Quotulatiousness

June 17, 2012

Narrow specialization, but very wide assumed knowledge

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:11

Tim Worstall on the problem when specialists in one area pretend deep understanding of radically different areas:

Regular readers will know that I’m perfectly happy to take what the climate scientists tell me about climate science. Where I start to stray from the path of green orthodoxy is those same scientists then tell us the economics of what we ought to do about it all. Something they are not competent to comment upon as they really don’t understand the economics. I do accept the economics of climate change as laid out by the economists who have studied the economics of climate change. William Nordhaus, Nick Stern and so on, tell us that if the climate science is right then a simple revenue neutral carbon tax will be the solution.

That’s fine by me. But it does still puzzle me as to why the not economists feel competent to pronounce on the economics of climate change. Are they intellectual supermen who can master two widely different subjects? Simply succumbing to politics: something must be done, this is something, do this? [. . .]

Which leads us to our conclusion. The reason the scientists are so in conflict with what the economists of climate change are saying about the economics of climate change is simply that the scientists are entirely ignorant of what the economists are saying. And I’m afraid that, despite the popularity of the stance among politicians, ignorance is not a notably successful form of governance.

Imaginary “planetary boundaries”

Filed under: Environment, Food, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:08

Matt Ridley on the shift in emphasis for the Rio+20 conference:

The Riocrats now have a new tack, which will dominate next week’s discussion: planetary boundaries. An influential paper in 2009 written by Johan Rockstrom of Stockholm University and 28 colleagues argued that there are nine thresholds, crossing any of which will trigger collapse of the Earth’s life support systems: land-use change, loss of biodiversity, nitrogen and phosphorus levels, water use, ocean acidification, climate change, ozone depletion, aerosol loading and chemical pollution.

The trouble with this approach, according to a new report by Linus Blomqvist, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute in San Francisco, is that, for six of these measures, “there are no global tipping points beyond which these ecological processes will begin to function in fundamentally different ways. Hence the setting of boundaries for these mechanisms is an arbitrary exercise.”

A good example is land-use change. The Rockstrom paper suggested that if human beings convert 15% of the land surface of the Earth to cropland, the world will pass a tipping point, because as marginal land gets exhausted, a small increment in food demand would produce an accelerating increase in cultivation. Currently we cultivate about 11.7% of the land. Yet there is no evidence that anything special happens at 15%. In the words of Steve Bass of the International Institute for Environment and Development in London, “If anything, the opposite has probably been more true: Converting land for farming and for industry has clearly delivered a great deal of well-being.”

[. . .]

The “boundaries” approach needs to incorporate the possibility that, thanks to technology, fossil fuels and minerals, people are already living more lightly on the land than we did in the past.

June 16, 2012

James Lovelock interviewed in the Guardian

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:28

James Lovelock, who is perhaps best known for his “Gaia” theory, gives a somewhat surprising interview to the Guardian:

“Adapt and survive,” he says, when asked why he has decided to move. After more than three decades living amid acres of trees he planted himself by hand, he and his wife Sandy have decided to downsize and move to an old lifeguard’s cottage by the beach in Dorset. “I’m not worried about sea-level rises,” he laughs. “At worst, I think it will be 2ft a century.”

Given that Lovelock predicted in 2006 that by this century’s end “billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable”, this new laissez-faire attitude to our environmental fate smells and sounds like of a screeching handbrake turn.

Indeed, earlier this year he admitted to MSNBC in an interview reported around the world with somewhat mocking headlines along the lines of “Doom-monger recants”, that he had been “extrapolating too far” in reaching such a conclusion and had made a “mistake” in claiming to know with such certainty what will happen to the climate.

[. . .]

Having already upset many environmentalists — for whom he is something of a guru — with his long-time support for nuclear power and his hatred of wind power (he has a picture of a wind turbine on the wall of his study to remind him how “ugly and useless they are”), he is now coming out in favour of “fracking”, the controversial technique for extracting natural gas from the ground. He argues that, while not perfect, it produces far less CO2 than burning coal: “Gas is almost a give-away in the US at the moment. They’ve gone for fracking in a big way. Let’s be pragmatic and sensible and get Britain to switch everything to methane. We should be going mad on it.”

Lovelock says the political fallout from the Fukushima disaster in Japan last year means that the chances of a surge in nuclear power generation are dramatically reduced. “The fear of nuclear is too great after Fukushima and the cost of building plants is very expensive and impractical. And it takes a long time to get them running. It is very obvious in America that fracking took almost no time to get going. There’s only a finite amount of it [in the UK] so before it runs out, we should really be thinking sensibly about what to do next. We rushed into renewable energy without any thought. The schemes are largely hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant. Fracking buys us some time, and we can learn to adapt.”

The reaction in Germany to Fukushima — which announced within weeks of the disaster that it was to shut down all its nuclear power plants by 2022 — particularly infuriates Lovelock: “Germany is a great country and has always been a natural leader of Europe, and so many great ideas, music, art, etc, come out of it, but they have this fatal flaw that they always fall for an ideologue, and Europe has suffered intensely from the last two episodes of that. It looks to me as if the green ideas they have picked up now could be just as damaging. They are burning lignite now to try to make up for switching off nuclear. They call themselves green, but to me this is utter madness.”

Nestled deep into an armchair, Lovelock brushes a biscuit crumb from his lips, and lowers his cup of tea on to the table: “I’m neither strongly left nor right, but I detest the Liberal Democrats.”

[. . .]

Lovelock does not miss a chance to criticise the green movement that has long paid heed to his views. “It’s just the way the humans are that if there’s a cause of some sort, a religion starts forming around it. It just so happens that the green religion is now taking over from the Christian religion. I don’t think people have noticed that, but it’s got all the sort of terms that religions use. The greens use guilt. You can’t win people round by saying they are guilty for putting CO2 in the air.”

June 15, 2012

The horrific environmental scourge of the plastic bag

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:40

Terence Corcoran on Toronto City Council’s most recent brainfart — banning plastic bags — and the actual environmental impact of same:

Meantime, most Canadians, through the media, would be relying on green activists and demagogic politicians who have been promoting plastic bags as a local and national environmental scourge for more than a decade. There’s not enough space here to review the mindset of politicians, including the inhabitants of Toronto city council, who last week voted 27-17 to ban plastic bags by 2013. Most of the bylaw’s backers would be getting their information from professionals, including Dr. Rick Smith, head of Environmental Defense.

[. . .]

Canadians who answer polls should know that Mr. Smith holds a PhD in green bull. He said Canadians know at a “gut level” that plastic bags are a “not terribly complicated environmental issue.” Well, here are three complications:

Litter The last city of Toronto audit of litter across the city, in 2006, found six plastic bags out of 4,341 items. That’s 0.14% by item. By weight, the percentage would be less.

Waste The 450 million plastic bags Mr. Smith mentions is a 2008 number. The city says the current number of bags is now estimated at about 215 million (the science of calculating this is something else). But even the 450 million-bag total, at about six grams per bag, works out to 2,600 tonnes. As a percentage of the city’s estimated 800,000 tonnes of waste, plastic bags would account for 0.3%. If all plastic bags were eliminated — an impossibility given their necessity as garbage-bin liners and other uses — Toronto’s waste stream would be essentially unchanged. Not a penny will be saved, and costs would likely go up under complications brought on by the ban.

Environment Numerous comprehensive studies by people who are as green or greener than Mr. Smith suggest plastic bags are better than the alternatives — whether paper or cloth. Plastic is less polluting and toxic than paper and cotton, according to a 2011 U.K. Environment Agency report. As for global warming, a cloth bag would have to be reused 327 times, and a paper bag nine times, to match the low warming impact of a high-density polyethylene bag that’s reused as a garbage-bin liner.

Perhaps “Dad” is not superfluous after all

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:24

In the National Post, Misty Harris reports that — contrary to certain assertions from the gender war front — fathers actually do have a positive role to play in the lives of their children:

Though the prevailing Father’s Day question is what to get Dad, a new study suggests the more pressing issue is what dads can give in return.

In a long-term analysis of 36 international studies of nearly 11,000 parents and children, researchers have found that a father’s love contributes as much — and sometimes more — to a child’s development as that of a mother, while perceived rejection creates a larger ripple on personality than any other type of experience.

The power of paternal rejection or acceptance is especially strong in cases where the father is seen by his child as having heightened prestige in the family, as this tends to boost his influence.

“In our half-century of international research, we’ve not found any other class of experience that has as strong and consistent an effect on personality as does the experience of rejection — especially by parents in childhood,” says co-author Ronald Rohner, whose study appears in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review.

My relationship with my father was less than positive, and I don’t think I’m mischaracterizing it by calling it “rejection”. However, he did provide me with a useful parenting template: I could usually figure out what to do as a parent by remembering what my own father did … then not doing that.

June 14, 2012

To go where no DIY project has gone before

Filed under: Europe, Space — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:51

In Wired, Dave Mosher has a profile of a fascinating little group with a sky-high goal:

Co-founders von Bengtson, an aerospace scientist and former NASA contractor, and Madsen, an entrepreneur and aerospace engineer, have a lot to be proud of since they founded their non-profit space program four years ago. In June 2011, for example, Copenhagen Suborbital’s army of volunteers successfully built, launched and recovered a 31-foot-tall rocket — the largest “amateur” launcher ever built — with a crash-test dummy tucked inside.

That first prototype ended its flight two miles up, and the organization has yet to check off their ultimate goal: sending a person more than 60 miles above the Earth, a height widely considered the boundary of outer space. But now they are creating a bigger, better and badder space vehicle to get there.

“We have gone from having a crazy idea on a submarine to a smoothly run organization that builds rockets and spacecraft, and has experience with big launches,” said von Bengtson, who also blogs about the project for Wired at Rocket Shop. “It feels like we have become a part of a new era in space. I wouldn’t trade that for anything. Not for millions of dollars.”

June 12, 2012

“It’s the slippery slope consciously deployed as a policy strategy”

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, Liberty, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:50

Shikha Dalmia on Bloomberg’s nanny complex and the underlying cause of it:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposed ban on big sodas in the Big Apple is generating accusations that he is a Nanny Statist. But that’s not quite accurate. A nanny forces others to do things for their own good. Bloomberg is a moral narcissist forcing New Yorkers to do things that make him feel good.

Under his soda ban, street vendors and restaurants would be barred from selling pop in anything over 16-ounce containers on the theory that limiting access to sugary drinks will help combat the city’s obesity and diabetes “epidemics.” No one — not even Bloomberg himself — believes that the ban will actually work, not least because unlimited free refills will remain legal, as will oversized helpings of apple juice and other “natural” beverages with arguably even more sugar. But workability isn’t the point right now. It’s to get the public used to the idea of the government slurping around in your Slurpee, and then to ratchet up. It’s the slippery slope consciously deployed as a policy strategy.

Nor is this Bloomberg’s first foray into minding your own business. He has also cracked down on smoking, salt and trans fats. He has mandated that fast-food joints post calorie counts. He also tried (unsuccessfully) to bar food stamp recipients from buying sodas — one-upping fellow Republicans who want to urine-test welfare recipients to make sure they don’t use their government aid for drugs.

Petty paternalism, “nudging”, and the urge to human perfection

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, Liberty, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:15

The Economist looks at the dietary meddling of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and other forms of “we know what’s better for you” paternalism:

In defence of Michael Bloomberg’s controversial proposal to ban large servings of sugary drinks, Timothy Noah of the New Republic cuts to the chase and plumps for paternalism:

    The truth is that there’s nothing inherently wrong with paternalistic government or, in the harsher, feminized shorthand of its detractors, the “nanny state.” Parents and nannies can be good or bad. No adult likes to be told how to live his life, but most of us benefit from baby authoritarianism far more than we’d like to admit.

Mr Noah’s argument seems to be that there’s nothing wrong with paternalistic measures as long as they actually benefit us. Philosophers sometimes call the form of paternalism Mr Noah has in mind, concerned with bodily health and mental well-being, “welfare paternalism”. Of course, ideas about the human good routinely incorporate moral and theological suppositions, which can take paternalism well beyond concern for physical health and psychological welfare. For example, Torquemada, the infamous Spanish inquisitor, acted paternalistically in torturing individuals to confess their sins insofar as he did so intending to save them from damnation to eternal hellfire, which he believed to be infinitely worse than the pain of the rack. For Torquemada, the true nature of the interests of individuals had been revealed by religious texts and religious authorities, which he no doubt took to be at least as reliable as we take the Journal of the American Medical Association to be. I wonder if Mr Noah would agree that Torquemada did nothing inherently wrong by torturing heretics on the rack in order to elicit confessions and save their eternal souls from infinite suffering. As a matter of fact, the inquisitor’s conception of welfare is false, and so he caused a monstrous quantity of pointless suffering. But what if his facts about our moral and spiritual welfare had been right and that he succeeded in saving many souls? No problem?

June 9, 2012

The future of dining

Filed under: Food, Health, Humour, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:09

What’s the restaurant of choice for Michael Bloomberg and Michelle Obama? Watch what happens when Brian tries to order lunch at Nou Nou D’Enfer!

H/T to Nick Gillespie.

June 8, 2012

Toronto City Council’s latest collective brain-fart

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:01

Terence Corcoran is too kind in his discussion of Toronto’s new ban on plastic bags:

In star-struck liberal green Los Angeles, it took a full-court press by environmental groups, major propaganda efforts, endorsement by the roll-over editorialists at the Los Angeles Times, and deployment of Hollywood stars, such as Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Peter Fonda, to work up the political steam needed to prompt L.A.’s city council to vote last month to ban plastic bags.

In starless Toronto, all it took was a bunch of dumb city councillors who suddenly decided — seemingly out of the blue — to stage a surprise vote.

“Ban the bags,” somebody said. “Good idea. Let’s vote!” Passed: 27 to 17.

No study, no research, no public review, no thought, no concept and no brains. What’s the environmental and fiscal impact of the ban? Nobody knows, although many people say the cost to both the city and the environment will be greater than the cost of using plastic bags.

As I think Adrian MacNair mentioned, one of the most likely outcomes is that people will end up buying less. It’s those little impulse buys that will be curtailed the most, as many folks — especially tourists — won’t have realized they need to bring their own carry bags.

Allergy season strikes

Filed under: Health, Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:43

I’ve had fall and spring allergy issues since I was a teenager. They’re pretty predictable in symptoms: dry, itchy eyes and full sinuses followed by sneezing and/or coughing (depending on which direction the sinus overflow headed). Over the last several years, the intensity of the allergy attacks has steadily declined, which has been great. This week, however, I got the worst symptoms I’ve had in at least a decade and it came on with little warning.

I tried to tough it out for the first couple of days, but as I really wanted to be awake and de-symptomized for the GW2 Beta Weekend Event kicking off later today, I figured I’d better take some allergy medicine. It turns out the only package of Claritin I had is past its use-by date. The unopened package expired in October.

Of 2009

I guess I really have been doing well in the allergy line recently.

June 7, 2012

High-ranking conspiracy or blundering incompetence?

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:21

Tim Worstall explores the range of possibilities:

Viewing the ghastly mess that politics makes of anything, it can be difficult to decide between cock-up and conspiracy theories. Are politicians simply too dim to perceive the effects of what they do, or are they are plotting to make the world a worse place?

Which brings us to where I believe the real climate change conspiracy is: in what we’re told we must do about it all. I’ve pointed out that if we assume that the basic science is correct (and I certainly don’t have either the hubris or technical knowledge to check it) then the answer is a simple carbon tax. The British Government employed Nick Stern to run through what was the correct economic response, assuming the IPCC was correct, and that was his answer. So the question has to be why hasn’t that same government enacted that very solution? Which is, as I say, where I think the conspiracy comes in.

For instead of this simple and workable solution we end up with the most ghastly amount of wibble and dribble.

Consider the subsidies to renewables. Our system gives higher subsidies to the more expensive technologies: clearly ludicrous. We have some limited amount of money, whatever that limit is, and we thus want to get as much renewable power as we can from that limited money. But we give five times more money per unit of power to the most expensive technology, solar, than we do to the cheapest, hydro. What have the politicians been smoking to deliberately spend our money in the most inefficient manner possible?

Or we could look at the argument for subsidy to solar itself: we’re told that it will be economic, comparable to coal-generated power, within only a couple of years. Thus we must have subsidy now – which is insane. If something is about to be profitable without subsidies then we don’t want anyone installing it yet; install it in a couple of years when it is profitable without subsidies. Why waste good money when we can just wait?

Reason.tv: Obesity in America

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:07

June 5, 2012

The US military’s SF research emporium

Filed under: Media, Military, Science, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:18

John Turner sent me a link to this amusing little survey of what the US military’s R&D organization is willing to admit they’re working on and how it might be helpful in case of an alien invasion:

As summer blockbuster season kicks into high gear, big-budget action movies like The Avengers, Battleship, and Prometheus remind us that there’s one thing that unites Americans: Our shared fear of an alien attack. They also remind us that when the invading space fleet arrives, humanity is not going to surrender without a fight to our intergalactic invaders. Instead, we will band together to fight off their incredibly advanced weaponry with our … well, with what, exactly? Are we really ready to battle our would-be alien overlords?

Luckily, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, as well as some of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers, are dreaming up the weapons of the future today. With the help of everything from lasers on jets to hypersonic planes to invisibility cloaks, we just might be able to make the battle for Earth a fair fight. You may think we’re joking, but why else would NASA be uploading The Avengers to the International Space Station if not as a training manual? Here’s a look at some of the most space-worthy inventions being cooked up now.

An issue for any unmanned, armed vehicle (whether land, sea or air) is the security of communications from the controller to the vehicle. Recent use of such devices has almost always been in combat against relatively low-tech opponents who did not have jamming or hacking capabilities (although the UAV forced down in Iran may signal the end of the easy period for combat UAVs). Earlier discussions of benefits and drawbacks to unmanned fighters are here, here, and here.

“We do not know if low salt diets improve or worsen health outcomes”

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:14

You’ve undoubtedly heard lots of recommendations to reduce the salt in your diet, right? The western diet — especially the North American variant — has “too much salt”, and it’s killing us. At least, that’s what has been drummed into our heads for the last twenty years or more. The problem is that is may not actually be true, and in fact may create other health issues:

Although researchers quietly acknowledged that the data were “inconclusive and contradictory” or “inconsistent and contradictory” — two quotes from the cardiologist Jeremiah Stamler, a leading proponent of the eat-less-salt campaign, in 1967 and 1981 — publicly, the link between salt and blood pressure was upgraded from hypothesis to fact.

[. . .]

When researchers have looked at all the relevant trials and tried to make sense of them, they’ve continued to support Dr. Stamler’s “inconsistent and contradictory” assessment. Last year, two such “meta-analyses” were published by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international nonprofit organization founded to conduct unbiased reviews of medical evidence. The first of the two reviews concluded that cutting back “the amount of salt eaten reduces blood pressure, but there is insufficient evidence to confirm the predicted reductions in people dying prematurely or suffering cardiovascular disease.” The second concluded that “we do not know if low salt diets improve or worsen health outcomes.”

The idea that eating less salt can worsen health outcomes may sound bizarre, but it also has biological plausibility and is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, too. A 1972 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the less salt people ate, the higher their levels of a substance secreted by the kidneys, called renin, which set off a physiological cascade of events that seemed to end with an increased risk of heart disease. In this scenario: eat less salt, secrete more renin, get heart disease, die prematurely.

With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death.

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