Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

There’s a very nice NASA-GISS site where you can click on a map of the United States to get monthly weather station temperatures since 1880. This will be useful to check out the facts when people say in conversation, “Oh, global warming has made it so much warmer this past few years around here.” Here’s some of the yearly averages for Bloomington, Indiana.

1980 11.71
1981 11.88
1982 11.08
1983 13.19
1984 11.3
1985 12.73
1986 12.39
1987 12.89
1988 12.11
1989 11.83
1990 12.32
1991 13.38
1992 12.18
1993 11.68
1994 11.97
1995 12.43
1996 10.91
1997 10.9
1998 13.64
1999 13.17
2000 12.06
2001 11.74
2002 12.76
2003 11.22
2004 12.26
2005 12.58

This data on monthly deviations from 1961-1990 monthly temperatures may be a bit hard to read, but it is interesting. It shows that the past decade has been warmer than 1961-1990, but it isn’t clear that the world is getting warmer in the 21st century. The source is the IPCC, a group which supports efforts to stop global warming.

The yearly averages are:
Year Average
1996 0.205
1997 0.462
1998 0.817
1999 0.487
2000 0.361
2001 0.553
2002 0.661
2003 0.641
2004 0.612
2005 0.745
2006 0.658

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Tyler Cowen has a good summary of his views on the social discount rate, in a post relating to Stern’s assumption of it being zero in global warming calculations: (more…)

Someone recently gave me a jar of three little marimo as a gift. From
Wikipedia:

Marimo (Japanese: ?? marimo), also known as Cladophora ball, Lake ball, or Moss Balls in English, is a species of filamentous green algae (Chlorophyta) found in a number of lakes in the northern hemisphere. The name though refers to a certain rare growth form of the species where the algae grow into large green balls with a velvety appearance. Colonies of such balls are known only from Iceland, Japan and Estonia….

Mari is a bouncy play ball. Mo is a generic term for plants that grow in water. The native names in Ainu are torasanpe (lake ghost) and tokarippu (thing that rolls in mud).

This article in Science is about experiments using 30,000 or so generations of bacteria to look at evolution. One lab found only one beneficial mutation in that time, but they found that 12 different populations all evolved to get the same fitness ina new environment, but using different methods and with different DNA. Here’s one excerpt to give the flavor:

Originally, Adams explains, natural selection favored mutants that had a souped-up appetite for glucose and so could outgrow its neighbors. But bacteria can metabolize only so much glucose; as their biochemistry got clogged with the sugar, the glucose-hogging mutants shunted the excess from aerobic metabolism to the less efficient anaerobic pathway, which generates a waste product, acetate. As Rosenzweig, Adams, and their colleagues described in the August 1994 issue of Genetics, the acetate buildup created a new ecological opportunity, and eventually a mutant emerged that could fill it: a new acetate-scavenging strain. Adams and his colleagues reported last summer in Molecular Biology and Evolution that the acetate scavengers appeared in six out of 12 populations they studied, and each time a mutation in the regulatory region of a gene that influences acetate uptake was responsible.

“It’s the first stage in speciation,” says Adams. “Diversity can exist even if you don’t seed it with something that can drive diversification.” And like other studies, this one shows that diversification is not only inevitable but also follows a predictable course.

A new thought on global warming: even if there is a 10% chance of bad things happening because of global warming, we should have a plan to deal with it. And even if there is a 90% chance, we should have a plan that is reversible, not causing permanent harm.

I think this lends argument to plans such as getting ready to put soot into the atmosphere to make it more opaque— but for waiting to do so until the bad effects are noticeable. If we were to be restricted to CO2-emission-reducing policies, it makes for a complicated and interesting tradeoff between restricting now, possibly uselessly, and restricting later, when adjustment costs are higher.

A friend told me he was benefiting from the non-prescription drug 5-Hydroxytryptophan, which works a bit like an SSRI, except it isn’t a serotonin reuptake inhibitor, but is supposed to help produce more serotonin. This is an interesting drug from a regulatory point of view. From Wikipedia: (more…)

From Jurisdynamics,

As the Harvard philosopher WVO Quine wrote, “for my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer’s gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind.” He wrote this because Homeric gods were not supposed to be taken to exist on faith, but rather as explanations of phenomena like Volcanic eruptions and lightning strikes.

I’ve decided to start a mushroom webpage. I’ll put pictures of mushrooms I come across there, and anthing else mycological.

A WSJ article by global warming skeptic Richard Lindzen has some useful stylized facts.

Most of the climate community has agreed since 1988 that global mean temperatures have increased on the order of one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, having risen significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early ’70s, increased again until the ’90s, and remaining essentially flat since 1998.

There is also little disagreement that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million by volume in the 19th century to about 387 ppmv today. Finally, there has been no question whatever that carbon dioxide is an infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas–albeit a minor one), and its increase should theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in carbon dioxide should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed, assuming that the small observed increase was in fact due to increasing carbon dioxide rather than a natural fluctuation in the climate system.

Spondylolisthesis - forward displacement of one vertebra on its lower neighbor.

A lovely word.

We went camping last weekend in Brown County State Park on a day that mushrooms had sprouted. There were yellow boletes in huge numbers, probably edible, though we did not try any. There were also amanitas such as the yellowish one depicted.
What kind? There are HREF="http://pluto.njcc.com/~ret/amanita/sectaman.html">lots of them. Maybe
it’s amanita pantherina, or maybe amanita
gemmata. Poisonous, no doubt. Two-year-old Lily quickly learned to say “Poisonous mushroom!” whenever she saw a big white one.

This is, accidentally, a good picture in that it shows mushrooms at three ages. The big one in front has its cap flat, but behind it is a younger one with its cap pointy and an older one with its cap spread like a blown-out umbrella.

Richard Posner has a good blog entry on extending life through medical care. Summary: most of the medical life extension is via infant mortality and heart disease, and the present cost per extra year is about $40,000 overall, $145,000 for old people.

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In The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins gives a theoretical support
for slow-
increment evolution (against creationism, intelligent design,
punctuationism, Lamarck, and all comers). At one point, he makes fun of
an English bishop who uses what Dawkins calls the weak Argument from
Personal Incredulity. “It seems implausible to me…. I cannot believe
that… Could it possibly happen that…” Dawkins does a good job of
making fun of it.

My first thought was that the Argument is nonetheless okay. What we
often do is to describe a situation and then say, “I don’t think that’s
plausible.” It, of course, can’t really be just an argument from
Personal incredulity. Rather, we are trying to share our doubts. And
this is a rational argument, that can be refuted. The opposing view can
try to present explanations or evidence that will overcome the
doubts.

My second thought, though, was that Dawkins relies on a very similar
argument, but one that sounds even worse. What he relies on is the
Argument from Personal Credulity. His answer to the bishop is “It seems
plausible to me, … I believe that,… It could easily happen that… ”
And, of course, that is an equally legitimate argument. It can be
refuted by evidence or explanation that undermines Dawkins’s beliefs.

Michael Fumento’s “Ketamine and Depression” at the American Spectator sounds like big news, and an interesting medical study. One injection of ketamine caused immediate (within hours) improvement in two thirds of severely depressed patients, and a third of them were better even after a week. The sample was tiny (17), but they first did a double-blind, with zero improvement in the placebo patients, and then reversed the roles, and found that thos same patients improved with the ketamine in the second round. Ketamine is a dangerous drug (euphoric and hallucogenic), but the results are remarkable. If true, why aren’t asylums rushing to use this? Or are they?

I find the global warming debate very hard to follow. There is lots of garbage published, and the respectable writers are not all that trustworthy, from what I can see. It is hard even to figure out the basic facts, and the models seem to be highly speculative and presented with too much confidence. I’m reminded of medical studies, with their dubious statistics and careless disregard of alternative causes.

One thing I wonder about is the actual pattern of temperature change over time. I know it’s not been a uniform increase in temperature over the 20th century– the temperature actually fell for 20 or so years in mid-century. That’s OK, if what we’re interested in is long-term trends, though it should remind us that the year-to-year variation in average temperature is greater than the century-to-century variation. But what I’d also like to pin down is (1) How does the temperature increase vary by continent and ocean? and (2) How much of the increase is in the summer and how much in the winter?

What I’ve heard is that global temperatures are not increasing. Rather, the average global temperature is increasing, because temperatures in some places and during some seasons are increasing. To wit, winter temperatures in central North America and Asia are increasing. I’d like to know if this is true, and temperatures at other times of year and in other places are not.

This is a big deal. When we worry about global warming, most of us are worrying about increases in summer temperatures, especially in the tropics, where life could become unbearable, or in the polar regions, where the ice would melt. We don’t worry about North Dakota winters having fewer below-zero days.

A Cato article shows the pattern of warming. Figure 48.1 above shows that the big increases in temperature have been in the Great Plains, Finland, and Siberia. Figure 48.3 shows that in the US since the 60’s it has been in the winter. It looks like the per-decade farenheit temperature increase by three-month group has been : JFM:.55, AMJ +.12, JAS +.08, OND -.11. Farneheit per decade. Extrapolating, in 50 years the US temperature would be about 3 degrees warmer in the winter and half a degree in the summer.

A WSJ op-ed has three examples of scientific reports using the tactic of an accurate report but tendentious executive summaries: (more…)

A nice turn of phrase from Tom Smith

This is my long winded way of saying, who is and who isn’t a Supreme Court clerk isn’t even a candidate for an instrument to measure intelligence, any more than being on the Supreme Court is. (That last point is what we lawyers call res ipsa loquiter.) Here’s a thought experiment for you. Four people enter a room, and Justice O’Connor interviews them; she has to pick the smartest one. Stop laughing and pay attention.

Clayton Cramer reports on twin studies of the heritability of homosexuality:

The earliest study found, done in 1952, found 100% concordance for monozygotic (MZ) male twins. Translated out of biospeak, this means that for 100% of the identical twins where one was homosexual, so was the other. Rates for dizygotic (DZ) male twins (fraternal twins) were much lower–53.8% concordance. This is what you would expect if homosexuality was genetic, since identical twins are, well, identical, while fraternal twins, while usually closer than siblings, still have significant genetic differences.

However: if Bogaert’s hypothesis that homosexuality is some sort of response to maternal hormonal actions, you would expect DZ concordance rates to be quite close to MZ concordance rates.

This 1952 study, however, is by far the highest concordance rates–and there’s a hint that perhaps it was not a terribly random sample. A 1968 study found MZ concordance of 43%, and DZ concordance of 14%. A 1991 study found 52% and 22%. These are much lower, but still hint that homosexuality could be a genetic issue.

From Pascal’s Thoughts, T.S. Eliot translation, entry 229, I find this item which is quotable for my Concealment Argument paper:

This is what I see and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and I see only darkness everywhere. Nature presents to me nothing which is not matter of doubt and concern. If I saw nothing there which revealed a Divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion; if I saw everywhere the signs of a Creator, I would remain peacefully in faith. But, seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied; wherefore I have a hundred time wished that if a God maintains nature, she should testify to Him unequivocally, and that, if the signs she gives are deceptive, she should suppress them altogether ; that she should say everything or nothing, that I might see which cause I ought to follow. Whereas in my present state, ignorant of what I am or of what I ought to do, I know neither my condition nor my duty. My heart inclines wholly to know where is the true good, in order to follow it; nothing would be too dear to me for eternity.

I envy those whom I see living in the faith with such carelessness, and who make such a bad use of a gift of which it seems to me I would make such a different use.