness of the real social institutions from which it is gathered.
Quoting from Governing the Commons:

“An important challenge facing policy scientists is to develop theories of
human organization based on realistic assessment of human capabilities
and limitations in dealing with a variety of situations that initially
share some or all aspects of a tragedy of the commons. … Theoretical
inquiry involves a search for regularities … As a theorist, and at
times a modeler, I see these efforts [as being] at the core of a policy
science. One can, however, get trapped in one’s own intellectual web.
When years have been spent in the development of a theory with
considerable power and elegance, analysts obviously will want to apply
this tool to as many situations as possible. The power of a theory is
exactly proportionate to the diversity of situations it can explain.
All theories, however, have limits. Models of a theory are limited
still further because many parameters must be fixed in a model, rather
than allowed to vary. Confusing a model – such as that of a perfectly
competitive market – with the theory of which it is one representation
can limit applicability still further. (pp.24-25)”

One plausible characterization of her life’s work is that it is about
demonstrating the empirical weaknesses of a ‘cute’ economic model (the
Tragedy of the Commons) that assumed a role in policy discussions far
out of proportion to its actual explanatory power, and replacing it
with a set of explanations that are nowhere near as neat, but are far
more true to the real world. …

It is also a vote in favor of supplementing quantitative work with
qualitative understanding – Lin spends a lot of time (albeit less than
she used to) in the field, soaking up practical knowledge which informs
her work in striking ways. She is hands-on in a way that very few
economists, political scientists or sociologists are. It is also
interesting to note that the Nobel committee pays specific attention to the political implications of her work.

“Elinor Ostrom has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is
poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or
privatized. Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks,
pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, Ostrom concludes that
the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by
standard theories.”

This reflects what she and her husband Vincent refer to as “polycentricity,” a normative approach to
governance which stresses the degree to which higher levels of
government should not crowd out self-organization at lower levels. Her
work implies that both pure marketization and top-down government
control can have badly adverse consequences for resource management,
because they rob individuals of the capacity to govern themselves, and
because they both lead to the depletion of important forms of local
collective knowledge. … Ostrom stresses repeatedly that even the best
functioning markets are undergirded by an array of collective
institutions which order people’s market interactions, and that in the
absence of such rules, self interested behaviour will have highly
adverse consequences.

Greg Ransom, Taking Hayek Seriously, October 14:

Elinor Ostrom Endorses Hayek’s Model of Economic Science

See Elinor Ostrom & Charlotte Hess, “Ideas, Artifacts, and Facilities: Information as a Common-Pool Resource”.

Ostrom also frequently cites Hayek’s work on social rules and local knowledge in many of her books & book articles and in her journal publications.

Most frequently Ostrom cites Hayek’s Law, Legislation and Liberty and Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society”.

As economist Art Carden says, “Ostrom’s win can be considered a win for the Hayekian worldview as opposed to the Samuelsonian worldview.”

Walter Block of Loyola University has graced the main LvMI blog with a rare post, this time a clipping – without commentary – from a piece entitled “Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age“, by Canadian conservative commentator Lorne Gunter concerning the relatively high snowfalls this winter in various parts of the North Hemisphere:   http://blog.mises.org/archives/007828.asp.

What’s the point, except to show that Prof. Block is happy to find something that feeds his own reluctance (and that on the LvMI blog generally) to talk about climate science or policy?  Where’s the beef, Prof. Block?

I posted the following to his thread; as it’s pending there I thought I’d put it up here (with a few typo corrections)

[snark level: high]

Dear Prof. Block:

Thank you for continuing in the hoary LvMI blog tradition, followed by Dr. Reisman, Sean Corrigan and many others here, of doing one’s level best, by way of self-example, to illustrate how strongly we are in the grip of reflexive cognitive patterns such as confirmation bias.

This confirmation bias helps us at LvMI to report, with self-reassuring glee, any iota of evidence that the planet might be cooling, while dodging evidence to the contrary, and to mock those who say that the “climate” is complex and not the same as the weather.

We just love confirmation bias, because it allows us to dismiss all those who have concerns about how our long-term and unmoderated experiment with the Earth’s climate and eco-systems are going as evil and/or crackpots – AND thus spares us from doing any heavy lifting on a number of distasteful tasks:

– actually trying to understand what climate scientists are saying about the climate system, our influences on it and present or future system responses;

– considering the likely consequences if we continue to treat the atmosphere and oceans as unmanaged open-access commons (Mises himself noted: “The extreme instance is provided by the case of no-man’s property referred to above. If land is not owned by anybody, although legal formalism may call it public property, it is utilized without any regard to the disadvantages resulting [to others]”);

– engaging in a good faith discussion with those who have differing views (and their own confirmation biases, no doubt); and

– exploring Austrian and libertarian principles and explicating their possible application to the problem that others declaim (i.e., the general efficacy of property rights, problems of information and transaction costs, rent-seeking, bureaucratic mal-incentives, the lack of rule of law relating to shared global/regional commons and in poorer nations, and with coordinating action for transborder commons under a Westphalian global order, and the legacy of 150+ years of – as you have put it – the “failure of the government to uphold free enterprise with a legal system protective of private property rights“).

It is precisely this cognitive bias that Friedrich Hayek noted in his 1960 essay, “Why I am Not a Conservative”:  http://www.fahayek.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=46

Personally, I find that the most objectionable feature of the conservative attitude is its propensity to reject well-substantiated new knowledge because it dislikes some of the consequences which seem to follow from it—or, to put it bluntly, its obscurantism. I will not deny that scientists as much as others are given to fads and fashions and that we have much reason to be cautious in accepting the conclusions that they draw from their latest theories. But the reasons for our reluctance must themselves be rational and must be kept separate from our regret that the new theories upset our cherished beliefs. . . . By refusing to face the facts, the conservative only weakens his own position. Frequently the conclusions which rationalist presumption draws from new scientific insights do not at all follow from them. But only by actively taking part in the elaboration of the consequences of new discoveries do we learn whether or not they fit into our world picture and, if so, how. Should our moral beliefs really prove to be dependent on factual assumptions shown to be incorrect, it would hardly be moral to defend them by refusing to acknowledge facts.”

Hayek noted these additional traits that distinguish market liberals from conservatives, which also are commonly manifested here:

• Habitual resistance to change (hence “conservative”);
• Use of state authority to protect established privileges against the forces of economic change; and
• Claim to superior wisdom based on self-arrogated superior quality in place of rational argument.

The upshot?  That most of us here at LvMI are engaged in the task of convincing ourselves that the climate is not changing or that those who have concerns about it are illogical man-haters, and that we refuse to engage these others by (i) understanding first that for resources where property rights are undefined or uneforceable, public debates rather than private transactions are the chief means of expressing one’s preferences, and (ii) actively defending or advancing freedom – through attempting to persuade others.

There are other freedom-loving thinkers who have made modest starts in a productive engagement with others, such as:

–  Sheldon Richman, in his essay  “The Goal Is Freedom: Global Warming and the Layman”, in the December 8, 2006 edition of The Freeman:   http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=966);

–  Gene Callahan, in his essay “How a Free Society Could Solve Global Warming”, in the October 2007 issue of The Freeman: http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=8150; and

–  Edwin Dolan, in his Fall 2006 Cato Journal essay, “Global Warming: Rethinking the Market Liberal Position”.  http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2008/02/14/edwin-dolan-applying-the-lockean-framework-to-climate-change.aspx.

But we here at LvMI don’t want to be troubled to be productive, engage others or advance the cause of freedom, so we don’t post, cite to or discuss authors like that.  Being thoughtful or engaging is too much work!  We prefer to cherish our existing beliefs and to nourish our hatred of “enviros”, while ignoring everyone else, as I’ve noted here:

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2008/02/18/cool-rationalists-or-conservatives-and-neocons-on-the-environment.aspx

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2007/12/17/holiday-joy-quot-watermelons-quot-roasting-on-an-open-pyre.aspx

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2007/12/15/quot-heroic-quot-expert-voices-proven-wrong-on-agw-make-another-slick-cry-for-relevance-at-bali.aspx

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2007/12/14/who-knows-climate-science-the-mises-blog.aspx

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2008/02/24/george-reisman-or-how-i-learned-to-hate-enviros-and-love-tantrums.aspx

I am relieved that you seem to want to be one of us, and are not challenging us to get engaged, like Callahan, Richman or Dolan.

Sincerely,

Tom

PS:  One of the conditions of membership in the “Reisman/Corrigan Club”, as we sometimes call it, is that we forswear reading any of the IPCC reports and the reports of all major academies of science.  Can you confirm that you have you have not yet tainted yourself with such “information” and undertake not to?  Also, you must avoid posts by apostates such as this who post other “science” tripe:  http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2008/01/15/did-global-warming-stop-in-1998-jim-hansen-says-no.aspx.

I would like to bring readers’ attention to Edwin G. Dolan’s “Science, Public Policy and Global Warming: Rethinking the Market Liberal Position“, from the Fall 2006 issue of The Cato Journal: www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj26n3/cj26n3-3.pdf.  Dolan examines libertarian, “market liberal” reactions to climate change and walks through Lockean provisions that he believes require further consideration and elaboration by libertarians in the context of climate change.

FWIW, Dolan was the editor of the Austrian classic, The Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1976)(online here: http://www.econlib.org/LIBRARY/NPDBooks/Dolan/dlnFMAContents.html), and author of the classic pamphlet TANSTAAFL: An Economic Strategy for the Environmental Crisis (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1971), which outlined Dolan’s chief perspective:

The fundamental principle on which this strategy is built may be expressed in a simple slogan—There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, the “TANSTAAFL principle,” for short. The TANSTAAFL principle is closely related to the fundamental theorem of ecological economics, that everything depends on everything else. Everything worthwhile has a cost. Whenever you think you are getting something for nothing, look again—someone, somewhere, somehow is paying for it. Behind every free lunch there is a hidden cost to be accounted for.

The task of ecological economics is to figure out how to restructure the economic system so that these hidden costs will be brought out into the open, with the ultimate aim that no one who benefits from the use of the environment will be able to escape without paying in full. The rest of this book is devoted to working out specific applications of this general strategy in order to deal with specific problems.

In the interest of assisting readers, I take the liberty of excerpting liberally from Dolan’s Cato article below.

First, Dolan suggests that many libertarian climate skeptics are acting quite as if they are “conservatives” of the type condemned by Friedrich Hayek.  Dolan cites Hayek’s 1960 essay, “Why I am Not a Conservative” (1960), in which Hayek identified the following traits that distinguish conservatism from market liberalism:

• Habitual resistance to change, hence the term “conservative.”
• Lack of understanding of spontaneous order as a guiding principle of economic life.
• Use of state authority to protect established privileges against the forces of economic change.
• Claim to superior wisdom based on self-arrogated superior quality in place of rational argument.
• A propensity to reject scientific knowledge because of dislike of the consequences that seem to follow from it.

Second, Dolan examines whether any of the above “conservative” traits are at work in libertarian positions on climate change.

… We need to address several questions. One issue is what the status is of the privileges and interests of those who are threatened by the possibility of climate change and of those who are threatened by proposed actions to mitigate it. Which of these has the greater claim to the sympathy of market liberals, when viewed in terms of the standards they apply in other areas of public policy? Another issue is what the values are that lie behind the positions taken by various parties to the debate. The issue of values may determine when market liberals can make principled alliances with one of the other corners of the triangle and when they want to make only tactical alliances. Still another issue is what manner of argument should be employed. For example, what is the proper attitude toward the purely scientific element in the global warming controversy? It will be worth taking a closer look at this last issue before proceeding further.

Hayek expresses himself so well on the role of science that it is worth quoting him at length:

Personally, I find that the most objectionable feature of the conservative attitude is its propensity to reject well-substantiated new knowledge because it dislikes some of the consequences which seem to follow from it—or, to put it bluntly, its obscurantism. I will not deny that scientists as much as others are given to fads and fashions and that we have much reason to be cautious in accepting the conclusions that they draw from their latest theories. But the reasons for our reluctance must themselves be rational and must be kept separate from our regret that the new theories upset our cherished beliefs. . . . By refusing to face the facts, the conservative only weakens his own position. Frequently the conclusions which rationalist presumption draws from new scientific insights do not at all follow from them. But only by actively taking part in the elaboration of the consequences of new discoveries do we learn whether or not they fit into our world picture and, if so, how. Should our moral beliefs really prove to be dependent on factual assumptions shown to be incorrect, it would hardly be moral to defend them by refusing to acknowledge facts [Hayek 1960: 404](emphasis added).

This passage raises obvious questions for the global warming debate. What lies behind the skepticism of market liberals regarding the propositions that the world is getting warmer at a rate that is unusually rapid in climate history, if not altogether unprecedented, and that this apparent trend is likely the joint product of natural cycles and human activity, rather than of the former acting alone? Are liberals correctly rejecting an inadequately grounded scientific fad? Or are they refusing to acknowledge facts for fear that doing so would upset their cherished beliefs?  …

Fortunately, the supposed dilemma is a false one. Liberals have long acclaimed the market as a way of adapting to change, and climate change should be no exception. … Also, market liberals should know well that effective environmental policy does not have to take the form of heavy-handed commandand-control measures. … The same kind of market-oriented policies should be possible in the case of climate change.

In short, if one takes into account both the market’s potential for adapting to change and market-based policy alternatives, there is no reason for market liberals to be anything but open-minded toward ongoing developments in climate science, whether those developments, as they unfold, reveal indications or counter-indications of global warming.

There could, instead, be another explanation for some market liberals’ apparent close-mindedness toward the global warming hypothesis. It could be that, when taking a position on issues of climatology, they are speaking not from perceived threats to their beliefs, but out of loyalty to conservative interests with whom they have struck some tactical alliance. For example, policies designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, no matter how carefully market-guided in their design, are likely to undermine the interests of politically powerful producers of carbon-based energy. Equally, they are likely to have a disproportionate impact on the United States relative to other, less carbon intensive, economies. It is understandable that a conservative member of Congress could be pledged to uphold the interests of energy industry workers or shareholders from his or her home constituency. It is also understandable that a U.S. negotiator at an international conference could work to increase the benefits for the United States of a proposed treaty while shifting the costs to other countries. What is harder to understand is why market liberals would see fit to support such positions, unless for the narrowest of tactical reasons. …

(emphasis added) 

Third, Dolan spends considerable time discussing how the Lockean framework of rights and duties applies to climate change, which he frames as follows:

In the case of global warming, the relevant unenclosed commons include the world air-shed, which, in one of its several competing uses, serves as a sink for greenhouse gasses, and the oceans, which serve as a sink for heat generated by the greenhouse effect and a catchment basin for melting ice. (We are still stipulating scientific certainty of these effects.) Whatever adverse impact the Midwestern power plant has on the Bangladeshi farmer are transmitted through the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on these common-property resources. What does a Lockean approach tell us about rights to make use of the global atmospheric and oceanic commons, and about how those rights might be established?

Dolan walks carefully through Locke’s three rights and three corresponding duties, which he summarizes as follows:

Rights:
• to property in one’s own person
• to property in the fruits of one’s own labor
• to property in land and natural resources taken from nature when mixed with one’s own labor

Duties:
• to abstain from harming others
• to abstain from taking property of others
• to leave enough and as good for others when taking from the common

His discussion here is quite useful.

Finally, Dolan summarizes his own analysis of “the proper market-liberal position on global warming,” that is, one “constructed on a sound Lockean respect for the persons and property of others”:

First, market liberals should keep arguments based on comparisons of costs and benefits in proper perspective. The fact that an action produces net benefits, even very large net benefits, does not shield the actor from liability if it also does harm. The relative magnitude of the costs and benefits, or their relative probabilities, is, in this regard, irrelevant. The duty not to harm people in their persons or property is not to be bypassed on the basis of any facile cost-benefit calculus. This is an essential part of what distinguishes the classical liberal tradition from other political theories that would invoke the power of the state to override individual rights in favor of some greater societal utility. This being said, cost-benefit calculations may in some other respects be relevant to the formulation of a market-liberal position on global warming. They may help choose between different mechanisms for implementing climate change policy. They may be relevant to the decision of whether to abstain from possibly harmful actions, or to risk possible harm while accepting a contingent duty of restitution. And they may be relevant to whether harm is better avoided by mitigation of climate change, or instead compensated through investments that help victims of climate change to adapt.

Second, the market-liberal position should be distinct from a conservative position that defends unjustly acquired privileges. Liberalism in America, in particular, grew up in a Lockean state of nature where it was really true, or at least seemed true, that homesteaders, loggers, grazers, and industrialists could take what they needed while leaving “enough and as good for others.” What the environmentalist side of the global warming debate is telling us is that we no longer live in such a world. It is not just that we can take no more from the commons; we have quite possibly already taken so much as to have breached our duty not to engross. To be sure, the science of just how much can safely be taken is not yet perfect. We may be way past the limit already or still a bit short of it. But to cry foul because those who have taken the most are now asked to bear a substantial share of the costs is not liberalism.

Third, market liberals should keep a clear head when it comes to the relationship between science and public policy. It is fine to be legitimately cautious when policies are urged on the basis of weakly established scientific fads. One should be vigilant against attempts to smuggle questionable economic or political assumptions into scientific analysis, as is sometimes done in the global warming debate, and also to possible biases in research produced by grant-seeking and public choice considerations. But at the same time, as Hayek warned, any reluctance to accept new scientific theories must itself be rational and must be kept separate from the regret that the new theories may upset cherished beliefs (let alone that they threaten the financial interests of useful allies). This is a fine line to walk, and I fear that the market-liberal camp may at times have overstepped it.

Fourth, market liberals should think about the implications of their principles not just for public policy, but for their personal conduct. It is fashionable in some conservative circles to ridicule environmentalism as a new religion that calls for a personal morality of abstinence (see, for example, Schlesinger 2005). Perhaps market liberals would not want to describe their beliefs as a religion, but all of the great thinkers to whom they pay homage make it clear that the duty not to harm others in their persons or property is not just an abstract guideline for public policy, but a specific imperative of personal morality.  To cede the moral high ground on environmental issues to the left is not just tactically foolish, it is unprincipled. To put it simply, a market liberal should not be ashamed to drive a Prius rather than a Humvee.

These broad outlines of a market-liberal position on global warming leave a great deal of room for debate and discussion. They leave open the whole area of how to design a policy to deal with global warming. Are the flaws of the Kyoto Protocol so serious that it is worse than doing nothing at all? Perhaps so—even its staunchest supporters acknowledge that it has many limitations. Should we act now, based on current scientific knowledge? Or should we wait, while firmly insisting on the principle of contingent liability, being prepared to make restitution should subsequent harm turn out to be greater than optimists think it will be? In formulating global warming policy, should each country act unilaterally, based on a duty to avoid harm regardless of what others do, or is it best to try to negotiate international agreements? If measures are to be taken, what role should be given to market-based mechanisms like tradable permits? How can such market-like devices, if used, be introduced in a way that respects existing property rights? How do such devices relate to Lockean principles regarding enclosure and management of residual unenclosed commons?

By addressing these and other questions, market liberals can make a uniquely valuable contribution to the global warming debate. If, however, they allow themselves to be perceived as ostriches whose only policy in the face of uncertainty is to hope for the best while ignoring the worst, and base their position on climate policy on arguments that they would disdain in any other context, they will end up making no useful contribution at all.

(emphasis added)

I hope others will take the time to look through Dolan’s framework, which I believe is useful as a call for constructive engagement by libertarians, even as it does not examine particular policy suggestions* or claim to be complete.  (For example, as Jeff Tucker has observed on another thread, Dolan’s article does not discuss the competency of the state to address climate change, if it is a problem.)

(h/t Donny with an A: http://mises.org/Community/members/Donny-with-an-A.aspx.  I note also that Sheldon Richman of the Foundation for Economic Education also recommends Dolan’s essay and calls for less wishful thinking and greater engagement by libertarians in the December 8, 2006 edition of The Freeman: The Goal Is Freedom: Global Warming and the Layman, http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=966.)

*  I note that Dolan has previously discussed pollution trading permits in the context of acid rain; his remarks were examined by Robert McGee and Walter Block in their “Pollution Trading Permits as a Form of Market Socialism and the Search for a Real Market Solution to Environmental Pollution,” Fordham Environmental Law Journal, vol. 16 (1994): 58  http://law.fordham.edu/publications/articles/100flspub4011.pdf.

For convenience of reference, I`ve excerpted from the long “Malthus and Mein Kampf” thread (http://blog.mises.org/archives/007152.asp) those portions of the exchange of posts I and others had with Fundamentalist that relate to creation science. [This is a re-post – as the first wouldn’t format correctly. Some formatting has been lost.]

Philemon: “You know they throw out the high outliers on the ice core data.” Good point. Did you see the documentary on PBS about the guys who rescued the WWII P-38’s from Greenland? Or maybe it was Iceland. Anyway, the planes are about 200 ft below the surface of the ice, which would make them about a thousand years old using the standard dating methods used with ice cores.
Posted by: Fundamentalist at October 4, 2007 8:43 PM

Roger, with your mention of the P-38s I now see why you’ve changed your handle to Fundamentalist! A little Googling shows that most mentions of the P-38s are connected to Creationists’ refusal to accept the idea that the Earth is older than 7000 years – can you please tell me that you are not in this group? Can you point me to any scientist who seriously doubts the ice core aging or our basic data captures from them? And do intend to seriously argue that the conditions of the active glaciers in Greenland’s southern coasts where the P-38s landed, which experience heavy snowfalls, bear any resemblance to the high, stable and much drier ice caps on Greenland or Antarctic wheere the ice cores are taken from? http://www.groupsrv.com/science/about36638.html http://www.evcforum.net/cgi-bin/dm.cgi?action=msg&f=8&t=67&m=62

That you can even throw this into the discussion makes me seriously question your “fundamental” seriousness. TT
Posted by: TokyoTom at October 4, 2007 10:30 PM

Fundamentalist, By the way, you neglected to share your thoughts on how old the ice cores (and the Earth) actually are – 7000 years tops? Regards, TT
Posted by: TokyoTom at October 5, 2007 10:22 PM

TT: “By the way, you neglected to share your thoughts on how old the ice cores (and the Earth) actually are – 7000 years tops?” 100,000 years tops, based on the research of the Institute for Creation Research. In case anyone is interested, the scientiests at the ICR call GW a hoax. They have a good article at www.icr.org/article/3233.
Posted by: Fundamentalist at October 6, 2007 7:39 PM

Fundamentalist/Roger: Thanks for the cite to mis-named “The Institute for Creation Research” in response to my question to you about the age of the ice cores. I appreciate your courage in confirming (albeit indirectly) that you are approaching the issue of climate change from the perspective of a Creationist.

I’ve taken a stroll through the ICR site and, in the interst of clarifying what the ICR is about and their views on AGW, attach below some excerpts of their views their “work” on the age of the Earth, climate science and man’s duties as steward of Creation. My view is that the ICR’s work is seriously skewed by the view that the Bible is an accurate historical record that tells us that the Earth is less than 7000 years old. Their persistence is admirable, but their approach cannot be fairly said to be either open-minded, clear thinking or scientific – nor does it confirm, Roger, that “the scientists at the ICR call GW a hoax”.

Nevertheless, I certainly agree that the Bible can provide valuable moral guidance about mankind’s role in the world and our obligations to the rest of God’s creation as His appointed stewards. My question to you, Roger, is whether, in trashing many parts of the Garden of Eden through a race – uncontrolled by clear ownership by individuals of large portions of it – to use, take, liquidate or dump our wastes in it without regard to others (much less to the rest of Creation), can we fairly regard ourselves as being good “stewards” of it? If you owned a large and rare property, Roger, let it out to tenants for a span of years and came back and found that they had trashed large parts of it and were still at work at it (except where some had started to fence parts off) – would YOU be happy? (Or would praise them and say that they had done absolutely the right thing, since the property really meant nothing to you and you had intended its destruction, and had come back to bring your friends with you to a better place?) Given your Creationist approach, I am see definite limits to the possibility of fruitful engagement with you on issues of climate science, but am more than willing to continue to explore further with you the moral aspects of man’s impact on Creation and our obligations to each other and with respect to that Creation. Respectfully, Tom

PS: Here are the excerpts from The Institute for Creation Research and its scholars:

God’s written, historical revelation of truth — the inspired text of Scripture — provides a framework for numerous intellectual pursuits and a philosophy for understanding man’s role as steward over creation. http://www.icr.org/article/3337/

The Bible, by contrast, paints a radically different picture of our planet’s history. In particular, it describes a time when God catastrophically destroyed the earth and essentially all its life. The only consistent way to interpret the geological record in light of this event is to understand that fossil-bearing rocks are the result of a massive global Flood that occurred only a few thousand years ago and lasted but a year. … The bottom line of this research is that the case is now extremely compelling that the fossil record was produced just a few thousand years ago by the global Flood cataclysm. The evidence reveals that macroevolution as an explanation for the origin of life on earth can therefore no longer be rationally defended. http://www.icr.org/article/117/10/

ICR has become a major numerical research center in paleoclimatology. http://www.icr.org/research/index/researchp_misc_climate_modeling/

However, some creationist models predict significant quantities of snow immediately after the Flood (Oard, 1990). Perhaps as much as 95% of the ice near the poles could have accumulated in the first 500 years or so after the Flood. From a creationist perspective, it would be extremely valuable to thoroughly explore these ice-core data. … We would expect considerably higher precipitation rates immediately following the Flood. … Nothing in the ice-core data from either Greenland or Antarctica requires the earth to be of great age. In fact, there are good reasons to believe that the ice cores are revealing important information about conditions following the Flood of Genesis and the recent formation of thick ice sheets. Reports of ice-core data containing records of climatic changes as far back as 160,000 years in the past are dependent upon interpretations of these data which could be seriously wrong, if the Genesis Flood occurred as described in the Bible. http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=355

Based on these limited observations, it appears likely that global warming seems to be occurring over at least the past 30-50 years…. These data do not address the question about man’s part in causing the warming trend. It is true that increased carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere would be expected to increase the greenhouse effect and possibly cause warming. In fact, the current warming trend may be returning our global climate closer to that prevalent in the Garden of Eden. … Earth has a stable environmental system with many built-in feedback systems to maintain a uniform climate. It was designed by God and has only been dramatically upset by catastrophic events like the Genesis Flood. Catastrophic climate change will occur again in the future, but only by God’s intervention in a sudden, violent conflagration of planet Earth in the end times (II Peter 3:1-12). http://www.icr.org/article/3233/

The Creator designed the earth well, with built-in feedback mechanisms to handle any crises. There is coming a time, however, when excessive heat will be a problem (see Revelation 16:8-9), and these fluctuations may be a foreshadowing, but that too is in God’s hands. http://www.icrmedia.org/article/3336/

In biblical terms, the disease is sin, curable only by regeneration through the work of the Holy Spirit, which is made possible by the love of God the Father expressed in the substitutionary death, burial, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. In human terms, the disease is a naturalistic worldview, curable only by embracing a genuinely theistic worldview that acknowledges the Creator. http://www.icr.org/article/3474/

The whole of creation is now running down and wearing out. “The earth shall wax old like a garment” (Isaiah 51:6), and man’s sinful nature has disrupted man’s relationship to the environment. The sin of Adam, which we all inherit, was one of rebellion against God’s rules, and man, ever since, has made his own rules. This results in selfishness (and therefore exploitation), the refusal of man to practice love to his fellow man and other creatures, as well as poor stewardship of His creation, and man’s desire to serve his own personal ends. … But man is not a perfect steward anymore. Even though the resources which God created are there for our use, man now often exploits these resources at the expense of his fellowman, and causes needless loss and destruction of other parts of God’s creation. Surely this is wrong! [TT: Amen to that!] http://www.icr.org/article/678/
Posted by: TokyoTom at October 6, 2007 9:12 PM

TT: “I appreciate your courage in confirming (albeit indirectly) that you are approaching the issue of climate change from the perspective of a Creationist.” Actually, I didn’t know the ICR had done research on GW until this week. I have been studying it since the late 1980’s. And it doesn’t take much courage to stand up for the truth. The scientists at the ICR are very good scientists. Some are from MIT and other top universities. One worked as a physicist for the Sandia Labs for many years. They’re rejected by the mainstream of the scientific community, not because their bad scientists, but because they refuse to drink the coolaid of evolution.

Being in the minority doesn’t bother me as it does some. The majority is often wrong. Jesus said the path to the truth is narrow and few people find it. If I wanted to be with the majority on religion I’d have to be a Muslim. I studied mainstream econ, even gained a masters degree in it, then discovered it was wrong on most things. That’s why I became an Austrian, another group that’s shunned by the mainstream. I believe that if Austrians would study the science of Creationism with an open mind and with the analytical skills they have learned as Austrians, they would become creationists, too.

TT: “the Bible is an accurate historical record that tells us that the Earth is less than 7000 years old.” That’s not true. A 29th century theologian calculated that the earth was 6,000 years old based on his understanding of the chronologies of the Bible. The Bible never states how old the earth is. Similar scholars have calculated 10,000 years for the age of the earth. I don’t know how old the earth is, but the scientific research at the ICR indicates it’s not more than 100,000 years old.

TT: “If you owned a large and rare property, Roger, let it out to tenants for a span of years and came back and found that they had trashed large parts of it…” Of course I would be unhappy. When that happens to the earth, let me know.
Posted by: Fundamentalist at October 6, 2007 11:23 PM

Roger: A few points:

1. “The scientists at the ICR are very good scientists.” “the scientiests at the ICR call GW a hoax. They have a good article at www.icr.org/article/3233.” “I don’t know how old the earth is, but the scientific research at the ICR indicates it’s not more than 100,000 years old.”

Hmm. Since the ICR is a Creationist organization dedicated to the propositions that the Bible is “God’s written, historical revelation of truth”, that God actively intervenes in history through events such as the Flood and to demonstrating that evolution is the “Koolaid” that unthinking scientists and other ignorant the world over have swallowed (except for a brave minority of religiously devout free thinkers in the US, and all of the Muslims) – why do I have such a hard time finding that either the ICR or you is at all “scientific”, as opposed to devoted to clinging to hold together a religiously derived worldview? Perhaps you can tell me which of these follwoing statements by the ICR upthread you agree with?

“The Bible, by contrast, paints a radically different picture of our planet’s history. In particular, it describes a time when God catastrophically destroyed the earth and essentially all its life. The only consistent way to interpret the geological record in light of this event is to understand that fossil-bearing rocks are the result of a massive global Flood that occurred only a few thousand years ago and lasted but a year. … The bottom line of this research is that the case is now extremely compelling that the fossil record was produced just a few thousand years ago by the global Flood cataclysm. The evidence reveals that macroevolution as an explanation for the origin of life on earth can therefore no longer be rationally defended. http://www.icr.org/article/117/10/”

“However, some creationist models predict significant quantities of snow immediately after the Flood (Oard, 1990). Perhaps as much as 95% of the ice near the poles could have accumulated in the first 500 years or so after the Flood. From a creationist perspective, it would be extremely valuable to thoroughly explore these ice-core data. … We would expect considerably higher precipitation rates immediately following the Flood. … Nothing in the ice-core data from either Greenland or Antarctica requires the earth to be of great age. In fact, there are good reasons to believe that the ice cores are revealing important information about conditions following the Flood of Genesis and the recent formation of thick ice sheets. Reports of ice-core data containing records of climatic changes as far back as 160,000 years in the past are dependent upon interpretations of these data which could be seriously wrong, if the Genesis Flood occurred as described in the Bible. http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=355”

2. “You can’t protect the environment without respect for property and respect for property is almost non-existent in the world, even in the so-called capitalist US. … So to protect the environment in the rest of the world, you have to start to convince them of the benefits of property rights and free markets.”

These are overstatements. Indigenous peoples and despots have all protected valuable environmental resource by the simple method of defending them against others – others who may not have been happy, but backed down in the face of superior power.

3. “Politicians are good at token gestures, like the Kyoto treaty, that accomplish nothing. But the danger of such token gestures is that they lull people into a false sense that something has been accomplished when it hasn’t.”

Kyoto failed because the largest AGW emitters refused to join because they saw greater short-term profit in continuing to treat the atmosphere as an open-access commons, so EU politicians and firms were not brave enough to incur sugnificant pain unilaterally (and thus overallocated permits). The real danger is that hard-boiled economic thinkers will jump to the wrong conclusion, and fail to consider that decisions to finally close commons are multiplayer prisoners dilemmas that often fail.

4. ” quit trying to scare people to death with nightmare scenarios”

Hmm, where have I done that? Or are you referring to Pew, USCAP, Bush and Paulsson, other industry groups, scientists worldwide, the intelligence community and various religious group?

5. “You and TT haven’t convinced anyone posting on this thread that GW is a serious problem, let alone that humans are the major cause. So why would any of us support a carbon tax that would not reduce GW?”

Where did I try to convince anyone on this thread that GW is a serious problem, let alone that humans are the major cause? You have not established that a carbon tax would have no effect, but of course the reason why the rest of the economics profession and much of industry – including Exxon – is that they believe it would improved our net marginal position.

6. “GW hysteria refuses to admit that the benefits of GW will at least equal the liabilities. Besides, Robert does not know that “…large parts of our best agricultural lands will become desert…” That’s a prediction based on highly flawed computer models that have never been tested for accuracy. Talk about irrational faith.”

For you, “GW hysteria” just seems to mean anyone who disagrees with you. Have you noticed, BTW, that your conclusion that “the benefits of GW will at least equal the liabilities” not only is based on “highly flawed computer models that have never been tested for accuracy”, but there is that pesky little point the the purported “benefits” will be localized in the temperate and Arctic (where Western economies are located), with little benefits accruing to poorer countries that are expected to face the greatest challenges? Regards, TT

“[M]an’s sinful nature has disrupted man’s relationship to the environment. The sin of Adam, which we all inherit, was one of rebellion against God’s rules, and man, ever since, has made his own rules. This results in selfishness (and therefore exploitation), the refusal of man to practice love to his fellow man and other creatures, as well as poor stewardship of His creation, and man’s desire to serve his own personal ends. … But man is not a perfect steward anymore. Even though the resources which God created are there for our use, man now often exploits these resources at the expense of his fellowman, and causes needless loss and destruction of other parts of God’s creation. Surely this is wrong!” http://www.icr.org/article/678/

Posted by: TokyoTom at October 10, 2007 5:33 AM

TT: “Perhaps you can tell me which of these follwoing statements by the ICR upthread you agree with?” I agree with all of them.

But the quotes you posted from the ICR web site are not the science, but the conclusions based on the science. Just as atheists like Richard Dawkins conclude from the theory of evolution that God does not exist, and wax eloquent about it, so creationists conclude from their research that God does exist.

Whether or not creationists are good scientists depends upon your definition of science. Since you are impressed with the consensus view on GW, I would guess that you define science as whatever the consensus view is. If so, you might want to read the articles on epistemology posted this week on this site. If science is nothing more than the consensus opinion, then Austrian econ is not science, because it represents the viewpoint of a small minority.

I, along with Austrians, still believe that science is the application of scientific principles to the study of nature. According to that definition, creationism is far better science than evolution. Creationism has two sides to it: 1) the study of the scientific phenomena and 2) drawing conclusions from the results of the study. Just as Austrian econ demonstrates that the real world does not and cannot work according to the principles of socialism, or Keynesian econ, so creationists use science to prove that evolution could not possibly take place as described by the theory. The scientific part of creationism is limited to answering the two questions: “Does the natural world work in the way described by the theory of evolution?” and “If not, how does it work?” The scientific answer to the first question is no, it’s impossible. The scientific answer to the second is to demonstrate the mechanisms by which the earth and life on the planet might have come about.

After answering the scientific part, the creationist takes off his science helmet and puts on his philosophical one, just as Dawkins does when he promotes atheism. The creationist then concludes that the science he has studied matches reasonably well with the Biblical account creation. To dismiss the science because of the theological conclusions would be similar to dismissing evolution because atheists take comfort in it. Atheism is a theological conclusion based on the science of evolution, just as respect for the Bible is a theological conclusion based on the science of creationism.

Anthony: “I’ve heard quite a few fundies allude to this before. I had wondered whence it came.” Why do creationists place so much emphasis on the Biblical flood? There is quite a bit of evidence that the stratified layers of rock did not accumulate over millions of years. The fossil record provides some of the evidence because the fact that the fleshy part of animals are so well preserved proves that they did not decay. It’s similar to the mammoths of Siberia that froze so rapidly that the food in their mouths was preserved. Many fossils had to have been buried very rapidly under tons of mud over a wide area. Also, many stratified rocks show sharp curvature without breaking, which could not have happened after the sediment hardened into rock, but must have occurred while still wet. This is just a sample of the evidence; whole books have been written on it. In sum, the fossil record and geologic record demonstrate a major, catastrophic event in the recent past. The Biblical flood matches that event in many ways, although there is no way to prove it beyond doubt.
Posted by: Fundamentalist at October 10, 2007 1:09 PM

“…many stratified rocks show sharp curvature without breaking, which could not have happened after the sediment hardened into rock, but must have occurred while still wet…” …or when deformed in a plastic state under enormous pressure and temperature conditions, over millions of years, as the science much more convincingly concludes.
Posted by: Jean Paul at October 10, 2007 3:59 PM

Jean Paul: “…or when deformed in a plastic state under enormous pressure and temperature conditions, over millions of years, as the science much more convincingly concludes.” You’re talking about metamorphic rock that lies under sendimentary rock. I was referring to sedimentary rock like sandstone and limestone. Several features of sedimentary rock contradict the ancient age of the earth. These, among others, include the fact that sedimentary layers can be traced over hundreds of thousands of square miles, whereas normal processes of sedimentation such as river deltas cover a tiny fraction of that area. Sedimentary layers usually have sharply defined boundaries and are parallel, with layers several thousand feet thick. If layers had been laid down over millions of years, erosion would have destroyed that parallelism. Dead animals and plants decay quickly and are eaten or destroyed by the elements; preservation of fossils in sedimentary rock requires rapid burial in sediments thick enough to preserve their bodily forms. On continents, sedimentary layers are more than a mile thick; conventional explanations of their origins are insufficient for that volume of sediment. Limestone layers hundreds of feet thick are too large and uniform for the conventional explanation that they are bodies of tiny sea creatures. These and many other geological facts point to a rapid formation of the sedimentary layers of the earth’s crust. For more, see the book “In the Beginning” on the web site www.creationscience.com, written by Dr. Walter Brown, PhD, MIT, former professor of science at the Air Force Academy and Chief of Science and Tchnology Studies at the Air War College.
Posted by: Fundamentalist at October 10, 2007 10:03 PM

Roger, you say that “The creationist then concludes that the science he has studied matches reasonably well with the Biblical account creation”, but leave out one of the most important details – as I noted with a number of quotes from the “Institute for Creation Research” upthread: Creationists start out with devout religious beliefs that form the basis of their understanding of the material world (the Bible is “God’s written, historical revelation of truth … [that] provides a framework for numerous intellectual pursuits”) and conduct “research” designed to confirm their beliefs. This is hardly scientific. Of course, Creationists are hardly unique in finding that all of the evidence they see in the world conveniently confirms that which they already believed. My own view is that our God-given cognitive conservatism and tribalism (both of which have provided important advantages) lie at the bottom of this phenomenon. Regards, Tom
Posted by: TokyoTom at October 11, 2007 12:31 AM

TT: “Creationists start out with devout religious beliefs that form the basis of their understanding of the material world (the Bible is “God’s written, historical revelation of truth … [that] provides a framework for numerous intellectual pursuits”) and conduct “research” designed to confirm their beliefs. This is hardly scientific.” I suppose you think that evolutionary scientists are blank slates when they approach the subject. That’s a little bit naive. Why did the majority of scientists adopt the theory of evolution long before it had any evidence for it? As Dawkins has written, it made atheism respectable for the first time. Most creationist scientists, such as Dr. Brown and Dr. Michael Behe, taught evolution for many years before changing their minds; the mounting scientific evidence against evolution changed their minds, not the Bible.
Posted by: Fundamentalist at October 11, 2007 8:03 AM

TT: “On the science, it is hard to find anyone who disagress with the IPCC’s summaries of the vast and growing scientific literature…” You really should read the articles on epistemology posted this week on this site. Consensus is not science nor proof of the correctness of one’s argument; it could mean that the majority have been fooled. The minority has often been right about such things while it has taken decades for the consensus to change.
Posted by: Fundamentalist at October 11, 2007 8:08 AM

Fundamentalist/Roger: So you turn from defending Creationist science to attacking the scientists who see evolution as a much more powerful (and productive in terms of research inquiries) explanation of the biological world than that of a God that made all of creation at once by fiat and intervenes from time to time at His whim to destroy or create further – though evolution is hardly the subject here. Evolution has had an uphill battle against oppression by church establishments, though there are noble holdouts throughout the universe of Islamic free thinkers, with a scattering in the US. Nice try on the IPCC, which I view as I think others like Lindzen, Christy and Michaels do – simply as a valuable digest of the developing science, not as a monolithic “consensus”.

You are right of course that “The minority has often been right about such things while it has taken decades for the consensus to change”, but it cut the other way, doesn`t it? Lindzen and others who take “noble” stands against consensus are like those who stood against Gallileo, Einstein, Darwin and continental drift.
Posted by: TokyoTom at October 11, 2007 12:16 PM

TT: “So you turn from defending Creationist science to attacking the scientists…” You know very well that wasn’t what I was doing. Just as you ignore the the scientists who oppose human-induced GW because you think their motives are tainted, while assuming pure motives for the consensus scientists, you also try to impune the science of creationists by judging their motives. I was simply pointing out that evolutionary scientists don’t have pure motives either. You really should get over the habit of determining the validity of an argument by what you perceive the motives of a person are. You seem to be unaware of the fact that you attribute pure motives to those you agree with and evil motives for those you disagree with. Motives are totally irrelevant. Just look at the evidence each side presents and decide for yourself.

TT: “Lindzen and others who take “noble” stands against consensus are like those who stood against Gallileo, Einstein, Darwin and continental drift.” Lindzen and others like him are very much like Gallileo, Newton, Einstein and others who stood against the consensus when it was wrong.
Posted by: Fundamentalist at October 11, 2007 2:35 PM

Fundamentalist: – Where do I “ignore the the scientists who oppose human-induced GW because you think their motives are tainted”? Are you talking about Linzen et al., or the Institute for Creation Research? I’ve looked at what I can find at ICR, but didn’t find any science but rather arguments against AGW based clearly on presuppositions that the Bible descriptions of the Flood are literally true. Does ICR have any published (journals or self-) research at all?

– Where do I “assum[e] pure motives for the consensus scientists” or for evolutionary scientists?

– I do not “impune the science of creationists by judging their motives” – there is no science that I can see to impugn. Rather, I’ve simply noted that they have rather clearly stated that they are trying to fit reality into a preconceived box we call the Bible. Is it unfair for us to note that or draw any conclusions from it?

– Yes, you have indicated that you think that “evolutionary scientists don’t have pure motives either”. However, this is not releveant to discussing climate science, and you have not actually made any case for “impure” motives among evolutionary scientists. If the active intervention (intermittent or ongoing) of God is in fact the best explanation for various aspects of the real world, at some point science will be incapable of finding materialistic explanations. Until that point, I prefer a science that does not presume such intervention – as neither has such intervention has ever been demonstrated, nor does such an approach provide any fruitful leads for further research or understanding. The theory of natural selection and ancillary theories in support of evolution gained adherent not because of political or ideological agendas to throw off theological shackles, but because they provided powerful and testable insights into the evidence, as opposed to the “God did it” school. Moving to a materialistic view of creation occurred on the basis of the fit between the evidence and the hypotheses, and often after much struggle with preconceptions based on the Bible and enforced by church establishments and popular culture.

– If I indeed had a “habit of determining the validity of an argument by what you perceive the motives of a person are”, then I would wholeheartedly agree that it is one I should strive to overcome. But I don’t think I actually do have such a habit, even while I do consider it useful to consider motive, self-interest and other aspects of human nature when weighing what people have to say – even Al Gore.

– “You seem to be unaware of the fact that you attribute pure motives to those you agree with and evil motives for those you disagree with.” Yep; I am unaware that I make any such attributions of pure or evil motives – nor do I see any evidence of this on my comments upthread. Rather, it seems to be you (and others like Philemon) who presents dichotomies of pure and evil motives, and “sides”.

– “Motives are totally irrelevant. Just look at the evidence each side presents and decide for yourself.” Understanding motivation may help in weighing evidence presented by others – that’s all. Only fools never try to look behind the curtain.

– “Lindzen and others like him” are largely old codgers (most, with much less relevant expertise than Lindzen) who have not yet been persuaded by new paradgims that everyone else has found convincingly fit the evidence. Some find this heroic, though it is also entirely consistent with our God-given tendencies to defend our worldviews at all costs (as ignoring cognitive dissonance may be less costly than changing our minds). Of course our climate is sufficiently complex that we will never understand it completely, so there is always room for new ideas, evidence and arguments against oversimplification, or concerning public policy. I do appreciate your thoughts. Regards, Tom

Posted by: TokyoTom at October 11, 2007 10:10 PM

… 6. Finally, I note that you have not responded to my previous comments to you about how you and the creationist “scientists” at ICR are letting your “fundamentalist” views of the Bible influence your views on the climate change science. Regards, Tom
Posted by: TokyoTom at October 15, 2007 11:16 PM

TT: “Finally, I note that you have not responded to my previous comments…” I didn’t read anything worthy of comments. You pretend that creationists have no science behind their theories. You don’t see it because you don’t want to. Did you follow the link to the book at creationscience.com? The only thing that influences my views on GW is the science.
Posted by: Fundamentalist at October 16, 2007 8:06 AM

Roger/Fundamentalist: Thanks for your further comments. …

2. As to the climate “science” at the Institute for Climate Science, yes of course I followed your link. I have not “pretend[ed] that creationists have no science behind their theories”, but simply couldn’t find any. Can you point to any real climate science at ICR? I saw no science, but could document that summaries of ICR’s views were explicitly grounded on a view that the Biblical view of a young Earth is historically accurate, such as the following:

However, some creationist models predict significant quantities of snow immediately after the Flood (Oard, 1990). Perhaps as much as 95% of the ice near the poles could have accumulated in the first 500 years or so after the Flood. From a creationist perspective, it would be extremely valuable to thoroughly explore these ice-core data. … We would expect considerably higher precipitation rates immediately following the Flood. … Nothing in the ice-core data from either Greenland or Antarctica requires the earth to be of great age. In fact, there are good reasons to believe that the ice cores are revealing important information about conditions following the Flood of Genesis and the recent formation of thick ice sheets. Reports of ice-core data containing records of climatic changes as far back as 160,000 years in the past are dependent upon interpretations of these data which could be seriously wrong, if the Genesis Flood occurred as described in the Bible. http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=355

Based on these limited observations, it appears likely that global warming seems to be occurring over at least the past 30-50 years…. These data do not address the question about man’s part in causing the warming trend. It is true that increased carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere would be expected to increase the greenhouse effect and possibly cause warming. In fact, the current warming trend may be returning our global climate closer to that prevalent in the Garden of Eden. … Earth has a stable environmental system with many built-in feedback systems to maintain a uniform climate. It was designed by God and has only been dramatically upset by catastrophic events like the Genesis Flood. Catastrophic climate change will occur again in the future, but only by God’s intervention in a sudden, violent conflagration of planet Earth in the end times (II Peter 3:1-12). http://www.icr.org/article/3233/

It is very clear by ICR’s establishment of its own “creation model”-only “science” journal that ICR is operating on the basis of a belief system, and not science: http://scienceantiscience.blogspot.com/2007/02/institute-of-creation-research-launches.html http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2007/05/01/peer-reviewed-creationist-research-hahahahahahahaha/

3. BYW, this was not a rhetorical question in my last comment to you: “Austrians are compelled at least to recognize the ongoing failure of catallaxy with respect to unowned open-access resources and other resources which are no effectively owned. Do you acknowledge this, but simply consider the costs imposed by any “remedy” to exceed purported benefits? If so, how long do you think we should wait before any policy action is merited – forever, or just until the Second Coming?”

The ICR makes the following observations – do you disagree that they apply to climate change? “[M]an’s sinful nature has disrupted man’s relationship to the environment. The sin of Adam, which we all inherit, was one of rebellion against God’s rules, and man, ever since, has made his own rules. This results in selfishness (and therefore exploitation), the refusal of man to practice love to his fellow man and other creatures, as well as poor stewardship of His creation, and man’s desire to serve his own personal ends. … “But man is not a perfect steward anymore. Even though the resources which God created are there for our use, man now often exploits these resources at the expense of his fellowman, and causes needless loss and destruction of other parts of God’s creation. Surely this is wrong!” http://www.icr.org/article/678/ Regards, TT
Posted by: TokyoTom at October 17, 2007 2:25 AM

TT: “It is very clear by ICR’s establishment of its own “creation model”-only “science” journal that ICR is operating on the basis of a belief system, and not science:” How do you think scientists operate? They form a hypothesis (guess) about how things work, then try to find evidence to support their guess. One group is trying to prove evolution, which has never been proven scientifically, just adopted by consensus as has GW. The evidence for evolution is so slim that it drove many of the scientiests at ICR and other places to search for an alternative explanation. They chose creation as described in the Bible. Now they’re searching for evidence that supports their hypothesis. Tell me one scientist that operates differently.

As Mises and Hayek tried to explain with history, it’s impossible to dive into the data of history and surface with a coherent theory about how economics works. To make sense of history, one must have a logical theory first and interpret the data of history through that theory. The same advice works in the natural sciences. I am fairly confident that no scientist has looked at the data without a theory and been overwhelmed with the evidence for evolution; the evidence simply doesn’t exist. Not that evolutionary scientists are trying to prove that evolution is true. They never have tried that. Soon after Darwin’s book came out, the majority of scientists adopted its thesis without question. I don’t know of any scientist many scientists who have even questioned evolution. It’s accepted because it’s the consensus. A few will admit that almost no evidence for evolution exists, but they still accept it on philosophical grounds.

All creationist scientists are doing is questioning the evidence for evolution, which almost no evolutionary scientist does, and proposing an alternative with evidence to back it up. How is that not scientific?

“Reports of ice-core data containing records of climatic changes as far back as 160,000 years in the past are dependent upon interpretations of these data which could be seriously wrong” As far as I know, creationists don’t dispute the CO2 data in ice cores, just the ages that scientists claim the cores represent. Most scientists claim that each layer of ice represents one year, but finding the P-38’s from WWII proved that wrong. Still, scientists refuse to change their minds. A similar example happened with the strata of mud found in ponds. Scientists used to claim that each layer represented one year, but creationists kept demonstrating that such deposits occur multiple times in a year until other scientists began to agree with them.

TT: “The ICR makes the following observations – do you disagree that they apply to climate change?” Yes I disagree.

TT: “Austrians are compelled at least to recognize the ongoing failure of catallaxy with respect to unowned open-access resources and other resources which are no effectively owned. Do you acknowledge this…?” No, I don’t agree. Free markets and property rights haven’t even been tried where the environment is concerned.
Posted by: Fundamentalist at October 17, 2007 1:07 PM

“But man is not a perfect steward anymore. Even though the resources which God created are there for our use, man now often exploits these resources at the expense of his fellowman, and causes needless loss and destruction of other parts of God’s creation. Surely this is wrong!”  Most creationists are for protecting the environment when it’s in danger. That’s why we should oppose socialism. But we also don’t believe in inventing dangers that don’t exist.
Posted by: Fundamentalist at October 17, 2007 1:10 PM

Fundamentalist: … 2. The difference between real scientists and creationists is that creationists start with magical/miraculous forces and occurrences, the existence of which cannot be confirmed or denied, and they refuse ever to modify their initial assumptions despite the absence of evidence or to accept alternative explanations that are consistent with the evidence but do not require magical forces. For creationists, protecting the world view is paramount. Real scientists of course start with premises, but they generate hypotheses that are productive and can be tested and confirmed or found wanting – even by critics who operate within a creationist mode.

3. “Most scientists claim that each layer of ice represents one year, but finding the P-38’s from WWII proved that wrong.” You brought this up before, but have failed to respond to my comments. Do you have a reference to any scientific studies that you think disprove the various means (not solely layers) by which the deluded scientists generally agree that the ice core record goes back 800,000 years or so in the Antarctic and 100,000 in Greenland? …

5. “Most creationists are for protecting the environment when it’s in danger.” And not only creationists – but all manner of religious groups, citizens groups and corporate leaders as well, who all care for the planet – even the parts they don’t personally own. Regards, Tom
Posted by: TokyoTom at October 18, 2007 6:16 AM

TT: “The difference between real scientists and creationists is that creationists start with magical/miraculous forces and occurrences, the existence of which cannot be confirmed or denied,...” And evolutionists don’t? The “big bang” postulates an entire universe popping into existence out of nothing. Where’s the evidence for that? It violates the second law of thermodynamics. Biological evolution violates the law of biology that life cannot come from nonliving matter. No evidence exists that it can or has. There are hundreds more examples of where evolution violates the laws of physics and biology.

TT: “…and they refuse ever to modify their initial assumptions despite the absence of evidence or to accept alternative explanations that are consistent with the evidence but do not require magical forces.” You’ve just described the “science” of evolution very well.

TT: “Do you have a reference to any scientific studies that you think disprove the various means (not solely layers) by which the deluded scientists generally agree that the ice core record goes back 800,000 years or so in the Antarctic and 100,000 in Greenland?” The science of ice cores isn’t rocket surgery. They count the layers of ice like you count tree rings. They assume each layer is one year. But creationists have shown them that that assumption is wrong. That’s really all there is too it.

TT: “I think that mine is the standard Austrian analysis…When you say that “property rights haven’t been tried” for much of the environment, you are essentially conceding the principal point – where resources which are not effectively owned, markets don’t work.” I don’t think you understand Austrians. The solution to the problem of commons is not greater government control, but getting rid of the commons by establishing private property. The air presents a more difficult property issue, but not one that can’t be solved, as many Austrians have shown.
Posted by: Fundamentalist at October 18, 2007 8:03 AM

Fundamentalist: …

2. Are you seriously suggesting that Darwin and those who his arguments persuaded and everyone after them started off by nailing down the fields of astronomy and cosmology, much less assuming the Big Bang? I suppose not. But if you have good evidence for that, of course I’d be interested.

3. I see, you really do think that the scientists who generally agree that the ice core record goes back 800,000 years or so in the Antarctic and 100,000 in Greenland ARE deluded, that ice core “data” rests only on a simple counting of annual layers that creationists have decisively proven wrong. Please give us the cites? The science of ice core dating is actually quite advanced, and isn’t a simple matter of counting annual layers. I offer for you this discussion the following lay-friendly pieces: The GISP2 Ice Core: Ultimate Proof that Noah’s Flood Was Not Global, http://www.asa3.org/aSA/PSCF/2003/PSCF12-03Seely.pdf Ice Core Dating, http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/icecores.html
Posted by: TokyoTom at October 18, 2007 9:51 AM

TT: “Are you seriously suggesting that Darwin and those who his arguments persuaded and everyone after them started off by nailing down the fields of astronomy and cosmology, much less assuming the Big Bang? I suppose not.” Again, I’d be pretty stupid to believe what you wrote. What you’re doing is twisting my words to make them sound ridiculous and then claiming that’s what I said. It’s a technique for getting out of an argument when you know you’re losing, but most people outgrow it when the leave junior high. I think I’ve explained my position on science well enough.

TT: “The science of ice core dating is actually quite advanced, and isn’t a simple matter of counting annual layers.” If you want the best information on the science of dating ice cores, visit the chapter on it in the online book “In the Beginning” at www.creationscience.com.
Posted by: Fundamentalist at October 18, 2007 12:30 PM

Roger, I didn’t call you stupid. You are obviously very intelligent, but like the rest of fundamentalists, I see you as invested primarily in defending a particular mind view. Cognitive conservatism is a basic human trait that we all have to struggle with, and I also am a sinner.

3. On creationism, I am certainly not twisting what you said, but mirroring it to you by asking you to confirm whether you intend the implications. You indicated that, like my argument about creationists, evolutionists also “start with magical/miraculous forces and occurrences, the existence of which cannot be confirmed or denied” and that “The “big bang” postulates an entire universe popping into existence out of nothing. Where’s the evidence for that?” How is it at all “twisting your words” (much less a juvenile debating tactic) to ask you whether you are “seriously suggesting that Darwin and those who his arguments persuaded and everyone after them started off by nailing down the fields of astronomy and cosmology, much less assuming the Big Bang?” In fact, that is precisely what you suggested, and it is clearly wrong. Darwin and other evolutionists didn’t start by positing a Big Bang or some such thing at all, but by looking at the differences between clearly related species and wondering if there was a scientific (non-God, non-magical) explanation for them. OTHER scientists got to the Big Bang – not as anything proven, but as a theory – by working backwards from a growing understanding of mechanics, physics and evidence of the motions of stars and galaxies collected with increasingly sophisticated instruments.

4. On the ice core data, I’d like to take a look at what “www.creationscience.com” has to say, and to put it up on my blog with the various sites I’ve offered to you. I’ve taken a look, but can’t find the chapter you’re referring to. Could I trouble you for a more precise link? BTW, the creationist response to the article on ice core dating that I sent you earlier precisely indicates my criticism of creationism generally. Allow me to quote:

“The resulting difference in age-interpretation is a result of the starting paradigm; the data is the same and does not speak for itself. What we believe colours what we see. … If one starts with the uniformitarian paradigm, it is easy to see how the various methods appear to be corroborating. However, when one steps back and questions the unspoken starting assumptions and allows the parameters to vary by the full range available, completely different consistent results can be obtained. This shows the importance of where we start. The Bible claims to be a reliable historical record and this history from the very beginning was attested to by Christ and the Apostles. Thus, it is a logical starting position from which to create our worldview. On the other hand, belief in deep time may be internally reinforcing, but has no external reference point. Either must be accepted by faith, only one will be right. “It is unfortunate that Seely and others in the American Scientific Affiliation accept man’s fallible, continually changing stories about the past rather than God’s clear Word. http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v18/i2/icecore.asp

This creationist is clearly trying to fit the facts into his Bible-based view of reality rather than conducting science; scientists, on the other hand, work from the assumption that, to the extent possible, physical laws rather than magic or miracles should provide the basis for our understanding of the world. Regards, Tom
Posted by: TokyoTom at October 19, 2007 1:15 AM

<blockquote>[Sorry about this mess.  I was able to get the formatting to work here:  http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2007/10/30/climate-science-a-fundamentalist-creation-science-approach-update.aspx]</blockquote>

For convenience of reference, I`ve excerpted from the long “Malthus and Mein Kampf” thread (http://blog.mises.org/archives/007152.asp) those portions of the exchange of posts I and others had with Fundamentalist that relate to creation science. Philemon: “You know they throw out the high outliers on the ice core data.” Good point. Did you see the documentary on PBS about the guys who rescued the WWII P-38’s from Greenland? Or maybe it was Iceland. Anyway, the planes are about 200 ft below the surface of the ice, which would make them about a thousand years old using the standard dating methods used with ice cores. Posted by: Fundamentalist at October 4, 2007 8:43 PM Roger, with your mention of the P-38s I now see why you’ve changed your handle to Fundamentalist! A little Googling shows that most mentions of the P-38s are connected to Creationists’ refusal to accept the idea that the Earth is older than 7000 years – can you please tell me that you are not in this group? Can you point me to any scientist who seriously doubts the ice core aging or our basic data captures from them? And do intend to seriously argue that the conditions of the active glaciers in Greenland’s southern coasts where the P-38s landed, which experience heavy snowfalls, bear any resemblance to the high, stable and much drier ice caps on Greenland or Antarctic wheere the ice cores are taken from? http://www.groupsrv.com/science/about36638.html http://www.evcforum.net/cgi-bin/dm.cgi?action=msg&f=8&t=67&m=62 That you can even throw this into the discussion makes me seriously question your “fundamental” seriousness. TT Posted by: TokyoTom at October 4, 2007 10:30 PM Fundamentalist, By the way, you neglected to share your thoughts on how old the ice cores (and the Earth) actually are – 7000 years tops? Regards, TT Posted by: TokyoTom at October 5, 2007 10:22 PM TT: “By the way, you neglected to share your thoughts on how old the ice cores (and the Earth) actually are – 7000 years tops?” 100,000 years tops, based on the research of the Institute for Creation Research. In case anyone is interested, the scientiests at the ICR call GW a hoax. They have a good article at www.icr.org/article/3233. Posted by: Fundamentalist at October 6, 2007 7:39 PM Fundamentalist/Roger: Thanks for the cite to mis-named “The Institute for Creation Research” in response to my question to you about the age of the ice cores. I appreciate your courage in confirming (albeit indirectly) that you are approaching the issue of climate change from the perspective of a Creationist. I’ve taken a stroll through the ICR site and, in the interst of clarifying what the ICR is about and their views on AGW, attach below some excerpts of their views their “work” on the age of the Earth, climate science and man’s duties as steward of Creation. My view is that the ICR’s work is seriously skewed by the view that the Bible is an accurate historical record that tells us that the Earth is less than 7000 years old. Their persistence is admirable, but their approach cannot be fairly said to be either open-minded, clear thinking or scientific – nor does it confirm, Roger, that “the scientists at the ICR call GW a hoax”. Nevertheless, I certainly agree that the Bible can provide valuable moral guidance about mankind’s role in the world and our obligations to the rest of God’s creation as His appointed stewards. My question to you, Roger, is whether, in trashing many parts of the Garden of Eden through a race – uncontrolled by clear ownership by individuals of large portions of it – to use, take, liquidate or dump our wastes in it without regard to others (much less to the rest of Creation), can we fairly regard ourselves as being good “stewards” of it? If you owned a large and rare property, Roger, let it out to tenants for a span of years and came back and found that they had trashed large parts of it and were still at work at it (except where some had started to fence parts off) – would YOU be happy? (Or would praise them and say that they had done absolutely the right thing, since the property really meant nothing to you and you had intended its destruction, and had come back to bring your friends with you to a better place?) Given your Creationist approach, I am see definite limits to the possibility of fruitful engagement with you on issues of climate science, but am more than willing to continue to explore further with you the moral aspects of man’s impact on Creation and our obligations to each other and with respect to that Creation. Respectfully, Tom PS: Here are the excerpts from The Institute for Creation Research and its scholars: God’s written, historical revelation of truth — the inspired text of Scripture — provides a framework for numerous intellectual pursuits and a philosophy for understanding man’s role as steward over creation. http://www.icr.org/article/3337/ The Bible, by contrast, paints a radically different picture of our planet’s history. In particular, it describes a time when God catastrophically destroyed the earth and essentially all its life. The only consistent way to interpret the geological record in light of this event is to understand that fossil-bearing rocks are the result of a massive global Flood that occurred only a few thousand years ago and lasted but a year. … The bottom line of this research is that the case is now extremely compelling that the fossil record was produced just a few thousand years ago by the global Flood cataclysm. The evidence reveals that macroevolution as an explanation for the origin of life on earth can therefore no longer be rationally defended. http://www.icr.org/article/117/10/ ICR has become a major numerical research center in paleoclimatology. http://www.icr.org/research/index/researchp_misc_climate_modeling/ However, some creationist models predict significant quantities of snow immediately after the Flood (Oard, 1990). Perhaps as much as 95% of the ice near the poles could have accumulated in the first 500 years or so after the Flood. From a creationist perspective, it would be extremely valuable to thoroughly explore these ice-core data. … We would expect considerably higher precipitation rates immediately following the Flood. … Nothing in the ice-core data from either Greenland or Antarctica requires the earth to be of great age. In fact, there are good reasons to believe that the ice cores are revealing important information about conditions following the Flood of Genesis and the recent formation of thick ice sheets. Reports of ice-core data containing records of climatic changes as far back as 160,000 years in the past are dependent upon interpretations of these data which could be seriously wrong, if the Genesis Flood occurred as described in the Bible. http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=355 Based on these limited observations, it appears likely that global warming seems to be occurring over at least the past 30-50 years…. These data do not address the question about man’s part in causing the warming trend. It is true that increased carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere would be expected to increase the greenhouse effect and possibly cause warming. In fact, the current warming trend may be returning our global climate closer to that prevalent in the Garden of Eden. … Earth has a stable environmental system with many built-in feedback systems to maintain a uniform climate. It was designed by God and has only been dramatically upset by catastrophic events like the Genesis Flood. Catastrophic climate change will occur again in the future, but only by God’s intervention in a sudden, violent conflagration of planet Earth in the end times (II Peter 3:1-12). http://www.icr.org/article/3233/ The Creator designed the earth well, with built-in feedback mechanisms to handle any crises. There is coming a time, however, when excessive heat will be a problem (see Revelation 16:8-9), and these fluctuations may be a foreshadowing, but that too is in God’s hands. http://www.icrmedia.org/article/3336/ In biblical terms, the disease is sin, curable only by regeneration through the work of the Holy Spirit, which is made possible by the love of God the Father expressed in the substitutionary death, burial, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. In human terms, the disease is a naturalistic worldview, curable only by embracing a genuinely theistic worldview that acknowledges the Creator. http://www.icr.org/article/3474/ The whole of creation is now running down and wearing out. “The earth shall wax old like a garment” (Isaiah 51:6), and man’s sinful nature has disrupted man’s relationship to the environment. The sin of Adam, which we all inherit, was one of rebellion against God’s rules, and man, ever since, has made his own rules. This results in selfishness (and therefore exploitation), the refusal of man to practice love to his fellow man and other creatures, as well as poor stewardship of His creation, and man’s desire to serve his own personal ends. … But man is not a perfect steward anymore. Even though the resources which God created are there for our use, man now often exploits these resources at the expense of his fellowman, and causes needless loss and destruction of other parts of God’s creation. Surely this is wrong! [TT: Amen to that!] http://www.icr.org/article/678/ Posted by: TokyoTom at October 6, 2007 9:12 PM TT: “I appreciate your courage in confirming (albeit indirectly) that you are approaching the issue of climate change from the perspective of a Creationist.” Actually, I didn’t know the ICR had done research on GW until this week. I have been studying it since the late 1980’s. And it doesn’t take much courage to stand up for the truth. The scientists at the ICR are very good scientists. Some are from MIT and other top universities. One worked as a physicist for the Sandia Labs for many years. They’re rejected by the mainstream of the scientific community, not because their bad scientists, but because they refuse to drink the coolaid of evolution. Being in the minority doesn’t bother me as it does some. The majority is often wrong. Jesus said the path to the truth is narrow and few people find it. If I wanted to be with the majority on religion I’d have to be a Muslim. I studied mainstream econ, even gained a masters degree in it, then discovered it was wrong on most things. That’s why I became an Austrian, another group that’s shunned by the mainstream. I believe that if Austrians would study the science of Creationism with an open mind and with the analytical skills they have learned as Austrians, they would become creationists, too. TT: “the Bible is an accurate historical record that tells us that the Earth is less than 7000 years old.” That’s not true. A 29th century theologian calculated that the earth was 6,000 years old based on his understanding of the chronologies of the Bible. The Bible never states how old the earth is. Similar scholars have calculated 10,000 years for the age of the earth. I don’t know how old the earth is, but the scientific research at the ICR indicates it’s not more than 100,000 years old. TT: “If you owned a large and rare property, Roger, let it out to tenants for a span of years and came back and found that they had trashed large parts of it…” Of course I would be unhappy. When that happens to the earth, let me know. Posted by: Fundamentalist at October 6, 2007 11:23 PM Roger: A few points: 1. “The scientists at the ICR are very good scientists.” “the scientiests at the ICR call GW a hoax. They have a good article at www.icr.org/article/3233.” “I don’t know how old the earth is, but the scientific research at the ICR indicates it’s not more than 100,000 years old.” Hmm. Since the ICR is a Creationist organization dedicated to the propositions that the Bible is “God’s written, historical revelation of truth”, that God actively intervenes in history through events such as the Flood and to demonstrating that evolution is the “Koolaid” that unthinking scientists and other ignorant the world over have swallowed (except for a brave minority of religiously devout free thinkers in the US, and all of the Muslims) – why do I have such a hard time finding that either the ICR or you is at all “scientific”, as opposed to devoted to clinging to hold together a religiously derived worldview? Perhaps you can tell me which of these follwoing statements by the ICR upthread you agree with? “The Bible, by contrast, paints a radically different picture of our planet’s history. In particular, it describes a time when God catastrophically destroyed the earth and essentially all its life. The only consistent way to interpret the geological record in light of this event is to understand that fossil-bearing rocks are the result of a massive global Flood that occurred only a few thousand years ago and lasted but a year. … The bottom line of this research is that the case is now extremely compelling that the fossil record was produced just a few thousand years ago by the global Flood cataclysm. The evidence reveals that macroevolution as an explanation for the origin of life on earth can therefore no longer be rationally defended. http://www.icr.org/article/117/10/” “However, some creationist models predict significant quantities of snow immediately after the Flood (Oard, 1990). Perhaps as much as 95% of the ice near the poles could have accumulated in the first 500 years or so after the Flood. From a creationist perspective, it would be extremely valuable to thoroughly explore these ice-core data. … We would expect considerably higher precipitation rates immediately following the Flood. … Nothing in the ice-core data from either Greenland or Antarctica requires the earth to be of great age. In fact, there are good reasons to believe that the ice cores are revealing important information about conditions following the Flood of Genesis and the recent formation of thick ice sheets. Reports of ice-core data containing records of climatic changes as far back as 160,000 years in the past are dependent upon interpretations of these data which could be seriously wrong, if the Genesis Flood occurred as described in the Bible. http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=355” 2. “You can’t protect the environment without respect for property and respect for property is almost non-existent in the world, even in the so-called capitalist US. … So to protect the environment in the rest of the world, you have to start to convince them of the benefits of property rights and free markets. These are overstatements. Indigenous peoples and despots have all protected valuable environmental resource by the simple method of defending them against others – others who may not have been happy, but backed down in the face of superior power. 3. “Politicians are good at token gestures, like the Kyoto treaty, that accomplish nothing. But the danger of such token gestures is that they lull people into a false sense that something has been accomplished when it hasn’t. Kyoto failed because the largest AGW emitters refused to join because they saw greater short-term profit in continuing to treat the atmosphere as an open-access commons, so EU politicians and firms were not brave enough to incur sugnificant pain unilaterally (and thus overallocated permits). The real danger is that hard-boiled economic thinkers will jump to the wrong conclusion, and fail to consider that decisions to finally close commons are multiplayer prisoners dilemmas that often fail. 4. ” quit trying to scare people to death with nightmare scenarios” Hmm, where have I done that? Or are you referring to Pew, USCAP, Bush and Paulsson, other industry groups, scientists worldwide, the intelligence community and various religious group? 5. “You and TT haven’t convinced anyone posting on this thread that GW is a serious problem, let alone that humans are the major cause. So why would any of us support a carbon tax that would not reduce GW?” Where did I try to convince anyone on this thread that GW is a serious problem, let alone that humans are the major cause? You have not established that a carbon tax would have no effect, but of course the reason why the rest of the economics profession and much of industry – including Exxon – is that they believe it would improved our net marginal position. 6. “GW hysteria refuses to admit that the benefits of GW will at least equal the liabilities. Besides, Robert does not know that “…large parts of our best agricultural lands will become desert…” That’s a prediction based on highly flawed computer models that have never been tested for accuracy. Talk about irrational faith.” For you, “GW hysteria” just seems to mean anyone who disagrees with you. Have you noticed, BTW, that your conclusion that “the benefits of GW will at least equal the liabilities” not only is based on “highly flawed computer models that have never been tested for accuracy”, but there is that pesky little point the the purported “benefits” will be localized in the temperate and Arctic (where Western economies are located), with little benefits accruing to poorer countries that are expected to face the greatest challenges? Regards, TT “[M]an’s sinful nature has disrupted man’s relationship to the environment. The sin of Adam, which we all inherit, was one of rebellion against God’s rules, and man, ever since, has made his own rules. This results in selfishness (and therefore exploitation), the refusal of man to practice love to his fellow man and other creatures, as well as poor stewardship of His creation, and man’s desire to serve his own personal ends. … But man is not a perfect steward anymore. Even though the resources which God created are there for our use, man now often exploits these resources at the expense of his fellowman, and causes needless loss and destruction of other parts of God’s creation. Surely this is wrong!” http://www.icr.org/article/678/ Posted by: TokyoTom at October 10, 2007 5:33 AM TT: “Perhaps you can tell me which of these follwoing statements by the ICR upthread you agree with?” I agree with all of them. But the quotes you posted from the ICR web site are not the science, but the conclusions based on the science. Just as atheists like Richard Dawkins conclude from the theory of evolution that God does not exist, and wax eloquent about it, so creationists conclude from their research that God does exist. Whether or not creationists are good scientists depends upon your definition of science. Since you are impressed with the consensus view on GW, I would guess that you define science as whatever the consensus view is. If so, you might want to read the articles on epistemology posted this week on this site. If science is nothing more than the consensus opinion, then Austrian econ is not science, because it represents the viewpoint of a small minority. I, along with Austrians, still believe that science is the application of scientific principles to the study of nature. According to that definition, creationism is far better science than evolution. Creationism has two sides to it: 1) the study of the scientific phenomena and 2) drawing conclusions from the results of the study. Just as Austrian econ demonstrates that the real world does not and cannot work according to the principles of socialism, or Keynesian econ, so creationists use science to prove that evolution could not possibly take place as described by the theory. The scientific part of creationism is limited to answering the two questions: “Does the natural world work in the way described by the theory of evolution?” and “If not, how does it work?” The scientific answer to the first question is no, it’s impossible. The scientific answer to the second is to demonstrate the mechanisms by which the earth and life on the planet might have come about. After answering the scientific part, the creationist takes off his science helmet and puts on his philosophical one, just as Dawkins does when he promotes atheism. The creationist then concludes that the science he has studied matches reasonably well with the Biblical account creation. To dismiss the science because of the theological conclusions would be similar to dismissing evolution because atheists take comfort in it. Atheism is a theological conclusion based on the science of evolution, just as respect for the Bible is a theological conclusion based on the science of creationism. Anthony: “I’ve heard quite a few fundies allude to this before. I had wondered whence it came. Anthony: “I’ve heard quite a few fundies allude to this before. I had wondered whence it came.” Why do creationists place so much emphasis on the Biblical flood? There is quite a bit of evidence that the stratified layers of rock did not accumulate over millions of years. The fossil record provides some of the evidence because the fact that the fleshy part of animals are so well preserved proves that they did not decay. It’s similar to the mammoths of Siberia that froze so rapidly that the food in their mouths was preserved. Many fossils had to have been buried very rapidly under tons of mud over a wide area. Also, many stratified rocks show sharp curvature without breaking, which could not have happened after the sediment hardened into rock, but must have occurred while still wet. This is just a sample of the evidence; whole books have been written on it. In sum, the fossil record and geologic record demonstrate a major, catastrophic event in the recent past. The Biblical flood matches that event in many ways, although there is no way to prove it beyond doubt. Posted by: Fundamentalist at October 10, 2007 1:09 PM “…many stratified rocks show sharp curvature without breaking, which could not have happened after the sediment hardened into rock, but must have occurred while still wet…” …or when deformed in a plastic state under enormous pressure and temperature conditions, over millions of years, as the science much more convincingly concludes. Posted by: Jean Paul at October 10, 2007 3:59 PM Jean Paul: “…or when deformed in a plastic state under enormous pressure and temperature conditions, over millions of years, as the science much more convincingly concludes.” You’re talking about metamorphic rock that lies under sendimentary rock. I was referring to sedimentary rock like sandstone and limestone. Several features of sedimentary rock contradict the ancient age of the earth. These, among others, include the fact that sedimentary layers can be traced over hundreds of thousands of square miles, whereas normal processes of sedimentation such as river deltas cover a tiny fraction of that area. Sedimentary layers usually have sharply defined boundaries and are parallel, with layers several thousand feet thick. If layers had been laid down over millions of years, erosion would have destroyed that parallelism. Dead animals and plants decay quickly and are eaten or destroyed by the elements; preservation of fossils in sedimentary rock requires rapid burial in sediments thick enough to preserve their bodily forms. On continents, sedimentary layers are more than a mile thick; conventional explanations of their origins are insufficient for that volume of sediment. Limestone layers hundreds of feet thick are too large and uniform for the conventional explanation that they are bodies of tiny sea creatures. These and many other geological facts point to a rapid formation of the sedimentary layers of the earth’s crust. For more, see the book “In the Beginning” on the web site www.creationscience.com, written by Dr. Walter Brown, PhD, MIT, former professor of science at the Air Force Academy and Chief of Science and Tchnology Studies at the Air War College. Posted by: Fundamentalist at October 10, 2007 10:03 PM Roger, you say that “The creationist then concludes that the science he has studied matches reasonably well with the Biblical account creation”, but leave out one of the most important details – as I noted with a number of quotes from the “Institute for Creation Research” upthread: Creationists start out with devout religious beliefs that form the basis of their understanding of the material world (the Bible is “God’s written, historical revelation of truth … [that] provides a framework for numerous intellectual pursuits”) and conduct “research” designed to confirm their beliefs. This is hardly scientific. Of course, Creationists are hardly unique in finding that all of the evidence they see in the world conveniently confirms that which they already believed. My own view is that our God-given cognitive conservatism and tribalism (both of which have provided important advantages) lie at the bottom of this phenomenon. Regards, Tom Posted by: TokyoTom at October 11, 2007 12:31 AM TT: “Creationists start out with devout religious beliefs that form the basis of their understanding of the material world (the Bible is “God’s written, historical revelation of truth … [that] provides a framework for numerous intellectual pursuits”) and conduct “research” designed to confirm their beliefs. This is hardly scientific.” I suppose you think that evolutionary scientists are blank slates when they approach the subject. That’s a little bit naive. Why did the majority of scientists adopt the theory of evolution long before it had any evidence for it? As Dawkins has written, it made atheism respectable for the first time. Most creationist scientists, such as Dr. Brown and Dr. Michael Behe, taught evolution for many years before changing their minds; the mounting scientific evidence against evolution changed their minds, not the Bible. Posted by: Fundamentalist at October 11, 2007 8:03 AM TT: “On the science, it is hard to find anyone who disagress with the IPCC’s summaries of the vast and growing scientific literature…” You really should read the articles on epistemology posted this week on this site. Consensus is not science nor proof of the correctness of one’s argument; it could mean that the majority have been fooled. The minority has often been right about such things while it has taken decades for the consensus to change. Posted by: Fundamentalist at October 11, 2007 8:08 AM Fundamentalist/Roger: So you turn from defending Creationist science to attacking the scientists who see evolution as a much more powerful (and productive in terms of research inquiries) explanation of the biological world than that of a God that made all of creation at once by fiat and intervenes from time to time at His whim to destroy or create further – though evolution is hardly the subject here. Evolution has had an uphill battle against oppression by church establishments, though there are noble holdouts throughout the universe of Islamic free thinkers, with a scattering in the US. Nice try on the IPCC, which I view as I think others like Lindzen, Christy and Michaels do – simply as a valuable digest of the developing science, not as a monolithic “consensus”. You are right of course that “The minority has often been right about such things while it has taken decades for the consensus to change”, but it cut the other way, doesn`t it? Lindzen and others who take “noble” stands against consensus are like those who stood against Gallileo, Einstein, Darwin and continental drift. Posted by: TokyoTom at October 11, 2007 12:16 PM TT: “So you turn from defending Creationist science to attacking the scientists…” You know very well that wasn’t what I was doing. Just as you ignore the the scientists who oppose human-induced GW because you think their motives are tainted, while assuming pure motives for the consensus scientists, you also try to impune the science of creationists by judging their motives. I was simply pointing out that evolutionary scientists don’t have pure motives either. You really should get over the habit of determining the validity of an argument by what you perceive the motives of a person are. You seem to be unaware of the fact that you attribute pure motives to those you agree with and evil motives for those you disagree with. Motives are totally irrelevant. Just look at the evidence each side presents and decide for yourself. TT: “Lindzen and others who take “noble” stands against consensus are like those who stood against Gallileo, Einstein, Darwin and continental drift.” Lindzen and others like him are very much like Gallileo, Newton, Einstein and others who stood against the consensus when it was wrong. Posted by: Fundamentalist at October 11, 2007 2:35 PM Fundamentalist: – Where do I “ignore the the scientists who oppose human-induced GW because you think their motives are tainted”? Are you talking about Linzen et al., or the Institute for Creation Research? I’ve looked at what I can find at ICR, but didn’t find any science but rather arguments against AGW based clearly on presuppositions that the Bible descriptions of the Flood are literally true. Does ICR have any published (journals or self-) research at all? – Where do I “assum[e] pure motives for the consensus scientists” or for evolutionary scientists? – I do not “impune the science of creationists by judging their motives” – there is no science that I can see to impugn. Rather, I’ve simply noted that they have rather clearly stated that they are trying to fit reality into a preconceived box we call the Bible. Is it unfair for us to note that or draw any conclusions from it? – Yes, you have indicated that you think that “evolutionary scientists don’t have pure motives either”. However, this is not releveant to discussing climate science, and you have not actually made any case for “impure” motives among evolutionary scientists. If the active intervention (intermittent or ongoing) of God is in fact the best explanation for various aspects of the real world, at some point science will be incapable of finding materialistic explanations. Until that point, I prefer a science that does not presume such intervention – as neither has such intervention has ever been demonstrated, nor does such an approach provide any fruitful leads for further research or understanding. The theory of natural selection and ancillary theories in support of evolution gained adherent not because of political or ideological agendas to throw off theological shackles, but because they provided powerful and testable insights into the evidence, as opposed to the “God did it” school. Moving to a materialistic view of creation occurred on the basis of the fit between the evidence and the hypotheses, and often after much struggle with preconceptions based on the Bible and enforced by church establishments and popular culture. – If I indeed had a “habit of determining the validity of an argument by what you perceive the motives of a person are”, then I would wholeheartedly agree that it is one I should strive to overcome. But I don’t think I actually do have such a habit, even while I do consider it useful to consider motive, self-interest and other aspects of human nature when weighing what people have to say – even Al Gore. – “You seem to be unaware of the fact that you attribute pure motives to those you agree with and evil motives for those you disagree with.” Yep; I am unaware that I make any such attributions of pure or evil motives – nor do I see any evidence of this on my comments upthread. Rather, it seems to be you (and others like Philemon) who presents dichotomies of pure and evil motives, and “sides”. – “Motives are totally irrelevant. Just look at the evidence each side presents and decide for yourself.” Understanding motivation may help in weighing evidence presented by others – that’s all. Only fools never try to look behind the curtain. – “Lindzen and others like him” are largely old codgers (most, with much less relevant expertise than Lindzen) who have not yet been persuaded by new paradgims that everyone else has found convincingly fit the evidence. Some find this heroic, though it is also entirely consistent with our God-given tendencies to defend our worldviews at all costs (as ignoring cognitive dissonance may be less costly than changing our minds). Of course our climate is sufficiently complex that we will never understand it completely, so there is always room for new ideas, evidence and arguments against oversimplification, or concerning public policy. I do appreciate your thoughts. Regards, Tom Posted by: TokyoTom at October 11, 2007 10:10 PM 6. Finally, I note that you have not responded to my previous comments to you about how you and the creationist “scientists” at ICR are letting your “fundamentalist” views of the Bible influence your views on the climate change science. Regards, Tom Posted by: TokyoTom at October 15, 2007 11:16 PM TT: “Finally, I note that you have not responded to my previous comments…” I didn’t read anything worthy of comments. You pretend that creationists have no science behind their theories. You don’t see it because you don’t want to. Did you follow the link to the book at creationscience.com? The only thing that influences my views on GW is the science. Posted by: Fundamentalist at October 16, 2007 8:06 AM Roger/Fundamentalist: Thanks for your further comments. 2. As to the climate “science” at the Institute for Climate Science, yes of course I followed your link. I have not “pretend[ed] that creationists have no science behind their theories”, but simply couldn’t find any. Can you point to any real climate science at ICR? I saw no science, but could document that summaries of ICR’s views were explicitly grounded on a view that the Biblical view of a young Earth is historically accurate, such as the following: However, some creationist models predict significant quantities of snow immediately after the Flood (Oard, 1990). Perhaps as much as 95% of the ice near the poles could have accumulated in the first 500 years or so after the Flood. From a creationist perspective, it would be extremely valuable to thoroughly explore these ice-core data. … We would expect considerably higher precipitation rates immediately following the Flood. … Nothing in the ice-core data from either Greenland or Antarctica requires the earth to be of great age. In fact, there are good reasons to believe that the ice cores are revealing important information about conditions following the Flood of Genesis and the recent formation of thick ice sheets. Reports of ice-core data containing records of climatic changes as far back as 160,000 years in the past are dependent upon interpretations of these data which could be seriously wrong, if the Genesis Flood occurred as described in the Bible. http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=355 Based on these limited observations, it appears likely that global warming seems to be occurring over at least the past 30-50 years…. These data do not address the question about man’s part in causing the warming trend. It is true that increased carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere would be expected to increase the greenhouse effect and possibly cause warming. In fact, the current warming trend may be returning our global climate closer to that prevalent in the Garden of Eden. … Earth has a stable environmental system with many built-in feedback systems to maintain a uniform climate. It was designed by God and has only been dramatically upset by catastrophic events like the Genesis Flood. Catastrophic climate change will occur again in the future, but only by God’s intervention in a sudden, violent conflagration of planet Earth in the end times (II Peter 3:1-12). http://www.icr.org/article/3233/ It is very clear by ICR’s establishment of its own “creation model”-only “science” journal that ICR is operating on the basis of a belief system, and not science: http://scienceantiscience.blogspot.com/2007/02/institute-of-creation-research-launches.html http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2007/05/01/peer-reviewed-creationist-research-hahahahahahahaha/ 3. BYW, this was not a rhetorical question in my last comment to you: “Austrians are compelled at least to recognize the ongoing failure of catallaxy with respect to unowned open-access resources and other resources which are no effectively owned. Do you acknowledge this, but simply consider the costs imposed by any “remedy” to exceed purported benefits? If so, how long do you think we should wait before any policy action is merited – forever, or just until the Second Coming?” The ICR makes the following observations – do you disagree that they apply to climate change? “[M]an’s sinful nature has disrupted man’s relationship to the environment. The sin of Adam, which we all inherit, was one of rebellion against God’s rules, and man, ever since, has made his own rules. This results in selfishness (and therefore exploitation), the refusal of man to practice love to his fellow man and other creatures, as well as poor stewardship of His creation, and man’s desire to serve his own personal ends. … “But man is not a perfect steward anymore. Even though the resources which God created are there for our use, man now often exploits these resources at the expense of his fellowman, and causes needless loss and destruction of other parts of God’s creation. Surely this is wrong! http://www.icr.org/article/678/ Regards, TT Posted by: TokyoTom at October 17, 2007 2:25 AM TT: “It is very clear by ICR’s establishment of its own “creation model”-only “science” journal that ICR is operating on the basis of a belief system, and not science:” How do you think scientists operate? They form a hypothesis (guess) about how things work, then try to find evidence to support their guess. One group is trying to prove evolution, which has never been proven scientifically, just adopted by consensus as has GW. The evidence for evolution is so slim that it drove many of the scientiests at ICR and other places to search for an alternative explanation. They chose creation as described in the Bible. Now they’re searching for evidence that supports their hypothesis. Tell me one scientist that operates differently. As Mises and Hayek tried to explain with history, it’s impossible to dive into the data of history and surface with a coherent theory about how economics works. To make sense of history, one must have a logical theory first and interpret the data of history through that theory. The same advice works in the natural sciences. I am fairly confident that no scientist has looked at the data without a theory and been overwhelmed with the evidence for evolution; the evidence simply doesn’t exist. Not that evolutionary scientists are trying to prove that evolution is true. They never have tried that. Soon after Darwin’s book came out, the majority of scientists adopted its thesis without question. I don’t know of any scientist many scientists who have even questioned evolution. It’s accepted because it’s the consensus. A few will admit that almost no evidence for evolution exists, but they still accept it on philosophical grounds. All creationist scientists are doing is questioning the evidence for evolution, which almost no evolutionary scientist does, and proposing an alternative with evidence to back it up. How is that not scientific? “Reports of ice-core data containing records of climatic changes as far back as 160,000 years in the past are dependent upon interpretations of these data which could be seriously wrong” As far as I know, creationists don’t dispute the CO2 data in ice cores, just the ages that scientists claim the cores represent. Most scientists claim that each layer of ice represents one year, but finding the P-38’s from WWII proved that wrong. Still, scientists refuse to change their minds. A similar example happened with the strata of mud found in ponds. Scientists used to claim that each layer represented one year, but creationists kept demonstrating that such deposits occur multiple times in a year until other scientists began to agree with them. TT: “The ICR makes the following observations – do you disagree that they apply to climate change?” Yes I disagree. TT: “Austrians are compelled at least to recognize the ongoing failure of catallaxy with respect to unowned open-access resources and other resources which are no effectively owned. Do you acknowledge this…? No, I don’t agree. Free markets and property rights haven’t even been tried where the environment is concerned. Posted by: Fundamentalist at October 17, 2007 1:07 PM “But man is not a perfect steward anymore. Even though the resources which God created are there for our use, man now often exploits these resources at the expense of his fellowman, and causes needless loss and destruction of other parts of God’s creation. Surely this is wrong!” Most creationists are for protecting the environment when it’s in danger. That’s why we should oppose socialism. But we also don’t believe in inventing dangers that don’t exist. Posted by: Fundamentalist at October 17, 2007 1:10 PM Fundamentalist: 2. The difference between real scientists and creationists is that creationists start with magical/miraculous forces and occurrences, the existence of which cannot be confirmed or denied, and they refuse ever to modify their initial assumptions despite the absence of evidence or to accept alternative explanations that are consistent with the evidence but do not require magical forces. For creationists, protecting the world view is paramount. Real scientists of course start with premises, but they generate hypotheses that are productive and can be tested and confirmed or found wanting – even by critics who operate within a creationist mode. 3. “Most scientists claim that each layer of ice represents one year, but finding the P-38’s from WWII proved that wrong.” You brought this up before, but have failed to respond to my comments. Do you have a reference to any scientific studies that you think disprove the various means (not solely layers) by which the deluded scientists generally agree that the ice core record goes back 800,000 years or so in the Antarctic and 100,000 in Greenland? 5. “Most creationists are for protecting the environment when it’s in danger.” And not only creationists – but all manner of religious groups, citizens groups and corporate leaders as well, who all care for the planet – even the parts they don’t personally own. Regards, Tom Posted by: TokyoTom at October 18, 2007 6:16 AM TT: “The difference between real scientists and creationists is that creationists start with magical/miraculous forces and occurrences, the existence of which cannot be confirmed or denied,…” And evolutionists don’t? The “big bang” postulates an entire universe popping into existence out of nothing. Where’s the evidence for that? It violates the second law of thermodynamics. Biological evolution violates the law of biology that life cannot come from nonliving matter. No evidence exists that it can or has. There are hundreds more examples of where evolution violates the laws of physics and biology. TT: “…and they refuse ever to modify their initial assumptions despite the absence of evidence or to accept alternative explanations that are consistent with the evidence but do not require magical forces.” You’ve just described the “science” of evolution very well. TT: “Do you have a reference to any scientific studies that you think disprove the various means (not solely layers) by which the deluded scientists generally agree that the ice core record goes back 800,000 years or so in the Antarctic and 100,000 in Greenland?” The science of ice cores isn’t rocket surgery. They count the layers of ice like you count tree rings. They assume each layer is one year. But creationists have shown them that that assumption is wrong. That’s really all there is too it. TT: “I think that mine is the standard Austrian analysis…When you say that “property rights haven’t been tried” for much of the environment, you are essentially conceding the principal point – where resources which are not effectively owned, markets don’t work.” I don’t think you understand Austrians. The solution to the problem of commons is not greater government control, but getting rid of the commons by establishing private property. The air presents a more difficult property issue, but not one that can’t be solved, as many Austrians have shown. Posted by: Fundamentalist at October 18, 2007 8:03 AM Fundamentalist: 2. Are you seriously suggesting that Darwin and those who his arguments persuaded and everyone after them started off by nailing down the fields of astronomy and cosmology, much less assuming the Big Bang? I suppose not. But if you have good evidence for that, of course I’d be interested. 3. I see, you really do think that the scientists who generally agree that the ice core record goes back 800,000 years or so in the Antarctic and 100,000 in Greenland ARE deluded, that ice core “data” rests only on a simple counting of annual layers that creationists have decisively proven wrong. Please give us the cites? The science of ice core dating is actually quite advanced, and isn’t a simple matter of counting annual layers. I offer for you this discussion the following lay-friendly pieces: The GISP2 Ice Core: Ultimate Proof that Noah’s Flood Was Not Global, http://www.asa3.org/aSA/PSCF/2003/PSCF12-03Seely.pdf Ice Core Dating, http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/icecores.html Posted by: TokyoTom at October 18, 2007 9:51 AM TT: “Are you seriously suggesting that Darwin and those who his arguments persuaded and everyone after them started off by nailing down the fields of astronomy and cosmology, much less assuming the Big Bang? I suppose not.” Again, I’d be pretty stupid to believe what you wrote. What you’re doing is twisting my words to make them sound ridiculous and then claiming that’s what I said. It’s a technique for getting out of an argument when you know you’re losing, but most people outgrow it when the leave junior high. I think I’ve explained my position on science well enough. TT: “The science of ice core dating is actually quite advanced, and isn’t a simple matter of counting annual layers.” If you want the best information on the science of dating ice cores, visit the chapter on it in the online book “In the Beginning” at www.creationscience.com. Posted by: Fundamentalist at October 18, 2007 12:30 PM Roger, I didn’t call you stupid. You are obviously very intelligent, but like the rest of fundamentalists, I see you as invested primarily in defending a particular mind view. Cognitive conservatism is a basic human trait that we all have to struggle with, and I also am a sinner. 3. On creationism, I am certainly not twisting what you said, but mirroring it to you by asking you to confirm whether you intend the implications. You indicated that, like my argument about creationists, evolutionists also “start with magical/miraculous forces and occurrences, the existence of which cannot be confirmed or denied” and that “The “big bang” postulates an entire universe popping into existence out of nothing. Where’s the evidence for that?” How is it at all “twisting your words” (much less a juvenile debating tactic) to ask you whether you are “seriously suggesting that Darwin and those who his arguments persuaded and everyone after them started off by nailing down the fields of astronomy and cosmology, much less assuming the Big Bang?” In fact, that is precisely what you suggested, and it is clearly wrong. Darwin and other evolutionists didn’t start by positing a Big Bang or some such thing at all, but by looking at the differences between clearly related species and wondering if there was a scientific (non-God, non-magical) explanation for them. OTHER scientists got to the Big Bang – not as anything proven, but as a theory – by working backwards from a growing understanding of mechanics, physics and evidence of the motions of stars and galaxies collected with increasingly sophisticated instruments. 4. On the ice core data, I’d like to take a look at what “www.creationscience.com” has to say, and to put it up on my blog with the various sites I’ve offered to you. I’ve taken a look, but can’t find the chapter you’re referring to. Could I trouble you for a more precise link? BTW, the creationist response to the article on ice core dating that I sent you earlier precisely indicates my criticism of creationism generally. Allow me to quote: “The resulting difference in age-interpretation is a result of the starting paradigm; the data is the same and does not speak for itself. What we believe colours what we see. … If one starts with the uniformitarian paradigm, it is easy to see how the various methods appear to be corroborating. However, when one steps back and questions the unspoken starting assumptions and allows the parameters to vary by the full range available, completely different consistent results can be obtained. This shows the importance of where we start. The Bible claims to be a reliable historical record and this history from the very beginning was attested to by Christ and the Apostles. Thus, it is a logical starting position from which to create our worldview. On the other hand, belief in deep time may be internally reinforcing, but has no external reference point. Either must be accepted by faith, only one will be right. “It is unfortunate that Seely and others in the American Scientific Affiliation accept man’s fallible, continually changing stories about the past rather than God’s clear Word. http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v18/i2/icecore.asp This creationist is clearly trying to fit the facts into his Bible-based view of reality rather than conducting science; scientists, on the other hand, work from the assumption that, to the extent possible, physical laws rather than magic or miracles should provide the basis for our understanding of the world. Regards, Tom Posted by: TokyoTom at October 19, 2007 1:15 AM