TT's Lost in Tokyo — by TokyoTom

I’ve addressed the poor health of the world’s oceans quite recently, in response to a flip comment  by Lew Rockwell about how the “ecosystem” is likely to “survive and thrive” regardless of environmental and/or political debacles. Further reports of an increasingly serious situation continue to appear.

Further to the information I provided there, I’d like to draw readers’s attention to a recent report in Science and to a recent article in The Economist:

1. Science, June 18, 2010

Here’s the blurb (emphasis added)

The Impact of Climate Change on the World’s Marine Ecosystems

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg^1,* and John F. Bruno^1,2

¹ Ocean and Coasts Program, Global Change Institute, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia.
² Department of Marine Sciences, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: [email protected]

McClatchy has good coverage (Les Blumenthal, Julky 4, 2010)(emphasis added)

A sobering new report warns that the oceans face a “fundamental and irreversible ecological transformation” not seen in millions of years as greenhouse gases and climate change already have affected temperature, acidity, sea and oxygen levels, the food chain and possibly major currents that could alter global weather.

The report, in Science magazine, brings together dozens of studies that collectively paint a dismal picture of deteriorating ocean health.

“This is further evidence we are well on our way to the next great extinction event,” said Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, the director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland in Australia and a co-author of the report.

John Bruno, an associate professor of marine sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the report’s other co-author, isn’t quite as alarmist, but he’s equally concerned.

“We are becoming increasingly certain that the world’s marine ecosystems are reaching tipping points,” Bruno said, adding, “We really have no power or model to foresee” the impact.

The oceans, which cover 71 percent of the Earth’s surface, have played a dominant role in regulating the planet’s climate. However, even as the understanding of what’s happening to terrestrial ecosystems as a result of climate change has grown, studies of marine ecosystems have lagged, the report says. The oceans are acting as a heat sink for rising temperatures and have absorbed about one-third of the carbon dioxide produced by human activities.

Among other things, the report notes:

 

• The average temperature of the upper level of the oceans has increased more than 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past 100 years, and global ocean surface temperatures in January were the second warmest ever recorded for that month.

 

• Though the increase in acidity is slight, it represents a “major departure” from the geochemical conditions that have existed in the oceans for hundred of thousands if not millions of years.

 

• Nutrient-poor “ocean deserts” in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans grew by 15 percent, or roughly 2.5 million square miles, from 1998 to 2006.

 

• Oxygen concentrations have been dropping off the Northwest U.S. coast and the coast of southern Africa, where dead zones are appearing regularly. There is paleontological evidence that declining oxygen levels in the oceans played a major role in at least four or five mass extinctions.

 

• Since the early 1980s, the production of phytoplankton, a crucial creature at the lower end of the food chain, has declined 6 percent, with 70 percent of the decline found in the northern parts of the oceans. Scientists also have found that phytoplankton are becoming smaller.

Volcanic activity and large meteorite strikes in the past have “resulted in hostile conditions that have increased extinction rates and driven ecosystem collapse,” the report says. “There is now overwhelming evidence human activities are driving rapid changes on a scale similar to these past events.

“Many of these changes are already occurring within the world’s oceans with serious consequences likely over the coming years.”

One of the consequences could be a disruption of major ocean currents, particularly those flowing north and south, circulating warm water from the equator to polar regions and cold water from the poles back to the equator. Higher temperatures in polar regions and a decrease in the salinity of surface water due to melting ice sheets could interrupt such circulation, the report says.

The change in currents could further affect such climate phenomena as the El Nino-Southern Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation. Scientists just now are starting to understand how these phenomena affect global weather patterns.

“Although our comprehension of how this variability will change over the coming decades remains uncertain, the steady increase in heat content in the ocean and atmosphere are likely to have profound influences on the strength, direction and behavior of the world’s major current systems,” the report says.

Kelp forests such as those off the Northwest U.S. coast, along with corals, sea grasses, mangroves and salt marsh grasses, are threatened by the changes the oceans are undergoing, the report says. All of them provide habitat for thousands of species.

The polar bear isn’t the only polar mammal that faces an escalating risk of extinction, the report says; penguin and seal populations also are declining.

“It’s a lot worse than the public thinks,” said Nate Mantua, an associate research professor at the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group.

Mantua, who’s read the report, said it was clear what was causing the oceans’ problems: greenhouse gases. “It is not a mystery,” he said.

There’s growing concern about low-oxygen or no-oxygen zones appearing more and more regularly off the Northwest coast, Mantua said. Scientists are studying the California Current along the West Coast to determine whether it could be affected, he added.

Richard Feely, a senior scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, said the report in Science seemed so direct because one of the authors was Australian.

“Australians come at you full-bore and lay it on the line,” Feely said.

Even so, he said, the condition of the oceans is indeed deteriorating.

“The combination of these impacts are tending to show they are additive,” he said. “They combine to make things worse.”

Asked what the oceans will be like in 50 years if trends aren’t reversed, Bruno, the UNC professor, said that all the problems would have accelerated and there’d be new ones. For instance, he said tens of thousands of species found only in the Pacific might migrate across the top of North America as the sea ice melts and enter the Atlantic, where they’ve never been.

Bruno said a 50-year time frame to consider changes in the ocean was way too short, however.

“I am a lot more worried about 200 to 300 years out,” he said

In December 2009, insurance giant Swiss Re released a paper focussed on arguments made by climate change “skeptics”, interested readers can find it here.

I thought some of you might be interested.

[View:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqBURjOdOG8:550:0]

h/t Michael Tobis: http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2010/07/climate-change-and-national-security.html

1. I noted in November 2007 Gene Callahan’s interesting post, entitled “How a Free Society Could Solve Global Warming“, in the October 2007 issue of The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, at the website of The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). To reprise briefly, one of Callahan`s chief arguments is that public moral pressure is a perfectly appropriate way by which concerned citizens, acting in the market of public opinion, can influence behavior that generates externalities:

Even when economic transactions generate so-called negative externalities (activities that shower harms on third parties), I still contend that the free market is the best institution for identifying and reducing the problems.

One way negative externalities can be addressed without turning to state coercion is public censure of individuals or groups widely perceived to be flouting core moral principles or trampling the common good, even if their actions are not technically illegal. Large, private companies and prominent, wealthy individuals are generally quite sensitive to public pressure campaigns.

2. Sheldon Richman (editor of The Freeman and TheFreemanOnline.org, and author of Tethered Citizens) has now joined Callahan in offering to libertarians the argument that coordinated, mass moral suasion is a viable, efficacious alternative to the use of the state to address global warming. I excerpt below portions of Sheldon’s argument in “Fixing Global Warming for Fun If Not Profit; Free-rider problem overcome” (June 04, 2010)(emphasis added):

[Some] free-market advocates … in effect throw up their arms and say there is no way voluntary efforts could address catastrophic global warming. It’s the standard case regarding public goods: Free riders and prisoner’s dilemmas would thwart voluntary remedial efforts. Each individual would rationally calculate that he can let others make the sacrifices necessary to bringing about the improvement while continuing to do what he has been doing. That way he’ll get the benefits for free. The problem is that if everyone, or most everyone, follows this strategy the public good is never produced.

To be specific, if we stipulate that catastrophic (but reversible) global warming is happening, why would anyone voluntarily change his behavior to mitigate it? One person’s effort would make no difference anyway, so why be the chump? Let the others do it.

We’re doomed.

Unless there’s something wrong with the public-goods argument, as I and others think there is. (See, for example, Gene Callahan’s Freeman article “How a Free Society Could Solve Global Warming.”)

What About Government Failure?

It’s really odd to hear a free-market advocate resign himself to a government solution to the supposed global-warming “market failure.” In every other area where government is proffered as the fix for market failure, free-market advocates immediately fire back that government is itself riddled with free-rider problems. There’s a growing if belated literature on government failure. How can government be the answer to a public-goods problem when it suffers the same defect that allegedly plagues the thing to which it is supposed to be superior? How can government solve the public-goods problem when it itself is a public “good.” (I mean that strictly in the technical sense, of course.)

All the goods that government in theory is said to produce are public in nature; they would benefit most everyone. But that means the benefits would redound not only to those who contribute to their production but also to those who don’t, the free riders. Therefore, special interests should never fail to trump the general interest, since smaller groups are less affected by the free-rider problem than larger groups.

Income-tax rate cuts, for example, would benefit everyone, even people who did nothing to help achieve them, say, by contributing money to taxpayer organizations. In theory, then, income-tax cuts should be virtually impossible to achieve.

But income-tax cuts have been enacted in the past. In fact, far bigger things that should have been fatally plagued by the free-rider problem have happened, such as revolutions. They should have been impossible according to the theory. Everyone should have been hanging back waiting for everyone else to overthrow the oppressor. It’s a great way to gain freedom without taking any risks—except if everyone thought that way, no revolution would have occurred. But revolutions have occurred.

So in the political realm the free-rider problem can be overcome. We know it. It’s in the history books. But if it can be overcome in that realm, why not in others? It seems hasty to say it can’t happen. In fact, it has, for example in the effort to end the slave trade, which required a change in public sentiment. So global warming might be amenable to purely voluntary remedies, perhaps not via the traditional for-profit business plan but rather through a voluntary social movement that promoted an ethic encouraging and pressuring people and firms to cease their destructive activities.

The key is ideology, the set of explicit or implicit beliefs that motivates people to act one way or another in public matters even though individually they may reap minimal if any concrete benefits from their own marginal efforts. People are capable of acting to achieve things other than personal monetary profits. Homo economicus is an inadequate picture of the human race, a gross and misleading oversimplification.

“Ideology therefore becomes the wild card that accounts for public spirited mass movements that overcome the free-rider problem…, for ideology can motivate people to do more to effect social change than the material rewards to each individual would justify,” Jeffrey Rogers Hummel wrote (pdf) in another context.

Obviously there’s much more to say on the matter, but for now be aware that serious global warming would be no reason to abandon economic (or other) freedom. We can have our scientific objectivity and our liberty too.

3. In response, let me make the following observations:

3.1  Callahan and Richman want MORE moral outrage and arm-twisting from the enviros that Austrians and other lovers of so-called “free markets” seem to love to hate? Sure, I can see all the libertarians and right-wingers signing up in droves, to lead enviro-fascists in a holy war against fossil fuels!

But even if were libertarians WERE to wish to lead such a voluntary movement, how likely is it, given the long hostility that libertarians have expressed towards enviros, that enviros would put any credence in what such libertarians have to say?

3.2  Given what we know (from Elinor Ostrom’s research, etc.) regarding the conditions for voluntary coordinated action, even though it is very clear that we see attempts at moral suasion at play in local, state, federal and international climate-change-directed regulatory efforts, it seems very unlikely that moral suasion alone can be expected to prove efficacious at an international or global scale. Far too many communities, nations and economic interests are involved.

3.3  Moral pressure via an ideology is likely to be blunt.  As Silas Barta noted on a comment thread,

public boycott/suasion campaigns will only give a very noisy signal to corporations of how damaging their activities are to the environment, and it will be skewed toward more visible ones.

You’ve seen environmentalists (like the “Green Lantern” on Slate) try to calculate which activity is “truly” more damaging to the environment.  It manifests in, for example, the debates over whether shipping organic food a long distance is worse than shipping factory farm food over a short distance.

The fact is, even for very basic calculations, it gets complicated, and environmentalists will almost certainly have biased calculations and use them for non-climate purposes when wielding their power — that’s what they already do.

3.4  I think that Callahan and Richman are very right that societies can and do address public goods/commons without using formal legal mechanisms. In this, both echo Nobel-Prizewinner commons-expert Elinor Ostrom, This is a point that Bruce Yandle (a “free-market environmentalist” who is dean emeritus and Distinguished Professor of Economics Emeritus at Clemson University, Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Economics at the Mercatus Center, a faculty member with George Mason University’s Capitol Hill Campus, and a Senior Fellow at PERC – the Property and Environment Research Center) made earlier and that I noted:

People can build institutions that take the edge off frantic commons behavior. People have unwritten and written constitutions that help to establish social order. People can and do accumulate wealth. People communicate, invent lines of kinship, and develop customs, traditions, and rules of law that limit anti-social behavior. People define, enforce, and trade property rights. People can and do avoid the tragedy of the commons. Indeed, instead of living with tragedies, people triumph over the commons. But the triumphs are never perfect or complete. There is always another commons to manage.

I wish to put forward the notion that encounters with the commons form the fundamental stimulus that yields, instead of tragedy, what we today call civilization. The ascent of man from a primitive existence with no wealth accumulation to life as we know it is fundamentally a story about triumph over, not tragedy of, the commons. Let me explain.

Our very existence as human beings is defined by evolved institutions for avoiding tragedies. We have names, which serve the economic purpose of identifying us as parties to contracts and agreements. Those names, first and last, form webs of communication that reduce the social cost of assigning responsibilities and liabilities. They enhance truth-telling and promise-keeping; they raise the cost of engaging in anti-social behavior. They limit a tragedy of the commons.

We have abstract symbols of ownership—deeds, titles, and contracts—that define spheres of autonomous behavior. We speak of our homes, our cars, our clothes, our families, and our pasture. Even language has evolved to provide a possessive form that accommodates triumph over the commons.

We write and observe contracts, wills, and marriage agreements that define relationships, identify turf, and conserve wealth. We accept evolved bodies of law and law-enforcement activities to assure the integrity of our agreements. We carry papers that enable us to acquire property, extinguish debt, cross borders, drive vehicles, and communicate effectively with strangers. And we have locks, keys, walls, fences, brands, and encryption devices, all this in an effort to avoid a tragedy of the commons.

Property rights define who we are and what we have. Property rights guard others from our unwanted advances and prevent us from contributing to a tragedy of their commons.

Avoiding a tragedy of the commons is costly. The benefits must be large. …

The tragedy is found where for reasons having to do with power, intolerance, or cost, human beings have not yet defined private property rights. Or, as we shall see, where evolving property rights encouraged by man the institution builder have been destroyed. What was once a triumph can become a tragedy. …

[At] very low levels of income, what might be called stage one, human beings cannot afford to do much about property-rights enforcement and the commons. They live in a world where custom and tradition sustain them. As incomes rise and losses from the commons expand, stage two is entered. Fences go up, and rules are set for protecting the commons. Finally, in stage three, markets evolve along with rules of law that define spheres of private and public action. Private rights replace public control, and the triumph replaces the tragedy of the commons.

3.5  What about statist corporations? What Callahan, Richman and Yandle all miss is that the current status quo is very much NOT a libertarian one, but one in there are powerful vested interests that profit from using government to shift risks to the rest of society. This is very visible in our financial crisis, Wall Street profiteering and bailouts, the elites running public companies, fights over publicly-controlled natural resources (such as oil) and the messes mineral extraction activities leave behind, and in the damages and risks created by the use of fossil fuels.

Very noticeably, all of these commenters are silent as to how likely any of the people who profit from the use of government – and who are both relatively faceless and face incentives peculiar to corporate ownership, management or employment (and not simply the same incentives that face our personal and extended local, state, national or global communities) – are going to worry very much about public opinion, as opposed to continuing to work actively to mold and assuage it.

[Update: added a link  to Roger Pielke, Jr. at the end.]

My pal Stephan Kinsella has pestered me about the recent letter in Science by a bunch of the world’s leading scientists, so I suppose I ought to mention it.  (I won’t make another “Climate Confession”, but some of my earlier remarks about the Great Climate Email Kerfluffle may be worth repeating, particularly as various investigations concluded that no scientific dishonesty occurred)

Those who have more than a passing interest in science, the role of science in policy and in climate-related rent-seeking ought to read the letter, signed by 255 members of the the National Academy of Science, including 11 Nobel Prize winners (in hard sciences); I won’t post any extensive quotes here.  I simply note this conclusion:

“Compelling, comprehensive, and consistent objective evidence that humans are changing the climate in ways that threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend.”

The letter is a reaction, chiefly by scientists not active in the IPCC process, to recent harsh attacks on their “climate science” colleagues (including threats of legal action by Sen. Inhofe and initiation of legal action by the Virginia Attorney General), and an effort to support such scientists by expressing a strong concerns about the possible consequences of continued inaction. The letter urges policy action and blames much of the attacks on efforts by rent-seeking fossil fuel interests to protect their advantaged position. The letter itself – as well as the fact Science put it behind a paywall along with a Photo-shopped photo of a polar bear on an ice floe! – showcases the political naivete and amateurishness of the scientific establishment.

Obviously scientists have no particular expertise in making public policy, but it IS striking that so many of them are willing to venture out onto thin ice by raising their voices in alarm.

Readers may find the following background/commentary on the letter to be useful:

1. I repeat some of remarks I made when the email scandal arose (altered somewhat):

• The Climate Hack is certainly egg on the face of some climate scientists – although this has been spun ridiculously out of context (much criticism is clearly simply wrong, though those who find the whole thing “delicious” have a tough time looking past the sources they prefer to read) – but the implication that the science is nothing but a conspiracy is an obvious fantasy. The political amateurishness of the scientists alone tells us that. (If any readers honestly need help in finding their way through the fog – self-deluded or deliberate – of the “skeptics” here, please let me know.)

• Austrians/libertarians already knew that much of the climate science is politicized, especially here, not simply because of public funding, but chiefly because all parties – fossil fuel investors seeking to protect a generous status quo, enviros, politicians & bureaucrats, and those seeking greater advantage or more investment climate certainty – are seeking to steer government in particular directions, in ways that may significantly affect all of us. A further factor in such politicization is the simple difficulty that laymen (and scientists) have in wrapping their own heads around the climate science, and for which personal confirmation may take a lifetime. Personal and tribal predilections to hate “environazis”and the like, on the one hand, or to disdain evil capitalists, on the other, has nearly everyone looking reflexively for whatever scrap of science confirms their existing views and/or suits their political preferences.

• The discord among scientists and attempts at gate-keeping are part and parcel of science – publicly-funded or not – but because of the political importance of climate science, we need greater, not less, transparency. The apparent efforts at gate-keeping (seeking to influence what gets published in peer-reviewed journals and what appears in IPCC reports) is what seems most objectionable, but there has been plenty of disagreement and change in views even in the dominant view; the science is and will always remain unsettled. All dissenters have found ways to make their views known, most of which have been examined and found wanting, and few dissenters have mutually coherent views.What has happened is that scientists who are extremely concerned about climate change have felt that political action is needed, and that dissenting views are dangerous distractions, and have made efforts to limit “distractions”. Such a belief appears to have been well-founded, but acting on it in this way a strategic mistake. Greater openness is required for publicly-funded research, particularly here where there is a strong, established and resistant rent-seeking class that seeks to minimize the science and to distract public discussion. While the efforts of climate scientists to provide data to and to address the arguments of “skeptics” would necessarily entail a distracting amount of attention, it is apparent that they simply need to grin and bear it.

• Much – though not all – of the “skepticism” is clearly revealed as an extended, deliberate campaign by fossil fuel interests, dressed up in part by scientists who are non-experts in the field they criticize, with support by “conservatives” and “libertarians” who prefer a massive unmanaged meddling with global ecosystems (and defense of a government-entangled, pro-fossil fuel firms status quo) over a likely expansion of government.

2.  Andrew Revkin’s NYT Dot Earth blog piece and an article at the Guardian both provide useful explanation of background and links.

3.  The related editorial by Brooks Hanson (deputy editor for physical sciences) and has some insightful remarks on the perceived urgency of the problem and how scientists can better interact with the public and policy makers.

4.  Nature, the highly respected British scientific journal, had an interesting (but misguided, I believe) editorial in March that appears to have influenced this letter; here is an excerpt:

Climate scientists are on the defensive, knocked off balance by a re-energized community of global-warming deniers who, by dominating the media agenda, are sowing doubts about the fundamental science. Most researchers find themselves completely out of their league in this kind of battle because it’s only superficially about the science. The real goal is to stoke the angry fires of talk radio, cable news, the blogosphere and the like, all of which feed off of contrarian story lines and seldom make the time to assess facts and weigh evidence. Civility, honesty, fact and perspective are irrelevant.

5.  While scientists have concerns and policy preferences, clearly they are not politically powerful, even as opposition to climate change policy is very solidly grounded in efforts by sophisticated fossil fuel interests to protect investment returns. Here is a brief introduction to the mis-information campaign.

6. The Royal Society of New Zealand has recently posted a statement regarding man’s impact on climate and ecosytems that is also worth review.

7. Roger Pielke, Jr. has some interesting comments; chiefly, he seems to castigate scientists for their poor PR skills – an approach consistent with his penchant for ongoing criticism of scientists (to the approval of “skeptics”), but hasn’t led any scientists to sign Roger up to be their PR coach.

Bill Gates – who clearly must have a screw loose (because all of us smarter people are absolutely sure that puny man can’t possibly affect climate, unless we’re trying intentionally, of course) – continues to invest in geoengineering projects that might be helpful to dampen climate change.

His latest venture? According to a report in Times Online

Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire, is funding research into machines to suck up ten tonnes of seawater every second and spray it upwards. This would seed vast banks of white clouds to reflect the Sun’s rays away from Earth.

The British and American scientists involved do not intend to wait for international rules on technology that deliberately alters the climate. They believe that the weak outcome of December’s climate summit in Copenhagen means that emissions will continue to rise unchecked and that the world urgently needs an alternative strategy to protect itself from global warming.

Many methods of cooling the planet, collectively known as geoengineering, have been proposed. They include rockets to deploy millions of mirrors in the stratosphere and artificial trees to suck carbon dioxide from the air. Most would be prohibitively expensive and could not be deployed for decades.

However, a study last year calculated that a fleet of 1,900 ships costing £5 billion could arrest the rise in temperature by criss-crossing the oceans and spraying seawater from tall funnels to whiten clouds and increase their reflectivity.

Silver Lining, a research body in San Francisco, has received $300,000 (£204,000) from Mr Gates. It will develop machines to convert seawater into microscopic particles capable of being blown up to the cloud level of 1,000 metres. This would whiten clouds by increasing the number of nuclei. The trial would involve ten ships and 10,000sq km (3,800sq miles) of ocean. Armand Neukermanns, who is leading the research, said that whitening clouds was “the most benign form of engineering” because, while it might alter rainfall, the effects would cease soon after the machines were switched off.

To the extent that he’s investing his own money and not twisting anyone else’s arms, I imagine that good libertarians and conservatives are cheering. I mean, hasn’t Gates embarked precisely on the type of bold, we-can-fix-it type of course that George Reisman and Stephan Kinsella have envisioned? And there’s still hope that Gates might finally invest in the pet idea of Dr. Reisman and Stephan of open-air “nuclear winter” testing!

My goodness! Another Frumming at NRO!

So Jim Manzi, a conservative/libertarian and a reasoned critic of cap and trade – who has been retained by NRO and is on the National Review board of trustees – has, by criticizing poor climate science arguments by neocon polemicist Mark Levin, become Public Enemy No. 1!! Could the right do a better job of illustrating Julian Sanchez’s point about the right-wing circle-?

The pirana feeding is on; enjoy the show!

Says Andrew Sullivan:

April 22nd, 2010 @ 04 12
Jim Manzi Is A “Global Warming Zealot”?!
Yes, Jim Manzi, one of the most effective, data-driven critics of cap and trade is described thus on Mark Levin’s Facebook page and all Levin’s fans congratulate him for smacking down a “liberal” and an “eco-Marxist”!

So there you have it. When someone like Manzi is a left-wing zealot, then the right has simply ceased to be in any way rational. The circle has closed.

David Frum:

How wonderful to return to a free country, I thought as I stepped off the plane from Beijing at Washington Dulles. No more censorship, no more official lies, no more kowtowing to high officials who gained power by their mindless repetition of party dogma…

Then alas I opened my browser and read the dump-on-Manzi comments on NRO’s The Corner. Manzi had deviated from the One Correct Way of Mark Levin Thought, and all his former colleagues had been summoned together to Denounce and Struggle Against Him.

Not one stood up to be counted in Manzi’s defense, not even colleagues whom Manzi might have had reason to regard as close personal friends. (Take a second to notice whose bylines are missing from yesterday’s discussions.)

What makes this episode all the more remarkable is that Manzi is actually a member of NR’s board of trustees – i.e., somebody who might claim a little more scope to speak his mind. But even for trustees, there are limits, and Manzi crossed them.

It’s important to understand what exactly the limit is.

Manzi could have safely disputed Levin’s claims on global warming if he had observed a couple of conditions. First, acknowledge Liberty and Tyranny as a good and important book. Second, acknowledge Levin’s “service” (i.e., leadership) of the conservative cause. Third, isolate criticisms to one particular finite point – avoid drawing any larger conclusions – and be sure to wrap any criticisms in a blanket of compliments. Just because one particular chapter happens to be slovenly, ignorant, and hysterical should not lead you to question the intellectual merit of the book as a whole.

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David Frumhttp://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/National-Review-Embroiled-in-Full-On-Civil-War-333

Last week at the NYT, Ross Douthat, himself stirred by Julian Sanchez’s recent perception of a problem of “epistemic closure” (an ideologically sealed news and thought echochamber) on the Right , and threw down a gauntlet to conservative intellectuals:

“Conservative domestic policy would be in better shape if conservative magazines and conservative columnists were more willing to call out Republican politicians (and, to a lesser extent, conservative entertainers) for offering bromides instead of substance, and for pandering instead of grappling with real policy questions.”

In response, an astonishing thing happened: Jim Manzi, a relatively informed and sophisticated commentator on climate policies at Cato (who I’ve disagreed with a number of times and whom Douthat referred to as one of the Right’s “impressive younger thinkers”), took up the challenge and – at NRO’s The Corner – in the heart of “Planet Gore” country, produced an April 21 post that pulled no punches in dismantling the climate change discussion in Mark Levin’s bestselling Liberty and Tyranny. Manzi had the effrontery to refer to Levin’s science discussion as “awful” and “wingnuttery“!

Readers beware, a liberal serving of graphic excerpts of Manzi’s piece follows (emphasis added):

“I’m not expert on many topics the book addresses, so I flipped to its treatment of a subject that I’ve spent some time studying — global warming — in order to see how it treated a controversy in which I’m at least familiar with the various viewpoints and some of the technical detail.

“It was awful. It was so bad that it was like the proverbial clock that chimes 13 times — not only is it obviously wrong, but it is so wrong that it leads you to question every other piece of information it has ever provided.

“Levin argues that human-caused global warming is nothing to worry about, and merely an excuse for the Enviro-Statists (capitalization in the original) to seize more power. It reads like a bunch of pasted-together quotes and stories based on some quick Google searches by somebody who knows very little about the topic, and can’t be bothered to learn. After pages d\evoted to talking about prior global cooling fears, and some ridiculous or cynical comments by advocates for emissions restrictions (and one quote from Richard Lindzen, a very serious climate scientist who disputes the estimated magnitude of the greenhouse effect, but not its existence), he gets to the key question on page 184 (eBook edition):

“‘[D]oes carbon dioxide actually affect temperature levels?’

“Levin does not attempt to answer this question by making a fundamental argument that proceeds from evidence available for common inspection through a defined line of logic to a scientific view. Instead, he argues from authority by citing experts who believe that the answer to this question is pretty much no. Who are they? An associate professor of astrophysics, a geologist, and an astronaut.

“But he says that these are just examples:

“‘There are so many experts who reject the notion of man-made global warming and the historical claims about carbon dioxide they are too numerous to list here.’

“He goes on to cite a petition “rejecting the theory of human-caused global warming” sponsored by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and signed by more than 31,000 scientists. There are a few problems with this survey that Levin doesn’t mention. More than 20,000 of these “scientists” lack PhDs in any field. There was very little quality control: At least one person signed it as Spice Girl Geri Halliwell. Scientific American did the hard work of actually contacting a sample of individual signatories, and estimated that there are about 200 climate scientists who agree with the statement in the petition among the signatories. And most important by far, the text of the petition is not close to Levin’s claim of rejecting the notion of man-made global warming. In the key sentence it says that signatories do not believe that there is compelling scientific evidence that human release of greenhouse gases will cause catastrophic heating and disruption of the earth’s climate. Depending on the definition of “catastrophic,” I could agree to that. Yet I don’t reject the notion of man-made global warming.

“On one side of the scale of Levin’s argument from authority, then, we have three scientists speaking outside their areas of central expertise, plus a dodgy petition. What’s on the other side of the scale that Levin doesn’t mention to his readers?

“Among the organizations that don’t reject the notion of man-made global warming are: the U.S. National Academy of Sciences; The Royal Society; the national science academies of Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, India, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand. Russia, South Africa, and Sweden; the U.S. National Research Council; the American Association for the Advancement of Science; the American Chemical Society; the American Physical Society; the American Geophysical Union; and the World Meteorological Organization. That is, Levin’s argument from authority is empty.

“Of course, this roll call could be arbitrarily long and illustrious, and that does not make them right. Groupthink or corruption is always possible, and maybe the entire global scientific establishment is wrong. Does he think that these various scientists are somehow unaware that Newsweek had an article on global cooling in the 1970s? Or are they aware of the evidence in his book, but are too trapped by their assumptions to be able to incorporate this data rationally? Or does he believe that the whole thing is a con in which thousands of scientists have colluded across decades and continents to fool such gullible naifs as the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, numerous White House science advisors, Margaret Thatcher, and so on? Are the Queen of England and the Trilateral Commission in on it too?

“But what evidence does Levin present for any of this amazing incompetence or conspiracy beyond that already cited? None. He simply moves on to criticisms of proposed solutions. This is wingnuttery.

“[D]espite what intellectuals will often claim, most people (including me) don’t really want their assumptions challenged most of the time (e.g., the most intense readers of automobile ads are people who have just bought the advertised car, because they want to validate their already-made decision). I get that people often want comfort food when they read. Fair enough. But if you’re someone who read this book in order to help you form an honest opinion about global warming, then you were suckered. Liberty and Tyranny does not present a reasoned overview of the global warming debate; it doesn’t even present a reasoned argument for a specific point of view, other than that of willful ignorance. This section of the book is an almost perfect example of epistemic closure.”

Manzi’s piece brought a quick and flabbergasted reactions by NRO neocons Andy McCarthy, Kathryn Jean Lopez and Chris Horner, as noted by Julian Sanchez, Daniel Larison at American Conservative,
and others:

http://www.ordinary-gentlemen.com/2010/04/i-know-mark-levin-and-you-sir-are-no-mark-levin/

http://www.anonymousliberal.com/2010/04/adventures-in-bubble-world.html

Said Larison:

“Jim Manzi made the mistake of taking up this challenge and applying intellectual rigor and honesty to a prominent conservative radio host’s book on a subject he understands fairly well. The inevitable circling-of-the-wagons that has followed illustrates perfectly the problem Manzi was trying to address in Levin’s work. Not only do Manzi’s colleagues automatically defend Levin’s sub-par arguments, but they regard it as horribly bad form to dare criticize those arguments with the vehemence that their poor quality would seem to merit.”

To be honest, I was surprised by Manzi’s bad form as well. That, if not his ideologically weak climate science views, ought certainly to exclude him from commenting at LvMI. On climate science, Hayek be darned: we want conservatives – nay – neocons! – on climate science.

Case in point is Kate Sheppard, reporter on energy and environmental politics in Mother Jones‘ Washington bureau (previously political reporter for Grist.org and a writing fellow at The American Prospect), who has an interesting but shallow piece up called “Most Credible Climate Skeptic Not So Credible After All” (Fri Feb. 26, 2010), which digs into climate scientist/policy-peddler Patrick Michaels, who –  as I have previously noted – acts as a paid mouthpiece for fossil fuel interests.

Sheppard’s piece is fair enough, as far as it goes. That THERE BE RENT-SEEKERS trying to win favors from government surely ought not to be a surprise to any libertarians following the Climate Wars, even though most tend naturally to fall into a partisan camp that makes them acutely aware of the Other Bad Guys while ignoring the self-seeking among the fossil fuel interests and other Well-Intentioned People who are on their own side of the fence.

The climate worriers also have blinders on, and frequently fail to engage in criticisms of the motives and self-seeking in climate change champions (like Gore) and their climate alliance business supporters (though some, like climate scientist Jim Hansen and Greenpeace strongly criticize the porkiness of legislative actions). They also ignore that they, too – like fossil fuel firms – are members of interest groups trying to influence government (on this, I think it is clear that fossil fuel firms, which are seeking to defend existing business turf, are much more powerful, sophisticated and effective than the climate coalitions).

While I have noted that cui bono arguments are fair and unavoidable (and have made a number of them myself), I do regret that the way people fall into partisan camps continues to get in the way of them noticing the very wide area of common ground, which if addressed would bring benefits to both sides.

But if libertarians – who know very well how government ownership and management of resources frustrates private deal-making and leads to politicized battles – cannot themselves break away from politicized battles to try to work for common ground, how can we expect those who think that Big Government is the only solution to the problems created by Big, Bad Corporations (which after all, do benefit from the very unlibertarian grant of limited liability) to do so?

Elinor Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for explicating that trust and communication are key elements by which communities can effectively manage common resources and common problems. Yet it seems that the past few Administrations (and Congress and the Supreme Court) have done a great job of destroying mutual trust and trust In federal government in general. In this climate, the effort to enlist a bulky federal government in climate regulation efforts has provided even further fuel to hose who benefit from polarization.

Is either communication or trust still possible on climate and energy? Maybe, but people have to start seeing that there are reasons to  cooperate. A shared future and ample middle ground seems like good reasons to me.

“Whhhaaat the heck is TT up NOW?” I can hear some of you asking yourselves. Bill Gates, Roger Pielke, the movie Avatar and climate?

Just what elusive illusions am I alluding to here? (Stop playing, you say.) Well, brace yourself, and bear with me.

Roger Pielke, Jr. has a post up regarding a interesting recent piece by Bill Gates on how to address climate issues (I will address Gates’ piece separately). The comment section at Roger’s predictably fell into into the usual patterns of questioning climate science, and a mutual questioning of motives and rationality. I just happened to run into it, and was moved to try to post a few thoughts there.

Libertarians ought to understand why suspicions run rampant on climate issues – even as they can’t seem to get past it (despite my annoying, incessant and level-headed ravings). But many others are so wrapped up in Climate KombatTM that they never think to even to question WHY – why all of the hostility, why all of the circling of wagons, and why the lack of interest in examining root problems and possible win-win approaches?

Well, that’s what my “Avatar” reference is intended to shorthand (pardon an archaic expression; maybe I shouldn’t telegraph my antiquity like this!): that movie was all about theft – theft that we can see all around us even today as I have noted in a number of posts (even as we may be blind to those that advantage us) –  group advantage, and communal responses to threats. Communal responses involve perceiving threats and banding together with brothers to defend all that is good, sacred, holy and OURS. This, I posit, is not only instinctive and reflexive, but EXACTLY what the climate discussion is about, on many levels.

It’s just that the disputants have entirely different views on who is trying to steal what from whom, and what or who is the threat, on who is an enemy, who is a brother, what is to be defended, and on strategy and tactics (as well as how to be advance personal interests).

I penned a few thoughts at Roger’s (I note that both Roger and his father. climate scientist Roger Pielke, Sr. , are in the thick of the climate wars, their own positions frequently being misunderstood in the fog of war). Being a bit inspired and prolix, the Muses ran a bit long. Roger is pretty good at letting comments through but I thought I post a copy here; perhaps you will be amused.

Here is what I tried to post (cleaned up slightly and with additional links and emphasis), in response to several who said to the effect, “Why should we agree to anything, until it is established to our satisfaction that CO2 reduction is important?“, and to others who questioned the motivations of Roger and others:

Those who do not agree now – with either the AGW thesis/science or the good faith, motives, intelligence or rationality of those who profess concern about a clearly changing climate and about whether man’s activities pose serious threats to human welfare and to things
that we value – still have lots to gain from plenty of win-win policies, policies that
would advance the interests of those who profess to love free markets but that are now just sitting about unused because practically everyone is too busy fighting, vilifying and mistrusting to actually step back from the emotional rush of partisan battle, sit back and to
exchange their armor and weapons for thinking caps (more on
these policies at end of this comment).

Nobel-prizewinner
political economist Elinor Ostrom reminds us that one sine qua non for solving
any commons problem is TRUST [see my post here].

Sadly,
that lack of that trust – nay, distrust and active hostility – are what
characterize our “discussions” on modern-day politics, and especially
climate change (the “our” in this case being a complex one at many
levels).

This
DISTRUST is the natural product of many factors:

– the
lack of property rights in the atmosphere & of any legal recourse by
individuals against GHG emitters/albedo changers, which together mean that –
unlike for other resources that can be bought, sold and husbanded – the
voluntary actions of individuals and firms via market exchanges simply are not
functioning, thus forcing climate concerns – and scientists and this discussion
– into the political realm;

 – in
the US, both parties have grossly MIS-governed and abused the public trust, via
political pandering, grasping for power at all costs (cynically sowing division
and cheapening discourse by selling war, hatred and suspicion, corruptly
selling favors to the highest bidders, and simply managing resources
incompetently). As a result, I think many people rightly feel that the US
government generally DOES NOT DESERVE our trust (this sentiment can be seen not
only in the TeaParty movement, but in calls by the likes of Larry Lessig for a
Constitutional Convention to fix our corrupt, broken political system);

 – as
has been the case since corporations were created as the faceless profit-making
machines of wealthy investors whose liability for the damage they do and risks
that they shift to others is limited by statute (http://bit.ly/4CKFPh), those corporations that have
licenses to pollute under current law and whose climate-risk generating
activities are now FREE and unregulated work hard to protect their favored status
(via behind-the-scenes influence-buying of politicians and
“free-market” pundit/voice-pieces, and deliberate PR
smokescreen/mis-direction campaigns designed to GENERATE mistrust);

 –
likewise, other corporations/investors have been busy working to buy climate
legislation that will help to put money in their pockets – while those who act
as spokesmen have not been voluntarily taking actions that show they put their
money (and life-style) where their mouth is;

 – most
of the science has been funded by governments, which makes it easier for
skeptics to dismiss it – and to ignore all of the sophisticated private
institutions and corporations that now strongly agree with the
“warmers” (viz., notably virtually all oil & gas majors and
virtually all insurers);

 – the
fact that the chief “solutions” proposed by our Western governments
are coercive and ham-handed, would serve to further drive basic manufacturing
to developing countries that care even less than we do about respecting
human/property rights, would give further give domestic industry rights to
behave in ways that are seen as harmful, would provide benefits to a host of
favorite insiders while shifting costs to middle and lower income classes, is being agreed behind closed doors (and written up drafted by lobbyists in mind-mumbingly long and opaque legislation) and our leaders lack the moral and political courage to be straight-forward and transparent about the need and purposes of the legislative/regulatory actions;

 –
Mistrust is not only NATURAL, it’s something that we LOVE to do; there is an
undeniable human penchant for viewing issues in a tribal, “us against
them” manner, which reflects a natural cognitive conservatism that means
we subconsciously ignore information that contradicts our pre-existing mental
map of reality, and to a strong tendency to reflexively support our tribal
brothers and “comrades” and to defend our pre-existing views against
what we tend to see as “attacks” by “enemies”;

– this
leads to group-think, black & white views, hostility, self-justification and to strawmen that
ignores the real issues: you know, “they have a religion”, we are
right and act in good faith, they are stupid, irrational, are evil and want to
destroy all we hold dear, versus capitalism is evil, those against cap and trade are
all pawns, of Big Oil and a host of other mantras regarding “truths” that respective group-thinks requires its members to hold as “self-evident”;

– while our moral senses are essential for managing our in-group interactions, unfortunately that lends itself both to moral outrage and to intolerance of the moral preachings and inconsistencies of others;

 – the
“climate” is enormously complex, will never be fully understood or
predictable,  the changes that we
are  forcing in it cannot be simply and
convincing demonstrated or understood by anyone, the system has many
inputs/outputs and displays tremendous variability, has great inertia that is
played out on scales of centuries, 
millennia and eons, and we have NO OTHER EARTHS to run ANY independently
verifiable “TESTS” on … just a number of computer models – again,
funded by governments, and with innards none of us has any real ability to
verify, much less understand;

 –
finally, as climate change is a global issue, it cannot be solved unilaterally
by ANY single individual, group, community, corporation or government/polity;
the “community” that must address it is the community of nations, the leaders and citizens of which all having a welter of differing interests and priorities.

To be flip – Trust
me; it’s natural for you NOT to trust me! Don’t we ALL understand this? (Roger,
I’m pretty sure you – and Joe Romm – know what I mean.)

But the high we get from self-righteousness and group struggle is such an easy
evil, such an addictive self-drug.

Sadly,
it is a clear political tactic by many on the climate issue to treat it as a war, and
to deliberately sow mistrust and misinformation, with the intention either to
defend turf previously purchased from government or to use government to cram
down preferred solutions. But I repeat myself.

Let me
end by noting that

 –
those who are concerned about climate change risks would do well by
fostering not anger but trust, and by seeking to use hammers only to build
bridges;

 –
those who are concerned chiefly with the mis-use of government might do well to
re-examine how government has already been misused, and explore whether there
are ways to harness the passionate “delusions” of evil/stoopid
enviro-fascists to actually achieve goals that self-professed market cultists
(I’m one!) ought to desire;

 – I
have humbly picked up my own hammer and started an exploratory
“task-force” of one, to look at the ways that corporate interests
have already mis-used government to lot in economic rigidity and market share,
and stand in the way of economic freedom and the massive wave of innovation,
investment and wealth-creation that would surely result if existing blockages
were removed. My
chief thoughts are here, intended initially as a plea to fellow libertarians
(who are deeply distrusting of enviro-facists like me who hope to disguise
their nefarious goals by falsely putting on libertarian clothing):

 http://bit.ly/ax3JB

A few
related thoughts at http://bit.ly/aUOcWC (libertarians/climate) and http://bit.ly/bLX25X  (delusion).

Readers, thanks for your indulgence!