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The recent USGCRP Climate Report
The recent USGCRP Climate Report predicts dire economic consequences by the year 2100 if we don’t act now. Think about that: 2100 is 82 years away. 82 years ago was 1936.
To paraphrase, and with apologies to, Michael Crichton regarding his prescient lecture (“Aliens Cause Global Warming,” 2003), here is a partial list of terms we use that would make no sense whatsoever to a person from 1936: iPhone, Amazon, Apple, Laptop, tablet, quant fund, derivatives, television, computer, cell phone (generally), jet, polyester, antibiotic, satellite, DNA, MRI, ICU, IUD, IRA, ERA, EEG, EPA, DOD, PCP, HTML, internet, interferon, instant replay, remote sensing, remote control, speed dialing, gene therapy, gene splicing, genes, spot welding, heat-seeking, bipolar, prozac, leotards, lap dancing, email, tape recorder, digital recorder, digital data, data storage, CDs, airbags, plastic explosive, plastic, microfibre, robots, liposuction, transduction, superconduction, dish antennas, step aerobics, smoothies, 12-step, ultrasound, nylon, rayon, teflon, fiber optics, carpal tunnel, laser surgery, laparoscopy, corneal transplant, kidney transplant, AIDS, stents, open-heart surgery, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Interstate Highway System, St. Lawrence Seaway, self-driving, Big Bang, Transgender, Gender Fluidity, yoga pants, X-box, gamer, microwave, Sea Train container.
The thought that someone carrying a modern electronic device in a pocket, living in an air-conditioned home, worrying about weight gain, watching a big-screen TV, with content supplied by subsidized wi-fi access, wearing brand-name clothes, secure in guaranteed health care and modern transportation, could possibly consider him- or herself to be poor would boggle the mind of someone living 82 years ago. Any attempt to predict economic consequences of any action 82 years from now is so absurd as to be fatuous.
I often wonder why anyone would take this stuff seriously.
Published in General
That’s why most of us don’t. Take it seriously, I mean.
There’s a conspiracy theory making the rounds among some climate change folk that the White House put out such a hyperbolic report because they want to discredit climate change orthodoxy.
The absurdity of predicting economic outcomes 82 years from now is only surpassed by the absurdity of the USGRCP having a budget of $2.7B.
35 years ago the temperature of the globe is the same as it is now. That means if we extrapolate forward a 100 years, the temperature will be …. the same.
The report was led by Katherine Hayhoe and she is true zealot for CAGW. Of course it is all bunk based on bad models and stupid assumptions (technology will regress, people will stop using birth control) and should be mocked as a the propaganda it is.
I wanted to take issue with this one because I think it brings up an important point. One of the recurring justifications for regulation I keep hearing is the that the world is so much more complex than it once was. With regard to the financial markets – and more specifically derivatives- this argument is garbage.
Generally speaking, derivatives are essentially any contract that derives its value from an underlying asset, index, or interest rate. The most common type people can think of are commodity futures where – for example – farm products are sold at a future date at an agreed upon price, but any contract where the thing purchased is delivered some time after the contract is signed – which allows the market price to fluctuate between the day the contract is signed and the day the thing is delivered – have similar characteristics.
Futures contracts have been with us in one form or another since well before the 30’s. One of the more famous contracts cases everyone reads in law school is from 1864 and deals with a futures contract to purchase cotton off of one of two ships bound for England from India. In some old school financial firms in England, the futures trading department is apparently called the arrivals department because most futures contracts at the time dealt with contracts to purchase goods on ships arriving in England from various parts of the world.
You may not like speculation on commodity prices, but fundamentally someone has to speculate on future prices: either the farmer when he puts his seed in the ground without knowing what the price will be when the crop is ready, or the trader who agrees to purchase the crop at a set price six months from now, come what may.
This isn’t to say that the financial markets are in no way more complex, but the extra complexity is usually caused by regulation, not the other way around. The regulators are purporting to solve the problem they caused, which is the traditional definition of a criminal racket.
Prognosticators and scientists who make predictions 82 years into the future have the luxury of never having to face up to the reliability or consequences of their predictions. Unlike the lowly weatherman, who must take responsibility on a daily basis for his accuracy, the 82-year fortune-teller is pretty much free to make up anything he wishes, for his prophesies will never be fact-checked during his lifetime. I want a job like that.
@jasonobermeyer: Thanks for the thoughts. Three points: 1. I certainly did not mean to imply that the world is more or less complex, merely vastly different. Any world that had Stalin, Mao & Chiang, Eden, Hitler, the chaos of the Far East, the aftermath of WWI, the Great Depression & the British Empire certainly posed a set of complexities we don’t face. That there are more (and richer) people in the world and that information velocity has gone through the roof is undeniable. Whether this increases or decreases the efficacy of decision making is open to dispute; 2. I definitely did not pass any judgement as to the value of any particular regulatory scheme or agency, merely noted that they now exist; 3. Modern derivatives are essentially computer based and operated. While the underlying concept is financially ancient, the modern instruments are relatively new.
By the way, were you referring to the Peerless case? Raffles v Wichelhaus [1864]? I still have the hornbook. Sends me back to good times (’76-’79) in law school.
Sorry if it seemed like I went overboard, but you would be surprised (or maybe not) at the number of people who think derivatives were invented in the early 2000’s specifically to tank the housing market. Also, the argument that we need more regulation now because “like, the word is so much more confusing and junk” is pet peeve of mine.
Of course. I missed the delicious irony in the case involving two ships named Peerless carrying the same cargo on the same route to the same destination until it was pointed out to me. I’m not always as smart as I let on.
@jasonobermeyer: They weren’t invented just to tank the housing market? A lot of “consumer advocate” lawyers just got the vapors.
I agree wholeheartedly with the point of the essay. I would quibble about a couple more words on the list. The word “robot”, for example, was first coined in 1920. Certainly not everyone in 1930 would have heard that word, but it’s not impossible that some people got it. Also, I’d bet people in 1930 would understand “lap dancing” if they heard the phrase. That precise expression might be of relatively recent vintage, but the act it describes is not.
@nickh: Personally, I’m still not sure exactly what a lap dance is, and I don’t intend to find out.
I’m no expert either. I’m just guessing that since it’s related to one of the world’s oldest professions that it’s not new. I don’t think I’ll be doing the research to find out if I’m correct or not, so like everyone else on the Internet I’ll just assume I am.
The article and the author’s comments are outstanding.
@iwalton: Thank you for the kind words.
Of course, people in 2018 don’t know stuff that people in the 20th Century took for granted.
A few weeks ago, on TV’s The Voice, a 15 year old sang Jim Croce’s song “That’s Not the Way I Feel.” Once he finished singing, he admitted he had to research what an operator was.
Meanwhile over on twitter this week, there is a #BeatlesSongsfor Millennials going on. Like “Can’t Buy Me Love, or A Car, Or A House.” And some wise guy tweeted, “What’s a Beatle?”
@CarolJoy: I knew that I was entering middle-age when I was in a record (any of you remember records?) store and I saw some young ladies, about to purchase the Band on the Run album, looking questioningly at a Rubber Soul album sitting next to the cashier. Finally, one of them said: “I didn’t know Paul McCartney was in another band.”
It does not matter what actually happens.
Anyone who notices the predictions were wrong will be kicked off all social media, denied tenure and called bad names.
Eighty-two years years from now, Obama will be credited for all technological innovation and economic growth occuring thru 2100.
The issue of “Climate change” will fade in favor of “extreme sameness”, dangerous levels of climate stability which we always knew to be the real threat.
Brawndo will be the most popular beverage on the market.
My only quibble is that I think a lot of 1936ers, even if they’d never heard of “lap dances” would have been able to figure it out.
Did you know that Paul Erlich, the original “Chicken Little”, is still around, and still singing the same song? Totally oblivious to the fact that NONE of his dire predictions have come true.
I still see modern documentaries on PBS where they quote Erlich’s predictions in order to scare the viewer, without informing the audience that every one of these predictions has failed spectacularly. In the same vein, climate scientists almost never admit that so far, the computer climate models have failed to make a single accurate prediction about Global Warming. Yet they quote the computer predictions all the time in order to scare their gullible audience.
I went and found the Michael Crichton lecture (which I’d never heard of before). The Heartland Institute has it for download. It’s a good read and it’s central point about global warming – that computer model outputs are not the same as evidence from observations of the natural world – has long been the reason I’m a skeptic where climate hysteria is concerned.
Hmmm—-
From Armstrong Economics:
“Posted Nov 14, 2018 by Martin Armstrong
“We see a cooling trend,” Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center said in late September. “High above Earth’s surface, near the edge of space, our atmosphere is losing heat energy. If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold.” … …. Ron Turner a Senior Science Advisor to NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program, said at the time that this solar cycle was “among the weakest on record,” noting that in the 23 solar cycles since recording began in 1755, there were very few solar maxima weaker than that recorded in 2014. As a consequence, scientists are predicting one of the coldest periods ever recorded for our upper atmosphere – and that means cooler temperatures down here, too. “We’re not there quite yet,” Mlynczak said about the anticipated record low thermosphere temperatures, “but it could happen in a matter of months.”
… Well gee, it looks like someone in the government despite all the guvmint attack dogs has wandered off the plantation and is actually telling the truth. Real climate change scientists have been warning for years we may be facing an unprecedented cooling period due to recent weak sun spot activity. To recap, since the last Ice Age, there have been several periods of cooling: around 1100 BC which coincided with the demise of the Mycenaean, Minoan and Egyptian cultures, around 400 AD which brought about the freezing of the Rhine New Years Eve 407, which allowed the Huns to cross the Rhine and devastate the Romans, ( also something called the Dark Ages) and the more recent “Little Ice Age” of 1645 to 1715 and another dump to about 1850 where the Thames and the Canals of Venice both froze. It appears that the cooling periods have been getting cooler and the warming periods weaker as time goes on. The current warming period since 1850 is an absolute pipsqueak compared to earlier warming periods when Greenland was actually green and citrus grew in Scandinavia. So much for anthropologic climate change, which really doesn’t even have a whiff of evidence to give it credence.
We should be expecting some perhaps devastating winters in the coming years, starting with this one which could be a doozy. Warming periods over the last fifty million years it’s thought only last roughly 10-20,000 years followed by roughly 80,000 years of Ice Age so we may be fast approaching the end of our warming period for a while. There are several factors affecting natural climate change including suns spots, the bending of the earth’s orbit ( it can go 3% out of sync) and the tilting of the earth and wobbling of said tilt at 23 degrees, among other things, so predicting natural climate change is a very poorly understood and challenging endeavor.
So a period of “Summer” (a warm period) followed by a longer period of “Winter” (an ice age). Game of Thrones is real! Winter is Coming!
Here in Cleveland, Ohio, we had the coldest Winter on record just four years ago. Cleveland temperature data go back to 1871.
I wish it was only PBS shows that did that. The news stations here in Calif always manage to somehow slip the idea of Global Catastrophic Climate change into so many of the news broadcasts. For instance, a reporter might interview a successful new restaurant owner, That guy will mention how sustainable his carry out boxes are, while the reporter adds, “That is so very needed so we can forestall the Climate Change events.”
I was wondering how I can read that lecture. Thanks for the information.
Bjorn Lomborg says the problem isn’t with the report itself, per se, but rather with the way the media is covering it:
https://nypost.com/2018/11/28/the-media-got-it-all-wrong-on-the-new-us-climate-report/