Another expert climate skeptic

A review of the new book Global Warming: Myth or Reality? by the French climatologist Marcel Leroux. I haven't read it yet personally, but I post the review as an example of another eminent climatologist who is uncomfortable with the attempts to assert a scientific consensus regarding climate change. Disciplinary expertise shuld not be the only criterion for commentary on public policy issues. Indeed, many intellectuals are book smart but sadly lacking in common sense. But for those who struggle with changing their belief system without the sheen of authoritative information, Leroux's book can be added to the testimony of other skeptical experts such as Richard Lindzen, Roger Piehlke Sr. and Tim Ball.

Countdown to Genocide in Dafur

Krauss and Pharn offer this update on the situation in Dafur. Sadly, they can only offer pessimism and a message to all those who still cling to the belief that the UN offers a viable option for securing any meaningful peace when intervening in situations of great oppression:

Even in Sudan the UN appears helpless before a relatively weak, lawless country whose Islamist leadership seems intent on massacring hundreds of thousands of its citizens. Do we sense a pattern here?

Churchill's take on appeasement was: "An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last'. I keep getting a visualization for a Far Side style cartoon expressing my view of the UN, which would involve a bunch of fat cats laying around a single tree on the savannah, trying to decide whose turn it is to get up and feed the crocodile today.

UPDATE: It seems Dafur has again been discovered by well-meaning do-gooders in the west, which O'Neill suggests is not necessarily a good thing.

Tags: Dafur, development, United Nations, change, genocide

JunkScience and climate

The first post for September 6, 2006 over at junkscience is Steve Milloy's latest attempt to summarize the global warming debate. He concludes:

The populist concept of carbon dioxide-driven catastrophic "global warming" does not exist in the real world and constitutes no risk (unless you happen to exist in a model-generated virtual world).

How can he say this? Well he cites the "consensus" data which puts contemporary warming for the last 120 years at 0.6C +/- 0.2C. Not exactly alarming. Moreover, the question arises as to how much of that warming is a function of solar activity, how much is due to urbanization and what proportion might then be due to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels?

Facts, not models. Facts, not ideologically driven, speculative and politicized science.

Health Care

I was reading the other day about Cuba's much-vaunted health care system, which is great unless you need medication and then its more problematic as medications generally are not available. So you get to see a doctor but they just can't treat you.

I was reflecting on this following my latest exposure to Canada's health system. My wife had the mis-fortune to beak her leg, quite badly and in three places. Our local hospital responded well in the provision of emergency treatment but needed to refer her to London because of the severity of the break. O.K. so far so good. Especially as London is one of Canada's leading medical centres. Except they can see her the next day but tell us to go into their emergency the day after. We get there, only to find out no one knows about it, X-rays have not been sent through, there is no-one from Orthopaedics answering their pager and the triage nurse is refusing to admit the patient with the triple break. Five hours later we go home, no available operating room that day, and no beds to admit her. Still in lots of pain but this is Canada, so drugs for pain are available except our insurance company won't cover the cost on the second prescription because its within 72 hours of the previous one and they view that as a"duplicate". (This is how they made over $700 million last year in profits I begin to realise: take in premiums and then fight tooth and nail against honouring programs).

Go back next day, there is now a scheduled operating time but the leg is now too swollen to operate and we go home again -- still no available beds. Come back in two days, through the out-patient clinic and "hopefully" there will be an operating room available and "hopefully" an available bed.

And people wonder why the Canadian public are in favour of a two-tier health system. My wife's problem apparently is that she doesn't play professional sport or she would have has her leg operated on and stabilized a week ahead of when she will as taxpayer. She would also have had access to professional nursing, not a husband angry at the inability of the health case system to actually open and staff the beds it has in its newly renovated hospital. Why do we insist on building institutions and not providing the staff to actually operate them?

With one exception, all the medical staff we have dealt with over the past week were wonderful and did a good job. However, all were suffering from a surfeit of poor morale: good people, trying to do their best, frustrated by poor planning and allocation of resources.

Welcome to Canadian health care: lots of toys, not so many beds or nurses. One system for all and no two-tier system (except for athletes, politicians and the other animals not in the barn yard with the rest of us).

Evolving science

File this under the heading of "the science is still evolving". The metric most understood by the public -- surface temperature -- is being recognized as a poor metric for the understanding of climate change.

Every topic has its own timelife, after which public attention is focussed on other, more salient issues. So with this particular ecomyth, at what point does the general public turn away from global warming stories and at what point are they no longer newsworthy enough for the media to carry them?

Forget the World Bank, Try Wal-Mart

Agents of change. Stasist thinkers will have you believe that no change can be achieved unless directed, controlled and/or initiated by government action. And there can be no government action without an accompanying bureaucracy. Thus, we get legions of articles and books on "management" and the inherent role of governance in the economy. In contrast, dynamists will suggest that if change is desired, get government (and especially bureaucracy) out of the way and let entrepreneurship create that change.

In empirical rather than theoretical terms, Strong suggests we should just 'forget the World Bank' and recognize what Wal-Mart has done to alleviate world poverty. This will be difficult for many to acknowledge as they are predisposed against seeing any benefits from large corporations.

Acknowledging the benefits of Wal-Mart's activities also requires that we recognize that another axiomatic construct is well past its due date: the necessity for world change to be managed by bureaucracies and controlled by governments.

The power of the internet

The world is indeed getting much smaller, at least in terms of information and communication. As this letter by AFM illustrates, all those environmental groups in the West who claim to be speaking on behalf of the developing world had better ensure that they are in accordance with what their presumed constituency actually believes.

The internet brings accountability much closer for all, interest groups as well as corporations, and the chief beneficiaries are those who can harness the power of the net to consistently flex that power of accountability.

A Preference for Ignorance

A lot of people see environmental issues as something that either can be, or should be, easily resolved if only more attention was paid to the facts -- particularly those facts established by science. Indeed, environmentalism as an ideology is predicated on the veracity of its science: we know this is happening, we know because the science tells us this, and, thus, we must act in this prescribed way to "fix" it.

However, the problem arises as to what it is we really know, how and what the "science" is, and is not, able to tell us. As this discussion by Kling illustrates, in many areas of policy concern our presumed "facts" are not incontrovertible as they stem from observational studies that 'often result in incorrect attributions of causal relationships'.

Most often observed data are found to have a statistically significant correlation with another variable. The inference that there is, therefore, some causal relationship between those variables is then subject to the ideological premises of the researcher(s) which may, or may not, have any basis in scientific "fact".

Most often, because of the nature of scientific inquiry, relationships are based on theories, conjecture and/or guess work, each adjective being a less desirable descriptor of "acceptable" scientific procedure. One person's "theory" is another guestimate, one person's hunch another's hypothesis for verification. And that is the point. In laboratory science, hypotheses can be tested and refuted by experimentation. In the real world of public policy, experimentation with live bodies is rarely as simple -- hence our use of observational studies in the first place.

The solution? To examine observational studies not only for their study protocols but also for their assumptions and ideological premises. But it also is incumbent on more researchers to become aware of, and to state clearly, what their ideology is and what are the resultant premises under which their research findings should be viewed.

A Liberal, Radical and Progressive Manifesto

An excellent review by Tim Worstall of the new book by Deepak Lal, Revising the Invisible Hand. Clearly Lal's book struck a resonant tone with Worstall because it shows that "just about every goal held dear by those who call themselves radicals and progressives is best reached by exactly the opposite policy prescriptions that they put forward".

Lal looks at the reality of today's globalisation and effectively dispenses with many of the popular myths that surround contemporary world trade and development. What will be interesting, will be to see who amongst the "liberal" writers, thinkers, commentators and voices (a) bother to read Lal's book and (b) do so with an open mind.

It is perplexing contradiction that many who espouse to be liberal in their thought are in fact the most closed minded to alternative perspectives that might cause them to re-assess their beliefs and ideas.

advocacy or bias?

This article was brought to my attention by a colleague. (Edit: here is a subsequent response by Terence Corcoran).

Notwithstanding the substantive discussion on climate and the motivation behind the article, it is interesting as it represents a good example of political correctness in environmentalism. In particular, it represents a good illustration of the failure to distinguish advocacy from bias.

Advocacy is the representational activity of vested interests within a democracy. It is the promotion of a particular set of policy choices with an intended outcome. Those choices reflect the varying beliefs, ideologies and values of the promoters. Advocacy is best characterized by an explicit disclosure of assumptions, beliefs and sources of support.

Bias is a systematic distortion of information and/or the wilful manipulation of data in an attempt to prejudice a result toward a preconceived outcome. It is often implicit and imbedded within the inherent, unstated, assumptions of a study and/or on behalf of its audience. (For example, the fact that the defining links I have used here are from Wikipedia is sufficient for some people to be dismissive of the whole post).

The fallacy in political correctness is to assign attributes of advocacy to those who are correct (government funding, refereed journals, consensus science, the Globe and Mail, media that agrees) and to accuse those who disagree as being biased (private-sector funding, blogs, skeptics, the National Post, media that presents a counter argument). Issues of clarity, accuracy, precision and ideology are subsumed within this characterization and instead those that are politically correct are praised and automatically exempt from accountability, whilst those who deviate from that norm are subject to personal scrutiny, vilification and innuendo.

The reality in environmentalism is, of course, that there is substantial advocacy of a myriad of political opinions. Moreover, bias does not respect nor observe prescribed political labels: it is common throughout all policy issues. And, as most glaringly illustrated by the recent examination of climate science in the NAS and Wegman reports (see my previous posts), bias has been a rampant characteristic of the government-funded, IPCC inhabited, refereed journal world of consensus climate science in the past 10-15 years.

Such nuances are seldom found within the mainstream media. Sadly, those who prescribe to political correctness don't really want their world to be confused by such subtleties.