They don’t admit their mistakes. In particular, they don’t admit when they’ve been conned.
1. Freakonomics
A Headline That Will Make Global-Warming Activists Apoplectic
The BBC is responsible. The article, by the climate correspondent Paul Hudson, is called “What Happened to Global Warming?” Highlights:
For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise. So what on Earth is going on?
And:
According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated. . . . Professor Easterbrook says: “The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling.”
Let the shouting begin. Will Paul Hudson be drummed out of the circle of environmental journalists? Look what happened here, when Al Gore was challenged by a particularly feisty questioner at a conference of environmental journalists.
We have a chapter in SuperFreakonomics about global warming and it too will likely produce a lot of shouting, name-calling, and accusations ranging from idiocy to venality. It is curious that the global-warming arena is so rife with shrillness and ridicule. Where does this shrillness come from? . . .
Ahhh, 2009. We were all so much younger then! We thought global warming was an open question. We used the word “shrill” unironically. We can’t be blamed for our youthful follies.
Sure, back in 2009 when Dubner was writing about “A Headline That Will Make Global-Warming Activists Apoplectic,” and Don Easterbrook was “virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling,” the actual climate-science experts were telling us that things would be getting hotter. The experts were pointing out that oft-repeated claims such as “For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures . . .” were pivoting off the single data point of 1998, but Dubner and Levitt didn’t want to hear it. Fiddling while the planet burns, one might say.
It’s not that the experts are always right, but it can make sense to listen to their reasoning instead of going on about apoplectic activists, feisty questioners, and shrillness.
But everyone makes mistakes. What bothers me about the Freaknomics team is not that they screwed up in 2009 but that they never seemed to have corrected themselves, or even realized how screwed up they were.
I found this interview from 2015 where one of the Freakonomics authors said:
I tell you what we were guilty of . . . We made fun of the environmentalists for getting upset about some other problem that turned out not to be true. But we didn’t do it with enough reverence, or enough shame and guilt. And I think we pointed out that it’s completely totally and actually much more religion than science. I mean what are you going to do about that? I think that’s just a fact.
Typical nudgelord behavior. Yammering on about how rational they are, how special it is to think like an economist, but not willing to come to terms with their own mistakes. Best defense is a good offense, don’t give an inch, etc. I hate that crap.
Just to be clear, I don’t think that the Freakonomics authors are currently pushing any climate change denial—sorry, “heresy.” They appear to have been convinced by all the evidence that’s convinced everyone else (for example, the rise in temperatures that contradicts the earlier claim they were pushing about some climate pattern “virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling”).
Their problem is not of hanging on to an earlier mistake but of not acknowledging it, not wrestling with it.
We learn from our mistakes. But only when we’re willing to learn.
Or, to put it another way: We are all sinners. But we can only be redeemed when we confront the sins within ourselves.
2. Nudge
From the celebrated book from 2008:
Brian Wansink . . . hmmm, where have we heard that name before?
But, sure, everybody makes mistakes. The Nudge authors were fooled by Wansink and his “masterpieces” of science fiction, but so were NPR, New York Times, Ted, and lots of other institutions. The Bush administration hired Wansink, but then again the Obama administration hired one of the Nudge authors. Getting conned was a bipartisan thing.
I assume the Nudge authors don’t believe Wansink now. But my problem with them is the same as my problem with the Freakonomists: no reckoning with the past. Given the hype they showered up on the now-disgraced food researcher (they described one of his experiments as “fiendish,” which I guess is more accurate than they realized), and given that they have had the time to smear their critics by analogizing them to the former East German secret police, you’d think they could’ve taken a few hours, sometime in the past couple of years, to come to terms with the fact that . . . they. got. conned. By an Ivy League professor. How embarrassing. Best not to talk about it.
But we should talk about it. We can learn from our mistakes, if we’re willing to do so.
Look. My point is not that everything in Nudge is wrong, or even that most of the things in Nudge are wrong. As the joke goes, all we know is that at least one sheep in Scotland is black on at least one side. That’s not the point. The point is that, if the Nudge recommendations are based on evidence, and some of the star evidence has been faked, maybe it’s worth reassessing your standards of evidence.
3. The Nudgelords
It’s embarrassing to admit you’ve been conned. I get it. But . . . get over it!
Or, you might think: This is yesterday’s news. The Freakonomics authors have moved on from climate change denial and the Nudge authors have left the school lunchroom behind. So why can’t we?
The reason why we can’t move on—why we shouldn’t move on—is because of the next time. And there will be a next time that these Nudgelords are swept up in enthusiasm for some idea promoted by a suave storyteller who’s unconstrained by the rules of scientific truth.
I can’t trust the Nudgelords because, if they can’t come to terms with how they got fooled last time, why should I think they won’t get fooled next time, in the very same way?
“We can learn from our mistakes, if we’re willing to do so.”
What an ironic post. Seen these?
https://climateaudit.org/2021/08/11/the-ipcc-ar6-hockeystick/
https://climateaudit.org/2021/08/15/pages19-asian-tree-ring-chronologies/
Too bad the linked piece contains childish jibes, but the claims should be refuted, not ignored.
Matt:
I don’t think there is any content in your phrase “childish jibes.” I mean, sure, consider my statements to be childish or not, consider them to be jibes or not, whatever. What’s relevant is the content.
I am bothered by the Freaknonomics and Nudge people because they have:
(a) made loud endorsements of ridiculous claims and then
(b) not confronted their errors.
It was a mistake for them to do step (a)—even at the time, it would’ve made sense to have been skeptical of those claims. But their real mistake is in step (b): not coming face-to-face with their errors and trying to learn from what went on. That’s the subject of my post. I guess that your links are supportive of this point, in that neither of these links suggests that we’re in the middle of a 30-year period of global cooling, nor do they support the claims of Brian Wansink.
“I don’t think there is any content in your phrase “childish jibes.”
Oops. I was not referring to what you wrote or linked to, although I can see why you thought that I was. I was referring to the childish jibes about “wokeness” in the two blog posts I linked to. Sorry about that.
As to this:
“(a) made loud endorsements of ridiculous claims and then
(b) not confronted their errors.”
Climate scientists, in particular the uber-Nudgelord Michael Mann, have made loud endorsements of Mann’s hockeystick for 20 years now. And they have not confronted their errors, they have doubled down. These are not just nitpicks, there is no hockeystick in the proxy data. The errors have become features, and they cover every aspect of bad statistics that have been covered in this blog:
1. The underlying data looks NOTHING like the published curve.
2. Methods are not disclosed.
3. Data is not archived.
4. Pal review.
5. Post hoc screening and and other forms of cherrypicking.
6. Doubling down on critics.
At this point, it is pretty obvious that you and the rest of the statistics community want no part in this battle. Everyone saw what happened to Wegman when he tried to insert some statistical sanity. But to focus on a stupid statement by Don Easterbrook, a retired glaciologist, and simply ignore the antics by Mann and the hockey team…let’s just say that it does not reflect well.
New here I guess? Perhaps you should search this blog for “Wegman”. He wasn’t inserting statistical sanity, he was reinforcing statistical inanity.
Speaking only for myself: I haven’t looked into the Hockey Stick in any detail, although I’ve read the Wikipedia article about it and have read some of McIntyre’s stuff. At this point it’s hard to get all that interested in it, especially in McIntyre’s critiques, because the evidence is so strong that the climate is indeed changing in pretty much the way the climate scientists have been saying for thirty years. Twenty years ago the signal was weak enough that maybe we needed paleoclimatology to see if it was happening, but at this point it just seems kind of silly to argue that it isn’t….and since it is definitely happening then well, I won’t say “who cares if the hockey stick is based on bad data or bad analysis” — it’s never good for science if incorrect data or analysis are propagated — but it really seems like a sideshow. McIntyre is starting to seem like a Flat Earther arguing that a specific piece of evidence for a spherical earth is seriously flawed.
I’m skeptical that all of the people who have confirmed the basic “hockey stick” shape of temperatures are shady or stupid — if I had to bet, I’d bet that McIntyre is the one who has this all wrong — but at this point, from the standpoint of whether climate change is or isn’t happening, it really doesn’t matter: the climate change signal has been well out of the noise for a while now.
+1 Phil. I mean, lift your eyes, look around,
More like 50+ years:
THERMAL EQUILIBRIUM OF ATMOSPHERE WITH A GIVEN DISTRIBUTION OF RELATIVE HUMIDITY
By:MANABE, S (MANABE, S); WETHERAL.RT (WETHERAL.RT), JOURNAL OF THE ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCES, Volume: 24, Issue: 3,Pages: 241-&
DOI: 10.1175/1520-0469(1967)0242.0.CO;2, Published: 1967
54 years actually. This is origin of the key climate model; in that it’s the iconic paper from whence all other acceptable climate models derive. If another model deviates too much from this paper you’re in “denial”, a “flat earther”, or “fossil fuel shill”, … The model was modified in the 1970s to add all the other radiatively active gases. It was modified again in 1981 by James Hansen. Finally “finished” 2001 by Held & Soden. Supporters call it “theory”, but it’s not even a hypothesis – since it never had any test criteria (proposed validations and falsifications). Model supporters refuse to discuss such tests. They refer to their model as “settled science”, or “simple physics”. Read the paper, and convince yourself the science is “settled”. I think most people reading that paper will laugh at it; or just scratch their heads. Which may explain why it’s only encountered today buried in climate model code. Here are some weaknesses of the model(s): https://greenfallacies.blogspot.com/2020/10/destroying-greenhouse-gas-conjecture.html
Matt:
I don’t have any respect for Wegman, given his repeated penchant for plagiarism and writing gobbledygook. I don’t care at all about “Don Easterbrook, a retired glaciologist,” but I do care about Freakonomics, partly because they could do better and partly because they’re a prominent part of the Ted-NPR media-industrial complex. Finally, I write to inform and to entertain. My goal is not to “reflect well.” It would make me happy if the Freakonomics crew were to confront their errors and learn from them, rather than denying their mistakes or acting as if they never happened.
Matt –
> What an ironic post. Seen these?
Whatabout is a weak logical frame.
More importantly, it’s a non-sequitur.
Just based on the most fundamental principles, it seems to me, talk about decades of cooling based on SATs only (given the importance of ocean heat content) would be something the Freaks should consider revisiting.
As would, perhaps, their focus on “activists” as a meaningful way to interrogate the science. But that’s probably less statistics adjacent.
Do you disagee?
I have to admit I was morbidly curious so I clicked on the first link, got an immediate ‘some random guy ranting about climate science on teh inter webs’ vibe and moved on. Strong filtering.
I don’t see what the freakonomics guys are doing is in any way different from what you are doing right here.
As humans who got lots of flak for their choices about global warming it’s only natural for them to focus on whether they made the right epistemic choice. They aren’t hanging on to any wrong factual claim but (as the context of 2015 quote makes clear) arguing that they made reasonable choices in assembling their book.
Ok, fine, maybe you don’t care about that and want them to talk about what (I think they assume) was wrong with the specific facts they cited…but given they have gotten lots of flak about this issue of the reasonability of their decisions (even if their estimates weren’t born out) what’s wrong with them focusing on that? I mean you are focusing on an issue you want to talk about here and certainly not summarizing all past claims in posts to correct every wrong one (even if unimportant) here.
If freakonomics was part of the primary literature and thus was spoiling the research record then yah you gotta academic up and take your lumps but a bunch of strongly supported facts about specific issues was never the point of freakonomics.
I mean I’d certainly find it better if they were more public and open about their fuckups but this doesn’t seem like a case where they have any special duty to do that so why would it affect how I judge their future suggestions/ideas.
(And I always take them to be, except on the abortion claim, more pushing different ways to think about it than a hard factual line about where evid ultimately comes down). But I admit this can be too blurry a distinction.
“They aren’t hanging on to any wrong factual claim but (as the context of 2015 quote makes clear) arguing that they made reasonable choices in assembling their book.”
That in itself is hanging on to a wrong factual claim, because “thirty years of cooling” and their dismissal of mainstream climate science was not a reasonable choice at the time. It was “earth is flat” level baloney. Which is why they were skewered by those with any knowledge of the complexity of our climate system, and the fact that natural variability around the trend was expected, predicted, an emergent property of all of the leading climate models, etc.
Well, he’s not exactly ‘some random guy.’ Rather he appears to have strong math and statistics skills.
The Wikipedia bio seems reasonably balanced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_McIntyre
He’s a fan of both R (https://climateaudit.org/2009/06/12/a-small-victory-for-the-r-philosophy/) and of reproducible science. He’d fit in on this blog.
Bob76
McIntyre is a “fan” of reproducible science in a very narrow and uninteresting sense. His “audit” nitpicks details that are entirely uninformative, while ignoring replications that are actually informative. He’d fit in here about as well as the gremlin guy.
I’m not so sure. Out of curiosity, I took a look at his famous critique and he seems to have a lot of trouble understanding PCA.
You might want to check out his Twitter feed.
Everyone is entitled to have political views of course, but given that he’s as much of a political activist as he is, you might want to consider whether his politics influences his science.
It’s also pretty funny given the Freak Guys’ take on activism and climate science.
Here’s just a small taste: https://twitter.com/ClimateAudit/status/1427007345981284354?s=20
This might be of interest also:
https://archive.ph/2021.08.17-144057/http://www.hi-izuru.org/wp_blog/2017/12/nazi-nazi-nazi/
McIntyre’s history suggests that strong math and statistics skill are not a strong predictor of honesty.
“Whatabout” can be a diversionary change of topic, or a perfectly sound argument demanding parity of reasoning. More often, I think, the latter.
Somewhat relevant to this post, has McIntyre ever admitted that the original M+M critique of the “hockey stick” was not just wrong but also misleading to the point of outright fraud? Has he admitted the Wegman report is wrong? Has he learned from his mistakes, or has he just keep ranting about details that don’t actually make a difference in the conclusions?
McIntyre has been refuted, over and over again. He doesn’t learn from his mistakes, he doesn’t want to. At some point ignoring him is the only rational strategy.
No, he has not.
He also, AFAIK, has not admitted that when he couldn’t get internet access in an airport once that he wasn’t actually being targeted because of who he is, something he ranted about even when some of his ardent admirers who understand such things told him he was being paranoid.
Nor has he admitted that when he was blocked by an admin from downloading a huge dataset from a NASA server using multiple parallel requests, because this was a violation of their terms of service, that he wasn’t actually being blocked because of who he is. Nor that he was told at the time about how he could get access to the data without violating their TOS.
He’s an interesting guy, in a somewhat unflattering definition of the word.
I am curious if you have a reference for him being blocked by NASA. We are not NASA, but we run into this all the time, people using multiple parallel requests to obtain large datasets. AWS and the like allow people to be even sneakier, as it is very easy to spin up a while lot of instances.
I had the details wrong, he was running an automatic downloader to scrape the GISS site (which is part of NASA), but not in parallel. The problem was made worse by the fact that he was trying to download dynamically generated, rather that static, data.
His program was ignoring the robots.txt file on the site and blocked after 16,000 requests.
His post on this actually resulted in some reasonable, informed responses from his fan club, such as the following:
“It appears that your R program indeed constitutes a “robot”
as that term is used in the context described.
Also, the files, such as the “monthly data as text” files,
that you download, are not stored as “permanent” files at
GISS, they are generated dynamically in response to a
request for them. So, your program is not only loading their
system with thousands of downloads, but also with thousands
of executions of programs to generate the files to be
downloaded.
Perhaps you might request copies of their programs which
generate those files from the GHCN and USHCN input data.”
https://climateaudit.org/2007/05/17/giss-blocks-data-access/
Thanks. Yes that is what we do also (we are government but not NASA). Usually people want a substitute of the data, or the data in a different format, so that every request starts an executable. “Glad” to see NASA has this problem also. We waste a lot of time dealing with such things.
I got bit by autocorrect, the should be “subset” not “substitute”.
“McIntyre has been refuted, over and over again.”
Nonsense.
I happen to despise the guy, he is a creepy conspiracy theorist. But his work has not been refuted. In trying to guess Mann’s undisclosed methodology, he made a few wrong guesses, but that all happened a long time ago. The salient facts have not changed: the underlying proxy data do not add up to a hockey stick. In fact, they add up to a flat line.
“The salient facts have not changed: the underlying proxy data do not add up to a hockey stick. In fact, they add up to a flat line.”
Well, yeah, if you believe everything you read – or post – in “Watts Up With That”.
Those who pay attention to science, including the long parade of papers using other proxies written by other researchers, know that the “hockey stick” has been replicated many, many times.
different from what you are doing right here.
As humans who got lots of flak for their choices about global warming it’s only natural for them to focus on whether they made the right epistemic choice. They aren’t hanging on to any wrong factual claim but (as the context of 2015 quote makes clear) arguing that they made reasonable choices in assembling their book.
Ok, fine, maybe you don’t care about that and want them to talk about what (I think they assume) was wrong with the specific facts they cited…but given they have gotten lots of flak about this issue of the reasonability of their decisions (even if their estimates weren’t born out) what’s wrong with them focusing on that? I mean you are focusing on an issue you want to talk about here and certainly not summarizing all past claims in posts to correct every wrong one (even if unimportant) here.
If freakonomics was part of the primary literature and thus was spoiling the research record then yah you gotta academic up and take your lumps but a bunch of strongly supported facts about specific issues was never the point of freakonomics.
I mean I’d certainly find it better if they were more public and open about their fuckups but this doesn’t seem like a case where they have any special duty to do that so why would it affect how I judge their future suggestions/ideas.
(And I always take them to be, except on the abortion claim, more pushing different ways to think about it than a hard factual line about where evid ultimately comes down). But I admit this can be too blurry a distinction.
First part of that sentence should have been “I don’t see what they are doing which is different from what you are doing in this post right now (focusing on the issues you want to focus on rather than taking the time to explicitly indicate places you’ve made mistakes in the past even when it’s obvious).
Peter:
Nobody has a duty to do anything here, but I think the Freaknomics guys and the Nudge guys are letting themselves down by not confronting their errors. They’re losing an opportunity to learn from their mistakes. It makes me sad. Also they have large and influential audiences and they’re losing the opportunity to educate these audiences on how these mistakes can happen. Sure, I understand that people don’t like to talk about failures. But I think this choice of not talking about failure is a mistake, hence the above post.
Large and influential audiences aren’t interested in “how mistakes can happen”. Nor for that matter are the small and the meek audiences. They want to get their jollies seeing how the next sucker picks up the worthless or depreciating nickel. Like the kid who gulps down a glass of spoiled milk, lets everyone see how pleased he is, his thirst slaked; just so his stuck-up older sister would drink hers; so he could see her rush from the table to the toilet to throw it up!
“Their mistakes”. So far as they see it, there are no mistakes; or rather, whatever pontificating sells more books is no mistake: what makes their stock go up is no mistake. There certainly can no consequence to it. The third or fourth rate academic pontificator would never dare to get himself into a scrape where he’s got to give *concrete* direction. He’s not going to suffer pangs if his advises aren’t taken or if they’re badly wrong and they’re taken. He hasn’t really got anything concrete to say to anyone about anything. Is “Linda the Bank Teller” going to suffer personally because of the chapters and volumes of academic chatter about the snap-judgements everyone makes about her? Does anyone steal the draft ms for these books and sell them to the underworld or the Chinese; as if whomever holds those recondite secrets within (that people misjudge what they see, that intuition sometimes fails in peculiar ways, and so forth) holds the key to the ages? No consequence. Academic cocktail-bar pianists; never mind what they have to say, it can no more be right than it can be wrong; but the stock can only go up — which is damn right by them. It’s not even like giving some hayseed out-of-towner wrong traffic directions out of boredom or schadenfreude or just sheer inattention or ineptitude (blame the GPS). There’s certainly nothing at all that’ll come back at the pomaded book-circuit lecturer like what happens in the private conscience of an ER doctor who realizes — say — he’d failed to see that hairline fracture in the old lady who’d come in after a fall from a bicycle (she said she was basically ok, tho’ it hurt) and he said ‘you’re good to go, but be more careful won’t you?’ when she was admitted a week later after the thing had just separated spontaneously along that crack. Or the cop who told the fighting couple, ‘simmer down already, you’re keeping the neighbors up’ and left, not really sure whether what he saw in the man’s face was contrition or … something inexplicable; when the senior lead the next roll let him know the guy had on the very next day burned down the house with the both of them in it. Or the first officer who’s too deferential to the chief pilot and doesn’t hold him to the checklist so they both forget they didn’t trim the trailing slats on takeoff and the plane struck that lamppost in the rental yard just 400 feet past the end of the runway …. The scribbler and the pomaded lecture-circuit pontificator hasn’t got to face risks like that, tho’ his advises would *appear* to be dense and critical and multiplicative leaping from domain to domain in his giant magic fleeced boots. Has he got an opportunity to learn from his mistakes? No mistakes. No opportunity. The stock can only go up!
More generally, isn’t using the fact that a few visible individuals in the nudge fields haven’t been as virtuous in admitting mistakes as you would like as a reason to distrust the Nudgelords generally going forward equally well the kind of thing someone could argue was a failure of perfect rationality. Since, as you note, we are all very fallible and none of us is as eager to acknowledge mistakes or otherwise correct the record as we would ideally be I guess I don’t why pointing out that they aren’t perfectly rational is supposed to be informative. I mean it seems like non-news absent some reason to believe they had taken their reluctance to admit mistakes outside the normal range we see everywhere all the time.
I mean yes, I’d feel even better if I new that someone would very publicly announce ‘Fuck, I was wrong’ if they try and share their views about nudges and then discover they were incorrect. That way I don’t need to worry I’ll miss the new evidence and be left mistaken. But that doesn’t mean I should assign lower credences to novel claims about nudges.
Peter:
It makes sense to have lower credence about novel claims about nudges, given that (a) many of the previous claims were so wrong, and (b) we were pushed by authority figures such as Kahneman to believe those claims in spite of their implausibility. As the saying goes, just cos something’s counterintuitive, that doesn’t make it true. More formally there’s the piranha argument.
The Freakonomics guys are not nudge lords; they’re regular non-behavioral economists. But they do absolutely need to learn to admit errors. Steven Levitt once told me that when criticized the only way to respond is to attack back twice as hard, so I doubt he’s going to change. It’s definitely reprehensible.
It’s silly to group claims into the category of “nudges” for the purpose of judging novel claims. Is it an illustration of a well-established theory/theories of behavior supported by a large experimental literature, such as that providing information about others’ behavior will influence behavior? Probably true. Is it a new framing effect without theoretical motivation? Be skeptical until replicated.
“Be skeptical until replicated.”
Multiple times. Science **IS** replication.
I hate the term “Nudgelords.”
Why? Just cos a derisive nickname is rude and distracts from the substantive points that I’m trying to make, also cos I wouldn’t like it if someone were to do that to me, etc?
“Nudgelords” is perfect. “Glibertarian”-level.
I don’t like “Nudgelords” because:
1. “Nudges” can actually work: people really do accept the defaults. “Nudgelords” sounds like it is mocking the whole concept.
2. These guys aren’t ‘lords’ of anything, except maybe hype. You could call them Hypelords, I wouldn’t object. I don’t think they have any real power.
3. Yes, it distracts from your substantive points. It makes you sound a bit juvenile, the way people who compare you to the Stasi or sound juvenile.
4. Maybe there’s something else about it that just rubs me the wrong way. I feel like 1-3 are the main issues but maybe there’s something more, I dunno, aesthetic about it; it just bugs me.
Sounds like Fudgelords?
Name calling weakens the argument severely in my view. The argument isn’t strong enough without the pejorative evidently.
And given that the decision is revealed at the beginning there is really no need to listen to the rest. Easy to see this but hard to practice.
Morris:
I did use an amusing neologism (which some people such as Phil don’t like, but them’s the breaks) and I also presented specific arguments.
You say my argument “isn’t strong enough.” Is there anything in particular you disagree with in my post? Maybe you think we are actually in the middle of 30 years of global cooling? Or maybe you think the claims of Brian Wansink are accurate?
It seems I offended or challenged you from your reaction. I’m sorry if I did b/c that certainly as not the intent.I do not disagree with your post and certainly do not think we are in a cooling period or care about Wansink.
My comment was really addressed to myself as I find myself occasionally resorting to name calling despite trying not to. But I do think that my point is in the right direction. Apologies.
A noodge ees a noodge ees a noodge (I think my bubbie might have repeated that more than 3 times in any one complaint about someone, but, well …. yeah).
I can see several of the perspectives discussed here about the lords of nudgedom and sure, on one side I would agree that the point of Freako*** was, more than not, promoting a more robust need for critical analytic thought.
But, like Andrew, with respect to the question ‘How much kvetching resources should we put into it?’. I think ‘influencers’ like the above do indeed have an ethical charge to be transparent about past errors, particularly if their audience decides to take some of their conclusions, with undisclosed errata, as axiomatic.
What is the likelihood that a person within Freakonomics 2013 stated market demographic on their podcast (https://freakonomics.com/2013/03/13/who-listens-to-freakonomics-radio-here-are-the-survey-results/#:~:text=Our%20listeners%20are%2C%20in%20a,%24150%2C000%20and%20another%2023%25%20earn) – and rightly or wrongly assuming that the audience demographic is reasonably similar – that they would strongly incorporate their beliefs with conclusions, which later turn out to be wrong, and whose context involves very sensitive world matters?
It’s ironic because both Nudge and Freako (to more extent the latter) are underpinning the need for more robust skepticism in today’s society. But a general tenant of healthy skepticism should be to additionally question one’s own sanity. So yeah, I feel as though the aforementioned influencers should indeed be transparent about conclusions that didn’t really pan out.
Misses and failures in any scientific endeavor are IMO even more important than the successes, as they act as the crow’s nest lookout to help others navigate uncertain waters.
I like “nudgelords”. To me the term alludes to:
a) the “we know what’s best for the rabble” arrogance;
b) the ultimate arrogance in that they’re so sure they know what’s right for the rabble that they don’t even care if their method works or not – the scientific process is just a formal confirmation, not an actual test of validity! They know best anyway, so why worry about the method?
c) the comical stupidity of the virgin-birth-style claim that a small breath can grow itself into a hurricane – for the just cause of what the Nudgelords believe.
All in all it makes me think of the mighty Don Quixote or Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
I wonder if that Nudge passage got cut in the new edition… Quick search at Amazon suggests yes, but not sure if it includes the whole book.
Dean:
It did get removed in the new edition . . . actually, I have a post on that too, scheduled for Dec or Jan, I think?
Andrew has mentioned that a common trope with (some) economists is the assumption that all behavior is rational, but most people erroneously fail to recognize it while the economists do. The economist’s paradoxical job is to rectify the shortcomings in others’ rationality, predicated on the economic insight that they are more rational than they think. (Everyone is rational, but some are more rational than others.)
A wing of behavioral economics goes one step further and argues that a lot of the choices people make are actually irrational and that, as specialists in rationality, economists are the ones to set them right. Since acting rationally will, by definition, make you better off, it shouldn’t usually take much persuading to get people on the rational path, so a nudge may do it.
The problems of the “nudgelords” (not happy with this term) are twofold. First, they are too quick to believe any study that confirms their view of the rest of humanity (not them) as beset by irrationalities. Second, since their unspoken assumption is that *they* are above such flaws (which allows them to perform reliable diagnoses on the rest of us), they are unwilling to confront their own limitations and learn from their mistakes.
I guess the point is that the problems Andrew is pointing to are not idiosyncratic shortcomings of a few errant academics but built into the framework. Of course, people might be attracted to that framework because of pre-existing inclinations.
The Social Psychology of Idiocracy …. should be a yet-to-be-conceived bestseller :)
I agree with your frustration with the Freakonomics team. But I’d argue that this problem of making mistakes and not owning up to them is pretty much universal. The New York Times, for example, is pretty terrible in this respect. I see examples of stats errors in their reporting every day. And I’m not even counting how their journalists take results from a single paper and trumpet it as definitive “proof”, but only if it corresponds to the NY Times’s editorial line. It seems to be getting even worse recently with the proliferation of “Analysis” pieces. I think that the fundamental problem here is that most journalists are not trained in statistics. Thus they examine exactly the same phenomena as social scientists, but they are ignorant to the most basic tools of social science. It’s no wonder they make a lot of mistakes. It’s like somebody explaining Shakespeare who never learned how to read.
Pretty universal indeed. Even, as I’ve discovered to my horror, among those who’ve explicitly advocated “owning up” and other Cliffordian epistemological standards.
And Dubner is just a journalist rather than a social scientist, so I don’t think he merits the title “Nudgelord” whether for good or ill.
Wonks:
Dubner is a nudgelord in the sense that he’s coming in from a position of authority (in this case, as a bestselling author, NPR media figure, and friend of prominent academics) to push the idea of making policy based on questionable social science research (or, in the case of that climate example, questionable physics research). He’s also nudgelord-like in the sense of promoting the science-as-hero narrative.
Re Gulic:
This is soooo frustrating when you live in the lightly informed Acela world in which NYT and NPR (especially! Because it no longer airs “editorials’) are revered as transparent communicators of the straight facts of the world, so much so that people repeat NYT and NPR stories as truths they ‘know” often without even remembering where they heard or read them.
Saying, “Uh, no, I don’t believe that, and I’ve done a lot of reading of the underlying evidence” makes you sound to people in this world like someone who sits in his parents’ basement reading Newsmax or the dark web. (“Oh, did you read that on one of your … BLOGS?”).
Here’s another reason to be careful about the (psych-side of the) nudge literature: http://datacolada.org/98, and, relatedly, this one: https://retractionwatch.com/2021/07/29/prominent-behavioral-scientists-paper-earns-an-expression-of-concern/
Wow.
this is worth a post of its own
I agree. Two items are worth pointing out. From footnote 14 in the dataColada post: “There were, however, two mistakes in the data file that Dan sent to Nina, mistakes that Nina identified. First, the effect observed in the data file that Nina received was in the opposite direction from the paper’s hypothesis. When Nina asked Dan about this, he wrote that when preparing the dataset for her he had changed the condition labels to be more descriptive and in that process had switched the meaning of the conditions, and that Nina should swap the labels back. Nina did so. ” And from the retractionwatch post: “Most of all, I wish I kept records of what statistical analysis I did. …That’s the biggest fault of my own, that I just don’t keep enough records of what I do.”
Wow, the lead is buried all the way to the bottom of the comment thread. While the admission that ““Most of all, I wish I kept records of what statistical analysis I did. …That’s the biggest fault of my own, that I just don’t keep enough records of what I do.” is embarrassing, it also distracts from the real issue. What’s lost is lost but it doesn’t matter. These authors should report what the results are based on what they would do today, not what they did in the past.
Good post, Andrew.
Watch out, though — skepticism of authoritarian nudgers sounds awwwwwwfully close to something that might come out of the Hoover Institution.
The:
I’m happy to stand with Hoover on this one!
The Hoover Institute is all fun and games until they send their scientific entertainers to advise and run your state’s public health system…
Climate science went wrong in 1988 when the IPCC was formed by UNFCCC. The brief of new IPCC was to investigate man-made global warming ONLY. In the same year, UNFCCC also recruited every green NGO to be shock troops to promote the man-made climate agenda. IPCC scientific reports dismiss the role of sun in climate change. They entirely discount the variable solar wind. For example, in AR6, on the same page as the (new) Hockey Stick, the report says the sun makes ZERO contribution to climate change.
In the IPCC publication process, the “Summary for Policymakers”, SPM, is completed first. It is entirely written by policymakers – who are political representatives, not “scientists”. Next key aspects of the language of the scientific reports is altered to conform with the SPM.
This has been going on for 33 years. It went really bad after 1995 (with the garbage Santer paper). So it’s been really bad for 26 years now.
“pushing any climate change denial”
<- I call it asking for evidence. There is no evidence for a greenhouse gas effect. There are just bad models, which claim to simulate earth's climate but don't. Am I being unreasonable "asking for evidence"? Isn't evidence supposed to be the foundation stone for science? During 8 years of Obama, over $3 billion per year, on average, was allocated to climate science research. $24 billion. What evidence did they get for a greenhouse gas effect, warming earth's surface by an average 32C? They never bothered because their apologists were busing calling every critic, auditor and skeptic: "climate deniar", "shill", and "flat earther".
Who thinks it may have been a better idea to spend the $24 billion (at least), on some actually useful science; rather than throwing it away on climate models which amount to bias, group-think, ignore the role of the sun, and are not audited nor validated in any way?
climate.nasa.gov/evidence
https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/climate-change-evidence-causes/basics-of-climate-change/
climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/what-evidence-exists-earth-warming-and-humans-are-main-cause
Mark:
Here is the argument rebutting yours? What are they getting wrong?
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/couldnt-sun-be-cause-global-warming
“They don’t admit their mistakes. In particular, they don’t admit when they’ve been conned.”
<- This is because the agenda is politically driven. The purpose is to drive policy; not to establish "truth". So the policy-makers exaggerate and simplify from the start. So even before they make any mistakes they're wrapped up in their own spin. It follows that no one can be allowed to question the evidence, or reasoning, or diktats, because that will cast doubt on the policy.
Mark:
This blog really isn’t the best place for these sorts of statements, for various reasons including the links offered by the other commenters above. Your statement that “no one can be allowed to question the evidence” is inaccurate and offensive, given that scientists are studying and questioning all these things. There are lots of places on the internet for climate change denial, including the Freakonomics site, which I’m sure gets lots more readers than we do.
The climate the earth is in is a 2.588-million-year ice age called the Quaternary Glaciation(fifth ice age) in a warm period called an interglacial period named the Holocene, which is seldom mentioned. That won’t change until all the natural ice melts. There are around 190,000 glaciers including Greenland and Antarctica that will have to melt and that will take around 5,000 years. Before that happens we will probably start another glacial period. We have interglacial periods that last around 10,000 years(this one has lasted 11,700 years) that alternate with glacial periods where the temperature drops about 10 C degrees and lasts about 90,000 years. That 100,000-year cycle has been going on for about 1 million years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation
We have 4.5 million people dying each year from moderately cold weather-related causes, mainly strokes and heart attacks, while only about 500,000 are dying from heat-related causes and most of them were also from moderate heat.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00081-4/fulltext
In this interglacial period, we are still about 6 degrees Celsius colder than the average of the last 500 million years when our biochemistry developed. Biological enzymes are often very sensitive to temperature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record
The sun is beginning a Grand Solar Minimum where it will produce less output for about 30 years which will reduce the temperature of the earth by about 1 degree Celsius for that time.
‘Modern Grand Solar Minimum will lead to terrestrial cooling’ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23328940.2020.1796243
Robot Measures Air-Sea Carbon Dioxide Exchange in Southern Ocean
Finds both outgassing of CO2 as well as absorption of CO2.
https://eos.org/editor-highlights/robot-measures-air-sea-carbon-dioxide-exchange-in-southern-ocean
The Earth’s orbit varies from a slight ellipse with the Sun at one foci to an almost circle over hundreds of thousands of year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_eccentricity
The model shows, contrary to IPCC claims, that human emissions do not continually add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, but rather cause a flow of carbon dioxide through the atmosphere. The flow adds a constant equilibrium level, not a continuing increasing level, of carbon dioxide.
Present human emissions add an equilibrium level of 18 ppm, which is the product of human carbon dioxide inflow of 4.5 ppm per year multiplied by the carbon dioxide residence time of 4 years. Present natural emissions add an equilibrium level of 392 ppm, to get today’s 410 ppm.
If human emissions continue as at present, these emissions will add no additional carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. If all human emissions were stopped, and nature stayed constant, it would remove only 18 ppm. The natural level of 392 ppm would remain.
https://edberry.com/blog/climate/climate-physics/human-co2-not-change-climate/
Why human CO2 does not change climate
Ralph:
I was curious so I clicked on one of your links, the one pointing to “Modern Grand Solar Minimum will lead to terrestrial cooling.” I read the article and it seemed kind of odd—some principal components analysis on solar cycles . . . this can’t be news, right? One of the citations was from D. Easterbrook, he of the notorious “virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling” quote discussed above. The article was listed as an Editorial in a journal called Temperature. I clicked on the link for the journal, where it says, “Temperature publishes papers related to interactions between living matter and temperature, with focus on the medical physiology of body temperature regulation.”
Huh? So this is an editorial (not a regular article) in a journal that doesn’t concern itself with climate change at all! I have no idea how this happened; perhaps the author of the article and the editor of the journal are personal friends, or there’s some other connection going on. The whole thing seems kinda weird. Why not just cut out the middleman and publish in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology? The internet’s a big place; look there long enough and you can find deniers of just about anything. The Freakonomics people should know better, though, and I think they would, if they’d set aside their ideology and their defensiveness. They’ve got enough money and enough fame so now maybe they could try looking into some of the preposterous claims they’ve been in the habit of promotion.
You can Google Grand Solar Minimum and get bunches of recent papers. Anyone can see that there are less and less sunspots every cycle. Lack of hot sunspots will lead to a cooler sun and a cooler earth. Principle components analysis are how they separate interacting entities. I don’t know how they got in that journal but there are other paper in other journals that are similar.
The “Climate Change” movement just popped up a couple of years ago. Before then there was the “Global Warming” movement from about 1980 to about 2010 and before that there was the “Global Cooling” movement from 1945 to about 1970. You have to look at long-term trends of at lease hundreds of years when looking at geological climate. The ice age that we are in has been going for 2.588 million years and is called the Quaternary Glaciation. It is even measured in 1,000 year increments. We are in a warm period that happens about every 100,000 years when the earth’s orbit is almost circular and usually lasts about 10,000 years, this one has lasted 11,700 years.
Anyone can see that there are less and less sunspots every cycle. Lack of hot sunspots will lead to a cooler sun and a cooler earth. We have to wear warm clothes half the year, our heating bills are 10 times that of our cooling bills and the next glacial period when the earths orbit is more elliptical is going to make things really bad with temperatures 10 degrees Celsius cooler and lasting for 90,000 years. That is what it has been doing for about 1 million year
Ralph –
> We have 4.5 million people dying each year from moderately cold weather-related causes, mainly strokes and heart attacks, while only about 500,000 are dying from heat-related causes and most of them were also from moderate heat.
Did you know that this is a classic climate change “skeptic” headfake?
Here. Read this and come back to discuss
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/06/will-climate-change-bring-benefits-from-reduced-cold-related-mortality-insights-from-the-latest-epidemiological-research/
Well, FWIW, despite all the costume rending, teeth gnashing, prophesying and pomp and drama over at Glasgow, this has become a moot point. EVs, lead by Tesla, are about to sweep ICE transportation off the face of the planet, revolutionizing both transportation and energy storage in the process and driving a dramatic acceleration of the ongoing decarbonation of civilization. WA state governor laughably announced this week that he’s going to decarbonize the state’s vehicle fleet by 2035. By that time, he won’t have any choice! :) There won’t be an ICE vehicle available to buy and hardly a mechanic to work on one.
In the end, while governments struggled to institute even slightly restrictive carbon policies and wasted literally trillions of dollars on glacially slow transit projects in the name of decarbonization, markets, with their incentives for profit and efficiency, solved the problem with only minor EV incentives.
Jim:
I agree with you regarding the power of markets, but I think it’s a mistake for you to think that one change, whether it be solar panels or electric vehicles or cleaner power plants or whatever, will have “solved the problem.” Emissions are huge, and it will take lots of changes to do the job. See for example the book by David Mackay. It’s 10 yrs old and the website looks pretty funny, but the general principles seem reasonable.
“So essentially the capacity of the electrical grid would need to triple to accomplish what you claim. ”
This is incorrect.
1) Even now EVs are 3-5x more efficient than equivalent ICEVs. So even with immediate full electrification, today’s EV technology and no off-peak storage the necessary ramp-up would be only 20-35% of what you suggest. (for example, Honda Fit: 33 MPG; Nissan Leaf: 108 MPGe; Tesla Model 3: 140 MPGe.
2) The grid operates at peak capacity for only a few hours a day for at most a few months per year! Even just off-peak charging, without additional off-peak energy storage, would render additional grid capacity unnecessary.
3) Here’s a “>great chart showing how power generation varies by demand in the Bonneville Power Administration in the Pacific Northwest. A quick eyeball suggests that smart charging and storage could access 25-40% more power with existing transmission and generating capacity, which would likely cover the additional power requirements for full electrification with today’s technology.
4) Home generation will also contribute to future power generation and storage as solar improves
5) EV efficiency and battery storage capacity will continue to improve
6) other types of electrical consumption will increase in efficiency
Andrew:
The problem with David Mackay type thinking is that he’s thinking about the wrong thing. What he should be thinking about is the history of technological revolutions, not taking inventory of the problems that need to be solved to reduce emissions and making dozens upon dozens of assumptions about a future he can’t – and won’t – accurately constrain, much less predict. If he knew how the problem would be solved, there wouldn’t be problem.
The reality is that the status quo is almost always wrong about technological revolutions:
“In 1930 Samuel Vauclain, Chairman of the Board [of Baldwin (steam) Locomotive Works], stated in a speech that advances in steam technology would ensure the dominance of the steam engine until at least 1980…[but] Between 1940 and 1948, domestic steam locomotive sales declined from 30 percent of the market to 2 percent.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldwin_Locomotive_Works
The money is telling you what’s going on, and it’s betting big on TSLA and RIVN – betting *far* bigger than the auto industry currently would promise to a person viewing it in the traditional 2010 framework, like Mackay.
Transportation is currently 30% of emissions. Removing that 30% would be a dramatic improvement, but it comes with myriad add-on effects that will eliminate entire industries: auto parts, auto repairs, lubricants and oil-field services to name just a few. Rising battery storage capacity will mean that more and more industries can store and/or generate power locally. Despite all the worry, autonomous operation is near, which will increase vehicles efficiency even further. It’s simply not possible to count the features of the upside.
Currently the transportation sector uses ~22 quadrillion BTU of petroleum and almost no electricity. Also, the total energy from electricity is ~12.5 quads: https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/flow/css_2020.png
So essentially the capacity of the electrical grid would need to triple to accomplish what you claim. Is this something that is happening? Even if transportation drops by 50%, the grid capacity would still need to double.
Looking at the supply side, I see even bigger problems for that scenario.
Essentially, how do you expect that chart to look in 2035? It seems the “all EV” scenario requires much more energy than used in 2020. I.e., due to system losses the US would need to use ~95 quads just for electricity, while in 2020 it was ~93 quads total. Where is this coming from?
“So essentially the capacity of the electrical grid would need to triple to accomplish what you claim. ”
This is wildly wrong.
1) Even now EVs are 3-5x more efficient than equivalent ICEVs. So even with immediate full electrification, today’s EV technology and no off-peak storage the necessary ramp-up would be only 20-35% of what you suggest. (for example, Honda Fit: 33 MPG; Nissan Leaf: 108 MPGe; Tesla Model 3: 140 MPGe.
2) The grid operates at peak capacity for only a few hours a day for at most a few months per year! Even just off-peak charging, without additional off-peak energy storage, would render additional grid capacity unnecessary.
3) Here’s a “>great chart showing how power generation varies by demand in the Bonneville Power Administration in the Pacific Northwest. A quick eyeball suggests that smart charging and storage could access 25-40% more power with existing transmission and generating capacity, which would likely cover the additional power requirements for full electrification with today’s technology.
4) Home generation will also contribute to future power generation and storage as solar improves
5) EV efficiency and battery storage capacity will continue to improve
6) other types of electrical consumption will increase in efficiency
Annonuoid: even if your claim were true: how many gas stations were there in 1900 vs 1915? :) Of course there is one difference: gasoline distribution in the early 1900s was private, unregulated, and profitable, so the system built out extremely fast. Electrical power generation, however, is highly regulated even where it isn’t public and it’s profitability held tightly in check. That’s the one factor that makes rapid buildout of electrical capacity tenuous.
In this, the best possible of all worlds. The market solves everything! jim, I sure hope you are an economist. Not that you are totally off-base, but small details such as “smart charging” are not as small as you think. “Smart” use of electricity would probably mean we need less than 1/3 of the generating capacity we currently have – if only we were smart enough to make sure that use was equalized over time. It’s a good think that the market prevents there from being congestion of any resources (electricity use, roads, internet usage, etc.) – but, wait, if we’d just use “smart peak-load pricing” then congestion would be solved as well!
Rather than being an economist, I think it’s more interesting to study the history of business and industry revolutions and the technology that drives them.
Dale wrote:
. . . if we’d just use “smart peak-load pricing” then congestion would be solved as well!
I don’t know if that was written tongue-in-cheek or seriously. I’m a big fan of peak-load pricing.
But it has problems. Consumers dislike uncertainty. Some decades ago, the telephone proposed local measured service (charge calls by the minute) in a number of jurisdictions and regularly got shot down.
Consumer advocates argued that the prospect of large bills was in itself a significant cost for people on tight budgets.
Some years ago, I heard a well-respected economist state that the cellular industry would inevitably adopt peak-load pricing with pricing varying almost cell-by-cell. That has not occurred yet.
There is a good examination of the reasons for resistance to peak-load pricing and auctions in section 5 of Odlyzko’s piece on Paris Metro Pricing of Internet Access (not quite the right title).
It’s available at http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/paris.metro.pricing.pdf.
I’m a fan of Odlyzko’s work—it’s interesting, sensible, and often fun to read.
Bob76
Then from your link:
From the figure I posted we see ~65% of energy put into the electrical grid is lost. Does your calculation account for this?
I really just want to see a version of that figure that corresponds to what you expect will be the case in 2035.
I don’t believe that 65% of the energy put into the electric grid is lost.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=105&t=3 (suggests transmission line losses are on the order of 5%)
I do believe that 65% of the energy in fuel used to power fuel burning power plants is lost before it is utilized as electricity. Most of this goes up smokestacks as heat. But apparently around 80% of energy in the fuel tank of a car is lost before it becomes motion… most of it becoming heat, so on net it’s a savings to burn fuel at a power plant. If instead you’re using solar or wind which are the cheapest forms of energy at the moment… then it’s a HUGE savings.
Makes sense. So 60% is lost at the plant, 5% is lost to the grid, then (according to the quote above) another 23% is lost from grid to car.
Then 0.4*0.95*0.77 = 0.29. So its 30% efficient rather than 20%. Given the nature of these numbers, I don’t think we can really say that is a real difference.
But even if we accept it, the grid capacity is still going to need to about triple. Is that an issue? I don’t know but it does not sound trivial.
Why does grid capacity need to triple? Assuming the entire transportation sector has 20% efficiency (which is an overestimate, since this ignores transporting, refining and storing fuel), this means that you need to supply 24.3*0.2 = 4.86 quads at 100% efficiency. With electric at >77% efficiency, this means electricity retail sales needs to increase by at most 6.3. I.e. the grid has to increase by a maximum of 50%.
It took me a bit but yea, this seems correct based on the numbers there. I was thrown off by the lack of efficiency numbers for petroleum in that figure.
I read that link. There has been another study released this year with 43 nations, US, Japan, China, UK, etc. and they say that 4.5 million people are dying mainly from heart attacks and strokes caused by the cold versus 500,000 dying from it being too warm. The enzymes that we have in our bodies are very sensitive to temperature and it is 6 degrees Celsius colder than the average temperature over the past 500 million years when our enzymes were designed by evolution. It is getting so cold in Cleveland that most of the animals that can leave have left. Most of the insects have frozen with the freezing temperatures last night.
This is how the geology of the ice age we are in works.
The way the geology works is that the Earth orbits the Sun in an orbit that also depends on Jupiter and Saturn. The Earths orbit cycles between a near circle and more of an ellipse. When the Earth’s orbit gets more circular the Earth has more sunlight, that brings on an interglacial period and warms the Earth. The warming oceans release CO2 and that warms the Earth even more. That warm period lasts for about 10,000 years. Then the orbit of the earth starts to get more elliptical, the Earth gets farther from the Sun on average, the Earth gets colder, the oceans absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere and it gets even colder. The cycle lasts about 100,000 year sand we usually have about 90,000 years of very cold weather and 10,000 years of warmer weather but still permanent ice existing. The biology that we inherited has been geared to a climate about 6 degrees Celsius warmer than today. That is why we are having 4.5 million deaths a year from heart attacks and strokes caused by the cold. Our body’s enzymes are very sensitive to temperature.
Ralph –
Thanks for getting back.
I was considering a response on the connection between warming temperatures globally and future mortality, but as I got deeper into reading your comment I realized trying to respond would entail going down the slippery slope of discussing the very notion of anthropogenic climate change in itself.
That’s would require a great deal of energy and I don’t doubt that In end I will inevitably arrive at saying I hope you’re right but based on (my) first principles of risk analysis, I’m not going to bet on it.
jim –
I sometimes wonder whether people who have your level of admiration for the efficiency of the free market have ever spent any time on the phone with Verizon or Comcast customer service, or considered how many trillions have been wasted in outright fraud in the private sector.
I think I can finish a session on the phone with Verizon while I am waiting for service at the DMV.
Bob76
This is a chart by geologists of the 100,000 year cycle of CO2 emissions. We are having increases in CO2 that matches the 100,000 cycle as the Earth is getting nearer to the sun as its orbit gets more circular.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation#/media/File:Vostok_Petit_data.svg
Here is a link to the Quaternary_glaciation Wikipedia article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation
That graph shows that CO2 levels rose in the last 100 years what it historically took 10,000 years to differ by, and that current CO2 far exceeds levels seen in the last 400,000 years.