“You should be steamed.” Some thoughts from the former head of the Hurricane Center:
What do the skeptics believe? First, they concur with the believers that the Earth has been warming since the end of a Little Ice Age around 1850. The cause of this warming is the question. Believers think the warming is man-made, while the skeptics believe the warming is natural and contributions from man are minimal and certainly not potentially catastrophic à la Al Gore.
Second, skeptics argue that CO2 is not a pollutant but vital for plant life. Numerous field experiments have confirmed that higher levels of CO2 are positive for agricultural productivity. Furthermore, carbon dioxide is a very minor greenhouse gas. More than 90 percent of the warming from greenhouse gases is caused by water vapor. If you are going to change the temperature of the globe, it must involve water vapor.
Third, and most important, skeptics believe that climate models are grossly overpredicting future warming from rising concentrations of carbon dioxide. We are being told that numerical models that cannot make accurate 5- to 10-day forecasts can be simplified and run forward for 100 years with results so reliable you can impose an economic disaster on the U.S. and the world.
I always find the religious language amusing. The “believers” seem to take it on faith, because the high priests of Science have ordained, it, while the “skeptics” act like actual scientists.
[Monday evening update]
A call for Climaquiddick whistleblowers. I hope they get a lot. I think that the bastions have been captured.
I dunno – I find it more apt than amusing.
Being at the end of reading Popper’s Poverty of Historicism, it brings to mind his definition of science, which is all about disconfirmation.
Science is skeptical at its core, and must be to be science.
This business of “climate models.”
There are two types of “models” people are talking about these days. One model is the type of statistical model used to correlate temperature data from different sources, thermometers at different weather stations, thermometers used at different times, proxies for thermometer readings such as tree rings, ice cores, and marine sediments. The second model is the GCM (Global Circulation Model), where one correlates the model with temperatures past and present and one predicts the future temperature.
Now, with respect to the GCM, I don’t do any work on such climate models, but I am active in research on vocal tract models, which are a kind of calculation involving fluid flows and pressures and also involve an uncertain system as it is difficult to get precise measures of vocal tract shape during speaking.
There are effectively “two schools of thought” with regard to models of complex and uncertain physical systems. One school is to either make measurements or assumptions regarding every possible detail one can think of and incorporate such detail into the model. The other school is to make a “cartoon model”, a grossly simplified approximation of reality, but to incorporate in perhaps a simplified way those details of which your “hypothesis”, “experience”, “expert knowledge”, or “scientific intuition” inform you are important.
This second school is the source of jokes like the mathematician asked to design a chicken plucking machine, with the punch line “First, assume a spherical chicken.” That punch line speaks to an important truth of “cartoon” or “simplified” or “back of the envelope” modeling. You may not get very far with a practical chicken plucking machine for use at Tyson Foods by assuming a spherical chicken, but you may get a first-order approximation to the power requirements or chicken-plucking speed of such a machine under that assumption.
An important property of the “cartoon” vocal tract model is that one gets an idea of the general process and physical principles by which vocal tract shapes determine speech sounds. A disadvantage of the cartoon model is that the cartoon model becomes “Gospel truth.” People had gotten so far characterizing vowel production with a single parameter “place of articulation”, but when we started measuring place of articulation in fluent speech with real-time tracking x-ray equipment, the correlation between our x-ray proxy for place of articulation and speech formant frequencies proved to be weak.
On the other hand, one can generate models with high levels of detail, but one cannot separate the “forest from the trees”, and the explanative power of these models in terms of paths of causation is weak.
The GCM’s could be in this second category, that they include high levels of detail. They don’t include a high enough level of detail that anyone can predict local weather more than a couple to a few days in advance, but they include such high levels of detail that they may not tell you “the big picture.”
Some few years ago, and since I am interested not only in the science but in the social implications, and if I dare say the politics, I probably should keep a diary of the talks I attend, listing when and the name of the speaker. For this talk I don’t remember, but it was to my recollection within the past ten years.
The talk was about a “cartoon” model of global climate, what the speaker called a “back of the envelope calculation of global warming.” I was highly interested in this talk. In my own work, as I have explained, both such cartoon models along with the more detailed models have contributed to scientific understanding. Not only that, that someone in climate modeling was going to present a “cartoon” model seemed like the way to go, to understand basic mechanisms of heat transport and their effect on global temperature.
The take home message of the talk was that this cartoon model predicts that a doubling of CO2 would result in warming at the low end of whatever the IPCC range of predictions was at the time, meaning that there would be some warming, but not catastrophic warming.
The other interesting thing is that the talk was given over in Meteorology/Space Science — I don’t know those people either professionally or personally, but I assume they were the in-house “community” who knew something about weather, climate, and global warming at the University of Wisconsin. What was interesting was that the talk was “well received” — people were interested in what the speaker had to say, there were on-topic questions for the speaker, and the speaker was received cordially. There was certainly no accusation of the speaker being “a denier” for coming up with a climate modeling result “at the low end of the range of IPCC predictions.”
My take home message is that whereas detailed climate models may not be able to predict the weather beyond 2 or 3 days (and adding much more detail may be a losing battle as weather is “chaotic”, meaning that the weather prediction is hyper-sensitive to initial conditions, that does not mean we cannot use GCM’s to make predictions regarding climate.
On the other hand, the prediction of climate may have a great deal of uncertainty given that the underlying physics has uncertainty — specifically positive or negative or neutral feedback on water vapor with CO2-induced warming. Given that level of uncertainty, that is not to say that the complex GCM’s cannot give reasonable predictions of future climate given correct values for these feedback coefficients, but simpler or “cartoon” models at this point may give more insight into what physical coefficients are the important ones for further measurement or study.
But just because a GCM cannot predict the weather in five days, however, does not mean that a GCM cannot predict climate in 50 years. The heat has to go somewhere, whether into deep ocean sinks or into the atmosphere. The chaotic fluctuation of heat flow between ocean sink and the atmosphere may mean that the CO2 “warming signal” may be masked by the El Nino (ENSO) flucuation, but that doesn’t mean that CO2 warming is something to be ignored if we go on burning fossil fuels long enough.
But the GCM model is uncertain for climate modeling for a different reason than it is uncertain for weather prediction. It is uncertain for weather prediction on account of chaos theory — the butterfly flapping effect on hyper-sensitivity to initial conditions. It is uncertain for climage prediction on account of longer-term cycles involving sinks, also a chaos theory effect, but also on account of uncertainties of physical mechanisms.
But the heat has to go someplace, and I am of the opinion that back-of-the-envelope models can tell us at least scenarios of what could happen based on different actions of the feedback mechanisms, and different actions of the heat sinks.
On the political level, we probably, as a society, a culture, and as the human race, ween ourselves from fossil fuels at some point, but the more data points I am taking in (and yes, Climate Gate is another data point I am considering), the less I subscribe to “we need to act NOW or we are ALL going to DIE!”
Paul,
Interesting analysis. I’m one of the few polymaths still around today. While I could follow the debates over AGW in some detail if I chose (I do have a degree in physics), I’m more interested in the social and cultural aspects. I’m struck how, in so many ways, the climate scientists are like so many people in science these days — narrow. It’s all too possible for narrow people to miss important data. Just consider the mess that “quants” have made of finance.
Now it is back to something I know much more about.
I think the real smoking gun of the ClimateGate releases wasn’t so much in the emails but in the computer source code. As a former professional programmer with 20 years of experience, I’m probably more qualified to evaluate the code than most scientists. That code was junk, pure and simple. Any outputs generated by that code are also junk. I would’ve flunked any first year computer science student (I taught for 8 years) who wrote code that bad. For example, the code threw errors and simply kept on going. Garbage!
The emails point to several serious issues such as undermining the peer review process. The apparent disposal of the original data and lack of documentation regarding the changes used to create the “value added data” means the processes are irreproducable. Years ago, there was a scientific humor magazine called “The Journal of Irreproducable Results” (still exists as a website). The ClimateGate releases show irreproducable input data and shoddy computer code. None of the related output products can possibly have any credibility. Call it what you want, but that isn’t science.
skeptics believe the warming is natural and contributions from man are minimal and certainly not potentially catastrophic
Skeptics don’t use words like “certainly”.
Second, skeptics argue that CO2 is not a pollutant but vital for plant life.
The words of a polemicist, not a scientist.
. We are being told that numerical models that cannot make accurate 5- to 10-day forecasts can be simplified and run forward for 100 years with results so reliable you can impose an economic disaster on the U.S. and the world.
Europe has carbon curbs, and no economic disaster. Who’s the alarmist here?
“Second, skeptics argue that CO2 is not a pollutant but vital for plant life. ”
“The words of a polemicist, not a scientist.”
More like a stone-cold fact. The Science is pretty much settled on that one.
Interesting observation, Paul. Let me add my own, which are related.
It so happens my training is in exactly the kind of basic physics the climate studies people work with: my PhD from Berkeley is in molecular physics. There isn’t anything about the IR spectrum of CO2 or the behaviour of gases in a gravitational gradient that is above my pay grade. Furthermore, I’ve worked for 20 years doing complex systems simulations, albeit mostly at the discrete molecular level — of complex fluids and such — and not at the continuum/hydrodynamics levels these folks use. But I know what they’re doing very well.
From that perspective, I get a lot of skepticism. Computer simulation is a bit like a drug, to scientists. You slave and sweat and work to measure something, and then along comes a computer simulation, and it sure looks like you can just simulate your system, make sure its behaviour matches up with what you know, and then measure on the computer what you want to know. It seems like magic.
Well, it is. And sometimes — if you use it right — it’s white magic, but sometimes — all too often, if you use it wrong — it’s black magic, a way to bedazzle yourself into amazing dead ends and follies. I’ve seen it happen too many times, to young inexperienced scientists.
Here’s the problem. You only simulate complex systems that are founded on simple physics. Only simple physics are simulable on a computer at speeds fast enough to be useful. Only complex systems are interesting. (No one simulates children on swings, or two pool balls colliding.)
What that means, however, is that the system is what philosophers call emergent. Complexity arises in a generally surprising and mysterious way from a bucketload of simple interactions, the way a human mind arises from a trillion simple neural synapses firing, or the amazing varied patterns in snowflakes arise from the simple crystal structure of ice and slight variations in the nucleation rate, or the Great Depression or Second World War arises from the decisions of millions of individuals — not one of which was, or at least very few of which were, designed to produce those outcomes.
Emergent systems are pretty much by definition (1) very counter-intuitive; if we had much in the way of good intuition about how and why their behaviour emerges from the underlying physics, we wouldn’t need to do the simulation, and (2) extremely sensitive to the details of the underlying model. Change the model slightly, often in ways that intuition suggests should have no effect — and the results can change mightily. What Paul calls the “butterfly effect,” I think. But not in the sense that small changes in the initial conditions change the outcome — small changes in the underlying model.
Computer simulation of complex systems first got started in my field (condensed matter physics) and only later spread to the atmospheric people. But we learned painful lessons in the 60s and 70s that they may only be learning now, namely this hard to understand and predict strange sensitivity to your model. These days, we tend to use computer simulation in the opposite way intuition suggests. We don’t construct simulations based on simple physics we know, and use it to predict the behaviour of a complex system. (Which is what the GCM people are doing, the fools.)
No, what we do is use a simulation of a complex system to discover clues about the underlying physics. That is, we simulate a system, see whether it aligns with the known complex properties of the complex system. Then we change something in the underlying model, and see whether it still does. No? Then we’ve found a portion of the physics that doesn’t matter to the emergent complex behaviour. Yes? Then we have, and we can explore the precise dependence.
Now, if climate studies were a true science, it would work like that. They’d simulate a climate, verify that it does what experiment proves it does, and use that to explore and check the underlying physics. Is temperature change sensitive to the IR absorption spectrum of trace gases? If so, how? How important are this or that feedback loop? All these questions are interesting, but you’ll notice this is backward from the way they’re actually working, which is assuming they understand all the important basic components, and then predicting the overall behaviour. That’s dangerous and fraught with the possibility — no, the probability — of gross error. That’s why we pretty much no longer do it in the older physical sciences.
Jim, you are so out of your depth. My grandmother had a saying: Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool, than to open it and remove all doubt.
““Second, skeptics argue that CO2 is not a pollutant but vital for plant life. ”
“The words of a polemicist, not a scientist.”
More like a stone-cold fact. The Science is pretty much settled on that one.”
Well yes,
“As a former professional programmer with 20 years of experience, I’m probably more qualified to evaluate the code than most scientists. That code was junk, pure and simple. Any outputs generated by that code are also junk. I would’ve flunked any first year computer science student (I taught for 8 years) who wrote code that bad. For example, the code threw errors and simply kept on going. Garbage”
We get it, Larry. You’re a f*ckin genius. No need to tell us of your qualifications again. What is this, the third time you’ve told us? Would you like a cookie for your efforts? Perhaps a nice tall glass of milk?
Paul Milenkovic “the heat must go somwhere”.
Richard Lindzen reckons it is being radiated out into space. This based on satellite measurements of actual outgoing long wave radiation. No problem.
Carl Pham: I like your explanation about emergent properties. My favorite is trying to predict life and the properties thereof by knowing the quantum mechanical properties of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen atoms etc.
I think most would classify Jerry Pournelle as a genuine polymath. He has been quite critical of the lack of application of basic scientific method in this debate, fwiw. I also found Burt Rutans presentation at OshKosh last year to be very well done.
We get it, Larry. You’re a f*ckin genius. No need to tell us of your qualifications again. What is this, the third time you’ve told us? Would you like a cookie for your efforts? Perhaps a nice tall glass of milk?
I don’t make the assumption that anyone knows who I am when I post. I never assume anyone has read any of the previous threads, either. Too bad if you don’t like it. Jealous, much?
I would dearly love to hear a sound bite of Carl Pham giving that explanation on NPR, and then on ABC, NBC and CBS.
I’ve been trying to explain to myself why I think the climate modelers are like 1850’s aeronautical engineers claiming they have the perfect design for a heavier than air flying machine. I think my explanation was somewhat useful, but Carl’s is brilliant.
Carl’s explanation covers not only the climate modeling mess, but the financial market prediction / risk assessment mess.
Yours,
Tom DeGisi
Dammit Larry,
Stop using common sense on the moron. You might educate him!
I, OTOH am a sophomore level college course polymath. Which is to say not a polymath at all, but I can fake it for a couple of minutes. Sigh.
Yours,
Tom DeGisi
Paul said “the heat has to go somewhere, whether into deep ocean sinks or into the atmosphere”. Or, into space. The T^4 blackbody radiation sink is very powerful. So, a continual supply of energy which produces heat is also necessary for a comfortable equilibrium.
At this point, Mike Borgelt beat me to the punch. To make the point finer, because heat is always radiating away, new heat producing energy also has to come from somewhere, and make it into the system in the first place, before it has to go somewhere else. Lindzen et al. reckon that some effect, most likely due to clouds, responds to increasing atmospheric heat by reflecting more of the incident heat producing energy away. The satellite data is unequivocally compatible with this hypothesis at the current level of knowledge.
Europe has carbon curbs, and no economic disaster. Who’s the alarmist here?
Jim, the problem is that as long as those “carbon curbs” don’t curb, then they have no economic disaster. But when the demand for carbon dioxide emission credits exceeds the rigid supply, then they do have an economic disaster. It’s a really poorly designed market with a highly inelastic singularity built in. They could fix this by replacing the hard caps with “soft caps”. That is, no upper limit to the number of carbon dioxide emission credits sold in a year, but there is an increasing marginal cost as more credits are sold.
We get it, Larry. You’re a f*ckin genius. No need to tell us of your qualifications again. What is this, the third time you’ve told us? Would you like a cookie for your efforts? Perhaps a nice tall glass of milk?
Perhaps we’d like for the facts to sink in with people like you. We have scientists who are obsessed with the need for their data and models to show global warming; we have data that has all sorts of dubious adjustments made to it; the models have code that is so bad it causes eyes to bleed; and a lot of that code, data, and results are hidden from public view using a variety of excuses, which we now know are intended to thwart debate on the merits of current climate research and projections. Based on that solid scientific evidence we are supposed to restructure our energy and transportation infrastructure, affecting the fate of billions of people one way or another.
More like a stone-cold fact. The Science is pretty much settled on that one.
The fact that plants need CO2 is utterly irrelevant to the climate change debate. No one is proposing we reduce atmospheric CO2 to zero. And no one (I don’t think) contests the fact that there are levels of atmospheric CO2 (e.g. 99%) that would have catastrophic effects. Arguing about whether CO2 is vital or a pollutant is pointless; it’s both.
If you want a solid example of “cartoon model” versus an a priori detailed computer model, you need look no further than a gas-filled pressure cooker on a stove. f(P,V,n,T,Q) = ??? The “cartoon models” in this case start with PV=nRT, and march through various accuracy improving refinements, alongside the various heat-flow models. Computational difficulty: undergrad. Complexity: five pages – max. Accuracy (say): 0.1 C, 0.1 kPa, 0.1 W. Expandable to basically any useful desired precision.
The “true model,” the atom-by-atom model (ignoring further layers of the onion), is a completely different ball of wax. Computational difficulty: ouch. Complexity: ouch2. Accuracy: You’re fundamentally measuring different things. You’re trying to predict the energy levels and locations of the individual atoms. Sure, with precisely correct inputs you can end up with even better results than the cartoon model. But with this model, the exact details matter. What precisely is the smoothness of the interior surfaces? Describe the topology of the area around the pressure relieve valve and the pressure gauge in atom-by-atom detail.
In the cartoon model, the precise details of initial conditions are dramatically simplified: I’d like to know Pi, Vi, ni…. In the precise model, I’d need to know the exact location, the exact velocity vector, and the exact internal energy state of every atom involved.
With the cartoon model, you can get a solid, replicable, verifiable, testable series of results. With the accurate model, you had better have a solid grasp of that data you’re feeding into the model – otherwise you’re just getting very precise garbage out.
And the key result of Climategate is evidence that the inputs are not as precise as their error bars might indicate.
“Arguing about whether CO2 is vital or a pollutant is pointless; it’s both.”
By the same argument, pure oxygen and pure water are also pollutants. You’re expanding the meaning of the word to absurdity. If you’re making the argument “We’re already past the level at which carbon dioxide should be considered a pollutant,” you should at least be able to point out where the line is. Without throwing in the moronic strawman “Well, most anything is toxic in the right circumstances.”
Jim claims, Europe has carbon curbs, and no economic disaster. Who’s the alarmist here?
Well, that depends on how you define “economic disaster,” doesn’t it?
http://business.asiaone.com/Business/News/Story/A1Story20100103-189406.html
Now, perhaps that has nothing to do w/ the carbon emissions. But more to the point, perhaps that’s why those curbs haven’t caused an economic disaster—Europe already is IN one.
Of course, this is the same Europe that views the double digit unemployment rates we now enjoy as pretty standard—French and German unemployment rates have been there for nearly a decade. Thus, who could tell if their economy was dragged down further?
“Paul Milenkovic “the heat must go somwhere”.
Richard Lindzen reckons it is being radiated out into space. This based on satellite measurements of actual outgoing long wave radiation. No problem.”
Again, I probably should have taken notes at that talk.
Put simply, the heat has to go somewhere, but that somewhere is not necessarily where it comes in. If I remember correctly, the greater heat input is in the tropics, and the giver of the talk made some sort of assumption about saturation of humidity at the tropics, and as you know, H2O is the more important greenhouse gas and so on.
Where the heat goes according to the model is that it is convected towards the poles, where it is more efficiently radiated owing to the much drier conditions.
What this “back of the envelope” model was all about was estabilishing the efficacy of, convective heat transport between lattitudes — largely what we call “weather” here in the continental US — in transporting heat from the tropics, where more of it is absorbed, to the Arctic, where more of it radiated into space.
Al Says:
January 4th, 2010 at 2:26 pm
“In the precise model, I’d need to know the exact location, the exact velocity vector, and the exact internal energy state of every atom involved.”
Paging Dr. Heisenberg!
Really, there is an important point here, and that is the law of diminishing returns. At some point, the extra effort becomes self-defeating.
The other side to this question is the social cost of “doing something.”
Germany is used as an example of “doing something.” The question, however, is if you are talking about Angie Merkel’s Germany as the right level of “doing something” or of Germany in 1946-47 under the “Morgenthau Plan.”
Someone here at Rand’s Web site introduced me to Mencius Moldbug at “Unqualified Reservations.” Mencius Moldbug is perhaps the wordiest blogger I have encountered, I don’t agree with his politics or policy prescriptions, but that blog is perhaps the most thought provoking one I have encountered recently.
Mencius Moldbug reasons that the Germany of today level of “doing something” is barely scratching the surface of the kind of CO2 reduction required, that is if the dire scenarios of the IPCC, Al Gore, and others are on target. The level of “doing something” that is meaningful is not 21st Century Germany, but Germany under Allied occupation in 1946-47, and at the time the policy was to collectively punish the German people for what they did under their Leader. That policy later changed to encouraging the German people to rebuild their industry, partly out of humanitarian impulse, partly out of concern for Communism.
As an aside, Mencius Moldbug asserts that in 1946-47, the occupation policies effectively limited the German people to 1000 calories per day because that was the consequence on the level of food imports they were allowed, something that Mencius Moldbug “laughed off” as “the German’s must have been fat enough to have that as a weight-reducing diet.”
I am curious if there is any corroboration if it was US policy to limit Germans to 1000 calories per person per day. If it were, that would have been as serious a war crime as anything the Germans did under the Leader. Yes, the Germans murdered civilians and murdered them for their race or ethnicity, but the worst thing they did was house people in camps, feed them a starvation diet, work them until they dropped dead, which they did in large numbers, and then wring their hands, “oh my, these poor souls died of natural causes!” Project Apollo with its roots in the V-2 rocket program has this blood on its hands, as it were.
Perhaps the “Morgenthau Plan” was not implemented or maintained long enough that it caused massed starvation?
“…the occupation policies effectively limited the German people to 1000 calories per day…”
Would this mean they snatched food out of peoples’ hands if it had more than 1000 calories, or does that mean that was the ration they doled out free, and the citizens were responsible for getting whatever else they needed or desired?
In this day and age, of course, the latter scenario is standard abuse of rhetoric. US citizens presumably are “denied” health care by their government, for example.
According to Wikipedia,
I don’t know where they’re getting these numbers from.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_Carbon_Dioxide.png
Somebody please find the line where it is a pollutant.
Looks to me that the problem is far too little bio-available carbon, not too much. I would argue we are doing a good thing by liberating carbon.
PS Graph is read right to left. K is Cretacious. C is Carboniferous(Pennsylvanina and Missippippian in North America). Pharnezoic means age of Palnts and Animals.
“Arguing about whether CO2 is vital or a pollutant is pointless; it’s both.”
So, it is both a dessert topping and a floor wax? Nice that the AGW crowd has feed yet another marketing gimmick for the very Oil companies they so despise. Oh look, yet another property of the petroleum product that can be marketed and traded until the green economy bubble bursts. No wonder Al Gore, who’s family made a great deal of money from oil, would come up with this crap. I don’t think most of the so called environmentalists even understand what the unintended consequences of the can of worms they are attempting to open. Not only does it give more power to the gov’t to cap and tax yet another aspect of our lives. But it provides yet a whole other layer of revenue generation to the oil barons who will no doubt find a way to capitalize on these trading schemes. The fact that greenies can’t even get the economic impacts, let alone the environmental ones, to their pollution mitigation schemes tells you how much of tool they are. But, I’m certain there is a polar bear out there somewhere that feels their love. *tears up
I see wut u did ther…
““…the occupation policies effectively limited the German people to 1000 calories per day…”
Would this mean they snatched food out of peoples’ hands if it had more than 1000 calories, or does that mean that was the ration they doled out free, and the citizens were responsible for getting whatever else they needed or desired?”
Actually, according to Wikipedia on “Morgenthau Plan”, the source for the 1000 calories per person per day, along with the accusation that the Adminstration (I guess it would be Truman continuing Roosevelt’s policies) came from Herbert Hoover. And before people start going about Herbert Hoover, it was in response to such criticism that these policies were reversed.
As far as I could tell, the German people were allowed to decide amongst themselves who got more and who got less of the 1000 calorie allotment. The allotment was pretty much the outcome of the occupation policy, in terms of what Germans were allowed and not allowed to do. The policy was ended, however, in response to stateside criticism in the US and in response to signs of an incipient humanitarian disaster — increased death rates, disease rates, and especially among young children.
The part that was new to me is that I knew that a punative occupation policy had been talked about, what I never learned “in school” is that this policy was given about two years before it was reversed.
So in answer to the question about whether the 1000 calories was in a ration “doled out” to people, I meant what I said when I said “effectively limited.” The country could only grow so much food at the time, and when industrial plants were shut down or dismantled by occupation orders, as a country they were unable to trade goods for more food than what was estimated to be 1000 calories per person, on average.
Again, it is attributed to Herbert Hoover, who by the way knew a thing about relief after a war based on his WW-I efforts, that for Germany to be self-sufficient in food, its population would need to be reduced by displacement or death by about 20 million. Say what you want about the failings of Herbert Hoover during his presidency and about his actions towards the Bonus March and other actions or inactions, but what he said in 1947 influenced enough people that Truman reversed Roosevelt’s policies.
This analogy of 70 percent reduction in CO2 emissions to Germany 1947, and mind you, Al Gore and others are talking about reduction of that magnitude by early to mid 21st century, not to eliminate CO2 in the atmosphere but to reduce the rate of increase to levels deemed necessary by the more dire predictions of climate models, this analogy is due to Mencius Moldbug, whom I admit is given to dramatic turns of phrase to make a point.
The notion is that we can build enough windmills and solar cells and build hypercars and hyperbuildings to achieve this 70 percent reduction without that level of privation. Windmills and solar cells are not working out in 21st century Germany — they are already jacking up their electric rates without much to show for it. I was OK with President Carter’s policy of not reprocessing nuclear fuel, which meant relying on fossil power for another generation or two, and I am OK with continued use of fossil power, if it will help keep atomic munitions out of the hand of governments that subscribe to millenialist and apocalytic doctrines and if it will help push back some of the abject poverty that continues in this modern world.
We get it, Larry. You’re a f*ckin genius. No need to tell us of your qualifications again.
One need not be a f**ckin’ genius to know that the computer models are crap. One need only be a little smarter than (say) Mark, and have actual experience with coding and modeling.
Paul – I looked through the Wikipedia article. I have to say I did not see anywhere stated that the policy was explicitly designed to limit calories, merely that it had that effect. So, I’m not sure I see a rationale for malign intent here.
As for the rest, we are in agreement in general terms.
I also looked through the Wikipedia article, and the “Morgenthau Plan” was clearly designed to punish and cripple Germany, and to avoid the errors in punishing and crippling Germany made after WWI. I found Morgenthau’s and FDR’s plans, rationale and behavior malign, disgusting and stupid.
I can get behind the seizure of German territory and forced relocations, though. The Germans needed to know they really, really lost and that genocidal bigotry is really, really bad, and I think they do.
It’s why I’m in favor of all Gazans being given Eygptian citizenship as per post-1948 territory and being relocated to Egypt and all West Bank Palestianians being given Jordanian citizenship as per post-1948 territory and being relocated to Jordan. Arabs (and by extension, Muslims) need to know they really, really lost and that genocidal bigotry is really, really bad.
I’m willing to be talked out of this particular plan, provided we have some suitable substitute that teaches Arabs that they really, really lost and that genocidal bigotry is really, really bad.
But none of them need to be starved and have their economy purposely destroyed.
Yours,
Tom
P.S. And if I take the German example, we would need a Marshal plan for Eygpt and Jordan.
That’s Egypt for those who can actually spell.
Tom:
The problem with mass relocation, as it were, is that they usually only work when they are all being moved inside the same nation or relocated country. Otherwise the nations you are moving these people to may take offense at having a large mass of dislocated people with little personal possessions at their door. There are already many Arab Palestinian refugees living in Jordan and Egypt. They also destabilized Lebanon.
These policies seldom fix things. Long term policy often changes and people move back. Uncle Joe and Tito liked this policy a lot. It took nearly half a century but finally the places exploded into conflict again (Chechnya, Yugoslavia). In the short term, or if you judiciously enforce the policy for centuries it definitively works.
IMO CO2 reduction policies are bunk. Indulgences (i.e. carbon credits) even more so. Europe could reduce CO2 emissions by the risible amount they did because France does most of its electricity generation using nuclear power and they have a well developed electric railroad network. High fuel and vehicle taxes ensure there is less consumption of liquid petroleum fuels. I suspect other economies in the EU may not weather this little adventure so well.
The big unspoken truth behind the push for wind and solar however is that some EU leaders are acutely aware of the massive energy deficit in their economic zone. Many of the leaders basically painted themselves into a corner by rejecting the nuclear power option so they have no other workable options to Russian gas and Middle Eastern oil. You can also grow capacity in small rapid increments using wind and solar, so there is less chance of projects failing because of political issues.
Godzilla1,
Very good. Let’s talk this out.
One big problem is that the Palestinians are/were refugees. That status must end. They must be full citizens. Their Marshall Plan might be buying them a place to live which they own. We should also note that Jordan is a Palestinian state – 80% of it’s population is Palestinian. It is ruled by a foreigner, but that also describes the Hanovers in Great Britain. In addition it is important that Israeli immigration law not allow them or their descendants to return for a suitable period of time, perhaps 150 years, or perhaps there could be an anti-Jewish bigotry test.
This is, of course, pie in the sky, and may very well be truly bad pie in the sky, but I’m not willing to encourage genocidal bigotry by allowing it to beleive it is succeeding in its goals. I want it to believe it is failing.
Yours,
Tom