Second thoughts

Cassander’s comment is not so much a defense of climate deniers as a confession that they hold an indefensible position.

JQ: “That in turn means that the goal of decarbonizing the economy can probably be reached in large measure through regulatory policies of various kinds, with only a modest increase in cost. Since there is much more effective political resistance (particularly on the political right) to price-based policies and market mechanisms than to regulations and tax breaks, it makes sense to go this way.”

Yahoo, JQ has finally been convinced. (Yes, OK, I know that that had nothing to do with your change of opinion on that subject.)

What is even more rare than changing one’s own mind is changing someone else’s mind about anything. I remember, maybe a decade ago I was writing that no one changed anyone else’s opinion about anything on the Internet and Walt commented to say that I’d convinced him of something — probably about the merits of an SF series — and it was shocking. It’s an break in the natural order of things.

I was in favor of the US involvement in Vietnam, and actually volunteered to speak on behalf of US policy to a couple of British groups in the mid-1960s. (I was respectfully listened to at Eton College, not so much amid the Dorking Socialists.) A few years later I wound up in the US Army, though not, by the skin of my teeth, in Vietnam. My views on the VN War evolved to opposition, in part by the developments in the War itself (e.g., the Tet Offensive), but also in part by seeing how the Army worked. What I saw was an organization that consistently lied to itself about everything under the sun, including the making up of minutes of meetings that never happened (my particular contribution), the forging of scores of signatures of people who were no longer around to sign (I helped with that one), and in view of an imminent inspection, the borrowing of materials we were supposed to have but didn’t, and the hiding of materials we weren’t supposed to have but did. (By loading up a 2-ton truck and driving it out to the firing range for the day.) This helped convince me of what more perceptive observers had concluded years before: official statements as to what was happening in Vietnam were not to be believed.

I think this constitutes evidence, and I certainly – if tardily – changed my mind.

I changed my mind on immigration, for certain. I used to be much more in favor of restrictions – in fact, I thought we’d be doing Mexico a favor in restricting immigration because they’d no longer be able to “use” the US as a “safety valve” for societal problems.

I believed in global warming, stopped believing in it for a while, then started believing in it again.

Its true our tribalism is a real barrier to changing our minds in the face of evidence – an even bigger barrier than losing face to others. Indeed I find as you get older its harder to make the effort – we become what the Calvinists call “hardened in sin”.

Things on which I’ve changed my mind in the last decade? Hmm … let me see. Well, nuclear power – I used to be pro it but eventually realised I was only so because of my annoyance at the FUD being put about in opposition to it. John as much as anyone made me see it for what I now think it is – safe enough but too expensive.

Mind you, I think it’s like John’s case for regulation versus price mechanisms in renewables (about which I remain unconvinced, BTW). Abating carbon is so vital that if in fact we can induce Big Energy to accept AGW by telling them shiny new nukes will make them even richer than oil – well then that’s what we should do, however economically wasteful. It’s cold political judgement rather than moral fervour that’s called for here.

Then there’s Iraq – I was always against the war but thought calls for hanging the perpetrators as war criminals were way over the top. The more I’ve learnt of it, the more I look longingly at the ICC. It changed my mind alright – back to my youthful Vietnam-induced contempt for the military/security state.

The Brexit vote is making me have second thoughts about income inequality. I still don’t think people are actually being harmed by it. But people do seem to be remarkably indifferent to the overall health of the economy, to the point where they’ll cheerfully vote themselves out of a free-trade bloc of half a billion people. Maybe they think only the rich are benefiting from it.

15.2: Well, yeah, I am expecting it, and suspect Quiggin will change his mind on all three of the propositions within the next few years

I hate hate the way the phrase “Central Planning” is used here. Is centrally planning 5% of the economy utter idiocy that must be resisted with force? 10%? I suspect y’all mean 100% centrally planned straw soviets, but since y’all mention Hayek I can’t be sure.

I suppose the 2016 Democratic Platform plank on climate change needs, according to point one in OP, a strong repudiation. National Mobilization? Might be some planning goin on there.

“We believe the United States must lead in forging a robust global solution to the climate crisis. We are committed to a national mobilization, and to leading a global effort to mobilize nations to address this threat on a scale not seen since World War II. In the first 100 days of the next administration, the President will convene a summit of the world’s best engineers, climate scientists, policy experts, activists, and indigenous communities to chart a course to solve the climate crisis.”

Going in a slightly different direction, this is certainly not a problem just in politics, but is also present in academics, something nodded at in the original post. I remember being struck as a grad student with how deeply invested so many scientists seemed to get in specific theories, to the point that there were often well defined camps that would coalesce around competing ideas. (The big deal when I was in school back in the 90’s was high temperature superconductivity–was it d-wave or s-wave pairing? No idea how the debate ended up, but since a local professor had developed the d-wave theory, by god every single professor at Illinois was all in on the d-wave side of things.)

So, far from the theoretical ideal of truth seeking scholars, you end up with something far closer to an American legal style system of adversarial advocates, with professors on each side attempting to spin all new evidence to support their own pet theory. (As a side note, it’s possible that this sort of outcome is actually beneficial to advance knowledge and the state of the art, with ego spurring competition and a quest for evidence to support one’s own views. Or maybe the unwillingness of folks to give up their old beliefs slowed things down.)

I can’t directly speak to other fields, but in the history I’ve read, an identical process seems to happen there. Once a scholar comes up with an idea, they’re likely to be a bitter ender, fighting a rearguard action against new and inconvenient facts, no matter the odds.

Anyway, given that this is the case in completely abstruse scientific issues, it’s no surprise that the phenomenon is even stronger when it comes to political issues where questions of values and identity creep in.

In a recent interview, Charles Koch waxed endless and eloquent about how scientific inquiry, discourse and objectivity led to truth — but when climate change came up, it was the same old horsedoodoo. So much for changing your mind.

JG

I’m an engineer and reasonably capable of understanding things like nuclear power station engineering as a costed project at a coarse-grain level. I’ve tried a few times to get my head around the total equation of nuclear power, from mining and all its costs and financing, to the power station construction part, operation and its costs, costs of contingency disaster management and decommissioning. It’s fiendishly difficult if not impossible to do this because there are so many hidden costs and externalities. I am far from convinced that any reliable costs or time to delivery of even just the central construction project e.g. of Hinkley can be known to better than a factor of 3. I gave up trying to compute any sort of overall TCO.

My experience from massive gov projects in IT (e.g. the NHS programme for IT, a £9bn epic failure of planning and deployment) is that human institutions, especially big ones – whether public like NHS or private like EDF – simply cannot estimate the real costs of any large project in the future. Most mega-IT and civil projects in the world prove this (submarines are always good example). The situation is MUCH WORSE when the thing being built has never been attempted before.

So we have to assume that whatever cost and delivery time is stated by the proposers e.g. of a new nuclear plant, are fiction and can be assumed to be tripled or worse, and the risks will be far worse than initially thought as well.

My point here is that while Nuclear power appears to be an on-paper acceptable and reasonable response to problems of pollution and climate change, but for all sorts of contingent reasons, it cannot be proved so. For people who don’t start with the assumption that calculating cost, delivery and TCO of nuclear power is essentially unknowable in advance, nuclear power appears to be something you can take an in-principle stand on (Lovelock, Monbiot, …), but that’s probably an error.

Climate change is a tougher proposition but in a different way. I am not a sceptic of the basic claim, but I find it difficult to put too much faith in any precise projection about the future, because the complex system in question contains (as far as we know) at least some unpredictable feedbacks whose signs are not even guaranteed over time, e.g. the effect of albedo. OTOH if a reliable gross measure of stored latent heat in atmospheres and oceans can be achieved, and the trend in that heat capture, then there is no argument (experts seem to assume that melt rate of Arctic ice is a good enough proxy for this). So with climate change, the question isn’t so much ‘do you believe in global warming’ or not, it’s what kind of global warming? Which projections do you believe in?

If the question is: what’s the best response? I think we have no way of knowing, because we simply don’t know the forward trajectory of the climate while the various feedback loops are in force. Will sea level rise be the first main problem, or extreme weather events? Or expansion of the zone of tropical diseases? Or access to fresh water leading to wars? In those cases, anyone proposing a particular course of action is doing so without evidence.

If the goal is simply to stop CO2 being produced, then it’s still difficult. First, you have to prove to yourself that doing so will have a useful effect if we start now (i.e. it’s not too late). Even if you can do that, it might seem obvious to claim that renewable energy should be implemented as an emergency measure and coal, oil etc stopped. But that’s not realistically possible either, without sinking the world economy. The rate at which renewables can replace carbon will be rather slow in reality. Given that, what’s the balance of expenditure on that and on amelioration of aforesaid other disasters? Noone can know. If it is too late to do anything about CO2, then a massive clean energy conversion is in fact not the main path to follow in the short / medium term – disaster management is.

My feeling is that the unknowable scale and sign of real world contingencies will often (usually?) defeat adherence to an in-principle stand on many pressing issues. Maybe we are all doomed to flip-flop…

Thomas Beale: “First, you have to prove to yourself that doing so will have a useful effect if we start now (i.e. it’s not too late).”

This particular problem can always get worse. People talk about 2 degrees as a goal, but you can also reach 4 degrees, 6 degrees, 8 degrees… If we never do anything (Actively or passively) then we will hit all of those and things will keep getting worse.

As my link up in comment #4 describes, I fundamentally don’t believe that this is an economic problem. Some people believe that everything is an economic problem, so they disagree. But really this is a question about what kind of society we want to have. Do we want to have one that will predictably destroy our way of life, or not? If the answer is not, then we fix this even if it is not economic to do so (i.e. even if the dollarized costs seemingly outweighs the dollarized benefits).

There is the question of, having decided to do it, how we do it most economically. JQ has made a number of posts about why, economically, nuclear power can’t really compete with renewables. But even if this wasn’t so, a lot of the political conflict is about risk tolerance. People who want global warming to be fixed generally have low risk tolerance, something that also predisposes them to oppose nuclear power. There is no way in which a nuclear power plant can ever be made as low risk as a solar installation.

“Defending his fellow “sceptics”, commenter Cassander wrote

When’s the last time you changed your mind as a result of the evidence? It’s not something people do very often.”

What business does a climate skeptic have maintaining any particular conviction on the subject, a mind that needs changing? The point is very well taken that actual convictions rarely change. But why would anyone have convictions on a technical question like climate change, as opposed to a mind completely open to the accumulation of new evidence? We should all be skeptics on all technical and scientific questions.

I don’t need a conviction that a diagnosis is correct to then prescribe a treatment. I just need the accumulation of enough evidence that the patient has a disease for which the treatment is less harmful than the disease, that treating makes sense. No sensible person thought, 50 years ago when the theory of anthropogenic climate change was proposed, that there was enough evidence that the theory was correct that it justified any measure at that time beyond further study. But now 50 years of that further study has accumulated enough such evidence that no sensible person now denies the steep price of not applying appropriate cures.

The time and place in which I grew up, the New Orleans of 55 years ago, presented people who lived there then with an actual matter of conviction. We had the open challenge to a legal and social system that was premised on the idea that black people weren’t actually people. Accepting or denying this premise was a matter of conviction. Cassander is right, I will never change my convictions on that and similar topics. If I do change my mind on such a question, it won’t be me anymore, it will be an effect of the Alzheimer’s taking my mind. There can be no accumulation of evidence that will budge me. I am not an equal rights skeptic.

And the 55 years of evidence that has accumulated since then is that people who adhered to the opposite set of convictions have also not budged. Lately they find it inconvenient to openly deny the humanity of fellow human beings, so they tend to pose as skeptics and hide the underlying conviction, as if any of us should have to prove our common humanity to any other set of us.

I can’t really see nuclear as a “bridge”, because of the regulatory and time barriers. It’ll only get much easier to build nuclear power plants in rich countries if we’re already under a crunch and frantically trying to decarbonize the economy as quick as possible, which we’re not doing yet.

@Cassander

I don’t reject nation-wide economic planning for all of an economy, just most of it. When we’re talking about large-scale enterprises with only a small number of firms and very long periods of adjustment to economic conditions (big firms have a “lot of ruin in them”), the quicker response time of a market versus democratic socialist governance isn’t nearly as big of a deal. That’s even more so if the product itself is relatively generic and mass-produced, like with utilities or mail.

It’s nice to see people like Lee A Arnold changing their mind to notice that AGW might be a threat to the human economy; or indeed JQ changing his mind to note that regulatory actions are important, not just market pricing.

These have been the opinions of environmentalists since about 1990. It would be nice if now that you have changed your mind you would also acknowledge that the people who have been excluded from polite debate on this issue – the Greenpeace and Earthfirst! and Sea Shepherd types, that “reasonable” people have to sneer at – were right all along.

Once again the environmental movement wins a debate. They’ve been wrong on basically one thing – nuclear power. And in the meantime nuclear power has been proven inefficient and useless (it can’t even get off the ground in China) and has become one of the main strategies for delay deployed by the libertard lovers of central planning (like Cassander in this thread).

Some recognition of the accuracy and authoritativeness of “fringe” environmentalists on this issue – which is now fundamental to the survival of industrial civilization – would be nice in these mea culpa threads.

@10 Brett 08.05.16 at 4:47 am:

I believed in global warming, stopped believing in it for a while, then started believing in it again.

So, there was a pause.

@27 cassander 08.05.16 at 2:50 pm, calls Quiggin something-other-than-honest:

… all [JQ] rejected was the USSR, and that a good 40 years later than any honest person should have…

…and, in the next paragraph:

JQ…cannot resist piling on insult rather than responding with argument.

Peter Erwin:

I understand what he’s imagining. He’s not talking an extinction event; he’s speculating about population crashes: events in which the population of a species suffers a huge loss due to an event at the extreme edge of natural variation in weather. Something like what happens in a severe drought or a giant forest fire, but bigger or affecting multiple much larger regions simultaneously.

The natural history of the Ice Age of the last 2.5 or 3 million years has many episodes of rapid climate switching which we have never experienced the like of in recorded history. If the Little Ice Age, which was much less severe a fluctuation in climate than, say, the Younger Dryas, disrupted farming, it is difficult to believe that episodes like the Younger Dryas did not stress many species populations.

We can quibble over details, but I think Lee is basically right to focus on trying to imagine the effects of severe fluctuations. It is not the effects of a steady rise in temperatures that we ought to fear, it is the setting off of extremely disruptive fluctuations in weather and climate. Not gradually building to a heat wave that never ends at the conclusion of a century, but the sudden onset of a heat wave or a cold snap, an order of magnitude beyond the norm of a stable climate.

Yeah, about this war thing: I joined the US Air Force & went to Vietnam believing in the “Cold War consensus,” i.e., it was a “zero sum” confrontation, & that if we lost in Vietnam it would be a win for communism. This was in 1971-72, and although the NVA came storming south after US troops (ground force units) had been withdrawn, the ARVN managed to hold on while US airpower inflicted massive casualties on the NVA and selective, substantial damage on North Vietnam, & their leadership realized that they had to get the US out of the war at any cost (I credit historian Ronald Spector for helping me reach this conclusion). But I came to realize, over time, that we would lose in the end, because 1) unlike Korea, Vietnam had an open flank in Laos, through which ran the Ho Chi Minh Trail, interdiction of which (a campaign in which I participated) would hamper but not block the flow of supplies and reinforcements to the South; and, 2) I believe that while President Nixon’s massive use of American airpower ensured the failure of Hanoi’s “Easter Offensive” and brought about a peace settlement, Hanoi was certain to renew their conquest of the South after Nixon had left office (which he did, sooner than expected) and the prospect of US reengagement with airpower dropped to zero — aided by drastic reduction of military aid to South Vietnam and the War Powers Act, of course.

That this unhappy outcome did not happen in Korea is mainly a function of geography — the absence of open flanks thanks to large bodies of water on both sides of the peninsula, which we controlled. Our kind of war could “work” there but could not work in Vietnam. And, surprisingly (to me), “global communism” gained little or nothing from Hanoi’s 1975 victory. Almost immediately China and Vietnam were at each other’s throats, and while Soviet bombers flew out of Cam Ranh Bay for several years, they altered the military balance on the Pacific Rim not a whit. So, everything I believed to be true before the war turned out to be false. I lost some friends and risked my own life for nothing.

What this means is that we as a nation need to take a really hard look at things and consider alternate scenarios for end-games before we start beating the war drums. The Iraq War, for example, had no informed rationale and over the course of a decade cost way too many lives and made things a lot worse in that part of the world. So yeah, war is very seldom the answer. Now, about global warming and climate change . . . .

JQ – might not be the place for this, but what do you make of energy density arguments for nuclear?
This is obviously irrelevant for countries like the USA, Canada, NZ or Australia, but for densely populated countries like the UK/Germany/India (China?), finding the space for a country sized power plant is challenging. There is little prospect of the energy density improving, so it seems like a reasonably hard physical limit to me.

The world economy is entirely undamaged by the nightmare of central planning, increasingly even in subdivisions. Competition between capitals is systemic, even to the point of multiple currencies and commodity equivalents. The vast majority of capital investments are made in pursuit of profit. No doubt it was the evidence from the economic history of the world in the last few centuries that convinced John Quiggin he was wrong, wrong, wrong about being soft on Communism, and the Great Crusade has paid off handsomely. But then I guess this is very much like Rich Puchalsky looking at world anarchy and thinking, great stuff!

People modify their views on all sorts of things because of evidence (even—or especially?—evidence that is is more trendy than substantive.) Reversals on little issues you haven’t much thought about because of evidence is also rather common. It is rather more unusual I think to find consistency than failure to accept evidence. Judging from personal experience, the vagaries of memory probably exaggerate the amount of consistency, thus minimizing the humiliating obeisance to mere facts.

As to reversing yourself on major tenets long held… I seriously doubt the OP could make a prima facie case that the centrally planned economies failed to meet human needs because they were centrally planned, or that the capitalist world met human needs better because they weren’t. So I very much doubt the evidence changed anybody’s mind, but it was a matter of changing standards about what counted as evidence, or what meet the standard of probative. I suspect that’s very much the case for most such reversals.

@Bruce B. 08.05.16 at 6:09 pm

>Cassander constantly demonstrates the second – they’re not in the market, in any general way, for things that might upend their current positions. John Q. models the first for us here.

I have repeatedly explained my LACK of certainty around the issues we’re discussing. I have repeatedly explained that my solutions are designed to deal with the fact that “the universe is surprising.” Few of those weighing in against me have shown even a hint of uncertainty or humility. John Q’s attitude, in particular, is neither. It expresses perfect certainty, just as it did in 2004, with zero adjustment made for having been wrong before, and especially zero acknowledgement of the method of the change, rapidly changing technological/market conditions. I happen to think he is wrong about solar power, but if he is right and I am not, the solutions I propose make room to learn of the error and adapt. His do not.

In future, please actually read what write before commenting on it, because you have the shoe entirely on the wrong foot.

@39: If you find that injecting carbon into the atmosphere has costs, you want to make their usage reflect those costs. There is nothing intrinsically “liberal” about this. You also want to make the costs of nuclear power properly accounted for. This includes long term waste storage and dealing with rare, but potentially devastating, failures. To be honest, it sounds very much to me as if pissing liberals off is more important to you than the actual problems at hand; otherwise the single minded focus on nuclear doesn’t make sense.

Subsidies to investigate non-CO2 emitting energy solutions fall into the category of things like searching for disease cures, e.g. they’re squarely in the regime of proper uses for publicly funded research. Calling the pricing of external costs and funding of research into alternatives as a power grab by the left seems pretty bizarre, to be honest.

It does seem that the statistical models used to calculate the dangers of a nuclear accident seriously overstated the consequences. The standard model was a linear no threshold model based on the evidence from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. So we had two data points close together based on rather large exposures and an assumed zero risk at zero exposure. This is not an extrapolation on which much confidence can be placed. Post accident epidemiology for Chernobyl indicates that any additional risk is too small to show up as an excess in mortality or morbidity over random variations in the rates. There is an increased diagnosis of cancer but as that is the same both inside and outside the plume that is presumably simply improvements in diagnosis rather than a consequence of the accident.

Faustusnotes #32: “It would be nice if now that you have changed your mind you would also acknowledge that the people who have been excluded from polite debate on this issue – the Greenpeace and Earthfirst! and Sea Shepherd types, that “reasonable” people have to sneer at – were right all along.”

Oh really! I have never sneered at any of them, probably have been following all of them longer than you, and I possess a copy of EVERY ISSUE of the Earth First! Journal going back almost to the first issue, as an invaluable and irreplaceable historical source of environment land-use issues that includes the detailed machinations of all the corporate crooks and clowns and how they destroyed wild acreage in many various places in the world. Much of it is first-hand reportage and there is nothing like it anywhere else in the published records.

That said, most of the members of these groups STILL believe that technological innovation and economic growth of ANY kind must cause biospheric damage — a belief which (as I wrote in comment #1) I no longer share, and which I am quite sure is wrong.

“Anyway the thing to do is to continue monitoring permafrost methane release.”
This will be performed by a fleet of 72 specially-instrumented jumbo jets, flying above the permafrost zone 24 hours a day, taking measurements.

When the evidence for X is overwhelming, where X is a matter of scientific enquiry (like global waring), and the evidence is readily available to and is regularly presented to a person, and that person does not believe X, it is going to be pretty rare that further evidence will convince them. But, when the evidence for X is merely very strong, and a person believes X, it is not at all rare that discomfirming evidence will shake, or change, their believe. And when, as in two of — and maybe all three of — JQs examples there is a normative dimension to the belief, people are liable to change their minds not just in response to empirical evidence, but in response to moral learning.

JQ’s arguments about war have maybe not entirely convinced me, but have certainly shifted me to a more anti-interventionist position than I had before. At the same time, I have changed my mind about the morality of two wars that I had previously thought were wrong (and put considerable energy into opposing), for a whole bunch of reasons, including reflection on JQs anti-war stance, and a very oblique comment Daniel made about 10 years ago!

Thanks, js, for crediting me with influence! I, too, have changed my mind about lots of issues to do with higher education, in particular the part of the sector I inhabit, in the course of the time I have inhabited it — partly in response to having (I think) a better understanding of how it works, partly thanks to normative arguments, and substantially thanks to students pressing me on what they think my job is and should be, and their ideas about how the institution might change. (In case that sounds like I am unduly deferential to them, I’m not — on issues about funding higher education I tend to disagree with most of those I talk to quite a bit).

In general, people do not change their minds about big things quickly. It would be bizarre if they did. You think slowly, mull things over, respond to considerations, test out ideas. I don’t think that is badly conservative, just sensible.

Communism. I read Orwell at a formative age (who doesn’t?) and for years identified myself proudly as a democratic socialist and took sides against Trots of any kind. (I hated actual Communists too, obviously, but since they were generally well to the Right of my position our paths didn’t often cross.) As I met and worked with people who actually were Trots – and listened to the bellowing of other proud defenders of post-Orwellian democratic leftism – it gradually became clear to me that I’d bought a bill of goods. I think the penny finally dropped in 1991, when I read a review of Frances Stonor Saunders’ Who Paid the Piper? by Francis Mulhern:

[The CIA’s] goal was to establish an America-friendly, anti-Soviet hegemony over Europe’s intelligentsias, and to do so by supporting the cultural projects of ‘non-communist lefts’ (‘NCLs’). Reactionaries were of little interest; professional ex-Stalinists such as Arthur Koestler were a nuisance. T.S. Eliot was all very well, but honest George Orwell was a precious resource. [The British Foreign Office’s Information Research Department] financed campaigns against the New Statesman, thought to be insufficiently hostile to the USSR, but supported Socialist Commentary, the house organ of Labour’s Atlanticist right, as well as Tribune: one anti-Stalinist was as serviceable as another. There is a difficult moral here, worth pausing over even – or especially – in our post-Wall world.

Also, not unrelatedly, anti-imperialism. The way the West stood aside and let Bosnia be butchered was disgraceful, I thought at the time, a disgrace matched only by the way parts of the Left leapt to the defence of what they naively imagined was still ‘socialist Yugoslavia’. A few years later I welcomed NATO’s intervention against Serbia over Kosovo, and hoped once again that some of my fellow leftists could be brought to agree with me. At least, I welcomed it until I realised that I disagreed with the tactics being used, the force using them and the stated war aims; in effect I supported an intervention against Serbia, but not the one that was actually happening.

The two shifts are connected; in both cases I was especially reluctant to go over to the ‘Left’ camp because I thought I’d be surrounded by know-nothing headbangers intent on blaming everything on their chosen enemy. In both cases I’ve since realised that there are just as many measured and thoughtful interventions being made on this side as there were on the side I was on – which is to say, very few, but enough – and there are certainly just as many know-nothing headbangers on that side as there are on this.

OW @ 52: This will be performed by a fleet of 72 specially-instrumented jumbo jets, flying above the permafrost zone 24 hours a day, taking measurements.

I laughed when I read this and then I had second thoughts.

My skepticism on the capacity of climate modelling to attribute global warming in proper proportion to man-made causes (as expressed in comments here) evaporated within a couple of years when first out-of-model confirmation came in the form of sea-surface temperatures consistent with AGW. My skepticism about the Kyoto protocol as being the proper way to address it has only been reduced somewhat (stuff like coniferous carbon sequestration get in the way). OTOH my skepticism regarding economic (esp financial) models has gone to 11.

At least, I welcomed it until I realised that I disagreed with the tactics being used, the force using them and the stated war aims; in effect I supported an intervention against Serbia, but not the one that was actually happening.

Yeah, but this is the case against humanitarian intervention in general, no? The ideal case humanitarian intervention sounds great; actually existing humanitarian interventions are uniformly indefensible.

Can I put in a word for *not* changing your mind here? It’s all very well—and entirely right—to say that one should change one’s mind in the face of evidence and argument. At the same time, it’s not a bad thing if one’s core convictions are resistant to this sort of change. In other words, it’s good to have core convictions—ideally, ones that are at least somewhat thought out (i.e. not simply received).

So OK, here’s an example of the kind of thing I mean. I don’t think there’s any “evidence” you could present that would lead me to change my mind that a non-exploitative mode of social production is possible and that it can be stable and successful over time. My point is tho that the same kind of thing is true of core convictions that I find morally abhorrent. (I mean something like: someone who thinks the social position of women is fundamentally different from that of men isn’t going to be convinced by the example of women successful in traditionally male social functions. And—somewhat rightly.) What you need in these kinds of cases is something like what Harry above calls “moral education”. At which point I do think you’re rather far away from the kind of thing JQ had in mind in the OP. I think.

I think this all generalizes? I mean to concerns relevant to the OP.

This is sort of ironic: the biggest change in my thinking during the past decade was from believing that forestalling catastrophic climate change would be relatively cheap (with lots of win-wins along the way) to my current view that it’s going to be a very difficult transition — in other words, largely the reverse of the reversal pointed to in the OP. JQ and I tilted about this on CT a while back, and there’s no need to rehash now. (My book next year will make a somewhat more extended case.)

This change of heart proved to be very anti-tribal. I used to be a respected member of Team Green, at least in my neighborhood, invited to give talks etc. Now I’m largely on the outside. Saying that eliminating fossil fuels within a generation is going to be a tough job is seen as giving aid and comfort to the other side.

“Head Start has been extensively studied and shown to be a failure”.

That misrepresents the conclusions of the OPRE assessment of the program. It found that it produced modest benefits, and that the benefits could be expected to be larger if the program was better targeted.

On central planning. The academic support for this has collapsed around the time that we got solid proofs from Stiglitz and Greenblatt that all actual markets, under the prevailing and inevitable asymmetries of information, are necessarily inefficient. IIRC their corollary is that in principle any market can be improved by a tailored technocratic state intervention, a nudge. Of course, in practice this does not work either: the technocrat is just another semi-informed schlub with a job to protect, so perfect nudging is impossible too. So realists have to concentrate on cases where the market gets things badly wrong (fossil fuels, health care, finance) and ignore those where the market seems to be doing OK . Pizza fits the latter at first sight, but then you think of high-fructose corn syrup.

Bruce B #69, Peter Erwin #73,

I agree with parts of what both of you say, but I am less sure about all of it.

The theory of “cryptic refugia” and “microrefugia” is just that, a theory, proposed to explain patterns of terrestrial colonization after the last glaciation.

If there are only a few such refuges, and/or the climate event is extended in time, then the likelihood of causing global extinctions is surely increased. As you both note, this would happen by add-on effects: of the animals consuming all the remaining food, by population-density effects, by adverse population dynamics, and by niche disappearances. The reduction in species by these processes, which are actuated in the “island biogeography” thesis, takes a bit of extended time to play out.

No argument there! The modern wildlife habitat fragmentation and enclosure by human settlements makes the likelihood much higher.

It is undoubted that local animal subspecies would be lost — but would this cause a global extinction of the whole species, or the genus? As I understand it, the paleo evidence isn’t always clear enough to distinguish the hundreds or thousands of subspecies which may have been part of a species (nor all of the species that might have been in a genus).

The green plant issue is different, of course. There could be 100% cessation of photosynthesis without much reduction of the number of plant species that survive, because seeds and pods can last many years in adverse conditions, and regerminate when conditions are better.

So I am not entirely convinced. But you made me realize that I haven’t examined the OTHER end of my argument: my question was about a very short, sharp event, after which the landscape quickly returns to normal. I had been reasoning that the event could stop. It occurs to me now that this idea of “short and sharp” is completely unrealistic.

The likely effects of a major methane release may be sharp, but it won’t be short!

Methane heating will release even more methane (and more CO2 from thawed permafrost decomp). Methane has a short “atmospheric half-life”, 7 years. But it is 100 times more powerful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.

This makes it highly likely that it would heat the earth, or at least the northern hemisphere, enough to continuously release new methane, and additional carbon dioxide, with occasional episodes wherein forest fires blanket the globe in smoke, and release sulphurous acid rain.

So: after food riots, mayhem in the streets and the destruction of civilization, there might then be a mass species extinction over the next 1000 years, similar to the fascinating scenario of the “Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum” but with more initial terrestrial animal extinction due to ecological dynamics impairment by anthropogenic habitat fragmentation.

I had missed the Head Start thread. I volunteered for Head Start in the late ’60s / early ’70s, and the anecdata I collected seemed positive.

I thought the privatization that began in the ’90s was supposed to lead to improvement. How could it fail?

It seems to me that this Second Thoughts thread has been skirting the problem of revising a World View.

A World View is, in important respects, pre-epistemic. It consists of a rough mix of habitual heuristics, comfortable intuitions, folk-wisdom, moral primitives with personal identity, experience and values. For an individual, a world view provides a filter on the incoming torrent of noise and the existential terror of being in a world of immeasurable uncertainty. But, world views are rarely idiosyncratic; as social animals, we need to share world views with our companions, because we need to share expectations and values in order to coordinate our behavior. That’s not to say we have to have identical expectations and values; on the contrary, cooperation, it seems to me, actually requires that we have different expectations and values, but somehow we make the conflicts of world views commensurable and negotiable.

An individual’s world view is necessarily anchored to that person’s point-of-view and limited by the person’s location and horizons. The society has to tolerate and make use of a variety of world views — this would be a standard modern liberal view: tolerance can make diversity a source of social strength and cultural innovation is a survival-enhancing adaptiveness.

The challenge of climate change to our shared world views won’t be met by finding the one right world view, but rather by finding some method or means of reconciling world views as commensurable and negotiable on the points critical to cooperating.

On this, I see some little progress, but mostly the world views present themselves as antagonistic long before they even begin to digest actual fact.

James Wimberley @ 72

I presume you refer to Greenwald & Stiglitz, but I’m not seeing the relevance to legitimacy of central planning, honestly.

Bruce Wilder @82
My comment wasn’t just a throw away line. Part of a world view is a view “of how we decide things” and “how do we revise heuristics”. Having a static world view in the first place is part of the problem.

bruce wilder @ 82:

“It seems to me that this Second Thoughts thread has been skirting the problem of revising a World View.”

Well yeah, that’s at the heart of the question at hand. There’s been a lot of work done in recent years about things like “motivated reasoning”, but the main result on our intellectual discourse is we now have more insults we can sling at each other. It’s always easier to spot the derp when the Dunning-Kruger is on the other foot.

“A World View is, in important respects, pre-epistemic. It consists of a rough mix of habitual heuristics, comfortable intuitions, folk-wisdom, moral primitives with personal identity, experience and values.”

Are you defining a “World View” as that portion of our understanding that is beyond reach of reason, and immune to evidence? You either have a very pessimistic view, or you’re using an idiosyncratic definition of what amounts to a technical term you’ve just introduced (admittedly we don’t have a very good vocabulary for talking about these things…).