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A Question for My Fellow Ricochetti
I’ve got a question I’m trying to answer, and it occurs to me that someone here might be able to help me. One of the things I like most about Ricochet is the thoughtfulness and intelligence of the members. Another thing that impresses me is the diversity of this crowd. So I’m going to toss this out there and see if anyone has any thoughts to offer.
I wrote a post not too long ago about the need for a civil dialog across the political divide. A fellow in New York City, one of these young, hyper-educated computer entrepreneur types, read it and invited me to participate in a new podcast he’s launching soon. He wants his first episode to feature someone from the left and someone from the right holding a civil discussion on matters about which they disagree.
The person on the left is another hyper-educated individual — Ph.D. from MIT in machine learning, something like that — who recently left Google to found a climate change advocacy organization in D.C. I’m the person on the right. We’re going to have a civil conversation, which I am going to assume will be centered around climate change, though that hasn’t actually been stated. The conference call will take place this Wednesday afternoon.
This isn’t intended to be a debate, but rather a conversation, a discussion, a meeting of minds. That’s the hope, anyway: ideally, we’ll each come away understanding the other’s perspective a little better. I’m an old dog, and I can’t honestly say that I want or expect my own views to change. (I think that’s probably true of most people, old dogs or not.) But I intend to do my best to listen, and to take a pleasant, non-confrontational tone.
I’ll get to my question for you in a moment.
My general thinking on climate change is pretty simple, and goes as follows:
- I’m agnostic about anthropogenic climate change. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if we’re warming the planet; might surprise me a little if we aren’t.
- I’m skeptical that we can project with any significant confidence the state of the climate 80 years from now, but I’m willing to entertain the possibility that we’re getting very good at modeling the complex dynamic system we call climate.
- I am more than skeptical that we can effectively model the several other complex dynamic systems involved in making cost/benefit analyses of various climate change mitigation strategies over a similar time scale. These include patterns of land use, agricultural production, technological evolution, urbanization, global distribution of poverty, etc. Eighty years is a very long time in terms of technological and economic development. (Step back to 1940 and imagine what futurists thought 2020 would be like; how much do you think they got right?)
- Given that I believe we can’t realistically evaluate the economic consequences of climate change 80 years from now, perhaps not even the sign of those consequences, I can not begin to justify imposing large-scale controls on current energy policy. While it’s difficult to model complex systems, history is full of examples of what happens when you create concentrated authoritarian control structures — and that’s what would be required to transform our energy economy as the climate change alarmists seem to desire.
I am ignoring two things, both of which are important in the discussion but neither of which is central to my argument. One is the impracticality of actually changing the future climate in a predictable way — at least, of doing so without crippling the global economy. The other is nuclear power, which I believe all climate change alarmists should eagerly embrace — believe so strongly that I distrust the motives or the intelligence (or both) of any climate change alarmist who doesn’t support nuclear power.
So my argument revolves around the assertion that we are not capable of making reliable long-term predictions about complex systems, and that climate mitigation strategies require us to make such predictions about several independent but linked complex dynamic systems. My question is this:
What examples do we have of anyone making successful predictions of the long-term behavior of complex systems?
Say that long-term is on the order of 50 years, give or take. Complex systems are “complex” in a relatively formal way, involving multiple interacting factors that are difficult to measure, the interactions of which may be poorly understood, chaotic, and involve feedback mechanisms.
Economies, political and social movements, markets, and technology-driven change all exhibit the behavior of complex systems. They are difficult to predict because they involve a lot of independent elements (often, people) making individual contributions based on an evolving range of factors. They are difficult to precisely describe, precisely measure, and accurately predict over any but the shortest time frames. They may exhibit sudden and chaotic changes in response to relatively small inputs (the shooting of an Archduke, for example).
In contrast, sending a rocket to the moon, designing a super-computer, making the next breakthrough in material science or battery technology or solar power or advanced medical imaging — all of these things may be complicated, but they are not complex. They are achieved by solving a large number of well-defined problems, with each solution contributing to the final goal. These systems are not characterized by chaotic behavior, subtle feedback loops, or factors that are difficult to define or measure.
We are very good at making predictions about non-complex systems, even fairly complicated ones, over pretty much any time frame. But I can think of no truly complex system about which we’ve ever successfully made an accurate long-term prediction. Hence my question.
Any thoughts?
Published in General
I would tack in a different direction. For time immemorial men have been sacrficing men and virgins to appease the Gods and alter or avert catastrope. The leaders and their Rasputins have always shown themselves willing to bear any sacrifice but their own, all for the common good. Nonetheless, harvests have failed, hurricanes have come, winters have persisted and droughts have continued. The only thing predictible here is the rise of charletans who contine to call for sacrifice, but not their own. You see, there is no science in declaring guilt, especially when those demanding recompense share in the collection. That, my friends, is a grift. Also, there is no consensus in science, just the hypothetical either proven or disproven. We’ve had time enough with this so called Climate Crisis to test those hypotheticals, and thus far at least in Canada, there has been nothing to be alarmed about.
That’s where you might get the “we must do it for the children” and “we can’t afford to be wrong” arguments come up, from my comment #1.
Sorry to be a pest, but that’s actually “beholden.”
Just your foot? I have a much… well, I would say “lower” but that part of my body is actually higher up… opinion of it.
I completely understand the concern here about walking into the lion’s den, being ambushed by a hostile host, etc. I’m not worried about it. In part that’s because I’ve had offline conversations with both the host and the opposing guest, and deemed them both sincere, if liberal, people. In part it’s because I fancy myself a silver-tongued devil who can hold his own with most people, as long as the framework of the discussion is sufficiently flexible.
This one is. There was no mention of climate change in the invitation I was given; rather, it was portrayed as a meeting of opposing perspectives and a pleasant conversation about our differences. That leaves me free to speak about technocratic hubris in general, and to avoid being pulled into the weeds: I can graciously concede anything I wish about the possibility of climate model accuracy, without conceding the larger point that there’s too much uncertainty in the economic, population, technological, agricultural, etc., domains to possibly justify draconian changes to the way we live now, with the inevitable attendant loss of freedom and disruption to the developing world, etc.
When you walk into a discussion knowing that the truth is on your side, it leaves you free to speak frankly and even generously. And the truth is that we are being asked, by the climate alarmists, to accept an outrageously expensive authoritarian regime today to avoid a vague, impossible to define catastrophe eighty years down the road. No matter what they think they know, they can not make a convincing case that it is worth starving an additional half billion people today in order to prevent an anticipated event of unknown consequence from maybe happening when my grandchildren are elderly.
Beyond all that, I think it will be a great opportunity to talk about nuclear power, and about the kind of priority-based activism that Lomborg addresses so well — and that happens to exclude global warming as a reasonable concern.
Incidentally, both the host and my opponent have told me, in private conversation, that they are pro-nuclear. But, since such discussion are Always Aimed at the Audience, it will be fun to get all three of us on record as agreeing that nuclear power is the only responsible path forward if reducing carbon emissions is a goal — or even, perhaps, if it isn’t. It will be fun to see how well that plays with a presumably left-leaning audience. ;)
I think that complex systems are best modeled with chaos theory functions rather than say Monte Carlo functions because they are deterministic at least in the short term. But chaotic systems (which is what they are talking about) are random in the long term. So long-term predictions are never going to work all that well and are subject entirely to the limits imposed as inputs. So sayeth a reformed modeler.
Yes a fine example of the folly of hooman beans. But I expect that building the new hospital at the same location, meant they didn’t have to buy land somewhere else, and then fight the environmentalist whackos over further despoiling of nature at the new site…
Perhaps more relevant is that, yes, “The Event” will occur eventually, but… what is the over/under, I suppose… on when? I’ve encountered similar realities about places like Yellowstone which is already “overdue” for an “Event” but the “window” on those is something like 2 million years, so the next “Event” could still be hundreds or even thousands of years off.
Yes, it still would have been better to build the new hospital in a better location, and “When” Yellowstone “goes off” again it might wipe out all life in North America, but is your solution to move the US to South America NOW?
Exactly.
There was another thread recently that involved some modeling issues, and one of the comments included something like “show me where the modeling for (some nuclear power plant that had an “accident”) factored in the risk of someone using a lit candle to check for a leak in a cable raceway, and I’ll believe in modeling.”
Which then means it’s not really a conversation, or at least not civil.
Henry
I spent all of the 90/s and early 00′ working to develop a satellite system that was to provide global highly calibrated data for the various universities that were doing research on that topic. It was/is a publicly available resource and all aspects of how the data is calibrated is also clearly discussed. Unfortunately it was apparent from the middle of the 2000’s that reality does not confirm the dire predictions, and kicked off a spate of where did the expected energy go hiding in the climate community?
There has been very oblique recognition within the IPCC that their earlier hair on fire pre year 2000 scenarios are not what nature has been doing. This recognition is buried in the thick text part of the multi hundred page document, but the summary abstract for the politicos and press completely ignores the modeling failures and continues with the eco repenting narrative.
I use this as a simple lay illustration as what we learned from our 12 billion dollar investment in garnering this ongoing data set.
I have not seen (nor have I really searched) that the lower curves (blue & green lines) which reflect the reality of our global energy balance, (ie temperatures) warming much since this graph was produced. Thermal modeling is has been part of my job for the last 40 years (on Spacecraft thermal designs). I would never present this as a “correlated” model. The trend in the 7 years since this graph was produced still shows a larger departure from the models, ie almost flat while the model continue to trend upward.
I suspect that the models are failing to properly account for the feed back from the clouds. There are instruments we have flying since the 70’s to measure the radiation into the earth’s atmosphere in the total spectrum, short, and long wavelengths, and visually pair it with what kind of cloud structure reflects, transmits, and reabsorbs/reflects the IR back to the earth. In my discussions with those PI’s (Principal Investigators) who have designed and have had us develop their instruments is that it is still a very sketchy to model, and more art than science (ie predictive).
Finally as has been mentioned by earlier commenters, if you are not including Nuclear in your base load power grid design, or adapting to a warmer planet, I believe you are abandoning civilization as we are currently enjoying and looking for a preindustrial Hobbesian existence.
Anything less than the recognition of that fact is a fantasy lifestyle. As we joke to each other at the shop, Thermodynamics is a harsh dose of reality. (Well at least that is the COC version)
Perhaps the better way of thinking about it is not How does weather and the climate work? but How can we apply and continuously adjust control of the climate to keep it on a desired course. Our climate is not static, after all.
An analogy might be the little race cars I played with as a kid, the car’s course was programmable with a card, but the steering was inexact and varied by a half a degree; though the course was not only predictable but pre-set, the little car ran into every shoe, wall and table leg at high speed, and we never could get it to keep its course.
And today our Teslas with all their continuous feedback loops can’t do much better. It seems impossible with our current understanding to think that we can set a climate course and keep it.
Excellent comment, and thank you.
The challenge of trying to respond with science and data is that, as Stalin almost certainly never opined in Russian or any other language, quantity has a quality all its own: there is no way I will be able to counter the wall of consensus modeling science with a tiny sample of contrarian observations. That is, there is no way that a listener will be able to evaluate something I say relative to something my interlocutor says. And I’ll have the disadvantages of (1) a complete lack of credentials, and (2) a life far removed from the language and references of the climate change industry.
Also, even if I concluded that the models are right, my larger objection — that we can’t justify imposing an authoritarian control regime in response to long-term predictions of the behavior of complex systems — remains, and so that is what I will focus upon.
But you don’t have credentials for that either, so I expect you would be ignored.
I don’t think the audience will ignore it. And I’ll keep saying it in different ways, whether or not my co-panelist(s) ignore it.
We’ll see what happens.
I was present at a lecture in 1978 in which the speaker predicted the emergence of new diseases involving collapse of the immune system.
Why would the immune system collapse? And what would that have to do with the emergence of new diseases? I can understand the evolution of new diseases exactly because of immune responses, but because of the collapse of the immune system doesn’t make a lot of sense. What am I missing?
Plus even if Henry R did have the credentials for this task, he is not on the correct moral side of the debate. I mean, Henry would need to get with the Lefty’s religious program: that if even one life can be spared by our ending fossil fuels, immediately banning the use of the products from the beef industry, as cows = methane, then the Left feels that it is best to shut the entire nation down.
Right now, WHO officials, Bill Gates and Soros, as well as Fauci, are advancing the notion that it would be wisdom personified to keep the lockdowns in place until we have reversed Global Climate Change and its potential to end the earth in 12 years. Note that Great Britain has now amped up its restrictions. Gov Newsom of Calif is about to do the same, by the end of this week. Is there a spike in deaths in either region? No, hell no. But facts do not matter, only the Truth of the New Age of Gaia.
HIV?
At the same time that some scientists have been suspected of developing AIDS.
Hence my pessimism in comment #1.
I’m waiting for “catastrophic climate collusion”.
The emergence of AIDS, circa 1983-’84, San Francisco area.
I was infected with pneumonia in early Spring, 1983. The Palo Alto doctor I saw told me that he did work in the gay community at a free clinic, and he was struck by how many gay men were coming down with pneumonia that they could not shake off, and that some simply were not getting better.
At that time, pneumonia was known to kill even young people. But the statistics he was putting together troubled him, as the numbers were three times higher than he expected to see. He was extremely puzzled, but not for long.
AIDS was continually in the headlines by June of that year.
First off, you have my deep respect and admiration for wading into this debate. You are a far braver person than me. Humble comment: I think the disadvantages you mention also apply to your long-term predictions position. If you’re not qualified to offer contrary evidence how can you be qualified to make a judgement about the behavior of complex systems? Indeed, how can you be qualified to even offer an informed opinion? This is not my opinion of you. I am merely playing devil’s advocate.
I think not presenting the contrary data because it’s a tiny sample cedes too much to the other side. Present it and force him to answer to it. My <<<<$.02.
Yes, that’s a concern of mine as well. Two thoughts that lend me some confidence: (1) like me, my opponent is not a complexity theorist, and (2) were my opponent a complexity theorist, my opponent would pretty much have to concede my argument, as it’s long been the accepted position in complexity theory.
I wish you luck in the lion’s den/petting zoo.
That one appears to be a lot more frequent than Yellowstone.
Yup!
Another point that Henry could bring up if he wanted to—how hoooman beans reacted to COVID. If the science said “everyone should socially isolate, avoid crowds, wear a mask” (okay, it sort of said that, eventually) notice that people in certain places…including the area to be affected by the CSZ…made exceptions for certain kinds of activities? One of the Oregon state government officials in one of the videos says “we won’t have enough police to get to everyone who needs help…”
Umn….and you’re talking about defunding police? It seems like a good idea to you to allow the cops to be abused and demoralized?
Even people who are wholly persuaded that a threat is real and imminent—Bill diBlasio, the governors of Washington and Oregon—do not behave as one would expect. These people had actual, visible COVID sufferers dying in hospital ICUs…and they still allowed large, unhygenic demonstrations, CHAZ/CHOP, multiple funerals for favored victims, and all the melodramatic rest of it.
So why would we expect the people of the near future—2030?—to have somehow improved our ability to focus? Why won’t anti-racism (or whatever the pet issue is 9 years from now) similarly take priority over “fighting ” climate change?
On the plus side, those CSZ videos also demonstrate how clever and innovative human beings are when it comes to mitigating the effects and adjusting to natural disasters. My son in law works in a hospital that “floated” through an earthquake in Anchorage— He went right on doing surgery even as the highways were cracking apart…
This could lead one to believe that we can handle seas that rise whatever it is—a couple of inches every hundred years?