Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

Has anyone pointed out that large landfills full of plastic bottles and disposable diapers are a solution to global warming?

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p>Three Hierarchies makes the nice point that if you look closely, the Bible does not say that God directly created animals and plants, just that He created the earth, and that spontaneous generation– as opposed to God having created all living things directly— was long accepted by Christians and everyone else. It was only in the 1800’s that scientists showed that life comes from life, so that the origins of life became a puzzle: (more…)

The sociology of global warming continues to puzzle me. Claims for it are wildly exaggerated. At the same time, however, I hardly ever see mentioned two of the strongest arguments on the pro-action side, to wit:

1. Temperature increases have been concentrated in the interiors of Asia and North America in winter. This is significant, because if increased carbon dioxide is the cause, warming would be strongest where there is the least water vapor– interior land masses with cold dry air. That’s a lot stronger evidence than just the correlation with increased CO2 levels. (Has anyone applied sophisticated time series techniques to that correlation, by the way? Maybe non-economists don’t know those techniques.)

2. There is some possibility of a catastrophic cycle of increased warming, turning the Earth into another Venus. Posner has emphasized this, I hear, in his book. That is much more serious than a few degrees of extra heat, even if less probable.

That these two things get so little play makes me wonder about the judgement of the pro-action people. But it means they may be even more correct than they think, too.

Brett Stephens has a good op-ed on how the behavior of prominent scientists in global warming makes the non-experts skeptical: (more…)

There is serious testing going on of dumping iron into the ocean to reduce carbon dioxide. See “Plan to Dump Iron in Ocean Criticized”, which also seems to me to imply that an important cause of global warming is a decline in plankton:

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Via Evolution News and Views:

Turner justifies his reasonable foresight by explaining that Kitzmiller only provided a pyrrhic victory for the pro-Darwin lobby:

Although there was general jubilation at the ruling, I think the joy will be short-lived, for we have affirmed the principle that a federal judge, not scientists or teachers, can dictate what is and what is not science, and what may or may not be taught in the classroom. Forgive me if I do not feel more free.

(J. Scott Turner, Signs of Design, The Christian Century, June 12, 2007.)

[This post has gotten long and sprawling as I investigated more. I’ll leave it that way, as a source of material for other people to analyze]

David Klinghoffer in the Weekly Standard tells us how Guillermo Gonzalez, a pro-ID astronomer at Iowa State, was denied tenure. Reporting is usually so bad that it’s impossible to tell whether somebody was denied tenure for good reason (his scholarship) or bad reasons (for example, his political views). But this story caught my eye because it says:

According to a Smithsonian/NASA astrophysics database, Gonzalez’s scientific articles from 2001 to 2007 rank the highest among astronomers in his department according to a standard measure of how frequently they have been cited by other scientists. He has published 68 peer-reviewed articles, which beat the ISU department’s standard for tenure by 350 percent. He has also co-authored a standard astronomy textbook, published by Cambridge University Press, which his faculty colleagues use in their own classes.

Yet in turning down Gonzalez’s appeal, ISU president Gregory Geoffroy claimed that the astronomer “did not show the trajectory of excellence that we expect.”

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I enjoyed the Christianity Today debate between Hitchens and Wilson because my guy was winning, but Hitchens was too easy a target. He embarassed himself by misunderstanding The Good Samaritan and he apparently hadn’t ever asked himself about the basis for his moral opinions, which he thinks are both self-evident and universally shared.

Here’s what he should have said to defend his position, an argument harder to attack. (I cross post this as a comment on Wilson’s blog, BLog and Mablog)

“Human morality is the result of evolution. We all share brain wiring that makes us feel guilty when we murder our fathers, steal from our sisters, and lie out of pure malice. Therefore, a human is well advised not to do these things. That is why I call them immoral. Also, our wiring makes us feel happy in condemning them, so I do.

I admit that our hard-wired morality won’t take us as far as I’d like. I can’t really say that infanticide or genocide are wrong, because too many people do these things without guilt, if the context is right. Our innate morality is designed for small groups of hunter-gatherers. But on top of that, we have the norms of our society, and the laws. My parents taught me to feel guilty if I stole even from strangers, plus I might get caught, so I don’t do it. Someone from India might well disagree, but I will cheerfully stand by my society’s principles and condemn him to other people in my society, at least. That’s fine for keeping me happy, even if it’s not universal.”

That argument require admissions of relativism and lack of personal autonomy, but it’s an argument, which Hitchens didn’t have. Also, I’m afraid that it does cause a collapse of the silly side Hitchens is defending in the debate, that Christianity has been bad for the world. A lot of his morality is society-linked, not universally human. His problem is that as a moralistic atheist, he really ought to concede that Christianity is a huge influence on his personal notion of morality and that Christianity’s influence is why he prefers the moral climate in England to that Iraq or India. His preferences (as I imagine they are) for things like equality, truth, respect for human life, and democracy are not universal.

What would happen if someone invented a drug that cured homosexuality? It sounds potentially very profitable. There do exist drugs that make heroin and alcohol use sickening, but they do not cure the desire. Could there be a cure for an inclination?

Three Hierarchies says

I have begun reading Gregory, Bishop of Tours (AD 536-594), known generally for his History of the Franks. Fortunately, however, I am also reading Walter Goffart’s Narrators of Barbarian History (ah, now you see the connection to the Mongol empire), which puts the work much more effectively in context than the translation’s introduction.

Gregory, or at least Goffart, does sound worth looking into. The point is that natural wonders and miracles are not as different as we might think. I’ll have to think whether that’s relevant to my Concealment Argument.

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I’m always frustrated by the difficulty of getting the basic models and facts of global warming. What happens to carbon dioxide in the ocean is important. Lots of carbon dioxide is dissolved in the ocean, and lots is taken up by ocean plants. The ocean is not saturated with carbone dioxide, unlike nitrogen and oxygen. So, will the ocean soak up some large fraction of the carbon dioxide man is putting into the atmosphere?

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I wonder if the CO2 scientists have accounted for the sequestering of carbon that results from increased crop yields. The natural limit on vegetation is apparently fertilizer, not carbon dioxide. Thus, with more fertilizer we have increased the amount of vegetation. We are eating more, too, but at any one time there is more carbon locked up in crops than there would have been 100 years ago. Trees have their own pattern, of course, and are better at sequestering carbon since they “waste” it in nonliving parts of the trunk.

Also, what would be the effect of the warming of Siberia and Canada on plant life? There would be a longer growing season perhaps– it might depend on sunshine instead of heat— but there might be fewer trees and more bushes.

I got this joke from The Volokh Conspiracy.

Two atoms were walking along, and one said to the other “Oh no — I just lost an electron!”

The other atom said, “Are you sure?”

To this the first atom replied, “Yes, I’m positive!”

Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center Frequently Asked Global Change Questions says that burning a gallon of gasoline produces 19.6 pounds of carbon dioxide, 8.8 kilograms, and a person’s breathing produces about 1 kilogram per day(though it depends on how hard he is breathing). Suppose I drive about 20 miles per day, using one gallon of gasoline. Then every day my car generates 8.8 kilograms of carbon dioxide and my breathing generates 1 kilogram. So driving does contribute more.[I misread the number as 1kg/HOUR in the draft of the post earlier today]

The CDIAC site says that my breathing is not a net contributor to carbon dioxide because I do not emit more than I eat in the form of plant and animal food, and those plants and animals’ carbon came from the atmosphere ultimately. That is wrong. My breathing does add carbon dioxide; it’s just that my other activities ultimately subtract the same amount. If, however, I stopped eating, we could take the food I eat and bury it and that would reduce greenhouse gases far more than if I had just stopped driving.

Later that day: Come to think of it, let’s check the numbers. First, gasoline. One gallon is 8 pints, which is 8 pounds of water. Water is H20, Oxygen basically. Gasoline is various C-H compounds, Carbon basically, which is lighter than oxygen (hence oil floats on water). Thus,one gallon has, say, 6 pounds of carbon, which combines with 2 parts Oxygen to make CO2— 6+8+8=22 pounds, pretty close to 19.6.

Now check breathing. 1 kilogram of C02 per day is about 2 pounds which is about .8 pounds of carbon per day. I have to get all that carbon by eating, and much of my food is water, not carbon. I suppose I eat about 4 pounds of food per day, of which 1 pound is carbon, so that matches up pretty well.

Woman X is much more attractive to men than Woman Y, though both are the same age and equally healthy. That is hard to explain evolutionarily except as sexual selection (as opposed to fitness selection). I suppose all sexual selection is surprising in this way, but this example bothers me. One thing is that in a monogamous species adultery is a threat. If I choose woman X for sexual selection, it is because her children will also be beautiful and will have more children than average. But she will especially tempting to other men, so her children may not be mine, whereas an ugly woman’s would have been.

People criticize Intelligent Design as being a theory meant to fill in gaps in our knowledge. That, however, is often the role of theory (always?)— to make better sense of stuff that doesn’t fit our current thinking completely. The neutrino is a good example. It was posited to explain a gap in theory in 1931, but there was not experimental evidence “finding” it until about 30 years later. As “What’s a Neutrino?” tells us:

• 1931 - A hypothetical particle is predicted by the theorist Wolfgang Pauli. Pauli based his prediction on the fact that energy and momentum did not appear to be conserved in certain radioactive decays. Pauli suggested that this missing energy might be carried off, unseen, by a neutral particle which was escaping detection.

• 1934 - Enrico Fermi develops a comprehensive theory of radioactive decays, including Pauli’s hypothetical particle, which Fermi coins the neutrino (Italian: “little neutral one”). With inclusion of the neutrino, Fermi’s theory accurately explains many experimentally observed results.
• 1959 - Discovery of a particle fitting the expected characteristics of the neutrino is announced by Clyde Cowan and Fred Reines (a founding member of Super-Kamiokande; UCI professor emeritus and recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in physics for his contribution to the discovery). This neutrino is later determined to be the partner of the electron.

I wonder if a carbon tax might not be a good idea even if it has absolutely no effect on global warming. The reason is that it is a flat tax rather than a progressive tax.

If taxes simply increase, that is of course more distortionary than our present system, but presumably if we imposed a carbon tax we would reduce the income tax to keep revenue constant. Then the two questions are (a) how distortionary is a carbon tax compared to a tax on labor, rents, and capital income, and (b) if the carbon tax is more distortionary in general, does its lack of progressivity and loopholes nonetheless make it less distortionary?

Of course, it could be that carbon is a luxury good, in which case a carbon tax is progressive in effect even if it is flat as applied. Or, it could be regressive in effect, which would increase its efficiency even more by reducing the tax effect on the marginal dollar.

On page 72 of Richard Dawkins’s, The Ancestor’s Tale: A
Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, we read why absence of
fossils helps confirm the truth of the theory of evolution:

It is in the nature of sedimentary rock that its materials are
continually being recycled. Old mountains such as the Scottish
Highlands have been slowly ground down by wind and water, yielding
materials which later settle into sediments and may ultimately push up
again somewhere else as new mountains like the Alps, and the cycle
resumes. In a world of such recycling, we have to curb our importunate
demands for a continuous fossil record to bridge every gap in
evolution. It isn’t just bad luck, that fossils are often missing,
but an inherent consequence of the way sedimentary rocks are made. It
would be positively worrying if there were no gaps in the fossil
record. Old rocks, with their fossils, are actively being destroyed by
the very process that goes to make new ones.

This is not a fallacious argument, but it is in the spirit of the
equally valid “God of the Gaps” argument which Dawkins so criticizes.

Pete Dupont has an excellent op-ed in the WSJ on global warming, with a coda about DDT and malaria.

Sunspot activity has reached a thousand-year high, according to European astronomy institutions. Solar radiation is reducing Mars’s southern icecap, which has been shrinking for three summers despite the absence of SUVS and coal-fired electrical plants anywhere on the Red Planet. Back on Earth, a NASA study reports that solar radiation has increased in each of the past two decades, and environmental scholar Bjorn Lomborg, citing a 1997 atmosphere-ocean general circulation model, observes that “the increase in direct solar irradiation over the past 30 years is responsible for about 40 percent of the observed global warming.”

… Half of the past century’s warming occurred before 1940, when the human population and its industrial base were far smaller than now.

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From Philosophers’ Playground, something relevant to Intelligent Design:

The” grue” of which he speaks comes from Nelson Goodman’s “New Riddle of Induction” in which he argues that the central logical tool in scientific reasoning, induction, is not the language independent thing we think it is. The idea is that if the word “grue” means “green before 1/1/07 and blue thereafter” then all of the evidence we currently have that the grass is green is also evidence that the grass is grue since all observations have come before the year 2007. By using induction from this evidence, speakers of our color language would predict that on New Years’ Day, the grass will still be green, but using the very same logical inference, grue-speakers will be lead by their language to argue that all scientific evidence points to it being what we would call blue. So we have different claims about how the world will be based on the same evidence and the same scientific inference, with the only difference being the language we choose to speak — something that should be innocuous.

Is the statement “Grass is grue” only falsifiable after 1/1/07. In the naive sense, yes, because that is the first point at which there theories make different predictions. But as Duhem, Quine, Kuhn, and Lakatos (amongst many others) point out. No matter what we observe, we haven’t necessarily falsified anything in particular. We can hold onto the grue language and grue-based inductions if we are willing to make adjustments elsewhere in our web of belief.