Tag Archives: AGW

CO2 Fail (Revisited)

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ADDENDUM BELOW

I observed, in November 2020, that there is no connection between CO2 emissions and the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. This suggests that emissions have little or no effect on the concentration of CO2. A recent post at WUWT notes that emissions hit a record high in 2021. What the post doesn’t address is the relationship between emissions and the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

See for yourself. Here’s the WUWT graph of emissions from energy combustion and industrial processes:

Here’s the record of atmospheric CO2:

It’s obvious that CO2 has been rising monotonically, with regular seasonal variations, while emissions have been rising irregularly — even declining and holding steady at times. This relationship (or lack thereof) supports the thesis that the rise in atmospheric CO2 is the result of warming, not its cause.

ADDENDUM (04/09/22):

Dr. Roy Spencer, in a post at his eponymous blog, writes:

[T]he greatest correlations are found with global (or tropical) surface temperature changes and estimated yearly anthropogenic emissions. Curiously, reversing the direction of causation between surface temperature and CO2 (yearly changes in SST [dSST/dt] being caused by increasing CO2) yields a very low correlation.

That is to say, temperature changes seem to drive CO2 levels, not the other way around (which is the conventional view).

Sources for CO2 levels:

https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gl_data.html

https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/data.html

Related reading: Clyde Spencer, “Anthropogenic CO2 and the Expected Results from Eliminating It” [zero, zilch, zip, nada], Watts Up With That?, March 22, 2022

P.S.

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Yesterday I posted about the hysterics who decry AGW but don’t act on their own to prevent its (non) occurrence. They remind me of wealthy advocates of big government who complain that their taxes are too low but don’t make voluntary donations to the U.S. Treasury.

In fact, I’m confident that most of the wealthy advocates of higher taxation are also rampant emitters of CO2. They’re foolishly consistent: hypocrites about taxation, hypocrites about AGW.

Not-So-Random Thoughts (XVIII)

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Links to the other posts in this occasional series may be found at “Favorite Posts,” just below the list of topics.

Charles Murray opines about “America Against Itself“:

With the publication in 2012 of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, political scientist Charles Murray – celebrated and denigrated in equal measure for his earlier works, Losing Ground (1984) and The Bell Curve (1994) – produced a searing, searching analysis of a nation cleaving along the lines of class, a nation, as he put it, ‘coming apart at the seams’. On the one side of this conflicted society, as Murray sees it, there is the intellectual or ‘cognitive’ elite, graduates of America’s leading universities, bound together through marriage and work, and clustered together in the same exclusive zipcodes, places such as Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and Boston. In these communities of the likeminded, which Murray gives the fictional title of ‘Belmont’, the inhabitants share the same values, the same moral outlook, the same distinct sense of themselves as superior. And on the other side, there is the ‘new lower class’, the white Americans who left education with no more than a high-school diploma, who increasingly divorce among themselves, endure unemployment together, and are gathered in neighbourhoods that Murray gives the title of ‘Fishtown’ – inspired by an actual white, blue-collar neighbourhood of the same name in Philadelphia.

It is in Fishtown that the trends Murray identifies as the most damaging over the past 50 years – family breakdown, loss of employment, crime and a loss of social capital – are felt and experienced. Its inhabitants have a set of values (albeit threadbare ones), an outlook and a way of life that are entirely at odds with those from Belmont. And it is between these two almost entirely distinct moral communities, that the new Culture Wars now appear to be being fought….

Collins: I was thinking about how, in Coming Apart, you explore how the elites seek to distance themselves from the working class. They eat so-called healthier foods, they have different child-rearing practices, and so on. Then, from afar, they preach their preferred ways to the working class, as if they know better. The elites may no longer preach traditional civic virtues, as you note in Coming Apart, but they are still preaching, in a way. Only now they’re preaching about health, parenting and other things.

Murray: They are preaching. They are legislating. They are creating policies. The elites (on both the right and the left) do not get excited about low-skill immigration. Let’s face it, if you are members of the elite, immigration provides you with cheap nannies, cheap lawn care, and so on. There are a variety of ways in which it is a case of ‘hey, it’s no skin off my back’ to have all of these new workers. The elites are promulgating policies for which they do not pay the price. That’s true of immigration, that’s true of education. When they support the teachers’ unions in all sorts of practices that are terrible for kids, they don’t pay that price. Either they send their kids to private schools, or they send their kids to schools in affluent suburbs in which they, the parents, really do have a lot of de facto influence over how the school is run.

So they don’t pay the price for policy after policy. Perhaps the most irritating to me – and here we are talking about preaching – is how they are constantly criticising the working class for being racist, for seeking to live in neighbourhoods in which whites are the majority. The elites live in zipcodes that are overwhelmingly white, with very few blacks and Latinos. The only significant minorities in elite zipcodes are East and South Asians. And, as the American sociologist Andrew Hacker has said, Asians are ‘honorary whites’. The integration that you have in elite neighbourhoods is only for the model minority, not for other minorities. That’s a kind of hypocrisy, to call working-class whites ‘racist’ for doing exactly the same thing that the elites do. It’s terrible.

The elites live in a bubble, which Murray explains in Coming Apart, and which I discuss in “Are You in the Bubble?” — I’m not — and “Bubbling Along.”

*     *     *

Meanwhile, in the climate war, there’s an interesting piece about scientists who got it right, but whose article was pulled because they used pseudonyms. In “Scientists Published Climate Research Under Fake Names. Then They Were Caught” we learn that

they had constructed a model, a mathematical argument, for calculating the average surface temperature of a rocky planet. Using just two factors — electromagnetic radiation beamed by the sun into the atmosphere and the atmospheric pressure at a planet’s surface — the scientists could predict a planet’s temperature. The physical principle, they said, was similar to the way that high-pressure air ignites fuel in a diesel engine.

If proved to be the case on Earth, the model would have dramatic implications: Our planet is warming, but the solar radiation and our atmosphere would be to blame, not us.

It seems to me that their real sin was contradicting the “settled science” of climatology.

Well, Francis Menton — author of “The ‘Science’ Underlying Climate Alarmism Turns Up Missing” — has something to say about that “settled science”:

In the list of President Obama’s favorite things to do, using government power to save the world from human-caused “climate change” has to rank at the top.  From the time of his nomination acceptance speech in June 2008 (“this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal . . .”), through all of his State of the Union addresses, and right up to the present, he has never missed an opportunity to lecture us on how atmospheric warming from our sinful “greenhouse gas” emissions is the greatest crisis facing humanity….

But is there actually any scientific basis for this?  Supposedly, it’s to be found in a document uttered by EPA back in December 2009, known as the “Endangerment Finding.”  In said document, the geniuses at EPA purport to find that the emissions of “greenhouse gases” into the atmosphere are causing a danger to human health and welfare through the greenhouse warming mechanism.  But, you ask, is there any actual proof of that?  EPA’s answer (found in the Endangerment Finding) is the “Three Lines of Evidence”….

The news is that a major new work of research, from a large group of top scientists and mathematicians, asserts that EPA’s “lines of evidence,” and thus its Endangerment Finding, have been scientifically invalidated….

So the authors of this Report, operating without government or industry funding, compiled the best available atmospheric temperature time series from 13 independent sources (satellites, balloons, buoys, and surface records), and then backed out only ENSO (i.e., El Nino/La Nina) effects.  And with that data and that sole adjustment they found: no evidence of the so-called Tropical Hot Spot that is the key to EPA’s claimed “basic physical understanding” of the claimed atmospheric greenhouse warming model, plus no statistically significant atmospheric warming at all to be explained.

What an amazing non-coincidence. That’s exactly what I found when I looked at the temperature record for Austin, Texas, since the late 1960s, when AGW was supposedly making life miserable for the planet. See “AGW in Austin? (II)” and the list of related readings and posts at the bottom. See also “Is Science Self Correcting?” (answer: no).

*     *     *

REVISED 11/18/16

Ten years ago, I posted “An Immigration Roundup,” a collection of 13 posts dated March 29 through September 22, 2006. The bottom line: to encourage and allow rampant illegal immigration borders on social and economic suicide. I remain a hardliner because of the higher crime rate among Hispanics (“Immigration and Crime“), and because of Steven Camarota’s “So What Is the Fiscal and Economic Impact of Immigration?“:

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine have just released what can fairly be described as the most comprehensive look at the economic and fiscal impact of immigration on the United States. It represents an update of sorts of a similar NAS study released in 1997, in the middle of an earlier immigration debate. Overall the report is quite balanced, with a lot of interesting findings….
The most straightforward part of the study is its assemblage of estimates of the current fiscal impact of immigrants. The study shows that immigrants (legal and illegal) do not come close to paying enough in taxes to cover their consumption of public services at the present time. The NAS present eight different scenarios based on different assumptions about the current fiscal impact of immigrants and their dependent children — and every scenario is negative. No matter what assumption the NAS makes, immigrants use more in public services than they pay in taxes. The largest net drain they report is $299 billion a year. It should be pointed out that native-born American are also shown to be a net fiscal drain, mainly because of the federal budget deficit — Washington gives out a lot more than it takes in. But the fiscal drain created by immigrants is disproportionately large relative to the size of their population. Equally important, a fiscal drain caused by natives may be unavoidable. Adding more immigrants who create a fiscal drain, on the other hand, can be avoided with a different immigration policy….
With regard to economics — jobs and wages — the results in the NAS study, based on the standard economic model, show that immigration does make the U.S economy larger by adding workers and population. But a larger economy is not necessarily a benefit to natives. The report estimates that the actual benefit to the native-born could be $54.2 billion a year — referred to as the “immigrant surplus.” This is the benefit that accrues to American businesses because immigration increases the supply of workers and reduces American wages. Several points need to be made about this estimate. First, to generate this surplus, immigration has to create a very large redistribution of income from workers to owners of capital. The model works this way: Immigration reduces the wages of natives in competition with immigrant workers by $493.9 billion annually, but it increases the income of businesses by $548.1 billion, for a net gain of $54.2 billion. Unfortunately, the NAS does not report this large income redistribution, though it provides all the information necessary to calculate it. A second key point about this economic gain is that, relative to the income of natives, the benefit is very small, representing a “0.31 percent overall increase in income” for native-born Americans.
Third, the report also summarizes empirical studies that have tried to measure directly the impact of immigration on the wages of natives (the analysis above being based on economic theory rather than direct measurement). The size of the wage impact in those empirical studies is similar to that shown above. The NAS report cites over a dozen studies indicating that immigration does reduce wages primarily for the least-educated and poorest Americans. It must be pointed out, however, that there remains some debate among economists about immigration’s wage impact. The fourth and perhaps most important point about the “immigrant surplus” is that it is eaten up by the drain on the public fisc. For example, the average of all eight fiscal scenarios is a net drain (taxes minus services) of $83 billion a year at the present time, a good deal larger than the $54.2 billion immigrant surplus.

There’s much more, but that’s enough for me. Build that wall!

*     *     *

It’s also time to revisit the question of crime. Heather Mac Donald says “Yes, the Ferguson Effect Is Real,” and Paul Mirengoff shows that “Violent Crime Jumped in 2015.” I got to the root of the problem in “Crime Revisited,” to which I’ve added “Amen to That” and “Double Amen.”

What’s the root of the problem? A certain, violence-prone racial minority, of course, and also under-incarceration. Follow all of the links in the preceding paragraph, and read and weep.

AGW in Austin? (II)

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I said this in “AGW in Austin?“:

There’s a rise in temperatures [in Austin] between the 1850s and the early 1890s, consistent with the gradual warming that followed the Little Ice Age. The gap between the early 1890s and mid-19naughts seems to have been marked by lower temperatures. It’s possible to find several mini-trends between the mid-19naughts and 1977, but the most obvious “trend” is a flat line for the entire period….

Following the sudden jump between 1977 and 1980, the “trend” remains almost flat through 1997, albeit at a slightly higher level….

The sharpest upward trend really began after the very strong (and naturally warming) El Niño of 1997-1998….

Oh, wait! It turns out that Austin’s sort-of hot-spell from 1998 to the present coincides with the “pause” in global warming….

The rapid increase in Austin’s population since 2000 probably has caused an acceleration of the urban heat-island (UHI) effect. This is known to inflate city temperatures above those in the surrounding countryside by several degrees.

What about drought? In Austin, the drought of recent years is far less severe than the drought of the 1950s, but temperatures have risen more in recent years than they did in the 1950s….

Why? Because Austin’s population is now six times greater than it was in the 1950s. The UHI effect has magnified the drought effect.

Conclusion: Austin’s recent hot weather has nothing to do with AGW.

Now, I’ll quantify the relationship between temperature, precipitation, and population. Here are a few notes about the analysis:

  • I have annual population estimates for Austin from 1960 to the present. However, to tilt the scale in favor of AGW, I used values for 1968-2015, because the average temperature in 1968 was the lowest recorded since 1924.
  • I reduced the official population figures for 1998-2015 to reflect a major annexation in 1998 that significantly increased Austin’s population. The statistical effect of that adjustment is to reduce the apparent effect of population on temperature — thus further tilting the scale in favor of AGW.
  • The official National Weather Service station moved from Mueller Airport (near I-35) to Camp Mabry (near Texas Loop 1) in 1999. I ran the regression for 1968-2015 with a dummy variable for location, but that variable is statistically insignificant.

Here’s the regression equation for 1968-2015:

T = -0.049R + 5.57E-06P + 67.8

Where,

T = average annual temperature (degrees Fahrenheit)

R = annual precipitation (inches)

P = mid-year population (adjusted, as discussed above)

The r-squared of the equation is 0.538, which is considerably better than the r-squared for a simple time trend (see the first graph below). Also, the standard error is 1.01 degrees; F = 2.96E-08; and the p-values on the variables and intercept are highly significant at 0.00313, 2.19E-08, and 7.34E-55, respectively.

Here’s a graph of actual vs. predicted temperatures:

Actual vs predicted average annual temperatures in Austin

The residuals are randomly distributed with respect to time and the estimated values of T, so there’s no question (in my mind) about having omitted a significant variable:

Average annual temperatures_residuals vs. year

Average annual temperaturs_residuals vs. estimates of T

Austin’s average annual temperature rose by 3.6 degrees F between 1968 and 2015, that is, from 66.2 degrees to 69.8 degrees. According to the regression equation, the rise in Austin’s population from 234,000 in 1968 to 853,000 (adjusted) in 2015 accounts for essentially all of the increase — 3.5 degrees of it, to be precise. That’s well within the range of urban heat-island effects for big cities, and it’s obvious that Austin became a big city between 1968 and 2015. It also agrees with the estimated effect of Austin’s population increase, as derived from the equation for North American cities in T.R. Oke’s “City Size and the Urban Heat Island.” The equation (simplified for ease of reproduction) is

T’ = 2.96 log P – 6.41

Where,

T’ = change in temperature, degrees C

P = population, holding area constant

The author reports r-squared = 0.92 and SE = 0.7 degrees C (1.26 degrees F).

The estimated UHI effect of Austin’s population growth from 1968 to 2015 is 2.99 degrees F. Given the standard error of the estimate, the estimate of 2.99 degrees isn’t significantly different from my estimate of 3.5 degrees or from the actual increase of 3.6 degrees.

I therefore dismiss the possibility that population is a proxy for the effects of CO2 emissions, which — if they significantly affect temperature (a big “if”) — do so because of their prevalence in the atmosphere, not because of their concentration in particular areas. And Austin’s hottest years occurred during the “pause” in global warming after 1998. There was no “pause” in Austin because its population continued to grow rapidly; thus:

12-month average temperatures in Austin_1903-2016

Bottom line: Austin’s temperature can be accounted for by precipitation and population. AGW will have to find another place in which to work its evil magic.

*     *     *

Related reading:
U.S. climate page at WUWT
Articles about UHI at WUWT
David Evans, “There Is No Evidence,” Science Speak, June 16, 2009
Roy W. Spencer, “Global Urban Heat Island Effect Study – An Update,” WUWT, March 10, 2010
David M.W. Evans, “The Skeptic’s Case,” Science Speak, August 16, 2012
Anthony Watts, “UHI – Worse Than We Thought?,” WUWT, August 20, 2014
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, “The Great Pause Lengthens Again,” WUWT, January 3, 2015
Anthony Watts, “Two New Papers Suggest Solar Activity Is a ‘Climate Pacemaker‘,” WUWT, January 9, 2015
John Hinderaker, “Was 2014 Really the Warmest Year Ever?,” PowerLine, January 16, 2015
Roy W. Spencer, John R. Christy, and William D. Braswell, “Version 6.0 of the UAH Temperature Dataset Released: New LT Trend = +0.11 C/decade,” DrRoySpencer.com, April 28, 2015
Bob Tisdale, “New UAH Lower Troposphere Temperature Data Show No Global Warming for More Than 18 Years,” WUWT, April 29, 2015
Patrick J. Michaels and Charles C. Knappenberger, “You Ought to Have a Look: Science Round Up—Less Warming, Little Ice Melt, Lack of Imagination,” Cato at Liberty, May 1, 2015
Mike Brakey, “151 Degrees Of Fudging…Energy Physicist Unveils NOAA’s “Massive Rewrite” Of Maine Climate History,” NoTricksZone, May 2, 2015 (see also David Archibald, “A Prediction Coming True?,” WUWT, May 4, 2015)
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, “El Niño Has Not Yet Paused the Pause,” WUWT, May 4, 2015
Anthony J. Sadar and JoAnn Truchan, “Saul Alinsky, Climate Scientist,” American Thinker, May 4, 2015
Clyde Spencer, “Anthropogenic Global Warming and Its Causes,” WUWT, May 5, 2015
Roy W. Spencer, “Nearly 3,500 Days since Major Hurricane Strike … Despite Record CO2,” DrRoySpencer.com, May 8, 2015

Related posts:
AGW: The Death Knell (with many links to related readings and earlier posts)
Not-So-Random Thoughts (XIV) (second item)
AGW in Austin?
Understanding Probability: Pascal’s Wager and Catastrophic Global Warming
The Precautionary Principle and Pascal’s Wager

Not-So-Random Thoughts (XVII)

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Links to the other posts in this occasional series may be found at “Favorite Posts,” just below the list of topics.

*     *     *

Victor Davis Hanson offers “The More Things Change, the More They Actually Don’t.” It echoes what I say in “The Fallacy of Human Progress.” Hanson opens with this:

In today’s technically sophisticated and globally connected world, we assume life has been completely reinvented. In truth, it has not changed all that much.
And he proceeds to illustrate his point (and mine).

*     *     *

Dr. James Thompson, and English psychologist, often blogs about intelligence. Here are some links from last year that I’ve been hoarding:

“Intelligence: All That Matters” (a review of a book by Stuart Ritchie)

“GCSE Genes” (commentary about research showing the strong relationship between genes and academic achievement)

“GWAS Hits and Country IQ” (commentary about preliminary research into the alleles related to intelligence)

Also, from the International Journal of Epidemiology, comes “The Association between Intelligence and Lifespan Is Mostly Genetic.”

All of this is by way of reminding you of my many posts about intelligence, which are sprinkled throughout this list and this one.

*     *     *

How bad is it? This bad:

Thomas Lifson, “Mark Levin’s Plunder and Deceit“

Arthur Milikh, “Alexis de Tocqueville Predicted the Tyranny of the Majority in Our Modern World“

Steve McCann, “Obama and Neo-fascist America“

Related reading: “Fascism, Pots, and Kettles,” by me, of course.

Adam Freedman’s book, A Less than Perfect Union: The Case for States’ Rights. States’ rights can be perfected by secession, and I make the legal case for it in “A Resolution of Secession.”

*     *     *

In a different vein, there’s Francis Menton’s series about anthropogenic global warming. The latest installment is “The Greatest Scientific Fraud of All Time — Part VIII.” For my take on the subject, start with “AGW in Austin?” and check out the readings and posts listed at the bottom.

Not-So-Random Thoughts (XV)

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Links to the other posts in this occasional series may be found at “Favorite Posts,” just below the list of topics.

*     *     *

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

This descent into the Dark Ages will not end well. It never has in the past. [“Building the New Dark-Age Mind,” Works and Days, June 8, 2015]

Hamson’s chronicle of political correctness and doublespeak echoes one theme of my post, “1963: The Year Zero.”

*     *     *

Timothy Taylor does the two-handed economist act:

It may be that the question of “does inequality slow down economic growth” is too broad and diffuse to be useful. Instead, those of us who care about both the rise in inequality and the slowdown in economic growth should be looking for policies to address both goals, without presuming that substantial overlap will always occur between them. [“Does Inequality Reduce Economic Growth: A Skeptical View,” The Conversible Economist, May 29, 2015]

The short answer to the question “Does inequality reduce growth?” is no. See my post “Income Inequality and Economic Growth.” Further, even if inequality does reduce growth, the idea of reducing inequality (through income redistribution, say) to foster growth is utilitarian and therefore morally egregious. (See “Utilitarianism vs. Liberty.”)

*     *     *

In “Diminishing Marginal Utility and the Redistributive Urge” I write:

[L]eftists who deign to offer an economic justification for redistribution usually fall back on the assumption of the diminishing marginal utility (DMU) of income and wealth. In doing so, they commit (at least) four errors.

The first error is the fallacy of misplaced concreteness which is found in the notion of utility. Have you ever been able to measure your own state of happiness? I mean measure it, not just say that you’re feeling happier today than you were when your pet dog died. It’s an impossible task, isn’t it? If you can’t measure your own happiness, how can you (or anyone) presume to measure and aggregate the happiness of millions or billions of individual human beings? It can’t be done.

Which brings me to the second error, which is an error of arrogance. Given the impossibility of measuring one person’s happiness, and the consequent impossibility of measuring and comparing the happiness of many persons, it is pure arrogance to insist that “society” would be better off if X amount of income or wealth were transferred from Group A to Group B….

The third error lies in the implicit assumption embedded in the idea of DMU. The assumption is that as one’s income or wealth rises one continues to consume the same goods and services, but more of them….

All of that notwithstanding, the committed believer in DMU will shrug and say that at some point DMU must set in. Which leads me to the fourth error, which is an error of introspection….  [If over the years] your real income has risen by a factor of two or three or more — and if you haven’t messed up your personal life (which is another matter) — you’re probably incalculably happier than when you were just able to pay your bills. And you’re especially happy if you put aside a good chunk of money for your retirement, the anticipation and enjoyment of which adds a degree of utility (such a prosaic word) that was probably beyond imagining when you were in your twenties, thirties, and forties.

Robert Murphy agrees:

[T]he problem comes in when people sometimes try to use the concept of DMU to justify government income redistribution. Specifically, the argument is that (say) the billionth dollar to Bill Gates has hardly any marginal utility, while the 10th dollar to a homeless man carries enormous marginal utility. So clearly–the argument goes–taking a dollar from Bill Gates and giving it to a homeless man raises “total social utility.”

There are several serious problems with this type of claim. Most obvious, even if we thought it made sense to attribute units of utility to individuals, there is no reason to suppose we could compare them across individuals. For example, even if we thought a rich man had units of utility–akin to the units of his body temperature–and that the units declined with more money, and likewise for a poor person, nonetheless we have no way of placing the two types of units on the same scale….

In any event, this is all a moot point regarding the original question of interpersonal utility comparisons. Even if we thought individuals had cardinal utilities, it wouldn’t follow that redistribution would raise total social utility.

Even if we retreat to the everyday usage of terms, it still doesn’t follow as a general rule that rich people get less happiness from a marginal dollar than a poor person. There are many people, especially in the financial sector, whose self-esteem is directly tied to their earnings. And as the photo indicates, Scrooge McDuck really seems to enjoy money. Taking gold coins from Scrooge and giving them to a poor monk would not necessarily increase happiness, even in the everyday psychological sense. [“Can We Compare People’s Utilities?,” Mises Canada, May 22, 2015]

See also David Henderson’s “Murphy on Interpersonal Utility Comparisons” (EconLog, May 22, 2015) and Henderson’s earlier posts on the subject, to which he links. Finally, see my comment on an earlier post by Henderson, in which he touches on the related issue of cost-benefit analysis.

*     *     *

Here’s a slice of what Robert Tracinski has to say about “reform conservatism”:

The key premise of this non-reforming “reform conservatism” is the idea that it’s impossible to really touch the welfare state. We might be able to alter its incentives and improve its clanking machinery, but only if we loudly assure everyone that we love it and want to keep it forever.

And there’s the problem. Not only is this defeatist at its core, abandoning the cause of small government at the outset, but it fails to address the most important problem facing the country.

“Reform conservatism” is an answer to the question: how can we promote the goal of freedom and small government—without posing any outright challenge to the welfare state? The answer: you can’t. All you can do is tinker around the edges of Leviathan. And ultimately, it won’t make much difference, because it will all be overwelmed in the coming disaster. [“Reform Conservatism Is an Answer to the Wrong Question,” The Federalist, May 22, 2015]

Further, as I observe in “How to Eradicate the Welfare State, and How Not to Do It,” the offerings of “reform conservatives”

may seem like reasonable compromises with the left’s radical positions. But they are reasonable compromises only if you believe that the left wouldn’t strive vigorously to undo them and continue the nation’s march toward full-blown state socialism. That’s the way leftists work. They take what they’re given and then come back for more, lying and worse all the way.

See also Arnold Kling’s “Reason Roundtable on Reform Conservatism” (askblog, May 22, 2015) and follow the links therein.

*     *     *

I’ll end this installment with a look at science and the anti-scientific belief in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.

Here’s Philip Ball in “The Trouble With Scientists“:

It’s likely that some researchers are consciously cherry-picking data to get their work published. And some of the problems surely lie with journal publication policies. But the problems of false findings often begin with researchers unwittingly fooling themselves: they fall prey to cognitive biases, common modes of thinking that lure us toward wrong but convenient or attractive conclusions. “Seeing the reproducibility rates in psychology and other empirical science, we can safely say that something is not working out the way it should,” says Susann Fiedler, a behavioral economist at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, Germany. “Cognitive biases might be one reason for that.”

Psychologist Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia says that the most common and problematic bias in science is “motivated reasoning”: We interpret observations to fit a particular idea. Psychologists have shown that “most of our reasoning is in fact rationalization,” he says. In other words, we have already made the decision about what to do or to think, and our “explanation” of our reasoning is really a justification for doing what we wanted to do—or to believe—anyway. Science is of course meant to be more objective and skeptical than everyday thought—but how much is it, really?

Whereas the falsification model of the scientific method championed by philosopher Karl Popper posits that the scientist looks for ways to test and falsify her theories—to ask “How am I wrong?”—Nosek says that scientists usually ask instead “How am I right?” (or equally, to ask “How are you wrong?”). When facts come up that suggest we might, in fact, not be right after all, we are inclined to dismiss them as irrelevant, if not indeed mistaken….

Given that science has uncovered a dizzying variety of cognitive biases, the relative neglect of their consequences within science itself is peculiar. “I was aware of biases in humans at large,” says [Chris] Hartgerink [of Tilburg University in the Netherlands], “but when I first ‘learned’ that they also apply to scientists, I was somewhat amazed, even though it is so obvious.”…

One of the reasons the science literature gets skewed is that journals are much more likely to publish positive than negative results: It’s easier to say something is true than to say it’s wrong. Journal referees might be inclined to reject negative results as too boring, and researchers currently get little credit or status, from funders or departments, from such findings. “If you do 20 experiments, one of them is likely to have a publishable result,” [Ivan] Oransky and [Adam] Marcus [who run the service Retraction Watch] write. “But only publishing that result doesn’t make your findings valid. In fact it’s quite the opposite.”9 [Nautilus, May 14, 2015]

Zoom to AGW. Robert Tracinski assesses the most recent bit of confirmation bias:

A lot of us having been pointing out one of the big problems with the global warming theory: a long plateau in global temperatures since about 1998. Most significantly, this leveling off was not predicted by the theory, and observed temperatures have been below the lowest end of the range predicted by all of the computerized climate models….

Why, change the data, of course!

Hence a blockbuster new report: a new analysis of temperature data since 1998 “adjusts” the numbers and magically finds that there was no plateau after all. The warming just continued….

How convenient.

It’s so convenient that they’re signaling for everyone else to get on board….

This is going to be the new party line. “Hiatus”? What hiatus? Who are you going to believe, our adjustments or your lying thermometers?…

The new adjustments are suspiciously convenient, of course. Anyone who is touting a theory that isn’t being borne out by the evidence and suddenly tells you he’s analyzed the data and by golly, what do you know, suddenly it does support his theory—well, he should be met with more than a little skepticism.

If we look, we find some big problems. The most important data adjustments by far are in ocean temperature measurements. But anyone who has been following this debate will notice something about the time period for which the adjustments were made. This is a time in which the measurement of ocean temperatures has vastly improved in coverage and accuracy as a whole new set of scientific buoys has come online. So why would this data need such drastic “correcting”?

As climatologist Judith Curry puts it:

The greatest changes in the new NOAA surface temperature analysis is to the ocean temperatures since 1998. This seems rather ironic, since this is the period where there is the greatest coverage of data with the highest quality of measurements–ARGO buoys and satellites don’t show a warming trend. Nevertheless, the NOAA team finds a substantial increase in the ocean surface temperature anomaly trend since 1998.

….

I realize the warmists are desperate, but they might not have thought through the overall effect of this new “adjustment” push. We’ve been told to take very, very seriously the objective data showing global warming is real and is happening—and then they announce that the data has been totally changed post hoc. This is meant to shore up the theory, but it actually calls the data into question….

All of this fits into a wider pattern: the global warming theory has been awful at making predictions about the data ahead of time. But it has been great at going backward, retroactively reinterpreting the data and retrofitting the theory to mesh with it. A line I saw from one commenter, I can’t remember where, has been rattling around in my head: “once again, the theory that predicts nothing explains everything.” [“Global Warming: The Theory That Predicts Nothing and Explains Everything,” The Federalist, June 8, 2015]

Howard Hyde also weighs in with “Climate Change: Where Is the Science?” (American Thinker, June 11, 2015).

Bill Nye, the so-called Science Guy, seems to epitomize the influence of ideology on “scientific knowledge.”  I defer to John Derbyshire:

Bill Nye the Science Guy gave a commencement speech at Rutgers on Sunday. Reading the speech left me thinking that if this is America’s designated Science Guy, I can be the nation’s designated swimsuit model….

What did the Science Guy have to say to the Rutgers graduates? Well, he warned them of the horrors of climate change, which he linked to global inequality.

We’re going to find a means to enable poor people to advance in their societies in countries around the world. Otherwise, the imbalance of wealth will lead to conflict and inefficiency in energy production, which will lead to more carbon pollution and a no-way-out overheated globe.

Uh, given that advanced countries use far more energy per capita than backward ones—the U.S.A. figure is thirty-four times Bangladesh’s—wouldn’t a better strategy be to keep poor countries poor? We could, for example, encourage all their smartest and most entrepreneurial people to emigrate to the First World … Oh, wait: we already do that.

The whole climate change business is now a zone of hysteria, generating far more noise—mostly of a shrieking kind—than its importance justifies. Opinions about climate change are, as Greg Cochran said, “a mark of tribal membership.” It is also the case, as Greg also said, that “the world is never going to do much about in any event, regardless of the facts.”…

When Ma Nature means business, stuff happens on a stupendously colossal scale.  And Bill Nye the Science Guy wants Rutgers graduates to worry about a 0.4ºC warming over thirty years? Feugh.

The Science Guy then passed on from the dubiously alarmist to the batshit barmy.

There really is no such thing as race. We are one species … We all come from Africa.

Where does one start with that? Perhaps by asserting that: “There is no such thing as states. We are one country.”

The climatological equivalent of saying there is no such thing as race would be saying that there is no such thing as weather. Of course there is such a thing as race. We can perceive race with at least three of our five senses, and read it off from the genome. We tick boxes for it on government forms: I ticked such a box for the ATF just this morning when buying a gun.

This is the Science Guy? The foundational text of modern biology bears the title On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. Is biology not a science?

Darwin said that populations of a species long separated from each other will diverge in their biological characteristics, forming races. If the separation goes on long enough, any surviving races will diverge all the way to separate species. Was Ol’ Chuck wrong about that, Mr. Science Guy?

“We are one species”? Rottweilers and toy poodles are races within one species, a species much newer than ours; yet they differ mightily, not only in appearance but also—gasp!—in behavior, intelligence, and personality. [“Nye Lied, I Sighed,” Taki’s Magazine, May 21, 2015]

This has gone on long enough. Instead of quoting myself, I merely refer you to several related posts:

Demystifying Science
AGW: The Death Knell
Evolution and Race
The Limits of Science (II)
The Pretence of Knowledge
“The Science Is Settled”
The Limits of Science, Illustrated by Scientists
Rationalism, Empiricism, and Scientific Knowledge
AGW in Austin?

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AGW in Austin?

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“Climate change” is religion refracted through the lens of paganism.

Melanie Phillips

There is a hypothesis that the purported rise in global temperatures since 1850 (or some shorter span if you’re embarrassed by periods of notable decline after 1850) was or is due mainly or solely to human activity, as manifested in emissions of CO2. Adherents of this hypothesis call the supposed phenomenon by various names: anthropogenic global warming (AGW), just plain global warming, climate change, and climate catastrophe, for example.

Those adherents loudly advocate measures that (they assert) would reduce CO2 emissions by enough to avoid climatic catastrophe. They have been advocating such measures for about 25 years, yet climate catastrophe remains elusive. (See “pause,” below.) But the true believers in AGW remain steadfast in their faith.

Actually, belief in catastrophic AGW requires three leaps of faith. The first leap is to assume the truth of the alternative hypothesis — a strong and persistent connection between CO2 emissions and global temperatures — without having found (or even looked for) scientific evidence which disproves the null hypothesis, namely, that there isn’t a strong and persistent connection between CO2 emissions and global temperatures. The search for such evidence shouldn’t be confined to the near-past, but should extend centuries, millennia, and eons into the past. The problem for advocates of AGW is that a diligent search of that kind works against the alternative hypothesis and supports the null hypothesis. As a result, the advocates of AGW confine their analysis to the recent past and substitute kludgy computer models, full of fudge-factors, for a disinterested examination of the actual causes of climate change. There is strong evidence that such causes include solar activity and its influence on cloud formation through cosmic radiation. That truth is too inconvenient for the AGW mob, as are many other truths about climate.

The second leap of faith is to assume that rising temperatures, whatever the cause, are a bad thing. This, despite the known advantages of warmer climates: longer growing seasons and lower death rates, to name but two. This is so because believers in AGW and policies that would (according to them) mitigate it, like to depict worst-case scenarios about the extent of global warming and its negative effects.

The third leap of faith is related to the first two. It is the belief that policies meant to mitigate global warming — policies that mainly involve the curtailment of CO2 emissions — would be (a) effective and (b) worth the cost. There is more than ample doubt about both propositions, which seem to flow from the kind of anti-scientific mind that eagerly embraces the alternative hypothesis without first having disproved the null hypothesis. It is notable that “worth the cost” is a value judgment which springs readily from the tongues and keyboards of affluent Westerners like __________ who already have it made. (Insert “Al Gore”, “high-end Democrats,” “liberal pundits and politicians,” etc.)

Prominent among the leapers-of-faith in my neck of the woods is the “chief weathercaster” of an Austin TV station. We watch his weather forecasts because he spews out more information than his competitors, but I must resist the urge to throw a brick through my TV screen when his mask slips and he reveals himself as a true believer in AGW. What else should I expect from a weather nazi who proclaims it “nice” when daytime high temperatures are in the 60s and 70s, and who bemoans higher temperatures?

Like any nazi, he projects his preferences onto others — in this case his viewership. This undoubtedly includes a goodly number of persons (like me) who moved to Austin and stay in Austin for the sake of sunny days when the thermometer is in the 80-to-95-degree range. It is a bit much when temperatures are consistently in the high 90s and low 100s, as they are for much of Austin’s summer. But that’s the price of those sunny days in the 80s and low 90s, unless you can afford to live in San Diego or Hawaii instead of Austin.

Anyway, the weather nazi would make a great deal out of the following graph:

12-month average temperatures in Austin_1977-2015

The graph covers the period from April 1977 through April 2015. The jagged line represents 12-month averages of monthly averages for the official National Weather Service stations in Austin: Mueller Airport (until July 1999) and Camp Mabry (July 1999 to the present). (There’s a history of Austin’s weather stations in a NOAA document, “Austin Climate Summary.”) The upward trend is unmistakeable. Equally unmistakeable is the difference between the early and late years of the period — a difference that’s highlighted by the y-error bars, which represent a span of plus-and-minus one standard deviation from the mean for the period.

Your first question should be “Why begin with April 1977?” Well, it’s a “good” starting point — if you want to sell AGW — because the 12-month average temperature as of April 1977 was the lowest in 64 years. After all, it was the seemingly steep increase in temperatures after 1970 that sparked the AGW business.

What about the “fact” that temperatures have been rising since about 1850? The “fact” is that temperatures have been recorded in a relatively small number of locales continuously since the 1850s, though the reliability of the temperature data and their relationship to any kind of “global” average is in serious doubt. The most reliable data come from weather satellites, and those have been in operation only since the late 1970s.

A recent post by Bob Tisdale, “New UAH Lower Troposphere Temperature Data Show No Global Warming for More Than 18 Years” (Watts Up With That?, April 29, 2015), summarizes the history of satellite readings, in the course of documenting the “pause” in global warming. The “pause,” if dated from 2001, has lasted 14 years; if dated from 1997, it has lasted 18 years. In either event, the “pause” has lasted about as long as the rise in late-20th century temperatures that led to the AGW hypothesis.

What about those observations since the 1850s? Riddled with holes, that’s what. And even if they were reliable and covered a good part of the globe (which they aren’t and don’t), they wouldn’t tell the story that AGW enthusiasts are trying to sell. Take Austin, for example, which has a (broken) temperature record dating back to 1856:

12-month average temperatures in Austin_1856-2015

Looks just like the first graph? No, it doesn’t. The trend line and error bars suggest a trend that isn’t there. Strip away the trend line and the error bars, and you see this:

12-month average temperatures in Austin_1856-2015_2

Which is what? There’s a rise in temperatures between the 1850s and the early 1890s, consistent with the gradual warming that followed the Little Ice Age. The gap between the early 1890s and mid-19naughts seems to have been marked by lower temperatures. It’s possible to find several mini-trends between the mid-19naughts and 1977, but the most obvious “trend” is a flat line for the entire period:

12-month average temperatures in Austin_1903-1977

Following the sudden jump between 1977 and 1980, the “trend” remains almost flat through 1997, albeit at a slightly higher level:

12-month average temperatures in Austin_1980-1997

The sharpest upward trend really began after the very strong (and naturally warming) El Niño of 1997-1998:

12-month average temperatures in Austin_1997-2015

Oh, wait! It turns out that Austin’s sort-of hot-spell from 1998 to the present coincides with the “pause” in global warming:

The pause_from WUWT_20150429
Source: Bob Tisdale, “New UAH Lower Troposphere Temperature Data Show No Global Warming for More Than 18 Years,” Watts Up With That?, April 29, 2015.

What a revolting development this would be for our local weather nazi, if he could be bothered to acknowledge it. And if he did, he’d have to look beyond the egregious AGW hypothesis for an explanation of the warmer temperatures that he abhors. Where should he look? Here: the rapid increase in Austin’s population, combined with a drought.

The rapid increase in Austin’s population since 2000 probably has caused an acceleration of the urban heat-island (UHI) effect. This is known to inflate city temperatures above those in the surrounding countryside by several degrees.

What about drought? In Austin, the drought of recent years is far less severe than the drought of the 1950s, but temperatures have risen more in recent years than they did in the 1950s:

Indices of 5-year average precipitation and temperature

Why? Because Austin’s population is now six times greater than it was in the 1950s. The UHI effect has magnified the drought effect.

Conclusion: Austin’s recent hot weather has nothing to do with AGW. But don’t try to tell that to a weather nazi — or to the officials of the City of Austin, who lurch zombie-like onward in their pursuit of “solutions” to a non-problem.

BE SURE TO READ THE SEQUEL, IN WHICH I QUANTIFY THE EFFECTS OF PRECIPITATION AND POPULATION, LEAVING NOTHING ON THE TABLE FOR AGW.

*     *     *

Related reading:
U.S. climate page at WUWT
Articles about UHI at WUWT
Roy W. Spencer, “Global Urban Heat Island Effect Study – An Update,” WUWT, March 10, 2010
Anthony Watts, “UHI – Worse Than We Thought?,” WUWT, August 20, 2014
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, “The Great Pause Lengthens Again,” WUWT, January 3, 2015
Anthony Watts, “Two New Papers Suggest Solar Activity Is a ‘Climate Pacemaker‘,” WUWT, January 9, 2015
John Hinderaker, “Was 2014 Really the Warmest Year Ever?,” PowerLine, January 16, 2015
Roy W. Spencer, John R. Christy, and William D. Braswell, “Version 6.0 of the UAH Temperature Dataset Released: New LT Trend = +0.11 C/decade,” DrRoySpencer.com, April 28, 2015
Bob Tisdale, “New UAH Lower Troposphere Temperature Data Show No Global Warming for More Than 18 Years,” WUWT, April 29, 2015
Patrick J. Michaels and Charles C. Knappenberger, “You Ought to Have a Look: Science Round Up—Less Warming, Little Ice Melt, Lack of Imagination,” Cato at Liberty, May 1, 2015
Mike Brakey, “151 Degrees Of Fudging…Energy Physicist Unveils NOAA’s “Massive Rewrite” Of Maine Climate History,” NoTricksZone, May 2, 2015 (see also David Archibald, “A Prediction Coming True?,” WUWT, May 4, 2015)
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, “El Niño Has Not Yet Paused the Pause,” WUWT, May 4, 2015
Anthony J. Sadar and JoAnn Truchan, “Saul Alinsky, Climate Scientist,” American Thinker, May 4, 2015
Clyde Spencer, “Anthropogenic Global Warming and Its Causes,” WUWT, May 5, 2015
Roy W. Spencer, “Nearly 3,500 Days since Major Hurricane Strike … Despite Record CO2,” DrRoySpencer.com, May 8, 2015

Related posts:
AGW: The Death Knell (with many links to related readings and earlier posts)
Not-So-Random Thoughts (XIV) (second item)

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Not-So-Random Thoughts (XIV)

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UPDATED 04/19/15 WITH THE ADDITION OF TWO ENTRIES

Links to the other posts in this occasional series may be found at “Favorite Posts,” just below the list of topics.

*     *     *

Paul Mirengoff explores the similarities between Neville Chamberlain and Barack Obama; for example:

We see with Chamberlain the same curious dynamic present in the Obama presidency. At home, a tough-as-nails administration/political machine that takes no prisoners and rarely compromises; abroad, a feckless operation with a pattern of caving to belligerent adversaries. [“Neville Chamberlain and Barack Obama: The Similarities Run Deep,” Powerline Blog, April 15, 2014]

See also John Hinderaker’s Powerline post, “Daniel Pipes: The Obama Doctrine Serves Up One Disaster After Another” (April 6, 2015), and a piece by Eileen F. Toplansky,”Obama’s Three Premises” (American Thinker, April 20, 2015).

What is Obama up to? For my take, see “Does Obama Love America?”

*     *     *

If it were possible to convince a climate alarmist that he is wrong, Christopher Monckton of Brenchley is the man for the job:

“What Evidence,” asks Ronald Bailey’s headline (www.reason.com, April 3, 2015), “Would Convince You That Man-Made Climate Change Is Real?”

The answer: a rational, scientific case rooted in established theory and data would convince me that manmade climate change is a problem. That it is real is not in doubt, for every creature that breathes out emits CO2 and thus affects the climate.

The true scientific question, then, is not the fatuous question whether “Man-Made Climate Change Is Real” but how much global warming our sins of emission may cause, and whether that warming might be more a bad thing than a good thing.

However, Mr Bailey advances no rational case. What, then, are the elements of a rational, scientific case that our influence on the climate will prove dangerous unless the West completes its current self-shutdown?… [“How to Convince a Climate Skeptic He’s Wrong,” Watts Up With That, April 9, 2015]

There follows a step-by-step dismantling of Mr. Bailey’s case for alarmism. Lord Monckton ends with this:

[I]f Mr Bailey does me the courtesy of reading the above, he will realize that temperatures are not rising by much, glacial ice-melt (if occurring) is on too small a scale to raise sea level by much, global sea ice extent shows little change in two generations, ditto northern-hemisphere snow cover, there has been little increase in rainfall and (according to the IPCC) little evidence for “stronger rainstorms”, and the ocean warming is so small that it falls within the considerable measurement error.

The evidence he adduces is questionable at best on every count. The Temple of Thermageddon will have to do better than that if it wants to convince us in the teeth of the evidence….

…[N]o rational scientific or economic case can be made for taking any action whatsoever today in a probably futile and certainly cost-ineffective attempt to make global warming that is not happening as predicted today go away the day after tomorrow.

The correct policy to address what is likely to prove a non-problem – and what, even if it were every bit as much of a problem as the tax-gobblers would wish, could not by even their most creative quantitative easing be cost-effectively solved by any attempt at mitigation – is to have the courage to do nothing now and adapt later if necessary.

The question is why, in the teeth of the scientific and economic evidence, nearly all of the global governing class were so easily taken in or bought out or both by the strange coalescence of powerful vested interests who have, until now, profited so monstrously by the biggest fraud in history at such crippling expense in lives and treasure to the rest of us, and at such mortal threat to the integrity and trustworthiness of science itself. [Ibid.]

My own modest effort to quell climate alarmism is summarized in “AGW: The Death Knell.”

*     *     *

Steve Sailer has some fun with the latest bit of experimental hocus-pocus by the intelligence-isn’t-heritable crowd, as interpreted by a reporter for The Washington Post:

In the last few years, there appears to have been a decision to blame racial differences in intelligence on differences in income level, although, of course, that’s not very plausible. That’s what people said way back in 1965, but then the federal Coleman Report of 1966 showed that affluent black students weren’t setting the world on fire academically on average, and vast amounts of data have accumulated validating the Coleman Report ever since.

But a half century later we’re back to asserting the same untested theories as in 1965….

Allow me to point out that a national newspaper has asked a couple of guys who know what they are talking about to punch holes in the latest bit of goodthink and, as of press time, the American public hasn’t dug up Hitler’s DNA and elected it President. So maybe we’re actually mature enough to discuss reality rather than lie all the time?…

Six decades from now, the Education Secretary of the hereditary Bush-Clinton Administration will be declaring the key periods for federal intervention are the eight months and 29 days before birth … but not a day sooner! [“Charles Murray and James Thompson Asked Their Opinions in ‘Post’ Article on Brain Size; World Hasn’t Ended, Yet,” The Unz Review, April 15, 2015]

Along the way, Sailer links to Dr. James Thompson’s post about the article in question. There’s a followup post by Thompson, and this one is good, too. See also this post by Sailer.

Gregory Cochran has a related post (“Scanners Live in Vain,” West Hunter, March 31, 2015), where he says this about the paper and the reporting about it:

There is a new paper out in Nature Neuroscience,  mainly by Kimberly Noble, on socioeconomic variables and and brain structure:  Family income, parental education and brain structure in children and adolescents. They found that cortex area went up with income, although more slowly at high incomes.  Judging from their comments to the press, the authors think that being poor shrinks your brain.

Of course, since intelligence is highly heritable, and since people in higher social classes, or with high income, have higher average IQs (although not nearly as high as I would like), you would expect their kids to be, on average, smarter than kids from low-income groups (and have larger brains, since brain size is correlated with IQ) for genetic reasons.  But I guess the authors of this paper have never heard of  any of that – which raises the question, did they scan the brains of the authors?  Because that would have been interesting.  You can actually do microscopic MRI.

Even better, in talking to Nature, another researcher, Martha Farah,  mentions unpublished work that shows that the brain-size correlation with SES  is already there (in African-American kids) by age one month!

Of course, finding that the pattern already exists at the age of one month seriously weakens any idea that being poor shrinks the brain: most of the environmental effects you would consider haven’t even come into play in the first four weeks, when babies drink milk, sleep, and poop. Genetics affecting both parents and their children would make more sense, if the pattern shows up so early (and I’ll bet money that, if real,  it shows up well before one month);  but Martha Farah, and the reporter from Nature, Sara Reardon, ARE TOO FUCKING DUMB to realize this.

And John Ray points to this:

Quick thinkers are born not made, claim scientists.

They have discovered a link between our genes and the ability to remain mentally on the ball in later life.

It is the first time a genetic link has been shown to explain why some people have quick thinking skills.

Researchers identified a common genetic variant – changes in a person’s genetic code – related to how quickly a person is able to process new information. [Jenny Hope, “Quick Thinkers Are Born Not Made: The Speed at Which We Process New Information Is Written in Our Genes,” DailyMail.com, April 16, 2015]

Dr. Ray links to the underlying studies, here.

I’ve probably said more than I should say about the heritability of intelligence in “Race and Reason: The Achievement Gap — Causes and Implications,” “Evolution and Race,” “‘Wading’ into Race, Culture, and IQ,” and “The Harmful Myth of Inherent Equality.”

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Speaking of equality, or the lack thereof, Daniel Bier explains “How Piketty Manufactured Rising [Wealth] Inequality in 6 Steps” (Foundation for Economic Education, April 9, 2015):

Piketty’s chart on US wealth inequality displayed a trend that none of its original sources showed. Worst of all, he didn’t tell his readers that he had done any of this, much less explained his reasoning.

But now Magness has deconstructed the chart and shown, step by step, how Piketty tortured his sources into giving him the result he wanted to see….

If your methods can produce opposite results using the same sources, depending entirely on your subjective judgment, you’re not doing science — you’re doing a Choose Your Own Adventure story where you start from the conclusion and work backwards.

Now that you’ve seen how it’s done, you too can “piketty” your data and massage your narrative into selling 1.5 million books — that almost no one will actually read, but will be widely cited as justification for higher taxes nonetheless.

Committed leftists will ignore Piketty’s step back from extreme redistributionism, which I discussed in “Not-So-Random Thoughts (XIII).”

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Committed leftists will lament the predicate of “Has Obamacare Turned Voters Against Sharing the Wealth?” (The New York Times, April 15, 2015). The author of the piece, Thomas B. Edsall (formerly of The Washington Post), clearly laments the possibility. (I do not, of course.) Edsall’s article is full of good news (for me); for example:

In 2006, by a margin of more than two to one, 69-28, those surveyed by Gallup said that the federal government should guarantee health care coverage for all citizens of the United States. By late 2014, however, Gallup found that this percentage had fallen 24 points to 45 percent, while the percentage of respondents who said health care is not a federal responsibility nearly doubled to 52 percent.

Edsall’s main worry seems to be how such a mood shift will help Republicans. Evidently, he doesn’t care about taxpayers, people who earn their income, or economic growth, which is inhibited by redistribution from “rich” to “poor.” But what else is new? Edsall is just another representative of the elite punditariat — a member of the “top” part of the left’s “top and bottom” coalition.

Edsall and his ilk should be worried. See, for example, “The Obamacare Effect: Greater Distrust of Government” (the title tells the tale) and “‘Blue Wall’ Hype” which debunks the idea that Democrats have a lock on the presidency.

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The question of nature vs. nurture, which I touched on three entries earlier, is closely related to the question of innate ability vs. effort as the key to success in a field of endeavor. “Scott Alexander” of Slate Star Codex has written at length about innate ability vs. effort in two recent posts: “No Clarity Around Growth Mindset…Yet” and “I Will Never Have the Ability to Clearly Explain My Beliefs about Growth Mindset.” (That should be “to explain clearly.”)

This is from the first-linked post:

If you’re not familiar with it, growth mindset is the belief that people who believe ability doesn’t matter and only effort determines success are more resilient, skillful, hard-working, perseverant in the face of failure, and better-in-a-bunch-of-other-ways than people who emphasize the importance of ability. Therefore, we can make everyone better off by telling them ability doesn’t matter and only hard work does.

This is all twaddle, as “Alexander” shows, more or less, in his two very long posts. My essay on the subject is a lot shorter and easier to grasp: “The Harmful Myth of Inherent Equality.”

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ENTRIES ADDED 04/19/15:

Obamacare, not unsurprisingly to me, has led to the rationing of health care, according to Bob Unruh’s “Obamacare Blocks Patients Paying for Treatment” (WND, March 6, 2014). And Aleyne Singer delivers “More Proof Obamacare Is Increasing Coverage but Not Access to Health Care” (The Daily Signal, December 9, 2014).

None of this should surprise anyone who thought about the economics of Obamacare, as I did in “Rationing and Health Care,” “The Perils of Nannyism: The Case of Obamacare,” “More about the Perils of Obamacare,” and “Health-Care Reform: The Short of It.”

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Ben Bernanke asks “Why Are Interest Rates So Low?” (Ben Bernanke’s Blog, March 30, 2015). His answer? In so many words, business is bad, which means that the demand for capital financing is relatively weak. But in a followup post, “Why Are Interest Rates So Low, Part 2: Secular Stagnation” (Ben Bernanke’s Blog, March 31, 2015), Bernanke argues that the problem isn’t secular stagnation.

I agree that interest rates are low because the economy remains weak, despite some recovery from the nadir of the Great Recession. But, unlike Bernanke, I don’t expect the economy to make a full recovery — and I’m talking about real growth, not phony unemployment-rate recovery. Why Not? See “Obamanomics in Action” and “The Rahn Curve Revisited.” The economy will never grow to its potential as long as the dead hand of government continues to press down on it.

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Links to the other posts in this occasional series may be found at “Favorite Posts,” just below the list of topics.

How Much Are Teachers Worth?

David Harsanyi writes:

“The bottom line,” says the Center for American Progress, “is that mid- and late-career teachers are not earning what they deserve, nor are they able to gain the salaries that support a middle-class existence.”

Alas, neither liberal think tanks nor explainer sites have the capacity to determine the worth of human capital. And contrasting the pay of a person who has a predetermined government salary with the pay earned by someone in a competitive marketplace tells us little. Public-school teachers’ compensation is determined by contracts negotiated long before many of them even decided to teach. These contracts hurt the earning potential of good teachers and undermine the education system. And it has nothing to do with what anyone “deserves.”

So if teachers believe they aren’t making what they’re worth — and they may well be right about that — let’s free them from union constraints and let them find out what the job market has to offer. Until then, we can’t really know. Because a bachelor’s degree isn’t a dispensation from the vagaries of economic reality. And teaching isn’t the first step toward sainthood. Regardless of what you’ve heard. (“Are Teachers Underpaid? Let’s Find Out,” Creators.com, July 25, 2014)

Harsanyi is right, but too kind. Here’s my take, from “The Public-School Swindle“:

[P]ublic “education” — at all levels — is not just a rip-off of taxpayers, it is also an employment scheme for incompetents (especially at the K-12 level) and a paternalistic redirection of resources to second- and third-best uses.

And, to top it off, public education has led to the creation of an army of left-wing zealots who, for many decades, have inculcated America’s children and young adults in the advantages of collective, non-market, anti-libertarian institutions, where paternalistic “empathy” supplants personal responsibility.

Utilitarianism, Once More

EconLog bloggers Bryan Caplan and Scott Sumner are enjoying an esoteric exchange about utilitarianism (samples here and here), which is a kind of cost-benefit calculus in which the calculator presumes to weigh the costs and benefits that accrue to other persons.  My take is that utilitarianism borders on psychopathy. In “Utilitarianism and Psychopathy,” I quote myself to this effect:

Here’s the problem with cost-benefit analysis — the problem it shares with utilitarianism: One person’s benefit can’t be compared with another person’s cost. Suppose, for example, the City of Los Angeles were to conduct a cost-benefit analysis that “proved” the wisdom of constructing yet another freeway through the city in order to reduce the commuting time of workers who drive into the city from the suburbs.

Before constructing the freeway, the city would have to take residential and commercial property. The occupants of those homes and owners of those businesses (who, in many cases would be lessees and not landowners) would have to start anew elsewhere. The customers of the affected businesses would have to find alternative sources of goods and services. Compensation under eminent domain can never be adequate to the owners of taken property because the property is taken by force and not sold voluntarily at a true market price. Moreover, others who are also harmed by a taking (lessees and customers in this example) are never compensated for their losses. Now, how can all of this uncompensated cost and inconvenience be “justified” by, say, the greater productivity that might (emphasize might) accrue to those commuters who would benefit from the construction of yet another freeway.

Yet, that is how cost-benefit analysis works. It assumes that group A’s cost can be offset by group B’s benefit: “the greatest amount of happiness altogether.”

America’s Financial Crisis

Timothy Taylor tackles the looming debt crisis:

First, the current high level of government debt, and the projections for the next 25 years, mean that the U.S. government lacks fiscal flexibility….

Second, the current spending patterns of the U.S. government are starting to crowd out everything except health care, Social Security, and interest payments….

Third, large government borrowing means less funding is available for private investment….

…CBO calculates an “alternative fiscal scenario,” in which it sets aside some of these spending and tax changes that are scheduled to take effect in five years or ten years or never…. [T]he extended baseline scenario projected that the debt/GDP ratio would be 106% by 2039. In the alternative fiscal scenario, the debt-GDP ratio is projected to reach 183% of GDP by 2039. As the report notes: “CBO’s extended alternative fiscal scenario is based on the assumptions that certain policies that are now in place but are scheduled to change under current law will be continued and that some provisions of law that might be difficult to sustain for a long period will be modified. The scenario, therefore, captures what some analysts might consider to be current policies, as opposed to current laws.”…

My own judgement is that the path of future budget deficits in the next decade or so is likely to lean toward the alternative fiscal scenario. But long before we reach a debt/GDP ratio of 183%, something is going to give. I don’t know what will change. But as an old-school economist named Herb Stein used to say, “If something can’t go on, it won’t.” (Long Term Budget Deficits,” Conversable Economist, July 24, 2014)

Professional economists are terribly low-key, aren’t they? Here’s the way I see it, in “America’s Financial Crisis Is Now“:

It will not do simply to put an end to the U.S. government’s spending spree; too many State and local governments stand ready to fill the void, and they will do so by raising taxes where they can. As a result, some jurisdictions will fall into California- and Michigan-like death-spirals while jobs and growth migrate to other jurisdictions…. Even if Congress resists the urge to give aid and comfort to profligate States and municipalities at the expense of the taxpayers of fiscally prudent jurisdictions, the high taxes and anti-business regimes of California- and Michigan-like jurisdictions impose deadweight losses on the whole economy….

So, the resistance to economically destructive policies cannot end with efforts to reverse the policies of the federal government. But given the vast destructiveness of those policies — “entitlements” in particular — the resistance must begin there. Every conservative and libertarian voice in the land must be raised in reasoned opposition to the perpetuation of the unsustainable “promises” currently embedded in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — and their expansion through Obamacare. To those voices must be added the voices of “moderates” and “liberals” who see through the proclaimed good intentions of “entitlements” to the economic and libertarian disaster that looms if those “entitlements” are not pared down to their original purpose: providing a safety net for the truly needy.

The alternative to successful resistance is stark: more borrowing, higher interest payments, unsustainable debt, higher taxes, and economic stagnation (at best).

For the gory details about government spending and economic stagnation, see “Estimating the Rahn Curve: Or, How Government Spending Inhibits Economic Growth” and “The True Multiplier.”

Climate Change: More Evidence against the Myth of AGW

There are voices of reason, that is, real scientists doing real science:

Over the 55-years from 1958 to 2012, climate models not only significantly over-predict observed warming in the tropical troposphere, but they represent it in a fundamentally different way than is observed. (Ross McKittrick and Timothy Vogelsang, “Climate models not only significantly over-predict observed warming in the tropical troposphere, but they represent it in a fundamentally different way than is observed,” excerpted at Watt’s Up With That, July 24, 2014)

Since the 1980s anthropogenic aerosols have been considerably reduced in Europe and the Mediterranean area. This decrease is often considered as the likely cause of the brightening effect observed over the same period. This phenomenon is however hardly reproduced by global and regional climate models. Here we use an original approach based on reanalysis-driven coupled regional climate system modelling, to show that aerosol changes explain 81 ± 16 per cent of the brightening and 23 ± 5 per cent of the surface warming simulated for the period 1980–2012 over Europe. The direct aerosol effect is found to dominate in the magnitude of the simulated brightening. The comparison between regional simulations and homogenized ground-based observations reveals that observed surface solar radiation, as well as land and sea surface temperature spatio-temporal variations over the Euro-Mediterranean region are only reproduced when simulations include the realistic aerosol variations. (“New paper finds 23% of warming in Europe since 1980 due to clean air laws reducing sulfur dioxide,” The Hockey Schtick, July 23, 2014)

My (somewhat out-of-date but still useful) roundup of related posts and articles is at “AGW: The Death Knell.”

Crime Explained…

…but not by this simplistic item:

Of all of the notions that have motivated the decades-long rise of incarceration in the United States, this is probably the most basic: When we put people behind bars, they can’t commit crime.

The implied corollary: If we let them out, they will….

Crime trends in a few states that have significantly reduced their prison populations, though, contradict this fear. (Emily Badger, “There’s little evidence that fewer prisoners means more crime,” Wonkblog, The Washington Post, July 21, 2014)

Staring at charts doesn’t yield answers to complex, multivariate questions, such as the causes of crime. Ms. Badger should have extended my work of seven years ago (“Crime, Explained“). Had she, I’m confident that she would have obtained the same result, namely:

VPC (violent+property crimes per 100,000 persons) =

-33174.6

+346837BLK (number of blacks as a decimal fraction of the population)

-3040.46GRO (previous year’s change in real GDP per capita, as a decimal fraction of the base)

-1474741PRS (the number of inmates in federal and State prisons in December of the previous year, as a decimal fraction of the previous year’s population)

The t-statistics on the intercept and coefficients are 19.017, 21.564, 1.210, and 17.253, respectively; the adjusted R-squared is 0.923; the standard error of the estimate/mean value of VPC = 0.076.

The coefficient and t-statistic for PRS mean that incarceration has a strong, statistically significant, negative effect on the violent-property crime rate. In other words, more prisoners = less crime against persons and their property.

The Heritability of Intelligence

Strip away the trappings of culture and what do you find? This:

If a chimpanzee appears unusually intelligent, it probably had bright parents. That’s the message from the first study to check if chimp brain power is heritable.

The discovery could help to tease apart the genes that affect chimp intelligence and to see whether those genes in humans also influence intelligence. It might also help to identify additional genetic factors that give humans the intellectual edge over their non-human-primate cousins.

The researchers estimate that, similar to humans, genetic differences account for about 54 per cent of the range seen in “general intelligence” – dubbed “g” – which is measured via a series of cognitive tests. “Our results in chimps are quite consistent with data from humans, and the human heritability in g,” says William Hopkins of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia, who heads the team reporting its findings in Current Biology.

“The historical view is that non-genetic factors dominate animal intelligence, and our findings challenge that view,” says Hopkins. (Andy Coghlan, “Chimpanzee brain power is strongly heritable,” New Scientist, July 10, 2014)

Such findings are consistent with Nicholas Wade’s politically incorrect A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. For related readings, see “‘Wading’ into Race, Culture, and IQ’.” For a summary of scholarly evidence about the heritability of intelligence — and its dire implications — see “Race and Reason — The Achievement Gap: Causes and Implications.” John Derbyshire offers an even darker view: “America in 2034” (American Renaissance, June 9, 2014).

The correlation of race and intelligence is, for me, an objective matter, not an emotional one. For evidence of my racial impartiality, see the final item in “My Moral Profile.”

“The Science Is Settled”

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Thales (c. 620 – c. 530 BC): The Earth rests on water.

Aneximenes (c. 540 – c. 475 BC): Everything is made of air.

Heraclitus (c. 540 – c. 450 BC): All is fire.

Empodecles (c. 493 – c. 435 BC): There are four elements: earth, air, fire, and water.

Democritus (c. 460 – c. 370 BC): Atoms (basic elements of nature) come in an infinite variety of shapes and sizes.

Aristotle (384 – 322 BC): Heavy objects must fall faster than light ones. The universe is a series of crystalline spheres that carry the sun, moon, planets, and stars around Earth.

Ptolemey (90 – 168 AD): Ditto the Earth-centric universe,  with a mathematical description.

Copernicus (1473 – 1543): The planets revolve around the sun in perfectly circular orbits.

Brahe (1546 – 1601): The planets revolve around the sun, but the sun and moon revolve around Earth.

Kepler (1573 – 1630): The planets revolve around the sun in elliptical orbits, and their trajectory is governed by magnetism.

Newton (1642 – 1727): The course of the planets around the sun is determined by gravity, which is a force that acts at a distance. Light consists of corpuscles; ordinary matter is made of larger corpuscles. Space and time are absolute and uniform.

Rutherford (1871 – 1937), Bohr (1885 – 1962), and others: The atom has a center (nucleus), which consists of two elemental particles, the neutron and proton.

Einstein (1879 – 1955): The universe is neither expanding nor shrinking.

That’s just a small fraction of the mistaken and incomplete theories that have held sway in the field of physics. There are many more such mistakes and lacunae in the other natural sciences: biology, chemistry, and earth science — each of which, like physics, has many branches. And in all branches there are many unresolved questions. For example, the Standard Model of particle physics, despite its complexity, is known to be incomplete. And it is thought (by some) to be unduly complex; that is, there may be a simpler underlying structure waiting to be discovered.

Given all of this, it is grossly presumptive to claim that climate science is “settled” when the phenomena that it encompasses are so varied, complex, often poorly understood, and often given short shrift (e.g., the effects of solar radiation on the intensity of cosmic radiation reaching Earth, which affects low-level cloud formation, which affects atmospheric temperature and precipitation).

Anyone who says that climate science is “settled” is either ignorant, stupid, or a freighted with a political agenda.

Not-So-Random Thoughts (IX)

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Links to the other posts in this occasional series may be found at “Favorite Posts,” just below the list of topics.

Demystifying Science

In a post with that title, I wrote:

“Science” is an unnecessarily daunting concept to the uninitiated, which is to say, almost everyone. Because scientific illiteracy is rampant, advocates of policy positions — scientists and non-scientists alike — often are able to invoke “science” wantonly, thus lending unwarranted authority to their positions.

Just how unwarranted is the “authority” that is lent by publication in a scientific journal?

Academic scientists readily acknowledge that they often get things wrong. But they also hold fast to the idea that these errors get corrected over time as other scientists try to take the work further. Evidence that many more dodgy results are published than are subsequently corrected or withdrawn calls that much-vaunted capacity for self-correction into question. There are errors in a lot more of the scientific papers being published, written about and acted on than anyone would normally suppose, or like to think. . . .

In 2005 John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist from Stanford University, caused a stir with a paper showing why, as a matter of statistical logic, the idea that only one . . . paper in 20 gives a false-positive result was hugely optimistic. Instead, he argued, “most published research findings are probably false.” As he told the quadrennial International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication, held this September [2013] in Chicago, the problem has not gone away. (The Economist, “Trouble at the Lab,” October 19, 2013)

Tell me again about anthropogenic global warming.

The “Little Ice Age” Redux?

Speaking of AGW, remember the “Little Ice Age” of the 1970s?

George Will does. As do I.

One Sunday morning in January or February of 1977, when I lived in western New York State, I drove to the news stand to pick up my Sunday Times. I had to drive my business van because my car wouldn’t start. (Odd, I thought.) I arrived at the stand around 8:00 a.m. The temperature sign on the bank across the street then read -16 degrees (Fahrneheit). The proprietor informed me that when he opened his shop at 6:00 a.m. the reading was -36 degrees.

That was the nadir of the coldest winter I can remember. The village reservoir froze in January and stayed frozen until March. (The fire department had to pump water from the Genesee River to the village’s water-treatment plant.) Water mains were freezing solid, even though they were 6 feet below the surface. Many homeowners had to keep their faucets open a trickle to ensure that their pipes didn’t freeze. And, for the reasons cited in Will’s article, many scientists — and many Americans — thought that a “little ice age” had arrived and would be with us for a while.

But science is often inconclusive and just as often slanted to serve a political agenda. (Also, see this.) That’s why I’m not ready to sacrifice economic growth and a good portion of humanity on the altar of global warming and other environmental fads.

Well, the “Little Ice Age” may return, soon:

[A] paper published today in Advances in Space Research predicts that if the current lull in solar activity “endures in the 21st century the Sun shall enter a Dalton-like grand minimum. It was a period of global cooling.” (Anthony Watts, “Study Predicts the Sun Is Headed for a Dalton-like Solar Minimum around 2050,” Watts Up With That?, December 2, 2013)

The Dalton Minimum, named after English astronomer John Dalton, lasted from 1790 to 1830.

Bring in your pets and plants, cover your pipes, and dress warmly.

Madison’s Fatal Error

Timothy Gordon writes:

After reading Montesquieu’s most important admonitions in Spirit of the Laws, Madison decided that he could outsmart him. The Montesquieuan admonitions were actually limitations on what a well-functioning republic could allow, and thus, be. And Madison got greedy, not wanting to abide by those limitations.

First, Montesquieu required republican governments to maintain limited geographic scale. Second, Montesquieu required republican governments to preside over a univocal people of one creed and one mind on most matters. A “res publica” is a public thing valued by each citizen, after all. “How could this work when a republic is peopled diversely?” the faithful Montesquieuan asks. (Nowadays in America, for example, half the public values liberty and the other half values equality, its eternal opposite.) Thirdly—and most important—Montesquieu mandated that the three branches of government were to hold three distinct, separate types of power, without overlap.

Before showing just how correct Montesquieu was—and thus, how incorrect Madison was—it must be articulated that in the great ratification contest of 1787-1788, there operated only one faithful band of Montesquieu devotees: the Antifederalists. They publicly pointed out how superficial and misleading were the Federalist appropriations of Montesquieu within the new Constitution and its partisan defenses.

The first two of these Montesquieuan admonitions went together logically: a) limiting a republic’s size to a small confederacy, b) populated by a people of one mind. In his third letter, Antifederalist Cato made the case best:

“whoever seriously considers the immense extent of territory within the limits of the United States, together with the variety of its climates, productions, and number of inhabitants in all; the dissimilitude of interest, morals, and policies, will receive it as an intuitive truth, that a consolidated republican form of government therein, can never form a perfect union.”

Then, to bulwark his claim, Cato goes on to quote two sacred sources of inestimable worth: the Bible… and Montesquieu. Attempting to fit so many creeds and beliefs into such a vast territory, Cato says, would be “like a house divided against itself.” That is, it would not be a res publica, oriented at sameness. Then Cato goes on: “It is natural, says Montesquieu, to a republic to have only a small territory, otherwise it cannot long subsist.”

The teaching Cato references is simple: big countries of diverse peoples cannot be governed locally, qua republics, but rather require a nerve center like Washington D.C. wherefrom all the decisions shall be made. The American Revolution, Cato reminded his contemporaries, was fought over the principle of local rule.

To be fair, Madison honestly—if wrongly—figured that he had dialed up the answer, such that the United States could be both vast and pluralistic, without the consequent troubles forecast by Montesquieu. He viewed the chief danger of this combination to lie in factionalization. One can either “remove the cause [of the problem] or control its effects,” Madison famously prescribed in “Federalist 10″.

The former solution (“remove the cause”) suggests the Montesquieuan way: i.e. remove the plurality of opinion and the vastness of geography. Keep American confederacies small and tightly knit. After all, victory in the War of Independence left the thirteen colonies thirteen small, separate countries, contrary to President Lincoln’s rhetoric four score later. Union, although one possible option, was not logically necessary.

But Madison opted for the latter solution (“control the effects”), viewing union as vitally indispensable and thus, Montesquieu’s teaching as regrettably dispensable: allow size, diversity, and the consequent factionalization. Do so, he suggested, by reducing them to nothing…with hyper-pluralism. Madison deserves credit: for all its oddity, the idea actually seemed to work… for a time. . . . (“James Madison’s Nonsense-Coup Against Montesqieu (and the Classics Too),” The Imaginative Conservative, December 2013)

The rot began with the advent of the Progressive Era in the late 1800s, and it became irreversible with the advent of the New Deal, in the 1930s. As I wrote here, Madison’s

fundamental error can be found in . . . Federalist No. 51. Madison was correct in this:

. . . It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure. . . .

But Madison then made the error of assuming that, under a central government, liberty is guarded by a diversity of interests:

[One method] of providing against this evil [is] . . . by comprehending in the society so many separate descriptions of citizens as will render an unjust combination of a majority of the whole very improbable, if not impracticable. . . . [This] method will be exemplified in the federal republic of the United States. Whilst all authority in it will be derived from and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.

In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects. The degree of security in both cases will depend on the number of interests and sects; and this may be presumed to depend on the extent of country and number of people comprehended under the same government. This view of the subject must particularly recommend a proper federal system to all the sincere and considerate friends of republican government, since it shows that in exact proportion as the territory of the Union may be formed into more circumscribed Confederacies, or States oppressive combinations of a majority will be facilitated: the best security, under the republican forms, for the rights of every class of citizens, will be diminished: and consequently the stability and independence of some member of the government, the only other security, must be proportionately increased. . . .

In fact, as Montesqieu predicted, diversity — in the contemporary meaning of the word, is inimical to civil society and thus to ordered liberty. Exhibit A is a story by Michael Jonas about a study by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century“:

It has become increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.

But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam — famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement — has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings. . . .

. . . Putnam’s work adds to a growing body of research indicating that more diverse populations seem to extend themselves less on behalf of collective needs and goals.

His findings on the downsides of diversity have also posed a challenge for Putnam, a liberal academic whose own values put him squarely in the pro-diversity camp. Suddenly finding himself the bearer of bad news, Putnam has struggled with how to present his work. He gathered the initial raw data in 2000 and issued a press release the following year outlining the results. He then spent several years testing other possible explanations.

When he finally published a detailed scholarly analysis in June in the journal Scandinavian Political Studies, he faced criticism for straying from data into advocacy. His paper argues strongly that the negative effects of diversity can be remedied, and says history suggests that ethnic diversity may eventually fade as a sharp line of social demarcation.

“Having aligned himself with the central planners intent on sustaining such social engineering, Putnam concludes the facts with a stern pep talk,” wrote conservative commentator Ilana Mercer, in a recent Orange County Register op-ed titled “Greater diversity equals more misery.”. . .

The results of his new study come from a survey Putnam directed among residents in 41 US communities, including Boston. Residents were sorted into the four principal categories used by the US Census: black, white, Hispanic, and Asian. They were asked how much they trusted their neighbors and those of each racial category, and questioned about a long list of civic attitudes and practices, including their views on local government, their involvement in community projects, and their friendships. What emerged in more diverse communities was a bleak picture of civic desolation, affecting everything from political engagement to the state of social ties. . . .

. . . In his findings, Putnam writes that those in more diverse communities tend to “distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.”“People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ — that is, to pull in like a turtle,” Putnam writes. . . . (“The Downside of Diversity,” The Boston Globe (boston.com), August 5, 2007)

See also my posts, “Liberty and Society,” “The Eclipse of ‘Old America’,” and “Genetic Kinship and Society.” And these: “Caste, Crime, and the Rise of Post-Yankee America” (Theden, November 12, 2013) and “The New Tax Collectors for the Welfare State,” (Handle’s Haus, November 13, 2013).

Libertarian Statism

Finally, I refer you to David Friedman’s “Libertarian Arguments for Income Redistribution” (Ideas, December 6, 2013). Friedman notes that “Matt Zwolinski has recently posted some possible arguments in favor of a guaranteed basic income or something similar.” Friedman then dissects Zwolinski’s arguments.

Been there, done that. See my posts, “Bleeding-Heart Libertarians = Left-Statists” and “Not Guilty of Libertarian Purism,” wherein I tackle the statism of Zwolinski and some of his co-bloggers at Bleeding Heart Libertarians. In the second-linked post, I say that

I was wrong to imply that BHLs [Bleeding Heart Libertarians] are connivers; they (or too many of them) are just arrogant in their judgments about “social justice” and naive when they presume that the state can enact it. It follows that (most) BHLs are not witting left-statists; they are (too often) just unwitting accomplices of left-statism.

Accordingly, if I were to re-title [“Bleeding-Heart Libertarians = Left-Statists”] I would call it “Bleeding-Heart Libertarians: Crypto-Statists or Dupes for Statism?”.

*     *     *

Other posts in this series: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII

AGW: The Death Knell

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UPDATED 02/12/14 (related reading added)

I am loath to write again about AGW, so convinced am I that it is a “scientific” myth. But the myth has a large, vociferous, politically motivated, and almost-unshakeable following. So here goes…

Watt’s Up With That? notes

a Technical University of Denmark press release [about] what looks to be a significant confirmation of [Henrik] Svensmark’s theory of temperature modulation on Earth by cosmic ray interactions. The process is that when there are more cosmic rays, they help create more microscopic cloud nuclei, which in turn form more clouds, which reflect more solar radiation back into space, making Earth cooler than what it normally might be. Conversely, [fewer] cosmic rays mean less cloud cover and a warmer planet as indicated here.  The sun’s magnetic field is said to deflect cosmic rays when its solar magnetic dynamo is more active, and right around the last solar max, we were at an 8000 year high, suggesting more deflected cosmic rays, and warmer temperatures. Now the sun has gone into a record slump, and there are predictions of cooler temperatures ahead….

The new paper is:

Response of cloud condensation nuclei (>50 nm) to changes in ion-nucleation” H. Svensmark, Martin B. Enghoff, Jens Olaf Pepke Pedersen, Physics Letters A 377 (2013) 2343–2347….

FULL PAPER LINK PROVIDED IN THE PRESS RERLEASE: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/51188502/PLA22068.pdf (open access PDF)

LOCAL COPY: (for those having trouble with link above):  Svensmark_PLA22068 (PDF)

What about the seemingly high rate of increase in temperatures in recent decades? As I say here,

It should be quite evident by now that the warming trend of the past thirty-odd years merely coincides with the rise in human activity (as measured by population) but is not explained by the “greenhouse” effect…. There are alternative and compelling alternative explanations for the warming trend, including the influence of solar activity summarized above….

What else explains the apparent (but exaggerated) warming trend of the past thirty-odd years (a “trend” that ended more than 15 years ago)? Poorly sited weather stations and urban heating are the two main culprits.

P.S. So much for the prematurely predicted disappearance of the Arctic ice cap: here and here.

*****

Recommended book: Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder, The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change, Totem Books, 2003

Related reading:
Anthony Watts, “The EPA Is Challenged in the Supreme Court over Greenhouse Gas Regulations,” Watts Up With That?, December 17, 2013
Chet Richards, “A Few Easy Tests to Debunk Global Warming Hysteria,” American Thinker, January 1, 2014
Ronald Bailey, “Ugly Climate Models,” reason.com, January 2014
Christopher Monckton, “IPCC Silently Slashes Its Global Warming Predictions in the Final AR5 Draft,” Watts Up With That?, January 1, 2014
Anthony Watts, “Could This Study on Honesty and Government Service Explain the EPA Climaterr Fraud and ‘Climategate’?,” Watts Up With That, January 6, 2014
Don J. Easterbrook, “Setting the Record Straight on the ‘Cause of the Pause’ in Global Warming’,” Watts Up With That?, January 21, 2014
Vincent Gray, “The Scientific Method and Climate Science,” Watts Up With That?, January 21, 2014

Related posts:
Hemibel Thinking
Climatology (a term that I use to distinguish phony climate science from the real thing)
Global Warming: Realities and Benefits
Another Blow to Climatology?
Another Blow to Chicken-Little Science
Global Warming and Life
Remember the “Little Ice Age”?
Science’s Anti-Scientific Bent
More Bad News for Global-Warming Zealots
“Warmism”: The Myth of Anthropogenic Global Warming
More Evidence against Anthropogenic Global Warming
Yet More Evidence against Anthropogenic Global Warming
Modeling Is Not Science
Anthropogenic Global Warming Is Dead, Just Not Buried Yet
Demystifying Science
Analysis for Government Decision-Making: Demi-Science, Hemi-Demi-Science, and Sophistry

Demystifying Science

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“Science” is an unnecessarily daunting concept to the uninitiated, which is to say, almost everyone. Because scientific illiteracy is rampant, advocates of policy positions — scientists and non-scientists alike — often are able to invoke “science” wantonly, thus lending unwarranted authority to their positions.

WHAT IS SCIENCE?

Science is knowledge, but not all knowledge is science. A scientific body of knowledge is systematic; that is, the granular facts or phenomena which comprise the body of knowledge are connected in patterned ways. Moreover, the facts or phenomena represent reality; they are not mere concepts, which may be tools of science but are not science. Beyond that, science — unless it is a purely descriptive body of knowledge — is predictive about the characteristics of as-yet unobserved phenomena. These may be things that exist but have not yet been measured (in terms of the applicable science), or things that are yet to be (as in the effects of new drug on a disease).

Above all, science is not a matter of “consensus” — AGW zealots to the contrary notwithstanding. Science is a matter of rigorously testing theories against facts, and doing it openly. Imagine the state of physics today if Galileo had been unable to question Aristotle’s theory of gravitation, if Newton had been unable to extend and generalize Galileo’s work, and if Einstein had deferred to Newton. The effort to “deny” a prevailing or popular theory is as old as science. There have been “deniers’ in the thousands, each of them responsible for advancing some aspect of knowledge. Not all “deniers” have been as prominent as Einstein (consider Dan Schectman, for example), but each is potentially as important as Einstein.

It is hard for scientists to rise above their human impulses. Einstein, for example, so much wanted quantum physics to be deterministic rather than probabilistic that he said “God does not play dice with the universe.” To which Nils Bohr replied, “Einstein, stop telling God what to do.” But the human urge to be “right” or to be on the “right side” of an issue does not excuse anti-scientific behavior, such as that of so-called scientists who have become invested in AGW.

There are many so-called scientists who subscribe to AGW without having done relevant research. Why? Because AGW is the “in” thing, and they do not wish to be left out. This is the stuff of which “scientific consensus” is made. If you would not buy a make of automobile just because it is endorsed by a celebrity who knows nothing about automotive engineering, why would you “buy” AGW just because it is endorsed by a herd of so-called scientists who have never done research that bears directly on it?

There are two lessons to take from this. The first is  that no theory is ever proven. (A theory may, if it is well and openly tested, be useful guide to action in certain rigorous disciplines, such as engineering and medicine.) Any theory — to be a truly scientific one — must be capable of being tested, even by (and especially by) others who are skeptical of the theory. Those others must be able to verify the facts upon which the theory is predicated, and to replicate the tests and calculations that seem to validate the theory. So-called scientists who restrict access to their data and methods are properly thought of as cultists with a political agenda, not scientists. Their theories are not to be believed — and certainly are not to be taken as guides to action.

The second lesson is that scientists are human and fallible. It is in the best tradition of science to distrust their claims and to dismiss their non-scientific utterances.

THE ROLE OF MATHEMATICS AND STATISTICS IN SCIENCE

Mathematics and statistics are not sciences, despite their vast and organized complexity. They offer ways of thinking about and expressing knowledge, but they are not knowledge. They are languages that enable scientists to converse with each other and outsiders who are fluent in the same languages.

Expressing a theory in mathematical terms may lend the theory a scientific aura. But a theory couched in mathematics (or its verbal equivalent) is not a scientific one unless (a) it can be tested against observable facts by rigorous statistical methods, (b) it is found, consistently, to accord with those facts, and (c) the introduction of new facts does not require adjustment or outright rejection of the theory. If the introduction of new facts requires the adjustment of a theory, then it is a new theory, which must be tested against new facts, and so on.

This “inconvenient fact” — that an adjusted theory is a new theory —  is ignored routinely, especially in the application of regression analysis to a data set for the purpose of quantifying relationships among variables. If a “model” thus derived does a poor job when applied to data outside the original set, it is not an uncommon practice to combine the original and new data and derive a new “model” based on the combined set. This practice (sometimes called data-mining) does not yield scientific theories with predictive power; it yields information (of dubious value) about the the data employed in the regression analysis. As a critic of regression models once put it: Regression is a way of predicting the past with great certainty.

A science may be descriptive rather than mathematical. In a descriptive science (e.g., plant taxonomy), particular phenomena sometimes are described numerically (e.g., the number of leaves on the stem of a species), but the relations among various phenomena are not reducible to mathematics. Nevertheless, a predominantly descriptive discipline will be scientific if the phenomena within its compass are connected in patterned ways.

NON-SCIENCE, SCIENCE, AND PSEUDO-SCIENCE

Non-scientific disciplines can be useful, whereas some purportedly scientific disciplines verge on charlatanism. Thus, for example:

  • History, by my reckoning, is not a science. But a knowledge of history is valuable, nevertheless, for the insights it offers into the influence of human nature on the outcomes of economic and political processes. I call the lessons of history “insights,” not scientific relationships, because history is influenced by so many factors that it does not allow for the rigorous testing of hypotheses.
  • Physics is a science in most of its sub-disciplines, but there are some (e.g., cosmology and certain interpretations of quantum mechanics) where it descends into the realm of speculation. Informed, fascinating speculation to be sure, but speculation all the same. It avoids being pseudo-scientific only because it might give rise to testable hypotheses.
  • Economics is a science only to the extent that it yields valid, statistical insights about specific microeconomic issues (e.g., the effects of laws and regulations on the prices and outputs of goods and services). The postulates of macroeconomics, except to the extent that they are truisms, have no demonstrable validity. (See, for example, my treatment of the Keynesian multiplier.) Macroeconomics is a pseudo-science.

CONCLUSION

There is no such thing as “science,” writ large; that is, no one may appeal, legitimately, to “science” in the abstract. A particular discipline may be a science, but it is a science only to the extent that it comprises a factual body of knowledge and testable theories. Further, its data and methods must be open to verification and testing. And only a particular theory — one that has been put to the proper tests — can be called a scientific one.

For the reasons adduced in this post, scientists who claim to “know” that there is no God are not practicing science when they make that claim. They are practicing the religion that is known as atheism. The existence or non-existence of God is beyond testing, at least by any means yet known to man.

Related posts:
About Economic Forecasting
Is Economics a Science?
Economics as Science
Hemibel Thinking
Climatology
Physics Envy
Global Warming: Realities and Benefits
Words of Caution for the Cautious
Scientists in a Snit
Another Blow to Climatology?
A Telling Truth
Proof That “Smart” Economists Can Be Stupid
Bad News for Politically Correct Science
Another Blow to Chicken-Little Science
Same Old Story, Same Old Song and Dance
Atheism, Religion, and Science
The Limits of Science
Three Perspectives on Life: A Parable
Beware of Irrational Atheism
The Hockey Stick Is Broken
Talk about Brainwaves!
The Creation Model
The Thing about Science
Science in Politics, Politics in Science
Global Warming and Life
Evolution and Religion
Speaking of Religion…
Words of Caution for Scientific Dogmatists
Science, Evolution, Religion, and Liberty
Global Warming and the Liberal Agenda
Science, Logic, and God
Debunking “Scientific Objectivity”
Pseudo-Science in the Service of Political Correctness
This Is Objectivism?
Objectivism: Tautologies in Search of Reality
Science’s Anti-Scientific Bent
Science, Axioms, and Economics
Global Warming in Perspective
Mathematical Economics
Economics: The Dismal (Non) Science
The Big Bang and Atheism
More Bad News for Global Warming Zealots
The Universe . . . Four Possibilities
Einstein, Science, and God
Atheism, Religion, and Science Redux
Warming, Anyone?
“Warmism”: The Myth of Anthropogenic Global Warming
Re: Climate “Science”
More Evidence against Anthropogenic Global Warming
Yet More Evidence against Anthropogenic Global Warming
A Non-Believer Defends Religion
Evolution as God?
Modeling Is Not Science
Anthropogenic Global Warming Is Dead, Just Not Buried Yet
Beware the Rare Event
Landsburg Is Half-Right
Physics Envy
The Unreality of Objectivism
What Is Truth?
Evolution, Human Nature, and “Natural Rights”
More Thoughts about Evolutionary Teleology
A Digression about Probability and Existence
More about Probability and Existence
Existence and Creation
We, the Children of the Enlightenment
Probability, Existence, and Creation
The Atheism of the Gaps
Probability, Existence, and Creation: A Footnote

What Is Truth?

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There are four kinds of truth: physical, logical-mathematical, psychological-emotional, and judgmental. The first two are closely related, as are the last two. After considering each of the two closely related pairs, I will link all four kinds of truth.

PHYSICAL AND LOGICAL-MATHEMATICAL TRUTH

Physical truth is, seemingly, the most straightforward of the lot. Physical truth seems to consist of that which humans are able to apprehend with their senses, aided sometimes by instruments. And yet, widely accepted notions of physical truth have changed drastically over the eons, not only because of improvements in the instruments of observation but also because of changes in the interpretation of data obtained with the aid of those instruments.

The latter point brings me to logical-mathematical truth. It is logic and mathematics that translates specific physical truths — or what are taken to be truths — into constructs (theories) such as quantum mechanics, general relativity, the Big Bang, and evolution. Of the relationship between specific physical truth and logical-mathematical truth, G.K. Chesterton said:

Logic and truth, as a matter of fact, have very little to do with each other. Logic is concerned merely with the fidelity and accuracy with which a certain process is performed, a process which can be performed with any materials, with any assumption. You can be as logical about griffins and basilisks as about sheep and pigs. On the assumption that a man has two ears, it is good logic that three men have six ears, but on the assumption that a man has four ears, it is equally good logic that three men have twelve. And the power of seeing how many ears the average man, as a fact, possesses, the power of counting a gentleman’s ears accurately and without mathematical confusion, is not a logical thing but a primary and direct experience, like a physical sense, like a religious vision. The power of counting ears may be limited by a blow on the head; it may be disturbed and even augmented by two bottles of champagne; but it cannot be affected by argument. Logic has again and again been expended, and expended most brilliantly and effectively, on things that do not exist at all. There is far more logic, more sustained consistency of the mind, in the science of heraldry than in the science of biology. There is more logic in Alice in Wonderland than in the Statute Book or the Blue Books. The relations of logic to truth depend, then, not upon its perfection as logic, but upon certain pre-logical faculties and certain pre-logical discoveries, upon the possession of those faculties, upon the power of making those discoveries. If a man starts with certain assumptions, he may be a good logician and a good citizen, a wise man, a successful figure. If he starts with certain other assumptions, he may be an equally good logician and a bankrupt, a criminal, a raving lunatic. Logic, then, is not necessarily an instrument for finding truth; on the contrary, truth is necessarily an instrument for using logic—for using it, that is, for the discovery of further truth and for the profit of humanity. Briefly, you can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it. [Thanks to The Fourth Checkraise for making me aware of Chesterton’s aperçu.]

To put it another way, logical-mathematical truth is only as valid as the axioms (principles) from which it is derived. Given an axiom, or a set of them, one can deduce “true” statements (assuming that one’s logical-mathematical processes are sound). But axioms are not pre-existing truths with independent existence (like Platonic ideals). They are products, in one way or another, of observation and reckoning. The truth of statements derived from axioms depends, first and foremost, on the truth of the axioms, which is the thrust of Chesterton’s aperçu.

It is usual to divide reasoning into two types of logical process:

  • Induction is “The process of deriving general principles from particular facts or instances.” That is how scientific theories are developed, in principle. A scientist begins with observations and devises a theory from them. Or a scientist may begin with an existing theory, note that new observations do not comport with the theory, and devise a new theory to fit all the observations, old and new.
  • Deduction is “The process of reasoning in which a conclusion follows necessarily from the stated premises; inference by reasoning from the general to the specific.” That is how scientific theories are tested, in principle. A theory (a “stated premise”) should lead to certain conclusions (“observations”). If it does not, the theory is falsified. If it does, the theory lives for another day.

But the stated premises (axioms) of a scientific theory (or exercise in logic or mathematical operation) do not arise out of nothing. In one way or another, directly or indirectly, they are the result of observation and reckoning (induction). Get the observation and reckoning wrong, and what follows is wrong; get them right and what follows is right. Chesterton, again.

PSYCHOLOGICAL-EMOTIONAL AND JUDGMENTAL TRUTH

A psychological-emotional truth is one that depends on more than physical observations. A judgmental truth is one that arises from a psychological-emotional truth and results in a consequential judgment about its subject.

A common psychological-emotional truth, one that finds its way into judgmental truth, is an individual’s conception of beauty.  The emotional aspect of beauty is evident in the tendency, especially among young persons, to consider their lovers and spouses beautiful, even as persons outside the intimate relationship would find their judgments risible.

A more serious psychological-emotional truth — or one that has public-policy implications — has to do with race. There are persons who simply have negative views about races other than their own, for reasons that are irrelevant here. What is relevant is the close link between the psychological-emotional views about persons of other races — that they are untrustworthy, stupid, lazy, violent, etc. — and judgments that adversely affect those persons. Those judgments range from refusal to hire a person of a different race (still quite common, if well disguised to avoid legal problems) to the unjust convictions and executions because of prejudices held by victims, witnesses, police officers, prosecutors, judges, and jurors. (My examples point to anti-black prejudices on the part of whites, but there are plenty of others to go around: anti-white, anti-Latino, anti-Asian, etc. Nor do I mean to impugn prudential judgments that implicate race, as in the avoidance by whites of certain parts of a city.)

A close parallel is found in the linkage between the psychological-emotional truth that underlies a jury’s verdict and the legal truth of a judge’s sentence. There is an even tighter linkage between psychological-emotional truth and legal truth in the deliberations and rulings of higher courts, which operated without juries.

PUTTING TRUTH AND TRUTH TOGETHER

Psychological-emotional proclivities, and the judgmental truths that arise from them, impinge on physical and mathematical-logical truth. Because humans are limited (by time, ability, and inclination), they often accept as axiomatic statements about the world that are tenuous, if not downright false. Scientists, mathematicians, and logicians are not exempt from the tendency to credit dubious statements. And that tendency can arise not just from expediency and ignorance but also from psychological-emotional proclivities.

Albert Einstein, for example, refused to believe that very small particles of matter-energy (quanta) behave probabilistically, as described by the branch of physics known as quantum mechanics. Put simply, sub-atomic particles do not seem to behave according to the same physical laws that describe the actions of the visible universe; their behavior is discontinuous (“jumpy”) and described probabilistically, not by the kinds of continuous (“smooth”) mathematical formulae that apply to the macroscopic world.

Einstein refused to believe that different parts of the same universe could operate according to different physical laws. Thus he saw quantum mechanics as incomplete and in need of reconciliation with the rest of physics. At one point in his long-running debate with the defenders of quantum mechanics, Einstein wrote: “I, at any rate, am convinced that He [God] does not throw dice.” And yet, quantum mechanics — albeit refined and elaborated from the version Einstein knew — survives and continues to describe the sub-atomic world with accuracy.

Ironically, Einstein’s two greatest contributions to physics — special and general relativity — were met with initial skepticism by other physicists. Special relativity rejects absolute space-time; general relativity depicts a universe whose “shape” depends on the masses and motions of the bodies within it. These are not intuitive concepts, given man’s instinctive preference for certainty.

The point of the vignettes about Einstein is that science is not a sterile occupation; it can be (and often is) fraught with psychological-emotional visions of truth. What scientists believe to be true depends, to some degree, on what they want to believe is true. Scientists are simply human beings who happen to be more capable than the average person when it comes to the manipulation of abstract concepts. And yet, scientists are like most of their fellow beings in their need for acceptance and approval. They are fully capable of subscribing to a “truth” if to do otherwise would subject them to the scorn of their peers. Einstein was willing and able to question quantum mechanics because he had long since established himself as a premier physicist, and because he was among that rare breed of humans who are (visibly) unaffected by the opinions of their peers.

Such are the scientists who, today, question their peers’ psychological-emotional attachment to the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). The questioners are not “deniers” or “skeptics”; they are scientists who are willing to look deeper than the facile hypothesis that, more than two decades ago, gave rise to the AGW craze.

It was then that a scientist noted the coincidence of an apparent rise in global temperatures since the late 1800s (or is it since 1975?) and an apparent increase in the atmospheric concentration of CO2. And thus a hypothesis was formed. It was embraced and elaborated by scientists (and others) eager to be au courant, to obtain government grants (conveniently aimed at research “proving” AGW), to be “right” by being in the majority, and — let it be said — to curtail or stamp out human activities which they find unaesthetic. Evidence to the contrary be damned.

Where else have we seen this kind of behavior, albeit in a more murderous guise? At the risk of invoking Hitler, I must answer with this link: Nazi Eugenics. Again, science is not a sterile occupation, exempt from human flaws and foibles.

CONCLUSION

What is truth? Is it an absolute reality that lies beyond human perception? Is it those “answers” that flow logically or mathematically from unproven assumptions? Is it the “answers” that, in some way, please us? Or is it the ways in which we reshape the world to conform it with those “answers”?

Truth, as we are able to know it, is like the human condition: fragile and prone to error.